Pemb. Hall, Sept. 16 [1780),
My dear Mother,
Mansfield and Townshend have run away with the Prize, but my struggle has not been dishonourable.
I am just going to Cheveley [the seat of the Duke of Rutland] for a day or two, and shall soon return to you for as long as the law will permit, which will now be probably the sole object with me. I hope you are all well.
Your ever dutiful and affectionate
W. Pitt19
It was not an easy autumn for the family. Pitt’s sister Hester had never fully recovered from the birth of her third child in February. She died in July. Over the next few years Pitt and his bereaved brother-in-law Lord Mahon would become close friends, but this was a sad time made even worse by the news the following year that the youngest brother, James, had died on naval service in the West Indies at the end of 1780. Pitt wrote to Pretyman: ‘I have to regret the loss of a brother who had every thing that was most amiable and promising, every thing that I could love and admire; and I feel the favourite hope of my mind extinguished by this untimely blow. Let me however, assure you, that I am too much tried in affliction not to be able to support myself under it; and that my poor mother and sister, to whom I brought the sad account yesterday, have not suffered in their health, from so severe a shock.’20
With the death of Earl Temple the previous year, Pitt’s mother had now lost in rapid succession her husband, elder brother, eldest daughter and youngest son. After Hester’s death William spent time at Hayes or Burton Pynsent with his mother, and at other times kept up his flow of excited and informative letters. By November 1780 he could report at last that he would be a Member of Parliament. His Cambridge friend Lord Granby had now succeeded his grandfather as Duke of Rutland. Wanting to see Pitt in Parliament as soon as possible, he approached his friend Sir James Lowther, who controlled a number of boroughs in the north of England. As Lowther’s cousin William had been returned in the election for both Appleby and Carlisle and chose to sit for the latter, Lowther needed a new Member for Appleby. Such rearrangements in the few months after a general election were entirely customary in the eighteenth century. Lowther had a reputation as a rather dominating patron, but he was prepared to lift any normal conditions for the son of Chatham. Pitt wrote to his mother:
Lincoln’s Inn, Thursday night [November 1780]
My dear Mother,
I can now inform you that I have seen Sir J. Lowther, who has repeated to me the offer He had before made, and in the handsomest manner. Judging from my Father’s Principles, He concludes that mine would be agreeable to his own, and on that Ground, to me of all others the most agreeable desires to bring me in. No Kind of Condition was mentioned, but that if ever our Lines of Conduct should become opposite, I should give Him an opportunity of choosing another Person. On such Liberal Terms I could certainly not hesitate to accept the proposal, than which Nothing could be in any respect more agreeable. Appleby is the Place I am to represent, and the Election will be made (probably in a week or Ten days) without my having any trouble, or even visiting my constituents.21
The offer from Lowther was liberal enough to provide Pitt with freedom of action unless he completely reversed his political stance. William Pitt, aged twenty-one, was now a Member of Parliament.
*Assessments of inflation over such long periods are at best approximate. In this book any illustrations of the present-day value of money in Pitt’s time are based on the index agreed in 2003 by the House of Commons Library, the Bank of England and the Office of National Statistics.
*The Pantheon, on Oxford Street to the east of Oxford Circus, was a prominent venue for concerts and dances and was described by Horace Walpole as ‘the most beautiful edifice in England’. Today the site is occupied by a store of Marks & Spencer.
*Cambridge and Oxford Universities had two Members each. The University Members were finally abolished in 1948.
*The franchise in the universities was based on membership of the University Senate, and was thus possessed only by academics. These constituencies were also unusual in having a secret ballot. The electorate of Cambridge University was a little over seven hundred strong in the early 1780s.
‘He was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under entire control.’
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE ON WILLIAM PITT
‘It is a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and diabolical war … Where is the Englishman who on reading the narrative of those bloody and well-fought contests can refrain lamenting the loss of so much British blood shed in such a cause, or from weeping on whatever side victory might be declared?’
WILLIAM PITT, 12 JUNE 1781
WILLIAM PITT WALKED onto the floor of the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament for the first time on 23 January 1781. For around 230 years the Commons had met in St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster, with the Speaker’s chair placed on the altar steps, and the Members sitting on either side in the tiered choir stalls.* In more recent times the Chapel had been altered to make it more suitable for parliamentary gatherings: a Strangers’ Gallery had been added on both sides, supported by columns reaching down among the Members, wooden panelling added throughout, and the lighting improved by enlarging the windows at the end nearest the River Thames and the hanging of large brass chandeliers from a lowered ceiling. There were nowhere near enough places for all the Members to sit, and the result, then as now, was that on major occasions the Chamber had a crowded and intimate atmosphere, easily roused to boisterousness and ribaldry.
The day on which Pitt took his seat was the first time the House had sat since breaking for Christmas in early December 1780. The floor of the House would have been busy, as it was around the end of January each year that Members were required to answer the ‘call of the House’, an actual rollcall of the Members who could in theory suffer a penalty for failure to attend. Looking around him Pitt would have seen an all-male legislature, younger in its average age than we would expect to see today, with around a hundred Members, more than one in six, being aged under thirty (compared to four Members out of 659 under thirty after the 2001 general election). He would have recognised among the Members a large slice of the youthful aristocracy – sixty-seven sons of peers, often the younger sons, were elected to the Commons in the election of 1780; his father had been right to call the Commons a ‘parcel of younger brothers’.1 Scattered among them he would have seen several dozen senior officers of the army and navy, including General Burgoyne, who had surrendered at Saratoga in the American War of Independence, and the celebrated Admiral Keppel, who had lost his seat but immediately been given another one. He would have seen the legal profession in force, with around eighty trained lawyers on the benches on both sides of the House. It being winter, the country gentlemen would also be in town and taking their seats in large numbers, although most of them would take a great deal of persuading to stay any later than Easter. Some of them would have worked for their financial and political independence by climbing the ladder of government offices and Crown appointments, accepting the advice of Hans Stanley, Ambassador to St Petersburg: ‘Get into Parliament, make tiresome speeches, you will have great offers; do not accept them at first; then do; then make great provision for yourself and family, and then call yourself an independent country gentleman.’2
As commerce and industry expanded, so did the number of merchants and other businessmen sitting in the House. In this Parliament seventy-two Members were actively engaged in business, many more than twenty years before. A higher proportion than in the past were there as the culmination of their business efforts rather than in order to actually