I need hardly tell you that every step you have taken has been exactly what we should have desired.
He who wrote these cheering words was in worse health than Harrowby. The latter lived on till the year 1847; Pitt had now taken his last journey but one. Sharp attacks of gout had reduced him to so weak and tremulous a state that he could scarcely lift a glass to his lips. So wrote Mrs. Jackson on 9th December, long before the news of Austerlitz reached these shores.[756] So far back as 27th November, Canning, in prophetic strains, begged him not to defer a projected visit to Bath until it was too late for the waters to do him good. But "the pilot that weathered the storm" refused to leave the tiller in case decisive news came from Harrowby. He also prepared to strengthen his Cabinet against the attacks certain to be made in the ensuing session, by including in it two excellent speakers, Canning and Charles Yorke, the latter taking the Board of Control. Why he did not complete these changes, as Canning begged him to do, is far from clear. Possibly the sharp though friendly criticism which Canning levelled against the Anglo-Russian expedition to Hanover made him apprehensive of divisions in the Cabinet on a question which was very near his heart. Certainly much could be said in favour of an expedition to Walcheren, which Canning urged should be entrusted to General M[oore?]. Pitt preferred the Hanoverian enterprise, doubtless because it would lay Russia and Prussia under a debt of honour to co-operate to the utmost of their power.
At last the strain became too great, and on 7th December Pitt set out for Bath, arriving there on the 11th. He resided at Harrowby's house, 11, Laura Place. His stay in Bath aroused interest so intense that he found it necessary to vary the time of his visits to the Pump Room in order to escape the crowd which would otherwise have incommoded him.[757] As has just appeared, he expected a speedy recovery; for, as was the case with his father, if the attack of gout ran a normal course, the system felt relief. Freedom from worry was the first condition of amendment. After his retirement from office in 1768 Chatham recovered so quickly that his opponents gibed at the illness as a political device.[758] Ten years later he succumbed to excitement and strain.
During the first part of his stay at Bath, Pitt was in good spirits and wrote cheerfully about his health. The following letter to his London physician, Sir Walter Farquhar, is not that of a man who feels death approaching:
Bath, Dec. 15. 1805.[759]
The gout continues pretty smartly in my foot; and I find from Mr. Crooks that it is attended with a feverish pulse and some other symptoms of the same nature. I have communicated to Mr. Crooks your directions, and he is to send me the saline draughts with some little addition, which he will explain to you. I thought he would detail symptoms more precisely than I could, and have therefore desired him to write to you. On the whole, I have no doubt the plan you have laid down will answer, and I do not at present see the smallest occasion to accept your kind and friendly offer of coming here.
P.S. 4.30 P.M. I enclose Mr. Crooks' letter to you. His account to me of the pulse was that it was not strong, but quick and beating near an hundred. One of the saline draughts which I have taken since I wrote the foregoing letter, seems, as far as I can judge from feeling, already to have had a very good effect.
Not until ten days later do we find signs of alarm in the letters of his friends; for it is characteristic of his buoyant nature that he never wrote despondingly about himself. There is a well-known story to the effect that, on hearing the news of Austerlitz, he called for a map of Europe, to see where the place was, and then said with a sigh: "Roll up that map: it will not be wanted these ten years." One version assigns the incident to Shockerwick House, near Bath. Pitt is looking over the picture gallery, and is gazing at Gainsborough's portrait of the actor Quin. His retentive memory calls up the lines in Churchill's "Characters":
Nature, in spite of all his skill, crept in—
Horatio, Dorax, Falstaff—still 'twas Quin.
At that moment he hears the beat of a horse's hoofs. A courier dashes up. He comes in, splashed with mud, hands the despatches. Pitt tears them open and hurriedly reads them. His countenance changes, he calls for brandy, then for a map, and is finally helped to his carriage, uttering the historic phrase.[760] In another version he mournfully rolls out the words to Lady Hester Stanhope, as she welcomes him in the hall of Bowling Green House, after his last journey to his home on Putney Heath.[761] The words probably fell from him on some occasion. But at the risk of incurring the charge of pedantry, I must point out that the news of Austerlitz did not come on him as one overwhelming shock: it filtered through by degrees. As we have seen, he wrote to Harrowby on 21st December, stating that reports from Berlin and other quarters represented the sequel to the battle as a great success for the Russians. It appears that Thornton, our envoy at Hamburg, wrote as follows on 13th December to Mulgrave: "From everything I can learn (for the details are even yet far from being circumstantial and decisive) the tide of success had completely turned in favour of the Russian and Austrian armies, tho', as the conflict still continued to the 4th and perhaps to the 5th, it could not be positively said on which side the victory had been declared. The certain intelligence cannot now be long delayed."[762]