William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham. Born at Westminster, Nov. 15, 1708: died at Hayes, Kent, May 11, 1778. A famous English Whig statesman and orator. He was the son of Robert Pitt of Boconnock, in Cornwall; studied at Trinity College, Oxford; and obtained a cornet’s commission in the dragoons. He entered Parliament in 1735, and in 1746 became vice-treasurer of Ireland in Pelham’s administration. He was in the same year promoted to the office of paymaster-general, which he retained under the Duke of Newcastle. Disappointed in his hope of advancement, he attacked the Government in 1755, and was deprived of office. He was secretary of state under the Duke of Devonshire 1756–57. In 1757 he formed a coalition with the Duke of Newcastle, who became premier, although Pitt, as secretary of state, obtained the ascendancy in the government. He adopted vigorous measures in prosecution of the Seven Years’ War, and the period which followed is one of the most brilliant in English history. He resigned in 1761, inasmuch as he failed to receive the support of the rest of the ministry for a war with Spain. He became premier on the fall of Rockingham in 1766, and was created Viscount Pitt and Earl of Chatham. He resigned in 1768, owing to ill health. He opposed the policy pursued toward the American colonies, although his last appearance in the House of Lords, on April 7, 1778, was in order to protest against the dismemberment of the British empire by the acknowledgment of their independence.

Personal

  Sir, the venerable age of this great man, his merited rank, his superior eloquence, his splendid qualities, his eminent services, the vast space he fills in the eyes of mankind, and, more than all the rest, his fall from power, which, like death, canonizes and sanctifies a great character, will not suffer me to censure any part of his conduct. I am afraid to flatter him; I am sure I am not disposed to blame him. Let those who have betrayed him by their adulation insult him with their malevolence.

  I am sure you will be desirous to hear a true account of Lord Chatham’s accident in ye House, and of his present condition of health. The newspapers are in but little credit in general, but their account of that affair has been very exact. His lordship had been long confined by a fit of the gout, so was debilitated by illness and want of exercise. The House was invaded by numbers who went to hear him on so critical a state of affairs. The thunder of his eloquence was abated, and the lightning of his eyes was dimmed in a certain degree, when he rose to speak; but the glory of his former administration threw a mellow lustre around him, and his experience of publick affairs gave the force of an oracle to what he said, and a reverential silence reigned through the senate. He spoke in answer to the Duke of Richmond. The Duke of Richmond replied. Then his lordship rose up to speak again. The genius and spirit of Britain seemed to heave in his bosom, and he sank down speechless. He continued half an hour in a fit. His eldest and second sons and Lord Mahon were in great agony, waiting the doubtful event. At last, he happily recovered; and though he is very weak still, I am assured by his family, that he looks better than he did before this accident.

  On the stage, he would have been the finest Brutus or Coriolanus ever seen…. His figure, when he first appeared in Parliament, was strikingly graceful and commanding, his features high and noble, his eyes full of fire. His voice, even when it sank to a whisper, was heard to the remotest benches; when he strained it to its fullest extent, the sound rose like the swell of the organ of a great cathedral, shook the house with its peal, and was heard through lobbies and down staircases, to the Court of Requests and the precincts of Westminster Hall. He cultivated all these eminent advantages with the most assiduous care. His action is described by a very malignant observer as equal to that of Garrick. His play of countenance was wonderful; he frequently disconcerted a hostile orator by a single glance of indignation or scorn. Every tone, from the impassioned cry to the thrilling aside, was perfectly at his command. It is by no means improbable that the pains which he took to improve his great personal advantages had, in some respects, a prejudicial operation, and tended to nourish in him that passion for theatrical effect which, as we have already remarked, was one of the most conspicuous blemishes in his character.

  It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most as we look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and action stands out in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In the midst of a society critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to the affectation of simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and of head, skeptical of virtue and enthusiasm, skeptical above all of itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy, his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he turned from a corruption which had till then been the great engine of politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out.

  “Power arising from popularity” was, of course, represented by Chatham, the head of the last great party in the State. By the energy of his haughty will he stands out above all contemporary politicians. Scorning the wretched intrigues which passed for statesmanship amongst his rivals, he placed himself for a brief period at the head of the nation. For a moment England was ruled by its natural king, and had its reward in a blaze of military glory. During his later years, disease, the distrust of his rivals, or his own arrogance, kept Chatham for the most part in melancholy retirement. For another brief period he tried, but failed grievously, to weld together the jarring elements of party into a powerful administration. The popular will could only impose a Chatham upon the king and the aristocracy at a time of fierce excitement. In calmer periods, and when his powers were failing, the politicians were too strong for him. Chatham, as the representative of the popular favour, and by the natural turn of a vehement mind, intuitive rather than discursive, and more eloquent than logical, was inclined towards the absolute dogmas of the revolutionary school. He was not, indeed, a believer in the rights of man in a revolutionary sense; for his ardent patriotism often took the form of almost melodramatic loyalty. But he judged the issues of the time by principles which easily assimilated with those of the revolutionists. Wilkes and the patriots of the City revered him as their natural head, though a head generally wrapped in clouds and darkness. Camden, his favourite lawyer, was the great judicial defender of popular rights. Shelburne, his lieutenant, was the patron of Priestley and Price; and it is not difficult to suppose that, under other circumstances, Chatham might have developed into a Mirabeau.

  Though Chatham’s character is absolutely free from suspicion of corruption, no statesman ever exhibited greater inconsistencies during his political career. Pride rather than principle seems to have actuated his conduct on more than one occasion. He consulted no judgment but his own. His haughtiness to his colleagues was only equalled by his abject servility to the king. His vanity was excessive, and he delighted in pomp and ostentation. He was always playing a part.

General

  What parent, anxious for the character and success of a son would not in all that related to his education, gladly have resorted to the advice of such a man? What youthful spirit, animated by any desire of future excellence, and looking for the gratification of that desire, in the pursuits of honorable ambition, or in the consciousness of an upright, active, and useful life, would not embrace with transport any opportunity of listening on such a subject to the lessons of Lord Chatham?

  The most interesting relic that we have of this greatest of statesmen, is his “Letters to his Nephew, Thomas Pitt (afterwards Lord Camelford), then at Cambridge.” No volume of equal size contains more valuable instructions for a young student than these letters.

  Five speeches were written out from notes taken on the spot by Sir Philip Francis and Mr. Hugh Boyd. One of them is said to have been revised by Lord Chatham himself. These are the best specimens we possess of his style and diction, and it would be difficult, in the whole range of our literature, to find more perfect models for the study and imitation of the young orator.

  In elementary studies like ours, we cannot undertake to deal with the Parliamentary Eloquence of our country. But we ought to learn, that the earliest specimens of its greatness may be said to have been given before the middle of the eighteenth century, in the commanding addresses of the elder Pitt, more commonly known as Earl of Chatham.

  His speeches, as they have come down to us, are confessedly fragments; but even these “shreds of unconnected eloquence” are without a parallel. They blaze with the authentic fire of the imagination,—of the imagination in the full sweep of excited and overmastering feeling. They are the masterful words of a great man; haughty and arrogant words sometimes, no doubt, but haughty and arrogant because the speaker, in the pride of his integrity, scorned from the depths of his soul all meanness, and baseness, and finesse.

  If examined word by word and sentence by sentence his speeches are full of instruction. The style is natural, easy, and varied, with short clauses expressing vivid ideas—the style of a man pressing right onward to the end he has in view, diverted by no by-play and checked by no inferior purpose. He had faults belonging to a self-confident and somewhat arrogant disposition, but they were faults of taste and not of motive. Counterbalancing and overwhelming all these minor defects was an impetuous earnestness, based upon deep conviction, which could not be expressed without the stamp of absolute sincerity. It was this quality that could not be hid by the wealth of poetic utterance nor obscured by the emotion which sometimes accompanied it.

  The idol of the nation, whose genius raised him head and shoulders above all competitors.