War has always been a spur to invention, and the Seven Years’ War was no exception. The invention of the spinning jenny in 1764 and improvements upon it in the following years brought about a revolution in the cotton industry and British manufacturing. That revolution gathered pace as Pitt studied his books at Cambridge, and was to become a mighty engine of economic growth throughout his political career. Cotton exports from Britain were £200,000 in 1764, and had risen to £355,000 by 1780, but had rocketed to £9,753,000 by the time of Pitt’s death in 1806, going on to form nearly half of total British exports.19
The use of coal and coke in iron production was also getting under way, further transformed by the use of steam engines and blast furnaces from 1790. This was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it would bring huge changes in the demography of Britain. By 1800, the great cities of manufacturing and trade such as Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds and Bristol would dwarf the previously largest cities (other than London) such as Norwich, Exeter and York. London was, and would remain, the largest city in the British Isles, but at the end of the eighteenth century many of what are today its central districts were still villages surrounded by fields. A German visitor, Carl Moritz, wrote of the view from the top of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1782: ‘beneath me lay a packed mass of towers, houses and palaces, with the London squares – their green lawns in their midst – adding pleasant splashes of colour in between. At one end of the Thames stood the Tower of London, like a city with a forest of masts behind it; at the other lay Westminster Abbey lifting up its towers. The green hills skirting the Paddington and Islington districts smiled at me from afar while nearer by lay Southwark on the opposite bank of the Thames.’20 At this stage St James’s Park was ‘nothing more than a semi-circular avenue of trees enclosing a large area of greensward in the midst of which is a swampy pond. Cows feed on the turf and you may buy their milk quite freshly drawn from the animal.’21*
We do not know whether the future politicians gathered around the young Pitt discussed the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, but the ingredients were present all around them. Agricultural productivity was rising much faster than in neighbouring France, as farm sizes increased and the population began to move to the cities. Coal output in 1775 was already nearly three times what it had been in 1700. The growth of the cotton industry and trade with the expanding Empire provided new employment on a huge scale. Population growth, facilitated by the availability of food and work, started to accelerate, with the population of England growing from five and a half million to seven million between 1751 and 1781. By 1841 it would reach fifteen million.22 The transport system was beginning to improve, with the canals undergoing expansion to link manufacturing centres and ports, and turnpike roads growing rapidly from 1750 onwards.
The huge expansion and movements of population would create immense political and social strains, but at the time of Pitt’s Cambridge education these trends had yet to gather their full momentum. It would undoubtedly have seemed in the 1770s that such changes as were happening could be safely accommodated within the existing political and economic order. The real explosion of agricultural and manufacturing production and export growth took place after 1780, just as Pitt entered Parliament, when in a twenty-year period the proportion of national output exported rose from 9 per cent to 16 per cent even while a war of unprecedented intensity was raging. Pitt and his colleagues in government would face the challenge of coping with economic change on a scale never witnessed before, and at a time when that change was unpredictable and uneven. They would also be the last generation to conduct the business of the nation without the advantage of the dramatic advances in travel and communications which were also on the way.
Although Pitt, on his increasing forays to the capital, would find it possible in the late 1770s to eat breakfast in London and dinner (generally taken in the late afternoon) in Cambridge, road travel was still an arduous business. It was not practical at this time, nor would it be for some decades, to make a tour even of a country as small as England without spending weeks or months doing so and being incommunicado for part of the time. As a result, Pitt in office would rarely stray north of Northampton or west of Weymouth. When William Wilberforce rushed to a crisis public meeting in York in 1795, taking less than forty-eight hours to make the journey from Westminster, it was regarded as an extraordinary achievement, made possible only by extra teams of horses as well as outriders to clear people from the last twenty miles of the route. Within fifty years, he could have done it in nine hours on the train. The fact that advances in communications came later than a great deal of other economic change would limit the ability of politicians to understand what was happening and to respond to it quickly.
Throughout the whole of this period all orders and correspondence dealing with a burgeoning national economy and war on a global scale would have to be conveyed by letter carried by a despatch rider on a horse, or on board ship. The complications this entailed for international diplomacy would be unimaginable today. Wars could be declared while peace proposals were still on their way from a foreign capital. A message sent by sea did not necessarily travel faster than a fleet. In 1762, when the Seven Years’ War widened into conflict between Britain and Spain, the enterprising British Admiralty sent a message to British forces in India to set off immediately to attack the Spanish colony in Manila in the Philippines. Arriving seven months after the original message had been sent from London, the British achieved the ultimate surprise attack, since word had still not arrived from Madrid that war had been declared at all. Their ships sailed under the Spanish defenders’ guns unchallenged before launching their successful assault. In the Nootka Sound crisis of 1790, the interval between events on the ground on the west coast of North America and a response from London could be anything up to a full year. It is therefore vital to remember that governments of this period, including Pitt’s administrations, were often groping in the dark when dealing with war or disorder, guessing at events, and trying to remember to err on the side of caution. This would not help them to cope with the convulsions which would shake the world in their lifetimes.
The first of these convulsions, and one which ranked high in the conversations of Pitt and his friends, was already taking place in the 1770s. In 1775 the diverging interests of Britain and the thirteen American colonies exploded into war, and Pitt’s letters of the time are peppered with requests for news, information and documents relating to it. The repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 had made Chatham a hero across the Atlantic, with statues of him erected in American towns, but ironically it was Chatham’s own victories that paved the way for this further and disastrous conflict. With the French cleared from Canada, the colonies had much less need of Britain to protect them. Instead, they found British commitments to Indian tribes getting in the way of the territorial expansion to the west which a rapidly growing American population now sought. And the emerging British Empire was now so vast and varied that the interests of one colony could be entirely different from the interests of the whole. When the British government reduced the duties on the export of tea to North America, it was meant to be excellent news for the troubled finances of the East India Company, but it was disastrous for the lucrative smuggling trade in Massachusetts. The result was the Boston Tea Party and, several years later, open conflict.
British political opinion was deeply divided over the developing war in America, but few in London would have doubted the capacity of Britain to bring the recalcitrant colonies to heel. The 350 ships and 25,000 soldiers assembled in America by the early summer of 1776 in the name of the King constituted an awesome display of military power. Yet they were to find, like the Americans themselves two centuries later in Vietnam, that regular troops fighting by conventional methods in vast, impenetrable terrain could win most of the battles but still not win the war.
Chatham, in his dying years, and after some time in which he took no part in politics, made three celebrated visits to the House of Lords to thunder against the folly of British policy. As Macaulay put it in his brilliant essay on Pitt, ‘Chatham was only the ruin of [the elder] 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