The Cambridge University attended by Pitt was not open to Roman Catholics, and served as a seminary for the Anglican clergy. We have seen how Pitt attended chapel twice a day in his early years at Pembroke. This was not because he was religious in feeling, but because religion was deeply interwoven with politics, custom and national outlook. Indeed, it was commonplace in society, as the debauched lives of many politicians demonstrated, to be irreligious in private while adhering unfailingly to the religious settlement inherent in 1688. The reason people felt strongly about religious questions was not in the main because they cared about the niceties of theological debates – any more than Henry VIII left the Church for theological rather than personal and political reasons – but because religion had come to symbolise the constitution of the country and its foreign policy.
Britain had fought endless wars by the end of the eighteenth century against His Most Christian Majesty the King of France, with the Stuart Kings of the seventeenth century having been suspiciously close, through the Catholic Church, to England’s historic foe. James II, whose behaviour precipitated the 1688 Revolution, even privately apologised to Louis XIV for summoning a Parliament without his permission.28 Protestant Huguenots had fled to England from Catholic persecution in France, and it was Charles I’s attempts to plan a comeback with Catholics in Scotland and Ireland that had led to the second stage of the Civil War in the 1640s and to Cromwell’s merciless destruction of Catholic power in Ireland. In more recent memory, in both 1715 and 1745–46, Jacobite attempts to restore the Stuarts to the throne in place of the Hanoverians had been assisted by Catholic powers, specifically France and Spain. To the great majority of people in England it was therefore unthinkable to allow Catholics to hold office. Far beyond the Church and Parliament, Catholicism meant to most people treachery and invasion, bloodshed and persecution. Any acceptance that Catholics could have the rights and privileges of other Englishmen was therefore pandering to foreigners – in particular the French – returning to Jacobite sympathies and destroying a fundamental attribute of Englishness.
Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union two centuries later led to changes in political attitudes in the countries that had stood guard against it, so the collapse of the Jacobite threat after 1745 led to a steady breaking down of the political and religious battle lines in the late eighteenth century. Fear of the Jacobites had kept the suspect Tories out of office for a generation, and the Whigs, who prided themselves on the 1688 settlement, were permanently in power from 1714 to the 1760s. Now that party system had broken down, with parliamentary factions forming and re-forming, able to hold office in many combinations and putting leading Whigs out of office in the 1770s. To politicians the religious prohibitions were breaking down too, and many saw a need to amend the absolutism of the constitutional hostility to Roman Catholics. The conquest of Canada had brought vast numbers of Catholics of French descent into the British Empire. The Quebec Act of 1774 officially recognised the toleration of their religion. Added to that, the war in America made it essential to recruit soldiers who were Catholics, leading Parliament in 1778 to end the practice of requiring recruits to take an oath denying the supremacy of the Pope.
Beyond Westminster, many people who did not appreciate the need for such changes were suspicious of the motives behind them. Such suspicion was political dynamite, and it was accidentally detonated in the summer of 1780 by Lord George Gordon, leader of the Protestant Association. His attempt to take a petition to Parliament calling for the repeal of the 1778 Act resulted in a crowd of 60,000 forming across the river from the Palace of Westminster, siege being laid to Members of Parliament, and then five days and nights of perhaps the worst rioting London had ever experienced. Order was only restored after resolute action by the King, and the calling in of 15,000 troops and militia. Many hundreds of people were killed and scores of London’s most prized residences destroyed in untold scenes of savagery and destruction. Pitt, in his rooms at Lincoln’s Inn, was in the centre of it, apparently free from danger but witnessing London in flames in all directions. With the relaxed humour that was becoming his trademark he wrote to his mother: ‘Several very respectable lawyers have appeared with musquets on their shoulders, to the no small diversion of all spectators. Unluckily the Appearance of Danger ended just as we embodied, and our military Ardour has been thrown away.’29 He could not have failed to notice, however, the huge power of religious issues, and the dangers of letting popular feelings run out of control. As he contemplated the end of what he called the ‘placid uniformity’ of Cambridge life, and the start of a political career, he was learning that great issues were at stake – of war and peace, of monarchical or parliamentary power, of the rights of religious minorities, and of how to administer and control a society changing unpredictably at home and suffering military humiliation abroad. It was a dramatic and exciting time to enter politics. If he was to have any influence on it, he needed a career, he needed money, and he needed a seat in Parliament.
* The main room of the set is now a function room, with portraits of Pitt and Gray on the walls.
* In his wonderful book recounting his travels in England, Moritz also remarks on the ‘incomparable’ English habit of ‘roasting slices of buttered bread before the fire … this is called “toast”’.
‘Appelby is the Place I am to Represent.’
WILLIAM PITT
‘A dead minister, the most respectable that ever existed, weighs very light in the scale against any living one.’
EARL TEMPLE
‘CHATHAM’, STANHOPE REMARKED in his 1860s biography of Pitt, ‘had been a little unthrifty.’1 This was putting it mildly. On the death of Chatham in 1778, Parliament voted £20,000 – the equivalent of something approaching £2 million today* – to rescue his family and his memory from financial embarrassment. They also voted an annuity of £4,000 in perpetuity to the Earldom of Chatham, now inherited by William’s elder brother John. Theoretically, William Pitt was left £3,500 by his father. In practice, there was no money to honour this legacy, since the whole of the generous grant by Parliament would be taken up by his father’s debts. William had also been left a share of the mortgaged properties at Burton Pynsent and Hayes, but none of this came his way until Hayes was sold, by which time he was already Prime Minister. His total income as he prepared to move from Cambridge into the wider world was £600 a year, in the form of a grant from his elder brother. This was to prove insufficient for the needs of a young gentleman laying the foundations of his career and travelling about in the south-east of England a good deal. When he needed more he submitted a request to his mother. ‘My finances’, he tells her in November 1778, ‘are in no urgent Want of Repair; but if I should happen to buy a Horse they will be soon, and therefore, if it is not inconvenient to you, I shall be much obliged to you for a draught of 50£.’2 Or in December 1779: ‘The approach of Christmas, and the expense of moving, oblige me to beg you to supply me with a draft of 60£.’3
He was particularly assiduous in assuring his mother that he would not drink too much or work too hard, as in this letter from Cambridge in January 1780:
The Charge of looking slender and thin when the doctor saw me, I do not entirely deny; but if it was in a greater degree than usual, it may fairly be attributed to the hurry of London, and an accidental cold at the Time … The use of the horse I assure you I do not neglect, in the properest medium; and a sufficient number of idle avocations secure me quite enough from the danger of too much study … Among the Principal Occupations of Cambridge at this Season of Christmas are perpetual College Feasts, a species of Exercise in which, above all others, I shall not forget your rule of moderation.4
His mother helped him financially whenever she could, but since the annuity settled upon Chatham by the King in 1761 and now due to her was frequently in arrears she was not always able to do so. Soon Pitt had borrowed £1,000 at 5 per cent from the friendly banker Mr Thomas Coutts, in return for his signing over the paternal legacy which would never be paid. In