The Story of Westminster Abbey

by Violet Brooke-Hunt

His monument in the Abbey shows him to us as he must often have looked when, wearing his Parliamentary robes, he addressed the House in that clear, sweet voice of his, which he could use with such wonderful effect, and the sculptor has well caught the expression of his fearless strength. Near him stand Prudence and Fortitude; below is Britannia, Mistress of the Seas; and the inscription tells how, under his administration, Great Britain was exalted to a height of prosperity and glory, unknown in any former age.

His second son, William, was born in 1759, the year that was perhaps the most successful in his father's life, and as he was too delicate to go to school, the older man personally supervised the early education of this his favourite child. When quite small, Chatham began to give him lessons in public speaking, making him stand on a platform to recite poetry or speeches, and later on teaching him to argue their points. With such a teacher and such a ready pupil, it is not surprising to hear of excellent progress made.

Little Willy Pitt, as he was called, soon showed in which direction his inclinations lay. "I am glad I am not the eldest son," he remarked, when he was seven, "as I want to speak in the House of Commons like papa."

He was only nineteen when his father died, but it was he who had helped the old statesman to his place in the House of Lords on the last day of his life, he who assisted to carry him out, and he who stood as chief mourner at that impressive funeral in the Abbey, his elder brother being abroad. The thought of any life but a political and a public one, never entered his mind, and two years later he became a member of Parliament. The first step up the ladder was taken. Already a trained speaker, his gifts were at once recognised by the House. Members of both parties generously praised him, and prophesied that his would be a great career. "I doubt not," said honest William Wilberforce, "but that I shall one day see him the first man in the country." His likeness to his father was remarkable. "Language, gesture, and manner were all the same," wrote his delighted tutor. "All the old members recognised him instantly, and most of the young ones said this was the very man they had so often heard described."

But it was not on his father's merits that William Pitt sprang into immediate fame; his own personality was his passport.

Thirteen years before, another young man had entered Parliament, Charles James Fox, the brilliant, excitement-loving son of Lord Holland. After Eton and Oxford he had been sent abroad to complete his education, but so great were his follies and extravagances, that his father had to firmly summon him home. This mandate, we are told, "he obeyed with great reluctance," and he seems to have gone back with an extensive wardrobe of clothes in the latest and most costly fashions, leaving behind him enormous debts in every town he had visited.

Lord Holland, who flattered himself that he had studied the world and human nature with great attention and success, decided that a seat in the House of Commons would best steady this irrepressible young man, and provide him with occupation and ambition, so, though he was only nineteen, and therefore legally not entitled to become a member, he was duly elected, the Speaker, by wilful or accidental oversight, offering no opposition. He too from the first delighted the House as a speaker, for he was fresh, forcible, and graceful, with a great personal charm of manner and an entire absence of conceit, and no one gave a more cordial welcome to Pitt than he did, little dreaming in how short a time this young man would be his lifelong and his successful rival. Rockingham, who had succeeded North as Prime Minister, died suddenly in 1782, and from every point of view Fox appeared to be the man who ought to have succeeded him. But the King cordially disliked Fox, and sent instead for Lord Shelburne. Fox, ever impetuous and hasty, refused to serve under him, and Shelburne turned to Pitt, who thus at the age of twenty-three became Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. A year later Lord Shelburne resigned, and the Premiership was offered to Pitt, an honour greater perhaps than any honour ever offered to a young man of twenty-four. He declined it; the Duke of Portland accepted it; and Fox became leader in the House of Commons, with what seemed to be a strong coalition Government at the back of him. For the moment the Whigs were all-powerful, and against them stood Pitt, who refused to be a member of any coalition, with a handful of men who had belonged to the old Chatham party. No one hated the present arrangement more than the King, and before long he saw an opportunity of crushing it. Fox, chiefly by his own magnetic influence, had carried a bill concerning India through the Commons, but the Lords, influenced by the King, threw it out, whereupon he dismissed the Government, and persuaded Pitt to accept the office of Prime Minister. Never before had such a state of things prevailed. The Premier was a youth of twenty-four, with a majority of two to one against him in the House of Commons! Whatever he brought forward was defeated. Fox used all his eloquence against him, and over and over again he was put in an impossible position. Pitt, Lord Rosebery has told us, was never young. Certainly, at this crisis, his patience, his caution, his firmness, and his cool judgment would have done credit to a statesman of half a century's experience. He did not make a mistake, and gradually he won the country to his side. Before many months were over, Parliament was dissolved; an election had taken place; and Pitt came back into power with a large majority. For seventeen years he remained in office. Nothing could have been greater than the contrast between him and his strenuous opponent Fox, who was the most impulsive, genial, and lovable of men; extravagant in every direction, in his likes, his hates, and his sympathies; easily stirred and able to pour forth a torrent of passionate eloquence; living always in the excitement and impulses of the moment, with never a thought for the morrow. Pitt, on the contrary, was cool and thoughtful. He stood, as it were, aloof from all the world, though on the rare occasions when he unbent, he was full of charm. "Smiles were not natural to him," said a contemporary. "He is," said Wilberforce, who unfeignedly admired him, even though he could not always follow him, "one of the most public-spirited and upright men I ever knew." And he was called upon to guide the ship of State through troubled waters. It was his task to raise the money in payment of the American war bill, for a debt of about twenty millions stared him in the face. Then he had to face more than the usual amount of difficulty with Ireland, where the celebrated Dublin Parliament which Henry Grattan, its brilliant leader, had forced Fox to agree to, proved itself so unable to cope with the task undertaken, that riots and disturbances broke out in every quarter. Pitt believed that only one solution was possible, namely, that instead of a separate Parliament at Dublin, the Irish members with the Scotch should sit at Westminster, and in the year 1799 he brought in the Act of Union, which was carried during the next session, in spite of a strong speech against it by Grattan, who was dragged from his sick-room for the occasion. Pitt had also to contend with a restless wave which swept over England, the result of the French Revolution. But though the young minister was always ready for reform, he would have nothing to do with violent changes or with revolution, neither was he afraid to bring in such measures as seemed likely to repress the revolutionary spirits in England. The French leaders, not content with having executed their king and queen, and having waged war on Austria, when that country moved to rescue the luckless Austrian princess, now Queen Marie Antoinette, went to the further length of declaring that every country not agreeing with the doctrines of the Revolution was to be regarded as an enemy, and was to be forced into war. For some while Pitt managed to hold the English people from plunging into the conflict. He was altogether a peace minister. But public opinion was too strong for him; the old hatred of France was there, and the events of the last few years had fanned it into life. Pitt had to bow to the will of the nation, though it was the French who finally declared war in 1793 by an attack on Holland, after which England could no longer stand aloof, though Fox, in his hot-headed way, declared that in his opinion we had no right to demand the withdrawal of French troops from the Netherlands. From that time until the day of victory at Waterloo in 1815, the fight between England and France continued with more or less intensity.

And the final issue was due in no small degree to Pitt, who, though he hated the war, had during his long ministry of peace freely spent millions of pounds on the British navy, recognising that so long as England was mistress of the seas she was safe. From the moment, too, that war was declared, he threw himself heart and soul into every measure for carrying it through successfully; never for a moment did he show a weak front, or fail to be the leader in every sense of the word. When Napoleon, elated by his series of triumphs on the Continent, prepared to invade England, it was Pitt who gave an impetus to the volunteer movement by himself raising a force of 3000 men, and placing himself at their head. "His spirit will lead him to be foremost in the battle, and I am uneasy at it," said Wilberforce; "yet it is his proper post, and I can say nothing against it." In an incredibly short time a volunteer force of 300,000 was enrolled, "their good sense and firmness supplying their want of experience." But though his spirit was as strong as ever, his delicate frame was giving way under the high pressure at which he had lived. True to his promise to Wilberforce, he had pushed forward the Abolition of Slavery Bill, and he did not relax an effort as regards his war policy, though on the Continent Napoleon was still all victorious. Wellesley, a young soldier, had just come back from India with a good reputation, and Pitt, then a dying man, sent for him. He knew that what England wanted now was a great soldier to lead her armies; her navy was safe under such commanders as St. Vincent, Collingwood, and Nelson. For hours he talked to Wellesley, only ceasing when he fainted from exhaustion. "The greatest minister that has ever ruled England," was the verdict of the soldier statesman. Then came the news of the victory at Trafalgar, saddened only by the death of the heroic Nelson. But Pitt was drifting far away from all these things. His mind wandered as his life flickered out; only just at the end there was a rally. "Oh my country!" he cried; "how I leave my country!" That was his last thought and his last speech.

When the usual proposal was brought forward that he should be buried at Westminster at the expense of Parliament, and that a monument should be erected, Fox characteristically felt bound to oppose it. "He could not honestly," he said, "call a man an excellent statesman who had consistently supported so bad a system." But when it was further suggested that Parliament should pay the debts he had left and provide for his nearest relations, no one agreed so cordially or so readily as Fox. Wrong-headed he often was; wrong-hearted never.

Into the same grave as his father William Pitt was laid in the presence of all the distinguished people of the day, his pall-bearers being six men each of whom had been, or was to be, a Prime Minister of England. "The figure of the first William Pitt," wrote Wilberforce, "seemed to be looking down with consternation into the grave of his favourite son, the last perpetuator of the name he had ennobled. It was an affecting ceremony."