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‘He was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under entire control.’

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE ON WILLIAM PITT

‘It is a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and diabolical war … Where is the Englishman who on reading the narrative of those bloody and well-fought contests can refrain lamenting the loss of so much British blood shed in such a cause, or from weeping on whatever side victory might be declared?’

WILLIAM PITT, 12 JUNE 1781

WILLIAM PITT WALKED onto the floor of the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament for the first time on 23 January 1781. For around 230 years the Commons had met in St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster, with the Speaker’s chair placed on the altar steps, and the Members sitting on either side in the tiered choir stalls.^* In more recent times the Chapel had been altered to make it more suitable for parliamentary gatherings: a Strangers’ Gallery had been added on both sides, supported by columns reaching down among the Members, wooden panelling added throughout, and the lighting improved by enlarging the windows at the end nearest the River Thames and the hanging of large brass chandeliers from a lowered ceiling. There were nowhere near enough places for all the Members to sit, and the result, then as now, was that on major occasions the Chamber had a crowded and intimate atmosphere, easily roused to boisterousness and ribaldry.

The day on which Pitt took his seat was the first time the House had sat since breaking for Christmas in early December 1780. The floor of the House would have been busy, as it was around the end of January each year that Members were required to answer the ‘call of the House’, an actual rollcall of the Members who could in theory suffer a penalty for failure to attend. Looking around him Pitt would have seen an all-male legislature, younger in its average age than we would expect to see today, with around a hundred Members, more than one in six, being aged under thirty (compared to four Members out of 659 under thirty after the 2001 general election). He would have recognised among the Members a large slice of the youthful aristocracy – sixty-seven sons of peers, often the younger sons, were elected to the Commons in the election of 1780; his father had been right to call the Commons a ‘parcel of younger brothers’.¹ Scattered among them he would have seen several dozen senior officers of the army and navy, including General Burgoyne, who had surrendered at Saratoga in the American War of Independence, and the celebrated Admiral Keppel, who had lost his seat but immediately been given another one. He would have seen the legal profession in force, with around eighty trained lawyers on the benches on both sides of the House. It being winter, the country gentlemen would also be in town and taking their seats in large numbers, although most of them would take a great deal of persuading to stay any later than Easter. Some of them would have worked for their financial and political independence by climbing the ladder of government offices and Crown appointments, accepting the advice of Hans Stanley, Ambassador to St Petersburg: ‘Get into Parliament, make tiresome speeches, you will have great offers; do not accept them at first; then do; then make great provision for yourself and family, and then call yourself an independent country gentleman.’²

As commerce and industry expanded, so did the number of merchants and other businessmen sitting in the House. In this Parliament seventy-two Members were actively engaged in business, many more than twenty years before. A higher proportion than in the past were there as the culmination of their business efforts rather than in order to actually procure trade in Parliament, although about a quarter of them were engaged in government contracts and Treasury loans. Nevertheless, this was primarily an assembly of gentlemen and noblemen. They would not have embraced among their number many representatives of the emerging middle class, and even years later Pitt’s great friend George Canning would be sneered at in the Commons for his humble background. But the aristocratic origins of the Members certainly did not mean that the atmosphere in the small debating Chamber was reserved or formal. The German visitor Carl Moritz was ‘much shocked by the open abuse which Members of Parliament flung at each other’, and complained that ‘they enter the House in greatcoats, boots and spurs! It is not unusual to see a Member stretched out on one of the benches while the rest are in debate. One Member may be cracking nuts, another eating an orange or whatever fruit may be in season; they are constantly going in and out … Whenever one of them speaks badly or the matter of his speech lacks interest for the majority, the noise and laughter are such that the Member can hardly hear his own words.’³

The one exception to this disorderly appearance might have been the Treasury bench, the front bench on the Speaker’s right. For here sat the Members of His Majesty’s Government in court dress, symbolising their proximity to the King and their employment in his service. Pitt took his seat somewhere on the back benches opposite them, sitting naturally enough with the opponents of a government his father had denounced. Most of those seated around him would call themselves Whigs, but Pitt recognised that the party labels of the early eighteenth century now had little meaning. ‘I do not wish’, he had written two years earlier, ‘to call myself any Thing but an Independent Whig which in words is hardly a distinction, as every one alike pretends to it.’⁴

The success of the Whigs in the early eighteenth century had itself contributed to the term losing much of its meaning. The Jacobite cause was dead, and Tories who had the ability or the desire to seek office had called themselves Whigs, much as a Republican in the post-Civil War southern United States would need to call himself a Democrat. George III had said to Pitt’s father in 1765: ‘You can name no Whig familys that shall not have my Countenance; but where Torys come to me on Whig principles let us take them.’⁵ Domestic political divisions had further broken down with the disappearance of the most burning political issue of the mid-eighteenth century, the entanglement of British affairs with those of Hanover. Unlike his grandfather, George III was an utterly English King, who was much less preoccupied with his ancestral country, and only occasionally did he let it complicate his politics.

Most of the MPs had not in any case entered politics in order to pursue a political agenda, quite apart from the fact that it was still frowned upon to come into Parliament or even government with a preconceived notion of what should be done. As Sir Lewis Namier put it in his comprehensive study of eighteenth-century politicians The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III: ‘Men went there [the House of Commons] “to make a figure”, and no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it … The seat in the House was not their ultimate goal but a means to ulterior aims.’⁶

Soame Jenyns, the author and Cambridgeshire MP, writing in 1784, said: ‘Men … get into Parliament, in pursuit of power, honours, and preferments, and till they obtain them, determine to obstruct all business, and distress government. But happily for their Country, they are no sooner gratified, than they are equally zealous to promote the one, and support the other.’⁷ Apart from the few such as Pitt who really did go into Parliament in order to be politicians, Namier identified the following as making up the majority of MPs: the ‘inevitable Parliament men’ who were part of the completely political families such as the Townshends, Cornwallises and Cavendishes; the ‘country gentlemen’ who sought primacy in their own county; the ‘social climbers’ who sought peerages; the ‘placemen and purveyors of favours’ who sought commissionerships and various offices and sinecures; those seeking ‘professional advancement’ in the army, the navy, the Civil Service or the law; the ‘merchants and bankers’ who sought government contracts and arranged public loans, particularly in wartime; and occasionally a small number seeking immunity from prosecution or arrest.

We should not be surprised that this was the nature of Parliament in an age when there were no salaries or pensions for MPs, and little concept of meritocratic preferment in the services of the state. The network of patronage which spread out from the Crown and the Ministers on the Treasury bench extended far into positions in every county, regiment and even church. Indeed, the bishops and peers in the House of Lords were generally even more craven than MPs in their susceptibility to such ‘influence’, since they often hoped for a more lucrative diocese or a step up in the ranks of the peerage.

Any eighteenth-century government could therefore usually rely on a large majority in the House of Lords. The combination of large-scale patronage and a general predisposition among the ‘country gentlemen’ that the King should be able to get his way, provided he did not directly assault the role and power of the aristocracy, meant that governments usually held the upper hand in the Commons as well. At any one time, about a quarter of the Commons might hold some government office, sinecure or pension. More than a third would regard themselves as entirely independent of any factional party, although some would certainly be open to ‘influence’ at its most persuasive. On top of that, there would be about twenty MPs whose seats had been directly purchased for them by the Treasury. These various groups tended to coalesce around the leading members of one of the factions chosen by the King to head his ministry. And so it was that Pitt would have looked across the Chamber at the ‘King’s friends’ and the ‘country gentlemen’ massed behind the complacent-looking figure of Lord North, First Lord of the Treasury for more than a decade.^*

Lord North is generally remembered in British history without much respect or affection. Overweight and perhaps overpromoted, he is thought of as an uninspiring figure who carelessly lost the American colonies. He did indeed lack the administrative drive required from the centre of government at a time of war, but he was nevertheless an astute politician and a formidable parliamentarian. Despite his corpulence and tendency to doze off in debates, he could still command the House of Commons by means of powerful speeches and a noted sense of humour. During one long speech by George Grenville which reviewed the history of government revenues, North went into a sound sleep, having asked his neighbour to wake him when the speaker reached modern times. When he duly received a nudge, he listened for a moment and then exclaimed, ‘Zounds! You have waked me a hundred years too soon.’⁸

North is often thought of as a ‘Tory Prime Minister’, but he himself would have rejected both labels. True, there were Tories among the ‘country gentlemen’ who backed him, but these were the remnants of a now meaningless term. As for ‘Prime Minister’, he had explicitly denied being such a thing, lest he be held even more accountable for the failings of the government of which he was undoubtedly the senior member. Desperate to give up office for at least the last two years, but bound to the King by a mixture of duty and gratitude (George III had paid off his debts of £18,000), he had soldiered on with a war he no longer believed in. Despite experiencing some kind of nervous breakdown, he had maintained his outward good humour and amiability: ‘Constant threats of impeachment, fierce attacks upon himself and all his connexions, mingled execration of his measures and scorn of his capacity, bitter hatred of his person … seemed to have no effect on his habitually placid deportment, nor to consume his endless patience.’⁹

Lord North governed with the support of a small band of his own followers, along with the factions commanded by Lord Sandwich and Lord Gower, as well as the ever-helpful friends of the King. Alongside him on the front bench in the Commons Pitt would have seen Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, who had borne the brunt of directing the war and was even now hoping that the thrust into the southern colonies by Lord Cornwallis and his troops would finally defeat George Washington. Elsewhere on the Treasury bench would be Henry Dundas, the Lord Advocate for Scotland, who had begun developing an iron grip on the forty-five Scottish seats and was now a leading spokesman of the government in the Commons, albeit one who doubted that the government’s remaining life would be very long. Altogether, North could rely on around eighty MPs from his own and allied factions along with 140 ‘King’s friends’, so he needed the support of about fifty of the more than two hundred independents in order to win a majority in a full House.¹⁰

Facing North’s Ministers and sitting on the front bench of the opposition side of the House was Charles James Fox. Fox, thirty-two years old the next day and son of the politician Henry Fox, who had become Lord Holland, was considered the most eloquent debater in Parliament. Brilliant, generous, impulsive, emotional and hugely persuasive, he was an unceasing opponent of North and the war. The King hated and mistrusted him, and the feeling was mutual. Fox was inconsistent, unpredictable, a chronic gambler and a relentless womaniser, but his friends adored him and his hold over his followers was powerful. His colourful private life – he would shortly commence an affair with Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire – would undoubtedly damage his political prospects. One critical MP noted that it was not possible to ‘trace in any one action of his life anything that had not for its object his own gratification’.¹¹ He and his brother were said to have lost £32,000 in a single night of gambling, and when he was not betting at Brooks’s he was doing so at the races. Horace Walpole, son of the longest-serving Prime Minister Robert Walpole, and writer of extensive but biased political memoirs, recalled him as ‘the hero in Parliament, at the gaming table, at Newmarket. Last week he passed four-and-twenty hours without interruption at all three, or on the road from one to the other; and ill the whole time.’¹² In a life which from this point on would be increasingly intertwined with that of Pitt, Fox would stand out as his opposite in almost every personal respect: a rounded figure who enjoyed social gatherings, cultivated a party following, revelled in all the pleasures of the senses and in no way regarded political success as the sole object of his life. He would become Pitt’s arch-rival, and would eventually consider that he had only one thing in common with him: ‘The only thing like good about him is his inattention to money.’¹³ But for the moment he would attempt to draw Pitt into his circle, and he would do so as a dominant figure in the opposition, enjoying the devoted support of a wide circle of friends who considered that, in the words of Gibbon, ‘perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity or falsehood’.¹⁴

Fox was the spokesman and inspiration of the Rockingham Whigs. Near him would have been Edmund Burke, secretary to Lord Rockingham, another figure of immense eloquence and persecutor of the King’s Ministers. Self-righteous and impassioned, he was driven on by his belief that the power and habits of George III were destroying the balance of the settlement of 1688. Around and behind Fox and Burke sat much the largest opposition grouping, comprising seventy to eighty Members.

Elsewhere on the opposition benches were the leaders of another but much smaller opposition faction, less than ten in number: John Dunning, who the previous year had successfully proposed the motion calling for a reduction in the powers of the Crown, and Colonel Barré, famed for accompanying General Wolfe in the storming of the cliffs at Quebec. The leaders of their grouping were the Earl of Shelburne and Lord Camden, who, like Rockingham, sat in the House of Lords. This grouping were the heirs of Chatham – Shelburne and Camden having served in his last government – and they were now joined in the new Parliament by Lord Mahon, John Pratt and, inevitably, William Pitt. As a new MP Pitt therefore looked to the Earl of Shelburne as his nominal leader. Shelburne was, after all, one of the few people who had encouraged Pitt in his bid for election at Cambridge the previous year. Intellectually brilliant, well informed about the full range of political and economic issues, and an enthusiastic exponent of the mix of economic liberalism and administrative improvements which Pitt would strongly support, Shelburne was nevertheless handicapped by what others saw as deficiencies of character. He could not resist displaying his brilliance and allowing others to see that he was manipulating them: ‘He flattered people in order to gain them, and he let it appear by his actions that his smooth words were sheer hypocrisy.’¹⁵ For the moment, however, he headed the small group of Chathamite loyalists.

These factions in Parliament manoeuvred for position and waited on events, but the politician who still mattered the most in the kingdom was George III himself. The King was a man of simple and straightforward views. The constitution must be upheld, which meant the rights of the Crown must be asserted. His coronation oath was inviolate. No politician should be trusted. No colonies could be surrendered in case others, including Ireland, rebelled. A good life required a regular diet, a huge amount of exercise, and marital fidelity. The Royal Family should set an example. His son, the Prince of Wales, was incapable of setting an example and had become a total disgrace. Disappointed by Bute, who had failed him, by George Grenville, who had lectured him, and by Chatham, who had let him down, George III had at last found in Lord North a politician with the pleasing combination of political staying power and a propensity to be bullied by his monarch. There was no question but that the policies carried out by North and his colleagues were the King’s policies, and that detailed decisions about political and military appointments and the approach to the war had been made by the King himself. When the opposition in Parliament attacked the policies of North, they were in fact attacking the actions of the King; the assaults of Burke on Crown appointments and the Civil List were another proxy for doing so.

The King was desperately worried that the war would end in defeat, and even spoke privately of abdicating rather than bearing the humiliation of himself and his kingdom. Not least among his concerns was that defeat in the war would mean the fall of North. The only other group of leaders in Parliament with widespread support were the Rockingham Whigs, to whom he could be forced to turn. That could mean being forced to accept Ministers he disliked intensely, and measures he would hate to see carried out in his name. Such Ministers would impose peace with America, abolish much of his patronage, and insist on having as junior Ministers some of his strongest opponents whom they would wish to reward. In contemplating these questions, George III was having to face up to some of the problems left unresolved by the ‘perfect’ constitutional arrangements resulting from 1688. The King had the right to choose a government, and the Commons the right to hold that government to account and even overturn it, requiring the King to nominate another. But what happened if a majority of the Commons decided to force a particular government upon the King? Rockingham and Fox intended to do so. George III would hate it. There was no answer written down in the settlement of 1688. The King still controlled many appointments and sinecures throughout the country, including Army appointments. What happened if the Commons insisted on taking all of those powers of appointment for itself? The King normally retained the right to choose particular Ministers and to continue some from one government to the next, even when the leading Minister changed. What happened if a new leading Minister came to him with a list of Ministers already decided and a majority of the House of Commons behind him?

George III was a wily political operator, and was determined not to show the weakness of his grandfather George II. The Duke of Newcastle had once forced George II into a corner in 1746 by presenting the collective resignation of all senior Ministers; when George III heard that he might try the same thing in 1762 he had fired him before he could open his mouth.

As 1781 opened, these political and constitutional questions hung in the balance. The war had gone a little better over the previous year, and the election had been satisfactorily concluded. The opposition seemed to have run out of steam and now, according to one of its members, was ‘if not dead at least asleep’.¹⁶ This was the political scene as William Pitt considered how to make his maiden speech.

A maiden speech in the House of Commons, then as now, was usually a rather humble affair. A Member would prepare for it for days, or even weeks, and would then rise nervously to advance a not too controversial proposition and accompany it with many thanks and pleasantries. Pitt’s maiden speech, delivered on 26 February 1781, was the exact opposite: delivered apparently on the spur of the moment and certainly without a note, radiating confidence despite taking place in a packed House debating a crucial motion, advancing a strong argument against the policies of the government and the Crown, and incidentally demolishing a key point of the previous speaker’s argument. The effect was to make him a major figure in the House of Commons from the very beginning of his career in it.

The occasion of Pitt’s speech was a major debate on Edmund Burke’s renewed attempt to introduce economical reform. Uncertain of the government’s majority. North had not prevented Burke from reintroducing his proposed legislation, but with the government’s confidence growing by late February Ministers determined upon voting the Bill down at its second reading on 26 February. In the fierce debate which ensued, Lord Nugent had just finished speaking against the Bill and in defence of the government when opposition Members cried out ‘Mr. Pitt! Mr. Pitt!’, trying to get him to speak Some historians have taken the view that this was merely spontaneous impatience from some Members who thought that Pitt had been in the House for more than a month and ought now to take a speaking role. Stanhope’s account, in which the Middlesex MP George Byng asks Pitt during Nugent’s speech whether he will reply to it, receives an uncertain reply, and then spreads the word to other Members that Pitt is about to rise even though he has now resolved not to, seems a more likely explanation.¹⁷ Since this was a subject dear to Pitt’s heart and he had been sitting through the debate for some time, it is fair to assume that he had a good idea about what he would say in a speech, even if he had not committed himself to making one. Members who thought they were listening to an entirely unplanned performance were therefore probably under a misapprehension, but it was one that added to the awesome impression that this new parliamentary orator now made on them.

Pitt’s speech was clear, logical and consistent with his known views. The government, he said, should have come forward itself with reductions in the Civil List, rather than the opposition have to bring the matter up:

They ought to have consulted the glory of their Royal Master, and have seated him in the hearts of his people, by abating from magnificence what was due to necessity. Instead of waiting for the slow request of a burdened people, they should have courted popularity by a voluntary surrender of useless revenue … It would be no diminution of true grandeur to yield to the respectful petitions of the people … magnificence and grandeur were not consistent with entrenchment and economy, but, on the contrary, in a time of necessity and of common exertion, solid grandeur was dependent on the reduction of expense.

The House was riveted. Pitt then pointed out that Lord Nugent had said he would have been happy to support the Bill if the reduction in Crown expenditure it called for was to be given to the ‘public service’ instead, in which case he would have become one of its warmest advocates. Nugent had told the House there was no such provision in the Bill, and therefore he opposed it. He was now to be briskly swatted in a manner that became entirely familiar to Members of Parliament over the next twenty-five years. Pitt said that the only merit he could claim in a competition with the noble Lord was that his eyes were somewhat younger than his. He could therefore read the clause in the Bill which demonstrated the exact opposite of what Lord Nugent had suggested. Pitt read out the whole of the relevant clause, and went on to read out another which had caused Nugent’s confusion. Having fitted this unanswerable point into his general argument, he then argued that the Bill should be supported because it would reduce the influence of the Crown. He attacked the idea that the £200,000 that would be saved was too insignificant a sum to bother with. ‘This was surely the most singular and unaccountable species of reasoning that was ever attempted in any assembly. The calamities of the crisis were too great to be benefited by economy! Our expenses were so enormous, that it was ridiculous to attend to little matters of account! We have spent so many millions, that thousands are beneath our consideration! We were obliged to spend so much, that it was foolish to think of saving any!’ Finally, he said that ‘it ought to be remembered, that the Civil List revenue was granted by Parliament to His Majesty for other purposes than those of personal gratification. It was granted to support the power and the interests of the Empire, to maintain its grandeur, to pay the judges and the foreign ministers, to maintain justice and to support respect; to pay the great offices that were necessary to the lustre of the Crown; and it was proportioned to the dignity and the opulence of the people.’ He said he considered the Bill essential to the being and the independence of his country, and he would give it the most determined support.

Pitt’s speech did not win the debate. Sufficient of the independents and country gentlemen rallied to Lord North to allow him to defeat Burke’s Bill by 233 votes to 190. But there is no doubt that the speech catapulted Pitt into the front rank of parliamentary orators. It was the evidence that, although still only twenty-one years old, he had entered the Commons fully formed as a politician and debater, able to marshal an argument and engage in a debate on equal terms with Members two and three times his age. It was the first exposure of other politicians to the speaking style which had resulted from the years of rehearsing and reciting with Chatham and Pretyman: structured, logical and controlled. In recent years Fox had been idolised as the greatest of parliamentary orators, with Pitt himself later referring to him wielding ‘the wand of the magician’,¹⁸ but Pitt’s style was in complete contrast to that of Fox. Fox’s style was to embrace his hearers with emotions, his speeches charging back and forth repeatedly but returning again and again to the point on which he hoped to stir his hearers to action. Pitt’s style was to encircle his listeners with logic, building up his argument piece by piece in a structure always clear in his mind, and forsaking emotion for the objective of leaving his audience with no intellectual option but to agree with his final unifying conclusion. One observer recalled: ‘Mr. Fox had a captivating earnestness of tone and manner; Mr. Pitt was more dignified than earnest … It was an observation of the reporters in the gallery that it required great exertion to follow Mr. Fox while he was speaking, none to remember what he had said; that it was easy and delightful to follow Mr. Pitt, not so easy to recollect what had delighted them.’¹⁹

Pitt’s compelling power of argument was one reason his maiden speech made such an impression. Perhaps a still greater reason was his manner, confidence and voice. The great parliamentary diarist Sir Nathaniel Wraxall commented:

Sanguine as might be the opinions entertained of his ability, he far exceeded them; seeming to obtain at his outset that object which other candidates for public fame or favour slowly and laboriously effect by length of time and regular gradation … It was in reply to Lord Nugent that Pitt first broke silence from under the gallery on the Opposition side of the House. The same composure, self possession, and imposing dignity of manner which afterwards so eminently characterised him when seated on the Treasury Bench distinguished him in this first essay of his powers, though he then wanted three months to have completed his twenty second year. The same nervous, correct, and polished diction, free from any inaccuracy of language or embarrassment of deportment, which, as First Minister, he subsequently displayed, were equally manifested by him on this occasion. Formed for a popular assembly, he seemed made to guide its deliberations from the first moment that he addressed the Members composing it.

Pitt’s speech, he said, ‘impressed more from the judgement, the diction, and the solemnity that pervaded and characterised it, than from the brilliancy or superiority of the matter … He seemed to possess himself as much as though he had pronounced the speech in his own closet; but there was no display of studied or classic images in any part of it; nothing gaudy, superfluous, or unnecessary.’²⁰

Ministers and opposition leaders were unanimous and generous in their praise. Lord North declared it ‘the best first speech he ever heard’.²¹ Burke exclaimed that Pitt ‘was not merely a chip off the old “block”, but the old block itself’.²² Above all, Charles James Fox appeared to be ecstatic at the emergence of such an eloquent figure on the opposition side of the House. Horace Walpole reported:

Mr. Pitt’s first speech, brilliant and wonderful as it was, was scarcely more remarkable than the warmth and generosity with which Mr. Fox greeted the appearance and extolled the performance of his future rival. Incapable of jealousy, and delighted at the sudden display of talents nearly equal to his own, he hurried up to the young Member to compliment and encourage him. As he was doing so, an old Member of the House (I think a General Grant) passed by them and said, ‘Aye, Mr. Fox, you are praising young Pitt for his speech. You may well do so; for, excepting yourself, there’s no man in the House can make such another; and, old as I am, I expect and hope to hear you both battling it within these walls as I have done your fathers before you.’ Mr. Fox, disconcerted at the awkward turn of the compliment, was silent and looked foolish; but young Pitt, with great delicacy, readiness, and felicity of expression, answered, ‘I have no doubt. General, you would like to attain the age of Methusaleh [sic].’²³

Pitt knew that his maiden speech had been a success, and when he wrote to his mother the next day his pleasure in it was only just under the control of his usual modesty:

I know you will have learnt that I heard my own Voice yesterday; and the Account you have had would be in all respects better than any I can give if it had not come from too partial a Friend. All I can say is that I was able to execute in some measure what I intended, and that I have at least every reason to be happy beyond measure in the reception I met with. You will, I dare say, wish to know more particulars than I fear I shall be able to tell you, but in the meantime you will, I am sure, feel somewhat the same Pleasure that I do in the encouragement, however unmerited, which has attended this first Attempt.²⁴

Fortunately the younger Pitt’s parliamentary speeches are more extensively recorded than those of his father. The reporting of parliamentary proceedings was forbidden earlier in the eighteenth century, but in 1771 this rule had been shown to be unenforceable after the City of London magistrates proposed only nominal fines on several writers who had been in the Public Gallery and written accounts in the newspapers. By the time of Pitt’s entry to Parliament the reporting of speeches was therefore in effect allowed, but no provision was made for the reporters, who had to compete with everyone else to get into the Gallery and then strain to hear above the noise. Unless the account was supported by a text issued by the speaker, something only furnished by Pitt three times in twenty-five years, the reports were often unreliable, incomplete, or biased. Nevertheless we know most of the content of Pitt’s speeches, including the two interventions he made in debates before the House rose for the 1781 summer recess. His speeches of 31 May and 12 June followed up the success of his maiden speech and confirmed, albeit in a thinner House, the impression he had already made. On the first occasion, the debate was about a government Bill to appoint Commissioners of Public Accounts. Fox and Pitt rose to speak simultaneously when Lord North sat down, and Fox, who at this stage was going to any lengths to draw Pitt into his circle of friends, gave way for Pitt to speak. Once again he made a forceful argument, telling the Commons that it alone had the right to hold the strings of the national purse, and ‘to delegate this right … is a violation of what gives them their chief consequence in the legislature, and what, above all other privileges, they cannot surrender or delegate without a violent breach of the constitution’. And once again he showed a mastery of detail, as Horace Walpole recounted: ‘the Young William Pitt has again displayed paternal oratory. The other day, on the commission of accounts, he answered Lord North, and tore him limb from limb. If Charles Fox could feel, one should think such a rival, with an unspotted character, would rouse him. What if a Pitt and Fox should again be rivals …’²⁵ William Wilberforce thought the same, as he wrote to a friend in Hull: ‘The papers will have informed you how Mr. William Pitt, second son of the late Lord Chatham, has distinguished himself. He comes out as his father did, a ready made orator, and I doubt not but I shall one day or other see him the first man in the country. His famous speech, however, delivered the other night did not convince me, and I stayed in with the old fat fellow [Lord North].’

Pitt’s other speech of the summer does genuinely seem to have been unpremeditated. Fox had moved a motion for the conclusion of immediate peace with the Americans, and in the ensuing debate two Members claimed that Chatham had really been in sympathy with the war. Pitt was provoked to intervene with a speech of his own, and Wraxall recorded what happened:

Pitt attempted to justify and explain that line of opinion attributed to his noble relation … he denied that his father had ever approved of the war commenced with America which, on the contrary, he had condemned, reprobated, and opposed in every stage. After thus throwing a shield over the memory of his illustrious parent, and rescuing him from the imputation of having countenanced or supported coercive measures for the subjugation of the colonies beyond the Atlantic, he then diverged with equal vehemence and majesty of expression to the topic immediately before the assembly. Referring to the epithet of holy which Lord Westcote had given to the contest, he declared that he considered it as unnatural, accursed, and unjust, its traces marked with persecution and devastation, depravity and turpitude constituting its essence, while its effects would be destructive in the extreme. The English language seemed inadequate fully to express his feelings of indignation and abhorrence, while stigmatising the authors of so ruinous a system. As a specimen of parliamentary eloquence, it unquestionably excelled his two preceding speeches, leaving on his audience a deep impression, or rather conviction, that he must eventually, and probably at no remote distance of time, occupy a high situation in the councils of the Crown, as well as in the universal estimation of his countrymen.

Dundas, who rose as soon as Pitt sat down, seemed to be thoroughly penetrated with that truth, and by a sort of a political second sight appeared to anticipate the period when this new candidate for office would occupy the place on the Treasury bench then filled by his noble friend in the blue ribband [Lord North].²⁶

Dundas indeed, while as usual that night defending both his colleagues and the war, was coming to have great respect for the eloquent young figure on the opposition benches. He wound up the debate without creating any animosity between himself and Pitt, and went out of his way to compliment him on ‘so happy an union of first-rate abilities, high integrity, bold and honest independence of conduct, and the most persuasive eloquence’.²⁷ The foundations of a formidable alliance were being laid.

At the end of the debate the government won the vote by 172 to ninety-nine. It was indicative of how the political atmosphere had improved for the North administration as the year had gone on. Government optimism about the war was high, with Lord George Germain writing on 7 March: ‘So very contemptible is the rebel force now in all parts, and so vast is our superiority everywhere, that no resistance on their part is to be apprehended that can materially obstruct the progress of the King’s arms in the speedy suppression of the rebellion.’²⁸ North was back in control of the Commons, with his majorities increasing through the spring and summer as the independents went home and the opposition was able to rely only on its most partisan supporters.

Pitt’s attacks had not brought down the government – far from it – but they had impressively launched his own career. As well as enjoying himself in the Commons at this time, his social life was busy and fun. He became a member of Brooks’s Club in February 1781 after being proposed by an eager Charles James Fox, but he kept his distance and characteristically preferred the company of a small circle of intimate friends. He became a member of Goostree’s, a small club on Pall Mall which in 1780 was effectively taken over by Pitt and some of his friends. The old friends from Cambridge were there, Pratt, Bankes, Euston and Edward Eliot, along with Pitt’s elder brother and his cousin William Grenville. But there were also new friends: Richard Pepper Arden, who would later serve in Pitt’s governments; Robert Smith, whom he would send to the Lords as the first Lord Carrington; Thomas Steele; and William Wilberforce, the wealthy son of a banker who owned an estate in Yorkshire and had just spent a small fortune ensuring his own election for Hull. Wilberforce adored Pitt’s company:

He was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under entire control. Others appeared struck by the unwonted association of brilliant images; but every possible combination of ideas seemed present to his mind, and he could at once produce whatever he desired. I was one of those who met to spend an evening in memory of Shakespeare at the Boar’s Head, East Cheap. Many professed wits were present, but Pitt was the most amusing of the party, and the readiest and most apt in the required allusions.²⁹

At Goostree’s the young friends drank and discussed politics, in effect moving the familiar dining atmosphere of Cambridge into Pall Mall. This was already Pitt’s favourite way of spending an evening, and it would remain so throughout his life, but, as ever, he had a clear sense of what he must not get drawn into. Gambling was highly fashionable, and Wilberforce was wealthy enough to indulge in it with gusto. Pitt lacked wealth, but not self-discipline. Wilberforce noted: ‘We played a good deal at Goostree’s, and I well remember the intense earnestness which Pitt displayed when joining in those games of chance. He perceived their increasing fascination, and soon after suddenly abandoned them forever.’

When Parliament rose for the summer Pitt returned to his legal practice on the Western Circuit to earn a little money. At the end of August he wrote to William Meeke: ‘I have this circuit amassed the immense sum of thirty guineas without the least expense either of sense or knowledge … I shall return to town with the fullest intention of devoting myself to Westminster Hall and getting as much money as I can, notwithstanding such avocations as the House of Commons, and (which is a much more dangerous one) Goostree’s itself. Adieu.’ It is not surprising that he expected for some time to be practising as a lawyer while occasionally speaking in the House of Commons against a government that had once again recovered its poise and seemed destined to continue in office. Yet even as he wrote, more than three thousand miles away in the marshes and woodlands of Virginia, George Washington’s troops were closing in on a trapped British army. The outcome would shatter the hopes of the King and his Ministers and begin more than two years of political convulsions. It would be a time of crisis which would only be ended by the rise to power of Pitt himself.

^*This is the origin of the layout of the House of Commons to this day, although the current Chamber was built on a different location within the new Palace of Westminster after the fire of 1834, and rebuilt after being bombed in 1941.

^*Lords could be Members of the House of Commons if they held Irish or Scottish peerages or a courtesy title. Lord North, for instance, was heir to the Earldom of Guilford, and went on to the House of Lords when he succeeded to this title in due course.