William Hague
William Pitt the Younger.
Knopf, 576 pages, $35
William Pitt the Younger was, along with Winston Churchill, Britain’s greatest Prime Minister. Unlike Churchill, however, he was as successful in peacetime as in war. He was the savior of his country in the most perilous moments of the Napoleonic Wars, when invasion of the British Isles was a serious and daily threat. In his astonishing eighteen years and eleven months in office—only exceeded in length by two other premiers, Sir Robert Walpole and Pitt’s own lieutenant Lord Liverpool—Pitt piled achievement upon achievement, yet there has not been a truly fine, full-scale one-volume life written of him—until now.
The reason for this is that Professor John Ehrman wrote a superb three-volume life of Pitt that is completely definitive. He started in the mid-1960s and ended in 1995, thus taking longer to research and write his masterpiece than Pitt himself took to be born, educated, enter parliament, and become Prime Minister. Some short biographies, such as that published by Michael Turner in 2003 (called Pitt the Younger: A Life) have been good, too, but the need for a distinguished, readable single-volume work has long been recognized.
William Hague has now triumphantly filled this historiographical gap in a way that will make professional political biographers thankful that he spent his first forty-three years of life becoming Leader of the Opposition rather than muscling in on their territory. For this book is heavily researched (while paying all due obeisance to Ehrman’s pathbreaking work), very well written, and narrated with a finely attuned sense of the politically dramatic. When he was thirty-six, in 1997 Hague became the youngest leader of the British Conservative party since Pitt himself, a via dolorosa he trod until 2001, so he is well placed to write about Toryism, child prodigies, and the inner life of a Westminster political system that has changed remarkably little in the past two centuries.
The life of Pitt was nothing if not dramatic. Take the single year 1797, for example, when the Bank of England had to suspend cash payments due to a massive run on the pound sterling, French armies chased the Austrians out of Italy, two Royal Navy fleets mutinied at Spithead and the Nore, a coup d’état was crushed in Paris, and Napoleon Bonaparte—the greatest captain of his age—was appointed to command the huge army being specially mustered at Boulogne for the invasion of England. The British Prime Minister was still in his thirties when he had to face these multifarious threats; he was drinking heavily and had to rely for his political future on a king who was constantly slipping in and out of periods of barking lunacy.
Fortunately, Britain had found a war leader equal to absolutely anything. Pitt was able to respond “with the rapidity of lightning” in debate. He had turned the tables on his lifelong rival Charles James Fox back in 1788 over the question of the powers of the Prince of Wales’s regency, rightly prophesying to friends: “I’ll unwhig him for the rest of his life.” As an orator he shone, even in a House of Commons that boasted the speaking abilities of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Lord North, and Fox himself. No mean parliamentary debater himself in his day, and a talented former president of the Oxford Union, the author conveys the excitement of those glory days of political rhetoric.
Furthermore there was Pitt’s reputation for incorruptibility, his capacity for mastering minute detail, his ability to spot coming men of talent such as Lord Castlereagh and George Canning, Admiral Nelson and Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington), and his heroic willingness to put the interests of his country before his own physical well-being. In his dedication to fulfilling the duties of his office, even at the risk of destroying his own health, Pitt gave his life for his country in January 1806 just as much as Nelson had three months earlier.
Hague goes into fascinating detail about what finally killed Pitt. After looking at the various alternatives usually propounded—including cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, gout, and chronic hyperuricæmia—he convincingly argues that it was peptic ulceration of the stomach or duodenum that fits in best with the symptoms recorded by Pitt’s doctors. Such an illness would be treated in a few days with a course of pills today, but in 1806 it spelt certain death.
Hague also provides a convincing theory about Pitt’s love life, or rather his conspicuous lack of one. Pitt clearly had a tendresse for the beautiful and charming Lady Eleanor Eden, but wrote to her father Lord Auckland in 1797 saying that as far as marriage was concerned, “the obstacles to it [were] decisive and insurmountable.” So what were they? Hague considers all the alternatives—including homosexuality, a loquacious prospective mother-in-law, public duty, major debts, and ill-health—and plumps for the fact that since Pitt had had not so much as touched a woman in all his thirty-seven years he simply lacked either the inclination or the confidence to see it through, and had probably “never even thought about Eleanor Eden in a sexual sense, while enjoying her company… .”
We are not wholly convinced, and are left to make up our own minds. Quite enough politicians of today are so bound up in themselves that they can simply find no time for anyone else in their lives, and it is not an exclusively modern phenomenon. The sex drive is entirely replaced by ambition and the lust for politics; that is this reviewer’s explanation for Pitt’s bachelorhood. In this part of the book Hague relies too much on overlong quotations, rather in the manner of Victorian three-decker biographies.
Pitt’s debts were enormous, because he was as careless with his private finances as he was infinitely prudent with those of the nation. Constantly spendthrift and regularly personally defrauded by servants and others, he died with debts so complicated that probate could not be granted until fifteen years after his death, even though back in 1806 parliament had voted £40,000—the equivalent of $2.5 million today—for their relief.
Hague is generally highly admiring of Pitt, but this is no hagiography. On occasion he is over-harsh, saying that “no decisive advantage in war was gained during his lifetime… .” This seriously underrates the significant victories won at sea, particularly at the battles of the Glorious First of June, Cape St. Vincent, Camperdown, the Nile, Copenhagen, and of course Trafalgar, which were indeed advantageously decisive in closing down France’s strategic options and making Pitt’s country safe for the rest of the Napoleonic Wars.
The tragic death of Pitt at the cruelly young age of forty-six is one of the most moving moments in British political history, and Hague tells it well. The news of Napoleon’s surprise victory over the Austrians and Russians at the battle of Austerlitz crushed the Prime Minister, who was already dying painfully from his gastric or duodenal ulceration. “Oh my country! How I leave my country!” were his sublime last words.
Andrew Roberts is currently writing a book entitled A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900.
