On the morning of Tuesday, 9 June 1778 huge crowds gathered in the centre of London. People came in their tens of thousands, despite the pouring rain, to line the streets and windows around the old Palace of Westminster. ‘The concourse of people assembled’, wrote one of the following morning’s newspapers, ‘was beyond belief: the windows of all the houses, and even tops of some were crowded; as were the streets, though the spectators had been not only exposed to the rain for several hours, but to stand in dirt and wet nearly to the ankles …’1
From the entrance to Westminster Hall in New Palace Yard, through Parliament Street, Bridge Street, King Street and then the Broad Sanctuary outside the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey, they waited for hours; some noisily, regarding it as ‘a scene only of festivity’, some quietly, as they ‘indulged a patriotic sigh to the memory of their country’s protector’.2
At two o’clock in the afternoon those with a view of the North Door of Westminster Hall saw the procession emerge. First the High Constable of Westminster, then the messenger to the College of Arms in a mourning cloak, soon afterwards seventy poor men in cloaks with black staves in their hands, then a Standard, then a long line of servants. Eventually came a great banner and a coronet on a black velvet cushion and then the coffin, covered in a black velvet pall, adorned with the Arms of the deceased and borne by eight gentlemen.
The previous day an estimated hundred thousand people had filed through the black-draped Painted Chamber of the Palace to see the same coffin lying in state. For these were the remains of the Earl of Chatham, known to a previous generation before his ennoblement as ‘the Great Commoner’, and to a later generation accustomed to the fame of his son as the elder Pitt. He had ended his turbulent and unpredictable career with the most dramatic possible exit, collapsing in the House of Lords while denouncing the mismanagement of the war with America, and had died in May, a month later. He had been a dominating figure, the great political leader of his time. Whatever mixture of curiosity, gregariousness and reverence had brought vast numbers to line the route of his funeral procession, there is no doubt that every single one of them knew something of his life, achievements and opinions.
Among his contemporaries, the elder Pitt had excited every feeling from adoration to contempt. To the court of King George III, already in the nineteenth year of what would be a sixty-year reign, Chatham was impudent, unreliable and inconsistent. He had switched royal patrons in the 1740s out of opportunism, had been unable to work with the King’s favourite Minister in the 1760s, and having schemed for years to return to office and regain his power, had retreated into hypochondria and depression once he was back. In the 1770s he had opposed the war with America, giving moral support to a colony in full rebellion, and had heaped scorn on the policies and Ministers of His Majesty. To the King he had been ‘a snake in the grass’,3 and to other critics he was guilty of ‘prevarication, self-contradiction, disregard of truth, mad ambition, mean popularity, pride, and the most intemperate passion’.4 Few tears would be shed at Windsor, or among the supporters of the increasingly embattled administration of Lord North, that this powerfully persuasive voice was now forever silent.
Yet to many others this man who had so offended the King was the greatest figure in politics in their lifetimes, a man who had rescued an outnumbered nation from military defeat and vanquished her enemies, particularly the French, in the Seven Years’ War, the greatest war they had ever known. To them he was ‘that great and glorious Minister, who, to all succeeding ages, will be quoted as an illustrious example, how one great man, by his superior ability could raise his drooping country from the abyss of despair to the highest pinnacle of glory, and render her honoured, respected, revered, and dreaded by the whole universe’.5 It was Chatham alone, they said, who had given direction, and a sense of purpose, and aggression to Britain’s war effort; Chatham who produced the great ‘year of victory’ of 1759, when Horace Walpole had written ‘our bells are worn threadbare with ringing of victories’.6 Thus Chatham was revered as a brilliant maker of war, who had brought Canada and India under British dominion, yet he was also supported as a far-sighted man of peace by the opposition politicians, led by the great Whig magnate the Marquis of Rockingham, who now proceeded to the Abbey. For it was Chatham too who had pointed with wisdom and clarity to the folly of the war in America.
The bitter controversies of Chatham’s lifetime had led to contrasting, and to simple observers confusing, approaches to his death. As the procession wound its way to Westminster Abbey the crowds must have wondered whether or not this was really meant to be a grand state occasion. The House of Commons had voted unanimously for a public funeral, a huge monument in the Abbey and the paying off of Chatham’s substantial debts. The Corporation of London, ever devoted in its support for him, had unsuccessfully petitioned the King to permit his burial in St Paul’s. Yet the House of Lords had voted against attending the funeral as a House, and there is no doubt that ‘the greatest influence was made by the Court to prevent the members of either House attending the funeral’.7 As a result the funeral arrangements were a compromise, a public procession without the pomp and pageantry which only the state was able to provide. Many onlookers would be disappointed, with the Morning Post commenting: ‘The funeral procession was allowed, on all hands, to be a very pitiful pageant, considered as a national one; for instead of having a platform erected for it from Westminster Hall to the Abbey, as is usual in such cases, the attendants were obliged to wade through the mud, preceded by half a dozen scavengers with their brooms!’ ‘It is rather remarkable’, the paper went on to point out, ‘that St Martin’s bells were ringing a merry peal during the interment of the late patriotic Earl.’8
The London Evening Post made a similar complaint: ‘The most scandalous parsimony prevailed, and every mark of disrespect was shown to those members who did attend. Not half the quantity of cloaks, scarfs, or hatbands were provided – great complaints were made but the answer, was, “it would have been too expensive to have furnished more.” Colonel Barré justly observed, “it is not a reign to complain in”.’9 Chatham had evidently complained too much.
Those who thought they would see the parliamentary leaders assembled en masse found instead only about forty peers and twenty MPs among the many hundreds of people attending the ceremony. There was Rockingham, the foremost opposition politician; there Edmund Burke, his right-hand man; there General Burgoyne, the soldier turned opposition MP – but they were there ‘more to vex the King’s Ministers than to honour the memory of the Earl’.10 Only one member of the government was present, Lord Amherst, who had commanded the army under Chatham, and only one member of the Royal Family, the Duke of Gloucester, the King’s estranged younger brother. There were no Sheriffs, no Masters in Chancery in their gowns, no judges or Privy Councillors. The Lord Mayor was missing, as was the Speaker of the House of Commons, and there was not ‘a sufficient number of Baronets to walk by themselves’.11
Still, the crowds had witnessed a solemn procession and a major event. Some of them might even have noticed the Chief Mourner, walking behind the coffin, the late Earl’s second son, another William Pitt. On his left was his brother-in-law, Lord Mahon, and on his right his uncle, Thomas Pitt. With his mother choosing to stay at home rather than grieve in public and his elder brother at sea on the expedition to reinforce Gibraltar, the nineteen-year-old William performed his first public duty, walking behind the coffin of the father who had doted on him. That night he wrote to his mother:
Harley Street
June 9th, 1778
My Dear Mother
I cannot let the servants return without letting you know that the sad solemnity has been celebrated so as to answer every important wish we could form on the subject. The Court did not honour us with their countenance, nor did they suffer the procession to be as magnificent as it ought; but it had notwithstanding everything essential to the great object, the attendance being most respectable, and the crowd of interested spectators immense. The Duke of Gloucester was in the Abbey. Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Northumberland, and all the minority in town were present … All our relations made their appearance