William Pitt the Younger: A Biography. William Hague

in the eighteenth century could accept youthful seniority to an extent inconceivable two centuries later? Part of the explanation for Pitt’s rapid rise lies, of course, in the unusual circumstances of 1782. One group of politicians had left office because of defeat in the war; now another group had left because of arguments over the peace: the system was literally running out of talented material. But more generally, politics in the eighteenth century was more of a younger man’s game. We have already seen that fully a hundred MPs in the early 1780s were under the age of thirty. Ability, family connections, and the sometimes early retirement or death of senior colleagues allowed some of them to rise more rapidly than could be the case in modern politics. Pitt was not alone in reaching senior office in his twenties. Charles James Fox was an MP at the age of nineteen and a Lord of the Admiralty at twenty-four. At the time of his dramatic resignation as a Secretary of State in 1782 he was still only thirty-three. Another leading Whig of the coming years, Charles Grey, became an MP at twenty-two and was a leading opposition spokesman throughout his twenties. On Pitt’s own death in 1806, the new government would include Lord Henry Petty as Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-six. For a politician to hold Cabinet rank or its equivalent in his twenties during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century was therefore uncommon, but not unknown.

      Attitudes to age and power were bound to be different from today in a period when immense and absolute power was wielded throughout Europe by monarchs who were themselves very young. Maria Theresa had assumed the throne of Austria and precipitated the War of the Austrian Succession at the age of twenty-three in 1740. Her successor Joseph II, on the throne in the 1780s, had been co-Regent at the age of twenty-four. Of the other great monarchs of Europe at the time Pitt took office as Chancellor, Louis XVI of France had become King at the age of twenty, Frederick the Great King of Prussia at twenty-eight, Catherine the Great Empress of Russia at thirty-three, and Gustavus III King of Sweden at twenty-five. George III himself, albeit without the absolute power of his fellow monarchs, had ascended to the throne at twenty-two. At a time when inheritance was more widely prized, it was easier to believe that the offspring of great leaders could themselves take on the burdens of leadership at an early age. There seems no doubt that Pitt was a beneficiary of that belief, and his early oratorical performances had strengthened its applicability to him.

      A final consideration in the eighteenth-century acceptance of youthful success is that the number of young prodigies in many disparate fields was far greater than it is today. Perhaps the greater risk of early death produced an impulse to young brilliance, and certainly the intensive use of private tutors added to it: Alexander Pope wrote his first verses aged twelve, and was famous at twenty-three; Henry Fielding’s plays were being performed in London when he was twenty-one; Adam Smith was a Professor of Logic at twenty-eight; the evangelist George Whitfield was preaching to crowds of tens of thousands in London when aged twenty-five; Isaac Newton had commenced his revolutionary advances in science in the previous century at the age of twenty-five; and Mozart had composed symphonies when eight years old and completed tours of Europe at the ripe old age of fifteen. If a young man seemed brilliant enough he would be accepted, indulged and given patronage, and so it was with William Pitt.

      Pitt had never had a spacious residence in London, having become accustomed to staying in his rooms at Lincoln’s Inn or at his brother’s house in Grafton Street. Since Shelburne preferred to stay in his house in Berkeley Square rather than move into the Downing Street house given by King George II in the 1730s to the incumbent First Lord of the Treasury, Pitt was able to look forward to moving in there instead. Lord North had lived there for many years as First Lord of the Treasury, and had been in no hurry to move out upon losing his job. Pitt wrote to his mother on 16 July:

      Our new Board of Treasury has just begun to enter on business; and tho’ I do not know that it is of the most entertaining sort, it does not seem likely to be very fatiguing. In all other respects my situation most perfectly satisfies, and more than satisfies me, and I think promises every thing that is agreeable … Lord North will, I hope, in a very little while make room for me in Downing Street, which is the best summer Town House possible.⁸

      The residence in question was one of fifteen terraced houses erected in the 1680s along the northern side of Downing Street. They were of poor quality, with inadequate foundations, but one of them was linked in the 1730s with the impressive house behind it, overlooking Horseguards Parade and originally built for the Countess of Lichfield, daughter of Charles II. The house was originally No. 5 Downing Street, and it was only three years before Pitt moved in that it was renumbered No. 10. Little did those who carried out the renumbering suspect that they were changing the vocabulary and symbolism of power in Britain for centuries to come. In August 1782 Pitt moved in. Although his initial occupation of No. 10 would last only eight months, he would go on to live there for by far the greater part of his adult life, and for longer than any other person since. It is not surprising that to begin with he found it a huge place: ‘I expect to be comfortably settled in the course of this week,’ he wrote on 30 July, ‘in a part of my vast, awkward house.’⁹

      He benefited from the construction of a new vaulted kitchen and from a series of major repairs in 1766 which resulted in many of the characteristic features recognisable today: the lamp above the door, the lion’s-head doorknocker, and the black-and-white chequerboard floor in the entrance hall. Other alterations, such as the creation of the modem Cabinet Room, would take place later in his tenure, in 1796. Externally, Downing Street at that time still had terraced houses along the other side from No. 10, as the new Foreign Office building was not constructed until the 1860s. It would have looked and seemed much more like a normal street, albeit a well-to-do one, and for Pitt it provided the great advantage of a short walk or ride to the Houses of Parliament.

      In the summer of 1782 Britain was still at war, and Ministers found it difficult to get away from London despite the parliamentary recess. Pitt managed to go shooting briefly in September, and described his lifestyle in a letter to his mother:

      My dear Mother,

      I am much obliged to you for your letter, which I received yesterday on my return from Cheveley, where I had been for two days. A short visit for such a distance; but as my brother was going there, I thought it worth the exertion, and it was very well repaid by a great deal of Air and Exercise in shooting, and the finest weather in the world. The finest part of all indeed is a fine east wind, which, as the fleet is just sailed for Gibraltar, is worth every thing. I assure you I do not forget the lessons I have so long followed, of riding in spite of Business; tho’ I indeed want it less than ever, as I was never so perfectly well. All I have to do now is to be done quite at my own Hours, being merely to prepare for the busy season; which is very necessary to be done, but which at the same time is not a close Confinement. We are labouring at all sorts of official Reform, for which there is a very ample Field, and in which I believe we shall have some success.

      Downing Street, Thursday Sept. 12 [1782]¹⁵

      Incredibly by today’s standards, Pitt as Chancellor of the Exchequer did not need any dedicated officials of his own. He explained to his mother that his secretary was an army friend of his brother, but since the job had no duties but that of receiving about £400 a year, ‘no profession is unfit for it’. Otherwise, ‘I have not yet any private secretary, nor do I perceive, at least as yet, any occasion for it.’¹⁶

      The standards of ministerial conduct were also rather different from those expected today: Pitt’s sister Harriot was soon expecting him to find a job for a friend, and his mother evidently looked to him to rectify the arrears in the payment of her annuity. Pitt showed early on the characteristics which would be with him throughout his ministerial life and would mark him out from other politicians of the time: his sense of propriety, which in this instance made him reluctant to push his mother’s case while Lord Shelburne was dealing with it, and a lack of interest in the lesser forms of patronage which led him to tell his sister that he would do what he could for her friend, but ‘of all the secrets of my office I have in this short time learnt the least about Patronage’.¹⁷ He was always embarrassed when pressed to deal with minor issues by acquaintances or relatives, sending on one such to Shelburne with the note: ‘Mr. Pitt cannot help forwarding this trifling request.’¹⁸

      Pitt attended the Treasury Board conscientiously,