The arrival of Dr George Pretyman as Pitt’s tutor presaged a lifelong friendship of deep mutual loyalty. Pretyman was the junior Fellow at Pembroke and he became Pitt’s principal tutor and mentor. With him, Pitt continued the practice of contemporaneous translation of classical texts which he had started with his father. Pretyman (later known as Tomline after an inheritance) was only eight years older than Pitt himself, and it is clear they spent a great deal of time together. As we shall see, he went on to be an unofficial aide to Pitt in his early years as Prime Minister, always remained a close friend and adviser, and was with him when he died in 1806. Pitt would reward him in 1787 by making him Bishop of Lincoln, and was only thwarted by the determination of George III from making him Archbishop of Canterbury in 1805.
Pretyman’s Life of Pitt has been excoriated for being of little literary or political merit and for tragically failing to give any private insights into Pitt’s character, with which he must have been extremely familiar. But it is possible to glean from the book a little of what Pitt’s life was like between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. ‘While Mr. Pitt was under-graduate, he never omitted attending chapel morning and evening, or dining in the public hall, except when prevented by indisposition. Nor did he pass a single evening out of the college walls. Indeed, most of his time was spent with me.’12 In the course of several years ‘I never knew him spend an idle day; nor did he ever fail to attend me at the appointed hour.’13 As Pitt’s tutor, Pretyman was enormously impressed by the talents of his pupil who, having exhausted all the principal Greek and Latin texts, requested that they study the little-known rhapsody of Lycophron. This he read ‘with an ease at first sight, which, if I had not witnessed it, I should have thought beyond the compass of human intellect’.14
Pretyman taught Pitt alternate sessions of Classics and Mathematics. The eager pupil excelled in both fields, and continued to give particular attention to speaking styles. ‘When alone, he dwelt for hours upon striking passages of an orator or historian, in noticing their turn of expression, in marking their manner of arranging a narrative … A few pages sometimes occupied a whole morning … He was also in the habit of copying any eloquent sentence, or any beautiful or forcible expression, which occurred in his reading.’15 The focus of Pitt’s learning was therefore narrow, but always practical and invariably intense. He showed very little interest in contemporary literature, European languages (although he developed a working knowledge of French) or the wave of French philosophical writing pouring forth at the time. There is no evidence that he spent a single day reflecting on theology, despite the fact that a very large proportion of his fellow students would have been preparing for a career in the Church, a path to which his close friend and tutor was also inclined. His intellectual diversions from Classics and Mathematics extended at a later stage to attending lectures in Civil Law, with the Bar in his mind as a stopgap or supplement to politics. He always had a thirst for information about public affairs in the wider world. Even in 1773, before his arrival in Cambridge, we find him writing to a Mr Johnson, ‘Can you tell whether Governor Hutchinson’s speech to the General assembly at Boston together with their answer and his reply again have been yet published together? If they have will you send them down.’16
Pitt had a very clear sense of what facts he wanted to know and which subjects he wanted to study, and was happy to leave aside fields of theoretical discussion which preoccupied many of his contemporaries. It is impossible to escape the very simple conclusion that throughout his teens he was consciously preparing for a career at the forefront of politics, and, certain of what was required from the close observation of his father, directed his studies to that end.
It may be thought from all of this that Pitt must have been dry and dull from a social point of view, but all who knew him are adamant that this was not the case. It was at this stage, at the age of seventeen in 1776, that his daily life began to broaden out and for the first time he developed his own circle of friends. He took his Master of Arts degree without an examination, as he was entitled to do as the son of a nobleman. He had intended to sit the examinations for a Bachelor of Arts degree but was prevented by his failure to attend for sufficient terms to qualify. This did not mean, however, that he would now leave Cambridge. He had at last been able to find friends approximating to his own age, and was freer to go about to other colleges and, increasingly, on short trips to London. Possibly conscious of how little he had experienced the life of the university in his first three years, and still being too young to do anything else, he decided to stay in residence at Pembroke for the time being, albeit moving rooms in 1777 when the previous occupant of his original set returned.
He was not slow in making friends, and now laid the foundations of many lifelong relationships. His close friends included Edward Eliot, who later became his brother-in-law, lived with him in Downing Street and was a member of the Board of the Treasury; Lord Westmorland, later Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Lord Privy Seal; William Meeke, later Clerk of the Parliament in Dublin and an MP; Lord Granby, later Duke of Rutland, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in Pitt’s first administration, and instrumental in getting him into Parliament; J.C. Villiers, later a member of the Board of Trade; Henry Bankes, later a supportive MP for many years; John Pratt, later Lord Camden and a member of Pitt’s governments; and Lord Euston, who became MP for Cambridge University alongside Pitt. It is easy to imagine a brilliant young man such as Pitt, holder of a famous political name, exploding into the company of such a talented and politically motivated group. Pretyman tells us: ‘He was always the most lively person in company, abounding in playful wit and quick repartee; but never known to excite pain, or to give just ground of offence … Though his society was universally sought, and from the age of seventeen or eighteen he constantly passed his evenings in company, he steadily avoided every species of irregularity.’17 Whether by inclination, calculation, or awareness of so many eyes being upon the son of Chatham, Pitt was careful as a teenager to do nothing which would disgrace his family or return to haunt him. In any case, he had no need of excesses to make him popular with his peers. William Wilberforce, part of a more dissolute set at Cambridge at the time but later to become another lifelong friend, referred to his ‘distinctive peculiarity that he was not carried away by his own wit, though he could at any time command its exercise, and no man, perhaps, at proper seasons ever indulged more freely or happily in that playful facetiousness which gratifies all without wounding any’.18
Pitt’s Cambridge friends, then, provided lively company and intellectual stimulation, and while not subject to many vices undoubtedly drank a good deal of port together. They were, however, all of a type, generally the sons of noblemen, and all familiar with politics and classics. Pitt was friendly and charming in their company, but he gained no experience in dealing with other types of people in other situations. The latitudinarian and Newtonian influences on Cambridge at the time emphasised the power of reason, and Pitt would have met far fewer people who were impervious to rational persuasion than would have been the case elsewhere.
He would have encountered very few women indeed, and certainly none at all on equal terms or in any intellectual environment. Nor did he have to cope with the company of people not of his choosing. It may have been because of his Grenville starchiness or it may partly have been the result of his education in the cloistered atmosphere of his home and college that Pitt was to be known throughout his life as aloof, difficult and sometimes haughty towards most people he met. The pattern of his character was now set: a brilliant and tireless interest in practical questions, a tremendously relaxed and talkative enjoyment of chosen company, and a stern face presented to the outer world.
Outside the college dining rooms inhabited by Pitt and his friends, life in the city of Cambridge would have looked and sounded very much as it had done for many decades. The first paved street in the city appeared in 1788, some years after Pitt left Pembroke, and gas lighting did not follow until 1823, well after his death. Yet as the