William Pitt the Younger
by William Hague
HarperCollins £25, pp651
There is more to Pitt the Younger than his caricature, from Gillray to Blackadder, but the outlines have remained remarkably unchanged. The son of a great Prime Minister who had dominated his age as much as Churchill did, young William was manoeuvred into his own premiership at the precocious age of 24 in 1783 by a rare combination of talent and circumstance. He remained in Downing Street for 19 of his subsequent 22 years of intense, and ultimately fatal, political exertion.
In office, he steered his country through a series of national crises: the madness of King George, the French Revolution and, finally, the rise of Napoleon. He was also the author of a domestic repression that achieved one of the greatest infringements of liberty ever perpetrated on the British people. As much a legend in death as in life, he passed away with not one ('My country, oh! My country!') but two ('I think I could eat one of Bellamy's veal pies') attributed last lines.
William Hague addresses Pitt's life with some formidable advantages. Like his subject, he is still famously young: the teenage star of a Tory party conference, he became the youngest cabinet minister, aged 34, under John Major. Aside from the obvious advantages of sympathy and intelligence, he brings to his first book a precocious grasp of parliamentary procedure. Compared to previous multi-volume biographers he is a model of succinctness, but like all his predecessors he faces two huge challenges: the complexity of 18th-century English politics and the repressed frostiness of a man bred for high office from birth (Pitt was generally thought to be cold and aloof). Hague easily masters the politics. He is less successful with the life.
English politics in the late 18th century was wrapped up, to an astounding degree, in the personality of the king. When George III first invited Pitt to form a government, he was astonished, and then piqued, to be turned down. But Pitt knew what he was doing. If he was to be the king's first minister, he had to be his own man, with his parliamentary powerbase. Hague describes the tumultous first months of Pitt's ministry with zest.
At first, the opposition, dominated by the enthralling figure of Charles James Fox, sneered at Pitt as a 'schoolboy' placeman. Gradually, he wore them down. When Fox was rebuffed by the all-important voters of the Westminster constituency, the game was up. Pitt went on to establish mastery over every aspect of government and somehow found a modus vivendi with the impossible king.
There's no doubt Pitt was brilliant. Everyone said so, from his earliest years. His mother was convinced he would 'become a personage'. He went to Cambridge at 14 and was in Parliament by 1780, aged 21. His speeches were compelling miracles of logic. Reared for high office by the great Chatham, he was fully attuned to political cut-and-thrust.
But what made him tick? His coldness seems to have been a mask. His friend William Wilberforce said Pitt was 'the shyest man' he knew. Behind the ungainly facade was a keen, sometimes dangerous intelligence. Others said that he could be mistaken for a poet not a Prime Minister. Hague relies heavily on his predecessors in a generally wooden assessment. He makes what he can of the testament of Pitt's friends and admirers that he was 'the wittiest man alive', but he never really conveys either the quality of that wit or the colour of Pitt's character.
This is hardly surprising. No sooner had Pitt trounced the opposition and secured his ministry than he was faced with some of the sternest tests a British Prime Minister has had to endure, from the royal madness to the rise of a European dictator. At a time when Tony Blair has been brought face to face with the human cost of office, it is sobering to read that, even in more undisciplined times, occupancy of Number 10 ends either with humiliation or death.