It will very soon be necessary for me to have rooms at Lincoln’s Inn … The whole expense of these will be Eleven Hundred Pounds, which sounds to me a frightful sum … The rooms are in an exceeding good situation in the new Buildings, and will be perfectly fit for Habitation in about two months. Soon after that time it will be right for me to begin attending Westminster Hall during the term, and then chambers will be more convenient than any other residence … I have done no more than to secure that they may not be engaged to any other person till I have returned an Answer, and I shall be glad to know your opinion as soon as possible. You will be so good as to consider how far you approve of the idea, if it be practicable, and whether there are any means of advancing the money out of my fortune before I am of Age.5
Desperate to help him, his mother was no doubt behind the surprise suggestion by his uncle Earl Temple that he would advance Pitt the necessary sum. Having paid the first instalment, Earl Temple disobligingly died, and Pitt secured the chambers on the promise of his late uncle’s obligation, while mortgaging them the following year to obtain more cash. Already, at the age of twenty-one, he had dipped a toe into the vicious whirlpool that his personal finances would become.
From his late teens Pitt enjoyed the busy life of a young man who could move about freely, flitting between the family homes, attendance at Lincoln’s Inn and the Galleries of the Lords and Commons in London, and the reassuring intellectual security of Pembroke College. He was often in London with his brothers and sisters, frequently staying in Harley Street at the house of his older sister Hester, who in 1775 had married Lord Mahon, son of Earl Stanhope, and by early 1780 had three children. Pitt seems to have attended the opera occasionally, having developed a taste for music at Cambridge even though Pretyman subsequently insisted that he had ‘no ear’,6 and reported attending masquerades and evenings at the Pantheon,* but he was not keen on the wilder social events:
Nerot’s Hotel, Wednesday Night [1779]
James is gone with my sisters to the ball as a professed dancer, which stands in the place of an invitation; a character which I do not assume, and have therefore stayed away.
He continued to prefer more intellectual evenings. It was at a dinner in Lincoln’s Inn during the Gordon Riots that the celebrated encounter took place between the twenty-one-year-old Pitt and the already famous historian Edward Gibbon, who was publishing the second and third volumes of his momentous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Another young lawyer, James Bland Burges, described how Gibbon had just concluded a series of ‘brilliant and pleasant’ anecdotes ‘with his customary tap on the lid of his snuff box’, when ‘a deep toned but clear voice was heard from the bottom of the table, very calmly and firmly impugning the correctness of the narrative, and the propriety of the doctrine of which it had been made the vehicle’. Gibbon saw
a tall, thin, and rather ungainly looking young man, who now sat quietly and silently eating some fruit. There was nothing very prepossessing or very formidable in his exterior, but, as the few words he had uttered appeared to have made a considerable impression on the company, Mr. Gibbon, I suppose, thought himself bound to maintain his honour by suppressing such an attempt to dispute his supremacy. He accordingly undertook the defence of the propositions in question, and a very animated debate took place between him and his youthful antagonist, Mr. Pitt, and for some time was conducted with great talent and brilliancy on both sides. At length the genius of the young man prevailed over that of his senior, who, finding himself driven into a corner from which there was no escape, made some excuse arising from the table and walked out of the room.
Gibbon stalked out ‘in high dudgeon’, and ‘when we returned into the dining-room we found Mr. Pitt proceeding very tranquilly with the illustration of the subject from which his opponent had fled, and which he discussed with such ability, strength of argument, and eloquence, that his hearers were filled with profound admiration’.7
It had been clear for some years that a career as a lawyer would be a fallback for Pitt, and the proximity to the House of Commons of the law courts, literally yards away in and around Westminster Hall, provided an additional incentive for him. As it turned out, his legal career was not long, but during it he again showed his usual mixture of easy ability and high popularity in private company. Another lawyer of the time recalled: ‘Among lively men of his own time of life, Mr. Pitt was always the most lively and convivial in the many hours of leisure which occur to young unoccupied men on a Circuit, and joined all the little excursions to Southampton, Weymouth, and such parties of amusement as were habitually formed. He was extremely popular. His name and reputation of high acquirements at the university commanded the attention of his seniors. His wit, his good humour, and joyous manners endeared him to the younger part of the Bar.’8
He was called to the Bar in the summer of 1780, but it is clear throughout all his correspondence that his overriding fascination remained with politics. In the summer of 1779 it was thought by some that Parliament might be dissolved two years ahead of its maximum seven-year term. The war was going badly, Lord North and his colleagues appeared dejected and the King was even forced to preside at a Cabinet meeting to try to deter North’s enemies from attacking his First Minister. Pitt turned his thoughts to how and where he could enter Parliament.
Pitt wanted to be in Parliament from the earliest possible date, but it did not accord with his concept of himself simply to represent any constituency which was available. He had a very clear idea of where he wished to represent, and from the summer of 1779 expressed an explicit interest in being one of the two Members for Cambridge University.* This was not simply because he spent a good deal of time there and was familiar with the place, since there was little need in this period for most Members of Parliament to know or to spend time in their constituencies. Rather it was because from the outset he wanted to be a particular type of politician, and that would require a particular type of constituency.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, accustomed as we are to universal suffrage and the periodic redrawing of constituency boundaries to keep up with the changing distribution of population, the electoral basis of the House of Commons in the eighteenth century seems extraordinary and chaotic. It was not democratic in any modern sense of the term, and was not intended to be; but it was intended to ensure that the interests of every part of the country were represented, and that an element of competition took place among the aristocracy and country gentry as to who would have access to power and the spoils of office.
The House of Commons in 1780 had 558 Members, around a hundred fewer than today, with 489 from England, forty-five from Scotland and twenty-four from Wales. Ireland had a separate Parliament which was to be given increased powers in 1782, so there were no Irish seats in the House of Commons at this stage. Only the English constituencies were of interest to Pitt as he sought his first election to Parliament. Of these the generally most prestigious were the forty counties, each of which elected two Members. For two reasons, however, these were of little appeal to a politician who aspired to high office. First, they had a relatively wide franchise, embracing all males who owned the freehold of land with a rental value of more than forty shillings a year, and could have electorates running into many thousands. A contested election in Yorkshire, for instance, could easily produce 20,000 voters at the poll. As a result they were extremely expensive to contest (William Wilberforce’s two opponents in Yorkshire in 1807 reportedly spent over £100,000 each – the equivalent of more than £5 million), and the funds had to be found by the candidate, or a rich patron, or his supporters. Often huge sums were spent on a ‘canvass’ of county seats to see whether it was worth putting a particular candidate forward before embarking on the immense expense and trouble of actually contesting the election. In the 1780 election, only two counties would actually go to the lengths of having a contest.
As an additional obstacle it had been agreed in 1707, as part of an earlier attempt to rein in the patronage of the Crown, that an MP accepting an office of profit from the Crown such as a ministerial position would resign his seat and fight a by-election. This practice continued into the early twentieth century, sometimes leading to the defeat of freshly appointed Ministers such as Winston Churchill in 1908. In the eighteenth century the expense