University Of Oxford Alumni

"Look at the great personage who dominates English politics through the whole middle period of that century, the elder Pitt. His greatness is throughout identified with the expansion of England; he is a statesman of Greater Britain. It is in the buccaneering war with Spain that he sows his political wild oats; his glory is won in the great colonial duel with France; his old age is spent in striving to avert schism in Greater Britain."

"In the last decade of the colonial period the ideal of the man of public virtue was made real in the person of William Pitt. The cult of this noblest of Whigs, "the Genius of England and the Comet of his Age" was well advanced toward idolatry at least five years before the Stamp Act. The greatest of "the great men of England", the last and noblest of the Romans, was considered the embodiment of virtue, wisdom, patriotism, liberty, and temperance... Pitt, "glorious and immortal", the "guardian of America", was the idol of the colonies. His eloquent arguments against taxation without representation were repaid in full measure by a grateful people. Ships, towns, and babies bore the proud name of Pitt; preachers, orators, and poets celebrated his Roman virtues."

"The memory of that great and glorious minister, who, to all succeeding ages, will be quoted as an illustrious example, how one great man, by his superior ability, could raise his drooping country from the abyss of despair to the highest pinnacle of glory, and render her honoured, respected, revered, and dreaded by the whole universe."

"Pitt was at home with men like his grandfather, men who believed that England's greatness and prosperity depended on aggression, on seizing and holding on to the world's trade... In the late thirties and early forties Pitt had spent much time studying the statistics of French commerce and industry, which had bred the conviction that France was the greatest danger England had to face, and the only rival worth considering in the race for overseas trade... Two aims, he thought, should dominate English policy – supremacy at sea and the capture of French trading posts."

"Pitt did not flinch from the contemplation of the violent aggression required by such an active and expanding commercial imperialism, and such an open avowal of England's aspirations bred its own elation... It was Chatham, ignorant of men, ignorant of politics, who knew with utter certainty England's destiny and showed her the way to it."

"With all his faults we shall want Mr Pitt, if such a complicated, such an extensive war is to be carried on. I know nobody who can plan or push the execution of any plan agreed upon in the manner Mr Pitt did."

"Thus, then, after such long gestation, and so many throes and struggles, came to light the first administration of Chatham,—the greatest and most glorious, perhaps, that England had ever yet known—an administration not always, indeed, free from haste or error in its schemes, and no doubt owing their success in part to the favour of Fortune and to the genius of Generals; but still, after every allowance that can be justly required, an administration pre-eminently strong at home and victorious abroad—an administration which even now is pointed at with equal applause by contending and opposite parties, eager to claim its principles as their own."

"The success of our arms was perhaps owing less to the skill of his dispositions than to the national resources and the national spirit. But that the national spirit rose to the emergency,—that the national resources were contributed with unexampled cheerfulness,—this was undoubtedly his work. The ardour of his spirit had set the whole kingdom on fire. It inflamed every soldier who dragged the cannon up the heights of Quebec, and every sailor who boarded the French ships amidst the rocks of Britanny."

"The greatest War Minister of modern times."

"Both the elder and the younger Pitt delighted in a kind of ostentatious virtue which raised them, in the eyes of careless observers, to a far higher level than politicians like Burke or like Fox, who, with abilities perhaps not inferior, sacrificed incomparably more to their principles. But yet with all his faults he was a very great man—far surpassing both in mental and moral altitude the other politicians of his generation. As a war minister his greatness was beyond question, and almost beyond comparison."

"When I saw Lord Chatham's bill, I entertained high hope that a reconciliation could have been brought about. The difference between his terms, and those offered by our Congress, might have been accommodated, if entered on, by both parties, with a disposition to accommodate. But the dignity of Parliament, it seems, can brook no opposition to its power."

"Over-bearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England,—his ambition was fame; without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting he made a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he smote the house of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England."

"Dr. Franklin is filled with admiration of that truly great man! He has seen, in the course of life, sometimes eloquence without wisdom, and often wisdom without eloquence: in the present instance, he sees both united, as he thinks, in the highest degree possible."

"It is a considerable fact in the history of the world, that he was for four years King of England."

"[A] great man, the greatest perhaps that this age or this country has produced, to whom this country owes her present prosperity, and, I am sorry to say it, her pride, her pride of conquest, which has infatuated her, even in this impracticable war, with the ideas of victory, and certain success; that great man, from whose opinions, though some of your lordships may sometimes differ, yet there is not one of your lordships who does not pay homage to his consummate capacity, his extensive talents, his great services, and his age, when he delivers those opinions from his place."

"This minister is, as you know, the idol of the people, who regard him as the sole author of their success, and they do not have the same confidence in the other members of the council... Pitt joins to a reputation of superior spirit and talent, that of most exact honesty...with simple manners and dignity, he seeks neither display nor ostentation... He is very eloquent, specious, wheedling, and with all the chicanery of an experienced lawyer. He is courageous to the point of rashness, he supports his ideas in an impassioned fashion and with an invincible determination, seeking to have no other ambition than to elevate Britain to the highest point of glory and to abase France to the lowest degree of humiliation."

"Lord Chatham a great Minister & bold in his undertakings. He inspired the People of England with Martial ardour when necessary for the safety of this Kingdom. He considered Mobs in the light of a raw material which might be manufactured to a proper stuff for their own Happiness in the end."

"In the conduct of the war he never suffered the enemy to breathe, but overwhelmed them with reiterated blows, and kept up the alarm in every quarter. If one of his expeditions was not so well calculated or so successfully executed, amends was made by another, and by a third. The spirit of the nation once roused, was not suffered for a moment to subside; and the French, dazzled, as it were, by the multitude and celerity of his enterprizes, seemed to have lost all power of resistance. In short, he revived the military genius of our people; he supported our allies; he extended our trade; he raised our reputation; he augmented our dominions."

"[W]e may affirm with truth and impartiality, that no man was ever better fitted than Mr. Pitt, to be the minister in a great and powerful nation, or better qualified to carry that power and greatness to their utmost limits. There was in all his designs a magnitude and even a vastness, which was not easily comprehended by every mind, and which nothing but success could have made to appear reasonable... He was called to the ministry by the voice of the people; and what is more rare, he held it with that approbation... Under him Great Britain carried on the most important war in which she ever was engaged, alone and unassisted, with greater splendour, and with more success than she had ever enjoyed at the head of the most powerful alliances. Alone this island seemed to balance the rest of Europe."

"Chatham had been the saviour of the national pride in the face of France. In the cases of general warrants and parliamentary privilege he had served popular liberties. As upholder of the rights of the Middlesex electors he was defender of the Constitution. In the cause of America he identified political and religious freedom at home with the constitutional and natural rights of the English-speaking peoples overseas, and, the vindication too, of the national dignity against the House of Bourbon. On each count, Chatham led the way, to the example of posterity."

"Pitt had been called to power by the suffrages of the 'people', the first minister in British history chosen by acclaim. Pitt's integrity and force of character convinced men that he alone could save the country, a capacity he himself never doubted. The call for the services of Churchill in 1940, and the co-operation he too had to welcome from old enemies of bitter blood on both sides of the House, is the irresistible parallel."

"The internationally acknowledged but over vast areas undeveloped monopoly of the greater part of America by Bourbon Spain appeared an unjust obstacle to the expansion of British trade. Pitt, from first to last a fiery patriot, nursed the utmost contempt for the foreigner, especially of the Catholic monarchies of Versailles and Madrid, whose subjects could not read the Bible and knew nothing of Protestant liberty. He never considered the pagan motive of greed underlying the rivalries between Britain and her Atlantic neighbours a reproach; Protestant Britain was entitled to God's blessing and the rewards of wealth and empire no detriment."

"Chatham was incomparably the greatest British statesman of the eighteenth century: none could match him in boldness of purpose or extent of achievement. Almost alone among his contemporaries he saw the vision of Britain expanded across the world, and set her feet firmly on the path of imperial greatness."

"He was possessed of the happy talent of transfusing his own zeal into the souls of all those who were to have a share in carrying his projects into execution; and it is a matter well known to many officers now in the House, that no man ever entered the Earl's closet who did not feel himself, if possible, braver at his return than when he went in."

"We have a Calvinistic creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy."

"My Lords, I rejoice that the grave has not closed upon me; that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy! Pressed down as I am by the hand of infirmity, I am little able to assist my country in this most perilous conjuncture; but, my Lords, while I have sense and memory, I will never consent to deprive the royal offspring of the House of Brunswick, the heirs of the Princess Sophia, of their fairest inheritance. Where is the man that will dare to advise such a measure? My Lords, his Majesty succeeded to an empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied. Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? Shall this great kingdom, that has survived, whole and entire, the Danish depredations, the Scottish inroads, and the Norman conquest; that has stood the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, now fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? Surely, my Lords, this nation is no longer what it was! Shall a people, that seventeen years ago was the terror of the world, now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, take all we have, only give us peace? It is impossible! ...My Lords, any state is better than despair. Let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!"

"I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America...As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies—to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never! ...I call upon the honour of your Lordships to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls, the immortal ancestor of this noble Lord frowns with indignation at THE DISGRACE OF HIS COUNTRY! In vain he led your victorious fleets against the boasted Armada of Spain; in vain he defended and established the honour, the liberties, the religion, the Protestant religion of his country, against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition."

"You have ransacked every corner of Lower Saxony; but forty thousand German boors never can conquer ten times the number of British freemen. You may ravage—you cannot conquer; it is impossible: you cannot conquer the Americans. You talk, my Lords, of your friends among them to annihilate the Congress, and of your powerful forces to disperse their army: I might as well talk of driving them before me with this crutch! ...If you conquer them, what then? You cannot make them respect you; you cannot make them wear your cloth: you will plant an invincible hatred in their breasts against you. Coming from the stock they do, they can never respect you..."

"Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of Parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or to enslave your fellow-subjects in America, who feel tyranny, whether ambitioned by an individual part of the legislature, or the bodies who compose it, is equally intolerable to British subjects...What, though you march from town to town, and from province to province; though you should be able to enforce a temporary and local submission, which I only suppose, not admit—how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress, to grasp the dominion of eighteen hundred miles of continent, populous in numbers, possessing valour, liberty, and resistance? This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen: it was obvious, from the nature of things and of mankind; and, above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America, is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money, in England: the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution: the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America; who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defence of their rights as men, as freemen."

"The first great and acknowledged object of national defence in this country, is to maintain such a superior naval force at home, that even the united fleets of France and Spain may never be masters of the Channel."

"Reparation for our rights at home, and security against the like future violations."

"A long train of these practices has at length unwillingly convinced me that there is something behind the throne greater than the King himself."

"I have the principles of an Englishman, and I utter them without apprehension or reserve...this is not the language of faction; let it be tried by that criterion, by which alone we can distinguish what is factious, from what is not—by the principles of the English constitution. I have been bred up in these principles, and I know that when the liberty of the subject is invaded, and all redress denied him, resistance is justifiable...the constitution has its political Bible, by which if it be fairly consulted, every political question may, and ought to be determined. Magna Charta, the Petition of Rights and the Bill of Rights, form that code which I call the Bible of the English constitution. Had some of his Majesty's unhappy predecessors trusted less to the commentary of their Ministers, and been better read in the text itself, the glorious Revolution might have remained only possible in theory, and their fate would not now have stood upon record, a formidable example to all their successors."

"When then, my Lords, are all the generous efforts of our ancestors, are all those glorious contentions, by which they meant to secure themselves, and to transmit to their posterity, a known law, a certain rule of living, reduced to this conclusion, that instead of the arbitrary power of a King, we must submit to the arbitrary power of a House of Commons? If this be true, what benefit do we derive from the exchange? Tyranny, my Lords, is detestable in every shape; but in none is it so formidable as where it is assumed and exercised by a number of tyrants. But, my Lords, this is not the fact, this is not the constitution; we have a law of Parliament, we have a code in which every honest man may find it. We have Magna Charta, we have the Statute-book, and we have the Bill of Rights...It is to your ancestors, my Lords, it is to the English barons that we are indebted for the laws and constitution we possess. Their virtues were rude and uncultivated, but they were great and sincere...I think that history has not done justice to their conduct, when they obtained from their Sovereign that great acknowledgment of national rights contained in Magna Charta: they did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people...A breach has been made in the constitution—the battlements are dismantled—the citadel is open to the first invader—the walls totter—the place is no longer tenable.—What then remains for us but to stand foremost in the breach, to repair it, or to perish in it?...let us consider which we ought to respect most—the representative or the collective body of the people. My Lords, five hundred gentlemen are not ten millions; and, if we must have a contention, let us take care to have the English nation on our side. If this question be given up, the freeholders of England are reduced to a condition baser than the peasantry of Poland...Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, there tyranny begins."

"When the people condemn me I shall tremble but I shall set my face against the proudest connection in the country."

"There are many things a parliament cannot do. It cannot make itself executive, nor dispose of offices which belong to the crown. It cannot take any man's property, even that of the meanest cottager, as in the case of enclosures, without his being heard."

"It is my opinion, that this kingdom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies. At the same time I assert the authority of this kingdom over the colonies to be sovereign and supreme in every circumstance of Government and legislation whatsoever. The colonists are the subjects of this kingdom, equally entitled with yourselves to all the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen...The Americans are the sons, not the bastards, of England. Taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power...When, therefore, in this House we give and grant, we give and grant what is our own. But in an American tax, what do we do? We, your Majesty's Commons for Great Britain, give and grant to your Majesty,—what? Our own property?—No! We give and grant to your Majesty, the property of your Majesty's Commons of America...The distinction between legislation and taxation is essentially necessary to liberty...There is an idea in some, that the colonies are virtually represented in this House...Is he represented by any knight of the shire, in any county in this kingdom?...Or will you tell him that he is represented by any representative of a borough?—a borough which perhaps its own representatives never saw.—This is what is called the rotten part of the constitution. It cannot continue a century. If it does not drop, it must be amputated...I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to let themselves be made slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest...The gentleman asks, When were the colonies emancipated? I desire to know when were they made slaves?"

"Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom."

"We retain nothing, although we have conquered everything...France is chiefly, if not solely, to be dreaded by us in the light of a maritime and commercial power; and therefore by restoring to her all the valuable West India islands, and by our concessions in the Newfoundland fishery, we have given her the means of recovering her prodigious losses and of becoming once more formidable to us at sea...all the Spanish treasures and riches in America, lay at our mercy."

"...the errors of Rome...[are] rank idolatry—a subversion of all civil as well as religious liberty, and the utter disgrace of reason and of human nature."

"While we had France for an enemy, Germany was the scene to employ and baffle her arms."

"As Germany was formerly managed it was a millstone about our necks; as managed now, it is a millstone about the neck of France. When I came in, I found the subsidy to Prussia dictated by Hanover, not by Great Britain. I insisted that national defence and America must stand first, nor would I agree to the German war until every other service had been provided for. I acceded to the plan of a Ministry that wanted vigour and borrowed their majority to carry on their own plan. But I carried it on in my own way, and, though that may have been the wrong way, I offer myself confitentem reum, if I have not thereby annihilated French power in the East and West Indies."

"America has been conquered in Germany, where Prince Ferdinand's victories have shattered the whole military power of that great military monarchy, France. Recall the troops from Germany, and I should be robbed of my honour, while England, by deserting her allies, would be deserted by God and man. And, honour apart, nothing but that spectre of an invasion which the Ministry of 1755 had not constancy enough to look at, frightened us out of Minorca. So would it be again, if the troops of France found themselves at liberty to quit Germany."

"A difference of opinion with regard to measures to be taken against Spain, of the highest importance to the honour of the crown, and to the most essential national interests, and this founded on what Spain had already done, not on what that court may further intend to do, was the cause of my resigning the seals."

"Without having ever asked any one single employment in my life, I was called by my Sovereign and by the Voice of the People to assist the State when others had abdicated the service of it. That being so no one can be surprised that I will go on no longer since my advice is not taken. Being responsible I will direct, and will be responsible for nothing that I do not direct."

"Spain's conduct in putting forward her grievances under the shield of England's enemy, with whom we are at war, is the highest indignity that ever was offered to the Crown of England, and it will fix an eternal stain upon that crown if no answer is returned to Spain's avowal of her action. As to the other consideration, the safety of the public—are we not already suffering from the worst species of war, when Spain supports France with her full weight, covers her trade, lends her moneys and abets her in negotiation? You are now at war with the House of Bourbon; but, for open war with Spain, you are prepared and she is not."

"No doubt with me that Spain is France [more] than that the Isle of France is, a union in the House of Bourbon; loss of time loss of opportunity. Whatever is dangerous will be more so 6 months hence; no safety but acting with vigour. Procrastination will increase the danger. The fact is proved, the treatment we have had shews what we are to expect. The question is that France and Spain are joined: what is to be done? ... I am still of opinion that an immediate action gives us the best chance to extricate ourselves. Acquiesced in their partiality till such time as we had broke the force of France, wishing then that Spain would give us an opportunity to punish them. Best chance to order Lord Bristol away and your fleets to take every Spanish flag. If the means to do this are doubtful will it not be more so next spring. I am for it now."

"This unjust and unexampled proceeding of the Court of Spain, by inforcing her demands on England through the channel and by the compulsion of a hostile power, denouncing eventually future war in conjunction, while Spain was still professing amity and friendship with Great Britain; and the full declaration and avowal at last made by the Spanish Ministry of a total union of councils and interests between the two monarchies of the House of Bourbon, are matters of so high and urgent a nature as call indispensably on His Majesty to take forthwith such necessary and timely measures as God has put into his hands, for the defence of the honour of his Crown, and of the just and essential interests of His Majesty's people."

"[Pitt] said that he saw so many Lords great in themselves and in their influence in the House of Commons, differing so much in opinion from him, and inclined to make concessions for the sake of peace than he could come into; that it was impossible for him to remain; that for the sake of unanimity he had gone as far as his conscience and even his sleep would permit him."

"[Pitt said] he saw combinations of great Lords against him but for his part he would go his own way; that he was a British subject and he knew he stood upon British ground; that he had learnt his maxims and principles under the great Lord Cobham and the disciples of the greatest lawyers, generals and patriots of King William's days: named Lord Somers and the Duke of Marlborough."