Throughout his career the elder Pitt emphasised the importance of overseas trade, an issue which regularly made him the darling of the City of London. To preserve and expand that trade, he believed in naval supremacy, the retention and expansion of the colonies, particularly in North America, and a firm stance against the Bourbon monarchies of France and Spain. Long after his death, elements of the same beliefs in trade and naval power would be discerned within the policies carried out by his son as Prime Minister.
Fourth, the elder Pitt cultivated a detachment from party as a healthy attribute in itself, along with a further detachment from the financial rewards and perquisites of office. Paymasters had traditionally made huge personal gains, usually by investing for their own account the balances of public money for which they were responsible, and taking a commission on foreign subsidies.* It was to the astonishment of other politicians and the delight of a wider public that on his appointment as Paymaster, Pitt lodged the balance of public money with the Bank of England and forwent his personal commission on a subsidy to Sardinia. It was as a result of such forbearance, as well as of his general political stance, that he was long regarded as different from other politicians, less corrupt and self-interested. Coupled with his apparent lack of interest in taking a title, this attribute led to him becoming known as ‘the Great Commoner’. It was also as a result of these sacrifices that his income rarely kept up with his lavish domestic expenditure. The huge debts which this produced seldom seemed to trouble him, a trait faithfully reproduced in his famous son.
The elder Pitt spent a large proportion of his life visibly ill. He suffered from a wide range of ailments, all of which were then associated with gout; he was frequently lame and also suffered from ‘gout in the bowels’ and similar disorders. For him to give a speech in the Commons with a walking stick and a large part of his body wrapped in flannels was not uncommon. He would often retreat to his bed even at times of crisis, as this anecdote from the time of the Seven Years’ War demonstrates:
Mr. Pitt’s plan, when he had the gout, was to have no fire in his room, but to load himself with bedclothes. At his house at Hayes he slept in a long room; at one end of which was his bed, and his lady’s at the other. His way was, when he thought the Duke of Newcastle had fallen into any mistake to send for him and read him a lecture. The Duke was sent for once and came when Mr. Pitt was confined to bed by the gout. There was, as usual, no fire in the room; the day was very chilly and the Duke, as usual, afraid of catching cold. The Duke first sat down on Mrs Pitt’s bed, as the warmest place; then drew up his legs into it, as he got colder. The lecture unluckily continuing a considerable time, the Duke at length fairly lodged himself under Mrs Pitt’s bed clothes. A person, from whom I had the story, suddenly going in, saw the two ministers in bed, at the two ends of the room, while Pitt’s long nose and black beard unshaved for some days, added to the grotesqueness of the scene.12
In 1760, the accession of George III, grandson of George II (and son of Prince Frederick, who after years of plotting for his accession with opposition figures, spoiled every calculation by dying before his father), set in motion a chain of events which led to Pitt’s departure from government. Favouring a more hardline approach to Spain than his colleagues would accept, Pitt wished to continue in office only on the basis of assured control of the government, an ambition irreconcilable with the new King’s advancement of his great favourite, the Earl of Bute.
Pitt left office at loggerheads with his colleagues but as a towering figure in public repute, which the King and Bute recognised by conferring on him and his descendants an annuity of £3,000 a year. Bute also tried to undermine Pitt’s reputation by unusually making the details of the annuity public. Pitt complained that ‘the cause and manner of my resigning’ had been ‘grossly misrepresented’. He had been ‘infamously traduced as a bargain for my forsaking the public’.13 As part of the same package a title was given to Pitt’s wife, who became Baroness Chatham. For the moment, Pitt himself chose to stay in his arena of greatest influence, the Commons, rather than go to the Lords. Out of office he could now bestow more attention on his devoted wife and five children, including William, now two years old.
However many wise decisions were taken by the elder Pitt in the Seven Years’ War, few compared in wisdom to his decision a few years earlier in 1754 to marry Lady Hester Grenville. Pitt was still unmarried at the age of forty-six. His most consistent and affectionate friendship had been with his sister Ann, although he reported falling in love with a French woman during his tour of the Continent. On the face of it, his decision to get married at that age, to someone he had known for years without apparently showing any previous romantic interest in her, seems sudden and strange. Pitt had one eye on posterity: it may simply be that he woke up one morning realising that if he did not find a wife and produce a family now he never would.
In any event, it was a marriage of great and enduring strength, supported by deep mutual affection. Hester proved utterly devoted to this difficult and often sick man, describing herself in early letters as ‘ever unalterably your most passionately loving wife’. She was thirty-three at the time of their marriage and herself came from a powerful political family. Her uncle was the Lord Cobham with whom Pitt had intrigued twenty years before, and her brothers were highly active in politics, including both Richard, Earl Temple and George Grenville. The two families were already related because Pitt’s elder brother Thomas had married Hester’s cousin, but much has always been made of the strikingly different characters of the Pitts and the Grenvilles. Where the Pitts were demonstrative, emotional and argumentative, the Grenvilles were cool, methodical and loyal. Pitts had a spirit of adventure, Grenvilles an inclination to caution. And where Pitts enjoyed foreign and military matters in politics, Grenvilles were more at home with finance and administration. The seemingly better-balanced personality of the younger William Pitt is often ascribed to the fortuitous combination of these contrasting traits, although one of his biographers has commented: ‘In the son – still more in the other children – was a full measure of the Grenville starchiness, which unhappily dulled the Pitt fire and brilliance.’14 Most other commentators have concluded that alongside a brilliant and impetuous father, the younger Pitt was fortunate indeed to have a mother who had resilience, a calm temperament and an unfailing sense of duty.
In 1755 the elder Pitt purchased Hayes Place in what would now be south London, near the village of Bromley. Although in time he would regard it as only a modest residence it had twenty-four bedrooms, elegant gardens and several hundred acres of pasture and woodland. In 1765, with his fame and reputation at their height, he had the immense good fortune to inherit a large estate, Burton Pynsent in Somerset, from an admirer, Sir William Pynsent, whom he seems never to have met. Excited by the prospect of living on a far grander scale than was possible at Hayes, Pitt soon fought off the descendants of the deceased who tried to dispute the will, and set about vast alterations and landscaping. This included a 140-foot-high column in memory of Pynsent, raised as a token of humble thanks. The scale of these changes, in addition to the cost of selling Hayes and then repurchasing it at a higher price (he discovered he could not do without a large residence close to London), plunged Pitt into debts which remained with him for the rest of his life. One of the many inestimable services performed by Hester was to bring more careful management to the family’s finances and to prevent further extravagances so that the debts did not become completely unsustainable.
The young William Pitt was born at Hayes in May 1759 ‘after a labour rather severe’,15 the fourth child in five years after Hester, John, and Harriot. The fifth and final child, James, was born two years later. These five children born within six years of each other made a great deal of noise: ‘The young ones are so delightfully noisy that I hardly know what I write,’16 wrote Pitt to his wife when she went to visit her own family. He seems to have taken the precaution of making alterations to the house at Hayes so that he could cut himself off, when he wished, from the sound and presence of his children.
It is clear that William soon emerged as a notably bright child and a particular favourite of both mother and father. Hester wrote within a few weeks of his birth: ‘I cannot help believing that