Pitt himself moved quickly out of Downing Street, and developed the habit of staying with his friends in Wimbledon. He seemed genuinely relaxed about leaving office. One of the puzzles about Pitt is whether his protestations of caring little whether or not he was in government – ‘I had no great desire to come in and shall have no great reluctance to go out’ – represented his genuine feelings or were an affectation to enhance the impression of an independent character. Honest though he had often proved himself to be, we know from his assertion on 24 March that he knew of ‘no arrangement’ for a new administration, when he was in full negotiation with the King, that he was not always truthful when trying to demonstrate his independence of action. A far more glaring example of this would become apparent when the stakes were even higher. It is also obvious that he was prepared to fight hard to retain office or to acquire it. He must have known, looking around him in the House of Commons, that he merited high office, and that he was one of the very few people actually capable of governing the country.
Three factors would seem to have combined to make Pitt at this stage in his career both ambitious for office and yet relaxed about the gaining or losing of it. The first was this very sense of meritocratic superiority. Shortly after Pitt became Prime Minister, Wraxall wrote his famous account of his personal style:
in his manners, Pitt, if not repulsive, was cold, stiff, and without suavity or amenity. He seemed never to invite approach or to encourage acquaintance, though when addressed he could be polite, communicative, and occasionally gracious … From the instant that Pitt entered the doorway of the House of Commons, he advanced up the floor with a quick and firm step, his head erect and thrown back, looking neither to the right nor to the left, nor favouring with a nod or a glance any of the individuals seated on either side, among whom many who possessed five thousand pounds a year would have been gratified even by so slight a mark of attention. It was not thus that Lord North or Fox treated Parliament, nor from them would Parliament have so patiently endured it; but Pitt seemed made to guide and to command, even more than to persuade or to convince, the assembly that he addressed.35
His immense intellectual self-confidence was combined with a second factor: the expectation that his hour would come. In part this was the natural feeling of a young man who had advanced far in politics at an early age. Old politicians have the advantage of seeing events in the perspective of the past, but young ones have the satisfaction of accepting events in the perspective of the future. The elder Pitt had lived for seventy years. As an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-three the younger Pitt could look forward to decades of pre-eminence in politics among colleagues still unborn. More immediately, he would undoubtedly have known from his cousin Temple and his own dealings with the King of the iron determination of George III to change the government when he could. Perhaps this explains one of Wraxall’s other observations, that Pitt ‘even while seated on the Opposition bench, appeared to anticipate his speedy return to power as certain, and only to wait for the occasion presenting itself to resume his former functions’.36
Such calculations would have reinforced Pitt’s confidence even in defeat, but there is a third factor which is also of great significance. His achievements to date helped to put him at the centre of a small circle of talented or loyal friends whose friendship sustained him when in office, but all the more so when out of it. Wilberforce recalled that after Pitt’s defiant speech of 21 February, ‘I remember our all going to Mr. Pitt’s from the House of Commons after our defeat about eight in the morning, where a dinner had been waiting for us from eleven or twelve the preceding night, and where we all laughed heartily.’37 On the day of his resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt joined Wilberforce for supper at Goostree’s and they stayed up much of the night. Pitt and his friends then descended on the house Wilberforce had inherited in Wimbledon, then a village in rural Surrey and a seven-mile ride from Westminster. Wilberforce’s diary recorded: ‘Delicious day, – lounged morning at Wimbledon with friends, foining* at night, and run about the garden for an hour or two.’38 Wilberforce’s house had eight or nine bedrooms* and a large garden. He explained that ‘Mr. Pitt, who was remarkably fond of sleeping in the country, and would often go out of town for that purpose as late as eleven or twelve o’clock at night, slept at Wimbolton for two or three months together.’39
Notwithstanding the fact that he had recently held one of the highest offices in the land, Pitt briefly found that spring and summer the exuberance of youth. Thomas Orde, MP for Aylesbury and one of Pitt’s circle, soon to become Chief Secretary of Ireland, was expected by Lord Shelburne to report to him on what Pitt was up to, and wrote: ‘He passes, as usual, most of his time with his young Friends in a Society sometimes very lively – Some little excess happen’d lately at Wimbledon … In the Evening some of the Neighbours were alarmed with noises at their doors, but Nobody, I believe, has made any reflection upon a mere frolic – it has only been pleasantly remarked, that the Rioters were headed by Master P. – late Chancellor of the Ex—, and Master Arden, late Sollicitor Genl.’40 Wilberforce’s diary that summer reads: ‘Sunday July 6th, Wimbledon. Persuaded Pitt and Pepper [Arden] to church. July 11th. Fine hot day. Went on water with Pitt and Eliot fishing. Came back, dined, walked evening. Eliot went home. Pitt stayed.’
Pitt’s behaviour among friends was the polar opposite of the icy coldness which Wraxall had observed. The explanation given by Wilberforce for this contrast is that Pitt was the ‘shyest man’ he ever knew: ‘great natural shyness … and even awkwardness … often produced effects for which pride was falsely charged on him’.41 Pitt is himself meant to have said to Wilberforce, ‘I am the shyest man alive.’42 Yet with these friends he threw off his restraints, writing to Wilberforce one afternoon from the Commons: ‘Eliot, Arden and I will be with you before curfew and expect an early meal of peas and strawberries.’43 One of the friends, Dudley Ryder, the future Earl of Harrowby, found one morning that the expensive hat he had worn to the opera the previous night had been cut up by Pitt and scattered over the flowerbeds.
The same spirit infected their proceedings everywhere. Harriot Pitt wrote one evening that she could hardly write for the noise of their laughter, and the MP George Selwyn noted one night in 1782: ‘When I left the House, I left in one room a party of young men, who made me, from their life and spirit, wish for one night to be twenty. There was a table full of them drinking – young Pitt, Lord Euston, Berkley, North &c. &c. singing and laughing à gorge déployée.’44
Pitt’s friends revered him. Wilberforce said of his humour: ‘Mr. Pitt was systematically witty … the others were often run away with by their wit. Mr. Pitt was always master of his. He could turn it to any end or object he desired.’45 Later in his career they would come to regard him as ‘something between God and Man’.46 This was in spite of his unprepossessing appearance. Pitt’s niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, would write many years later that ‘Mr. Pitt’s was not a face that gave one the idea of a clever man. As he walked through the park, you would have taken him for a poet, or some such person, thin, tall, and rather awkward; looking upwards as if his ideas were en air and not remarking what was passing around him.’47 All agreed that only his eyes gave force to his appearance: they ‘lent animation to his other features … they lighted up and became strongly intelligent’,48 and ‘lighted up in a manner quite surprising. It was something that seemed to dart from within his