When I came to Parliament everyone knew who I was. Now they all look through me as though I’m not there … I have no presence, no role, nothing but a name, and even that is more William’s than mine now.

Thus speaks the 2nd Earl of Chatham, the main character of my novel The Long Shadow, shortly after his brother Pitt the Younger makes his maiden speech in the House of Commons. John’s words are, of course, my own, and they reflect one of the main themes of the novel, John’s search for his own identity beyond the long shadow of his father and brother. My theme, however, is well-grounded in fact. He was the eldest son, the head of the family, but heavily dependent on the patronage and favour of his younger brother. It was a complete inversion of the 18th century aristocratic norm. Not only that, but John possessed an impoverished and virtually landless title which was nonetheless closely associated with greatness and authority. How difficult must John’s position have been?

John, 2nd Earl of Chatham, in John Singleton Copley’s “The Death of the Earl of Chatham” (1779)

With our 20/20 hindsight it is all too easy to forget that Pitt the Younger was not his father’s eldest son. When the first Earl of Chatham died in 1778 all eyes did not automatically turn to his second son, who was barely nineteen, still kept rooms at Cambridge, and was only just embarking on legal training at Lincoln’s Inn. William Pitt had not yet done anything to distinguish himself in the public, although his reputation for hard study and a defence of his father’s posthumous reputation published as an open letter to Lord Bute suggested he had inherited more than his fair share of the family brains. Quite reasonably, everyone turned their attention to the eldest son, John, now the 2nd Earl. “One looks upon him as the Child of the Publick,” Lord Grantham wrote, explaining his curiosity to meet the eldest son of the great Lord Chatham.[1]

At the time of his father’s death John was twenty-one and about to serve as aide-de-camp to General Boyd at Gibraltar. He does not seem to have been well known in political circles, but had clearly kept up social links with the effective head of the Chathamite political interest in Parliament, Lord Shelburne, and he had served on various occasions as a scribe for his gout-stricken father. John’s closest friend, the Duke of Rutland, might have formed a political group of his own — his father, the Marquis of Granby, was nearly as famous a political figure as Pitt the Elder, and Rutland’s rank, wealth and intelligence would have suited him to the task. Astonishingly, however, Rutland laid himself completely at the service of “a man for whom I profess & most sincerely do feel so much”[2]:

My dear Lord, give me Leave to thank you in the Sincerest Manner for the Great Honor you have done me in trusting me with your Proxy [while John was abroad in the West Indies]. Such an unequivocal testimony such a Publick distinguished Demonstration of Confidence from one whose Good opinion & Friendship is the Pride & Pleasure of my Life is a Circumstance too affecting, for me to be able to Express the Satisfaction I feel upon it in terms adequate to my Sensations.[3]

Charles, 4th Duke of Rutland (Wikimedia Commons) [a]

Had Chatham wanted to, he could have taken advantage of his name and parentage (as his brother William was later to do). His attitude to politics started out diligently enough. He was in Gibraltar from June 1778 until March 1779, so he could do nothing in that period, but one of the first things he did upon returning to England was to take his seat in the House of Lords. The reappearance of the Earl of Chatham in Parliament caused a frenzy of interest:

The young Earl of Chatham took the oaths and his seat in Parliament on Thursday last. His Lordship was dressed in his regimentals … and presented a very elegant, manly, and graceful figure. He is as tall as his late father, has the appearance of much mildness in his countenance, and is said to be a most exemplary young nobleman in his morals, and general good character.[4]

Chatham did not spend much time in England over the next two years, but he crops up regularly enough in the Journals of the House of Lords, and was one of nine opposition Lords who signed an official protest against the King’s elevating Lord George Germain to the peerage as Viscount Sackville.[5] As Rutland’s letter suggests, Chatham cared enough about political issues to make arrangements for his proxy vote to be deployed in his absence.

During a period  of leave in 1781 he spent some time at Lord Shelburne’s house at Bowood, where he was looked upon with great curiosity by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham:

Do you know Lord Chatham? … He has his father’s Roman nose, and, if events should concur to make him have a good opinion of himself, will soon, I dare say, acquire his commanding manner: at present, one sees little more than a kind of reserve, tempered with mildness, but clouded with a little dash of bashfulness.[6]

That “bashfulness”, however, was one of several reasons why John never did manage to find a political niche for himself. His “mildness” was remarked upon by many who met him, often in surprise. “Lord Chatham … has not his [father’s] Countenance,” Lord Grantham noted in astonishment when he met John in Madrid in 1779.[7] But Chatham was not his father, despite inheriting the title: he simply wasn’t cut out for politics. Much later in his life, during the Walcheren debacle, a military subordinate suggested “that he wants confidence in his own powers”, a remarkably incisive comment.[8] He had the intelligence to be interested, but neither the energy nor the drive to make his name. And in any case, by the time Bentham was writing in 1781, the rising star of the Pitt family was becoming clear… and it wasn’t John.

What sort of effect must all this have had on Chatham? He must have been aware that his father always expected great things of him. “The promise of our dear children does me more good than the purest of pure air,” Pitt the Elder once wrote to his wife, referring specifically to both John and William.[9] In the first few years after his father’s death he must have had a great burden on his shoulders, one he was not necessarily well-suited to carry, but he did his best.

William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham by William Hoare (Wikimedia Commons) [b]

References

[1]Lord Grantham to Frederick Robinson, 27 March 1779, Wrest Park (Lucas) MSS, Bedford and Luton Archives, L30/15/54/127

[2] Rutland to Chatham, 8 December [1778], PRO 30/8/368 f 231

[3] Rutland to Chatham, 22 January 1780, PRO 30/8/368 f 233

[4] London Evening Post, 19 July 1779

[5] House of Lords Journal vol XXXVI, 18 February 1782

[6] Jeremy Bentham to George Wilson, 1781, Benthamiana, ed. J H Burton (London, 1843), p 333

[7] Lord Grantham to Frederick Robinson, 25 March 1779, Wrest Park (Lucas) MSS, Bedford and Luton Archives, L30/15/54/126

[8] Letters from Flushing by an officer of the 81st Regiment (London, 1809), p 126

[9] Lord Chatham to Lady Chatham, 8 June 1770, Chatham Correspondence IV, 267

[10] Lord Grantham to Frederick Robinson, 6 April 1779, Wrest Park (Lucas) MSS, Bedford and Luton Archives, L30/15/54/132; Frederick Robinson to Lord Grantham, 27 April 1779, Wrest Park (Lucas) MSS, Bedford and Luton Archives, L30/14/333/198

Image references

[a] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A4th_Duke_of_Rutland.jpg

[b] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWilliamPittTheElder.jpg

No, I’m not ready to do that post just yet, but the Walcheren campaign of 1809 — and obviously the involvement of John, 2nd Earl of Chatham in that campaign — has been on my mind recently. I am aware that when I lay down my pen in a few months at the end of my novel, I am going to have to do some research on Walcheren: I feel I owe it to myself, and to my boy Chatham, to do it. I know it won’t be pleasant, but I can hardly call myself a Chatham expert until I have familiarised myself with every aspect of the campaign.

In due course, therefore, I will probably be writing a series of Walcheren-related posts. For now I’m thinking about it mainly because I have recently made contact with Dr Carl A. Christie, whose doctoral research was on the Walcheren campaign and who kindly sent me an article he wrote on the subject in 1981.[1] While reading the article one of the references caught my eye, so I chased it up:

I was expecting the book to be harsh on John, but while it is not exactly favourable,I was surprised at how positive it was about him. I freely admit I’m much more likely to blog about the nice stuff at this stage (cross my heart I will be fair to Chatham when I come to look at Walcheren properly) but after the bad press he has in the history books I really wasn’t expecting his subordinates to, well … like him. Although it must be noted that being a likeable chap does not necessarily make for a great military commander, and there’s plenty of censure here too.

George Cruikshank, “The Grand Expedition” — a rather more critical *coughs* portrayal of Lord Chatham’s inactivity than in “Letters from Flushing” (Wikimedia Commons)

The anonymous officer of the 81st Regiment who wrote the letters printed in “Letters from Flushing” may have had a pro-Chatham agenda of some sort, I don’t know: I haven’t done enough research even to guess who he might have been. He certainly had an axe to grind against the navy, so would be expected to take the army’s side in a debate. Taking all that as given, he begins (pp. 3-5) with a lengthy description of Lord Chatham, and the way in which he was viewed at the beginning of the expedition at the end of July 1809. (The letter in question is dated from Ramsgate, 27 July 1809.)

There’s a fair amount of implied criticism in the account — the author is quite circumspect about his opinion: “there is an old proverb, that ‘walls have ears’, and perhaps there are some things which should not be committed to letters” — but the John I have come to know in my research is certainly recognisable here.

So much, however, I will say, that I could wish the Earl [of Chatham] would be more active in putting his talents forth. He is certainly a man of abilities, he thinks solidly, and writes extremely well; but it is not very easy to arouse him into exertion; he is indolent beyond any man I have ever seen. At the present moment he bustles about with some appearance of alacrity; but it is evidently only a fit and a start, and all of us begin to apprehend a relapse. If you pass his window in his hours of leisure, you will invariably see him yawning, or with a book, over which he is sleeping. To sum up all, however, and perhaps to compensate for all, he has the reputation of being as honest a man as Heaven ever formed; he is the perfect gentleman, moreover, in his manners and deportment, and, as I have said before, whatever he does, he does well. If his activity were but equal to his talents, he would be inferior to none of our most celebrated Generals.

The author goes on to hint at one possibility never mentioned by historians for why Chatham was chosen to lead the expedition: his name and heritage inspired loyalty in the troops under his command (pp 4-5).

As the brother of the immortal Pitt, his appointment has given universal satisfaction amongst all the officers; and I do really believe that, under this impelling principle, they would do more for him than for any General in the service. I can scarcely describe to you the enthusiasm with which the good people of Ramsgate flock around the brother of Pitt, and the son of Chatham.

Presumably the soldiery were at least expecting a man who would be at least half as brilliant as his father and brother, although as the account suggests Chatham’s reputation for indolence was well-known.

On pp 125-7, the author again speaks of Chatham’s popularity among the soldiers, something I found rather surprising: from a couple of sources quoted in Gordon Bond and Martin Howard’s accounts of Walcheren I had the impression he was viewed as a distant commander, rather out of touch with what was happening on the front lines. Still, John was always an affable chap, and well-mannered, as the author keeps mentioning (he’s not the only one to lay emphasis on John’s “manners”). There’s nevertheless a flavour of censure about his easy-goingness, and the author does attack his hesitation and inactivity:

As to our Commander in Chief, he spends the greater part of his time in Middleburg [the headquarters], and very freely and good-naturedly permits the officers to follow their own inclinations.

Above: Middelburg, Walcheren Island

So much I must say of him, that every one seems to feel a lively regard for him; his manners are so gentlemanlike, and his temper so easy and affable, that he has at least won all our hearts. But there are certainly some murmurs that he is not sufficiently decisive, that he wants confidence in his own powers [I’d say this is a very incisive observation], that he is too fond of councils of war, and that he is deliberating, where the nature of the service requires that he should be acting. Be this as it may, he is the perfect gentleman [but of course]; and when he thinks proper to exert himself, an excellent officer. Every one acknowledges his abilities, whilst they lament that he does not sufficiently put them forth.

Even the author, however, seems to have fallen under the spell of John’s charm, since he can’t resist finishing off with a sweet story from John’s childhood. It’s almost certainly apocryphal, but having read a fair amount of Pitt family correspondence there is a flavour of truth about the tale:

I have heard that the late Lord Chatham, the great Chatham as he is deservedly called, entertained a very high opinion of our Commander’s abilities. The late Lord Clarendon being one day at his house, and Mr Pitt and Lord Chatham, at that time boys, happening to pass — ‘There, my Lord,’ said Lord Chatham, ‘are my best services to my country; there are two boy who will hereafter be most useful men. The one, Mr Pitt, is the readiest; he has a due confidence in himself. The other will be the most solid thinker.’

There, then, you have it: easy-going, lazy, difficult to rouse, diffident, a slavish follower of official military protocol: yes, that is definitely a Chatham I recognise. But popular, intelligent, full of ability, respected by the men under his command? Now that’s a John I have yet to see in any history books.

____________

Reference

All quotations from Letters from Flushing by an officer of the 81st Regiment (London, 1809)

[1] Carl A. Christie, “The Royal Navy and the Walcheren Expedition of 1809”, New Aspects of Naval History ed C. L. Symonds et al (Annapolis, 1981) 190-200