The War of Wars (15 page)

‘Kindness and good-humour’, ‘playful facetiousness’; ‘playfulness, urbanity, and good-humour’ – this is from one quarter. ‘His laugh – love of fun – playful tricks’: this is from another, less well disposed. Men who had never met him, or come across him only in public, were amazed when they caught a rare glimpse of him in private, and his friends, of whatever description, mourned him bitterly when he died . . . He was the same with all his intimates; and yet, distrustful of larger acquaintance, he seemed unconcerned who his intimates might be.

But perhaps the answer is suggested by the question: by this very catholicity of affection in one who found it difficult to seek out and choose his friends. Amiable and warm, he was happy from the start to take what circumstances offered: shy and haughty, he was unable to take the initiative himself. The family combination of simplicity and pride, the power to charm or repel, must have been given a peculiar impress by his upbringing and was set hard by his early fame.

Frances Williams Wynn, a contemporary, gave this engaging account of the private man’s antics:

I was about sixteen or seventeen when, at Dropmore – where I was with Lord and Lady Grenville only – Mr Pitt arrived for a visit of two days. First, I was disappointed in that turned up nose, and in that countenance, in which it was so impossible to find any indication of the mind, and in that person which was so deficient in dignity that he had hardly the air of a gentleman . . . From what I then heard and saw, I should say that mouth was made for eating; – as to speaking, there was very little, and that little was totally uninteresting to me, and I believe it had been so to everybody . . . On the second day arrived Lord Wellesley whom I thought very agreeable; partly, I fancy from his high-bred manners, and still more from his occasionally saying a few words to me, and thus making me feel treated as a reasonable creature. After we had retired for the night, I heard from the library, which was under my room, the most extraordinary noises – barking, mewing, hissing, howling, interspersed with violent shouts of laughter. I [assumed it was the servants that had come] into the room, and had got drunk and riotous; and I turned to sleep when the noise had ceased. Never can I forget my dismay (it was more than astonishment) when next day at breakfast I heard that my wise uncle and his two wise guests, whom they had left talking, as I supposed, on the fate of Europe, had spied in the room a little bird; they did not wish it to be shut out there all night: therefore, after having opened every window, these great wise men tried every variety of noise they could make to frighten out the poor bird.

Wroxall wrote of Pitt:

It was not till Pitt’s eye lent animation to his other features, which were in themselves tame, that they lighted up and became strongly intelligent . . . In his manners, Pitt, if not repulsive, was cold, stiff, and without sincerity and amenity. He never seemed to invite approach, or to encourage acquaintance . . . 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.

Rosebery said his nose was turned up at all mankind. Pitt’s speeches were short and to the point. Fox remarked of him that although he himself was never in want of words, Pitt was never without the best words possible.

The contrast between this snooty boyish bachelor aristocrat with his penetrating command of the House of Commons and iron self-control and his future adversary Napoleon – an emotional, voluble, deadly serious professional soldier with a score of lovers – could hardly have been more pronounced. The master politician and the master gunner had only one thing in common: cool, detached and analytical minds capable of quick decisions and instant, practical judgements.

Pitt’s first cousin, his foreign secretary William, Lord Grenville, made an interesting contrast. Unlike the brilliant Pitt, Grenville was a formidable, practical man of great administrative ability and domineering temperament. As Pitt’s first cousin and intimate and from one of the pre-eminent political families of the age, he regarded himself as Pitt’s equal and spoke to him as such with often brutal frankness. Being older than Pitt, although not as talented, he perhaps harboured some resentment at his young cousin’s seamless rise to the very top. But his indispensability to Pitt is clear from the way he remained at his side for eighteen years after joining one of his earliest administrations.

He had first entered the government as paymaster of the forces, when most senior politicians refused to serve the ‘schoolboy’; indeed Grenville’s own powerful older brother, the imperious Lord Temple, who was expected to become leader of the Lords, had at the last minute refused to serve, leaving Pitt in the lurch. The young man had been deeply grateful to cousin William for providing Grenville family backing. The two cousins, along with only one other man of substance, Henry Dundas, a deeply corrupt Scottish political fixer of great ability but somewhat crude tastes, had had to face the uncertain early years of the administration together, and were bound by close friendship.

The key to Pitt’s appointment at such an early age had been the support of the King. George III, an intelligent, energetic and conscientious man, although with a callous disregard for those who served him even before his descent into madness, had come to the throne desperately seeking to establish the Crown’s power as the lynch-pin of the political system in a country which since the arrival of the absentee German-speaking Hanoverians had been a republic in all but name.

For a while he had tried to rule from behind a tame prime minister, backed by a tough advocate, Lord Bute. This had failed disastrously, never more so than when Bute himself had served as prime minister, attracting the scorn of such polemicists as John Wilkes and the anonymous ‘Junius’. After several further attempts, he had secured a loyal prime minister, Lord North, a brilliant man at reconciling the demands of King and parliament for twelve years: but North had presided unhappily over the failure of the American War of Independence – largely the King’s fault – and had fallen.

Now the King, as his mind began to totter, was desperate for a more pliant figure and was faced instead by an attempt to take power by the man he most detested in British politics – and there were many – Charles James Fox. Pitt had been brought in as the King’s puppet, allying the royal party and country squirearchy in the Commons with his famous name and his father’s lingering supporters; but it was far from clear that he would survive the torrent of invective that the experienced and brilliant Fox would unleash upon this pimply youth. Temple evidently believed he would not. The young Grenville came to his help to become Pitt’s indispensable right-hand man.

Modern historians have recognized the steely resolve that was sometimes needed to buttress Pitt’s more petulant personality, as well as the huge grasp of foreign affairs and diplomacy that added a necessary world view to Pitt’s innate provincialism. John Ehrman writes:

[Grenville’s] talents, his very appearance, were in many ways like Pitt’s. Grenville had the family gift for administration and finance. He had a good mind, a strong character and his share of the family pride. He was indeed something of a caricature of his cousin – he really was as steady, as unbending, as industrious as the Prime Minister seemed to the world. Lacking any of Pitt’s mercurial brilliance, his influence was perhaps the stronger. Such a character, placed in close contact with a more impressionable one, was bound to have an effect; and so it did through a succession of posts ending with that of Foreign Secretary. The influence was liberal in peacetime – the cousins studied Adam Smith together – as it was unyielding in war. Grenville was one of the most reliable agents of administrative and financial reform, and the strongest opponent of any idea of reconciliation with a republican France.

At that stage the important traits of the imperious, good-looking, unbending Grenville were his undying hostility towards the French (Pitt was much more of an ‘appeaser’) and his dislike of continental commitments: he saw Britain’s opportunities as lying with the overseas colonies, not continental entanglements. These were to some extent contradictory views: but the evidence is that from an early stage he urged Pitt to be more resolute towards revolutionary France, against Pitt’s own inclinations.

Too many historians have insisted that Pitt was cut from the same fearless cloth as his father, the ‘creator of the British empire’. It is always absurd to see any son as a clone of his father. Pitt had as much of the Grenville caution, careful judgement and over-attention to detail as his father’s robustness. And he had come to office after a nearly disastrous experience – the American War of Independence, which had destroyed the ministry of Lord North and very nearly wrecked the British empire as well.

Pitt came to office determined to avoid another such conflict and the King, so quick to react to foreign slights, was also chastened. This led directly to the next few years of appeasement towards France, which were certainly not Pitt’s finest hour. Pitt’s reputation has gone curiously unchallenged by later generations – in part owing to his longevity as prime minister, in part his own incorruptible personality. Yet while his successes were many, so too were his mistakes, one of which – his initial policy towards France – was to prove nearly fatal, and caused his cousin and foreign minister, Grenville, to despair on occasion.

Pitt was farsighted in seeking to place Britain on a firm financial footing, and providing the excellent administration needed to man the royal navy and the army, because he was seeking desperately to avoid the mistakes that had led France to become financially overstretched during the War of Independence and which were to lead to the downfall of the monarchy. In doing so, Pitt at the beginning of his ministry proved to be a brilliant domestic minister and a weak and nearly disastrous one in foreign policy – attributes which ironically were nearly to reverse themselves in his last years in office. The two main objectives Pitt set himself in his first years in office were the prosperity of the country and to maintain domestic peace. He succeeded brilliantly in the first, to begin with, and much more controversially in the second, as unrest threatened while the French Revolution got under way.

The Austrian Emperor, Joseph II, remarked contemptuously at the end of the American war that Britain had fallen to the status of a second-rate power. That, however, was not how it looked from Britain, now under its new young prime minister. In the late eighteenth century, in spite of the American fiasco – and a spate of brilliant British military victories under Rodney, Hood and Howe had partially redeemed that – Britain was overwhelmingly the most powerful country in Europe economically, sustained by a huge and prosperous empire and undergoing a creative renaissance.

Political stability at home; imperial revenues generated from abroad; a sudden surge in agricultural income provided by land enclosures; and later, the final key ingredient, the breakthrough in innovation and technology provided by the Enlightenment and advances in science – all these conspired to create a great leap forward in British society that has had no parallels before or since. The aristocracy shared the good fortune with a new moneyed class in a field of the cloth of gold of dazzling cultural and intellectual life.

The agricultural and industrial revolutions began to transform the appearance of Britain. As the downside, however, the new urban masses that were to provide the labour pool for the world’s first industrialized society were huddled into crowded, insanitary terraces. Only the need to unite against an external enemy and the comparative liberalism of Britain’s political system would prevent this powder keg of misery from exploding in the early part of the following century.

In France and other eighteenth-century continental systems, while
faction struggles raged at court, these were largely in secret, neither corresponding to the real balance of forces in the country as a whole, nor providing a safety valve for discontent. Nor was debate confined to the ranks of the aristocracy and
la haute bourgeoisie,
as in France; for while the British aristocracy certainly fought to retain its influence, its real power had been diluted in the struggles of the previous century by the much larger middle class of country squires, urban merchants and professionals.

In the parliamentary maelstrom, monarch, lords and commoners battled it out, now one gaining the upper hand, now another, none succeeding in imposing his will for long. After the reign of the Whig grandees had ended with the installation of the Hanoverians, Sir Robert Walpole, bourgeois, stolid, cunning, a machine politician, and his successors Pelham and Newcastle, had ushered in the new political age.

In turn the newly ennobled Grenvilles and ‘commoner’ Pitt – ‘issue politicians’ in an almost twentieth-century mould – came to dominate the stage, vying with the remnants of the old Whig aristocracy represented by the Duke of Devonshire and the Marquess of Rockingham, and the newly assertive ‘court party’ of George III, represented by the cack-handed Marquess of Bute and, later and more successfully, by Lord North. The system embraced most dissent: it is scarcely surprising that it became the age of oratory, for rarely have political leaders felt so free to express their own viewpoints, unhindered by fear of official reprisal, or by the harsh disciplines of the party machine.

The vitality of parliamentary debate was but one of the lasting innovations of the eighteenth-century system. Another was the way in which general elections – although most of the seats went uncontested or were in the gift of political bosses – actually mattered. Governments could be undone and were unseated by the verdicts of limited electorates in the small number of contested seats. Public opinion, however restricted the franchise, had real influence.