Inevitably, there are plenty of stories in which visitors to the Pitt household claim prescience about the child’s future greatness. Lady Holland, mother of Charles James Fox, is meant to have said, ‘I have been this morning with Lady Hester Pitt, and there is little William Pitt, not eight years old and really the cleverest child I ever saw; and brought up so strictly and so proper in his behaviour, that, mark my words, that little boy will be a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives.’18 Other reports include the young William standing up on a mounting block and addressing the trees as if they were Members of the House of Commons. Such stories may be fanciful, but the essential point, that he was extraordinarily well versed in politics and philosophy at a remarkably early age, certainly stands up to examination. Family correspondence refers to him as ‘the Philosopher’, ‘the Young Senator’, ‘Eager Mr. William’ and ‘Impetuous William’. In 1766, when he was seven, his tutor wrote of him and his sister:
Lady Hester and Mr. Pitt still continue to surprise and astonish as much as ever; and I see no possibility of diminishing their ardour either by too much business or too much relaxation. When I am alone reading, Mr. Pitt, if it is any thing he may attend to, constantly places himself by me, where his steady attention and sage remarks are not only entertaining but useful; as they frequently throw a light upon the subject, and strongly impress it on my memory.19
The same tutor, Edward Wilson, who taught all the Pitt children at home because of their father’s unforgiving recollections of public school, marvelled on another occasion that William ‘seemed never to learn but merely to recollect’.20 At the age of seven he was able to write letters in Latin to his father, and also did so in English in a rather pompous and wordy style. With his father delivering thundering orations against the Stamp Act in the Commons in early 1766, William showed an insatiable appetite for political news. ‘I expect many sage reflections from William upon the public papers,’ his father wrote to his mother, and later that year, with a peerage for the elder Pitt in prospect, William commented that he was glad he was not the eldest son, because ‘he could serve his country in the House of Commons like his Papa’.21
A seven-year-old with such attitudes and interests in our own times would probably find them beaten out of him at school, and indeed that could as easily have happened in the 1760s. William had the advantage of mixing almost exclusively with his own siblings, his tutor and adult family members, most of whom encouraged his political interest. The poet William Hayley reported when William was a boy of fourteen that he ‘eclipsed his brother in conversation’.22 It is hard to think that he was not sometimes an irritation to his brothers and sisters; as the historian J. Holland Rose commented, ‘the boy … narrowly escaped being a prodigy of priggishness’.23 His narrow escape seems to have been made possible by an easygoing disposition and pleasant temperament, which made it easier for him to win friends in a small circle. He was also a rather sickly child, with frequently recurring problems in the nose and throat, and many coughs and colds. His fragility probably helped the other children to put up with his bookish ways.
Father and son showed a deep attachment to each other. ‘If I should smoke,’ the elder Pitt wrote, ‘William would instantly call for a pipe.’24 He would in later years describe William as ‘the hope and comfort of my life’.25 In 1772, when Hester took the three eldest children to Hayes and left William and his younger brother with their father at Burton Pynsent, the elder Pitt wrote:
My dearest life will read with joy that the boys go on well. I believe William’s sequestration, as he learnedly terms it, agrees better with his contemplative constitution than more talk and more romps. Airing, literature, the arts, tea-table, sober whist and lecturing Papa for staying out too late, together with the small amusement of devouring a joint of mutton, or so, before I can look about, make up our daily occupations.26
His wife replied: ‘I do not in the least wonder that the style of William’s present life agrees with him. It is certainly not better suited to the state of his constitution, than to the fineness of his mind, which makes him enjoy with the highest pleasure what would be above the reach of any other creature of his small age.’27
In 1772 William even wrote a play, performed by the Pitt children, which was wholly political in content and eerily foreshadowed the Regency crisis in which he would play the real lead role seventeen years later. It is obvious that he showed academic gifts and political interest from an exceptionally early age, encouraged and nurtured by the adults around him, and that he enjoyed a pleasant and sheltered upbringing in the midst of a loving family. In all these respects he was very fortunate, but he was not unique. There must have been something more to his formative years, even before he went to university at the age of fourteen, to equip him to carry out the functions of Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four.
There were at least three factors which, in the formation of the young William Pitt’s personality and opinions, were not only fortunate but truly unique. The first was that a father who had himself dominated the House of Commons and presided over a government took an active, usually daily, role in his education. At no other time in British history has the head of one administration acted as the tutor of another. A home education seems to have been well suited in any case to a child of William’s temperament and health, but Mr Wilson’s tuition was frequently supplemented by the ministrations of the elder Pitt. Bishop Tomline, in his surprisingly uninformative biography of the younger Pitt written shortly after his death, reports that ‘when his lordship’s health would permit, he never suffered a day to pass without giving instruction of some sort to his children; and seldom without reading a chapter of the Bible with them’.28 While the elder Pitt seems to have been attentive to all his children, he particularly enjoyed passing on to William examples of eloquence from contemporary or classical writers and speakers, and asking him to study them. He taught him to speak in a clear and melodious voice by making him recite each day passages from the best English poets, particularly Shakespeare and Milton. Another biographer of the younger Pitt, Lord Stanhope, wrote the following with the advantage of his father having spoken to Pitt himself:
My father had the honour to be connected in relationship with that great man – and, as such, he had the privilege of being in the house with him sometimes for many weeks together. Presuming on that familiar intercourse, he told me, he ventured on one occasion to ask Mr. Pitt by what means – by what course of study – he had acquired that admirable readiness of speech – that aptness of finding the right word without pause or hesitation. Mr. Pitt replied that whatever readiness he might be thought to possess in that respect, he believed that he derived it very much from a practice his father – the great Lord Chatham – had recommended to him. Lord Chatham had bid him take up any book in some foreign language with which he was well acquainted, in Latin, Greek, or French, for example. Lord Chatham then enjoined him to read out of this work into English, stopping where he was not sure of the word to be used in English, until the right word came to his mind, and then proceed. Mr. Pitt states that he had assiduously followed this practice. At first he had often to stop for a while before he could recollect the proper word, but he found the difficulties gradually disappear, until what was a toil to him at first became at last an easy and familiar task.29
By the time he arrived at Cambridge in 1773, William could apparently read into English six or seven pages of Thucydides, without previous study of it and with barely a mistake. He may have been educated at home but he had in effect attended a master school in the use of language and its delivery. In addition he showed a strong early aptitude for mathematics. Uninhibited by peer pressure and required from