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By Root 968 0

France by destruction of French trade and trading bases. With passionate application of funds and forces to this object, and infusion of his own assurance, which once expressed itself in the statement “I know I can save this country and that I alone can,” he reconditioned and manned the fleet, recruited fellow-countrymen to replace foreign mercenaries, and turned feckless campaigning into a national war and tide of victory. Louisburg, on Cape Breton, Guadeloupe, Ticonderoga, Quebec, Minden in Europe, naval triumph in the Bay of Biscay—such a series of successes, wrote Horace Walpole, that “we are forced to ask every morning what victory there has been for fear of missing one.” Captured French flags were hung from St. Paul’s amid roars of the multitude. Supplies were voted without discussion. Pitt dominated his colleagues and, as the Great Commoner, was the idol of the public, who admired his absence of title and felt that in him they had a representative. This feeling carried as far as New England, where, according to Ezra Stiles, he was “idolized.” Fort Duquesne, captured from the French in 1758, was renamed Fort Pitt and its wooden village Pittsburgh.

Only when he wanted to carry the war to Spain, the other maritime rival, his dominance failed against the resistance to increased taxes and against the new King’s determination to turn out the Newcastle Whigs and take patronage into his own hands. When Pitt resigned in 1761, cheers followed his coach from the palace, ladies waved their handkerchiefs from windows, the populace “clung to the wheels, shook hands with the footmen and even kissed the horses.”

Thereafter Pitt was too unbending, too arrogant, too vain to enter into bargaining for place. He did not fit into the system, having no interest in groups and cabals. His interest was in policy commanded by himself. On leaving office in 1761 he told the House that he would not govern when his advice was not taken. “Being responsible, I will direct and will be responsible for nothing I do not direct.” A member thought this was “the most insolent declaration ever made by a Minister,” but it was Pitt to the core. He was of the rare type incapable of acting in association with others. “Unattached to any party, I am and wish to be entirely single,” he said, and more starkly on another occasion, “I cannot bear the least touch of command.” Perhaps what spoke here was a touch of megalomania. Pitt may have suffered from what in our time would be called delusions of grandeur and manic depression, but these had no names in his time and were not recognized as mental illness.

Tall, pale, thin-faced, with a hawk nose and piercing eye, ankles swollen with the gout that caused him to hobble, he was grand, proud, imposing, appearing always in full dress and full peruke, in manner “sage and awful as a Cato.” He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within. His glance of scorn or indignation could wither an opponent, his invective and sarcasm were “terrible”; he had the same quality of terribilità as Julius II. His gift for oratory at a time when political success resided in it was literally spellbinding though few could explain why. His eloquence, vehement, fiery, original, bold, could win the support of the independents in Parliament. Theatrical, even bombastic in language, spoken with an actor’s gestures and plays of tone, employing “very brilliant and striking phrases,” his most successful speeches were composed on his feet, although of a particularly striking phrase he told Shelburne that he had “tried it on paper three times” before deciding to use it. At a whisper his voice could be heard to the remotest benches, and when swelling like a great organ to its fullest register, the volume filled the House and could be heard in the lobbies and down the stairs. All fell silent to listen when Pitt stood up to speak.

Failing Pitt, the Duke of Cumberland put together a mixed ministry whose three principal offices were filled by personal acquaintances from the turf and the Army, none