by William Hague
I got this book in paperback 1/3 off, and so bought it remembering that it had received generally good reviews when it was published a couple of years ago. It certainly did not disappoint me.
I know very little in detail of the political history of the period that was dominated by William Pitt the Younger. His father was in many ways the architect of Britain's victories in the Seven Year's War in the mid-eighteenth century. A second son, he became First Lord of the Treasury (the office which over the course of history morphed into today's office of Prime Minister) at the tender age of twenty-four, in 1784. He retired briefly in 1803, returned to office in 1804, and died in 1806. He is one of the great men of British history, especially in more recent times. And yet I knew very little about him.
I know a good deal more now. William Hague is able to deftly portray an image of a man devoted to political life. He also has a sense of the dramatic. The book opens with the funeral of Pitt's father, and ends with his own. comparing the differences between the scorned hero that was Pitt the Elder, and the truly national mourning that occured at the passing of his son. He writes with an effective style that passes information from the dry page to a thereby enriched brain with a minimum of fuss and bother. There are also a few nice touches about the way he organises things. For example, this was a period when many people would receive a peerage half-way through their career. William Hague scrupulously follows the practice of referring such people by their family names before their peerage, and then by their title (as was custom) afterward, with a point of transition clearly made. This helps to gain a feel of the period, in many respects as important as just knowing some bare and thereby embarrased facts.
His portrait is generally sympathetic, and it is hard to escape the idea that this book is in many respects a paean of praise. There is very little genuine criticism to William Hague's account, and where there is it is usually tempered by reminding the readers of the particular circumstances that Pitt was operating in when he turned his back on Parliamentary Reform after the outbreak of the French Revolution. The one primary exception is that Pitt did not force through the abolition of the slave trade, something he argued strongly for but never comitted the political capital to achieve.
No man is entirely isolated however, and William Hague also richly captures some of Pitt's contemporaries. In particular Wilberforce and Fox emerge best-formed after Pitt himself.
Finally, William Hague is of course a politician himself. In some of his discussions of why Pitt made this or that decision you can see William Hague the poltician behind the visage of the author, nodding thoughtfully.
Of course since this a period where my knowledge is limited to military matters, and this book really is concerned with British domestic politics, I cannot make any judgements on its various accuracies. I liked it however, and I sincerely hope that William Hague will consider another foray into the field in the future.
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