Prime Factors - Ranking UK Prime Ministers

9.1 - William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham (Part 1)

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9.1 - William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham (Part 1)

Episode Transcript

Parliament: Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!

Abram: Hello and welcome back to Prime Factors. I'm Abram and I'm here with my dad reviewing all the British Prime Ministers from Robert Walpole to Keir Starmer.

9.1 - William Pitt the Elder, Part One

Joe: This is exciting. This is big. William Pitt has been a fixture on our podcast since Robert Walpole, Part 2. He's always been in the background. Governments tried to court him. Governments tried to push him away. And finally, Abram, he gets his own episode.

Abram: It's the end of an era.

Joe: So William Pitt's one of the few Prime Ministers that we Americans even learn about. He is a brilliant orator. He led Britain to some of its greatest military victories in the Seven Years' War. And then he failed to stop the colonies in their march towards revolution. And he is the namesake of my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Abram: You lived in Dormont way more than Pittsburgh.

Joe: Okay. I never actually lived in Pittsburgh.

Abram: No.

Joe: Point being, I grew up around Pittsburgh. I didn't grow up in Pittsburgh. How's that?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: But Pittsburgh is where we are right now.

Abram: That's where we are right now. We're in a hotel at Station Square, just south across the Monongahela River from downtown. Looks pretty nice. We're going to eat inside of Fort Pitt later.

Joe: And for our podcast, this is also the beginning of another era. Sam, our fearless editor since episode one, who has removed so many of our ums and who helped to make this a real podcast, has stepped away. This will be the first episode edited by someone new. I know they're going to do great, but as of when we're recording, I have no idea who it's going to be. And if this episode sounds more amazing than usual, you will have that new editor to thank.

Abram: But don't get too upset at Sam. If you were ever into editing again, we'd love to have you back.

Joe: That's nice of you to say, Abram.

Abram: And don't forget that you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, www.primefactorspodcast.com, also on Facebook and BlueSky. If you enjoy listening, please like, subscribe, comment, and review.

Joe: Are you ready, Abram? We're about to start at a pivotal moment for the young William Pitt.

Abram: Even though we don't get to him until page 8 of our notes.

Joe: That's not true. I actually changed the script so that we got to him earlier because I didn't want to not get to Pitt until page 8. That just felt weird.

Abram: Whoever the new editor is, please keep that in.

Joe: Or don't.

Abram: Please.

Picture This

Joe: William Pitt sat uneasily on his green bench in the House of Commons. He tried to hide his nervousness from the friends beside him and the opposition across the floor. He placed his hands in his lap, then to his side, and then in his lap again.

Joe: The House was crowded. The seating was tight. On this April afternoon in 1736, the cool weather outside seemed to do little to stifle the heat and frankly the smell of his fellow MPs.

Joe: Off to his left sat Speaker Arthur Onslow in a great chair placed where once the altar had been in this chapel, when it was a chapel in the Palace of Westminster rather than a normal room for the people's business. The symbolism was lost on no one, and Arthur ruled the room like a demigod himself, calling on MPs in turn, giving each their moment, even if that moment was often difficult to hear over side conversations.

Joe: To Arthur's right sat Robert Walpole on the Treasury Bench, round-faced, and relaxed. For all that Onslow ruled the room, Walpole ruled the government.

Joe: Member after member rose and spoke, with Onslow calling each one of them in turn. The topic, Abram, was a joyful one. Prince Frederick— remember him?

Abram: Yes, I remember him. He has kids.

Joe: No, he doesn't have kids yet. Prince Frederick was married. The son of King George II now had a wife. The 16-year-old—

Abram: Was it an arranged marriage?

Joe: Yes, it was.

Abram: That means he really doesn't.

Joe: Well, he still has a wife. Even if it was arranged, Abram, there was real joy to the news. The cycle of kings proceeding through another turn. The future King Frederick was married.

Joe: A hand fell on William's shoulder. He looked up to a smile from his childhood friend George Lyttelton, now a fellow MP and also just as new to the room. George squeezed his shoulder. They were in this together.

Joe: William Pitt took a deep breath and stood up. The room seemed to grow quieter. In parliamentary procedure, this was like raising your hand. He was asking to speak. Speaker Onslow looked surprised. William Pitt, still a relatively new MP, though he'd been in Parliament now for a year, had never spoken before.

Abram: Onslow intoned, "The gentleman from Old Sarum—" Old Sarum got a new tanny so he done a swim in there. Places that once existed but now are somewhat empty. We're gonna lump all the seats and give the two— my good friend the Old Sarum got a new tiny suit on his tummy there, Lee.

Joe: William Pitt cleared his throat and began to speak. We don't know what he said precisely, because in those days it was not legal to record an MP's speech directly. That was part of parliamentary privilege. But we know what he meant.

Joe: William Pitt congratulated the Prince on his marriage, but he did so in a way that was a condemnation of King George and Robert Walpole's government. When William Pitt admired the young prince's virtues, he used words that everyone in the room knew were insulting to George's. When William Pitt spoke of his faith, of his morality, of his statesmanship, every word was carefully crafted to be a knife in the back of Robert Walpole and his government. Walpole, on the Treasury Bench, turned beet red.

Joe: Turn after turn, William Pitt's speech electrified the room, but not once did he stray from congratulating the prince. If someone had written out his words, it would be impossible to see anything but a joyous message to a newly married couple. But in William Pitt's mouth, no one in that room could see anything short of a declaration of war.

Joe: William Pitt finished speaking and sat down. In his first ever speech, Pitt showed everyone in the room that he knew how to play the game. He was going to be punished, of course. Walpole ripped away his military commission a short time later, leaving him unemployed. But don't worry, a very flattered Prince Frederick would not hesitate to add the young orator to his household.

Joe: We're going to end with a poem written to William Pitt by that very same boyhood friend, George Lyttelton. Quote: "Long had thy virtues marked thee out for fame, far, far superior to a Cornet's name. This generous Walpole saw, and grieved to find, so mean a post disgraced the human mind. The servile standard from the free-born hand, he took and bade thee lead the patriot band."

Joe: With one speech, William Pitt stood proud as the new, although unofficial, leader of the Patriot Whigs.

A Child of the Empire

Joe: To get to that moment in Pitt's life, we need to backtrack a long way. William Pitt's life was defined, more than any other Prime Minister we've discussed, by the British Empire. His grandfather was the Governor of Madras in India in William's youth. Thomas Pitt was the boy that once smuggled out a legendary diamond. We'll talk about that in a bit.

Joe: The Pitt fortune was made in India, and we can't talk about William Pitt without looking at the two men that shaped him. And to talk about them, you have to talk about India. So let's start there.

Joe: India had been known to Europeans as a distant land in the East for a very, very long time. India is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Esther. The Roman Empire had contact with India, but it wasn't until the 1498 voyage of Vasco da Gama for the Portuguese that any Europeans actually made it there by sea.

Abram: Had any Europeans even gone there? Yeah, I think so. But they hadn't like made it official.

Joe: Well, the point was that the—

Abram: Or like they had gone to maybe like Persia and had heard about going a bit further and getting to India or something.

Joe: Well, that's exactly it. So the Europeans were aware of India through the trade routes, but the trade routes were controlled by Persia. And at this point in our story, of course, remember that the Christians and the Muslims don't exactly get along. So really, if they wanted to do good trading with India, they needed to find a way there by water.

Joe: And I think you have a very good point, though, that India has been at the crossroads of the world for thousands of years with trade routes from India to Persia to China. By some metrics at this point in our story, India was the richest country in the world. They had treasure fleets that more than rivaled the European ones and technology that was at par with both the Western world and the Eastern world.

Joe: There were a lot of challenges. India wasn't really a single country but a collection of often warring states, and by this point there was a very constant strain because the Muslim Sultanates were sort of pushing in from the west. The Hindu kingdoms had to push back in the east.

Joe: And it's all oversimplified, but just don't think of it like the Europeans discovered India. The Europeans had known about India for a long time and were just trying to find a better way to get there. Europe is going to eventually come to colonize India, but the colonization that's going to happen there is going to be very different than the way it is in the Americas and Australia and pretty much all the other places where we think about colonies.

Joe: So India is a real country in a very European sense. They didn't have Christianity. They didn't have everything that Europeans cared about, but they did have an awful lot of money. And for the most part, Europe considered them like on that level.

Abram: So they consider India kind of like the Holy Roman Empire of like a bunch of tiny little thingies. You know, I bet something like that.

Joe: Abram, do you know where in India the Portuguese settled first?

Abram: No. I know they settled. I don't know where.

Joe: Portuguese captured the city of Goa on the west coast in 1510. And that was really the start of the European conquest of the area. At that moment, Goa had been controlled by a Muslim Bijapur Sultanate, and it was being contested by the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire just to the east. And the Portuguese actually played them off of each other like a fiddle. Using the rivalries between Hindu privateers and the Muslim occupiers in order to basically take control of the city. And the British are going to learn those tricks pretty well.

Joe: The English were slow to respond to the mercantile threat, but they did get there eventually, and they formed the East India Company in 1600, and they set off to do their own voyages to India.

Joe: Britain's strategy for getting the very, very riches of India out of India and into Britain was by using for-profit companies sponsored by the crown. The American colonies, Abram, are actually founded by for-profit companies like the Plymouth Company and the Virginia Company, but they didn't stay for-profit and they ended up being more colonization ideals. But in India, it never stopped being like a profit motive, and it was just for many, many decades a matter of the British establishing trading posts across India rather than Britain really taking control over India by itself.

Joe: By the time the English arrived, much of southern and central India was controlled by the Mughal Empire, which was an Islamic kingdom that actually had a lot of Turkish and Persian culture mixed in. And this empire caused a lot of the internal strife that made it easy for Britain to kind of— I don't want to say conquer, but it made it easy for Britain to sort of wedge their way in. There were Muslim elites ruling over a majority Hindu population. So the locals were always happy, at least at some level, for the British to take over, put Hindus in charge, at least ostensibly.

Joe: The first British trading post was established at a place called Surat on the west coast in 1608. But for our story, we care about the 1639 purchase of a village on the east coast called Madraspatnam, and it's later going to be called Madras. But today it is called Chennai. Have you heard of Chennai?

Abram: Yes, it's in southern India. It's in southern India. It's in southern India. Okay.

Joe: Is that all you know? That's good. So it's probably easiest to imagine this as like two parallel governments. The Europeans own the trading centers and sometimes warred on each other, but officially the land was leased from Indian governments. The Indian governments also were warring on each other. The two were overlapping, but they were also weirdly separate. And I don't think I can explain India politics well enough for this podcast to get into it in deep. But for the British, just remember, profit was the key.

Joe: Now fast forward to 1673. I want you to picture a 21-year-old merchant adventurer traveling to India for the first time on an East India Company boat. His family isn't wealthy. His father just died, but he's the second son, so he doesn't get a lot of money out of that. If he's going to make something of his life, he's going to have to make something on his own. And that person is Thomas Pitt, William Pitt's grandfather.

Joe: And although he's traveling on an East India Company ship, he is not the kind of guy that follows the rules. As soon as he arrives in India— he arrived at a place called Balasore in the northeast of the country— he starts signing his own trading deals. He works in competition against the East India Company that he was supposedly working for. How did he do it? I don't know. He must have had some investment money, but I don't really get it.

Joe: By 1675, Thomas was such a nuisance that the East India Company ordered him to be arrested and returned to London.

Joe: But this— this is amazing. This guy is weird. In his just one year in India, he managed to become good friends with the British leader of Balasore— he's a guy named Richard Edwards— the British leader of Bengal, Mattias Vincent. And they were cousins despite their different last names. So I guess it's possible one introduced him to the other.

Joe: So while the East India Company wanted Thomas Pitt to be arrested, he was best friends with the two leaders in the area. And they were entertaining him at their house and throwing parties that he was invited to instead of arresting him.

Joe: And for our story, they also made a very important deal with him. They introduced him to their niece. I really need to look at a family tree. Two cousins, they share a niece. I don't get it. Her name was Jane Innes, and she was in India with them. She met Thomas. They were married. And so he is now— wow— again, should be arrested and tossed out of India— the brother-in-law to two of the leaders of British India. And Jane was actually from a prominent Scottish family. She's a descendant of the Scottish King James V.

Abram: James, James, James, James, James, Mary, Queen of Scots, James.

Joe: Yes. The fifth of those Jameses was him. But before Mary.

Joe: So with the help of his wife and friends, Thomas built a trading empire between 1675 and 1681, and ships under his employ traveled to Persia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and they started a family together. By 1680, they had Robert Pitt, and that young family decided, hey, let's return to London. Yeah, he was a wanted man, but he'd deal with that when he got there.

Joe: Back in London a number of months later, because it took a long time, he started his own trading company. He was a wanted man. Yes. The East India Company still tried to get him arrested, and a judgment was enacted against him that he was not permitted to leave England again. But, you know, Thomas was not the type to ever let the rules get in the way. Do you know what he did?

Abram: Left England immediately.

Joe: Yes. He took his fastest ship and got the heck out of England. Britain dispatched a letter to India saying, as soon as this guy arrives in India, arrest him. He beat the letter by 11 days. So he had enough time to get resources and leave. He was supposed to be arrested. They got a judgment that said he wasn't allowed to leave the country. He immediately jumped on a ship. Britain sent their fastest ships to India after him, and he beat them by 11 days.

Abram: And then what happened? Did he get arrested after 11 days?

Joe: Well, he landed in Balasore July 6th, 1682. He announced he was starting a new company. He hired Portuguese, mixed-race, and Indian soldiers. He even set himself up in a big house. And he basically spent the next year just staying a little bit ahead of the law and making money. Because it didn't matter how much they wanted to arrest him. He kept just escaping, or he kept bribing the right people. He was making a lot of money and just getting away with it.

Joe: In February 1683, you know what Thomas decided he wanted to do? Go back to London.

Abram: He went back to London.

Joe: What do you want to guess what happened when he got there?

Abram: Arrested. He got arrested.

Joe: Why did he go back? Why?

Abram: Why?

Joe: But, but, but get this. He was arrested. And so they were going to put him on trial. But you can post a bond in order to stay out of jail while you are waiting for your trial, right? He had to post a £20,000 bond, which is many, many millions of dollars today. But he had it.

Abram: What?

Joe: He's like, "Sure, arrest me. I've posted bond. I'm just gonna keep going." So while he's in London, this trial is taking years to happen. He invests his fortune. He buys property in Cornwall. He buys up most of Old Sarum. He buys up a lot of places.

Joe: And when the trial's over in 1686, despite the fact that he had done all these illegal things, you know how much he was fined?

Abram: 1 pound.

Joe: Close. He was fined 1,000 pounds. He negotiated it down to 400 pounds. And then William III pardons him down to—

Abram: Nothing. Nothing.

Joe: So when did he leave for the first time?

Abram: So when did he leave for the first time?

Joe: He left for the first time in 1673. So he has basically been a merchant working against the British. He's pardoned in 1686. And he's 33 at the time. So what does Thomas do? He buys himself a seat in Parliament. He buys himself Old Sarum.

Abram: Old Sarum got a new tanny, so he don't need to swim in there. Places that once existed but now are somewhat empty. We're gonna love— jump all the seats and give the two a friend. The Old Sarum got a new tiny suit, understand that, Harley? Very good. I think we've found the running gag.

Joe: We'll figure something out. So the point is, he is now living in England. He bought himself a seat in Parliament. He is sitting on a committee that is considering complaints against the East India Company.

Joe: When the Nine Years' War breaks out against France, he outfits a privateer to go try to sink some ships. He succeeded a little bit, but he only broke even because the ship got sunk. He starts an American trading company and he gets the rights to compete against Hudson's Bay Company around Labrador. But a lot of these activities are going nowhere, right? Thomas is really a man of India. He is really good at India and doesn't seem to be as successful with some of these other ventures.

Joe: So in 1693, he gets bored of London and moves to India, and he goes back to India with his 13-year-old son.

Abram: His 13-year-old son.

Joe: That's Robert, who is William's dad. So this time he goes back to India. What do you think happens when he gets there?

Abram: Arrested?

Joe: No, because this time the East India Company had given up and they decided that fighting against Thomas Pitt wasn't worth it. So do you know what they did?

Abram: Gave him £1 million.

Joe: They hired him. And not just hiring him. They made him the Governor of Madras, which was a province of British India. Officially, he was called the President of Fort St. George, but every source calls him the Governor of Madras.

Joe: Can I see a map?

Abram: Yeah, let me find a map.

Joe: But remember, this was a British map, and there were still Indian kingdoms underneath. He was only officially responsible for about 200 Europeans and a territory that was only a tenth of a square mile. But he had a political role over about 300,000 local Indian citizens. So this map is about 100 years later.

Abram: But is it about the same?

Joe: But it's the same region. So it just gives you an idea of what the territory looked like. Some of the exact details might differ slightly. I'll put this up on our BlueSky.

Joe: But as you can see, Madras is there, which is eventually going to be Chennai. So later historians, Abram, are going to call this the "Golden Age of Madras" because of Pitt's government, political savvy, and the fact that he pushed out rival claimants, including another company that called itself East India Company. He also dealt with the locals and waged some wars, and he did some stuff. I don't really know that I would want to call any aspect of the British occupation a golden age, but the point was that he—

Abram: When did he die then, or when did he stop?

Joe: We'll get to when he stopped in a minute because that's very much part of our story. So this is when Thomas Pitt had his most famous adventure.

Joe: Now, I kind of think that Thomas Pitt reminds me a little bit of Scrooge McDuck from DuckTales. Do you remember DuckTales?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: And like, he had all these adventures. He always stayed ahead of the law. He started all these business ventures, like he made friends with the king. He's really like this super businessman.

Joe: And when he was governor, a 400-plus-carat diamond was smuggled out of the Kollur Mine by a worker who tried to buy his freedom, but he was killed for his trouble. And the diamond somehow made it into Pitt's hands. So Thomas bought the diamond, and then he smuggled the diamond out of India by hiding it in his son Robert's boot. Like, he hollowed out a portion of his son's boot, hid the diamond in the boot, and put his son on a boat back to London.

Abram: Oh. What's the diamond thing called?

Joe: Well, this is called the Pitt Diamond at the time, and it's not going to be called the Pitt Diamond forever. In fact, I'll spoil a little bit. It is now one of the crown jewels of—

Abram: I thought it was France.

Joe: Oh, we'll get there. So you'll notice that he had Robert, right, do the dangerous part of actually hiding the diamond in his shoes. This whole story might be made up, but the point is that Thomas benefited from his position. He managed to buy the diamond.

Abram: But wait, why did he have to do it illegally? Why? Why was it bad if it was under his possession? Couldn't he say, "It's now legal for me to have it," or something?

Joe: I think the problem is that nobody was exactly sure how he got this diamond. So one of the stories is that he bought it off a merchant who bought it off of a slave. Another story is that somebody looted a Hindu temple somewhere and that they found this gigantic diamond. Thomas didn't really want the truth of how he got the diamond necessarily to get out, and he didn't want the people of India to realize that he had just bought and then extricated it to London, one of the greatest treasures of India, like this gigantic diamond that's worth millions and millions and millions of dollars.

Joe: Once in England, it's going to take years to sell the diamond. Just cutting it and polishing it to be ready for sale is going to take till 1706, and it'll be years later before they can find anybody rich enough to actually buy it. Like, this diamond is so big, you just can't imagine how expensive it is.

Joe: Back in London, Robert's going to become the local partner to his father in India. He's going to act as his agent and businessman. But the two of them were strained, as Thomas Pitt's going to complain, also a little bit like Scrooge McDuck, that every time that Robert spent even a penny, Thomas is going to get upset. "Do not let any of my money lie idle or unemployed," he wrote.

Abram: Money has jobs. I'm a million dollars and I work at a shop. I am a nickel and I work at the grocery store. I'm a quarter and I work at the local factory. And I'm a dime. I work in a random office a few towns away.

Joe: You're weird. And I love you.

Abram: I made a song out of it. Can I continue?

Joe: Oh yeah. So Thomas also divorced his wife at this time because he heard that she might have been cheating on him. And then he wrote, quote, "I make no distinction between women that are reputed ill and such that are actually so." That doesn't really seem fair to me. And actually, Thomas, honestly, he's this adventure-y, money-making guy, but I don't think he's a nice guy.

Abram: No.

Joe: In 1704, Robert Pitt married a woman named Harriet Villiers, the daughter of Katherine FitzGerald, the Viscountess Grandison.

Abram: Wait, so is this guy now 50 years old?

Joe: Thomas is now 50, but we're switching from Thomas to Robert because he just married the daughter of the Viscountess Grandison, and she was from a prominent Irish family, and she helped the Pitts marry up because now William Pitt has both Scottish and Irish prominent families in his background.

Joe: Robert entered Parliament and has his first son in 1705, and we'll talk a little bit more about his career soon, but I want to get to one important event in his life.

Joe: William Pitt, Robert's second son, was born November 15th, 1708, just after 8 AM. Robert summarized the event in a letter to his father, saying, quote, "My wife intended to have written to you this day, but early in the morning was suddenly prevented by the birth of another son. We now have two boys and two girls."

Joe: That's an understatement if I ever heard one. It's like, oh, by the way, my wife was going to write to you today, but she accidentally had a baby.

Abram: I mean, it was kind of a weird sentence to say.

Joe: It is weird and kind of a sentence no one would say anymore. That is true.

Silver Spoons

Joe: William Pitt was born to a family that had broken out on the national and even international stage, but it was also very much a work in progress. They hadn't sold the diamond yet. And so really all they had in their house was a very expensive paperweight that a lot of people would want to steal. I hope they kept it in a bank or something.

Joe: Both his father and grandfather at this point had been MPs, and the family owned the seats at Old Sarum. So often considered, as you know, the most corrupt seats in Britain, which we've written a song about.

Abram: Old Sarum got a new tanny, so don't you shame them. Places that once existed now are somewhat empty. They can knock off all the seats and give them to a friendly— the Old Sarum gets a new Tennyson down his throat daily.

Joe: On his mother's side, the family had deep connections to Ireland, while his grandfather and uncle on that side had both been Irish MPs. And there's a twisty little tale that we don't have time to get into where his grandmother was made Viscountess Grandison in her own right, even though her nephew, William's uncle, was already Viscount Grandison. It's complex. We don't have time.

Joe: Adding up all of his points, William Pitt gets 9.6 silver spoons, which places him on par with George Grenville. They were both families that were on their way up, with uncles and cousins that were higher on the social rankings than them, but very, very far from some of our more highborn— like Compton.

Abram: Like Compton. Yeah.

Joe: And as I said before, William was the second son. Thomas Pitt, named for his grandfather, was the first son of Robert Pitt, and he's gonna be the heir to the Pitt fortune.

Abram: Wow.

Joe: William has an older sister Harriet and four younger ones: Catherine, Ann, Lucy, and Elizabeth.

Abram: And who's the fourth? Catherine, Ann, Lucy, Elizabeth.

Joe: I thought Ann was Ann.

Abram: Oh, that makes sense.

Joe: Some sources list a Mary, but I can't figure out which— like, you know, the genealogies at this point are kind of crazy and it's the 1700s. The unimportant members of the family are not documented well.

Joe: When William was born, the family was in disarray. His grandfather Thomas— we're going to start calling him Governor Pitt so you know it's not his brother Thomas— was still in India, but he was a passionate Whig and he was a supporter of the Hanoverians.

Abram: So wait, how old's that guy, the adventure guy who kept escaping jail?

Joe: How old is Governor Pitt at this point? Governor Pitt was born in 1653.

Abram: So that means he's 55.

Joe: You are very fast at that.

Abram: How is he still alive? He's only 55.

Joe: That's not old.

Abram: Oh, yeah.

Joe: So the point is, his grandfather is a passionate Whig supporter. Love the Hanoverians. But his father Robert, guess what his father Robert was?

Abram: Tory. He's a Tory. Tory, Tory, Tory, Tory, Tory.

Joe: And what is worse than a Tory?

Abram: Nothing.

Joe: A very special kind of Tory.

Abram: A John Stuart.

Joe: No. Robert, William's father, is a Jacobite! And we even have letters from Governor Pitt accusing his son of, quote, "trying to put a French kickshaw upon the throne again."

Joe: But Governor Pitt was very far away, and he depended on his son to manage his family affairs in London and to sell that Pitt Diamond. So of course, there was little he could do about his son's flirtations with treason. And William was at this point way too young to understand.

Joe: And actually, it's possible that Robert's flirtations with the Tories are connected to the diamond also, because he tried to sell the diamond to Parliament in 1708 to be used as one of the crown jewels of Britain. But they said no. And so if he were to help a Jacobite king get on the throne, we assume that they would buy the diamond from him.

Joe: William's early life was spent at a mansion named Mawarden Court in Salisbury. It's nice. I have a painting of it, but it's nowhere near as crazy as some of the other nice mansions and castles we've seen in our other episodes.

Abram: Like what?

Joe: Like Wentworth Woodhouse, the house that was so long you needed a carriage to ride from one end of it to the other.

Joe: And although Governor Pitt and his son probably disagreed on a lot of stuff, the governor wanted Pitt to have a nice place to live and a nice place to raise his family. But in 1709, Governor Pitt was replaced as the Governor of Madras, and then he came home. And after a slow and scenic trip around Africa, he arrived back in London in 1710. The family was not exactly united, but they were in one place.

Jacobites Rising and Falling

Joe: "Not exactly united, but they were all in one place" is kind of a line that we could use for the whole country in 1715, because Britain was a nation divided by the key question of who was fit to rule over them. Abram, do you remember what was going on then?

Abram: Royal family issues. Who's going to rule?

Joe: Well, yes. So it's been a while since we talked about this, but from 1711 to 1714, Britain was led by a Tory government under Queen Anne. And many members of that government wanted Anne to not be followed by one of those weird German princes, but rather by the previous ruling family, the Stuarts. And many, of course, across Britain felt the same way, especially those with Catholic sympathies, and especially the Scottish, for whom the Stuarts had been their monarchs for generations longer than the English.

Joe: And Robert Pitt, William's father, was a Jacobite. He wanted to bring the Stuarts back.

Joe: When George I came to the throne, Jacobite hopes seemed to have been dashed, right? But this actually only led to widespread violence as the legitimate routes to change went away and the only routes to bring a Stuart on the throne now involved rioting and kicking George back out again.

Joe: So Britain was divided. The Pitt family was divided. But Thomas, Governor Pitt, knew that if the Hanoverians won, which they most likely would win, anybody that was backing the Jacobite cause would be in for a heap of trouble. And so he was really pushing his son Robert in order to not publicly support the Jacobites so much.

Joe: They had screaming matches at their house in Pall Mall and some of their other houses between Thomas and Robert, Jacobite versus Hanoverian. And at the end, Robert accepted a job in Prince George's household. That's the future George II. Robert funded a militia company in Dorset to help fight against the Jacobites.

Joe: But in 1715, a close friend of Robert Pitt named Edward Harvey was arrested and all of his papers were taken. And among those papers, almost certainly, were letters from Robert implicating him in the Jacobite plot.

Joe: We know that Robert was still in contact with the Jacobite leaders at this point, and he had actually delivered a secret letter to the Duke of Ormond to encourage him to flee to France. You're going to be arrested. Leave quickly.

Joe: The family held their breath. William Pitt was probably too young to understand, but if they were found to be a Jacobite clan, they could lose their fortune. They could lose their future.

Abram: The diamond.

Joe: Well, they could lose that too. But the Jacobites were defeated at the Battle of Preston. We talked about that in Henry Pelham's episode. It was a long time ago. And suddenly the heat was off. The Pitt family had survived, but barely.

Making the Family Fortune

Joe: With the Jacobite threat gone, the Pitt family had a stroke of luck because they found a buyer for the Pitt Diamond. The French government. It's an ironic twist that the largest diamond found in British India is going to be part of the French Crown Jewels, not the British ones. But Governor Pitt was more interested in the money than he was in the optics of the situation or patriotism. And Parliament had already refused. So it's not like he didn't offer it to them first.

Joe: There is a funny story associated with this, probably the last of our Governor Pitt stories. Governor Pitt took the diamond to Calais to be looked at by a jeweler before the sale. And if you like, you can imagine that there's an 8-year-old William Pitt coming with him, but he probably wasn't really there.

Joe: The jeweler hemmed and hawed. Claiming, you know, this is a lower quality than you tell me. I mean, it's a big diamond, but it's not so good. You know what Thomas did?

Abram: What?

Joe: Thomas told the jeweler that he would be able to see that gem a bit more clearly if he looked in the light by the window. So the jeweler picks up the diamond, walks over to the window, and there he found a small pouch filled with coins. He pocketed the money. He returned to Thomas and agreed that yes, in fact, the light was a lot better by the window and the diamond looks a lot better now.

Abram: Can we just— a bit more money?

Joe: It was a bribe. It might not even be true. The British might be attempting to discredit the diamond later because it's going to be a part of the French Crown Jewels. But it does seem like something Governor Pitt would do.

Joe: In 1717, the diamond was officially sold to the Duke of Orleans, who was the regent to the King of France, who at the time was only 7 years old. Who was king of France in 1717? Do you know?

Abram: Louis XV.

Joe: I think that's true. Yep. I keep asking you because I keep expecting you not to know, but you always know. Louis XV. How do you do this?

Abram: Hmm. I don't know who was king of France in 1051.

Joe: Well, that's good. When you don't know something.

Joe: The point is, the Duke of Orleans buys the diamond for £135,000. Like a king's ransom. Tens, many millions of dollars today. Now the Duke will end up stiffing Thomas on a little bit of it. And depending on which source you read, either Thomas only got paid for 80% or he only got paid for 30%. And I don't know. But the point is, it's still a massive profit.

Joe: In all this time, Thomas— Governor Pitt— was appointed the Governor of Jamaica.

Abram: So he's back to being a governor.

Joe: Yes, but he never actually made it to Jamaica because he wanted to spend time closing the sale of his diamond, and then he died. So after like a year of being Governor of Jamaica but not actually going to Jamaica, they eventually just appointed someone else. But I thought it was kind of cool that he almost governed a territory in both the West and the East Indies.

Joe: So I don't want to go into tremendous detail because William was the second son of Robert Pitt, and he's not actually going to get any of that money. But Governor Pitt's going to invest it all very quickly. He's going to buy even more property, and he's going to pay for the young William Pitt's education. Because in 1719, at age ten, William Pitt joined all those other high-ranking children we've talked about by both him and his brother being enrolled in Eton.

Life at Eton

Joe: So almost all the Prime Ministers, most that we've covered so far, have attended Eton. It was the boarding school for the elites, but it was also a difficult place filled with social stratification and bullying. It was a difficult place to go, and this was a really bad period for children there.

Abram: Why?

Joe: Because the staff ignored the bullying.

Abram: Why did they ignore it?

Joe: You know, I don't know. They just considered it part of the culture.

Joe: So surviving and thriving in that type of environment was not something that everyone did. And quite frankly, William Pitt didn't really do well. Some historians today claim that the intense stress of the school contributed to his illnesses and gout that he would suffer from the rest of his life. But honestly, both his father and his grandfather had similar illnesses, so it's more likely to be hereditary than stress.

Joe: It's not all bad for young William, though. He met his lifelong best friend— maybe not lifelong. I didn't check. Maybe they fought later— George Lyttelton. That's who he saw earlier. He wrote him that poem. He sat next to him in our Picture This.

Joe: He's also gonna meet Henry Fox.

Abram: He's the fox.

Joe: Well, we've seen Henry Fox a bunch of times before, but—

Abram: And we always say that he's the fox. Yeah.

Joe: But there's actually gonna be a lot of animosity between the Fox and the Pitt families. But actually, most of that's going to be in William Pitt the Younger's episode because Henry Fox's son becomes William Pitt's son's greatest enemy. We'll get there later.

Joe: On some weekends, William would go with Governor Pitt, his grandfather, along with his, quote, "comrogues"— Governor Pitt called his gaggle of friends his comrogues— and take them to his estate for very long extended playdates at Swallowfield. Governor Pitt and William's father Robert are increasingly not going to get along, but Governor Pitt always seems to like his grandson. They always have a great time, and it seems like his grandson is taking more after his grandfather than he did his father.

Joe: Because of William's gout, by age 14, he's no longer able to play sports and frequently could not always get up to the other mischief that kids got into. Now, some of this might not be true because in another book it says he was one of the first Prime Ministers to ever play cricket. But William Pitt would study sometimes to excess just to work through the boredom.

Abram: Maybe he played cricket when he was like 10.

Joe: Maybe. I think William exaggerated some of this a bit when he told this later in life, but he was a studious kid. He didn't enjoy sports, and I think we would just call him a bit nerdy today. I like nerds. Do you like nerds, Abram?

Abram: The candy?

Joe: Yep. Well, I'm a nerd, so—

Abram: You're a candy? You're a candy, you're a candy. Can I please eat you? You're a candy, you're a candy. You are yummy too.

Joe: You and the songs today. That's the running gag.

Abram: I don't know if I like that running gag.

Joe: Why?

Joe: In his teens, William had some sort of fainting spell where he fell and had to be taken to a doctor by carriage. Two surgeons attended him and gave him a medical bill of like £4 4 shillings or about $1,200 today. He made a full recovery, but William Pitt's actually gonna be pretty sickly throughout his entire life.

Abram: Aww.

Joe: We don't have report cards if they even had such a thing back then, but his tutor William Burchett wrote this letter to William's father in 1723. He said, quote, "Your younger son has made great progress since coming here. Indeed, I was never concerned of a young gentleman of so good abilities and at the same time, so good a disposition."

Joe: In contrast, Burchett had nothing good to say about William's older brother Thomas. He was the opposite of William. He wasn't studious, he struggled to keep up in school, and he wasn't always a good behavior person.

Joe: But in April 1726, William Pitt received word his grandfather, Governor Pitt, had passed away. How old was he in 1726?

Abram: 73.

Joe: William Pitt graduated from Eton a few months later, not really knowing what to do with his life. He gave himself six months' break before entering Trinity College in Oxford. His father wanted him to join the church, but William was quickly developing other ideas.

College Days

Joe: With his father as head of the family and inheritor of his grandfather's fortune, William's financial situation seemed to have changed drastically. His father and grandfather had invested in the South Sea Company, and remember what happened to them?

Abram: Oh, it crashed.

Joe: But that was Robert Walpole's episode. I've not been able to see how much money they lost, but the family fortune became less liquid at this point. They had plenty of property and more gas, but no cash.

Abram: What happened to their cash?

Joe: William struggled to pay for school. His father lorded over every cent and challenged every expense. Even as other students at Oxford are hiring their own servants, William struggled to even pay his laundry bill. It's like his dad saying, "Can't you just wear those pants again? They hardly smell at all."

Abram: That's funny.

Joe: I'm making a joke of it, but we'll see in letters at the time that William Pitt seemed actively afraid of his father. He wrote, quote, "I am ashamed to send you the following account without first making great apologies for not executing your commands sooner." Those commands, by the way, were to spend less money. Spend less money!

Joe: Just like at Eton, William Pitt was a studious person who suffered tremendously from gout and other ailments. William's father was also suffering, and he spent a significant amount of time at Bath. And actually, in May 1727, he died.

Abram: His father?

Joe: Yep. So both now, his father and his grandfather died.

Abram: How old was his father?

Joe: Oh, he died in 1727. Tell me when he was born, and I'll calculate. Robert Pitt was born in 1680.

Abram: So he was 47. Yeah.

Joe: I don't like people dying at 47.

Abram: Why? Why do you think, Abram? Because you're almost 47.

Joe: The family fortune passed—

Abram: Yeah, you are almost 47, which means if you were him, you'd not survive much longer.

Joe: Thank you for reminding me.

Joe: The family fortune passed to William's older brother, except for £100 a year that he was given as an allowance. William and his brother actually didn't get along very well. But it seems like he was at least continuing his father's support. But £100 was maybe a lot of money for some, but not enough for school.

Joe: We do get one funny story from his time at Oxford, however. After the death of George I in 1727, students were invited to participate in a poetry competition for the best poem in honor of their departed king. The poems had to be written in Latin, and in hexameter. I don't even know what hexameter is, but it sounds like a complicated rhyming system.

Joe: So for all that we hear about how great William Pitt is, he was apparently a dreadful poet, although his classmates must have done worse because he supposedly came second. I found the poem, but I haven't taken Latin since the 7th grade and I would butcher it, so I'm not going to read it. I looked at a translation. It looked okay.

Joe: But shortly after this competition, William dropped out of college. We don't have a great reason why, but there are a couple theories. Are you ready?

Abram: Hehe.

Joe: First, it could have been the money. With his father dead and his older brother now in charge, he was an outsider. A second son was expected to make his own way in the world, just like his grandfather had done by going to India. And Thomas was also really bad with money, and so maybe there wasn't a lot to go around.

Joe: Second, we know at that point that Oxford was a bastion of Toryism, which may have been one of the reasons why Robert, William's dad, wanted him to go there. But William took after his grandfather. He was a Whig and a Hanoverian, and so he might have felt uncomfortable at Oxford.

Joe: And my third theory— are you ready?

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: He dropped out because he lost the poetry slam. Okay, that one's probably not true.

Joe: William picked up the pieces, went to a university in Utrecht. Do you know where that is?

Abram: Netherlands.

Joe: And this was a common place for middle-class Englishmen to study and much cheaper than Oxford. We know that he was very ill during the crossing of the Channel. He didn't have his grandfather's sea legs, and maybe that's why he didn't journey to the continent all that often when he was an adult.

Joe: But by 1730, he dropped out of there as well, and he was basically living on the couch at his brother's estate of Boconnoc in Cornwall. His brother claimed that he could stay as long as he needed, but he was 22. And, well, he really needed to find a career. And so he chose the military.

Cornet of Horse

Joe: Abram, you remember William Pitt's friend for life, right? His best friend, George Lyttelton.

Abram: Yep.

Joe: So George was the nephew of somebody that you already know. Was it— Richard Temple? The Viscount Cobham.

Abram: Oh, they're back.

Joe: Yes, this is the same Cobham from our episode about George Grenville. William knew him through his relationship with Lyttelton, but Cobham was already getting involved in Whig politics. And so I think the two had a lot to talk about.

Joe: But Cobham wasn't just the leader of the Cubs, Abram. He was also the colonel of something called the King's Own Regiment of Horse, sometimes called Cobham's Regiment or Cobham's Horse. That was a cavalry unit in the British military. Do you know what cavalry is, Abram?

Abram: The foot people?

Joe: No, the horse people.

Abram: Oh.

Joe: The knights on the chessboard, not the pawns on the chessboard.

Abram: Okay, so keep on going with the chess references.

Joe: So William, you probably noticed, was a bit of a nerd as well as an aristocrat. He was in no shape or health to ride horses into battle himself. So what did he have to do? He had to become an officer. And at this time, you didn't become an officer because you were qualified or because you did good in school.

Abram: You just randomly became one?

Joe: No, you bought your way in. And in this case, the cost to become a cornet is £1,000.

Abram: What, to become a piece of corn?

Joe: No, a cornet. A cornet is the lowest rank in a British cavalry unit at this point in the story. So Uncle Cobham— he's not William Pitt's uncle, but everyone calls him Uncle Cobham anyway— Uncle Cobham was a colonel. Underneath him were captains. Under the captains were lieutenants, and under lieutenants were the cornets. So William Pitt was very, very low in the rankings of this unit, but that's because he didn't have so much money. And by the way, one source said £1,000, another source said £3,000. I don't know the exact amount of money. The point about the money is that it's a lot. So even though this wasn't like a prestigious role, it still costs a lot of money and Pitt couldn't afford it. So how did he get that job? Guess who helped him?

Abram: George Lyttelton.

Joe: No.

Abram: George Grenville.

Joe: No.

Abram: George Harrison.

Joe: No. Robert Walpole.

Abram: Oh.

Joe: So Robert Walpole really didn't care at all about William Pitt, but he wanted Thomas Pitt, who was also an MP, on his side. And so in order for Walpole to get in Thomas Pitt's good graces— remember that's William's brother— Robert Walpole offered to pay for William's cornetcy. Little did he know that he was promoting a man who would one day be his greatest enemy.

Joe: So with Walpole's surprise help, William had a job, and the job was actually very, very boring. His regiment was stationed at Northampton. His medical condition still meant that he wasn't doing all that much, and the regiment really didn't have work to do.

Joe: William Pitt would later claim that he spent that time reading every military book he could find. But his letters at the time actually paint a little bit of a different picture. He wrote, quote, "My head is not settled enough to study, nor my heart light enough to find amusement in doing nothing." It's like, I'm having trouble studying, but I also don't want to just be bored. What should I do?

Joe: And we don't know what he's going to do.

Abram: What?

Joe: So while Walpole successfully kept England out of the War of Polish Succession, a very bored William Pitt took an 8-month vacation. And finally, remember, what do all of the nobles do before they go to college?

Abram: World tour.

Joe: A Grand Tour. And so this is his mini Grand Tour. He didn't really have enough money for a big one, but he basically took 8 months to tour France and Switzerland. And he writes to his sister Ann during this period a lot because they're very close and she is the only family that he really has that he enjoys talking to. At least at this point in the story.

Joe: And while in France, William is introduced to a young woman in the Besançon region. He doesn't name this woman in his letters home, but William is in love.

Abram: William is in love. He found someone in eastern France to fall in love with, to fall in love with, to fall in love with. In eastern France.

Joe: Abram, I like your songs. Yeah. But you go on a little bit too long.

Abram: Hey, the walrus is coming after you.

Joe: I am sure the walrus is. Is it really in eastern France?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: I should trust you on this. Should I check?

Abram: Yep.

Joe: Eastern France. Geez, how did you know that?

Abram: I'm very smart.

Joe: There. I should learn to never underestimate your geography abilities. Because I should have looked it up, to be honest, but I clearly didn't.

Joe: Anyway, William is in love, but it is with profound regret that he has to tear himself away from her.

Abram: It is very sad for him. Him. Hell. Bye-bye, love. I'll see you hopefully again. Bye-bye. That was funny for a while. Why did it stop being funny?

Joe: Sometimes a joke works for one round.

Abram: It doesn't work for four. How dare you insult my jokes.

Joe: All right, William Pitt writes to his sister, and he always writes in French at this point because he's practicing his French. And I'm not going to read the French, but he writes to his sister with some regret that, quote, "She has neither title nor grand name to impress, and that's the devil." If only she was rich, then he could marry her, but he can't marry her. Doesn't matter how much he loves her. Kind of sucks.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: While he was having this difficult breakup, his sponsor, Viscount Cobham, was having a breakup of his own. This is the moment in our story that we've discussed before where Walpole tries to get the Excise Tax passed. Cobham goes against Walpole. It fractures the Whigs. And in punishment, Walpole has George II rip Cobham's cavalry unit off of him. So when William returns from France, he's gonna have a different boss and someone he doesn't have any connections with.

Joe: But that does not mean that Cobham was forgotten. To the contrary, Cobham is getting even. You remember how this worked in Grenville's episode. He's building an army of MPs that were going to fight against Walpole. George Lyttelton was one of these MPs, as was William's brother Thomas. This group, of course, is going to be known as Cobham's Cubs.

Joe: But Cobham knew William well, and it was easy to see that Thomas needed to get his brother in this club. And they had a bit of a mischance for this in 1734, where Thomas made a last-minute substitution and didn't give the seat to his brother. But in February 1735, William Pitt was officially the MP from Old Sarum.

Abram: Old Sarum got a new tony, so don't offend him early.

Joe: So William Pitt is still technically in the military, but he's now also a Cub. And I guess they allowed military people to go attend Parliament when they weren't otherwise occupied. So that's what he did.

Joe: And so this is pretty much where our Picture This takes place at the beginning of our episode. One year after taking his seat for the first time, Pitt finally gives his first speech in Parliament, and that is the very famous speech where he is theoretically complimenting Prince Frederick on his marriage, but he's in fact ripping Walpole and Walpole's government and George II, ripping them apart in the nicest possible words you could ever use.

Joe: And Walpole is quoted after this as simply saying, quote, "We must muzzle this terrible cornet of horse."

Abram: It's sad that none of the 502 horses are involved.

Joe: No, those horses belong to Rockingham. He's like 5. That's like 20-plus years in the future from this point in the story.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: So just like Walpole removed Cobham's command of the regiment, Walpole removed Pitt's cornetcy. And just like that—

Abram: There goes his military career. There goes. Down the drain, down the drain, there it goes.

Joe: Right. Just like that, William Pitt was unemployed. But fortunately, he made a bunch of new friends.

The Prince and the Commoner

Joe: One of these new friends was Prince Frederick, the next in line to the British throne. Being friends with the future king? That's a good friend to have.

Joe: But as you remember, Frederick and King George hated each other. Frederick had been exiled to Hanover as a boy and had never forgiven his father. And no sooner did he arrive in England in 1728 than Frederick turned against George and against Robert Walpole and against their government. And under his wing, the opposition Whigs were supported and encouraged. And because he was the crown prince, nobody could see supporting him as being against the monarchy itself, right? He could create a safe space for opposition because he would be king someday.

Joe: By 1737, the relationship between Frederick and his parents was dangerously toxic. When his wife, Princess Augusta, became pregnant, Frederick tried to hide it as long as he could. He lied about her due date. And when she went into labor unexpectedly in July 1737, he forced his wife out into a carriage so that she could deliver the child away from her future grandparents.

Joe: It was crazy and dangerous to take a woman in labor onto the bumpy London cobblestones, but he did. And it's even more dangerous because the kid would potentially be right next in line for the throne after Frederick.

Joe: So King George was so incredibly angry that he actually kicked Frederick out of the Palace of St. James. He was forced to move into a smaller mansion, right? It's not a super mansion, it's only a really big mansion. And you've heard of that. That's called Leicester House.

Abram: Oh yeah.

Joe: But when setting up his new household in exile across London, Frederick thought back to that dashing young parliamentarian that praised him so well. And so William Pitt was made a Groom of the Bedchamber for the prince, someone that theoretically helps him get dressed and things, although how often he needed to do that is a little bit unclear. And his good friend George Lyttelton became the Prince's private secretary.

Joe: This gave Pitt tremendous access, and very personal access, to the Prince. So much so that even his mentor, Lord Cobham, feared that Pitt could be a bit of a loose cannon. Let me quote a story:

Joe: "The Prince of Wales and Mr. Pitt were walking in the gardens of Stowe apart from the general company. They were engaged in earnest conversation when Lord Cobham expressed his apprehension to one of his guests that Mr. Pitt would draw the Prince into some measures of which his Lordship disapproved. The gentleman observed that the tête-à-tête could not be of long duration. 'Sir,' said Lord Cobham with eagerness, 'you don't know Mr. Pitt's talent of insinuation. In a very short quarter of an hour, he can persuade anyone of anything.'"

Abram: Whoa. Dun dun dun!

Joe: But while William Pitt was siding with Prince Frederick, his sister Ann Pitt was actually working for the enemy. She was a Maid of Honor to George II's wife. And although William and his sister were on opposite sides of the royal family, they remained close. There was a push to try to keep them apart so that William couldn't spill the beans about Prince Frederick to Ann, or that Ann couldn't spill the beans about Queen Caroline and George II to William. And it was suggested that they shouldn't even send letters to each other.

Joe: But in the end, it became moot. Queen Caroline died that November, and now it was Ann's turn to crash on her brother's couch at Pall Mall.

Joe: It was a small thing, but remember that the political battles of Whig versus Tory, Walpole Whig versus Patriot Whig, and Hanoverian versus Jacobite, they divided families. And sometimes being a noble that needed the support of a powerful patron might mean that you couldn't always act the way you believed.

Joe: So one example of this for Pitt was in February 1738. Robert Walpole put in a bill to increase the number of standing British troops from 12,000 to 18,000 to offset the increasing war footing across the Channel. We know from later in his life that William Pitt was a war guy. He believed in the might of the British Empire, and in almost every case he pushed to strengthen the British military— their army, their navy, and their commercial arms— in order to improve Britain's position in the world.

Joe: But here Pitt's feelings didn't matter. Prince Frederick wanted William to argue against this troop increase, and so Pitt did. He argued in Parliament that the standing army was unnecessary. The Jacobites weren't gonna be a threat ever again. And wait, what year is this again?

Abram: Oh, 1738.

Joe: When are the Jacobites going to be a threat again?

Abram: '45. 1745.

Joe: It's difficult to look at that scene and not see a William Pitt not in control. He's not acting on his own instincts. And I wonder if his more assertive stance later, refusing to join governments that he didn't agree with, stems in part from these times where he had to argue points that he didn't believe just to make sure he kept good with the prince.

Walpole's Losing War

Joe: So I don't think I need to remind Abram, or maybe even our listeners, about the War of Jenkins' Ear. Spanish privateers were boarding British ships and supposedly looking for smuggling, and they would rough up British sailors. And in 1731, they supposedly cut the ear off of Captain Robert Jenkins. And that ear was much later, 1738, passed around Parliament.

Joe: Of course, the British were almost certainly smuggling, and there are some questions as to the total number of ears that Robert Jenkins owned or whether the one in Parliament was real or not.

Joe: But the important point in our story is that the tensions with Spain were rising. But Robert Walpole was a peacemonger. He kept Britain out of the War of Polish Succession, but it was becoming difficult to forgive Spain for all the insults.

Joe: Pitt, more on brand this time, argued for war. No official records exist of his speech, but one chronicler of Parliament was able to give what I hope is a good summary. You ready?

Joe: Quote: "Is this any longer a nation, or what is an English Parliament if, with more ships in your harbours than in all the navies of Europe, with above two millions of people in your American colonies, you will bear to hear of the expediency of receiving from Spain an insecure, unsatisfactory, dishonourable Convention? You tell us that our right of sailing unmolested by Spanish searchers will be submitted to plenipotentiaries. The mere submission of such a right is an indignity."

Joe: Pitt was saying that the British Empire should not be humbled by Spain in this way. It needs to rise up. And this is the first speech that I could find where we see that firebrand Pitt, the one that was gonna demand and receive victories in the Seven Years' War.

Joe: Walpole eventually relented and Britain went to war in October 1739. We covered that war in Walpole's episode. I don't want to do it again, but Pitt will argue just as vehemently that Walpole was fighting the war badly as he argued that Britain should have fought it at all.

Joe: Walpole was simply not a great war leader. Ships were undermanned. Key forts like Minorca were under-defended, although that wouldn't be a real big issue till later. The navy struggled. They won a battle at Portobelo, but lost a more important one at Cartagena.

Joe: Pitt privately lamented the fate of his country and worried whether England would even survive. He wrote to Lord Chesterfield, quote, "The scene abroad is most gloomy. Whether day is ever to break forth again or destruction and darkness is finally to cover all"— and then he wrote a bit in Latin— "impiaque æternam meruerunt sæcula noctem"— "must soon be determined. I only wish in this great crisis every man in England may awake."

Joe: Now, I butchered the Latin there, but Pitt is deliberately misquoting Virgil. I looked it up. The original says something like, "Impious generations fear an everlasting night," but Pitt said they "deserved" an everlasting night. If the British Empire doesn't stand up for itself, it would find itself humbled by Europe and deserve it.

Abram: So is this the closest England came to ever being defeated?

Joe: I don't know that they were really that close, but Pitt was really painting it as life and death for the country. And maybe it was true. I mean, there were times where France was preparing to invade, so it could very well have been. I mean, it was a tough time.

Joe: Walpole's reluctance to fight and his poor aptitude to doing so ultimately led to his declining support in the Commons and his fall in January 1742.

A Man of the People

Joe: With the fall of Robert Walpole, things initially continued much as they had been. While the Patriot Whigs hoped that his fall would be their rise, instead, who came next?

Abram: Compton.

Joe: Right. But who was really Prime Minister?

Abram: Carteret.

Joe: Yes, we saw a government where Spencer Compton was supposedly the Prime Minister, with Lord Carteret pulling the strings as Secretary of State. Walpole lost, but he kinda won. At least for now.

Joe: But the European situation was getting worse. It wasn't just about Spanish ears anymore. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI died, and that led to a massive scramble as Britain backed Maria Theresa, Charles's daughter, for the throne, while France and Spain pushed for somebody named Charles Albert of Bavaria. Lots of countries invaded each other, and quickly Britain's little war with Spain over an ear and trading rights became a gigantic tangle of alliances and a mess.

Joe: Hanover was in the middle of the mess. And King George II quickly traveled to Europe to fight personally. And he is the last British monarch to do so.

Abram: To ever, like, fight personally?

Joe: Yep. We talked about that back in Compton's episode, maybe Pelham's episode.

Abram: I'm not sure which. It was 1740— when did he do it?

Joe: Well, the Battle of Dettingen was 1743.

Abram: So that was either during Compton or Pelham.

Joe: Yes. But with the royal family in Hanover fighting an unpopular war, the mood in Britain turned against those in power. Parliament wanted to keep British money away from what they saw as a Hanoverian war, even when the king demanded that they fight it.

Joe: So the mood soured on those in power. William Pitt loved to play to the crowds, and he played Parliament like a fiddle.

Joe: You know, Pitt always had a flair for the dramatic. During the period that Walpole had fired him from his cornet role, he had taken to traveling around London in a cheap one-seater carriage so that anyone that cared to see would see how much Walpole's corruption had affected him, how poor he was now that Walpole made him lose his job.

Joe: He also frequently attended Parliament while on crutches or with his foot wrapped in bandages because of his gout. A signal that despite his near-constant pain, he was a patriot first and would do his duty in Parliament. Of course, a lot of his detractors think that he kind of was faking it. I mean, he really did have gout, but maybe he was playing up his illness to score points. And honestly, knowing William Pitt, I think it's possible. He had a flair for the dramatic.

Joe: This "man of the people" persona continued. Horace Walpole accused William Pitt of, quote, "inciting the dregs of society to insult their superiors." Basically giving them an avenue for their displeasure with the king.

Abram: Okay, so they're upset with the king and now they have a street named after them.

Joe: Good. That's good enough. But it was not only the common people that admired William Pitt. Sarah Churchill, one of the most important and wealthiest women of the era, made no secret of her admiration of Pitt. And guess what?

Abram: What?

Joe: Prime Time has a special on her that's on their Patreon feed, so I recommend you check that out. And when she died in 1744, she bequeathed Pitt a fortune— £10,000, many millions of dollars today— as a thank you.

Abram: How many pounds today?

Joe: I don't know, I didn't do all the calculations. Well, the problem is that I've been using a different inflation calculator, and I'm realizing that inflation calculators for the 1700s to today, there's like three different ways to calculate it. And so that could have been like $5 million or $100 million depending on which calculator you use. So that means it's hard for me to be happy giving any numbers when the data just might be wrong.

Joe: The point was that she wrote that that money in her will was "acknowledgment of the noble defence he had made for the support of the laws of England and to prevent the ruin of his country."

Joe: William Pitt would never be poor again, and he'd never have to rely on his brother or the prince or Lord Cobham or anyone else for his livelihood.

Joe: She and many others felt that Pitt was just what the country needed to keep Britain on the right path. So it was, of course, frustrating that George II kept denying him a place in government. Even when the short-lived Spencer Compton Wilmington government closed and Henry Pelham's began, William Pitt was still locked out.

Joe: Henry Pelham wanted to build a broad-bottomed approach to government. He wanted to select people based on their abilities, not on their connections. And even though he knew that William Pitt was one of the greatest speakers of his age, George II didn't want Pitt in government. But Henry Pelham had a plan to get Pitt in.

Abram: What is it?

Outsider No More

Joe: With Pelham in government, the new Prime Minister began mending bridges with the opposition, but always behind the scenes. None of Lord Cobham's Cubs had roles in Pelham's first government. And Pelham was stymied because Lord Carteret was still Secretary of State, and quite frankly, the king was still listening to him.

Joe: But Pelham wasn't satisfied with being another Prime Minister in name only, like Spencer Compton was. He dreamed of a British government where the best men could take part, just so long as they were men and Whigs and mostly agreed with him. But still, it was better than Walpole, right? It's better than, "Who's gonna pay me the most?"

Joe: So this is probably why we gave Henry Pelham, I think, our highest score so far.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: Eagle-eared listeners will notice that we're about to hit the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. What did William Pitt do in that rebellion? Abram, what do you think?

Abram: Fight!

Joe: No. Try again.

Abram: Run away!

Joe: No. Try again.

Abram: Panic!

Joe: No. Three losses. I am sorry. You get no points, Abram. He did nothing. Despite everything we know about Pitt's military genius, he did not have any significant role in the revolt. And unlike several of the Prime Ministers, he didn't even have a role in a county militia that he would use to lead or to fight.

Joe: But let's just remember, Pitt was out of office. He had almost no control. He had no official roles. So how could he really have much to do? He wouldn't.

Joe: But although Pitt wasn't involved in the revolt, it was one more proof for Henry Pelham that he needed to build a government of the best people now. And that Lord Carteret, who kept trying to hold control, was more focused on European politics than British politics.

Joe: The king refused, of course, but Henry Pelham seized control of the situation by doing one thing that nobody expected.

Abram: Leaving.

Joe: Leaving. He resigned. The king, desperate to build a replacement government, put William Pulteney at the head, but it failed. How long did it last?

Abram: Like two days.

Joe: Two days, yes. So for Henry Pelham to come back, George II agreed to all of his demands. First and foremost, he would be allowed to select the best people in Britain for his government.

Joe: Pitt's old friend George Lyttelton was made a Lord of the Treasury. George Grenville became a Lord of the Admiralty. Other Cobham's Cubs got roles.

Joe: But bringing in William Pitt was almost a bridge too far. George II did not forgive Pitt for siding with his son. He didn't forgive Pitt for putting the needs of England above those of Hanover. He didn't forgive Pitt for being a perpetual pain in his butt.

Joe: But Henry Pelham really wanted Pitt. He wanted him to be Secretary at War, but George II said no. The most George would agree to was a minor role as Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, and Pitt's biographers aren't even sure whether he ever turned up to do that job. Whether it was vetoed. There seems to be a little ambiguity on that point.

Joe: But Henry Pelham was persistent, and fortunately or unfortunately, a guy named Thomas Winnington died. He was Paymaster of the Forces, a role that put him in charge of military pay, amongst other things. And with an open slot, Henry Pelham tried again, and this time George II agreed. William Pitt is the new Paymaster.

Joe: It wasn't a huge job, but for the first time William Pitt was not on the outside looking in. William Pitt had made it. And after years in opposition, crowing about how poorly the government was executing the war and everything else, it was finally William Pitt's turn to prove that he was the man that Britain thought he was.

Joe: Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean. We're staring right now out the window at the confluence of three rivers. No. Actually, we're not. We moved to a library a couple of hours ago, but we were looking at those rivers when we started this morning.

Joe: And at this point in our story, the Iroquois League have semi-recently conquered this region, and they exert nominal control, considering it part of their extended hunting territory. While it's true that they've been pushed away from the coasts by the Europeans, the Iroquois League has been conquering territory since well before the Europeans arrived. Native American history is more complicated and less static than most of us are taught.

Joe: King George's War— the name for the North American theater of the War of Austrian Succession— has mostly stayed away from this part of the world, right?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: The New Englanders were raiding into New France and vice versa, but we're very far from them here.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: Even though the war is far away, the British are still concerned about French control of the Ohio Valley. To block off French encroachment, the Ohio Company of Virginia was just founded to expand British control west through forts and trading posts. William Trent, best known as the namesake for Trenton, New Jersey, purchased territory up and down the Ohio River from the Iroquois.

Joe: And actually, William had a great spot for a trading post in mind, one with convenient access to not one, not two, but three rivers. One that Abram and I are looking at right now.

Abram: Hartley's Wharf.

Joe: And most importantly for our story, the one that will shape both Britain and William Pitt in the years to come.

Joe: And that's where we end it this week. So what did you think of our episode? Do you like Pitt?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Do you prefer Thomas Pitt over William?

Abram: No, 100%.

Joe: Thomas Pitt is kind of neat. He's like this mercantile hero villain person. Like, are you supposed to like him? Are you supposed to hate him? He's just a cool character.

Abram: He is a very cool character.

Joe: And I think William Pitt's gonna be a cool character too. Say goodbye, Abram.

Abram: Good evening.

Bibliography

Joe: This was a really fun episode to put together, and Abram and I had a lot of fun in Pittsburgh recording it. There's just so much information about Pitt and just so many awesome places to go. We went to the Fort Pitt Museum. We went up Mount Washington. It was a really great couple of days.

Joe: I want to thank the Sheraton Hotel in Station Square for the great view and for letting us stay a little bit longer to try to finish our recording. We actually didn't finish, and so I would also like to thank the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh downtown for giving us a room where we could finish recording our podcast in, well, relative peace and quiet.

Joe: This week our primary sources are "Pitt the Elder: Man of War" by Edward Pearce, written in 2010, and "The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham" by Basil Williams, written in 1913. That's a two-volume set, but I can only find the first volume, but fortunately that's all I needed for this episode where we're still relatively early in William Pitt's life.

Joe: I also used two other books for supplementary material: "Pitt the Elder" by Jeremy Black, written in 1992, and "William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and the Growth and Division of the British Empire" by Walford David Green, written in 1901.

Joe: Next time should be a special episode. Fingers crossed that I get that sorted out in time.

Joe: It's time for Beatles Review.

Abram: Beatles Review.

Joe: Okay, what are we reviewing today?

Abram: Okay, so we are reviewing Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, and Let It Be. Yellow Submarine has one good song. It has like three other not good songs. That's it.

Joe: I mean, Yellow Submarine is a really short album. It only has like six songs and a whole bunch of instrumentals. We didn't even listen to the instrumentals. And I think only the American edition even has Yellow Submarine on its own album, but I could be mistaken about that. So what is the one good song?

Abram: Hey Bulldog.

Joe: Yeah. What is it with you and Hey Bulldog? It's a good song. Is it your favorite song?

Abram: Second. You keep having to ask.

Joe: Oh yeah, that's true. I already asked that. Okay, so Yellow Submarine.

Abram: I'm not sold on it. I think it's okay. Next we have Abbey Road, one of the best albums. It has Come Together and a few other good songs.

Joe: Well, and Here Comes the Sun.

Abram: I think Abbey Road is probably their best album.

Joe: I think it's the second best after Revolver.

Abram: Yeah, I can get that. I really think it has just such a great collection, and then the medley is cool. It all really comes together in a way that I don't think all the other albums did.

Joe: What's next? Let It Be.

Abram: Let It Be. Well, it's weird because that one— it's weird. I like it, but it's not very good. It's better than Yellow Submarine. But it's not that good. It is Let It Be and Get Back.

Joe: Oh, and I Me Mine.

Abram: That's about it.

Joe: Yeah, that's true. I mean, I thought it was good, but I mean, it's good but not like very good like Abbey Road.

Abram: Yeah, I agree. I think Abbey Road is really like pinnacle Beatles, honestly.

Joe: And we didn't talk about the rest of The White Album last time, right?

Abram: Yeah, the rest of it was okay. Number 9 exists.

Joe: Yeah, it's basically— it sounds like they're experimenting with new recording technology, but decide to put it on an album.

Abram: Yeah, and honestly, I just think some of it just gets a little bit too artsy.

Joe: But if it's backwards, it's, "Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man."

Abram: You're weird. Yeah.

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