We have been serving the greater Los Angeles area for over 43 years and pride ourselves on our customer service. William Pitt had a serious problem with drink, which almost certainly accelerated his decline towards an early death in 1806 at the age of 47.Stratton and Sons Moving & Storage is a family owned and operated business. It was not long before he was back in office, though his second term was not as spectacular as the first, despite Nelson’s victory over a combined Franco/Spanish fleet at Trafalgar (1805). Pitt resigned in consequence (1801) in the first year of the nineteenth century. He proposed an Act of Union, but George III refused to consider it. Pitt believed Irish feuding could only be halted by the political union of Britain and Ireland. In Ireland, trouble was brewing the Irish agreed with French revolutionaries, with the added aggravation of conflicting religious argument. This is made perfectly clear in his speeches. Pitt had no illusions however, and though he raised three coalitions to fight Napoleon and gave subsidies to the enemies of France, Pitt never fought to restore the Frenchy monarchy he did it to defend Britain. In fact he was the first in a line of economic wizards that includes Disraeli.įrom 1793 he stood with the rest of Britain against every tenet of the French Revolution, and Bonaparte himself, rising like a rotund phoenix from the ashes.
During the years of peace until 1793 Pitt the Younger concentrated on nurturing Britain’s expanding economy, following the loss of the American colonies. In 1783 the Fox/North coalition was overthrown and Pitt became Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four.
This quite remarkable parliamentarian became Chancellor of the Exchequer at twenty-three! Though hardly out of his teens, he refused to betray Lord Shelburne in his conflict with Charles James Fox, starting rivalry between the younger Pitt and Fox which lasted years. William Pitt (Pitt the Younger) was the second son of the Earl of Chatham.
As a revered elder statesman he sympathised with the American revolutionaries he saw their point of view, but found it impossible to reconcile himself to colonists’ independence, somnething he made abundantly clear in the last speech he was able to make in Parliament before his death at the age of seventy in 1778. Pitt’s past years were negatively influenced by illness. But his premiership of 1766 – 68 was not successful, mostly because of failing health and strength. In 1766 however he accepted and formed a government. In 1764 and the following year he was twice invited by the king to form a government, but (rather gracelessly) he declined. Pitt instantly resigned, after becoming hopelessly involved in disagreement with other ministers over what their actions should be with Spain. The fact remains that he might have been a domineering tyro, but Britain sailed out of the war victorious.
Throughout these seven years of open war involving Prussia, Britain and Hanover on one side, and Austria, France, Russia, Sweden and Spain on the other – public opinion in Britain venerated Pitt as a national hero, while fellow parliamentarians found him bullying and aloof. No-one really knows by what means he had learned about war (he had no military or naval training), but he was a supreme strategist, and fully understood the importance and paramountcy of sea power. Pitt controlled this war for seven years. The Seven Years War put them together, however cautiously, in a coalition government in 1757. The prime mover in this political manoeuvre had been the Duke of Newcastle, but it was not long before William Pitt was engaging the Duke in semi-permanent argument. In 1746 heavy court influences forced George II to give the thirty-eight year old William a ministerial post. Politically, he was Whig – a liberal of the original stamp who earned the mistrust of Hanoverian George II.Īt least George spoke English, whereas George I (his father, qv.) had arrived in England from Hanover without a word of English, to take the throne on the strength of having a mother who was the granddaughter of a Stuart king – James I (and VI of Scotland). He joins the brief list of brilliant orators and parliamentarians who rose to become Prime Minister (1756-61, 1766-68). William PItt, 1 st Earl of Chatham, sometimes known as Pitt the Elder, was born in 1708, narrowly avoiding the tumultuous seventeenth century in Europe.
0 kommentar(er)
