ABSTRACT
William Pitt was the second longest serving prime minister in British history: he was also the youngest, having first taken office at the age of 24. Pitt’s reputation as an enlightened minister sympathetic to fiscal, administrative, constitutional and humanitarian reform was established in the 1780s, a decade of diplomatic and economic recovery from the humiliations of the American War of Independence. Few British prime ministers are as difficult to place in intellectual terms as Pitt the Younger. The achievements of the 1780s, the ‘years of acclaim’, would appear to identify him as a Whig but when the enlightened tolerance of youth gave way to the defensive caution of middle age it seems more appropriate to classify Pitt as a ‘Tory’. His canonization as the saint of Britain’s revolutionary war effort had begun before his death; in 1804 he had been lauded by Canning as ‘the Pilot who weathered the Storm’.
