The doctor was a croaker, as was the fashion of the time, with all who pretended to peculiar political sagacity. Of course the family physician of the ex-minister was in duty bound to echo the ex-minister's discontent. It is clear that, whatever professional gifts the doctor inherited from Apollo, he did not share the gift of prophecy. The doctor, after realising enough by his profession to purchase an estate in Devonshire, retired to Reading, where, in 1790, he died, having had, in the year before, the enviable gratification of seeing his son elected to the Speakership of the House of Commons.
Henry Viscount Sidmouth was born in 1757, on the 30th of May. At the age of five years, he was placed under the care of the Rev. William Gilpin, author of the Essays on the Picturesque, who for many years kept a school at Cheam, in Surrey.
Lord Sidmouth had but one brother, Hiley, who subsequently figured so often in the caustic rhymes of Canning, and who, under his brother's auspices, was successively secretary of the treasury, paymaster of the forces, and under-secretary of state. In his twelfth year, Henry, followed by Hiley, was sent to Winchester, then under the government of the well-known Dr Joseph Wharton, with George Isaac Huntingford as one of the assistants.
The author of the biography gives Huntingford credit for the singular degree of attachment exhibited in his occasional letters to his pupil. It certainly seems singular; when we know the slenderness, if not sternness of the connexion generally subsisting between the teachers at a great English seminary, and the pupils. In one of those epistles Huntingford says to this boy of fifteen.
"For my own part, to you I lay open my whole heart without reserve. I divest myself of the little superiority which age may have given me. With you I can enter into conversation with all the familiarity of an intimate companion. The few hours of intercourse which we thus enjoy with each other give more relief to my wearied body and mind than any other amusement on earth. What I am to do when you leave school, a melancholy thought, I cannot foresee. May the evil hour be postponed as late as possible. Yet let me add, whenever it shall be most for your advantage to leave me, I will not doubt to sacrifice my own peace and comfort for your interest. I love myself, but you better."
We hope that this style is not much in fashion in our public schools. Dean Pellew tells us that numerous letters of this kind were written by this tutor to his pupil in after life, and adds with a ludicrous solemnity, "It will readily be imagined how efficacious they must have proved, in forming the character of the future statesman, and erecting Spartan and Roman virtues on the noble foundation of Christianity."
For our part, we know not what to make of such communications: they seem to us intolerably silly, and we think ought not to have been published. In later life, their writer was made Bishop of Hereford and Warden of Winchester. He seems to have been a fellow of foresight!
In 1773, Henry and Hiley were both removed from Winchester, and put under the tuition of Dr Goodenough, who took private pupils at Ealing, and who was afterwards Bishop of Carlisle. In the next year, Henry entered as commoner in Brazen-Nose College under the tuition of Radcliffe, then a tutor of some celebrity. In this college he became acquainted with Abbot, afterwards Lord Colchester, and William Scott, afterwards Lord Stowell. He took his degree in 1778, and in this year had the misfortune to lose his mother, who seems to have been an amiable and sensible person. In the next year, he obtained the Chancellor's prize for an English essay on "the affinity between painting and writing in point of composition;" and at the recital of this essay in the theatre he first became acquainted with Lord Mornington, afterwards Marquis Wellesley, an intimacy which lasted for sixty-two years. He now adopted law as his profession, took chambers in Paper Buildings, and kept his terms regularly at Lincoln's Inn. In 1781, he married Ursula Mary, eldest daughter and co-heiress of Leonard Hammond, Esq. of Cheam, in Surrey, and took a house in Southampton Street, Bloomsbury, where he determined to follow the profession of the law. But this determination was speedily over-ruled by the success of the celebrated son of Chatham. On the 26th of February, 1781, William Pitt, then only in his twenty-second year, made his first speech in the House of Commons, in support of Burke's bill for the regulation of the civil list. This epoch in parliamentary annals is noticed in a brief letter from Dr Goodenough to Pitt's early tutor, Wilson, who sent it to Mr Addington, among whose papers it was found:—
"Dear Sir,—I cannot resist the natural impulse of giving pleasure, by telling you that the famous William Pitt, who made so capital a figure in the last reign, is happily restored to his country. He made his first public re-appearance in the senate last night. All the old members recognised him instantly, and most of the young ones said he appeared the very man they had so often heard described: the language, the manner, the gesture, the action were the same; and there wanted only a few wrinkles in the face, and some marks of age, to identify the absolute person of the late Earl of Chatham."
Addington, at this period, had a good deal of intercourse with Pitt, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-three, and whose brilliant success in parliament evidently stimulated his friend to political pursuits. But the infamous coalition broke in, and Pitt was dismissed from the ministry. Its existence, however, was brief: it not merely fell, but was crushed amidst a universal uproar of national scorn; and Pitt, not yet twenty-five, was appointed prime minister. In the course of the month, an interview took place between Pitt and Addington, which gave his friends strong hopes of seeing him in immediate office. His friend Bragge thus writes to him: