William Pitt the younger (1759–1806)

PITT, WILLIAM (1759–1806), stateman, second son of William Pitt, first earl of Chatham [q. v.], and Hester, daughter of Richard Grenville, was born at Hayes, near Bromley, Kent, on 28 May 1759. As a child he was precocious and eager, and at seven years old looked forward to following in his father's steps (Chatham Correspondence, ii. 393-4). His health being extremely delicate, he was educated at home. His father took much interest in his studies, preparing him to excel as an orator by setting him to translate verbally, and, at sight, passages from Greek and Latin authors, and hearing him recite. When thirteen years old he composed a tragedy—'Laurentino, King of Chersonese'—which he and his brothers and sisters acted at his father's house. It is extant in script. The plot is political, and there is no love in it (Macaulay, Miscellaneous Writings, p. 396). At fourteen, when he knew more than most lads of eighteen, he matriculated at Cambridge, entering Pembroke Hall in the spring of 1773, and going into residence the following October. He was put under the care of the Rev. George Pretyman, afterwards Tomline [q. v.], one of the tutors. Soon afterwards a serious illness compelled his return home, and he remained there until the next July. Dr. Anthony Addington [q. v.] recommended a copious use of port wine. The remedy was successful, and at eighteen his health was established. For two years and a half he lived at Cambridge, with little or no society save that of his tutor, Pretyman. He studied Latin and Greek diligently, and showed a taste for mathematics; but of modern literature he read little, and of modern languages knew only French. In the spring of 1776 he graduated M. A. without examination, and towards the end of the year began to mix with other young men. He was excellent company, cheerful, witty, and well-bred. While still residing at Cambridge, he often went to hear debates in parliament, and on one of these occasions was introduced to Charles James Fox [q. v.], who was struck by his eager comments on the arguments of the different speakers (Stanhope, Life, i. 27). He was present at his father's last speech in the House of Lords on 7 April 1778, and helped to carry the earl from the chamber. On his father's death he was left with an income of less than 300l. a year, and, intending to practise law, began to keep terms at Lincoln's Inn, though he lived for the most part at Cambridge. In the following October he published an answer to a letter from Lord Mountstuart with reference to his father's political conduct (Ann. Reg. 1778, xxi. 257-61). He was called to the bar on 12 June 1780, and in August went the western circuit. At the general election in September he stood for the university of Cambridge, and was at the bottom of the poll. Sir James Lowther, however, caused him to be elected at Appleby, and he took his seat on 23 Jan. 1781. Among his closest friends were Edward Eliot (afterwards his brother-in-law), Richard Pepper Arden (afterwards lord Alvanley), and Wilberforce. In their company he was always full of life and gaiety. At first he gambled a little, but gave it up on finding that the excitement was absorbing; for he resolved to allow nothing to hinder him from giving his whole mind to the service of his country.

On entering parliament Pitt joined himself to Lord Shelburne, then head of the party that had followed his father Chatham. He was thus in opposition to Lord North's administration. He made his first speech on 26 Feb. in support of Burke's bill for economical reform. The house expected much of Chatham's son, and was not disappointed. Perfectly at his ease, and in a voice full of melody and force, he set forth his opinions in well-ordered succession and in the best possible words (Parl. Hist. xxi. 1261). Burke's praise was unmeasured; Fox warmly congratulated him; and North declared his speech 'the best first speech that he had ever heard' (Stanhope, i. 56, 08; Life of Wilberforce, i. 22). On 12 June he spoke in support of Fox's motion for peace with the American colonies. After expounding Chatham's principles, which had been impugned in the debate, he insisted on the injustice of the war and the miseries it had produced (Parl. Hist. xxii. 486). In the summer he again went circuit, had a little business, and impressed his fellow-barristers by his genial humour (Stanhope, i. 63). In the debate on the address, on 28 Nov., after the disaster at York Town, he scornfully denounced the speech from the throne in an energetic speech, which was loudly applauded (Parl. Hist. xxii. 735). During the early part of 1782 he was prominent in opposition to the government, and on 8 March, when North's ministry was obviously tottering, declared that were it possible for him to expect to enter a new administration he 'would never accept a subordinate situation.' Though the words probably fell from him accidentally in the excitement of speaking (Memoirs of Rockingham, ii. 423), they expressed a settled intention (Tomline, i. 67). When, a few days later, Rockingham was forming an administration, Pitt was offered some minor offices, among them that of vice-treasurer of Ireland, which, though of small importance politically, was worth about 5,000l. a year and had been held by his father. Poor as he was, he refused it (Life of Shelburne, iii. 136). While giving the government an independent support, he was consequently not involved in its difficulties. Following in his father's steps, he moved on 7 May for a select committee on the state of the representation. He inveighed against the corrupt influence of the crown, declared that it was maintained by the system of close boroughs, and referred to his father's opinion that reform was necessary for the; preservation of liberty. He did not, however, bring forward any definite plan. His motion was defeated by 161 to 141 (Parl. Hist. xxii. 1416). On the 17th he supported a motion for shortening the duration of parliaments, and on 19 June a bill for checking bribery.

On Rockingham's death Pitt reaped the fruit of his refusal of subordinate office. Shelburne became prime minister; Fox and Burke thereupon resigned, and Shelburne, almost without allies in the commons, turned to Pitt. On 6 July, at the age of twenty-three, he became chancellor of the exchequer. Differing from Shelburne on the peace with the Americans, he at once insisted that the preliminaries implied a recognition of independence that was irrevocable in the case of the failure of the final treaty. The king in vain urged that he should retract his words, declaring that, as a young man, he could do so honourably (Life of Shelburne, p. 309). The ministry needed further support. Neither Shelburne nor Pitt would consent to a union with North. Both were, however, willing to receive Charles James Fox, and on 11 Feb. 1783 Pitt, at Shelburne's request, invited him to join the ministry. Fox refused unless Shelburne ceased to be prime minister, and Pitt is said to have broken off the interview with the words, 'I did not come here to betray Lord Shelburne.' From this interview is to be dated the political hostility between Pitt and Fox (ib. p. 342; Court and Cabinets, i. 149; Tomline, i. 89). While the coalition between Fox and North was being formed, Pitt, on the 17th, upheld the government in a speech below his usual standard. He taunted Sheridan with his dramatic work, and Sheridan replied by comparing him with the Angry Boy in Jonson's 'Alchemist.' On the 21st, however, he spoke against the coalition for two hours and three-quarters with unequalled power. It was one of his most successful efforts, and North in reply referred to his 'amazing eloquence' (Speeches, i. 50 sq.; Malmesbury, ii. 35). On the 23rd Shelburne resigned. Pitt, although he had loyally supported him, disliked him heartily. Next day the king offered Pitt the treasury. Shelburne and his friend Dundas urged him to accept, and the king was importunate. He hesitated, but finally (25 March) declined the offer, for he considered that North's support was essential to success, and that it would be prejudicial to his honour as well as precarious to depend on North. The king expressed himself 'much hurt' (Stanhope, vol. i. App. pp. i-iii; Court and Cabinets, i. 209). On the 31st he announced his resignation, broke off all political connection with Shelburne, and declared that he was 'unconnected with any party whatever,' and should act independently (Memorials of Fox, i. 326). On 2 April the coalition ministry, with the Duke of Portland as premier, took office. On 7 May Pitt again brought forward the question of reform of parliament, this time in resolutions embodying a definite plan for (1) checking bribery at elections; (2) disfranchising corrupt constituencies; (3) adding to the number of knights of the shire and members for London. His resolutions were lost by 293 to 149 (Parl. Hist. xxiii. 827-75). Another bill that he brought forward on 2 June, for reforming abuses in public offices, passed the commons, but was rejected by the lords.

On 12 Sept. 1783 he went with Wilberforce and Eliot to France, the only visit that he made to the continent. He stayed some time at Rheims, where he met Talleyrand, and on 9 Oct. went to Paris and Fontainebleau, where 'men and women crowded round him in shoals.' It is said, but probably falsely, that Necker proposed that Pitt should marry his daughter, afterwards Madame de Staël. He returned home on 24 Oct., and took up his residence in his brother's house in Berkeley Square, intending to resume his legal work, for even his friends thought that the formation of the coalition had 'extinguished him nearly for life as a politician' (Rose, Diary, i. 45). The coalition administration, however, soon came to an end over Fox's India bill [see under Fox, Charles James], which Pitt opposed in terms of scarcely justifiable vehemence (Parl. Hist. xxiii. 1279). It passed the commons by majorities of more than two to one, but the king authorised Earl Temple to state in the lords that he should regard any one as his enemy who voted for the bill; and on 17 Dec. the lords rejected it by 95 votes to 76. On the same day a resolution was moved in the commons condemning in general terms the action of Earl Temple. Pitt declared the resolution 'frivolous and ill-timed.' Fox, in reply, taunted him with his youth and inexperience, and with following 'the headlong course of ambition.' The resolution was carried by 153 to 80. On 19 Dec. the king dismissed the ministers and appointed Pitt first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer. He had become prime minister before he was twenty-five.

The announcement of his acceptance of office was received in the commons with derisive laughter. There was a strong majority in favour of the late ministers, including, with the exception of Pitt himself and Dundas, every debater of eminence in the house (Rosebery, p. 53), while the circumstances under which the coalition had fallen added to the bitterness of the opposition. Pitt did not find it easy to form an administration, and when his cousin Temple retracted on 21 Dec. his acceptance of the seals of a secretary of state, he was 'led almost to despair' (Rose, i. 50). By the 23rd he had 'hastily patched together an administration composed of men wholly inadequate to the work before them' (Bland Burges Papers, pp. 66-8). His cabinet of seven contained no member of the commons besides himself. He alone, therefore, was to bear the main brunt of the battle. An immediate dissolution was expected (Life of Wilberforce, i. 48). Pitt was determined to appeal to the electorate; but he was equally determined not to dissolve until public opinion was strongly on his side. Fox, on the other hand, was set on preventing a dissolution, and hoped to drive Pitt from office by votes of the existing house. Pitt employed the recess in framing an India bill which, while establishing a board of control as a state department, left the patronage to the company. On the meeting of the commons on 12 Jan. 1784, Fox proposed, as a means of preventing dissolution, that the house should at once go into committee on the state of the nation. In the debate Pitt loftily defended himself against charges of intriguing with the king. He was in a minority of 39. The attack was renewed on the 16th, when the opposition majority was 21. On the 23rd Pitt's India bill was rejected by a majority of eight, and violent efforts were made in vain to provoke him to disclose his intentions. The king, who regarded him as his one hope of salvation from the men he hated, was in despair, and wrote that he thought a dissolution necessary for the preservation of the constitution. But Pitt remained firm. A body of 'independent' members proposed, and the king assented, that Pitt should meet the Duke of Portland with a view to a combination, and on 2 Feb. the house voted that a united ministry was necessary. Pitt refused to resign office as a preliminary to union, and declared that as the right of dismissal did not rest with the commons, a minister might constitutionally retain office against the will of the house. He denied its right to express a general want of confidence without specific charges. The proposed compromise failed.

The tide began to turn at the same time. The clerkship of the pells, worth 3,000l. a year, fell vacant, and, instead of taking it for himself, Pitt won universal admiration by bestowing it on Colonel Barré [q.v.] on condition that he surrendered a pension of greater value, which was thus saved to the country. The king helped him by creating some peers on his nomination. The lords on 4 Feb. declared strongly in his favour, and the East India Company was on his side. On the 28th the freedom of the city was presented to him at a banquet. As he returned his carriage was attacked opposite Brooks's, the club frequented by his opponents, and he escaped with difficulty. This outrage excited much indignation. Fox's majority sank to twelve on 1 March. He proposed to delay supply, and Pitt cast on him the odium of endeavouring to throw the country into disorder. Addresses in Pitt's favour were presented to the king from many towns, and in the commons he succeeded in obtaining votes of supply. On the 8th Fox's 'Representation' to the king against the ministers was carried by only one vote, and the next day the Mutiny bill was passed without opposition. The victory was won, and the king dissolved on 24 March, the day fixed by Pitt (see Lecky, Hist. of England, iv. 297-308; May, Const. Hist. i. 83). Throughout the struggle Pitt was aided by the mistakes of Fox, but he owed his victory to his own skill and determination.

At the general election of 1784 he was returned for the university of Cambridge, and kept that seat during the rest of his life. His triumph was assured by the rejection of 160 of Fox's party, and he was at this date supported by a greater degree of popular favour than had ever been accorded to any minister. In the debate on the address Pitt's majority was 282 to 114. He at once turned his attention to the nation's finances, which were in grave disorder. The interest of the funded debt, the civil list, appropriated duties, and the expenses of the services exceeded the permanent taxes by 2,000,000l, and there was an unfunded debt of about 14,000,000l., of which the bills were at 15 to 20 per cent, discount. Towards funding this debt Pitt issued a loan of 6,500,000l., for he would not disturb the money market by going too fast. Consulting only the interest of the country, he took the then novel step of offering the loan for public tender, and accepting the most advantageous terms. He dealt a decisive blow at smuggling by lowering the duties on the articles most largely smuggled, while he increased the smugglers' risks by the 'Hovering Act.' The duty on tea he reduced from 119 to 12½ per cent., ad valorem, providing for the anticipated loss by a window tax. The success of this measure established his reputation as a financier. In his budget he proposed various taxes calculated to return 930,000l. (Tomline, i. 483-507; Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, ii. 184-7). In this and all his schemes for taxation he aimed at making all classes contribute to the revenue without pressing unfairly on any. Nor, though there was much that was new in his finance, did he strive for novelty; for he constantly adopted and improved on the devices of earlier financiers. His new India Bill, which passed easily, gave the crown political power, while it left to the directors the appointment of those who were to carry out the orders of the board of control. It established the system of double government, which, with some modifications, remained in force until 1858.

In the session of 1785 he suffered a damaging defeat in his attempt to nullify Fox's election to Westminster, and by the course he pursued incurred the charge of acting vindictively. By his motion for parliamentary reform of 18 April, which he pressed eagerly, he proposed to extinguish by purchase the privileges of borough-holders or electors in thirty-six decayed boroughs, and to transfer the seventy two seats to the larger counties and the cities of London and Westminster, and to proceed in like manner in the future if other boroughs fell into decay (Parl. Hist. xxv. 445). Neither the cabinet nor the opposition was unanimous on the motion, and Pitt did not treat it as one on which the fate of the government was to depend. He spoke on it with eloquence, but was defeated by 248 to 174, and, greatly as he desired reform, would never again do anything for its accomplishment (Lecky, v. 63). In his budget of 9 May 1785 he further reduced the floating debt by new taxes, some of which were opposed, and passed with modifications. By including a number of taxes of various kinds in a single group, known as the assessed taxes, he checked waste and fraud. He sought to free trade from restrictions, and, anxious to strengthen the bond between Great Britain and Ireland, drew up resolutions establishing free trade and reciprocity between the two countries, and providing that Ireland should contribute towards the protection of the commerce of the empire in proportion to the consequent improvement in its trade. His scheme, presented in resolutions to the Irish parliament on 7 Feb. 1785, passed with a general concurrence, and on 22 Feb. Pitt introduced it in the English parliament. Here it was vehemently opposed, and he was forced to modify it in the interests of English manufacturers (Parl. Hist. xxv. 778). The bill was recast, 'seriously to the detriment of Ireland' (Lecky); it was, in its new form, passed in England, but was rejected by the Irish parliament, In 1786 another government measure, the proposal to fortify Plymouth and Portsmouth, was rejected by the speaker's casting vote. Such rebuffs were due partly to the fact that the ministerial party was not knit together by enthusiasm for any great question, partly to some distrust of Pitt's youth, and partly to his manners, which, though genial in private life, were stiff and haughty with his political supporters (Wilberforce, i. 78).

Pitt's financial successes enabled him in 1786 to bring forward a scheme for the reduction of the national debt. He regarded the debt as an excessive burden on the country, and in that belief declared it better for the country to borrow at a high than at a low rate of interest (Parl. Hist. xxiv. 1022). Having a surplus of revenue of nearly a million, he proposed that a million a year should be placed in the hands of commissioners to be applied to the reduction of the debt, and that to it should be added the interest of the sums so redeemed, that this 'sinking fund' should be out of the control of the government, and that its operation should continue whatever the financial condition of the country might be. A sinking fund had already been tried by Walpole; Pitt owed his scheme to Dr. Richard Price (1723-1791) [q. v.] He believed, and people generally agreed with him, that if it was carried out without interruption it would extinguish the debt simply by the efficacy of compound interest (ib. xxv. 1310). The scheme was adopted, and by 1793 ten and a quarter millions of debt had thus been paid off. But it has long been proved that there is nothing spontaneous in the working of such a fund, and that public debt can only be lessened by taxation. It is obvious that the maintenance of the fund during the war which began in 1793, so far from being economical, was extremely wasteful, for the nation borrowed vast sums at high rates and applied part of them to paying off debts which bore a low rate of interest. This was not perceived at the time, and the knowledge that the fund was maintained helped to support public credit, and so strengthened Pitt's position during the worst periods of depression (McCulloch, Tracts, pp. 526-53, 572 sqq.)

The charges against Warren Hastings [q. v.] were promoted by the opposition, and were opposed by Pitt's friends generally. He voted against the Rohilla charge, which was rejected on 2 June 1786; but when, on 13 June, Fox brought forward the Benares charge, to the astonishment of all he spoke and voted for it, and it was carried by 119 to 79 (Parl. Hist. xx vi. 102). It is probable that on studying the charges he came to the conclusion that he could not honourably continue to support Hastings. He voted for the Begum charge in February 1787, and thus rendered the impeachment certain (Stanhope, i. 298-305, 327; Memoirs of Sir P. Francis, ii. 237; Rosebery, Pitt, pp. 84, 87-8). During 1786 he was engaged on a commercial treaty with France, negotiated by William Eden, afterwards Lord Auckland [q. v.], on lines suggested by Bolingbroke in 1713, and contemplated by Shelburne. Pitt's attitude signally exhibited his dislike of restrictions on trade and his freedom from national prejudice. Fox objected to the treaty in January 1787 on the ground that France was the unalterable enemy of England. Pitt replied that 'to suppose that any nation could be unalterably the enemy of another was weak and childish.' The treaty was approved by a large majority. By reducing the duties on French wines it revived the taste for them in England, and the consumption increased rapidly (Lecky, v. 37-46; Parl. Hist. xxvi. 233, 382-407). His consolidation of the port and excise duties and the produce of other taxes into one fund was an important fiscal improvement (Dowell, ii. 192), and the masterly fashion in which he dealt with the nearly three thousand resolutions occupied by this intricate measure excited the admiration even of the opposition (Tomline, ii. 233-49). Both in this year (1787) and in 1789 he resisted motions for the repeal of the Test and Corporations Acts; for, though not opposed to religious freedom, he held that the alliance of church and state was founded on expediency, that the restrictions imposed by the acts were necessary to it, and that they were not in themselves unreasonable (Parl. Hist. xxvi. 825, xxix. 509).

In 1787 events induced Pitt to specially direct his attention to foreign affairs. He held the independence of Holland to be a matter of the highest importance, and desired to check the growth of French influence there. The stadtholder, the Prince of Orange, who favoured the English alliance, had been forced by the 'patriot' party, which was in close alliance with France, to leave the Hague. Active assistance was promised by France to the states, while a Prussian army was sent to reinstate the prince. Pitt promised to aid the Prussians with a fleet. War seemed imminent, and Pitt made full preparations for it. But the Prussians were received in Holland as allies, France held back, the stadtholder was reinstated, and both England and France agreed to put an end to their preparations for war (27 Oct.) Since the American war England had no ally on the continent except Portugal. Pitt followed up the success of his policy in Holland by an alliance in 1788 with the states and with Prussia. He thus re-established English influence abroad.

Early in that year he had a hard struggle over his India declaratory bill, which compelled the board of control to maintain a permanent body of troops out of the funds of the company. The course of the struggle illustrates the extent to which the hold of the government on its majority depended on Pitt personally (Court and Cabinets, i. 356, 361; Annual Register, 1788, xxx. 108-21). His bill finally passed with some modifications. The success of his financial measures enabled him for the time to dispense with any new taxes, and to bring forward a plan for compensating the American loyalists. It was in accordance with his advice that Wilberforce took up the slave-trade question, and, Wilberforce being ill, Pitt, on 9 May 1788, brought forward his resolution on the subject for him. It was supported by Fox and Burke, and was carried (Life of Wilberforce, i. 151, 171). In the same session he supported Sir William Dolben's bill for regulating the slave trade [see under Dolben, Sir John], in 1789 and 1790 upheld Wilberforce's motions, and on 2 April 1792, in opposition to many of his followers, urged the immediate abolition of the trade in a speech which, eloquent throughout, ended with a gorgeous peroration (Parl. Hist. xxix. 1134-88, 1277).

In November 1788 Pitt's position was imperilled by the king's insanity. Had the Prince of Wales become regent, Pitt would have been dismissed in favour of Fox and his party. Pitt, while he looked forward unmoved to loss of office, held that it was for parliament to name a regent, and to impose such restrictions on him for a limited time as would enable the king, on his recovery, to resume his power without difficulties. The prince and his party intrigued to prevent the imposition of restrictions, and Lord-chancellor Thurlow treacherously abetted them. On 10 Dec. Pitt moved for a search for precedents; Fox declared that the prince had an inherent right to the regency with sovereign powers, and that parliament had merely to decide when that right was to be exercised. Pitt, on hearing this argument, whispered to his neighbour, 'I'll unwhig the gentleman for the rest of his life' (Life of Sheridan, ii.38). While acknowledging that the prince had an irresistible claim, he maintained that it was not of strict right, and was to be decided on by parliament. He answered an intemperate attack by Burke by a dignified appeal to the house. On the 16th his resolutions for a bill of regency were carried by a majority of sixty-four (Court and Cabinets, ii. 49-54). Still many wavered, and some members of the cabinet' were inclined, in case of a regency, to coalesce with the opposition. Not so Pitt, who contemplated returning to work at the bar (Rose, i. 90). Impressed by his high-minded conduct, the London merchants offered him a gift of 100,000l., which he declined. On the 30th he wrote to the prince announcing the provisions of his regency bill, which withheld the power of making peers, and of granting pensions or offices except during pleasure, and placed the king's person and household, with the patronage, amounting to over 200,000l. a year, wholly in the queen's hands. These provisions were drawn up in the well-grounded expectation that the king's disablement was temporary. The bill passed the commons on 5 Feb. 1789; its progress in the lords was stopped by the king's recovery. Meanwhile, the Irish parliament had invited the prince to assume the regency in Ireland with full powers, but Pitt upheld the lord lieutenant, the Marquis of Buckingham, in his refusal to present the address to the prince, and recommended creations and promotions in the peerage as rewards of Buckingham's supporters (Court and Cabinets, ii. 146, 156). The violence and tactical mistakes of the opposition were in part responsible for Pitt's triumph at this crisis; but his conduct throughout showed the highest skill and courage. The king was conscious of the debt that he owed him, and both inside and outside parliament his position was stronger than even at the date of his victory over Fox four years before.

The general election of October-November 1790 gave the government an increased majority; on important divisions it was generally well over a hundred. The king pressed Pitt to accept the Garter (December); he declined, and requested that it might be conferred on his brother, Lord Chatham (Stanhope, ii. App. p. xiii). At the king's request he accepted, in August 1792, the wardenship of the Cinque ports, which was worth about 3,000l. a year. In the autumn of 1785 he had bought an estate called Hollwood, near Bromley, Kent, raising 4,000l. on it by mortgage, and paying 4,950l. by 1794. He took much delight in the place, and loved to improve it. But his affairs rapidly fell into disorder; he neglected them, and his servants robbed him.

When the question was raised whether the impeachment of Hastings was abated by the late dissolution, Pitt had an interview with Fox. The rival statesmen treated each other cordially, and came to an agreement. On 17 Dec. Pitt spoke against the abatement with such masterly effect as 'to settle the controversy' (Parl. Hist. xxviii. 1087-1099; Life of Sidmouth, i. 80). The dislike of the English in Canada to the Quebec Act of 1774 made legislation necessary, and Pitt, in April 1791, brought forward a bill for the government of Canada. He proposed the creation of two separate colonies, in order that their mutual jealousy might prevent rebellion, and by his 'Constitutional Act' divided the country into Upper and Lower Canada, giving to each its own governor, house of assembly, and legislative council. Provision was made for a protestant clergy from lands called the clergy reserves, and the crown was empowered to grant hereditary honours in Canada. Both these last provisions were strongly opposed by Fox (Parl. Hist. xxix. 111). Soon afterwards Pitt came to an open rupture with Thurlow, the lord chancellor, who had long been an element of discord in the cabinet. Out of consideration for the king, Pitt bore for years with his opposition and ill-temper. In 1792, however, the chancellor vehemently opposed Fox's libel bill, to which Pitt gave a vigorous support. Pitt plainly told the king that he must choose between him and the chancellor, and George dismissed Thurlow (Stanhope, ii. 31, 72, 147-50, App. pp. xii, xiii).

Meanwhile foreign politics made heavy demands on Pitt's attention. Spain, hoping for help from France and Russia, had in 1789 seized a British trading station on Nootka Sound in Vancouver's Island, and had taken some English vessels. Pitt insisted on reparation, obtained a vote of credit in May 1790, and equipped the fleet for service. France, however, was diverted by domestic affairs; and though for a time war seemed certain, Spain drew back, and on 28 Oct. a convention was signed that satisfied the demands of England. The energy of the government raised Pitt's reputation abroad. In December Pitt, in a supplementary budget, arranged to pay the expense of the armament, amounting to 3,133,000l. in four years by special taxes, which, so far as was possible, touched all classes (Dowell, ii. 195-6). But while insisting on respect for the rights of Great Britain, Pitt was anxious to maintain peace, and to preserve the status quo and the balance of power in Europe. With this object he had, in 1788, forwarded the alliance between Great Britain, Holland, and Prussia. The allies had, by threats of war, saved the independence of Sweden in that year, and their action secured British commerce in the Baltic. Though unable to stop the war of Catherine of Russia whose forward policy was highly distasteful to Pitt and her ally the Emperor Leopold II against the Turks, he persuaded the emperor, in 1790, to make an armistice with the Porte on the basis of the status quo. In the negotiations with Russia, however, Pitt sustained a signal rebuff. Pitt considered that it was for the interest of the maritime powers to prevent Russia from establishing a naval force in the Black Sea (Parl Hist. xxix. 996), and agreed with Prussia to insist on Catherine's restitution of Oczakow and its district. The fleet was prepared for service, an ultimatum to the empress was despatched, and on 28 March 1791 Pitt moved an address pledging the commons to defray the expenses of the 'Russian armament,' The address was carried by 228 to 135; but the arguments of the opposition were strong, the prospect of the war was unpopular, and Pitt, finding that persistence in the line of the status quo would risk the existence of the government, gave way, and Russia retained Oczakow. He was deeply mortified, his reputation at home and abroad suffered, and the alliance with Prussia was relaxed.

The revolution in France soon involved more perplexing considerations. Pitt had viewed the outbreak of 1789 as a domestic quarrel, which did not concern him, and into which he was resolved not to be drawn. To Elliot, who was in unofficial communication with Mirabeau, he wrote in October 1790 that England would preserve a scrupulous neutrality in the struggle of French political parties (Stanhope, ii. 38, 48, 59; Lecky, v. 559), and Burke was convinced that it was impossible to move him from that position (Burke, Correspondence, iii. 343, 347). In February 1792 no thought of war had entered his head. Having on the 17th shown a surplus of 400,000l., he repealed taxes amounting to 223,000l., reduced the vote for seamen by two thousand men, declared that the Hessian subsidy would not be renewed, and, speaking of the sinking fund, said that in fifteen years twenty-five millions of debt would be paid off. Nor was it, he said, presumptuous to name fifteen years; for 'there never was a time when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than we may at the present moment' (Parl. Hist. xxix. 816-37). In the autumn, however, the situation changed. In August the French court to which the English ambassador was accredited had ceased to exist, and he was recalled from Paris. France had already declared war on Austria and Prussia, and in September conquered Savoy and Nice. In November Holland was threatened, and treaty rights set at naught by the opening of the Scheldt. Pitt recognised that England was bound by the treaty of 1788 to maintain the rights and independence of Holland (Rose, i. 114). Maret, a French envoy, found Pitt eager to preserve peace as late as 2 Dec. (Ernouf, Maret, Due de Bassano, pp. 94-8), but resolved never to consent to the opening of the Scheldt (Parl. Hist. xxx. 253 sq.)

Meanwhile French republican agents, and especially the insolent envoy Chauvelin, were busy in England. Societies were formed in London and Edinburgh to propagate revolutionary doctrines. Their members were in constant communication with Paris. Seditious publications were widely distributed among British soldiers and sailors, and riots were raised. The government issued a proclamation against seditious writings; on Pitt's advice the militia was partially called out, and he supported the alien bill, a police measure rendered necessary by the crowd of French immigrants (Parl. Hist. xxx. 229-38). Chauvelin, who had no recognised diplomatic position, made himself personally obnoxious to Pitt, who refused to see him, and, when the news of the king's murder reached England, he was ordered to leave the kingdom. On 30 Jan. 1793 the French agent Maret, who was acceptable to Pitt, revisited London in an informal capacity. Pitt voted in the cabinet to receive him, but Lord Hawkesbury, in the king's name and his own, opposed his reception. The majority supported Hawkesbury (Ernouf, p. 126). The time for diplomatic intervention was then past. On 1 Feb. Pitt gave a masterly exposition of the provocations which the English government had received from France (Parl. Hist. xxx. 270 sq.), and on the same day France declared war against England. In the House of Commons Fox and his small party alone contested Pitt's prudence at this crisis, and throughout the continuance of the war pursued him and his policy with unremitting hostility. In 1794 the government was strengthened by the accession of the Duke of Portland, Lords Spencer and Fitzwilliam, and Windh'am, leading whigs who were in favour of a strenuous prosecution of the war. When asked whether he did not fear that these new allies might outvote him in the cabinet, Pitt replied that he had no such fear, for 'he placed much reliance on his new colleagues, and still more on himself' (Life of Sidmouth, i. 121).

Pitt believed that the finances of France would soon be exhausted, and that the war would therefore be short (Parl. Hist. xxxi. 1043-5; Life of Wilberforce, ii. 10, 92, 332). On this assumption he determined to meet the war expenses mainly by loans, so as to avoid a great increase of taxation and the danger of thereby checking commercial development. On 11 March 1793 he announced a continuance of some temporary taxes, and made up the deficiency in the estimates by borrowing four and a half millions. He tried to obtain this loan at 4 or 5 per cent., but was forced to issue it at 3 per cent, at a price of 72l. In 1794, while imposing some new taxes, he announced a loan of eleven millions. He declared that commercial prosperity and the growth of the revenue would continue, since in all wars, while we had the superiority at sea, our trade had increased (Parl. Hist. u.s, 1022). In 1793 a serious monetary crisis took place, arising from causes unconnected with the war. To restore credit, Pitt issued exchequer bills for five millions, to be advanced on good security. Only four millions were borrowed, confidence was restored, and the money was repaid.

At the same time the declaration of war made it, in Pitt's opinion, absolutely necessary that all domestic dissension should be suppressed. He shared the general fear of revolutionary doctrines, and believed it essential to check their dissemination. With this object he supported, on 15 May 1793, the 'traitorous correspondence' bill, which was followed by prosecutions and judicial sentences that cannot be wholly justified. In May he brought in a Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill, which, though vehemently opposed by Fox and his party (Parl. Hist. xxx. 617), passed through all its stages in twenty-four hours. Such repressive measures were demanded and approved by popular sentiment. From the beginning of the war, too, Pitt, in his anxiety to avoid domestic disputes, opposed parliamentary reform. It was not, he said, speaking against a motion for it on the 17th, 'a time to embark on a constitutional change' (ib. pp. 890-902); he considered that the demand was urged by dangerous means, and that the bill itself went too far.

At the outset of the war Pitt resolved to meet the aggressions of France by forming a great European coalition against her. Between March and October 1793 he concluded alliances with Russia, Sardinia, Spain, Naples, Prussia, Austria, Portugal, and some German princes, and granted subsidies of 832,000l. for the hire of foreign troops. The Austrian and Prussian armies were at first successful; at sea Hood in 1793 destroyed the French fleet in Toulon, although he was compelled to evacuate the town, which had been handed over to the English by the anti-Jacobins; gains were secured in the West Indies, and on 1 June 1794 Howe won his famous victory off Brest. But in Europe the tide turned, and in 1794 the Austrians and Prussians retreated into Germany. The Duke of York, in command of the British and subsidiary forces, was routed near Dunkirk, and the Belgic provinces and subsequently Holland were conquered. In spite of the resistance of the king, Pitt insisted on York's dismissal. The keeping the allies together taxed all Pitt's energies. In April he was forced to grant a subsidy of 1,226,000l. to Frederick William II of Prussia, who gave no return for it, and in 1795 signed a peace which neutralised North Germany.

In a short time Austria and Sardinia were the only active allies left to England. 'We must,' Pitt said, 'anew commence the salvation of Europe' (Alison, History, iii. 157). He formed a triple alliance with Russia and Austria, the Austrian emperor receiving a loan of four millions and a half. Russia, however, remained inactive, and the action of Austria was barren of results. From these disappointing results he turned hopefully to an ill-judged scheme for conveying French royalist troops to Brittany in English ships. Money and stores were liberally supplied for the expedition. The emigrant troops were landed on the peninsula of Quiberon, and in July 1795 were destroyed by Hoche. The disaster was attributed by the French refugees to Pitt's duplicity, and Fox declared that he had lowered the character of Britain by sending a gallant army to be massacred. While Pitt, no doubt, thought more of the possible advantage to England by the destruction of the enemy's munitions of war than of the success of the royalist cause in France, he fully performed his share in the expedition, and the accusations of disloyalty brought against him seem unfounded (Parl. Hist. xxxii. 170; cf. Forneron, Histoire des Emigrés, ii. 99-116, 150).

The budget of February 1795 marks the beginning of a long period of financial difficulty. Pitt was compelled both to increase taxation and to raise a loan of eighteen millions on terms equal to interest at 4l. 16s. 2d. per cent. At the same time he observed that the foreign trade of the country 'surpassed even the most flourishing years of peace' (Parl. Hist. xxxi. 1315). Scarcity, however, prevailed owing to bad harvests, and in August wheat was at 108s. a quarter. On going to open parliament in October, the king was greeted with cries of 'Bread,' 'Peace,' and 'No Pitt,' and a missile was aimed at him. The law of treason was at once extended, and Pitt carried a 'sedition bill.' The distress of the poor led Pitt to adopt a temporary measure of relief, which contravened his economic principles. He defended his action on the ground of emergency. In December he urged the necessity for a reform in the poor laws. He embodied his plans in a bill containing provisions strongly savouring of state socialism, such as the formation of 'schools of industry,' and the supply of cows to paupers. The bill was laid before the commons, but it was severely criticised, and was abandoned (Times, 19 March 1838; Stanhope, ii. 365-7; Rosebery, pp. 169-70) [see Bentham, Jeremy.]

Early in 1795 Pitt had to meet an Irish difficulty. In 1785 he had sought to give Ireland the same commercial position as England, and to effect a parliamentary reform on a protestant basis (Lecky, vi. 375). The French revolution, which won much sympathy in protestant Ulster, inclined him, however, to favour the claims of the Roman catholics, in whom he detected a powerful conservative element. Misled by the anti-catholic spirit in Europe, he believed, too, that the papal system was near its end (ib. p. 497). He consequently supported the English Catholic Relief Bill of 1791, and insisted, with reference to the Irish Catholic Relief Bill of 1792, that the government should not pledge itself against further concessions. He considered that a legislative union would be the means by which catholics might most safely be admitted to the franchise (ib. 513). Already in the rejection of his commercial proposals and in the differences that had developed themselves on the subject of the regency he had been impressed by the difficulties arising from legislative independence. The Catholic Relief Act, passed by the Irish House of Commons in 1793, was due to the pressure that his government brought to bear on the government in Ireland, but the act stopped short of complete emancipation, and failed to alleviate Irish discontent. The whigs who joined Pitt in 1794 urged on him a policy of reform and emancipation. Pitt promised that Lord Fitzwilliam [see Fitzwilliam, William Wentworth, second Earl], a strong whig, should be appointed viceroy, and Portland and Fitzwilliam at once led the whig leaders in Ireland to believe that there would be a complete change of system and administration. Pitt had no intention of surrendering Ireland to the whigs, but to avoid a split in the cabinet he nominated Fitzwilliam, on the vague understanding that there were to be no sweeping changes, and that the admission of catholics to parliament should not be treated as a government question, though if he were pressed he might yield (Life of Grattan, iv. 177). Fitzwilliam, on his arrival in Ireland, dismissed John Beresford [q. v.] and other tory officials, and informed the cabinet that emancipation must be granted immediately. Pitt, with the assent of the cabinet, straightway recalled him, and thus roused the bitterest animosity among the exasperated catholics (Lecky, vii. 1-98; Rosebery, pp. 174-85). Pitt's error lay in not giving Fitzwilliam more explicit instructions. The king was hostile to emancipation, and, although Pitt himself desired it, he considered that the time for it had not yet come. The personal question involved in the dismissal of his political friends also weighed much with him.

By the end of 1795 he was anxious for peace, and in March 1796 caused proposals to be laid before the French directory. They failed, and on 10 May Fox made their failure the occasion of a strenuous attack on the conduct of the war. Pitt replied ably, and had a majority of 216 to 42. In his budget, besides a new loan, he announced additions to the assessed taxes, and to the duties on horses and tobacco, and introduced a new tax on collateral successions (Dowell, ii. 213-15). A dissolution followed, and in the new parliament his majority was maintained. During the year Great Britain made some gains in the West Indies, but the French, though suffering some temporary reverses in Germany, conquered Italy. In the course of the general election Pitt had found it necessary to support the emperor by a loan of 1,200,000l., and he raised it without the consent of parliament. When attacked on the grant by the opposition in December, he argued that the loan came under the head of 'extraordinaries,' recognised as necessary in times of war; but, although he obtained a majority of 285 to 81, opinion was against him, and he promised not to repeat the irregularity. In the late autumn further attempts to obtain peace proved futile. France refused to give up the Netherlands Malmesbury, Diaries, iii. 259-365), and threatened an invasion of Ireland. Pitt appealed to British patriotism by issuing a loyalty loan of eighteen millions at 5 per cent., which was taken up with enthusiasm at 100l. for 112l. 10s. stock. In his budget for 1797 he imposed additional taxes of over two millions, the incidence of which he made as general as possible, the more important being a third addition of 10 per cent, on the assessed taxes, and additions to the duties on tea, sugar, and spirits. The failure of the peace negotiations led to a run on the Bank of England. The directors appealed to Pitt for help, and on 26 Feb. 1797 cash payments were suspended by an order in council. The victory off Cape St. Vincent (14 Feb.) gave him only temporary consolation, for the mutiny of the fleet at the Nore in May, when the Dutch fleet was threatening invasion, seemed to paralyse the arm on which he chiefly leant. England's prospects never looked less hopeful. Ireland was on the eve of open rebellion; Russia deserted the anti-French policy of Catherine; in October Austria made peace with France; and the war on the continent came to an end. The general alarm was manifested by the fall in the price of consols to 48.

Throughout these calamities Pitt maintained an extraordinary calm, and made stirring appeals to the spirit of the nation. Nevertheless, he was anxious for peace, and in April 1797 obtained the king's unwilling consent to reopen negotiations. Grenville vehemently opposed him in the cabinet, but he was determined 'to use every effort to stop so bloody and wasting a war' (Windham, Diary, p. 368; Malmesbury, u.s. iii. 369). To Malmesbury, who was sent to negotiate at Lille, Pitt gave secret instructions that, if necessary, he might offer France either the Cape or Ceylon (ib. iv. 128). The negotiations failed in September. Pitt's budget of November showed a deficit of twenty-two millions; three millions he borrowed from the bank, twelve he obtained by a new loan, and the remaining seven he provided for by a 'triple assessment,' charging the payers of assessed taxes on a graduated scale. His heavy demands excited discontent, and in December, at the public thanksgiving for the naval victories, he was insulted by the mob, and guarded by cavalry. The publication of the 'Anti-Jacobin,' which began in the autumn, was useful to him, for it 'turned to his side the current of poetic wit which had hitherto flowed against him' (Stanhope, iii. 84-9). At the same time the opposition in parliament had since July relaxed its aggressive energy, owing to the partial secession of Fox.

Pitt's health was weakened by the anxieties of the year, and never fully recovered. He was ill in June 1798, and the opposition newspapers insisted, without the slightest ground, that he was insane. Wilberforce in July found him better, and 'improved in habits' — that is, probably drinking less port wine (Life of Wilberforce, p. 317). During the summer of 1800 his physicians ordered him to Bath, but public business kept him in town, and he prepared for the labours of the folio wing November session by a visit of three weeks to Addington, the speaker. During 1796 he had taken much pleasure in the society of Eleanor Eden, a daughter of Lord Auckland, but he explained to her father that his affairs were too embarrassed to allow him to make her an offer of marriage. His debts amounted at the time to about 30,000l. (Stanhope, iii. 1-4).

With the Irish rebellion of 1798 Pitt had little to do directly, but on its outbreak he considered it necessary to renew the suspension of habeas corpus, and other bills were passed for the suppression of secret societies and the regulation of newspapers. Measures of defence mainly absorbed his attention. During the debate on his bill on manning the navy, on 25 May, Tierney, who had become prominent in opposition to him, spoke against hurrying the bill through the house. Pitt suggested that he desired to obstruct the defence of the country, and Tierney sent him a challenge. Pitt informed the speaker of the matter as a friend, in order to prevent him from interfering, and he met Tierney on Sunday, 27 May, on Putney Heath. Both fired twice without effect, Pitt the second time firing in the air, and the seconds declared that honour was satisfied (Life of Sidmouth, i. 205; Life of Wilberforce, ii. 281-4).

The victory of the Nile on 1 Aug. 1798, its important and far-reaching consequences, and its effect on the European powers, aided Pitt in forming a second great coalition against France, which by the end of the year consisted of Great Britain, Portugal, Naples, Russia, and the Porte, Austria acceding soon afterwards. For a time the military operations on the continent, where Suwarow drove the French out of Italy in 1799, as well as the taking of Seringapatam (4 May), gave him encouragement. Believing that the Dutch were ready to rise against the French, he planned an expedition to Holland consisting of British and Russian troops. In August the British fleet captured the Dutch vessels in the Texel. The Duke of York took the command by land; the Dutch did not rise; the duke was unsuccessful, his army suffered from sickness, and he capitulated. Pitt, undismayed, planned an attempt on Brest in conjunction with French royalists, which happily was not carried out.

On 25 Dec. 1799 Bonaparte, the First Consul, wrote to George III personally, proposing negotiations. The adverse answer sent by Grenville was approved by Pitt, who no doubt rightly believed that negotiations would have dissolved the new coalition without leading to a lasting peace, but in tone and matter the letter was unfortunate. The government was attacked for the rejection of the overture, and on 3 Feb. 1800 Pitt offered a masterly vindication of his policy (Parl Hist. xxxiv.ll97-1203, 1301-97). He was, however, full of anxiety; Russia was ill-affected and had withdrawn from co-operation; it was necessary to support Austria, and on the 17th he announced that two millions and a half would be required for subsidies. In answer to Tierney, who challenged the ministers to deny that the object of the war was the restoration of monarchy in France, Pitt retorted, in a speech full of passionate eloquence, that its object was security (ib. pp. 1438-47). His hopes of Austria were disappointed, for she was forced to an armistice. Though meeting with strong opposition in the cabinet, he again made overtures for peace during the blockade of Malta. They failed, and Malta surrendered to the British.

The government's financial embarrassments were rapidly growing. Early in 1798 Pitt arranged to receive voluntary contributions to supplement payments due under the triple assessment, and himself contributed 2,000l. in lieu of his legal assessment (Rose, i. 210). In April he rendered the land tax perpetual and subject to redemption, and stock being as low as fifty-six, about a quarter of the charge was redeemed by the end of 1799 (Dowell, iii. 88). His budget of 3 Dec. 1798 showed an excess in supply over the ordinary revenue of more than twenty-three millions. Premising that the amount to be raised by loan should be as small as possible, and that no loan should be greater than could be paid within a limited time, he pointed out the defects of the triple assessment, which, he said, had been shamefully evaded, and proposed that a general tax should be levied on income, beginning with a 120th on incomes of 60l., and rising by degrees until on incomes of 200l. and upwards it reached ten per cent. This, he calculated, would return ten millions, but in 1799 the yield was little more than six (ib. p. 92). His resolutions were carried. He also issued a loan of three millions, and in June 1799 another of fifteen millions (Newmarch). His budget on 24 Feb. 1800 showed estimates for supply amounting to thirty-nine and a half millions, and he announced the contract for a loan of eighteen and a half millions taken by the public at 157l. stock at three per cent, for 100l. money. Although his account of the revenue justified his belief in the growing commercial prosperity (ib. xxxiv. 1515-1519), the wet and cold summer of 1799 had created widespread distress. Wheat rose to 120s. a quarter. Pitt desired to adopt remedial measures, but Grenville argued that artificial contrivances would increase the evil (Stanhope, iii. 244-50). By Pitt's advice there was an early meeting of parliament in 1800 to consider measures for relief. He pointed out that war had no necessary connection with scarcity, and recommended regulation, though he deprecated the suggestion of 'a maximum price of corn' (ib. xxxv. 514-31, 789, 793).

Although Pitt had in 1792 looked on a legislative union with Ireland as the best means of solving the religious difficulty, he did not set himself to carry it out until June 1798, when the rebellion was in progress. His tentative policy towards the catholics, and his want of precision in the Fitzwilliam affair, had helped to increase the ferment in Ireland (Lecky, viii. 281, 285), and the question of the union had become urgent. At first he hoped to effect a union on a basis of emancipation, but he soon doubted whether that would be possible (Castlereagh Correspondence, i. 404, 431; Cornwallis Correspondence, ii. 414-18). The cabinet generally was against such a scheme, and Clare [see Fitzgibbon, John, Earl of Clare] persuaded Pitt in October to adopt an exclusively protestant basis for the union. Yet, while yielding to considerations of policy, he was determined that the union should be the means by which the catholics should attain political rights (Life of Wilberforce, ii. 318, 324). On 23 Jan. 1799 he brought proposals for the union before the British House of Commons, and was opposed by Sheridan, whose amendment received no support. He continued the debate on the 31st, when he made an eloquent speech, which he corrected for the press. He held out the prospect that the union would lead to the recognition of the catholic claims, which could not safely be admitted otherwise, and that, after it was effected, emancipation would depend only on the conduct of the catholics and the temper of the times. He ended by moving eight resolutions which were carried. Pitt has been blamed for the means taken by the Irish government to obtain a majority. He has been charged with cynically securing the assent of the Irish parliament to its own dissolution, by recklessly bribing its members. Extensive jobbery was practised by Cornwallis and Castlereagh in accordance with the evil traditions of Irish politics before the union, and Pitt, as prime minister, must be held largely responsible for their doings (Cornwallis Correspondence, iii. 8, 100). But the amount and character of the corruption sanctioned by Pitt have often been exaggerated. Little money was sent from England during the struggle (ib. pp. 34, 151, 156, 184; Castlereagh Corresp. iii. 260; Lecky, viii. 409; Ingram, Irish Union, p. 219), and little, if any, was spent in the purchase of votes. Cornwallis declared it would be bad and dishonourable policy to offer money-bribes. Some Irish members of the opposition vacated their seats during the struggle, induced by money payments, promises, or grants of pensions. The bill disfranchised eighty-four boroughs, and Pitt, in the Reform Bill which he had vainly introduced into the English House of Commons in 1785, had accepted the principle that compensation was due to dispossessed borough-holders. Other views prevailed in 1832; but in 1798, unless provision had been made for such compensation, no bill which involved the disfranchisement of boroughs would have had any chance of passing the legislature either in Ireland or England. Under Pitt's scheme, as accepted by the Irish legislature, a court was established for the settlement of borough-holders' claims, and 1,260,000l. was paid under the act. In a few instances official posts were promised or granted; seven officers of the crown were dismissed and two resigned. Pitt allowed Cornwallis and Castlereagh to promise honours to some waverers. At the end of the struggle there were granted in fulfilment of these pledges sixteen new peerages and nineteen promotions in the Irish peerage, and four or five English peerages to Irish peers. Pitt's methods will not be approved in the light of modern political morality. But it is difficult to detect any flaw in the arguments by which he convinced himself and others that the measure was essential to the stability of the empire and the welfare of Ireland. The Irish parliament having passed the bill for the union on 28 March 1800, the first imperial parliament of Great Britain and Ireland met on 22 Jan. 1801.

In the king's speech, Pitt referred to the unfortunate course of the war. The failure of the coalition was fully declared by the treaty of Lunéville, and Russia had renewed the policy of 1780 by forming an alliance of armed neutrality in the north. Still undaunted, Pitt urged the importance of a naval attack before the northern powers had assembled their forces, and maintained the justice of the British system with respect to neutrals. To this he ascribed 'that naval preponderance which had given security to this country and more than once afforded chances for the salvation of Europe' (ib. pp. 908-18). His position in the house may be gauged by the rejection of an amendment to the address by 245 to 63, the opposition being in comparatively strong force. A few weeks later he ceased to hold ministerial office.

Pitt, in accordance with his original view, had regarded the Irish union as incomplete without catholic emancipation; and while not definitely pledging himself to that effect, had allowed Cornwallis to enlist the votes of catholics on the understanding that it would follow (Castlereagh Corresp. iv. 10, 11, 34). Accordingly, he had at once planned with Grenville the abolition of the sacramental test, the commutation of tithes in both countries, and a provision for the Irish catholic clergy and dissenting ministers (Court and Cabinets, iii. 128-9). The lord-chancellor, Loughborough, who spoke against Pitt's plan in the cabinet on 30 Sept. 1800, betrayed Pitt's intentions to the king, and did all he could to intensify George's dislike of the proposals. Pitt, while the matter was still before the cabinet, abstained from speaking of it to the king. On 29 Jan. the speaker, Aldington, by the king's request, endeavoured to dissuade him from his purpose. On the 31st Pitt learnt that the king had declared that he should reckon any one who proposed emancipation as his personal enemy. Thereupon he wrote to George that, unless he could bring the measure before parliament with the royal concurrence and the whole weight of government, he must resign. George was obdurate. On 3 Feb. Pitt announced his intention of resigning, and the king agreed to accept his resignation. He did not, however, quit office immediately. On 18 Feb. he brought forward his budget, announcing loans of twenty-eight millions and additional taxation calculated at 1,794,000l. For the first time his budget was not opposed. Wishing to calm the catholics, Pitt instructed Castlereagh to write a letter to Cornwallis, promising the catholics the support of the outgoing ministers. His surrender of his seals was delayed by the king's derangement. On 6 March he was much moved by a message from the king attributing his illness to Pitt's conduct. Although he remained convinced of the necessity of emancipation to the end of his life (Parl. Debates, xvi. 1006), he sent back an assurance that during George's reign he would never agitate the catholic question (Stanhope, iii. 304). Thereupon some of his friends urged him to cancel his resignation. He hesitated, but decided not to do so except at the king's request, and on the voluntary withdrawal of Addington, who had been designated his successor with his concurrence. Addington declined to move in the matter, and Pitt finally deemed the project improper (Rose, i. 329; Malmesbury, iv. 33-7). The king recovered, and on 14 March Pitt formally resigned; among those that went out of office with him were Lords Grenville, Spencer, and Cornwallis, Dundas, Windham, and Canning. On 25 March Pitt haughtily declared in the commons that he had not resigned to escape difficulties. His assertion was undoubtedly true.

Convinced that it was important for the country that the new ministry should be strong, Pitt did what he could to strengthen it. He probably promised his support to Addington too unconditionally (Malmesbury, iv. 75). On the whole, he heartily approved the preliminaries of the peace of Amiens of 1801, differing therein from Grenville and others of his friends. During the session of 1802 he relaxed his attendance in parliament, but maintained constant communication with Addington. In February he was attacked in the commons by Tierney, in his absence, and felt aggrieved by the lukewarmness of Addington in his defence. But he advised Addington on both the budget in April and the royal speech in June. Grenville and others urged on him the weakness of the government and the need of a strenuous policy in view of a probable renewal of the war. He became convinced that the peace would not last, and that measures should be taken to show that England would not submit to injury or insult. On 12 April he was violently attacked by Sir Francis Burdett [q. v.], and on 7 May John Nicholls moved an address to the king thanking him for having dismissed Pitt. The house, however, voted by 211 to 52 that Pitt had 'rendered great and important services to the country, and deserves the thanks of the house.' His birthday (28 May 1802) was celebrated by a dinner, for which Canning wrote the song ' The pilot that weathered the storm.' Pitt, who was residing at Walmer Castle, was not present.

Private debts were causing Pitt much embarrassment. Though his official salaries had for some years amounted to 10,500l., he owed 45,000l. in 1801. On the loss of his political salaries, his creditors became pressing, and an execution was feared. The London merchants again tendered him 100,000l. and the king proposed a gift of 30,000l. from his privy purse, but he declined both offers. Finally fourteen of his friends and supporters advanced him 11,700l. as a loan, and he sold Hollwood which, after the mortgage on it was paid, brought him 4,000l. (Rose, i. 402–27; Adolphus, History, vii. 595–6; Stanhope, iii. 341-9). In September 1802 he had at Walmer a sharp attack of illness, which necessitated a visit to Bath next month. In 1803 he took his niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, to live with him, and, while spending the autumn at Walmer, organised and reviewed a large body of Cinque port volunteers in anticipation of a French invasion. When subsequently Napoleon gathered about Boulogne 130,000 men ready to invade England, Pitt, while at Walmer, busily attended reviews and promoted works of defence.

Late in 1801 Canning and Grenville had strongly represented to him the incapacity of the ministers, and that it was his duty to 'resume his position.' He replied that he was bound by an engagement to support Addington, though if the cabinet should ask his advice, and then act contrary to it, his hands would be free. His absence from London was prolonged at the entreaty of his friends, who desired that it should signify his disapproval of the government's policy. At Addington's earnest request he visited him on 5 Jan. 1803, but left unexpectedly the next day. On a renewal of his visit Addington suggested that he should return to 'an official situation,' meaning that he should form some coalition. Pitt answered guardedly (Life of Sidmouth, ii. 112–13). While avowing to his friends, who made no secret of it, his dislike of the government's proceedings, and specially of its finance, he still refused to take any step that might overthrow it (Court and Cabinets, iii. 251).

By the middle of March 1803 it was evident that war was at hand, but Pitt remained at Walmer. On the 20th Addington sent Lord Melville (Dundas) to propose that he and Pitt should hold office together under some first lord of the treasury to be named by Pitt, suggesting Pitt's brother, Lord Chatham. When Melville opened the scheme Pitt seems to have cut him short, and said afterwards in reference to the interview, 'Really I had not the curiosity to ask what I was to be' (Life of Wilberforce, iii. 219). Later, he declined the proposals, declaring his disapproval of the government's finance and policy generally, and saying that there should be a real first minister, and that finance should be in his hands (Colchester, Diary, i. 414). Addington then requested an interview with a view to Pitt's reinstatement as prime minister. Pitt agreed to meet him on 10 April at Charles Long's house. Meanwhile Grenville arrived at Walmer, and communicated to Pitt the terms on which he might reckon on the support of him and his friends. Grenville insisted that a new ministry should be formed by Pitt, and urged the admission of some members of the old opposition, like Moira and Grey. On that point Pitt expressed his unwillingness to act contrary to the king's wishes (Court and Cabinets, iii. 282–90). But resolving to adopt Grenville's first suggestion, he told Addington at their meeting that, if the king called upon him, he must submit his own list of ministers, and suggested that Addington should take a peerage and the speakership of the lords. Addington demanded the exclusion of Grenville and Windham. Several letters passed without advancing matters (Life of Sidmouth, ii. 119-29; Rose, ii. 33-40), the differences between them grew acute, and their old friendship was interrupted. The feebleness of Addington and his ministry meanwhile excited much popular ridicule. Pasquinades, the best of which are by Canning, appeared in a paper called the 'Oracle' (reprinted in the 'Spirit of the Public Journals.' 1803-4), and exposed the absurdity of Addington's pretensions to rival Pitt; for, as Canning wrote,

'Pitt is to Addington
As London to Paddington.

War was declared on 16 May 1803, and Pitt returned to London on the 20th. The country's need of a strenuous policy drew him back to parliament. Towards the ministry he assumed an independent attitude, supporting strong war measures, and opposing those that were weak and insufficient. In speaking in behalf of the address on the 23rd. he warned the house that the struggle would be more severe than during the lasfwar, and that the French would strive to break the spirit of the nation. His speech, which was virtually unreported, was held to be the finest he had made (Malmesbury, iv. 256), and, although its delivery showed signs of impaired physical power, Fox said that 'if Demosthenes had been present, he must have admired and might have envied' it (Memoirs of Homer, i. 221). On a vote of censure on the ministry on 3 June, he moved the orders of the day, saying that, while he would not join in the censure, he held the ministers to blame. His motion was lost by 335 to 58, the minority roughly representing the number of his personal following as distinct from Grenville's party. Pitt's motion appears to have been a tactical mistake; it satisfied no section (Malmesbury, iv. 263-4; Life of Sidmouth, ii. 140). At the close of the session, Pitt was attacked by Addington's party in a pamphlet entitled 'A few cursory Remarks, &c.'; he at once instructed his friend George Rose (1744-1818) [q. v.] to procure an answer. This was written by Thomas Peregrine Courtenay [q. v.], and other pamphlets followed on both sides. Although exasperated by this attack, Pitt resolved not to depart from his position of neutrality, and persisted for a while in what Grenville, with some irritation, described as 'middle lines and managements and delicacies "où l'on se perd"' (Court and Cabinets, iii. 342; Malmesbury, iv. 288-91). But from the beginning of 1804 he showed increased hostility to the government. In February, when there was a strong probability of invasion, he condemned the ministerial measures for defence as inadequate; and on 15 March, when he moved for papers on the navy, passed severe strictures, some of which were ill-founded, on the administration of Lord St. Vincent, the first lord of the admiralty (Speeches, iv. 275, 287; Mahan, ii. 123). On the 19th, however, he supported the government against the followers of Fox and Grenville.

At the moment the king was ill, and Pitt wished to avoid a crisis. If, in forming a ministry, he found that the king insisted on the exclusion of Fox and Grenville, he determined to yield (Letter of 29 March; Stanhope, iv. 142-3). After the recess he went into avowed opposition. On 16 April he denounced a government measure; the followers of Fox and Grenville voted with him, and the majority sank to twenty-one. Addington invited his advice on the situation. He answered that his opinion as to a new government was at the service of the king. The lord-chancellor, Eldon, called on him, at the king's request, at his house, No. 14 York Place. He communicated these proceedings to Fox, and through Fox to Grenville, and promised, in general terms, to persuade the king to consent to a comprehensive government. He informed the king of his intention of opposing the government, and on the 23rd and 25th spoke strongly against its policy. Addington's resignation was now imminent, and the king ordered Pitt to prepare a plan for a new government. Pitt requested permission to treat with Fox and Grenville. The king angrily refused, and demanded of Pitt a pledge to maintain the Test Act. Pitt renewed his promise as to the catholics, and on 7 May, in a long interview with the king, sought to overcome his objections to Fox and Grenville. He ultimately obtained permission to include Grenville and some of his party. Pitt consented to form an administration on these terms. He hoped in a short time to bring Fox into the cabinet, and to persuade him meanwhile to accept a mission to Russia. But next day he was informed that none of Fox's or Grenville's friends would take office without Fox. Fox declined to see him. He thus lost the help of, among others, Lords Grenville, Spencer, and Fitzwilliam, and Windham, and was forced to look merely to his own friends and some of the existing ministers. He was highly indignant with Grenville. He would, he said, 'teach that proud man that in the service, and with the confidence of the king, he could do without him, though he thought his health such that it might cost him his life' (Rose, ii. 113-29; Malmesbury, iv. 299-302; Life of Eldon, i. 447). Pitt re-entered office as first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer on 10 May 1804; his cabinet consisted of twelve members, of whom he and Castlereagh alone were in the commons; six were members of the late government, the rest were chosen from his own following; it was therefore neither comprehensive nor thoroughly homogeneous. Arrayed against him were three parties, respectively headed in the commons by Addington, Windham, and Fox. The return to a more vigorous policy was at once apparent. In June the government's Additional Force Bill, although attacked by all three parties in opposition, was carried after a sharp struggle. At the close of the session Pitt went to Walmer, but as he was constantly needed in London, he rented a house on Putney Heath, that he might have country air while attending to his official duties.

Pitt was endeavouring to form a third coalition against France. The negotiations proceeded slowly. A preliminary agreement was formed between Russia and Austria in November; but Prussia stood aloof, and Russia was offended by the British capture of the Spanish treasure-ships. Spain declared war against Great Britain on 3 Dec. On 19 Jan. 1805 Pitt, being assured of the goodwill of Austria, formally invited the accession of Russia (Alison, vi. 391-3). The Anglo-Russian convention was signed on 11 April; Sweden and Austria also entered the alliance.

Pitt had during the summer of 1804 also been engaged in negotiating a reconciliation between the king and the Prince of Wales, and he seems to have made some inquiry as to the possibility of obtaining the support of the prince's friends, but was answered in the negative (Court and Cabinets, iii. 373-6). His ministry needed strengthening. Unable to obtain aid elsewhere, he communicated with Addington, who accepted a peerage, as Viscount Sidmouth, and entered the cabinet on obtaining a promise from Pitt that some of his friends and relatives should receive secondary offices as soon as possible (Life of Sidmouth, ii. 324-44). Pitt and Addington had a personal reconciliation on 23 Dec. On the opening of the next session the opposition in the commons showed some vigour, but on 11 Feb. 1805 Pitt obtained a majority on the Spanish war of 313 to 106. On the 18th he expounded his budget; the estimates were enormous, the total charges, exclusive of the interest on debts, being put at forty-four millions. A loan of twenty millions was announced, and, to meet the interest, augmentations were made to postage and various duties; the property tax was also increased by twenty-five per cent. During this session most of the ministerial departments depended on Pitt for inspiration, and the incessant work told heavily on his declining health. By the end of 1804 he felt the need of rest and solitude. His physicians urged another visit to Bath, but he was kept in London by the negotiations with Russia. Again at Easter 1805 he was detained by public business.

Pitt was much harassed by the charges brought against his old friend Melville [see under Dundas, Henry, first Viscount Melville] then first lord of the admiralty. Convinced that Melville had not 'pocketed any public money,' he determined to support him. Sidmouth, however, by a threat of resignation, forced him to agree to a select committee of inquiry (Colchester, i. 546-7). On 8 April 1805 he advocated this course as against a motion for censure. When the speaker, the numbers on division being equal, gave his casting vote for the censure, one of Pitt's friends saw 'the tears trickling down his cheeks.' Some young members of his party formed a circle round him, and in their midst he walked out of the house shielded from the brutal curiosity of his opponents. His mortification probably helped to shorten his life (Malmesbury, iv. 347). During the further proceedings against Melville, a question was raised as to an advance that Pitt had in 1796 made from the navy funds to certain contractors for a public loan; no imputation was made on his integrity. He admitted that he had acted irregularly for the benefit of the country, and a bill of indemnity was passed unanimously. On 14 May he spoke against the catholic petition presented by Fox, referred to his previous policy, and declared that a revival of the catholic claims would be useless, and would only create discord.

When Melville resigned, Sidmouth demanded an appointment that would have placed office at the disposal of one of his relatives. Pitt refused to act on the suggestion, and Sidmouth, who charged him with a breach of the agreement made in December, threatened with his follower, Lord Buckinghamshire, to retire. Pitt persuaded Sidmouth to remain (26 April), promising that his friends should be at liberty to vote as they pleased on Melville's impeachment, and that their claims should be considered. But despite professions of good feeling, their mutual relations were unstable. Sidmouth's brother, Hiley Addington, and Bond, one of his party, pressed matters against Melville with such violence that Pitt declared that 'their conduct must be marked,' and that he could not give them places. Sidmouth was offended, and he and Buckinghamshire resigned on 5 July.

At the close of the session of 1805, Pitt's health was bad, but his hopes ran high. In August Napoleon's plan of invasion ended in failure, and in September Pitt took leave of Nelson. The coalition seemed to promise well. He was, however, fully aware of the weakness of his ministry, and in September visited the king at Weymouth, and pressed upon him the need of opening negotiations with Fox and Grenville, but George refused to yield and Pitt forbore from further insistence for fear of injuring the king's health (Rose, ii. 198-201). In order to strengthen his cabinet, he decided to bring in Canning and Charles Yorke.

The news of the capitulation of Ulm (20 Oct.) affected him deeply. When he first heard it on 2 Nov., he declined to credit it; the next day, when it was confirmed, his look and manner changed, and Lord Malmesbury had a foreboding of his death (Malmesbury, iv. 340). The mingled joy and sorrow that the news of Trafalgar (21 Oct.) brought him (ib. p. 341) destroyed his sleep, which had hitherto been proof against all mental excitement. On the 9th he attended the lord mayor's banquet, and was in good spirits. When he was toasted as 'the Saviour of Europe,' he simply said that Europe was not to be saved by any one man, and that 'England has saved herself by her exertions; and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example' (Stanhope, iv. 346). Nelson's victory had given him fresh hopes, and he offered Frederick William of Prussia large subsidies if he would join in the war.

On 7 Dec. he found it possible to go to Bath. While there the news of the battle of Austerlitz (2 Dec.) gave him his death-blow. When he heard of the armistice that followed it, the gout left his feet, and he fell into extreme physical debility. He was removed from Bath on 9 Jan. 1806, and took three days on the journey to his house at Putney. As he entered the house he noticed the map of Europe on the wall. 'Roll up that map,' he said; 'it will not be wanted these ten years.' On the 13th he received Lords Hawkesbury and Castlereagh, and on the 14th drove out and received Lord Wellesley, who found his intellect as bright as ever. He took to his bed on the 16th, and was visited ministerially on the 22nd by his old tutor, Bishop Pretyman, to whom he dictated his last wishes. The following night his mind wandered, and he died early on the 23rd, his last words being, 'Oh, my country! how I leave my country!' (Stanhope, vol. iv. App. p. xxxi). His debts, amounting to 40,000l. — exclusive of the 11,700l. advanced by friends, who declined repayment — were paid by the nation; pensions were granted to his three nieces, and a public funeral was voted, which was carried out on 22 Feb. in Westminster Abbey.

There are statues by Westmacott in Westminster Abbey, by Chantrey in Hanover Square, London, by J. G. Bubb in the Guildhall, London (with an inscription by Canning), and by Nollekens in the senate-house, Cambridge. Flaxman executed a bust. Pitt's portrait was painted by Gainsborough, Hoppner (painted in 1805), and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The last is at Windsor. That by Gainsborough, of which there are replicas and copies, is engraved in Stanhope's 'Life;' of that by Hoppner there are copies and an engraving in Gifford's 'Life.' A drawing, by Copley, of Pitt in his youth, was engraved by Bartolozzi; and again by Holl for Stanhope's 'Life.' Other engravings are by Bartolozzi, from a portrait by G. du Pont, by J. Jones, Sherwin, Gillray, Edridge, and by Cardon in Gifford's 'Life,' after the bust by Flaxman (Stanhope, iv. 398-9 and note C; Bromley, Catalogue of Engraved Portraits, sec. ix. p. 3).

Pitt was tall and slight, and dignified, though rather stiff, in carriage. His countenance was animated by the brightness of his eyes. In his later years his hair became almost white, and his face bore the marks of disease, anxiety, and indulgence in port wine. The habit was acquired early through a doctor's recommendation, and he made no serious effort to break it. He was once only seen drunk in the House of Commons (Wrazall, Memoirs, iii. 221). His private life was remarkably pure. His debts were the result in part of his absorption in public affairs, and in part of a culpable contempt for private economy, inherited from his father. To all not on intimate terms with him, his manners were cold and even repellent. The mass of his supporters, who admired and obeyed him, were not drawn to him personally. Men of the highest rank found him stiff and unbending; and the king, though he esteemed him, looked on him as a master, and felt far more comfortable with Addington. His intimate friends were few; they were ardently attached to him, to them he was warm-hearted and affectionate, and in their company was cheerful and gay. He loved children, and enjoyed romping with them. He exercised a special charm over younger men, who found him sympathetic and inspiring. Eager by nature, he trained himself to a singular degree of calmness and self-possession. Greatness of soul enabled him to rise above calamity and, conscious of his powers, to remain undismayed by defeat. His temper was rarely ruffled, but he did not easily forgive those who offended him. While he retained through life his delight in Greek and Roman literature, and appreciated elegant English writing, he did not approach Fox either in classical scholarship or knowledge of literature generally. In office he offered no reward either to literature or art — a course which, if not matter for reproach, proved impolitic. As an orator, he spoke more correctly than Fox, expressed his meaning with less effort, and was far more master of himself. The best word always seemed to come spontaneously to his lips; he never stormed, his speeches were lucid, and his handling of his subject always complete. His memory was good, and he seldom used notes. He excelled in sarcasm, and used it freely. While Fox persuaded his hearers, Pitt commanded their assent; his speeches appealed to reason, and breathed the lofty sentiments of the speaker. His voice was rich, but its tone lacked modulation; his action was vehement and ungraceful. His judgment in party matters was admirable, and was conspicuously shown in his refusal of office in 1782, in his use of Fox's mistakes, and his conduct of affairs in 1784 and 1788-1789, and in his readiness to withdraw taxes that were generally obnoxious. Constantly needing the help of men of the higher classes, he paid for it with honours that cost the country nothing. He thus almost doubled the number of the House of Lords, and destroyed the whig oligarchy which, during the earlier years of the reign, had become intolerable (Rosebery, pp. 275-7). He showed remarkable foresight in declaring, during his last days, that a national war beginning in Spain might even then save Europe (ib. p. 256); but in one or two notable instances, such as his belief that the war with France would be short, his prescience was at fault. He made some serious political mistakes. A sanguine tendency to resort, in the face of difficulties, to a policy of vagueness, probably accounts for the Fitzwilliam imbroglio, and is to be discovered in his hopes about Fox in 1804, and his promises to Sidmouth. He acted unwisely in not speaking earlier to the king about his intention respecting catholic emancipation; and his pledge to abandon the question during the king's lifetime , though well-intentioned, is not to be defended. At times his conduct was inconsistent. His attitude towards Addington's ministry, though dictated by a sense of honour, was inspired by no intelligible principle. He honestly strove in 1804 to persuade the king to consent to a comprehensive government; but he allowed the king's wishes to outweigh his judgment in a matter which clearly involved the country's best interests.

As a peace minister Pitt aimed at extending the franchise and purifying elections. Supported by the crown, and yet acting independently, he destroyed the whig oligarchy, and pursued in every direction a policy large and statesmanlike. He strengthened public, credit by creating a surplus, established an enlightened system of finance, and brought order into the administration of the revenue. In 1783 the three-per-cents were at 74; in 1792 they were over 96 (Newmarch). The success of his commercial policy, which is illustrated by his reduction of customs duties, by his proposals for Ireland, and by his treaty with France, may be estimated by the vast increase in British commerce between the same dates (Rosebery, p. 280). He enabled the country to reap the full benefit of the extension of manufactures consequent on the introduction of machinery. Peace was necessary for the fulfilment of his work; war forced him to abandon domestic reforms and to direct his energies as a domestic minister towards stringently exacting from the people, in face of a relentless foe, the fullest adherence to the existing constitution.

As a war minister he has been compared unfavourably with his father. Chatham, however, had not to deal with Bonaparte; his son had no such ally as Frederick the Great. Pitt recognised that England should not engage in a war on land. The war on the continent had to be carried on by the continental powers, and Pitt, by means of his coalitions, strained every nerve to array them against France. The European sovereigns would not stir in the common cause without money, and he had to find it. From 1793 to 1801 8,836,000l. was spent in subsidies. This and other expenses of the war he met largely by loans, increasing the public liabilities during the period by 334,525,436l., though from this must be deducted the large amount of debt redeemed by the sinking fund (ib. pp. 150-1). He was forced to borrow at high rates of interest, which made the difference between the money he received and the capital he created 103,000,000l., but he was unwilling to check commercial development by excessive taxation, and his loans employed capital that could not in any case have been used in trade. Pitt's coalitions failed of their purpose, but it was not his fault that the sovereigns of Europe were jealous, selfish, and short-sighted.

He held that it was the part of Great Britain to check French aggrandisement by making herself mistress of the sea. By striking at France in the West Indies, and by rigidly restraining the trade of neutrals, he inflicted a severe blow on the enemy and vastly enlarged the resources of his own country. The commerce of France was ruined. The British navy, which was increased 82 per cent, between 1792 and 1800 (Mahan, ii. 404), was everywhere victorious, and controlled the trade of the world. Between 1793 and 1799 the average value of British imports as compared with the preceding six years rose by upwards of three and a half millions, that of the exports of British merchandise by nearly two and a half, and of foreign merchandise by nearly five and a half millions (Newmarch; Rosebery). On the progress of this increase, and the progressive decline in the enemy's trade, Pitt constantly insisted in his speeches, and these results should weigh for much in an estimate of his policy as a war minister. It was well for this country and for Europe that in the period of her deepest need Great Britain was guided by his wisdom and animated by his lofty courage. He lived for his country, was worn out by the toils, anxieties, and vexations that he encountered, and died crushed in body, though not in spirit, by the disaster that wrecked his plans for the security of England and the salvation of Europe.

[Besides the tragedy and the answer to Lord Macartney noticed above, Pitt wrote the articles on finance in the 'Anti- Jacobin,' Nos. i., ii., xii., and xxv., and in No. xxxv. the 'Review of the Session.' He was also responsible for a verse of the 'University of Göttingen,' a translation of Horace, Ode iii. 2, and a few other lines of verse.

Lives of Pitt have been published by Gifford (i.e. John Richards Green [q. v.]) as a History of Pitt's Political Life (3 vols. 4to, 1809), verbose, once useful, but superseded; by Bishop Tomline (formerly Pretyman) (3 vols. 8vo, 1822), goes down to 1793, and is so far useful; by Lord Stanhope (4 vols. 8vo, 2nd ed. 1862), the standard 'Life,' written with much care, and defending Pitt throughout; by Lewis Sergeant in Engl. Political Leaders Ser. (8vo, 1882), a fair handbook; and by Lord Rosebery in the 'Twelve English Statesmen' Ser. (8vo, 1891), a masterly and interesting study. For general views of Pitt's career, see Brougham's Sketches of Statesmen, 1st ser. vol. ii. (12mo, 1845), a poor production; Macaulay's Essay on William Pitt, written for Encycl. Brit. 1859, and included in Miscellaneous Writings (8vo, 1860, 1889); Sir George Cornewall Lewis's Essays on the Administrations of Great Britain (8vo, 1864), extremely valuable; Mr. Goldwin Smith's Three English Statesmen, 1867, 8vo, and The Two Mr. Pitts in Macmillan's Magazine, August 1890; also an art. by Mr. Lecky on Pitt in Macmillan, February 1891. For notices of early life : Chatham Correspondence, ed. Taylor (4 vols. 8vo, 1840); Pitt's Speeches (4 vols. 8vo, 1806); see also Parl. Hist. and Parl. Deb. and Ann. Reg. sub ann. For notices in Memoirs, &c. : Fitzmaurice's Life of Shelburne (3 vols. 8vo, 1875); Lord Aberdare's Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham (2 vols. 8vo, 1852); R. I. and S. Wilberforce's Life of W. Wilberforce (5 vols. 12mo, 1838) which contains many valuable notices, and is specially interesting as witnessing to Wilberforce's friendship for William Pitt; Russell's Memorials of C. J. Fox (4 vols. 8vo, 1853-7) and Life of C. J. Fox (3 vols. 8vo, 1859); Diaries and Corresp. of first Earl of Malmesbury (4 vols. 8vo, 1844); Holland's Mem. of the Whig Party (2 vols. 1854); Rose's Diaries and Corresp. ed. Harcourt (2 vols. 8vo, 1860); Lord Auckland's Journal and Corresp. (4 vols. 8vo, 1866); Grenville's Court and Cabinets of George III (4 vols. 8vo, 1855) which contains important notices of private negotiations; Pellew's Life of Sidmouth (3 vols. 8vo, 1847) which presents an ex parte view of William Pitt's relations with Addington; Lord Colchester's (Abbot) Diary and Corresp. ed. Colchester (3 vols. 8vo, 1861) on Addington's side; Windham's Diary, ed. Baring (8vo, 1866); L. Homer's Life of F. Homer (2 vols. 8vo, 1853); Twiss's Life of Eldon (2 vols. 2nd ed. 1846); Wraxall's Hist. and Posth. Memoirs (5 vols. 8vo, 1884); Moore's Life of Sheridan (2 vols. 8vo, 1825); Yonge's Life of Lord Liverpool (3 vols. 8vo, 1868); Letters and Corresp. of Bland Burges, ed. Hutton (8vo, 1885); Bruce's Life of Sir W. Napier (2 vols. 8vo, 1864) which has some interesting personal reminiscences in vol. i. For negotiations with France, 1792-3, see Marsh's Hist. of Politicks (2 vols. 8vo, 1800); Ernouf's Maret, Due de Bassano (8vo, 1878); W. A. Miles's Corresp. on the French Revolution (2 vols. 1890); Browning's England and France in 1793 in Fortnightly Review, February 1883. For Pitt's public economy and finance : Dowell's Hist. of Taxation (4 vols. 8vo, 2nd ed. 1888); Tooke's Hist. of Prices (8vo, 1858); Bastable's Public Finance (8vo, 1892); Collection of Tracts on the National Debt, by McCulloch. specially the last tract by Hamilton on the Sinking Fund and the Debt (8vo, 1857); Speech by Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons on 8 May 1854, in Parl. Deb. 3rd ser. vol. cxxxii, cols. 1472-9, containing an attack on Pitt's finance during the war, which is ably defended in Newmarch's On the Loans raised by Mr. Pitt, 1793-1801 (8vo, 1855), criticised in Rickard's Financial Policy of War (8vo, 1855). For Pitt's attitude to constitutional questions, see Erskine May's Constitutional Hist., 1760-1860. For the expedition of 1795: Forneron's Histoire Générale des Émigrés (2 vols. 2nd ed. 1884). For dealings with Ireland : Fitzpatrick's Secret Service under Pitt (8vo, 1892) contains little personal information; Stewart's [Marquis of Londonderry] Mem. and Corr. of Viscount Castlereagh (12 vols. 8vo, 1848), for this purpose vols. i.-iv. : Cornwallis's Corr. (3 vols. 8vo, 18539) has also other important notices of William Pitt; Corresp. between W. Pitt and Charles, Duke of Rutland, 1890; Grattan's Life of Grattan (5 vols. 8vo, 1839); Grattan's Speeches (4 vols. 8vo, 1822); Coote's Hist. of the Union (8vo, 1802); Lecky's Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, 1861; Ingram's Hist. of the Irish Union (8vo, 1887); above all, Lecky's Hist. of England, vols. vi.-viii. For satirical writing on Pitt's side : Spirit of the Public Journals, 1802-1804, see list of Canning's verses in Lewis's Administrations, p. 249; the Anti-Jacobin. Against Pitt: Wolcot's [Peter Pindar] Works (5 vols. 8vo, 1812); Morris's Lyra Urbanica (2 vols. 12mo, 1840). For caricatures, see Works of James Gillray, and in Wright's Caricature History of the Georges (8vo, 1868). For accounts of William Pitt in general histories: Lecky's Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Century (8 vols. 8vo, 1882-90), vols. iv.-viii.; Mahan's Influence of Sea Power on the French Revolution, 1793-1812 (2 vols. 8vo, 1892), which contains a fine defence of Pitt's war policy, specially with reference to naval operations; Adolphus's Hist. of England (7 vols. 8vo, 1845) ends at 1303; Alison's Hist. of Europe (12 vols. 9th ed. 8vo, 1853), vols. ii.-v.]

W. H.

PITT, WILLIAM (1759–1806), English statesman, the second son of William Pitt, earl of Chatham, and of Lady Hester Grenville, daughter of Hester, Countess Temple, was born at Hayes, near Bromley, Kent, on the 28th of May 1759. The child inherited a name which, at the time of his birth, was the most illustrious in the civilized world, and was pronounced by every Englishman with pride, and by every enemy of England with mingled admiration and terror. During the first year of his life every month had its illuminations and bonfires, and every wind brought some messenger charged with joyful tidings and hostile standards. In Westphalia the English infantry won a great battle which arrested the armies of Louis XV. in the midst of a career of conquest; Boscawen defeated one French fleet on the coast of Portugal; Hawke put to flight another in the Bay of Biscay; Johnson took Niagara; Amherst took Ticonderoga; Wolfe died by the most enviable of deaths under the walls of Quebec; Clive destroyed a Dutch armament in the Hugli, and established the English supremacy in Bengal; Coote routed Lally at Wandewash, and established the English supremacy in the Carnatic. The nation, while loudly applauding the successful warriors, considered them all, on sea and on land, in Europe, in America, and in Asia, merely as instruments which received their direction from one superior mind. It was the great William Pitt who had vanquished the French marshals in Germany and French admirals on the Atlantic — who had conquered for his country one great empire on the frozen shores of Ontario and another under the tropical sun near the mouths of the Ganges. It was not in the nature of things that popularity such as he at this time enjoyed should be permanent. That popularity had lost its gloss before his children were old enough to understand that the earl of Chatham was a great man. The energy and decision which had eminently fitted him for the direction of war were not needed in time of peace. The lofty and spirit-stirring eloquence which had made him supreme in the House of Commons often fell dead on the House of Lords. Chatham was only the ruin of Pitt, but an awful and majestic ruin, not to be contemplated by any man of sense and feeling without emotions resembling those which are excited by the remains of the Parthenon and of the Colosseum. In one respect the old statesman was eminently happy. Whatever might be the vicissitudes of his public life, he never failed to find peace and love by his own hearth. He loved all his children, and was loved by them; and of all his children the one of whom he was fondest and proudest was his second son.

Early Life. The child’s genius and ambition displayed themselves with a rare and almost unnatural precocity. At seven the interest which he took in grave subjects, the ardour with which he pursued his studies, and the sense and vivacity of his remarks on books and on events amazed his parents and instructors. One of his sayings of this date was reported to his mother by his tutor. In August 1766, when the world was agitated by the news that Mr Pitt had become earl of Chatham, little William exclaimed, “I am glad that I am not the eldest son. I want to speak in the House of Commons like papa.” At fourteen the lad was in intellect a man. Hayley, who met him at Lyme in the summer of 1773, was astonished, delighted, and somewhat overawed, by hearing wit and wisdom from so young a mouth. The boy himself had already written a tragedy, bad, of course, but not worse than the tragedies of his friend. This piece (still preserved) is in some respects highly curious. There is no love. The whole plot is political; and it is remarkable that the interest, such as it is, turns on a contest about a regency. On one side is a faithful servant of the Crown, on the other an ambitious and unprincipled conspirator. At length the king, who had been missing, reappears, resumes his power, and rewards the fathful defender of his rights. A reader who should judge only by internal evidence would have no hesitation in pronouncing that the play was written by some Pittite poetaster at the time of the rejoicings for the recovery of George III. in 1789.

The pleasure with which William’s parents observed the rapid development of his intellectual powers was alloyed by apprehensions about his health. He shot up alarmingly fast; he was often ill, and always weak; and it was feared that it would be impossible to rear a stripling so tall, so slender, and so feeble. Port wine was prescribed by his medical advisers; and it is said that he was, at fourteen, accustomed to take this agreeable physic in quantities which would, in our more abstemious age, be thought much more than sufficient for any full-grown man. It was probably on account of the delicacy of his frame that he was not educated like other boys of the same rank. Almost all the eminent English statesmen and orators to whom he was afterwards opposed or allied North, Fox, Shelburne, Windham, Grey, Wellesley, Grenville, Sheridan, Canning went through the training of great public schools. Lord Chatham had himself been a distinguished Etonian; and it is seldom that a distinguished Etonian forgets his obligations to Eton. But William’s infirmities required a vigilance and tenderness such as could be found only at home. He was therefore bred under the paternal roof. His studies were superintended by a clergyman named Wilson; and those studies, though often interrupted by illness, were prosecuted with extraordinary success. He was sent, towards the close of the year 1773, to Pembroke Hall, in the university of Cambridge. The governor to whom the direction of William's academical life was confided was a bachelor of arts named Pretyman,^[1] who had been senior wrangler in the preceding year, and, who though not a man of prepossessing appearance or brilliant parts, was eminently acute and laborious, a sound scholar, and an excellent geometrician. A close and lasting friendship sprang up between the pair. The disciple was able, before he completed his twenty-eighth year, to make his preceptor bishop of Lincoln and dean of St Paul's; and the preceptor showed his gratitude by writing a life of the disciple, which enjoys the distinction of being the worst biographical work of its size in the world. Pitt, till he graduated, had scarcely one acquaintance, attended chapel regularly morning and evening, dined every day in hall, and never went to a single evening party. At seventeen he was admitted, after the fashion of those times, by right of birth, without any examination, to the degree of master of arts. But he continued during some years to reside at college, and to apply himself vigorously, under Pretyman's direction, to the studies of the place, while mixing freely in the best academic society.

The stock of learning which Pitt laid in during this part of his life was certainly very extraordinary. The work in which he took the greatest delight was Newton's Principia. His liking for mathematics, indeed, amounted to a passion, which, in the opinion of his instructors, themselves distinguished mathematicians, required to be checked rather than encouraged. Nor was the youth's proficiency in classical learning less remarkable. In one respect, indeed, he appeared to disadvantage when compared with even second-rate and third-rate men from public schools. He had never, while under Wilson's care, been in the habit of composing in the ancient languages; and he therefore never acquired the knack of versification. It would have been utterly out of his power to produce such charming elegiac lines as those in which Wellesley bade farewell to Eton, or such Virgilian hexameters as those in which Canning described the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it may be doubted whether any scholar has ever, at twenty, had a more solid and profound knowledge of the two great tongues of the old civilized world. He had set his heart on being intimately acquainted with all the extant poetry of Greece, and was not satisfied till he had mastered Lycophron's Cassandra.

To modern literature Pitt paid comparatively little attention. He knew no living language except French; and French he knew very imperfectly. With a few of the best English writers he was intimate, particularly with Shakespeare and Milton. The debate in Pandemonium was, as it well deserved to be, one of his favourite passages; and his early friends used to talk, long after his death, of the just emphasis and the melodious cadence with which they had heard him recite the incomparable speech of Belial, He had indeed been carefully trained from infancy in the art of managing his voice, a voice naturally clear and deep-toned. At a later period the wits of Brookes's, irritated by observing, night after night, how powerfully Pitt's sonorous elocution fascinated the rows of country gentlemen, reproached him with having been “taught by his dad on a stool”.

His education, indeed, was well adapted to form a great parliamentary speaker. The classical studies of Pitt had the effect of enriching his English vocabulary, and of making him wonderfully expert in the art of constructing correct English sentences. His practice was to look over a page or two of a Greek or Latin author, to make himself master of the meaning, and then to read the passage straight forward into his own language. This practice, begun under his first teacher Wilson, was continued under Pretyman. Of all the remains of antiquity, the orations were those on which he bestowed the most minute examination. His favourite employment was to compare harangues on opposite sides of the same question, to analyse them, and to observe which of the arguments of the first speaker were refuted by the second, which were evaded, and which were left untouched. Nor was it only in books that he at this time studied the art of parliamentary fencing. When he was at home he had frequent opportunities of hearing important debates at Westminster; and he heard them, not only with interest and enjoyment, but with close scientific attention. On one of these occasions Pitt, a youth whose abilities were as yet known only to his own family and to a small knot of college friends, was introduced on the steps of the throne in the House of Lords to Fox, his senior by eleven years, who was already the greatest debater, and one of the greatest orators, that had appeared in England. Fox used afterwards to relate that, as the discussion proceeded, Pitt repeatedly turned to him, and said, “But surely, Mr Fox, that might be met thus,” or “Yes; but he lays himself open to this retort.” What the particular criticisms were Fox had forgotten; but he said that he was much struck at the time by the precocity of a lad who, through the whole sitting, seemed to be thinking only how all the speeches on both sides could be answered.

He had not quite completed his nineteenth year when, on the 7th of April 1778, he attended his father to Westminster. A great debate was expected. It was known that France had recognized the independence of the United States. The duke of Richmond was about to declare his opinion that all thought of subjugating those states ought to be relinquished. Chatham had always maintained that the resistance of the colonies to the mother country was justifiable. But he conceived, very erroneously, that on the day on which their independence should be acknowledged the greatness of England would be at an end. Though sinking under the weight of years and infirmities, he determined, in spite of the entreaties of his family, to be in his place. His son supported him to a seat. The excitement and exertion were too much for the old man. In the very act of addressing the peers, he fell back in convulsions. A few weeks later his corpse was borne, with gloomy pomp, from the Painted Chamber to the Abbey. The favourite child and namesake of the deceased statesman followed the coffin as chief mourner, and saw it deposited in the transept where his own was destined to lie. His elder brother, now earl of Chatham, had means sufficient, and barely sufficient, to support the dignity of the peerage. The other members of the family were poorly provided for. William had little more than £300 a year. It was necessary for him to follow a profession. He had already begun to “eat his terms.” In the spring of 1780 he came of age. He then quitted Cambridge, was called to the bar, took chambers in Lincoln's Inn, and joined the western circuit. In the autumn of that year a general election took place; and he offered himself as a candidate for the university; but he was at the bottom of the poll. He was, however, at the request of an hereditary friend, the duke of Rutland, brought into parliament by Sir James Lowther for the borough of Appleby.

Parliament, 1780. The dangers of the country were at that time such as might well have disturbed even a constant mind. Army after army had been sent in vain against the rebellious colonists of North America. Meanwhile the house of Bourbon, humbled to the dust a few years before by the genius and vigour of Chatham, had seized the opportunity of revenge. France and Spain had united against England, and had recently been joined by Holland. The command of the Mediterranean had been for a time lost. The British flag had been scarcely able to maintain itself in the British Channel. The northern powers professed neutrality; but their neutrality had a menacing aspect. In the East, Hyder Ali had descended on the Carnatic, had destroyed the little army of Baillie, and had spread terror even to the ramparts of Fort St George. The discontents of Ireland threatened nothing less than civil war. In England the authority of Lord North'r government had sunk to the lowest point. The king and the House of Commons were alike unpopular. The cry for parliamentary reform was scarcely less loud and vehement than afterwards in 1830.

The Opposition consisted of two parties which had once been hostile to each other, but at this conjuncture seemed to act together with cordiality. The larger of these parties consisted of the great body of the Whig aristocracy, headed by Charles, marquess of Rockingham. In the House of Commons the adherents of Rockingham were led by Fox, whose dissipated habits and ruined fortunes were the talk of the whole town, but whose commanding genius, and whose sweet, generous and affectionate disposition, extorted the admiration and love of those who most lamented the errors of his private life. Burke, superior to Fox in largeness of comprehension, in extent of knowledge, and in splendour of imagination, but less skilled in that kind of logic and in that kind of rhetoric which convince and persuade great assemblies, was willing to be the lieutenant of a young chief who might have been his son. A smaller section of the Opposition was composed of the old followers of Chatham. At their head was William, earl of Shelburne, distinguished both as a statesman and as a lover of science and letters. With him were leagued Lord Camden, who had formerly held the Great Seal, and whose integrity, ability and constitutional knowledge commanded the public respect; Barre, an eloquent and acrimonious declaimer; and Dunning, who had long held the first place at the English bar. It was to this party that Pitt was naturally attracted.

On the 26th of February 1781 he made his first speech in favour of Burke's plan of economical reform. Fox stood up at the same moment, but instantly gave way. The lofty yet animated deportment of the young member, his perfect self-possession, the readiness with which he replied to the orators who had preceded him, the silver tones of his voice, the perfect structure of his unpremeditated sentences, astonished and delighted his hearers. Burke, moved even to tears, exclaimed, “It is not a chip of the old block; it is the old block itself.” “Pitt will be one of the first men in parliament,” said a member of the Opposition to Fox. “He is so already,” answered Fox, in whose nature envy had no place. Soon after this debate Pitt's name was put up by Fox at Brookes's Club. On two subsequent occasions during that session Pitt addressed the house, and on both fully sustained the reputation which he had acquired on his first appearance. In the summer, after the prorogation, he again went the western circuit, held several briefs, and acquitted himself in such a manner that he was highly complimented by Buller from the bench, and by Dunning at the bar.

On the 27th of November the parliament reassembled. Only forty-eight hours before had arrived tidings of the surrender of Cornwallis and his army. In the debate on the report of the address Pitt spoke with even more energy and brilliancy than on any former occasion. He was warmly applauded by his allies; but it was remarked that no person on his own side of the house was so loud in eulogy as Henry Dundas, the lord advocate of Scotland, who spoke from the ministerial ranks. From that night dates his connexion with Pitt, a connexion which soon became a close intimacy, and which lasted till it was dissolved by death. About a fortnight later Pitt spoke in the committee of supply on the army estimates. Symptoms of dissension had begun to appear on the treasury bench. Lord George Germaine, the secretary of state who was especially charged with the direction of the war in America, had held language not easily to be reconciled with declarations made by the first lord of the treasury. Pitt noticed the discrepancy with much force and keenness. Lord George and Lord North began to whisper together; and Welbore Ellis, an ancient placeman who had been drawing salary almost every quarter since the days of Henry Pelham, bent down between them to put in a word. Such interruptions sometimes discompose veteran speakers. Pitt stopped, and, looking at the group, said with admirable readiness, “I shall wait till Nestor has composed the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles.” After several defeats, or victories hardly to be distinguished from defeats, the ministry resigned. The king, reluctantly and ungraciously, consented to accept Rockingham as first minister. Fox and Shelburne became secretaries of state. Lord John Cavendish, one of the most upright and honourable of men, was made chancellor of the exchequer. Thurlow, whose abilities and force of character had made him the dictator of the House of Lords, continued to hold the Great Seal. To Pitt was offered, through Shelburne, the vice-treasurership of Ireland, one of the easiest and most highly paid places in the gift of the Crown; but the offer was without hesitation declined. The young statesman had resolved to accept no post which did not entitle him to a seat in the cabinet; and a few days later (March 1782) he announced that resolution in the House of Commons.

Pitt gave a general support to the administration of Rockingham, but omitted, in the meantime, no opportunity of courting that ultra-Whig party which the persecution of Wilkes and the Middlesex election had called into existence, and which the disastrous events of the war, and the triumph of republican principles in America, had made formidable both in numbers and in temper. He supported a motion for shortening the duration of parliaments. He made a motion for a committee to examine into the state of the representation, and, in the speech (May 7, 1782) by which that motion was introduced, avowed himself the enemy of the close boroughs, the strongholds of that corruption to which he attributed all the calamities of the nation, and which, as he phrased it in one of those exact and sonorous sentences of which he had a boundless command, had grown with the growth of England and strengthened with her strength, but had not diminished with her diminution or decayed with her decay. On this occasion he was supported by Fox. The motion was lost by only twenty votes in a house of more than three hundred members. The Reformers never again had so good a division till the year 1831.

Office, 1782. The new administration was strong in abilities, and was more popular than any administration which had held office since the first year of George III., but was hated by the king, hesitatingly supported by the parliament, and torn by internal dissensions. It was all that Rockingham could do to keep the peace in his cabinet; and before the cabinet had existed three months Rockingham died. In an instant all was confusion. The adherents of the deceased statesman looked on the duke of Portland as their chief. The king placed Shelburne at the head of the treasury. Fox, Lord John Cavendish, and Burke immediately resigned their offices; and the new prime minister was left to constitute a government out of very defective materials. It was necessary to find some member of the House of Commons who could confront the great orators of the Opposition; and Pitt alone had the eloquence and the courage which were required. He was offered the great place of chancellor of the exchequer and he accepted it (July 1782). He had scarcely completed his twenty-third year.

The parliament was speedily prorogued. During the recess a negotiation for peace which had been commenced under Rockingham was brought to a successful termination. England acknowledged the independence of her revolted colonies; and she ceded to her European enemies some places in the Mediterranean and in the Gulf of Mexico. But the terms which she obtained were quite as advantageous and honourable as the events of the war entitled her to expect, or as she was likely to obtain by persevering in a contest against immense odds. There is not the slightest reason to believe that Fox, if he had remained in office, would have hesitated one moment about concluding a treaty on such conditions. Unhappily Fox was, at this crisis, hurried by his passions into an error which made his genius and his virtues, during a long course of years, almost useless to his country. He saw that the great body of the House of Commons was divided into three parties — his own, that of North, and that of Shelburne; that none of those three parties was large enough to stand alone; that, therefore, unless two of them united there must be a miserably feeble administration, or, more probably, a rapid succession of miserably feeble administrations, and this at a time when a strong government was essential to the prosperity and respectability of the nation. It was then necessary and right that there should be a coalition. To every possible coalition there were objections. But of all possible coalitions that to which there were the fewest objections was undoubtedly a coalition between Shelburne and Fox. It would have been generally applauded by the followers of both. It might have been made without any sacrifice of public principle on the part of either. Unhappily, recent bickerings had left in the mind of Fox a profound dislike and distrust of Shelburne. Pitt attempted to mediate, and was authorized to invite Fox to return to the service of the Crown. “Is Lord Shelburne,” said Fox, “to remain prime minister?” Pitt answered in the affirmative. “It is impossible that I can act under him,” said Fox. “Then negotiation is at an end,” said Pitt; “for I cannot betray him.” Thus the two statesmen parted. They were never again in a private room together. As Fox and his friends would not treat with Shelburne, nothing remained to them but to treat with North. That fatal coalition which is emphatically called “The Coalition” was formed. Not three-quarters of a year had elapsed since Fox and Burke had threatened North with impeachment, and had described him night after night as the most arbitrary, the most corrupt, and the most incapable of ministers. They now allied themselves with him for the purpose of driving from office a statesman with whom they cannot be said to have differed as to any important question. Nor had they even the prudence and the patience to wait for some occasion on which they might, without inconsistency, have combined with their old enemies in opposition to the government. That nothing might be wanting to the scandal, the great orators who had, during seven years, thundered against the war determined to join with the authors of that war in passing a vote of censure on the peace.

The parliament met before Christmas 1782. But it was not till January 1783 that the preliminary treaties were signed. On the 17th of February they were taken into consideration by the House of Commons. There had been, during some days, floating rumours that Fox and North had coalesced; and the debate indicated but too clearly that those rumours were not unfounded. Pitt was suffering from indisposition — he did not rise till his own strength and that of his hearers were exhausted; and he was consequently less successful than on any former occasion. His admirers owned that his speech was feeble and petulant. He so far forgot himself as to advise Sheridan to confine himself to amusing theatrical audiences. This ignoble sarcasm gave Sheridan an opportunity of retorting with great felicity. “After what I have seen and heard to-night,” he said, “I really feel strongly tempted to venture on a competition with so great an artist as Ben Jonson, and to bring on the stage a second Angry Boy.” On a division, the address proposed by the supporters of the government was rejected by a majority of sixteen. But Pitt was not a man to be disheartened by a single failure, or to be put down by the most lively repartee. When, a few days later, the Opposition proposed a resolution directly censuring the treaties, he spoke with an eloquence, energy and dignity which raised his fame and popularity higher than ever. To the coalition of Fox and North he alluded in language which drew forth tumultuous applause from his followers. “If,” he said, “this ill-omened and unnatural marriage be not yet consummated, I know of a just and lawful impediment; and, in the name of the public weal, I forbid the banns.” The ministers were again left in a minority, and Shelburne consequently tendered his resignation (March 31, 1783). It was accepted; but the king struggled long and hard before he submitted to the terms dictated by Fox, whose faults he detested, and whose high spirit and powerful intellect he detested still more. The first place at the board of treasury was repeatedly offered to Pitt; but the offer, though tempting, was steadfastly declined. The king, bitterly complaining of Pitt's faintheartedness, tried to break the coalition. Every art of seduction was practised on North, but in vain. During several weeks the country remained without a government. It was not till all devices had failed, and till the aspect of the House of Commons became threatening, that the king gave way. The duke of Portland was declared first lord of the treasury. Thurlow was dismissed. Fox and North became secretaries of state, with power ostensibly equal. But Fox was the real prime minister. The year was far advanced before the new arrangements were completed; and nothing very important was done during the remainder of the session. Pitt, now seated on the Opposition Bench, brought the question of parliamentary reform a second time (May 7, 1783) under the consideration of the Commons. He proposed to add to the house at once a hundred county members and several members for metropolitan districts, and to enact that every borough of which an election committee should report that the majority of voters appeared to be corrupt should lose the franchise. The motion was rejected by 293 votes to 149.

After the prorogation Pitt visited the Continent for the first and last time. His travelling companion was one of his most intimate friends, William Wilberforce. That was the time of Anglomania in France; and at Paris the son of the great Chatham was absolutely hunted by men of letters and women of fashion, and forced, much against his will, into political disputation. One remarkable saying which dropped from him during this tour has been preserved. A French gentleman expressed some surprise at the immense influence which Fox, a man of pleasure, ruined by the dice-box and the turf, exercised over the English nation. “You have not,” said Pitt, “been under the wand of the magician.”

In November 1783 the parliament met again. The government had irresistible strength in the House of Commons, and seemed to be scarcely less strong in the House of Lords, but was, in truth, surrounded on every side by dangers. The king was impatiently waiting for the moment at which he could emancipate himself from a yoke which galled him so severely that he had more than once seriously thought of retiring to Hanover; and the king was scarcely more eager for a change than the nation. Fox and North had committed a fatal error. They ought to have known that coalitions between parties which have long been hostile can succeed only when the wish for coalition pervades the lower ranks of both. At the beginning of 1783 North had been the recognized head of the old Tory party, which, though for a moment prostrated by the disastrous issue of the American war, was still a great power in the state. Fox had, on the other hand, been the idol of the Whigs, and of the whole body of Protestant dissenters. The coalition at once alienated the most zealous Tories from North and the most zealous Whigs from Fox. Two great multitudes were at once left without any head, and both at once turned their eyes on Pitt. One party saw in him the only man who could rescue the king; the other saw in him the only man who could purify the parliament. He was supported on one side by Archbishop Markham, the preacher of divine right, and by Jenkinson, the captain of the praetorian band of the king's friends; on the other side by Jebb and Priestley, Sawbridge and Cartwright, Jack Wilkes and Home Tooke. On the benches of the House of Commons, however, the ranks of the ministerial majority were unbroken; and that any statesman would venture to brave such a majority was thought impossible. No prince of the Hanoverian line had ever, under any provocation, ventured to appeal from the representative body to the constituent body. The ministers, therefore, notwithstanding the sullen looks and muttered words of displeasure with which their suggestions were received in the closet, notwithstanding the roar of obloquy which was rising louder and louder every day from every corner of the island, thought themselves secure. Such was their confidence in their strength that, as soon as the parliament had met, they brought forward a singularly bold and original plan for the government of the British territories in India. What was proposed in Fox's India bill was that the whole authority which till that time had been exercised over those territories by the East India Company should be transferred to seven commissioners, who were to be named by parliament, and were not to be removable at the pleasure of the Crown. Earl Fitzwilliam, the most intimate personal friend of Fox, was to be chairman of this board, and the eldest son of North was to be one of the members.

India Bill. As soon as the outlines of the scheme were known all the hatred which the coalition had excited burst forth with an Fox's astounding explosion. Burke, who, whether right or wrong in the conclusions to which he came, had at least the merit of looking at the subject in the right point of view, vainly reminded his hearers of that mighty population whose daily rice might depend on a vote of the British parliament. He spoke with even more than his wonted power of thought and language, about the desolation of Rohilcund, about the spoliation of Benares, about the evil policy which had suffered the tanks of the Carnatic to go to ruin; but he could scarcely obtain a hearing. The contending parties, to their shame it must be said, would listen to none but English topics. Out of doors the cry against the ministry was almost universal. Town and country were united. Corporations exclaimed against the violation of the charter of the greatest corporation in the realm. Tories and democrats joined in pronouncing the proposed board an unconstitutional body. It was to consist of Fox's nominees. The effect of his bill was to give, not to the Crown, but to him personally, whether in office or in opposition, an enormous power, a patronage sufficient to counterbalance the patronage of the treasury and of the admiralty, and to decide the elections for fifty boroughs. He knew, it was said, that he was hateful alike to king and people; and he had devised a plan which would make him independent of both. Some nicknamed him Cromwell, and some Carlo Khan. Wilberforce, with his usual felicity of expression, and with very unusual bitterness of feeling, described the scheme as the genuine offspring of the coalition, as marked with the features of both its parents, the corruption of one and the violence of the other. In spite of all opposition, however, the bill was supported in every stage by great majorities, was rapidly passed, and was sent up to the Lords. To the general astonishment, when the second reading was moved in the upper house, the Opposition proposed an adjournment, and carried it by eighty-seven votes to seventy-nine. The cause of this strange turn of fortune was soon known. Pitt's cousin Earl Temple, had been in the royal closet, and had there been authorized to let it be known that his majesty would consider all who voted for the bill as his enemies. The ignominious commission was performed, and instantly a troop of lords of the bedchamber, of bishops who wished to be translated, and of Scotch peers who wished to be re-elected, made haste to change sides.

Prime Minister 1783. On a later day the Lords rejected the bill. Fox and North were immediately directed to send their seals to the palace by their under-secretaries; and Pitt was appointed first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer (December 1783).

The general opinion was that there would be an immediate dissolution. But Pitt wisely determined to give the public feeling time to gather strength. On this point he differed from his kinsman Temple. The consequence was that Temple, who had been appointed one of the secretaries of state, resigned his office forty-eight hours after he had accepted it, and thus relieved the new government from a great load of unpopularity; for all men of sense and honour, however strong might be their dislike of the India Bill, disapproved of the manner in which that bill had been thrown out. The fame of the young prime minister preserved its whiteness. He could declare with perfect truth that, if unconstitutional machinations had been employed, he had been no party to them.

He was, however, surrounded by difficulties and dangers. In the House of Lords, indeed, he had a majority; nor could any orator of the Opposition in that assembly be considered as a match for Thurlow,who was now again chancellor, or for Camden, who cordially supported the son of his old friend Chatham. But in the other house there was not a single eminent speaker among the official men who sat round Pitt. His most useful assistant was Dundas, who, though he had not eloquence, had sense, knowledge, readiness and boldness. On the opposite benches was a powerful majority, led by Fox, who was supported by Burke, North and Sheridan. The heart of the young minister, stout as it was, almost died within him. But, whatever his internal emotions might be, his language and deportment indicated nothing but unconquerable firmness and haughty confidence in his own powers. His contest against the House of Commons lasted from the 17th of December 1783 to the 8th of March 1784. In sixteen divisions the Opposition triumphed. Again and again the king was requested to dismiss his ministers; but he was determined to go to Germany rather than yield. Pitt's resolution never wavered. The cry of the nation in his favour became vehement and almost furious. Addresses assuring him of public support came up daily from every part of the kingdom. The freedom of the city of London was presented to him in a gold box. He was sumptuously feasted in Grocers' Hall; and the shopkeepers of the Strand and Fleet Street illuminated their houses in his honour. These things could not but produce an effect within the walls of parliament. The ranks of the majority began to waver; a few passed over to the enemy; some skulked away; many were for capitulating while it was still possible to capitulate with the honours of war. Negotiations were opened with the view of forming an administration on a wide basis, but they had scarcely been opened when they were closed. The Opposition demanded, as a preliminary article of the treaty, that Pitt should resign the treasury; and with this demand Pitt steadfastly refused to comply. While the contest was raging, the clerkship of the Pells, a sinecure place for life, worth three thousand a year, and tenable with a seat in the House of Commons, became vacant. The appointment was with the chancellor of the exchequer; nobody doubted that he would appoint himself, and nobody could have blamed him if he had done so; for such sinecure offices had always been defended on the ground that they enabled a few men of eminent abilities and small incomes to live without any profession, and to devote themselves to the service of the state. Pitt, in spite of the remonstrances of his friends, gave the Pells to his father's old adherent, Colonel Barre, a man distinguished by talent and eloquence, but poor and afflicted with blindness. By this arrangement a pension which the Rockingham administration had granted to Barre was saved to the public. Pitt had his reward. No minister was ever more rancorously libelled; but even when he was known to be overwhelmed with debt, when millions were passing through his hands, when the wealthiest magnates of the realm were soliciting him for marquisates and garters, his bitterest enemies did not dare to accuse him of touching unlawful gain.

At length the hard-fought fight ended. A final remonstrance, drawn up by Burke with admirable skill, was carried on the 8th of March by a single vote in a full house. The supplies had been voted; the Mutiny Bill had been passed; and the parliament was dissolved. The popular constituent bodies all over the country were in general enthusiastic on the side of the new government. A hundred and sixty of the supporters of the coalition lost their seats. The first lord of the treasury himself came in at the head of the poll for the university of Cambridge. Wilberforce was elected knight of the great shire of York, in opposition to the whole influence of the Fitzwilliams, Cavendishes, Dundases and Saviles. In the midst of such triumphs Pitt completed his twenty-fifth year. He was now the greatest subject that England had seen during many generations. He domineered absolutely over the cabinet, and was the favourite at once of the sovereign, of the parliament and of the nation. His father had never been so powerful, nor Walpole, nor Marlborough.

Pitt's First Administration. Pitt's first administration (1784-1801) lasted seventeen years. That long period is divided by a strongly marked line into two almost exactly equal parts. The first part ended and the second began in the autumn of 1792. Throughout both parts Pitt displayed in the highest degree the talents of a parliamentary leader. During the first part he was fortunate and in many respects a skilful administrator. With the difficulties which he had to encounter during the second part he was altogether incapable of contending; but his eloquence and his perfect mastery of the tactics of the House of Commons concealed his incapacity from the multitude.

The eight years which followed the general election of 1784 were as tranquil and prosperous as any eight years in the whole history of England. Her trade increased. Her manufactures flourished. Her exchequer was full to overflowing. Very idle apprehensions were generally entertained that the public debt, though much less than a third of the debt which we now bear with ease, would be found too heavy for the strength of the nation. But Pitt succeeded in persuading first himself and then the whole nation, his opponents included, that a new sinking fund, which, so far as it differed from former sinking funds, differed for the worse, would, by virtue of some mysterious power of propagation belonging to money, put into the pocket of the public creditor great sums not taken out of the pocket of the tax-payer. The minister was almost universally extolled as the greatest of financiers. Meanwhile both the branches of the house of Bourbon found that England was as formidable an antagonist as she had ever been. France had formed a plan for reducing Holland to vassalage. But England interposed, and France receded. Spain interrupted by violence the trade of the English merchants with the regions near the Oregon. But England armed, and Spain receded. Within the island there was profound tranquillity. The king was, for the first time, popular. From the day on which Pitt was placed at the head of affairs there was an end of secret influence. Any attempt to undermine him at court, any mutinous movement among his followers in the House of Commons, was certain to be at once put down. He had only to tender his resignation and he could dictate his own terms. For he, and he alone, stood between the king and the coalition. The nation loudly applauded the king for having the wisdom to repose entire confidence in so excellent a minister. His people heartily prayed that he might long reign over them; and they prayed the more heartily because his virtues were set off to the best advantage by the vices and follies of the prince of Wales, who lived in close intimacy with the chiefs of the Opposition.

The Regency, 1788. How strong this feeling was in the public mind appeared signally on one great occasion. In the autumn of 1788 the king became insane. The Opposition, eager for office, committed the great indiscretion of asserting that the heir apparent had, by the fundamental laws of England, a right to be regent with the full powers of royalty. Pitt, on the other hand, maintained it to be the constitutional doctrine that when a sovereign is, by reason of infancy, disease or absence, incapable of exercising the regal functions, it belongs to the estates of the realm to determine who shall be the vicegerent, and with what portion of the executive authority such vicegerent shall be entrusted. A long and violent contest followed, in which Pitt was supported by the great body of the people with as much enthusiasm as during the first months of his administration. Tories with one voice applauded him for defending the sick-bed of a virtuous and unhappy sovereign against a disloyal faction and an undutiful son. Not a few Whigs applauded him for asserting the authority of parliaments and the principles of the Revolution, in opposition to a doctrine which seemed to have too much affinity with the servile theory of indefeasible hereditary right. The middle class, always zealous on the side of decency and the domestic virtues, looked forward with dismay to a reign resembling that of Charles II. That the prince of Wales must be regent nobody ventured to deny. But he and his friends were so unpopular that Pitt could, with general approbation, propose to limit the powers of the regent by restrictions to which it would have been impossible to subject a prince beloved and trusted by the country. Some interested men, fully expecting a change of administration, went over to the Opposition. But the majority, purified by these desertions, closed its ranks, and presented a more firm array than ever to the enemy. In every division Pitt was victorious. When at length, after a stormy interregnum of three months, it was announced, on the very eve of the inauguration of the regent, that the king was himself again, the nation was wild with delight. Pitt with difficulty escaped from the tumultuous kindness of an innumerable multitude which insisted on drawing his coach from St Paul's Churchyard to Downing Street. This was the moment at which his fame and fortune may be said to have reached the zenith. His influence in the closet was as great as that of Carr or Villiers had been. His dominion over the parliament was more absolute than that of Walpole or Pelham had been. He was at the same time as high in the favour of the populace as ever Wilkes or Sacheverell had been. But now the tide was on the turn. Only ten days after the triumphant procession to St Paul's, the states-general of France, after an interval of a hundred and seventy-four years, met at Versailles.

French Revolution. The nature of the great Revolution which followed was long very imperfectly understood in England. Burke saw much further than any of his contemporaries; but whatever his sagacity descried was refracted and discoloured by his passions and his imagination. More than three years elapsed before the principles of the English administration underwent any material change. Nothing could as yet be milder or more strictly constitutional than the minister's domestic policy. Not a single act indicating an arbitrary temper or a jealousy of the people could be imputed to him. In office, Pitt had redeemed the pledges which he had, at his entrance into public life, given to the supporters of parliamentary reform. He had, in 1785, brought forward a judicious plan for the representative system, and had prevailed on the king, not only to refrain from talking against that plan, but to recommend it to the houses in a speech from the throne.[2] This attempt failed; but there can be little doubt that, if the French Revolution had not produced a violent reaction of public feeling, Pitt would have performed, with little difficulty and no danger, that great work which, at a later period, Lord Grey could accomplish only by means which for a time loosened the very foundations of the commonwealth. When the atrocities of the slave trade were first brought under the consideration of parliament no abolitionist was more zealous than Pitt. A humane bill, which mitigated the horrors of the middle passage, was, in 1788, carried by the eloquence and determined spirit of Pitt, in spite of the opposition of some of his own colleagues. In 1791 he cordially concurred with Fox in maintaining the sound constitutional doctrine that an impeachment is not terminated by a dissolution. In the course of the same year the two great rivals contended side by side in a far more important cause. They are fairly entitled to divide the high honour of having added to the statute-book the inestimable law which places the liberty of the press under the protection of juries. On one occasion, and one alone, Pitt, during the first half of his long administration, acted in a manner unworthy of an enlightened Whig. In the debate on the Test Act he stooped to gratify the master whom he served, the university which he represented, and the great body of clergymen and country gentlemen on whose support he rested, by talking, with little heartiness indeed, and with no asperity, the language of a Tory. With this single exception, his conduct from the end of 1783 to the middle of 1792 was that of an honest friend of civil and religious liberty.

Nor did anything, during that period, indicate that he loved war, or harboured any malevolent feeling against any neighbouring nation. Those French writers who have represented him as a Hannibal sworn in childhood by his father to bear eternal hatred to France, as having, by mysterious intrigues and lavish bribes, instigated the leading Jacobins to commit those excesses which dishonoured the Revolution, as having been the real author of the first coalition, know nothing of his character or of his history. So far was he from being a deadly enemy to France that his laudable attempts to bring about a closer connexion with that country by means of a wise and liberal treaty of commerce brought on him the severe censure of the Opposition. He was told in the House of Commons that he was a degenerate son, and that his partiality for the hereditary foes of our island was enough to make his great father's bones stir under the pavement of the Abbey.

And this man, whose name, if he had been, so fortunate as to die in 1792, would have been associated with peace, with freedom, with philanthropy, with temperate reform, with mild and constitutional administration, lived to associate his name with arbitrary government, with harsh laws harshly executed, with alien bills, with gagging bills, with suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, with cruel punishments inflicted on some political agitators, with unjustifiable prosecutions instigated against others and with the most costly and most sanguinary wars of modern times. He lived to be held up to obloquy as the stern oppressor of England and the indefatigable disturber of Europe. Poets, contrasting his earlier with his later years, likened him sometimes to the apostle who kissed in order to betray, and sometimes to the evil angels who kept not their first estate. By the French press and the French tribune every crime that disgraced and every calamity that afflicted France was ascribed to the monster Pitt and his guineas. While the Jacobins were dominant it was he who had corrupted the Gironde, who had raised Lyons and Bordeaux against the Convention, who had suborned Paris to assassinate Lepelletier, and Cecilia Regnault to assassinate Robespierre. When the Thermidorian reaction came, all the atrocities of the Reign of Terror were imputed to him. Collot D'Herbois and Fouquier Tinville had been his pensioners. It was he who had hired the murderers of September, who had dictated the pamphlets of Marat and the carmagnoles of Barère, who had paid Lebon to deluge Arras with blood and Carrier to choke the Loire with corpses. The truth is that he liked neither war nor arbitrary government. He was a lover of peace and freedom, driven, by a stress against which it was hardly possible for any will or any intellect to struggle, out of the course to which his inclinations pointed, and for which his abilities and acquirements fitted him, and forced into a policy repugnant to his feelings and unsuited to his talents.

Between the spring of 1789 and the close of 1792 the public mind of England underwent a great change. If the change of Pitt's sentiments attracted peculiar notice, it was not because he changed more than his neighbours, for in fact he changed less than most of them, but because his position was far more conspicuous than theirs, because he was, till Bonaparte appeared, the individual who filled the greatest space in the eyes of the inhabitants of the civilized world. During a short time the nation, and Pitt as one of the nation, looked with interest and approbation on the French Revolution. But soon vast confiscations, the violent sweeping away of ancient institutions, the domination of clubs, the barbarities of mobs maddened by famine and hatred, produced a reaction. The court, the nobility, the gentry, the clergy, the manufacturers, the merchants, in short nineteen-twentieths of those who had good roofs over their heads and good coats on their backs, became eager intolerant Antijacobins. This feeling was at least as strong among the minister's adversaries as among his supporters. Fox in vain attempted to restrain his followers. All his genius, all his vast personal influence, could not prevent them from rising up against him in general mutiny. Burke set the example of revolt; and Burke was in no long time joined by Portland, Spencer, Fitzwilliam, Loughborough, Carlisle, Malmesbury, Windham, Elliot. In the House of Commons the followers of the great Whig statesman and orator diminished from about a hundred and sixty to fifty. In the House of Lords he had but ten or twelve adherents left. There can be no doubt that there would have been a similar mutiny on the ministerial benches if Pitt, had obstinately resisted the general wish. Pressed at once by his master and by his colleagues, by old friends and by old opponents, he abandoned, slowly and reluctantly, the policy which was dear to his heart. He laboured hard to avert the European war. When the European war broke out he still flattered himself that it would not be necessary for this country to take either side. In the spring of 1792 he congratulated the parliament on the prospect of long and profound peace, and proved his sincerity by proposing large remissions of taxation. Down to the end of that year he continued to cherish the hope that England might be able to preserve neutrality. But the passions which raged on both sides of the Channel were not to be restrained. The republicans who ruled France were inflamed by a fanaticism resembling that of the Mussulmans, who, with the Koran in one hand and the sword in the other, went forth conquering and converting, eastward to the Bay of Bengal, and westward to the Pillars of Hercules. The higher and middle classes of England were animated by zeal not less fiery than that of the crusaders who raised the cry of Deus vult at Clermont. The impulse which drove the two nations to a collision was not to be arrested by the abilities or by the authority of any single man. As Pitt was in front of his fellows, and towered high above them, he seemed to lead them. But in fact he was violently pushed on by them, and, had he held back but a little more than he did, would have been thrust out of their way or trampled under their feet.

Pitt's War Policy. He yielded to the current; and from that day his misfortunes began. The truth is that there were only two consistent courses before him. Since he did not choose to oppose himself, side by side with Fox, to the public feeling, he should have taken the advice of Burke, and should have availed himself of that feeling to the full extent. If it was impossible to preserve peace, he should have adopted the only policy which should lead to victory. He should have proclaimed a holy war for religion, morality, property, order, public law, and should have thus opposed to the Jacobins an energy equal to their own. Unhappily he tried to find a middle path; and he found one which united all that was worst in both extremes. He went to war; but he could not understand the peculiar character of that war. He was obstinately blind to the plain fact that he was contending against a state which was also a sect, and that a new quarrel between England and France was of quite a different kind from the old quarrels about colonies in America and fortresses in the Netherlands. It was pitiable to hear him, year after year, proving to an admiring audience that the wicked republic was exhausted, that she could not hold out, that her credit was gone, that her assignats were not worth more than the paper of which they were made — as if credit was necessary to a government of which the principle was rapine, as if Alboin could not turn Italy into a desert till he had negotiated a loan at 5%, as if the exchequer bills of Attila had been at par. It was impossible that a man who so completely mistook the nature of a contest could carry on that contest successfully. Great as Pitt's abilities were, his military administration was that of a driveller. In such an emergency, and with such means, such a statesman as Richelieu, as Louvois, as Chatham, as Wellesley, would have created in a few months one of the finest armies in the world, and would soon have discovered and brought forward generals worthy to command such an army. Germany might have been saved by another Blenheim; Flanders recovered by another Ramillies; another Poitiers might have delivered the Royalist and Catholic provinces of France from a yoke which they abhorred, and might have spread terror even to the barriers of Paris. But the fact is that, after eight years of war, after a vast destruction of life, after an expenditure of wealth far exceeding the expenditure of the American War, of the Seven Years' War, of the War of the Austrian Succession and of the War of the Spanish Succession united, the English army under Pitt was the laughing-stock of all Europe. It could not boast of one single brilliant exploit. It had never shown itself on the Continent but to be beaten, chased, forced to re-embark or forced to capitulate. To take some sugar island in the West Indies, to scatter some mob of half-naked Irish peasants — such were the most splendid victories won by the British troops under Pitt's auspices. The English navy no mismanagement could ruin. But during a long period whatever mismanagement could do was done. The earl of Chatham, without a single qualification for high public trust, was made, by fraternal partiality, first lord of the admiralty, and was kept in that great post during two years of a war in which the very existence of the state depended on the efficiency of the fleet. Fortunately he was succeeded by George, Earl Spencer, one of those chiefs of the Whig party who, in the great schism caused by the French Revolution, had followed Burke. Lord Spencer, though inferior to many of his colleagues as an orator, was decidedly the best administrator among them. To him it was owing that a long and gloomy succession of days of fasting, and most emphatically of humiliation, was interrupted, twice in the short space of eleven months, by days of thanksgiving for great victories.

It may seem paradoxical to say that the incapacity which Pitt showed in all that related to the conduct of the war is, in some sense, the most decisive proof that he was a man of very extraordinary abilities. Yet this is the simple truth. While his schemes were confounded, while his predictions were falsified, while the coalitions which he had laboured to form were falling to pieces, while the expeditions which he had sent forth at enormous cost were ending in rout and disgrace, while the enemy against whom he was feebly contending was subjugating Flanders and Brabant, the electorate of Mainz and the electorate of Treves, Holland, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, his authority over the House of Commons was constantly becoming more and more absolute. There was his empire. There were his victories — his Lodi and his Arcola, his Rivoli and his Marengo. Of the great party which had contended against him during the first eight years of his administration more than one-half now marched under his standard, with his old competitor the duke of Portland at their head; and the rest had, after many vain struggles, quitted the field in despair. Session followed session with scarcely a single division. In the eventful year 1799 the largest minority that could be mustered against the government was twenty-five.

Domestic Policy. In Pitt's domestic policy there was at this time assuredly no want of vigour. While he offered to French Jacobinism a resistance so feeble that it only encouraged the evil which he wished to suppress, he put down English Jacobinism with a strong hand. The Habeas Corpus Act was repeatedly suspended. Public meetings were placed under severe restraints. The government obtained from parliament power to send out of the country aliens who were suspected of evil designs; and that power was not suffered to be idle. Writers who propounded doctrines adverse to monarchy and aristocracy were proscribed and punished without mercy. The old laws of Scotland against sedition, laws which were considered by Englishmen as barbarous, and which a succession of governments had suffered to rust, were now furbished up and sharpened anew. Men of cultivated minds and polished manners were, for offences which at Westminster would have been treated as mere misdemeanours, sent to herd with felons at Botany Bay. Some reformers, whose opinions were extravagant, and whose language was intemperate, but who had never dreamed of subverting the government by physical force, were indicted for high treason, and were saved from the gallows only by the righteous verdicts of juries.

Irish Policy. One part only of Pitt's conduct during the last eight years of the 18th century deserves high praise. He was the first English minister who formed great designs for the benefit of Ireland. Had he been able to do all that he wished, it is probable that a wise and liberal policy would have averted the rebellion of 1798. But the difficulties which he encountered were great, perhaps insurmountable; and the Roman Catholics were, rather by his misfortune than by his fault, thrown into the hands of Jacobins. There was a third great rising of the Irishry against the Englishry, a rising not less formidable than the risings of 1641 and 1689. The Englishry remained victorious; and it was necessary for Pitt, as it had been necessary for Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange before him, to consider how the victory should be used. He determined to make Ireland one kingdom with England, and, at the same time, to relieve the Roman Catholic laity from civil disabilities, and to grant a public maintenance to the Roman Catholic clergy. Had he been able to carry these noble designs into effect the union would have been a union indeed. But Pitt could execute only one-half of what he had projected. He succeeded in obtaining the consent of the parliaments of both kingdoms to the union; but that reconciliation of races and sects without which the union could exist only in name was not accomplished. The king imagined that his coronation oath bound him to refuse his assent to any bill for relieving Roman Catholics from civil disabilities. Dundas tried to explain the matter, but was told to keep his Scotch metaphysics to himself. Pitt and Pitt's ablest colleagues resigned their offices (March 14, 1801).

Addington Ministry, 1801-1804. It was necessary that the king should make a new arrangement. But by this time his anger and distress had brought back the malady which had, many years before, incapacitated him for the discharge of his functions. He actually assembled his family, read the coronation oath to them, and told them that, if he broke it, the crown would immediately pass to the house of Savoy. It was not until after an interregnum of several weeks that he regained the full use of his small faculties, and that a ministry after his own heart was at length formed. In an age pre-eminently fruitful of parliamentary talents, a cabinet was formed containing hardly a single man who in parliamentary talents could be considered as even of the second rate. Henry Addington was at the head of the treasury. He had been an early, indeed an hereditary friend of Pitt, and had by Pitt's influence been placed, while still a young man, in the chair of the House of Commons. He was universally admitted to have been the best Speaker that had sat in that chair since the retirement of Onslow. But nature had not bestowed on him very vigorous faculties; and the highly respectable situation which he long occupied with honour had rather unfitted than fitted him for the discharge of his new duties. Nevertheless, during many months, his power seemed to stand firm. The nation was put into high good humour by a peace with France. The enthusiasm with which the upper and middle classes had rushed into the war had spent itself. Jacobinism was no longer formidable. Everywhere there was a strong reaction against what was called the atheistical and anarchical philosophy of the 18th century. Bonaparte, now first consul, was busied in constructing out of the ruins of old institutions a new ecclesiastical establishment and a new order of knighthood. The treaty of Amiens was therefore hailed by the great body of the English people with extravagant joy. The popularity of the minister was for the moment immense. His want of parliamentary ability was, as yet, of little consequence; for he had scarcely any adversary to encounter. The old Opposition, delighted by the peace, regarded him with favour. A new Opposition had indeed been formed by some of the late ministers, and was led by Grenville in the House of Lords and by Windham in the House of Commons. But the new Opposition could scarcely muster ten votes, and was regarded with no favour by the country.

On Pitt the ministers relied as on their firmest support. He had not, like some of his colleagues, retired in anger. He had expressed the greatest respect for the conscientious scruple which had taken possession of the royal mind; and he had promised his successors all the help in his power. But it was hardly possible that this union should be durable. Pitt, conscious of superior powers, imagined that the place which he had quitted was now occupied by a mere puppet which he had set up, which he was to govern while he suffered it to remain, and which he was to fling aside as soon as he wished to resume his old position. Nor was it long before he began to pine for the power which he had relinquished. Addington, on the other hand, was by no means inclined to descend from his high position. He took his elevation quite seriously, attributed it to his own merit, and considered himself as one of the great triumvirate of English statesmen, as worthy to make a third with Pitt and Fox. Meanwhile Pitt's most intimate friends exerted themselves to effect a change of ministry. His favourite disciple, George Canning, was indefatigable. He spoke; he wrote; be intrigued; he tried to induce a large number of the supporters of the government to sign a round robin desiring a change; he made game of Addington and of Addington's relations in a succession of lively pasquinades. The minister's partisans retorted with equal acrimony, if not with equal vivacity. Pitt could keep out of the affray only by keeping out of politics altogether; and this it soon became impossible for him to do. The treaty of Amiens had scarcely been signed when the restless ambition and the insupportable insolence of the First Consul convinced the great body of the English people that the peace so eagerly welcomed was only a precarious armistice. As it became clearer and clearer that a war for the dignity, the independence, the very existence of the nation was at hand, men looked with increasing uneasiness on the weak and languid cabinet which would have to contend against an enemy who united more than the power of Louis the Great to more than the genius of Frederick the Great. They imagined that Pitt was the only statesman who could cope with Bonaparte. This feeling was nowhere stronger than among Addington's own colleagues. The pressure put on him was so strong that he could not help yielding to it. His first proposition was that some insignificant nobleman should be first lord of the treasury and nominal head of the administration, and that the real power should be divided between Pitt and himself, who were to be secretaries of state. Pitt, as might have been expected, refused even to discuss such a scheme, and talked of it with bitter mirth. “Which secretaryship was offered to you?” his friend Wilberforce asked. “Really,” said Pitt, “I had not the curiosity to inquire.” Addington was frightened into bidding higher. He offered to resign the treasury to Pitt on condition that there should be no extensive change in the government. But Pitt would listen to no such terms. Then came a dispute such as often arises after negotiations orally conducted, even when the negotiators are men of strict honour. Pitt gave one account of what had passed; Addington gave another; and, though the discrepancies were not such as necessarily implied any intentional violation of truth on either side, both were greatly exasperated.

Meanwhile the quarrel with the First Consul had to come to a crisis. On the 16th of May 1803 the king sent a message calling on the House of Commons to support him in withstanding the ambitious and encroaching policy of France; and on the 22nd the house took the message into consideration.

Pitt had now been living many months in retirement. There had been a general election since he had spoken in parliament, and there were two hundred members who had never heard him. It was known that on this occasion he would be in his place, and curiosity was wound up to the highest point. Unfortunately, the shorthand writers were, in consequence of some mistake, shut out on that day from the gallery, so that the newspapers contained only a very meagre report of the proceedings. But several accounts of what passed are extant; and of those accounts the most interesting is contained in an unpublished letter written by a very young member, John William Ward, afterwards earl of Dudley. When Pitt rose he was received with loud cheering. At every pause in his speech there was a burst of applause. The peroration is said to have been one of the most animated and magnificent ever heard in parliament. “Pitt's speech,” Fox wrote a few days later, “was admired very much, and very justly. I think it was the best he ever made in that style.” The debate was adjourned; and on the second night Fox replied to it in an oration which, as the most zealous Pittites were forced to acknowledge, left the palm of eloquence doubtful. Addington made a pitiable appearance between the two great rivals; and it was observed that Pitt, while exhorting the Commons to stand resolutely by the executive government against France, said not a word indicating esteem or friendship for the prime minister.

Pitt's Second Administration. War was speedily declared. The First Consul threatened to invade England at the head of the conquerors of Belgium and Italy, and formed a great camp near the Straits of Dover. On the other side of those straits the whole British population was ready to rise up as one man in defence of the soil. In the spring of 1804 it became evident that the weakest of ministries would have to defend itself against the strongest of Oppositions, an Opposition made up of three Oppositions, each of which would, separately, have been formidable from ability, and which, when united, were also formidable from number. It was necessary to give way; the ministry was dissolved, and the task of performing a government was entrusted (May 1804) to Pitt. Pitt was of opinion that there was now an opportunity, such as had never before offered itself, and such as might never offer itself again, of uniting in the public service, on honourable terms, all the eminent talents of the kingdom, The treasury he reserved for himself; and to Fox he proposed to assign a share of power little inferior to his own. The plan was excellent; but the king would not hear of it. Dull, obstinate, unforgiving, and at that time half mad, he positively refused to admit Fox into his service. In an evil hour Pitt yielded. All that was left was to construct a government out of the wreck of Addington's feeble administration. The small circle of Pitt's personal retainers furnished him with a very few useful assistants, particularly Dundas (who had been created Viscount Melville), Lord Harrowby and Canning.

Such was the inauspicious manner in which Pitt entered on his second administration (May 12, 1804). The whole history of that administration was of a piece with the commencement. Almost every month brought some new disaster or disgrace. To the war with France was soon added a war with Spain. The opponents of the ministry were numerous, able and active. His most useful coadjutors he soon lost. Sickness deprived him of the help of Lord Harrowby. It was discovered that Lord Melville had been guilty of highly culpable laxity in transactions relating to public money. He was censured by the House of Commons, driven from office, ejected from the privy council and impeached of high crimes and misdemeanours. The blow fell heavy on Pitt. His difficulties compelled him to resort to various expedients. At one time Addington was persuaded to accept office with a peerage; but he brought no additional strength to the government. While he remained in place he was jealous and punctilious; and he soon retired again. At another time Pitt renewed his efforts to overcome his master's aversion to Fox; and it was rumoured that the king's obstinacy was gradually giving way. But, meanwhile, it was impossible for the minister to conceal from the public eye the decay of his health and the constant anxiety which gnawed at his heart. All who passed him in the park, all who had interviews with him in Downing Street, saw misery written in his face. The peculiar look which he wore during the last months of his life was often pathetically described by Wilberforce, who used to call it the Austerlitz look.

Still the vigour of Pitt's intellectual faculties and the intrepid haughtiness of his spirit remained unaltered. He had staked everything on a great venture. He had succeeded in forming another mighty coalition against the French ascendancy. The united forces of Austria, Russia and England might, he hoped, oppose an insurmountable barrier to the ambition of the common enemy. But the genius and energy of Napoleon prevailed. While the English troops were preparing to embark for Germany, while the Russian troops were slowly coming up from Poland, he, with rapidity unprecedented in modern war, moved a hundred thousand men from the shores of the ocean to the Black Forest, and compelled a great Austrian army to surrender at Ulm. To the first faint rumours of this calamity Pitt would give no credit. He was irritated by the alarms of those around him. “Do not believe a word of it” he said; “it is all a fiction.” he next day he received a Dutch newspaper containing the capitulation. He knew no Dutch. It was Sunday, and the public offices were shut. He carried the paper to Lord Malmesbury, who had been minister in Holland; and Lord Malmesbury translated it. Pitt tried to bear up, but the shock was too great; and he went away with death in his face.

The news of the battle of Trafalgar arrived four days later, and seemed for a moment to revive him. Forty-eight hours after that most glorious and most mournful of victories had been announced to the country came the Lord Mayor's Day; and Pitt dined at Guildhall. His popularity had declined. But on this occasion the multitude, greatly excited by the recent tidings, welcomed him enthusiastically, took off his horses in Cheapside, and drew his carriage up King Street. When his health was drunk, he returned thanks in two or three of those stately sentences of which he had a boundless command. Several of those who heard him laid up his words in their hearts; for they were the last words that he ever uttered in public: “Let us hope that England, having saved herself by her energy, may save Europe by her example.”

This was but a momentary rally. Austerlitz soon completed what Ulm had begun. Early in December Pitt had retired to Bath, in the hope that he might there gather strength for the approaching session. While he was languishing there on his sofa arrived the news that a decisive battle had been fought and lost in Moravia, that the coalition was dissolved, that the Continent was at the feet of France. He sank down under the blow. Ten days later he was so emaciated that his most intimate friends hardly knew him. He came up from Bath by slow journeys, and on the 11th of January 1806 reached his villa at Putney. Parliament was to meet on the 21st. On the 20th was to be the parliamentary dinner at the house of the first lord of the treasury in Downing Street; and the cards were already issued. But the days of the great minister were numbered. On the day on which he was carried into his bedroom at Putney, the Marquess Wellesley, whom he had long loved, whom he had sent to govern India, and whose administration had been eminently able, energetic and successful, arrived in London after an absence of eight years. The friends saw each other once more. There was an affectionate meeting and a last parting. That it was a last parting Pitt did not seem to be aware. He fancied himself to be recovering, talked on various subjects cheerfully and with an unclouded mind, and pronounced a warm and discerning eulogium on the marquis's brother Arthur. “I never,” he said, “met with any military man with whom it was so satisfactory to converse.” The excitement and exertion of this interview were too much for the sick man. He fainted away; and Lord Wellesley left the house convinced that the close was fast approaching.

Death. And now members of parliament were fast coming up to London. The chiefs of the Opposition met for the purpose of considering the course to be taken on the first day of the session. It was easy to guess what would be the language of the king's speech, and of the address which would be moved in answer to that speech. An amendment condemning the policy of the government had been prepared, and was to have been proposed in the House of Commons by Lord Henry Petty (afterwards 3rd marquess of Lansdowne). He was unwilling, however, to come forward as the accuser of one who was incapable of defending himself. Lord Grenville, who had been informed of Pitt's state by Lord Wellesley, and had been deeply affected by it, earnestly recommended forbearance; and Fox, with characteristic generosity and good nature, gave his voice against attacking his now helpless rival. “Sunt lacrymae rerum,” he said, “et mentem mortalia tangunt.” On the first day, therefore, there was no debate. It was rumoured that evening that Pitt was better. But on the following morning his physicians pronounced that there were no hopes. It was asserted in many after-dinner speeches, Grub Street elegies and academic prize poems and prize declamations that the great minister died exclaiming, “Oh my country!” This is a fable, but it is true that the last words which he uttered, while he knew what he said, were broken exclamations about the alarming state of public affairs. He ceased to breathe on the morning of the 23rd of January 1806, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day on which he first took his seat in parliament.

It was moved in the House of Commons that Pitt should be honoured with a public funeral and a monument. The motion was opposed by Fox in a speech which deserves to be studied as a model of good taste and good feeling. The task was the most invidious that ever an orator undertook; but it was performed with a humanity and delicacy which were warmly acknowledged by the mourning friends of him who was gone. The motion was carried by 288 votes to 89. The 22nd of February was fixed for the funeral. The corpse, having lain in state during two days in the Painted Chamber, was borne with great pomp to the northern transept of the Abbey. A splendid train of princes, nobles, bishops and privy councillors followed. The grave of Pitt had been made near to the spot where his great father lay, near also to the spot where his great rival was soon to lie. Wilberforce, who carried the banner before the hearse, described the awful ceremony with deep feeling. As the coffin descended into the earth, he said, the eagle face of Chatham from above seemed to look down with consternation into the dark house which was receiving all that remained of so much power and glory.

Character. Pitt was emphatically the man of parliamentary government, the type of his class, the minion, the child, the spoiled child, of the House of Commons. He was a distinguished member of the House of Commons at twenty-one. The ability which he had displayed in the House of Commons made him the most powerful subject in Europe before he was twenty-five. It was when the House of Commons was to be convinced and persuaded that he put forth all his powers. Of those powers we must form our estimate chiefly from tradition; for, of all the eminent speakers of that age, Pitt has suffered most from the reporters. Even while he was still living, critics remarked that his eloquence could not be preserved, that he must be heard to be appreciated. They more than once applied to him the sentence in which Tacitus describes the fate of a senator whose rhetoric was admired in the Augustan age: “Haterii canorum illud et profluens cum ipso simul exstinctum est.” There is, however, abundant evidence that nature had bestowed on Pitt the talents of a great orator; and those talents had been developed in a very peculiar manner, first by his education, and secondly by the high official position to which he rose early, and in which he passed the greater part of his public life.

At his first appearance in parliament he showed himself superior to all his contemporaries in command of language. He could pour forth a long succession of round and stately periods, without premeditation, without ever pausing for a word, without ever repeating a word, in a voice of silver clearness, and with a pronunciation so articulate that not a letter was slurred over. He had less amplitude of mind and less richness of imagination than Burke, less ingenuity than Windham, less wit than Sheridan, less perfect mastery of dialectical fence and less of that highest sort of eloquence which consists of reason and passion fused together than Fox. Yet the almost unanimous judgment of those who were in the habit of listening to that remarkable race of men placed Pitt, as a speaker, above Burke, above Windham, above Sheridan and not below Fox. His declamation was copious, polished and splendid. In power of sarcasm he was probably not surpassed by any speaker, ancient or modern; and of this formidable weapon he made merciless use. In two parts of the oratorical art which are of the highest value to a minister of state he was singularly expert. No man knew better how to be luminous or how to be obscure. When he wished to be understood, he never failed to make himself understood. Nothing was out of place; nothing was forgotten; minute details, dates, sums of money, were all faithfully preserved in his memory. On the other hand, when he did not wish to be explicit — and no man who is at the head of affairs always wishes to be explicit — he had a marvellous power of saying nothing in language which left on his audience the impression that he had said a great deal.

The effect of oratory will always to a great extent depend on the character of the orator. There perhaps never were two speakers whose eloquence had more of what may be called the race, more of the flavour imparted by moral qualities, than Fox and Pitt. The speeches of Fox owe a great part of their charm to that warmth and softness of heart, that sympathy with human suffering, that admiration for everything great and beautiful, and that hatred of cruelty and injustice, which interest and delight us even in the most defective reports. No person, on the other hand, could hear Pitt without perceiving him to be a man of high, intrepid and commanding spirit, proudly conscious of his own rectitude and of his own intellectual superiority, incapable of the low vices of fear and envy, but too prone to feel and to show disdain. Pride, indeed, pervaded the whole man, was written in the harsh, rigid lines of his face, was marked by the way in which he walked, in which he sat, in which he stood, and above all, in which he bowed. Such pride, of course, inflicted many wounds. But his pride, though it made him bitterly disliked by individuals, inspired the great body of his followers in parliament and throughout the country with respect and confidence. It was that of the magnanimous man so finely described by Aristotle in the Ethics, of the man who thinks himself worthy of great things, being in truth worthy. It was closely connected, too, with an ambition which had no mixture of low cupidity. There was something noble in the cynical disdain with which the mighty minister scattered riches and titles to right and left among those who valued them, while he spurned them out of his way. Poor himself, he was surrounded by friends on whom he had bestowed three thousand, six thousand, ten thousand a year. Plain Mister himself, he had made more lords than any three ministers that had preceded him. The garter, for which the first dukes in the kingdom were contending, was repeatedly offered to him, and offered in vain.

The correctness of his private life added much to the dignity of his public character. In the relations of son, brother, uncle, master, friend, his conduct was exemplary. In the small circle of his intimate associates he was amiable, affectionate, even playful. He indulged, indeed, somewhat too freely in wine, which he had early been directed to take as a medicine, and which use had made a necessary of life to him. But it was very seldom that any indication of undue excess could be detected in his tones or gestures; and, in truth, two bottles of port were little more to him than two dishes of tea. He had, when he was first introduced into the clubs of St James's Street, shown a strong sense for play, but he had the prudence and the resolution to stop before this taste had acquired the strength of habit. From the passion which generally exercises the most tyrannical dominion over the young he possessed an immunity, which is probably to be ascribed partly to his temperament and partly to his situation. His constitution was feeble; he was very shy; and he was very busy. The strictness of his morals furnished such buffoons as Peter Pindar and Captain Morris with an inexhaustible theme for merriment of no very delicate kind. But the great body of the middle class of Englishmen could not see the joke. They warmly praised the young statesman for commanding his passions, and for covering his frailties, if he had frailties, with decorous obscurity.

Estimates of Pitt. The memory of Pitt has been assailed, times innumerable, often justly, often unjustly; but it has suffered much less from his assailants than from his eulogists. For, during many years, his name was the rallying cry of a class of men with whom, at one of those terrible conjunctures which confound all ordinary distinctions, he was accidentally and temporally connected, but to whom, on almost all great questions of principle, he was diametrically opposed. The haters of parliamentary reform called themselves Pittites, not choosing to remember that Pitt made three motions for parliamentary reform, and that, though he thought that such a reform could not safely be made while the passions excited by the French Revolution were raging, he never uttered a word indicating that he should not be prepared at a more convenient season to bring the question forward a fourth time. The toast of Protestant ascendancy was drunk on Pitt's birthday by a set of Pittites who could not but be aware that Pitt had resigned his office because he could not carry Catholic emancipation. The defenders of the Test Act called themselves Pittites, though they could not be ignorant that Pitt had laid before George III. unanswerable reasons for abolishing the Test Act. The enemies of free trade called themselves Pittites, though Pitt was far more deeply imbued with the doctrines of Adam Smith than either Fox or Grey. The very negro-drivers invoked the name of Pitt, whose eloquence was never more conspicuously displayed than when he spoke of the wrongs of the negro. This mythical Pitt, who resembles the genuine Pitt as little as the Charlemagne of Ariosto resembles the Charlemagne of Eginhard, has had his day. History will vindicate the real man from calumny disguised under the semblance of adulation, and will exhibit him as what he was—a minister of great talents, honest intentions and liberal opinions, pre-eminently qualified, intellectually and morally, for the part of a parliamentary leader, and capable of administering with prudence and moderation the government of a prosperous and tranquil country, but unequal to surprising and terrible emergencies, and liable in such emergencies to err grievously, both on the side of weakness and on the side of violence.  (M.)

Authorities.—Lord Macaulay's article, a classic on its subject, written in 1859 for this Encyclopaedia and included in the 9th edition unaltered, is preserved above in its essentials, but has been shortened and readjusted. Among standard biographies are the 5th Earl Stanhope's important Life (4 vols., 2nd ed., 1862), and Lord Rosebery's masterly study in the “Twelve English Statesmen Series” (1891). See also the bibliographical note to the Rev. William Hunt's article on Pitt in the Dict. Nat. Biog., and also the same historian's app. i., pp. 461-462, to his vol. x. (for the years 1760-1801) of The Political History of England (1905), dealing with the authorities for the period.