There is one initial part of a biography which is skipped by every judicious reader; that in which the pedigree of the hero is set forth, often with warm fancy, and sometimes at intolerable length. It is, happily, not necessary to enter upon the bewildering branches of the innumerable Pitts, but only to keep to one conspicuous stem. We must however record that the Pitt family was gentle and honourable; 'it had,' says one of them, 'been near two centuries growing into wealth without producing anything illustrious.'[1] But in the eighteenth century it was destined to blossom into no less than four peerages, Londonderry, Rivers, Camelford, and Chatham, not one of which survives. William Pitt's great-grandfather was Vicar of Blandford in Dorsetshire; and there was born Thomas, his grandfather, better known as Governor Pitt, and associated in history with the famous Pitt diamond. The Vicar, being the younger son of a younger son, had no fortune but the advowson of his own living of St. Mary; and Thomas again being a younger son set forth to seek his fortunes in the Golden East, and, it may be added, found them there.

Of this redoubtable progenitor, Governor Pitt, as he was always called, it would be possible to say much, as his life, measured by the length of current biographies, would justify a volume; in any case it is necessary to say something, for in his character may be traced some germs of his grandson's intractable qualities.

We first catch sight of him as an 'interloper,' that is, an illicit merchant carrying on trade in violation of the East India Company's monopoly. In that capacity he showed himself formidable and intrepid, 'of a haughty, huffying, daring temper,'[2] and the Company waged unsparing war against him. In a letter to their agents, writing with special reference to him, they say: 'We have a most acceptable accompt of the flourishing condition of all our affaires in those parts, and of the wreck and disappointment of all the interlopers; insomuch that if you have done your parts in reference to the Crowne, that Tho. Pitts went upon, there is no probability (that) of seven interloping ships that went to India the same year that our Agent did, any one ship will ever come to England again; and ... we cannot doubt that you will in due time render us as pleasing an accompt of those interlopers that went out this year, which will certainly put an end to that kind of robbery.'[3] And so these hostilities continued for more than a score of years, but without the suppression of Pitt, who appears to have greatly thriven in the process; for during the latter part of this period he was member of Parliament for his own pocket borough of Old Sarum,[4] bought out of these contraband gains. Victory, indeed, rested with him; for the Company, weary and baffled, determined, on the faith of an ancient but precarious principle, to set a thief to catch a thief; and in November 1697 appointed Pitt governor of Fort St. George, though some fastidious stockholders protested. This 'roughling immoral man,' as one of the objectors called him, governed with a high and strong hand from 1698 to 1709; when the Company, finding the burden of him intolerable, summarily dismissed him. He was, no doubt, like his grandson, a difficult servant; and in his career we see the source of that energy, haughtiness, and self-reliance which were so conspicuous in both. Lord Camelford, his great-grandson, though a relentless critic of his family, gives, in the grateful character of an heir, a leniently appreciative account of the Governor; and says that 'he amassed a fortune which was reckoned prodigious in those times without the smallest stain on his reputation. I have heard (but at what exact period of his life I know not) that, having accomplished such a sum as he thought would enable him to pass the remainder of his days in peace, he was taken prisoner, together with the greatest part of his effects, on his return to England, and released at the intercession of the Duchess of Portsmouth, who was then in France. He went back to India and made in a shorter time a much larger fortune from the credit he had established and the experience he had acquired.'

However that may be, he now returned promptly to England, by way of Bergen, having shipped on a Danish vessel, and having sent before him in the heel of his son's shoe[5] the precious chattel which made his name famous, until, under his descendants, it acquired a different lustre. This was a prodigious diamond, to which he alludes in his correspondence as his 'grand concern,' which he bought for 48,000l., and sold, after keeping it for some sixteen years, to the Regent of Orleans for the French Crown. It was rather a sonorous than a profitable bargain, for though he sold it for 133,000l., he was never paid in full. He received 40,000l. and three boxes of jewels, but the balance, calculated at 20,000l., was never discharged. He and his descendants reckoned, indeed, that on the whole he was the poorer by the possession of this gem. A tradition remains that the bargain might have fallen through at the last moment but for the shrewdness of the Governor's second son, Lord Londonderry. When Rondet, the royal jeweller, came from Paris to receive it, he criticised the water of the stone. 'His lordship, who was quick enough in business, understood him, and putting a bank-note into his hands, bid him go to the window to see it in a better light. It was then decided to be in all respects perfect.'[6]

It is evident, however, that he was possessed of considerable though exaggerated wealth, and he was probably the first of those nabobs who were to bulk so largely in the drama, the society, and the politics of the eighteenth century. Among these his diamond gave him pre-eminence, and made his name both famous and proverbial. In England he remained for the rest of his life, some sixteen years, dying in 1726. The reformed filibuster had become a power in the land. He had wealth, force of character, political connection, and parliamentary influence. This last must have been an object with him, as we find him sitting for Thirsk instead of his own borough of Old Sarum; and his eldest grandson seems to have inherited a considerable but indefinable interest in the borough-mongering of the West, having definite powers in regard to Okehampton and Sarum, and vaguer connections elsewhere. So the Governor, a staunch Whig and furious anti-Jacobite, with an influential son-in-law in Stanhope, a soldier and statesman who was First Minister for a time, was a man to be reckoned with. He was indeed offered, and had accepted, the Governorship of Jamaica, a high compliment, for it was then a position of peculiar difficulty, but never took up the appointment; finding probably his hands full at home, with an insubordinate family to manage, capital to invest, and estates to superintend.

We find him living at Twickenham, Swallowfield, Blandford, and in Pall Mall, but mainly at Stratford, near Old Sarum. He had indeed contemplated building his principal residence at Blandford, his early home. But the younger children, finding that this would be settled on the eldest son, intercepted his purpose and turned his attention to Swallowfield, 'where, however, he contrived to throw away as much money in a very ugly place with no property about it,'[7] writes his resentful heir.

Finally, in 1726, the Governor was gathered to his fathers, and his spoils caused some disappointment. His wealth had been over-rated, as is perhaps the case with all notorious fortunes, and not well invested; at any rate, he had burned his fingers in the South Sea Bubble. He seems to have left 100,000l. in personal property, though some of that may have consisted in unsubstantial and unrealised advances to Lord Londonderry, or others of his children. He had bought land wherever he could find it (for the sake, perhaps, of influence as much as income), in London (Soho), Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, and Cornwall, as well as that most marketable of assets, Old Sarum, and apparently other borough interests. But his greatest acquisition was the noble estate of Boconnoc, which he purchased in 1717 from the widow of that wild Mohun who was slain in duel by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Hamilton. The Governor paid 53,000l. for the estate, a great price in those days; but was held to have got a bargain.[8]

To his family he had always been formidable, but also an object of jealous rapacity and expectation. They wrangled and intrigued for his money both during his life and afterwards, and seem to have been universally dissatisfied by the result. 'From the various characters of these persons' (the Governor's children) 'it is easy to conceive,' writes Lord Camelford, 'in what manner the Governor must have been pulled to pieces by their different passions and interests when he came to realise his wealth in England.' The transactions with Lord Londonderry seem to have been particularly complicated; in fact they were never unravelled. We only gather, as a specimen of them, that after the Governor's death his executors claimed 95,000l. as due from Lord Londonderry; which Lord Londonderry denied, claiming 10,000l. from the estate. Thirty years were vainly spent in the endeavour to clear up this issue, a process rendered all the more arduous by Lord Londonderry's having peremptorily possessed himself of his father's papers after death. Only one case seems to have been free from complication. The Governor stated succinctly that his son John was good for nothing, and so he logically left him nothing. John, however, claimed an annuity which, we may be confident, he never obtained. Thus there were endless disputes, a civil war in the family, not uncongenial, perhaps, to those who waged it; which died out only with the combatants, but which illustrates once more the volcanic character of these truculent Pitts.

It is in his family relations, in his dealings with these ungracious heirs and with his own wife, that the Governor is most vivid and interesting; at any rate, to one who has to trace the heredity of genius and character in his descendants. Thomas Pitt's blood came all aflame from the East, and flowed like burning lava to his remotest descendants, with the exception of Chatham's children; but even then it blazed up again in Hester Stanhope. There was in it, even when it throbbed in the veins of his eldest son and grandson, some tropical, irritant quality which, under happy circumstances and control, might produce genius, but which under ordinary circumstances could only evolve domestic skirmish and friction. The Governor himself, in his dealings with his wife and children, does not seem to have been tolerant or tolerable. He set himself to rule them with the notions of absolutism which are associated with the Oriental monarchies, but he met with no great measure of success. It is necessary to study his methods as exhibiting the volcanic source of a formidable race.

His wife was of the family of Innes in Morayshire, 'of Scotch and Cornish extraction,' says Lord Camelford, and she was lineally descended from the Regent Murray. Sir John Sinclair, like a loyal Scot, attributes the genius and eloquence of the Pitts to their 'fortunate connection ... with a Miss Innes of Redhall, in the Highlands of Scotland.' Of her, nevertheless, in unconsciousness of this obligation, but in receipt of private advices, the Governor writes in terms of implacable hostility. He had heard, he says to his son, 'that your mother has been guilty of some imprudence at the Bath ... let it be what it will, in my esteem she is noe longer my wife, nor will I see her more if I can help it.'[9]

But his children were not to be released from duty to her by her supposed misconduct. Four years earlier he had written to Robert: 'If what you write of your mother be true, I think she is mad, and wish she was well secured in Bedlam; but I charge you let nothing she says or does make you undutiful in any respect whatever.' So when they apparently act on the Governor's view of Mrs. Pitt, he turns round and belabours them. 'Have all of you,' he inquires of his eldest son, 'shook hands with shame, that you regard not any of the tyes of Christianity, humanity, consanguinity, duty, good morality, or anything that makes you differ from beasts, but must run from one end of the kingdome to the other, aspersing one another, and aiming at the ruine and destruction of one another?' This genial picture of his offspring does not seem wholly imaginary, for the Governor proceeds: 'That you should dare to doe such an unnatural and opprobrious action as to turne your mother and sisters out of doors?—for which I observe your frivolous reasons, and was astonished to read them; and I no less resent what they did to your child at Stratford. But I see your hand is against every one of them, and every one against you, and your brother William to his last dying minute.' (William had died young, in 1706.) A week later he writes again: 'Not only your letters, but all I have from friends, are stuffed with an account of the hellish confusion that is in my family; and by what I can collect of all my letters, the vileness of your actions on all sides are not to be paralleled in history. Did ever mother, brother, and sisters study one another's ruine and destruction more than my unfortunate and cursed family have done?' He again reverts to the grievance of Robert's having turned his mother and sisters out of doors, though he calls them, in the same letter, 'an infamous wife and children,' and states that he has 'discarded and renounced your mother for ever;' apparently on suspicion, for he makes 'noe distinction between women that are reputed ill and such as are actually soe.' The wife of the CÆsar of Fort St. George had to be above suspicion. Nor is this by any means an isolated passage. From his Eastern satrapy the Governor pours on his hapless family, and especially on his firstborn, a constant flood of scorn and invective. The arrival of the Indian mail must have caused a periodical panic to his children, and his announcement in 1715 that 'writing now is not so much my talent as formerly' a corresponding relief.

In vain does Robert, the eldest son, inspire friends to write to the Governor glowing accounts of his conduct; the Governor sniffs suspicion in every breeze. 'I wish gaming bee not rife in your family, or you could never have spent so considerable an estate in so short a time.' 'I wish gameing, drinking, and other debaucheries has not been the bane of you.' 'I wish these sore eyes of yours did not come by drinking, and that generally ushers in gaming, of either of which vices or any other dishonourable action, if I find you guilty, you may be assured I will give you no quarter.' 'I think that no son in the world deserves more to be discarded by a father.' But on the rare occasions when the Governor does not write in a passion his letters are full of sound sense. The cost of education is the only expense which he does not grudge. 'I would also have you putt your mother in mind that she gives her daughters good education, and not to stick at any charge for it.' But he wishes to get his money's worth. 'See that your brothers and sisters keep close to their studies, and let not my money be spent in vain on them; if it be, I'll pinch 'em hereafter.' Again, later, he writes: 'When this reaches you your brothers will be 17 years old. If their genius leads them to be scholars, I would have them sent to Oxford, but placed in two distinct colleges; and if inclined to study law you may enter them in the Temple. But if they are inclined to be merchants, let them learn all languages, and obtain perfect knowledge of the sciences bearing upon trade. I believe that trade will flourish rather than decay.'

When he returned home things were probably not much better for his children, though his letters, of course, are less frequent, and also less violent. But we gather from timid and vigilant bulletins sent off by those who cautiously approached the Governor's lair that he was still as formidable and plain spoken as ever. He suspects Robert of Jacobitism, the supreme sin in the judgment of the old Governor. 'It is said you are taken up with factious caballs, and are contriving amongst you to put a French kickshaw upon the throne again.' 'I have heard since I came to towne,' he writes seven years afterwards, 'that you are strooke with your old hellish acquaintance, and in all your discourse are speaking in favour of that villainous traytor Ormond.' And again: 'Since last post I have had it reiterated to me that in all company you are vindicating Ormonde and Bullingbrooke, the two vilest rebells that ever were in any nation, and that you still adhere to your cursed Tory principles, and keep those wretches company who hoped by this time to have murthered the whole Royall family: in which catastrophe your father was sure to fall,' &c. &c. From which it may be gathered that the moral temperature of Pall Mall, whence the Governor was writing, differed little from that of Madras.

The only note of tenderness that he ever strikes is with regard to his grandson, William, to whom he looks with a rare prescience of attention. At first he conducts both boys from Eton to Swallowfield, 'with some of their comrogues,' on a short leave of absence. But soon it is William alone whom he takes as a companion. 'I set out for Swallowfield Friday next; your son, William, goes with me.' 'I observe you have sent for your son, William, from Eton. He is a hopeful lad, and doubt not but he will answer yours and all his friends' expectations,' 'I shall be glad to see Will here as he goes to Eton.' 'Monday last I left Will at Eton.' Sentences like these taken from the Governor's letters are, when the writer is considered, a sufficient testimony of exceptional regard. It is not too much to say that William is the only one of his descendants whom the Governor commends; the only one, indeed, who never falls under the lash of the Governor's uncontrollable tongue.

The Governor left behind him three sons, Robert, Thomas, and John; and two daughters, Lucy and Essex. Robert, the eldest son, married, somewhat clandestinely, Harriot Villiers, sister of the Earl of Grandison, 'who seems to have brought with her,' says her grandson, 'little more than the insolence of a noble alliance.' A more favourable estimate declares that she had a fortune of 3000l., and that 'it is a great dispute among those who have the pleasure of conversing with her whether her beauty, understanding, or good-humour be the most captivating.' She makes a pale apparition in Lady Suffolk's correspondence, soliciting a place for her brother, Lord Grandison, with the offer of a bribe, and subsiding under the royal confidant's rebuke.[10]

The second, Thomas, married one of the heiresses of Ridgeway, Earl of Londonderry. After that nobleman's death 'he bought the honours which were extinct in the person of his wife's father.'[11] One infers from casual hints that Thomas may have had the most influence with his father, and that he was not embarrassed by scruples. He was, says Lord Camelford, 'a man of no character, and of parts that were calculated only for the knavery of business, in which he overreached others, and at last himself.' But Camelford may have been soured by the controversies which followed the Governor's death. The honours so dubiously acquired died out with Lord Londonderry's two sons.

John, the Governor's third son, 'was in the army, an amiable vaurien, a personal favourite with the King, and, indeed, with all who knew him as a sort of Comte de Gramont, who contrived to sacrifice his health, his honour, his fortunes to a flow of libertinism which dashed the fairest prospect, and sank him for many years before his death in contempt and obscurity.'[12] This death took place, within Lord Camelford's memory, 'at the thatched house by the turnpike in Hammersmith.' John seems to have been a sort of Will Esmond, and we have on record a horse transaction of his which savours strongly of Thackeray's famous knave.[13] He married 'a sister of Lord Fauconberg's, whose personal talents and accomplishments distinguished her as much at least as her birth, and much more than her virtues.'[14]

Another of Colonel John's freaks is worth retailing, as throwing light on the peremptory methods of the Pitts, and of the manner in which the Governor was harried by his offspring. He waited outside his father's house in Pall Mall on a day when he knew that one of the estate agents was to bring up the rents of an estate. He watched the man in and out of the house, then went in, where he found some secretary counting the money over, swept it deftly with his sword into his hat, and escaped into the street, full of glee at having bubbled an unappreciative parent out of his dues, and leaving the unhappy subordinate paralysed behind him.[15] This anecdote enables us to understand why the Governor had so low an opinion of John, and why the keys were kept under the Governor's bed when this scapegrace was at home.[16]

Of the two daughters, Lucy, who married the first Earl Stanhope, the minister and general, seems to have left a fragrant memory behind her; we are pleased to find her resenting her sister-in-law's behaviour to her mother, the Governor's wife. She died in February 1723-4.

Essex, the second, married Charles Cholmondely, of Vale Royal, grandfather of the first Lord Delamere. 'Her peevishness made her the scourge of her family,' says her great-nephew, so we may conclude that she was not devoid of the Pitt characteristics. She died in 1754.

Over his luckless heir the Governor had kept constantly suspended the terrors of his testamentary dispositions. 'My resentments,' he wrote not long before his death, 'against you all have been justly and honourably grounded, and that you will find when my head is laid.' Nevertheless, when he died in 1726, Robert, the belaboured eldest son, succeeded to the great bulk of his fortune. He, in his turn, did not lose a moment in visiting on his eldest son, Thomas, the sufferings that he himself had endured. In the very letter in which he announces his father's death to the lad, he speaks of his son's 'past slighting and disobedient conduct towards me,' and lectures him with uncompromising severity. He does, indeed, announce an allowance of 700l. a year, but soon after docks it of 200l. on the flimsiest and shabbiest pretexts. Robert, who seems to have been a poor creature, as his portrait at Boconnoc represents him, mean and cantankerous, with some of the violence but without the vigour and ability of the Governor, only survived his father a year, into which he managed to concentrate a creditable average of quarrels with his family. His death was something like the sinking of a fireship; spluttering and scolding he disappears in 1727.

Robert's life and death were on the lines laid down by Pitt precedent. He lived and died on ill terms with his family, and his death was followed by the customary lawsuits. During his short possession of his patrimony he had laboured under some miscalculation as to its extent; for, after examining the rentals and estates, he had congratulated himself on the possession of 'full 10,000l. a year;' ' in which belief he died soon after, leaving the same delusion to his son, which was one of the principal causes of his misfortunes.'[17] As the estate was entailed, Thomas, Robert's eldest son, was not liable for the debts of his father, or anxious to assume that responsibility. The claims that gave him most trouble were those of his mother, Robert's widow, who had obtained additions to her jointure, and had had 10,000l. settled on her children at her marriage, a provision which was apparently never carried into execution. Many bills and cross bills in Chancery were the consequence of these claims, which ended in Mrs. Robert Pitt's retirement into France, where she shortly afterwards died. Her brother and champion, Lord Grandison, also retreated to Ireland, both thus renouncing administration of the effects of Robert Pitt. So, avows Lord Camelford, 'my father seized whatever fell into his hands without account, either belonging to my grandfather or grandmother, keeping at arm's length every demand upon him, till somehow or other these litigations seem to have worn themselves out and slept by the acquiescence of all parties.' The 'acquiescence,' we may add, seems only to have accrued by the death of the litigants.

Robert left two sons and five daughters, and this brood was not unworthy of the family traditions. The eldest son was Thomas, the second William, the subject of this book; to the daughters we shall come presently.

The volcanic element in the Pitt blood was fully manifest in this generation, and Thomas was a child of wrath. His relations with his younger brother William seem always to have been uneasy, and from an early period they seem to have been wholly uncongenial to each other.

Whatever William may have been, Thomas was impracticable, and no one seems to have succeeded in working amicably with him. He was a man of extremes. 'All his passions,' writes his son, 'were violent by nature, particularly pride and ambition, which were painted in his figure, one of the most imposing I ever saw. He was not without good qualities; but, to speak fairly, they were greatly over-balanced by the contrary tendencies.' He was said not to have been naturally vicious, but early embarrassments, perpetual family litigations, a sense of injury, the flattery of dependents, and a train of mortifications and disappointments 'had formed in him such habits of rapacity, injustice and violence that he seemed at last to have lost even the sense of right and wrong.' He had, evidently, personal attractions, marred by an imperious demeanour, was strong and graceful, addicted to hunting and manly sports, fond of music and dancing. His overbearing manner, which arose from an undisguised contempt of his equals, gave him some ascendancy in Cornwall, where, however, though endured, he was secretly detested.

So haughty and violent a character might, one supposes, have been mellowed and redeemed by a fortunate marriage, and Thomas seems to have secured an angel as his wife. At the opera one night he saw a daughter of Sir Thomas Lyttelton, was struck by her extraordinary beauty, proposed in his headlong manner next day, and was accepted. Her son laments her want of any fortune to remedy her husband's eternal embarrassments, but she seems to have lacked nothing else. Besides her loveliness, 'as a faithful wife, a tender mother, a kind friend, an indulgent mistress, she was a pattern to her sex.'[18] But her very virtues turned her husband against her. Her meek gentleness, humility, and charity, the extreme piety, carried almost to bigotry, in which she had been reared, were reproachful contrasts to his opposite qualities. She was the object of ridicule to the wit and malice of others, possibly, we should guess, of her sisters-in-law; and, finally, every kind sentiment, even of common humanity, towards her, was extinguished in the husband who had loved her so passionately.

Thomas seems, from the moment of succession until death, to have been a prey to pecuniary embarrassment. He started with an exaggerated view of his resources, and launched into extravagance; arrogance and ambition made him more profuse; a taste for borough management, strong in him, was probably more expensive than any other possible form of gambling; so all his life was soured by the struggle between pride and debt, and by consequent mortification. This seems to be the secret of his wasted and unhappy existence.

United as he was by his marriage to the Lytteltons, Grenvilles, and Cobham, he naturally became an adherent and favourite of the Prince of Wales. He probably called the Prince's attention in glowing terms to the possibilities of the Heir Apparent's Duchy of Cornwall, and, at any rate, became His Royal Highness's parliamentary manager in the West, the realm of rotten boroughs. There the Prince was flattered, or flattered himself, with influence as Duke of Cornwall, in a region where Lord Falmouth, the famous threatener of 'we are seven,' and Thomas himself exercised a more substantial sway. He enjoyed a fleeting triumph at the General Election of 1741, not unaccompanied with the constant quarrels which were the vital element of his family. As a reward he was appointed in 1742 Warden of the Stannaries.

Then he seems to decay. The General Election of 1747, on which he had built high hopes, brought him nothing but debt and disaster. He writes in despair to the Prince, and Frederick sends kindly and reassuring messages in reply; but he was now ruined, and his last prospects vanished with the Prince of Wales, on whose death he was superseded in the Stannaries; this perhaps marks the date of his final catastrophe. At any rate, there was a financial collapse, and he had to go abroad. Shelburne met him at Utrecht and heard him hold forth in the true Pitt style, abusing his brother William as a hypocrite and scoundrel, with a great flow of language and a quantity of illustrative anecdotes. 'A bad man,' says Horace Walpole. 'Never was ill-nature so dull as his, never dullness so vain.'

Shelburne hints that he was mad, or nearly mad, and that, though not actually confined, he was obliged to live a very retired life, complicated by straitened circumstances. 'The unhappy man,' as William calls him, had never been on cordial terms with his brother: they had had the usual family wrangles about property, and recently, in his distress, Thomas had solicited from William, now Secretary of State and supreme, the appointment of Minister to the Swiss Cantons. He might have foreseen refusal, for he was fit for no such employment, and William was sensitive as to charges of favour to his family from the Crown. But men are friendly judges of their own fitness for any post which they may happen to desire, and Thomas did not care, probably, to have his merits or demerits so justly appraised by his junior; so he spent his time of exile in denouncing to any audience that was attracted by his name, the ingratitude and neglect of his successful relative. He died in July 1761, and William frigidly announces to his nephew the death of 'the unhappy man' from apoplexy.

This nephew was created Lord Camelford under the auspices of his first cousin, the younger Pitt, whom, by the way, Pitt-like, he seems unable to forgive for this favour, as he never mentions his creator. The malicious bards of the Rolliad hinted that the peerage accrued from some borough-mongering transaction:

But, though he was by no means destitute of the family characteristics, this Thomas was a man of high honour, character and charm. He won the heart of Horace Walpole, whose neighbour he was, until they quarrelled, as of course they were sure to do. But for a time Horace, whose affection was not often or easily given and whose confidence in matters of taste was fastidious, gave both affection and confidence unstintedly to this young man. He attracted, too, the still rarer tenderness of his uncle William. To him Chatham addressed the well-known letters on education which he found time to write in all the business of office; though Thomas on attaining manhood repaid him with the most cordial aversion. This sentiment, which seems at first to savour of ingratitude, is not in reality difficult to explain. In the first place, the uncle was to some extent involved in those financial questions connected with the paternal inheritance in which the father played, as we have seen, so intrepid though unscrupulous a part. Mutual aversion facilitated mutual disagreement in matters always fertile of friction; and the younger Thomas, though he had an ill opinion of his father, sided with him as against his uncle. We cannot, even on Thomas's own showing, blame the uncle in these rather petty transactions, and William's besetting sin was certainly not avarice; but neither can we blame the son for siding with the father. On an impartial survey we may conclude that disputes between two Pitts who were near descendants of the Governor were incapable of an amicable solution.

But there was more than this. William, for some purpose of persuasion, says Lord Camelford, informed Thomas that his nephew, the younger Thomas (Lord Camelford himself), would be his heir. This was a considerable, almost a magnificent, prospect. William was then middle-aged and unmarried, his position and future were alike splendid, and high office might in those days lead to wealth. His career had, moreover, brought him a legacy of 10,000l. from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. But, far beyond that there was the reversion of the great Althorp inheritance, between which and William there were only the lives of the short-lived possessor and his sickly child. That William held out this expectation we think so probable that we do not even question it. He had all his life been half an invalid, and never seems to have contemplated marriage till he did marry, at the age of forty-eight. He, moreover, loved his nephew with sincere and proved tenderness. Why, then, should it be doubted that he indicated him as his heir, when, in truth, he had no other? But that he did this with an unworthy motive or for the purpose of deception there is neither proof nor probability. The episode probably furnished matter for his brother's maudlin ravings at Utrecht, but we do not think that it materially influenced the opinions of his nephew.

The true reason for Camelford's hatred of his uncle was that he fell under the influence of George Grenville at a time when Grenville had broken for ever with Pitt. The estimable qualities of Grenville have been described with a colour and exuberance which could only proceed from the glowing imagination of Burke. But, with all allowance for what Burke saw in this able, narrow, and laborious person, it cannot be denied that the foundation of his qualities was a stubborn self-esteem which necessarily led to stubborn hatreds. Grenville came to hate Bute, to hate the King, to hate the Duke of Cumberland; but it may be doubted if all his other accumulated hatreds equalled that which he felt for his brother-in-law. Pitt, while in office, had kept Grenville in a subordinate position, and had apparently thought it adequate to his deserts. When Grenville was Minister, Pitt had negotiated with the King to overthrow him. In the schism produced by Pitt's resignation, Temple had sided with Pitt and quarrelled with his brother George. But, worst of all, Pitt had held Grenville up, not unsuccessfully, to public ridicule and contempt. Now, a Grenville to himself was not as other men are; he was something sacred and ineffable. Neither Temple nor George ever doubted that they were the equals, nay, the superiors, of their brother-in-law, whom in their hearts they regarded as only a brilliant adventurer, useful, under careful guidance, to the Grenville scheme of creation. When, therefore, Pitt quizzed and thwarted George, he raised an implacable enemy. Later on, they might affect reconciliation, and Temple might pompously announce to the world that the Brethren were reunited. But George's undying resentment against Pitt never flagged to the hour of his death.

Thomas Pitt came under Grenville's influence at the fiercest moment of this rancour, and seems to have been the only person on record who was fascinated by him. Thomas writes of him with affectionate enthusiasm long after his death, and in his life waged his wars with zeal. One of these led to a quarrel with Horace Walpole, arising out of the dismissal of Conway, which produced a lengthy correspondence, still extant. But to become the disciple of George Grenville it was necessary to abhor William Pitt. Thomas took the test without difficulty, and adhered to it conscientiously. His father's influence, such as it was, tended in the same direction. So, though Thomas specifically places his uncle at the head of all British statesmen, and although he besought Chatham to sit to Reynolds for the gallery at Boconnoc, and though he displayed grief, real or ostentatious, at Chatham's death, going the quaint length of asking every one to dinner who spoke sympathetically in either House on the occasion; in spite of all this, he retails aversion in every sentence that he writes; aversion of which the obvious source is devotion to Grenville. It is necessary to explain this because Camelford's manuscript notes would otherwise be inexplicable. Putting this violent prejudice on one side, this memorial drawn up by Camelford for his son, though too intimate for complete publication, is a priceless document. Let all be forgiven him for the sake of this manuscript. It may be inaccurate, and biassed and acrid, but it presents the family circle from within by one of themselves, and no more vivid picture can exist of that strange cockatrice brood of Pitts.

The son for whom it was written grew up a spitfire, not less eccentric than his sires, and became notorious as the second Lord Camelford. His was a turbulent, rakehelly, demented existence, the theme of many newspaper paragraphs. He revived in his person all the pranks and outrage of the Mohawks. Bull-terriers, bludgeons, fighting of all kinds were associated with him; riots of all kinds were as the breath of his nostrils, more especially theatrical tumults. One of these latter contests brought him into contact with the pacific authors of the 'Rejected Addresses,' who were admitted, not without trepidation, to his apartment, which was almost an arsenal. It can scarcely be doubted that the lurking madness of the Pitts found a full expression in him. As an officer in the Navy, commanding a sloop in the West Indies, his conduct fell little if at all short of insanity. It is not easy to understand how even in those more facile times he escaped disgrace.

Eventually, at the age of twenty-nine he was killed in a wanton duel with a Mr. Best. The circumstances of this mortal combat show that he was a true Pitt of the Governor's headstrong breed. Both before the duel and afterwards, on his death-bed, he acknowledged that he was the sole wanton aggressor, and that his antagonist was blameless. But as Mr. Best was reported the best pistol-shot in England, his pride would not allow him to lend himself, however indirectly, to any sort of accommodation. So he died, and with him died the eldest line of the Governor's branch of Pitts. Boconnoc passed to his sister, Lady Grenville, wife of the minister who was Chatham's nephew. The relations of the brothers-in-law seem to have been on the Pitt model. 'Pique against Lord Grenville explains his (Lord Camelford's) conduct,' writes Lady Holland.[19] Despite all their idiosyncrasies it seemed impossible to keep the Pitts and Grenvilles from quarrelling and blending.

All this may seem trivial enough, but it has an important, indeed necessary, bearing on the story of William's life, as showing the stock from which he sprang.

The harsh passions of the Governor and the petulant violence of his heirs seem so outrageous and uncontrolled as to verge on actual insanity. Shelburne explicitly states that 'there was a great deal of madness in the family.' Every indication confirms this statement. What seemed in the Governor brutality and excess, frequently developed in his descendants into something little if at all short of mental disorder. We thus trace to their source the germs of that haughty, impossible, anomalous character, distempered at times beyond the confines of reason, which made William so difficult to calculate or comprehend.