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William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, PC, FRS (15 November 1708 – 11 May 1778) was a British Whig statesman who served as Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1766 to 1768. Historians call him " Chatham " or " Pitt the Elder " to distinguish him from his son William Pitt the Younger, who also served as prime minister.
- Earl of Chatham - Wikipedia
William Pitt (the Elder), 1st Earl of Chatham. Earl of...
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William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (15 November 1708 – 11 May...
- Earl of Chatham - Wikipedia
- Overview
- Background and education
- Early political career
William Pitt, the Elder, (born November 15, 1708, London—died May 11, 1778, Hayes, Kent, England), British statesman, twice virtual prime minister (1756–61, 1766–68), who secured the transformation of his country into an imperial power.
Pitt was born in London of a distinguished family. His mother, Lady Harriet Villiers, daughter of Viscount Grandison, belonged to the Anglo-Irish nobility; his father, Robert Pitt, member of Parliament, was the son of Thomas (“Diamond”) Pitt, governor of the East India Company’s “factory” at Madras (now Chennai), India, where he made a vast fortune and secured one of the world’s largest diamonds (sold in 1717 to the regent of France). “Diamond” Pitt had returned from India with a despotic temper made devilish with spleen and gout; he quarrelled violently with his wife and declared war on “that hellish confusion that is my family,” but he treated his grandson William with affection. Father Robert was mean and cantankerous, and the Villiers blood was notoriously unstable. William inherited the gout, as well as a haughty temper and a strain of manic depression.
Such was the background and the smoky, explosive inheritance that was suddenly to blaze into genius. But William’s passionate temper and Pitt truculence had to be disciplined, so he was sent to Eton College, where he acquired social polish and learned to be aloof and yet agreeable, to be politely insolent. Delicate health and the early onset of gout deprived him of field sports and hunting, but he learned to ride with a good seat and take his port wine, and he enjoyed the select company of clever and well-connected friends—the two Grenvilles (one to be Earl Temple; the other, George, to be first minister to George III), George Lyttelton, Charles Pratt (to become a follower of Pitt and, as the 1st Earl Camden, a member of his 1766 ministry), and other men who would later become influential in politics, as well as Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones. But Pitt hated the brutal harshness of Eton and determined to have his own sons educated at home. He continued his education at Trinity College, Oxford, but left after a year without taking a degree. He then spent several months at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, probably studying law.
His classical education made him think, act, and speak in the grand Roman manner. His favourite poet was Virgil, and he never forgot the patriotic lessons of Roman history; he constantly read Cicero, the golden-tongued orator who could yet lash offenders with his indignation. Later, in Parliament, his organ-like voice could be distinctly heard outside the House. This voice, perfect timing, and splendid gestures were worthy of David Garrick, the greatest actor of the day and a personal friend; Pitt’s lean, tall, commanding figure, combined with a Roman beaky nose and hawklike eyes—large and gray but turning black when he was roused—overwhelmed all onlookers. To his countrymen he was to become almost a divine portent, a voice from the Delphic oracle.
For the present, possessed of a mere £100 a year, he nevertheless rejected the church, a younger son’s last resort as a career. While he was vegetating on a small family property in Cornwall, which he called a “cursed hiding-place” in one of his many letters to his adored sister and confidante, clever Nan (Ann) Pitt, help came from a politically powerful millionaire nobleman, Lord Cobham, who lived in splendour in a palatial mansion and vast park at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, to which William and his friends paid visits. Cobham sent William abroad on “The Grand Tour” of Europe (only France and Switzerland were visited, however) and later bought him a cornetcy—a commission—in his own regiment of horse (1731).
In 1735 Pitt was offered one of the “pocket” boroughs his brother controlled, in Wiltshire, and entered Parliament. He belonged to the small group known as “Cobham’s cubs” and the “boy patriots,” the connection of family friends and place hunters whom Cobham was mobilizing to oppose the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole (later the 1st earl of Orford). Walpole had governed England since 1720, monopolizing patronage, and had—they thought—become too ready to compromise in foreign affairs for the sake of peace. The “patriots” joined other discontented Whigs such as John Carteret (later Earl Granville) and William Pulteney (later the 1st earl of Bath) to rally opposition forces behind Frederick Louis, prince of Wales, who was vehemently estranged from his father, King George II.
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There were no formal political parties in the 18th century, and political power, together with the financial opportunities it brought, was a gift of patronage from a handful of landowning family oligarchies and from the monarch himself; nor was there a formal opposition in Parliament, and opposition to the king’s ministry was regarded as factious and even traitorous. Pitt’s maiden speech in Parliament was so critical of the ministry that it provoked Walpole to deprive him of his military commission, to “muzzle this terrible young cornet of horse.”
In 1737 the Prince of Wales made Pitt one of his court officials with a salary of £400 a year. He was still a relatively poor dependent of a powerful Whig clan but already showed an independence of mind and a readiness to appeal to public opinion outside Parliament that were new in English political life: when Walpole dismissed him from his cornetcy, he ostentatiously drove about London in a one-horse chaise to underline his poverty. His talents as an orator had already become clear. He repeatedly referred to the “voice of England,” which had to be sought outside Parliament because Parliament was so packed with placemen and sinecurists. He claimed to speak for the commercial interests and even for the colonies overseas, the latter scarcely represented in the Commons. He was using arguments that carried far beyond the close interests of the Whig families; but he made lasting and valuable friendship with the rich sugar planter-aldermen of the City of London in his opposition to Walpole’s cautious handling of the disputes with Spain over West Indian trade.
Walpole at last fell from power in 1742 and was replaced by a ministry that included his old colleagues Thomas Pelham-Holles, the 1st duke of Newcastle, and Philip Yorke, the 1st earl of Hardwicke, with Carteret as secretary of state. Pulteney was silenced by the grant of a peerage. The “boy patriots,” of whom Pitt was the acknowledged leader, were still excluded. They opposed Carteret even more vigorously than they had Walpole. In the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), Pitt, a former warmonger, now vigorously opposed the sending of men and subsidies to check the French by protecting Hanover (the king’s territory in Germany) and condemned Carteret as a “Hanover troop minister”: for this he was never forgiven by his sovereign.
William Pitt 'The Elder', 1st Earl of Chatham. Whig 1766 to 1768. “Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.”.
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (15 November 1708 – 11 May 1778) was a prime minister of Great Britain. He was appointed by King George III. His London house, in St. James's Square, is now the home of the international affairs think tank called Chatham House.
William Pitt (the Elder), 1st Earl of Chatham. Earl of Chatham, of Chatham in the County of Kent, was a title in the Peerage of Great Britain. It was created in 1766 for William Pitt the Elder on his appointment as Lord Privy Seal, along with the subsidiary title of Viscount Pitt, of Burton Pynsent in the County of Somerset, also in ...
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham PC (November 15, 1708 – May 1, 1778) was a British Whig statesman who achieved his greatest fame as Secretary of State during the Seven Years' War that was fought between France and Great Britain, (known as the French and Indian War in North America), and who was later Prime Minister of Great Britain.
29 mag 2018 · Pitt (the Elder), William, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–78) British statesman, known as ‘the Great Commoner’. He entered Parliament in 1735. Pitt was noted for his opposition to the foreign policies of prime ministers Walpole and Carteret and King George II.
