William Hague on William Pitt

so I should perhaps have introduced myself and I for not doing so Steven born I'm the chief executive of the press and University printer and this is my humble abode and it's a wonderful building great opportunity to have the Pitt building in which to to host a lecture of this kind and to celebrate the birth of of William Pitt along with everything else that we are celebrating this year and of course one of the big events of the year from our point of view if the press are very narrow and jaundiced point of view of course is that this is our four hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of printing our first publication and we also celebrate the 500th anniversary of the accession of King Henry the eighth to the throne and he like was our founding father it was he who signed the Charter that enabled the press to happen in the first place so that's our little bit of history and now we turn to to William Hague our speaker for this evening and we all know about William don't we well I thought maybe that there are a few things you might not know about him so I thought I would share a couple of those first of all that he was and I don't even know if I'm going to pronounce this correctly William he was educated at woth on durn what it is what on durn comprehensive school now that's somewhere near Rotherham all people from the raagam area please stand up with their directors of the press dr. richard samake you have one there so he was he was educated there before heading downhill to the other place you know where he became president of the Oxford Union and and honed that that that debating style that we we can witness nowadays did you know that he had an MBA also from INSEAD no one answered yes to that so revelations here did you know that he once worked for McKinsey yes they all knew that okay did you know that he was a liveryman of the worst worshipful company of stationers and newspaper makers could we have all hands up of stationers in this room I see you're among friends with him but he has been MP for Richmond where another of our directors has retired for the past 20 years and during that time he's somehow found the time to write just a little and one of them of course is this wonderful book which one the history book of the Year award for 2005 it is of course about William Pitt the Younger he's also written and published in 2007 I think the a biography of William Wilberforce and then along the way as I say he did a little bit in the way of politics and is now shadow foreign secretary and has been so since December 2005 so that's what he does if you don't like his his policies and you fancy roughing him up a bit my advice is don't because he's a member of the Buddha why martial arts club so I think the best things I could do is rather than antagonize him further get out of his way quickly William Hague well Stephen ladies and gentleman thank you very much indeed for that introduction and for inviting me to talk to you tonight on the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Pitt and it's very good of you given the celebrations going on 425 years of Cambridge University publishing it's very good of you to adopt such a much more recent anniversary as one only in 1759 and it is the 250th anniversary today of his birth and it's therefore the 207 'the anniversary of the great meeting in the merchant Taylor's Hall which came together on his birthday the year after he had left office as Prime Minister left office in 1801 temporarily Prime Minister which was called together by his supporters a great feast where they sang or recited certain passages in his honor he wasn't present there himself he disdained to attend himself inviting him to return to office at some point in the future and a couple of the verses went like this one said and shall not his memory to Britain be dear whose example with envy all nations behold a statesman unbiased by interest or fear by power uncorrupted untainted by gold which is exactly what people are looking for at the moment of course and it went on it concluded after many other verses and oh if again the rude whirlwind should shall rise the dawning of peace should fresh darkness deform the regrets of the good and the fears of the wise shall turn to the pilot that weathered the storm and this was the legend of Pitt the pilot that weathered the storm that was how he was regarded by his supporters at the beginning of the 19th century who idolized him it can't be said that everybody in the country idolized him in the same way many of course held him in contempt as they do any incumbent Prime Minister he received hate mail I printed in my book a piece of hate mail I really enjoyed from 1805 that said I say Billy you infernal blacklist son of a thief you bottlenose rascal of a prime minister egad my old book nobody puts a GAD in hate mail anymore at this but they they did 200 years ago a GAD my old book you'll be getting alongside of the devil soon but he'll shave your timbers for you and give you a broadside and send you but he won't send you to Windsor to drink three bottles of wine after dinner while many a poor thing can't get bread and all through you you meager looking hound and so well alive in 1805 is a marvelous British tradition of irreverence towards their political leaders that is fully on display in the 21st century and we all have our little bits of of postlets from more modern times that that strike a nice parallel with I think one of my favorite bits of mail I received as an MP said from a constituent said I hope you can take some constructive criticism of your recent speech it was rubbish that's what a Yorkshire man calls constructive criticism I actually my favourite letter which arrived two years ago said dear mr. Haig the Taliban have taken over and witih comes body and no one has noticed and that was Enda there was no other explanation of the ladies girl sincerely and the end of letter but that irreverence that is there now was there then and it was not some genteel age where they all deferred to the politicians of the time they were part of a rough-and-tumble of debate and the press were perhaps even ruder the cartoons of the time more explicit and ruder than what we see today today we have to put up with you know the front cover of Private Eye and things I know I was once on the front cover private eye picture of me and Cecil Parkinson and there was a bubble coming out of my mouth that said I want to bring unity to the party and there was a bubble coming out of sessle's mouth for that said is she a goer which which tells you tells you something about the state of my party at the time but the there would be leaflets at that time which carried much sexual innuendo about Pitt and his lack of familiarity with women that were very rude and sexually graphic about the royal family in their cartoons they had plenty to go on of course because of Prince George Prince of Wales who had even by the standards more recent standards of the royal family perhaps the most catastrophic marriage in the entire history of our royal family sending his mistress to greet Caroline of Brunswick at the docks asking for brandy as soon as he saw her getting being drunk throughout the wedding and of course it culminated at his coronation after he was crowned Georgia forth having refused to let her into Westminster Abbey where she was hammering on the doors outside during the coronation ceremony itself in 1821 when Napoleon died and the messages came to him to say that your majesty your greatest enemy is dead he apparently replied by God is she and thought they were talking about his wife and the newspapers had a great deal to to go at at that time but they certainly went at it and so Pitts had to cope with all of that as a politician at the end of the 18th century early 19th century and he achieved much more in my view than he's generally been given credit for in popular memory I've always believed and this is why I've been so determined to come and give this talk tonight in the middle of an election campaign of the 21st century I've always believed that his memory is not honored enough what most people know about him might have been summed up by that scene on Black Adder a few years ago where someone is depicted talking to him say well who are you and Pitt the elder Pitt the Younger Pitt the embryo what are you and he is depicted answering questions as Prime Minister about his Latin vocabulary and and when I was when I made a notorious speech when I was 16 years old I was taken off to see Margaret Thatcher for the first time who was leader of the Opposition this is in 1977 and well first of all she said you must go and telephone your mother and I can't tell you how irritating this a bit as a teenager to be told in public to go and telephone your mother but I took it in my stride and the next thing she said was we may be standing here with another young mr. Pitt and I not having studied much history of school thought who on earth is she talking about I hadn't really heard much of mr. Pitt at all but I thought afterwards I better take myself off and learn about mr. Pitt and by the time I became leader of the Conservative Party 20 years later I'd learned so much about mr. Pitt and that I put his portrait on the wall of the Shadow Cabinet Room after the conservative shattering election defeat of 1997 so that he might inspire us so that his portrait on the wall might stir us to think that whatever difficulties we had he encountered far greater difficulties in his life and he was on the wall there throughout my four years as leader of the party and then this portrait having failed to provide the necessary inspiration to bring a conservative victory in 2001 I set about learning more about him and writing a book about him and started out by visiting his grave in Westminster Abbey a remarkable Grove because there that's the grave of here of him and his father two prime ministers buried in the same tomb in the North transept of Westminster Abbey and it is just where the tourists all come in to see the Abbey I can see them queuing there from my office and I resent them because I know they are going to walk over his grave and the inscription on his grave has been worn almost smooth by the passage of hundreds of thousands of feet and I said to the authorities in the Abbey perhaps I can use some of the proceeds of my book to restore the lettering on the grave and let's have it chiseled back into what it should be first of all because they looked astonished at the idea that a York Sherman was going to spend money unnecessarily but having recovered from that they went off to look up what the inscription was and found out they didn't know what had been written on the grave there may be someone here may have a record of it but I haven't yet found it and so I haven't been able to engage in its restoration if indeed that would be allowed but the passage of all those feet shuffling over his grave and the lack of knowledge about what it might have said on it really reinforced for me that peat that his memory was not honored enough amplified further when I became a member of a London pit club one of the few surviving pit clubs that still honor his memory and one of the members said to me as I sat down to my first dinner listen here young man you know about this sort of stuff which pit is it we're on about at this club anyway and so even the members of the pit club weren't very sure which pits they were honoring and yet here was a man who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of 23 who was Prime Minister at the age of 24 having twice refused to take office as Prime Minister before the age of 24 who was Prime Minister for 19 years in total and who even when he died in office as Prime Minister after 19 years while still younger than all but two of his 38 successes to date as Prime Minister even when they entered office as Prime Minister here is a man who restored the finances of the nation and its Navy and its fortunes and respects after the terrible defeats of the American War of Independence who lived in 10 Downing Street longer than any other politician before or since who was the longest-serving war leader of this country in modern times who dealt with the insanity of Georgia 3rd and all the crises that it produced who debated in the House of Commons in an age of eloquence with Fox and Sheridan and Burke and Wilberforce and was the equal or master of them all who dealt with the repeated threat of invasions of Britain with an all-out mutiny in the Royal Navy at the height of a war who dealt with a run on the Bank of England not merely a run on a bank which we've had in more modern times but a run on the bank the Bank of England itself who suppress rebellion in Ireland who plotted naval strategy with Nelson and who stood alone against Napoleon and so this is a towering figure in our history and we should be more conscious of his life and achievements that at some points in the last 250 years we have managed to be he is a difficult man to get to know he was difficult to get to know in life and he's difficult to get to know in death because he was a rather paradoxical character in so many different ways he is regarded as the founder of the Tory Party because the people who he left behind him when he died for want of any other better collective description were initially known as Pitts friends and then coalesced into the Tory Party of the 19th century but he would never have described himself as a Tory he really believed that he should succeed on merit without any party label or consideration never courted a party following and if anything described himself as an independent Whig he was owned master of financial affairs Chancellor of the Exchequer throughout the entire 19 years it was Prime Minister Chancellor of the Exchequer as well which at least avoided damaging splits between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor another lesson for modern times Anna's was regarded within weeks of coming to office as having someone said so remarkable a knowledge of the Commerce and Sons of the country that he might have been dealing with it for 50 years and yet he was so incompetent and inattentive in his own personal finances that when he died he left debts which in today's money would have been 2 million pounds which were written off by a grateful parliament something that certainly wouldn't happen today and certainly is not happening today he was also brilliant at the administration of government and it's seeing it how it could be reformed and yet again utterly incompetence in his own personal administration neglecting letters for months and sometimes years when he died in 1806 some letters were found in his desk unopened from the 1780s which he had never got round to attending to from more than 20 years before he was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the wittiest man they ever knew those who really got close to him and yet to others as he confessed to William Wilberforce I am the shyest man alive he said they seemed a cold aloof and difficult man to get to know he was an eternal optimist often often inappropriately optimistic about military events and their likely consequences and yet he also managed to work and worry and drink himself to death and so he was a strange character difficult to define and of course the question that always occurs to people when you mentioned William Pitt the Younger is how on earth could a 24 year old become Prime Minister in any age how on earth did that happen it had never happened before it is a it has not happened since not remotely it is of absolutely safe bet that it will not happen again in the future of this country so how on earth did this happen and in answering that question we will learn much more about him well the first of five principal reasons why it was possible for a 24 year old to become Prime Minister was that he was the son of his father an obvious thing to say but his father was like the Churchill of his day a controversial voluble but brilliant politician the man who had been called into office in what they call then the Great War having no knowledge of the wars that were to come the Seven Years War and it was he who turned around the fortunes of the nation politically and militarily and in 1759 the year that Pitt was born the elder Pitts strategy was paying off the victor the news of the victories from all over the world was pouring in victories across India with the Empire of Britain being much extended a victory on the high seas in the West Indies victory at Minden on the continent victory of course in the autumn of that year at Quebec with the French cleared from Canada and France's Empire being taken to pieces and horace walpole wrote our church bells are worn threadbare with their ringing it was the great year of victories and so the elder picked although he left office a couple of years later with the war still continuing was revered as a great leader of the country and the younger Pitt in his infancy in his earliest years would have been conscious he was the son of a very great man the earliest descriptions of the family going on holiday include them hearing the church bells of Yeovil being rung in their honor as they passed by the town on their way to Weymouth a flowers being strewn before them have a deputation of Mohicans being diverted from their visit in order to bow before the great elder Pitt he would know he was the son of a very great man and he would know too when his father returned to office briefly as Prime Minister in 1766 and declined into hypochondria and probably manic-depression that it turned out that his mother was no mean leader and administrator either since she managed to conduct successfully the dealings with the rest of the cabinet and the King on his father's behalf and so the younger Pitt by the age of nine would have realized from knowing his mother and his father that there really was no limit to what he could achieve and nothing particularly unthinkable about leading the country and being able to do so and so by the age of seven he wanted to serve he said in the House of Commons like Papa something that even that to me even sounds ridiculously precocious at the age of seven but that was the younger Pitts who did not go to school his father thought he was too delicate a boy to send him to anywhere such as Eton he was educated at home until the age of fourteen when he came across the street here to Pembroke as a prodigy to be admired as his tutor explained it and where he devoted himself to classics and mathematics it was extraordinary then as it would be now for a fourteen-year-old to arrive here at the University my examination of the admissions book of that time across the road revealed that the only a minority of the students of that time were under 18 let alone 14 when they arrived but while being educated at home he was actually attending a master class in oratory and politics at the feet of his father who would make him stand before him every evening to translate contemporaneously into Latin and Greek not allowing him to proceed until he had found the perfect word and so he developed the ability to speak on his feet and it meant that when he arrived in the House of Commons at the age of 21 people were astonished by watch racks all the great observer of parliamentary events said was his transcendent eloquence every word another observer said seemed to be the one that even the most diligent study would have selected and Edmund Burke was heard to exclaim after his maiden speech this is not a off the old block this is the block itself and so being his father's son was one of the crucial factors that allowed him to be so young a prime minister the second was this can be a convenient thing for young politicians that events wiped out most of the older politicians the loss of the American War had disgraced the people who had led the country during the war as such as the Lord North while those who would oppose the war were in disgrace with King George a third for opposing it and it had been a humiliating national experience the French and Spanish navies cruising unmolested in the English Channel in 1779 their rubbish being washed ashore on the southern beaches of England with a Royal Navy impotent to clear them from the sea and after that experience there was a search for new leadership that led to political convulsions in the early 1780s and George the 3rd was determined to find a prime minister not contaminated by what had happened before at one point offering office to pits distant uncle mr. Thomas Pitt and then calling for mr. Thomas Pitt or mr. Thomas anybody rather than have Charles James Fox admitted to high office and this allowed Pitts the younger Pitt to step into the breach at an earlier at an early age the third factor that allowed him to do this was that youthfulness was much more indulged in politics then than it is today we think we live in an age of youth in the 21st century but not compared to the late 18th century there were only three members of parliament under the age of 30 elected to the current House of Commons when it was elected at the last general election in 2005 but in the House of Commons elected in 1780 of which Pitt became a member one hundred members were under the age of thirty in a house that was not much smaller than today politics was much more frequently a young man's game and of course they were used to the idea that the rulers of nations could be very young since many them were the monarchs of other countries louis xvi ed ascended the throne of France at the age of 20 Frederick the Great had embarked on his great career at the age of 28 Gustavus the third of Sweden was 25 when he became the king and this extended to other fields of life I have at home now the portrait of Pitt by the great portrait artist Thomas Lawrence and Pitt was 21 when it was drawn Lawrence was 13 it was one one prodigy sketching another and we are in the period where Alexander Pope had published his first works at the age of 12 and Isaac Newton was renowned for his work at the age of 25 and Adam Smith was a professor of logic at the age of 28 and so the idea that people could enjoy great responsibilities or dispense considerable wisdom in their 20s was far more prevalent then than it is today the fourth factor that allowed him to succeed to becoming Prime Minister was the patronage that allowed young men to come into politics so readily and at such a at such a youthful age he was able to write excitedly to his mother Appleby is the seat I am to represent he said I am to be elected without any having any trouble at all and without even having to visit my constituents which indeed Eden he never visited Appleby when I when I gave a talk about pits in Appleby people came up to me to say that pit had once stood there and I once stood over there by the market cross and I had to disappoint them and say he never came within a hundred and fifty miles of Appleby because I know what he did or can find out what he did almost every day of his life and he never came there he represented a rotten borough he was appointed to it by the northern borough Sir James louder in 1781 having been defeated in the election for Cambridge University but three years later as Prime Minister he contested Cambridge again much more democratic constituency where the members of the University Senate several hundred of them at that time were able to cast their votes and he was elected and remained the member for Cambridge University something of which II was immensely proud to the day he died but it's important to remember when we discuss 18th century politics what an extraordinary mixture of skullduggery and bribery and democracy made up the elections of those times they involved vast amounts of alcohol sometimes at the Grosvenor family in the city of contesting the city of Chester in 1784 and Pitt was confirmed in office as Prime Minister provided for the voters 1187 barrels of ale 3756 gallons of rum and brandy and 27,000 bottles of wine for an election that involved 1,500 voters now those were the days when elections electric a much more enjoyable than they are today in the county of Yorkshire in 1807 and the year after Pitt Stephan William Wilberforce was challenged in a full-scale County election in the general election of that year with one polling station in the middle of the whole of Yorkshire which the voters had to be transported to the costs of the candidates came to a court of three candidates came to a quarter of a million pounds in 1807 money the equivalent of 15 million pounds today which would be the cost now of the entire national general election campaign of one of the main political parties that was what was spent in the one constituency in an election in 1807 and these elections sometimes were riotous the City of Westminster held its poll open for 40 days in the election of 1784 waiting for more people to vote 40 days riot and 40 days confusion as Pitt described it in that election he and we were talking about the station as a company he became a he was given the freedom of the City of London in the grocer's Hall in his first few weeks as Prime Minister and on the 28th of February 1784 was taken from his brother's house in Berkeley Square in London to the to the grocer's hall and after the great feast and ceremony there he was going back to Berkeley Square when the crowd and this was a great honor in at that time insisted on taking the horses off the carriage and pulling him along themselves which was a great honor except the crowd or than in charge of where you were going and and they took her rather they changed the route somewhat and when they got along pal mal they hissed long and loud outside the Prince of Wales house Carlton has two pits acute embarrassment they then tried to turn down when they turned the corner into some James Street into little son James Street to break the windows of Charles James Fox which they were at length dissuaded from doing it when they got higher ups and jam the street the members of Brooks's Club came out with poles and broken chairs and bits of furniture and set about Pitts carriage Brooks bring a very Whiggish Club beat it almost a destruction pitch had to be dragged to the safety of lights and this it tells you something about politics in those days at the alibi with its Charles James Fox showed he could not have been present at this afraid was that he was in bed with his mistress at the time and everybody thought that was a perfectly adequate explanation the fifth I'm digressing a little bit from how he became but I do enjoy the politics at that time the fifth reason he was able to become primaries with 24 on top of all these factors of youth and the events and the patronage was that he did also happen to be brilliant at politics and he was brilliant at creating an image of himself one of the first politicians really to consciously create an image of himself in the burgeoning press of the time which had only really started reporting parliamentary proceedings because it hadn't been allowed to do so until recently before then it only just started reporting parliamentary proceedings in in great detail and he created an image of himself that was appealing to the country at a time of thieving venal politicians people sometimes say to be at the moment has the reputation of MP's ever been lower and I think well possibly in this you have to go back to the 1770s and 17-8 but not far off what we see today and they of course had the abuse of office which makes any of today's abusers look decidedly amateurish there was a Henry Fox Charles James Fox his father being paymaster general making millions in today's money and a short spell as paymaster general since the habit was to take Commission's on foreign loans and to pay the government pay bill into your own bank account and disperse it as you saw fit often with some leftover taking the interest as well at the time these there were very different standards then and Along Came Pitt who in his first one of his first acts as the new young prime minister appointed by the King against the opposition of the House of Commons was to disdain one of the sin occurs that came at came available because its occupant had died and it would have been entirely in conformity with the political habits of the time for him to appoint himself to this meaningless office which carried an income of five thousand pounds a year he declined to do so he saved the taxpayer the money and the legend of Honest Billy was born and in an age where people were utterly disillusioned with their politicians honest Billy had real popular appeal and he also came as a as a new young politician with the modern ideas of that time a favoring free trade favoring the abolition of the slave trade on good economic not just on libertarian grounds favoring the reform of the House of Commons something that he did not actually managed to achieve favoring making government more efficient and tidying up all the many different accounts of the Treasury and the complex ways in which government departments went in effectively about their business and so he was the the modern appealing politician of the time at least to begin with and he brought remarkable talents among them that transcendent eloquence that I referred to a moment ago his speeches in the House of Commons were reliably brilliant even when he was the young chance of the Exchequer when he was so sick listening to Charles James Fox denouncing that he was actually vomiting through the door of the House of Commons while listening to the speech to which he had to reply he returned to the despatch-box and gave a long and brilliant response he composed budgets he delivered 25 budgets at least more than anyone else in the last 200 years but there are accounts of him composing himself for a budget by having his sister and other guests to lunch at Downing Street by saying he needed to go off and clear his mind about something walking in some James's Park for 20 minutes and then going down to the House of Commons with only notes in front of him and delivering a budget speech of four or five hours in length without making a single error his speech on the abolition of the slave trade in 1792 again something not quite achieved in his lifetime was regarded by contemporaries as one of the great feats of oratory speaking at 5:00 a.m. on an April morning and as the first shafts of the sunlight came through the windows of the House of Commons talking of the new dawn in Africa brilliantly choreography in his speech and the rising of the Sun his speech on the resumption of war with France in 1803 this is in a brief period when he wasn't Prime Minister was that although it was not recorded in any detail because the arrangements for admission to the public gallery had been changed that day and all the reporters were locked out of the gallery those MPs who wrote about it capture the the atmosphere of a Pitt speech in Parliament one of them said it was the greatest of his harangues Bonaparte absorbing the whole power of France Egypt consecrated by the heroic blood that had been shed upon it the liquid fire of Jacobin achill principles desolating the world an electrifying peroration on the necessity and magnitude of our future exertions and one of the hostile MPs wrote then came the great fiend himself Pitt who in the elevation of his tone of mind and Composition in the infinite energy of his style the miraculous perspicuity and fluency of his outdid as it was thought all former performances of his never was there such an exhibition its effect was dreadful and so here was a here was a real orator added to which was real intellect he sought in office neat lasting solutions to complex seemingly intractable problems faced with a smuggling of tea in which tens of thousands of people were employed in the early 1780s he vastly reduced the complexity of tea duties cutting them down from more than a hundred different rates of duty to just a simple rate of duty that put the smugglers out of business he then had to work with a team urchins to stop the attempt at cornering of the tea market in retaliation for his measures he ended up with a simpler and lower rate tax that actually yielded more revenue another lesson for policymakers in our own time dealing with a run on the Bank of England in 1797 he found the solution working to rebuild confidence in the financial market of creating paper money on a far greater scale hence it was written if I can remember the words of a Gustus and Rome the poet still warble how he found it of brick and left it of marble so of Pitt and of England men may say without vapor that he found it of gold and left it of paper not necessarily one of his greatest achievements but a necessary one he sought to resolve the intractable problems of Ireland by a full union between Ireland and Great Britain creating the Union Parliament with Island having full representation in the House of Commons not something that worked in the end but the radical and principled solution to it he was a talented spotter of talent and all of the prime ministers and most of the leading ministers who led the country for twenty-one years after his death had served in his administration's he was the first perhaps the first real modern prime minister using the power of the Treasury establish centralized control of the other government departments something that previous leaders such as Lord North had disdained to do and he was a brilliant parliamentary tactician seen at its most advantageous in the regency crisis of 1789 spinning out parliamentary debate for fully three months while the king was raving was shaking hands with a tree believing it to be the King of Prussia was flinging himself against walls and having to be put into straitjackets it was Pitt to insisted that the King might recover and a Regency did not need to be declared coming up with precedents from more than three hundred years earlier that needed committees to examine them in great detail that went on for weeks bringing new doctors to try to get a different diagnosis and the king recovering five days before a Regency was due to be declared and instead of the king coming into his senses to find his enemies in power Pitt was still there hailed by the king and the nation for standing by the monarch he was disinterested in in money as I have earlier described that led to his great debts money our titles but he knew others were susceptible to money and titles and so while incorruptible himself he knew well how to manage the political system and when he needed the Irish House of Commons to vote itself out of existence in 1800 observers may have noticed that twenty-eight of its members subsequently succeeded to new peerages of one sort or another and others were credited with four thousand guineas for their vote they duly voted themselves out of existence incorruptible aims health he knew how to get others to vote the right way so he was a real political operator what were his weaknesses amidst all of this well he was an aloof figure there are accounts of him walking into the House of Commons refusing to look left or right or greet other members of parliament who would have given half their fortune to have had a discussion with him for half an hour and he became frozen as a personality in many ways at the age of 24 when he became Prime Minister it is a distinctive feature of holding high political office in government in my view that you cease to develop as a person although you may learn quite a lot as a politician or minister at that point you make very few new friends because you don't know who you can trust and you don't develop new interests because you don't have time and for those of us who cycle in and out of senior political office this still allows us to become vaguely resembling human beings in the years where we're not in government but for someone who becomes prime minister the age of 24 and remains prime minister for 19 of the subsequent 22 years before their death his remarkable growth and achievements as a politician stunted his growth as a man and it meant for example that he was not able to travel far from going to Appleby in Westmoreland he actually never as far as we can tell made it north of Northampton in his life or west of Weymouth he managed to he managed an empire and conducted great Wars without ever having seen a mountain without ever having seen the Lake District without ever having been to Wales only having me to France once in his life because he was not able to travel abroad due to warfare for much of his life he developed little interest in women or indeed in as far as we can tell in any sexual relations much fun was made of this from time to time he relied too much on the on the habits he developed as a teenager at Cambridge of enjoying conversation about politics classics and mathematics and a good deal of port washing down his meals he sometimes was drunk in the House of Commons shortly after the declaration of war in 1793 when he walked into the House of Commons with his great friend and fixer Dundas the opposition newspaper made fun of them but I saying I cannot see the speaker how can you what cannot see the speaker I see too and much fun was made of his drinking one of the most enjoyable aspects of doing the research on my book was to spend an afternoon with berry Brothers and road working out just how much he must have drunk by drinking three bottles of Port a day he was known as a three bottle man it turns out other glass was much thicker than it is today the punt at the base of the bottle was much bigger and so the bottles only held about two-thirds as much liquid as they would today and were not as fortified with brandy so it was like drinking two bottles of strong wine a day no longer an unimaginable amount as three bottles of Port may be but still quite a lot to drink if you are the Prime Minister and war leader at the same time and these were these were his weaknesses among his weaknesses and defects nevertheless he was clearly a brilliant politician and leader with great ideas when he took office intending to repay the national debt within 28 years through a sinking fund that was one of the goals of his life where did all this go wrong well it went wrong because of the French Revolution the importance of which we cannot really overstate in the history and politics of that time and at an earthquake in the political world in Britain as well as of course in in France because that was an event that was to change British politics that split the Whig party asunder split Fox from Burke that confirmed Pitt in office with a vast conservative inclined majority but led him to very different domestic policies and all the demands of warfare the man who had been noted for favouring parliamentary reform and the abolition of the slave trade what we would think of now as progressive causes became known in the 1790s for Pitts terror for repression for the suspension of habeas corpus for show trials and their and so on the man who was brilliant with finance placed too much faith in France being defeated because it would run out of money but this was not a war in which France needed money because it was fueled by Rev Ellucian and by vast numbers of people by a political revolutionary force that was new to the politicians of that time and which Pitt was slow to understand the French convention declaring on 17 August 1793 from this moment until that in which our enemies shall have been driven from the territory of the Republic all Frenchmen are requisitioned for service in the armies the young men shall fight the married men shall Forge weapons and transport supplies the women will make tents and clothes and will serve in the hospitals that children will make up old linen into lint the old men will have themselves carried into public squares to arouse the courage of fighting men to preach the unity of the Republic and the hatred of Kings this was the vast mobilisation of the most populous nation of Europe to wage total war as something that he certainly picked was not ready for and Britain was not ready for both sides thought it would be a short war but Britain had reserves of finance and France of manpower that meant a quarter of a century of war would now take place pet would not live to see the end of it he distrusted himself on military subjects with good reason since he had no experience in the field of course of military matters and his interference with the work of generals was sometimes disastrous but he seemed to have a good instinct for naval decisions and his decision to send part of the Navy back into the Mediterranean to search for the French Mediterranean fleet in 1798 even when England was in danger of invasion can be compared to Churchill's decision to send tanks to the North African desert in 1940 when Britain was in danger of invasion and it led to a similarly dramatic result the annihilation of the French Mediterranean fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 his work when he returned to office in 1804 to make sure the Navy was at its most powerful possible pay dividends - of course in 1805 essential men in a moment but it was returning to office in 1804 with his reserves of Health and a political support really near their end that was to kill him he seemed to know that it may do so he actually said that he would prefer to die at his post rather than deserted illustrating a devotion to public life an inability to think of life other than in public office which is rare indeed even among the most famous political leaders of our history the pressures of life as a war leader Prime Minister were undoubtedly enormous even in the days before 24-hour news media there were a massive decisions to be made for a man who took the vast majority of decisions upon himself I recount in my book just one day the 25th of May 1797 to show what a day might be like for a prime minister like that being woken early to the sound of artillery fire because the soldiers were rioting across the river Woollett then going down into a cabinet meeting where the news came through that Austria Britain's last remaining ally in the war against France was considering pulling out of the war then hearing that there was to be an opposition motion condemning him for every kind of other misfortune in the House of Commons that afternoon was spending the whole evening long into the night debating into the Commons while still trying to manage the war effort the physical toll was enormous and the doctors who I asked the modern doctors who asked to analyze the 11 years of records of his physical symptoms discounted the previously entertained theories that he might have died of cancer or cirrhosis of the liver because his symptoms came and went and they concluded that it was ulcers in his stomach that made him ill and that were eventually to kill him if an ulcer in those days blocked your digestive system there wasn't anything that could be done for you there were no antibiotics at the time and it was consistent with that condition he drew some sustenance from alcohol that he was occasionally able to eat but at other times unable to keep anything down and by late 1805 once again waging the taking on his own shoulders an immense war effort he was clearly very worn down and the events of the first week of November 1805 illustrate what life was like for him on the Sunday November the 3rd a Dutch newspaper arrived in London with a report that Napoleon had destroyed an entire Austrian army at home and this they had to take around London Pitt had to get it taken around London to find someone who can translate it from the Dutch but when the story was confirmed to him one observer said he gave a look that was not his own that foretold the loss with which we were threatened each new defeat was striking a a wound inside him eventually he was killed by the in the words of the Duke of Wellington it was news from the front that struck a terrible blow within and yet four days later on November the 7th news arrived of the Battle of Cape Trafalgar the battle had been fought on October 21st one of the fascinating things for us I think about those times is that since news could still travel no faster than a horse or a ship even a battle fought off the coast of Spain took 16 days for the 18 days for the news of it to arrive in London with the messages arriving on the south coast late at night on the 6th of August a message is galloping through the night to London to wait the Prime Minister at 3:00 a.m. with the news in the dispatch of Admiral Collingwood of 20 sail of the line captured the greatest and most decisive victory ever gained over a powerful enemy where the news at Nelson who had called on Pitt before he set off for that campaign had been killed and two days later Pitt was again hauled along to the Guildhall for the annual speech of the First Lord of the Treasury and toasted as the savior of England and he returned thanks with the simplest and one of the most memorable speeches by Prime Minister in the whole of British history he said England is not to be saved by any single man England has saved herself by her exertions and will as I trust save Europe by her example and it was the last time his voice was ever heard in public he was taken much more ill than he had previously been in the days that followed went to Bath as he often did to try to recover his health in the spa water but failed to do so this time and it was while he was there that news of the shattering defeat for his allies of the battle of Austerlitz came through and he was alone Britain would be alone once again facing Napoleon at the height of his power with Pitt having to account to the House of Commons for the destruction of the coalition against Napoleon with a small majority and highly partisan politics being pursued at the height of a war in which Britain faced of course immense challenges and had only recently faced invasion he had literally nothing left to look forward to and take him back to his house in early January 1806 in Putney he was it became clear to his closest friends that he was dying asked by his old tutor from Cambridge Joe then who would become Bishop Pratt seaman to pray he said that he had neglected prayer for so long and that he had no hope that it would be efficacious now and so he did not embark on praying he he gradually drifted into a delirium on the night of the 22nd of January 1806 sometimes saying here here as if he was sitting in the House of Commons sometimes inquiring about the direction of the wind and saying East our that will bring him quick hoping for a messenger to say from Berlin that Prussia would enter the war against Napoleon his last words were variously reported as my country how I love my country or my country how I leave my country or bring me one of mrs. Bellamy's pork pies given the state of his digestion at the time he seems highly unlikely when he called for a pork pie it would have been much more in character given his devotion to public office and to leading his country almost throughout his entire adult life and that he would say how I leave my country how because the state of the country was certainly not one that he could be satisfied with and so this man who had given his life entirely to public service and being the youngest Prime Minister by far in the history of the country died at the age of 46 but his devotion to politics to leadership to government is remarkable by comparison even with the other great prime ministers and leaders who we can recall over the last 250 years and it is remarkable that as I concluded at the end of my book that he so aligned his life with the fate of his country that at no moment of his existence was he able to separate himself from it and that was William Pitt the Younger born 250 years ago today thank you very much indeed right we have ten minutes for some questions or if there are any who don't have to ask them but you're very welcome who would like to ask first guy I think we have a roving microphone as well yes there's as oh one there and then and then the gentleman here next yes I thank you very much for your wonderful talk I was struck by the image of the picture of mr. Pitts looming over the shadow cabinet during your four years does that picture still hang in the shadow cabinet room and is the shadow cabinet still looking to mr. Pitts for inspiration hmm it doesn't hang in the shadow cabinet room I don't know what my successes did with it I'm sure it's being well looked after somewhere in fact your question may prompt me to ask the house will come as a throw to where it is and so it's not there anymore does the current shadow cabinet look for it no well thankfully circumstances have improved sufficiently that we no longer look to paintings for our inspiration we know and we're in slightly better shape than that next question yes there was a gentleman here yes hmm in the letters that had lain neglected for 20 years was there anything of significance in there that might have changed things substantially if you'd bothered to open them no I don't think there was the way to avoid stomach ulcers or anything like that they would have changed things dramatically we don't know really what was in those letters there are accounts of letters being unopened I don't know which letters they were and unfortunately some of his close friends did destroy a lot of his papers on his death whether they did so deliberately to conceal something we don't know thankfully many papers survived quite a lot of them are in the university library here and others are scattered all over the place in American universities and in the public record office and so on but no we don't really know what was in those letters he he was not very good at attending two letters seeking honors of various kinds he never really he didn't as you can tell he didn't want any honors for himself he knew that his father had gone wrong when he accepted a title what Thomas Gray and we may be going over to the greys room some of his later on over in Pembroke when to when when Pitts father became the Earl of Chatham Gray wrote never was so weak a thing done by so great a man and Pitt clearly never wanted to serve in the House of Lords he was a House of Commons man and disdained really people who sought titles although he knew he could use them as I mentioned earlier because they sought title but he was inundated with letters from people saying that they should be appointed not only to earldoms but to positions in the church which the prime minister of that day controlled to a degree we would consider remarkable now and really inundated with them and many of the letters that he that he most seriously neglected were these letters people putting themselves forward for and there was there was one amusing I can't remember it verbatim but there's an amusing exchange of letters that I put in my book and where someone writes to say they've heard a rumor that they are to be Bishop of Norwich and is he aware of this rumor and he has to write a one-sentence reprising it had no such thing and doesn't expect to which got rid of that rumor very quickly so as those sorts of letters that probably that he just had never bothered with and was never going to bother with him and next question Roy all ready for a drink yes sir over there and then there's one on this in the second row did the remarkable genes that produce the two pits subsequently produce any other remarkable people of that lineage no hey well first of all they Pitt didn't pass on himself any of the genes again this is disappointing to some people I have been asked at meetings about when I've talked about William Pitt whether the person the orders could possibly be a descendent and I have to say no he had no children so you're definitely not a descendant and what is more his brother who inherited the earldom also had no children so the male line died out his sisters did live to have children and of course this Ella happy and you get into this his celebrated nice lady has to Stanhope and so on but it's not I don't think we can I can't think of anyone among bear heirs and successors who has featured prominently and they in the political world so no this was the this was the end of the line really and his brother while he served in Pitts cabinet and was active in the House of Lords was known as the late Lord Chatham because of his record of being unable to turn up to anything on time and Pitt had him responsible for several various military matters for the Admiralty but he had to get rid of him his own brother when the war started because he clearly was not up to handling such a serious situation so that these this political ability really just appeared in those two individuals and some of their predecessors so you can go back but not forward to find political talent yes there was a gentleman as a question here yes thank you what do you think we what is our inheritance why why is it tell me how politics or or the country is is different now compared how it might have been if we hadn't heard William Pitt what does he what are we what are we left what are we left with now in 250 years later well first of all I I don't think it makes any difference the importance of history if it is different now as a result of what here I think these events have a fascination to me they do any all of their own but what was different I think first of all was the way government functioned and was constructed because he was a centralizing force as I mentioned briefly before and the way British government worked Lord if you had accused him of being Prime Minister would have at times would have denied that he was the Prime Minister deny that he was a Tory or a prime minister when he was Tory Prime Minister legacy we didn't want to take responsibility for what was happening across the whole of government picked within a few years later after Lord North was very happy to take that responsibility and to dominate his cabinet colleagues and to ensure that the Treasury got its tentacles into everything maybe Gordon Brown took some lessons from him so he did a lot to create modern cabinet government as we understand it I think his other biggest contribution well there are others that we may choose to forget in his financial brilliance he was the first one to introduce income tax in 1798 as a temporary measure revealingly when he added up the whole income of the country and said it was a hundred million pounds and that therefore ten percent tax rate would produce 10 million pounds of revenue when it came to the next year when everybody had had to declare their income the income of the country had gone down to 58 million pounds and the revenue was only half or - was expecting so then he had to start making sure people really were declaring what they were income they were receiving but he brought innovations such as that into our financial system that then proved not to be very temporary and repealed a few years later but then brought back again and simplified the system of taxation really expanded that because of warfare the the role of the state in personal finances something that had been very much resisted before and I think his other contribution was in military matters if if he had lived to the end of the Napoleonic Wars I think he would be automatically ranked up there with our great war leaders but dying in the middle of a war is never very convenient for being remembered for the victory that was won at the end if Churchill or Lloyd George had died in the the world wars we probably wouldn't Revere them in the same way but his attention to the Navy after the American War of Independence and while allowing the country of a very small army but his rigorous attention to the Navy following in a way his father's belief in a Bluewater strategy for this country and the importance of being able to win conflicts globally rather than compete with the great massed armies on thee on the continent was a very important insight that contributed along with many other things such as Nelson's brilliance to the naval victories in those Wars that actually prevented the country from being invaded and we could go on for a long time about how things might have been different had Napoleon being able to cross the channel so in these in many other ways I think he did change our history but whether he did or not I just find it a fascinating tale um any other questions probably got time just for another yes also in the second row here several times mentioned close friends what was the nature of those friendships they were well they were they were playful friendships he the accounts of him going to Wilberforce's villa in Wimbledon when they were both in their early twenties are of playing around in the garden of him going out on his horse at night from the House of Commons when he was chancellor the Exchequer and sending word ahead that he wanted a good meal of strawberries and Pease from the garden then there are accounts of them cutting up each other's hats in the garden and leaving them in the flowerbeds there was a lot of boiling boiling in its hospital its fencing sense but of playing of mucking around and he always enjoyed I think a bit of physical rough-and-tumble in a way there is even an account in his later to with a few years before he died of him playing around with his nieces and friends and his face being blackened by them you know having a good physical tussle and when news arrived that castle ray was just outside the door was an important dispatch and then they all are the rest of the family hugely enjoyed the scene as he cleaned himself up straightened himself up and Castle ray came in and bowed to the Prime Minister and you would never a thought that this was a man who was playing around on the carpet ten minutes before so he enjoyed that sort of he certainly has a very close friendships with his with a cooler with a tight circle of friends one of his great Cambridge friends was Edward Elliot who then died suddenly at the age of 37 and the descriptions of Pitt from the news arrives in Downing Street unexpectedly of Elliot's death are of a man utterly distraught and really in a state that they had never seen him before so I think he had some deep affection for his friends there's no evidence that that was ever translated into sexual relationships no people have wondered whether he was gay there was a mention a lot of innuendo about his remoteness from women but there's no evidence of it and actually I've come to the conclusion that somebody who was in that office from his early 20s and living in Downing Street all that time and who clearly from the accounts of them waking him up in the middle of the night always slept with his door open and was disturbed by messengers servants and ministers 24 hours of the day I think really he became or was asexual he you know that he lived an almost wholly political life so he had close friends who's deeply fond of but they were a tight circle and I don't think there was anything more to it than that and I think the signal has come for we do yes he regularly came to dinner at Pembroke which is a delight I am hoping to be about to enjoy and he it well that's a very 21st century question if I might say so which is what we are asked now what have you done for your constituency there wasn't much of a concept in those days of having to do anything for your constituency Oh them to go down to the House of Commons and use your judgment well in his case to go and run the country so he was a regular correspondent with people in the university and and there are little bits of records of him intervening now and again to secure the smooth running of this and that but it wasn't that sort of activist representation that we expect today those were the days William thank you very much indeed this afternoon I was I was asked by someone whether this was to be a serious academic lecture or an entertainment and I replied rather pompously perhaps although of course I was going to be serious academic lecture and so it was and extraordinarily well researched and beautifully delivered if I may say so but it was also a terrific entertainment and we thank you for that and I think it's a measure of how much people have enjoyed it that no one is yet rushing across the road for that drink but we shall do now once again will in pay many things you

Channel: Cambridge University

Views: 31,916

Keywords: University of Cambridge, William Hague, William Pitt, 250th Anniversary, Printing, Publishing, University Press

Id: O0tHmYEaqok

Length: 69min 35sec (4175 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2009