Pitt the Elder's house: Burton Pynsent, Somerset

by Jacqueline Reiter

A lonely tower stands perched on top of a ridge overlooking the valley of Sedgemoor in Somerset. It can be seen for miles from the winding country roads crossing the plain. The tower is the highest thing around for miles, one hundred and forty feet tall, its empty viewing platform gazing austerely out onto the flat, water-logged landscape.

This is the Burton Pynsent monument, erected between 1767 and 1769 by Lancelot "Capability" Brown for William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham. Close up, it is covered with moss and lichen, carved with graffiti, peppered with metal pins to stop it falling down.


The story starts off well enough. Pitt the Elder woke up one day in 1765 to the news that he had unexpectedly inherited a house and estate. Pitt was by that time a famous politician, widely credited with masterminding Britain's victories during the Seven Years War, but even so he had never met his benefactor, and possibly never even heard of him.

Sir William Pynsent was a wealthy Somerset landowner who died without issue and in a state of hostility with all his relatives. In 1763 he cut them almost entirely out of his will and, partly in recognition of Pitt the Elder's stand against a tax on cider, named the late Secretary of State as his executor and primary beneficiary. The surviving Pynsents were horrified and challenged the will in the courts, but it was too late, because Pitt the Elder (Lord Chatham after 1766) had taken enthusiastic control of the estate.

Burton – or Burton Pynsent, as Chatham renamed it in honour of the man who had left it to him – was a magnificent bequest. By the time it passed out of Pitt family hands in 1805 it had grown to "eleven hundred and sixty-eight axres and three roods ... of fertile meadow, grazing, arable, and wood land ... abundantly stocked with capital oak, elm, and other timber trees" and brought in £3000 pounds a year (...........nominally).[1] For Pitt the Elder, who had no "proper" country estate of his own beyond a modest estate at Hayes in Kent, it was a dream come true. He promptly sold his Kent home and set to making Burton Pynsent his own.

Chatham added a completely new wing onto the old-fashioned Tudor and Jacobean house he had inherited. That wing is now all that survives, denuded of many of its original classical features (the portico, the colonnade connecting it to the original house) but still recognisable as part of an 18th century aristocratic home.


In 1791 the house was described as "a large irregular building, erected at different periods ... The apartments are elegant, and contain some excellent paintings ... The principal front is to the north, commanding a rich and very extensive prospect of all the flat country between Mendip and the Quantock hills, the channel and Welch [sic] mountains".

By 1804, the house consisted of a dining room and a ball room, two drawing rooms and "a Grotto Room", a library, bird room, morning room, "twenty chambers and dressing rooms", "arched vaults and cellarage", a separate kitchen, bakery, brewery and laundry, "Five Coach Houses, [and] Four Stables for Twenty-Five Horses", and various servants' quarters.[2]

Chatham also levelled the landscape, planting cedar, beech and elm, designing walkways, pleasure grounds and alcoves, and (emulating his brother-in-law at Stowe) erecting temples and follies all round the estate.


Only one of these follies still survives: the Burton Pynsent monument, on Troy Hill. The monument was designed as a mark of gratitude to Sir William Pynsent, inscribed with the Latin lines "Hoc saltem fungar inani munere" ("Let this perform the empty office [of gratitude]"). A statue of Fame had been intended to stand on top of the viewing platform, but it was never erected. Chatham's visitors often climbed the two hundred-odd steps to the top of the tower to enjoy the view over the plains below, and on special occasions a beacon was lit on the platform in celebration.


All this work on the estate was expensive, and Chatham had no money. This, to him, was not a problem. He cheerfully went about taking loans off close friends and family, generally without the faintest intention of paying them back (he was lucky that his wife, at least, made some attempts to do so, and to smooth over the resulting rifts when repayments were not forthcoming). Hayes had been sold, of course, but that was repurchased in 1767 at great expense, and immediately mortgaged for £10,000.

Burton, inevitably, went the same way. In the early 1770s Chatham was in considerable financial trouble. He took out a series of loans from a family friend, Alexander Hood, on the security of Burton Pynsent which, by 1777, totalled £13,000 (a sum Chatham cheerfully palmed off onto his brother-in-law, Earl Temple, when Hood demanded repayment).[3] There were additional sums attached to the estate as well, and Chatham made matters worse by tying his younger children's inheritance to Hayes and Burton in a way that made it impossible to fulfil the conditions of his will without selling and settling the enormous mortgages.

The result, combined with poor maintenance of Burton's estate and farms, was financial disaster, although this did not become obvious till after Chatham's death in 1778. "I had no money to set out with," Lady Chatham recalled, "... till 1780 [Burton] paid nothing (being let) beyond annuitants and taxes ... the Farms all out of condition".[4] Hayes was swiftly sold (in 1785), but Chatham's widow, Hester, remained living at Burton Pynsent until her death in 1803. As she got older she got less and less capable of managing the estate, and restricted herself to living in the wing her husband had built. The old part of the building was shut up, and crumbled away with damp and neglect. "The Air [is] so Damp that the House except where there is Fire [is] almost as wet within as without," Lady Chatham's granddaughter wrote on one occasion.[5] Meanwhile, interest on the outstanding mortgages kept racking up.

By the time the Dowager Countess died in 1803 there was no doubt the house would have to be sold. Her eldest son, the 2nd Earl of Chatham, had estimates of Burton's value drawn up even before his mother died: he clearly had no intention of throwing money he did not have at what was, essentially, a ruin and a money-pit.[6] A year after his mother died the house and estates were parcelled up and auctioned off in several lots.

The house went to a local landowner named John Frederick Pinney. Already condemned – there was provision in the sales catalogue for pulling down the buildings – Burton did not long survive the sale. Pinney pulled down the older portion of the house and seems to have used the newer wing as offices for his farm staff. By the mid 19th century the house was derelict and deserted, and remained so until the Pinneys sold it at the end of the century.

The Burton monument did a little better. Pinney had intended to pull it down, but a subscription by locals, headed by a member of the Woodforde family (a relative of the famous Parson Woodforde, whose brother had been Lady Chatham's physician), bought it for the community. For over a hundred years the tower crumbled, slowly, into neglect. Cows found their way up the stairs, sometimes plummeting to their deaths, which led to the tower being blocked up. Only in the 1980s did the tower receive the attention it deserved when the family of the present owners secured a grant to have it restored. It is now safe to approach, although it is still blocked up at the base.

The story is a sad one, particularly as the Pitts loved Burton Pynsent so much, but the current owners are doing much to restore the estate and there is still much from Pitt's day that can be seen. The Burton Pynsent Monument is still accessible to the public and it is well worth visiting if only to see the ancient graffiti on its base (dating back to 1770 in some cases).



In the nearby village of Curry Rivel, the church contains one of the hatchments used at the death of the Dowager Countess of Chatham and a touching plaque erected to the Pitt family nurse, Elizabeth Sparry.


The memory of Lord Chatham is alive and well in the community, and his cedars still speckle the estate. Perhaps, then, the story is not so sad after all.
__________

References

[1] "Sales particulars of ... Burton Pynsent", 16 October 1804, Somerset Heritage Centre DD/MK 101/1
[2] John Collinson, The history and antiquities of the county of Somerset ... (London, 1791) I, 24; "Sales particulars of ... Burton Pynsent", 16 October 1804, Somerset Heritage Centre DD/MK 101/1
[3] The deeds are at the Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/LC 54/9
[4] William Douglas Home, The prime ministers: stories and anecdotes from Number 10 (London 1987) p. 55
[5] Harriot Hester Eliot to Edward James Eliot, 9 February 1794, Ipswich RO Pretyman MSS HA 119/678/1
[6] "Estimate of Burton Pynsent in the county of Somerset..." February 1803, National Archives Chatham MSS PRO 30/8/71 f 158

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Jacqueline Reiter has a Phd in 18th century political history. She is currently working on the first ever biography of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham, due to be released by Pen & Sword Books in September 2016. When she finds time she blogs about her historical discoveries at http://alwayswantedtobeareiter.wordpress.com/, and can be found on Twitter as https://twitter.com/latelordchatham.

Introducing that Amazing Man: William Pitt, the Younger ~ Part I

by Jacqui Reiter

Ladies and gentlemen. I realise some of you will probably already have made his acquaintance, but I would like to introduce, or reintroduce, you to a historical phenomenon: William Pitt, the Younger.

He was, of course, Britain's youngest (and second longest-serving) prime minister, son of William Pitt the Elder, himself another prime minister. He was in office under George III from 1783-1801 and 1804-6. He was at the helm for much of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and died in office aged only 46.

Pitt by George Romney

William Hague's 2004 biography and the 2007 film Amazing Grace have somewhat restored Pitt to the sphere of public consciousness. But only ten years ago it was a different story. Revealing the subject of my study to acquaintances generally resulted in the question: "Pitt the Younger? Why?"

So please put aside all your preconceptions of spotty teenagers, Benedict Cumberbatch, 'the Pilot that Weather'd the Storm', possible founders of modern-day Conservatism, and stick-thin Gillray figures molesting the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.* For today, for your edification and delight, I present: Reasons why William Pitt the Younger is amazing.

1. His youth

Obvious? Maybe, but enough stress can't be laid on this.  Historians tend to be quite blasé about the whole 'prime minister at 24' thing, as though its happening once made it completely normal. It wasn't any more normal then than it would be now. Pitt's enemies played on his age most ruthlessly: 'A sight to make surrounding nations stare, A kingdom trusted to a schoolboy's care'.[1]  Gillray depicted Pitt's political opponent, Charles James Fox, as a schoolmaster whipping a student Pitt:

Of course Pitt was much more experienced than the average 24 year old politician. He had served eight months as Chancellor of the Exchequer under a previous prime minister, Lord Shelburne. Plus he had already refused the premiership before he turned twenty-four. Twice.

So how did Pitt manage to jump straight to the top spot?  Talent had something to do with it: from the moment he first opened his mouth in the House of Commons it was obvious to his listeners that he was something special. But it was more a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Pitt joined Parliament in January 1781, nine months before the Battle of Yorktown confirmed that Britain had lost the War of Independence with America. In March 1782 Lord North, prime minister since 1770, resigned and a prolonged period of political instability followed.

The process that led to Pitt coming to power was complex, but the reason he was chosen boils down to this: he had a famous name; he was a fresh face; and he was an excellent orator. Oh yes, and a whole bunch of people assumed he would be pliable. They were wrong.

2. His staggering intelligence

Pitt came to office through a combination of luck and circumstance. He stayed there for seventeen years (not counting his second ministry) because he was good at his job. Historians quibble over how much he owed to the King's favour in maintaining his hold on power. Obviously that played a part, but it was a comparatively minor one.

Pitt came to dominate so thoroughly that even his enemies felt the seismic effect of his death on the political scene. Upon hearing the news Pitt's lifelong rival, Fox, said that there was 'something missing in the world-- a chasm or blank that cannot be supplied'.[2]

Pitt was bright. He was fluent in Latin by the age of seven, fluent in ancient Greek by the age of twelve, and developed a lifelong interest in complex mathematics and scientific theory. He was quick to grasp the main points and flaws of an argument, something that came in helpful on the floor of the House of Commons. 

Trained by his father, Pitt the Elder, in the art of public speaking, he could rattle off a two-hour Budget speech with only a handful of notes (when he used notes-- mostly he didn't). His speeches were, by all accounts, a tour de force: 'that matchless eloquence, which called forth unbounded applause from all who heard it'.[3]  He had an eye for detail that stood him well both in Parliament and in day-to-day business.

Pitt addressing the House of Commons by K.A. Hickel

He had a complete grasp of the way 18th century politics worked. He was no stranger to its darker side, and was happy (a little too happy, sometimes) to reward political service with peerages and pensions. He knew exactly how much pressure could be placed on the various influences within the system, from the King all the way down to the humblest voter.

And he certainly knew all about image, propaganda and morale, which came in extremely useful during the long war with revolutionary France. The opposition press passed sarcastic comment on his ability to twist gloomy statistics to his advantage: 'Although the real situation of the Country may be truly alarming, yet the bulk of mankind shall not be able to perceive that so it is … This I look upon as a master-stroke of Policy, for next to being in a secure state, it is of the utmost moment, that a country should appear to be so'.[4]

Pitt was exceptionally skilled at playing the political game. On one occasion he managed to turn a vote of censure on his war policy round so completely he ended up leading the entire House of Commons in a standing rendition of 'Britons Strike Home'.[5] That takes guts, but it also takes talent.

3. .... but also his humanity

Pitt's intelligence, thankfully, came with a generous dash of human frailty. Some of his character flaws are more pleasing than others, of course. One does not become prime minister at 24, and remain prime minister for so long, without believing in oneself, and Pitt was more self-confident than most.

Pitt the Elder was the one who said 'I know that I can save this country, and that no-one else can', but the phrase might just as well have been spoken by his son. Pitt's confidence in everything except military matters (in which he 'mistrust[ed] extremely any ideas of my own')[6] added to his ability to sway audiences through oratory, but it was more than ordinary single-mindedness.

To put it simply, Pitt sometimes liked to show off. While still a trainee lawyer at Lincoln's Inn he out-argued the historian Edward Gibbon at a party, and continued to hold forth long after Gibbon had stormed off in a huff.[7] In the 1780s he enjoyed putting down his own Secretary to the Treasury by displaying his superior knowledge of detail in committee.[8] Ignorant of his own abilities Pitt was not; yet he managed to show it in a most endearing way.

There was also his optimism. No doubt it carried him through many a dark patch in the 1790s when the war with France was going badly, but it was not always a useful trait in a war minister. Pitt's sheer inability to countenance failure blended with a tendency to see success in every scheme.

His Secretary of State for War, Henry Dundas, had to rein in Pitt's 'eagerness' and 'sanguineness of ... temper'.[9] Again, sweet; but to his colleagues often highly annoying.

Paradoxically for a man accustomed to speechifying on a daily basis, Pitt was also extremely shy. He overcame it with a public mask of stiffness and pride, a mask many men not intimate with him came to see as the reality. This is Sir Nathaniel Wraxall's famous description of Pitt's haughtiness:

  'In his manners, Pitt, if not repulsive, was cold, stiff, and without suavity or amenity. He seemed never to invite approach, or to encourage acquaintance; though, when addressed, he could be polite, communicative, and occasionally gracious. Smiles were not natural to him ... From the instant that Pitt entered the doorway of the House of Commons, he advanced up the floor with a quick and firm step, his head erect and thrown back, looking neither to the right nor to the left; nor favouring with a nod or a glance, any of the individuals seated on either side, among whom many who possessed five thousand a year, would have been gratified even by so slight a mark of attention. ... Pitt seemed made to command, even more than to persuade or to convince, the Assembly that he addressed.'[10]

To those who had the good fortune to peer beneath the mask Pitt expressed himself in a remarkably unselfconscious and light-hearted style. The following is a typical extract from a letter Pitt wrote to his friend and later brother-in-law Edward Eliot in 1782 when Chancellor of the Exchequer:

 'What do you imagine is the immediate Cause of my writing to You? It concerns to say the Truth neither the Treasury Board nor the Treasury Bench, but if I must tell you, another Treasury Rendezvous the Treasury Box at the Opera. I forget, whether you promised to be one of Lady Shelburne's Subscribers, and as the Session approaches, I find it very necessary to know, both to satisfy Lady Shelburne [wife of the prime minister], who wishes to know that you are, and Mrs Townshend [wife of the Home Secretary], who wishes, for her own sake, to know if you are not. You see the Harmony and Concert of Administration.'[11]

Pitt was a much more attractive personality than many portrayals imply (take, for example, historian Philip Ziegler's throwaway line 'so far as Pitt was capable of loving any human being...').[12]  Wilberforce called Pitt 'the wittiest man I ever knew'.[13] Admittedly this doesn't entirely square with Pitt's fondness for bad puns. When told that the Customs House excisemen had formed a volunteer corps against French invasion he replied 'I am very glad of that; they are all seizers [Caesars ... in case you hadn't got it] to a man!' [14] Ha ha.

He did have the ability to laugh at himself, and decorated his country house with Gillray 's political cartoons. He couldn't sing for toffee and, when he could find the time, he wrote terrible poetry. In the right company he was the life of the party. He sounds like he must have been fun to know, and worth the trouble of getting to know.

One of the best known things about Pitt is his addiction to Port wine. While this certainly rounds out his personality, I find the way some historians have treated the issue distasteful (it was one of the issues I felt William Hague dealt with most sensitively in his 2004 biography). 

Pitt's drinking was a big problem. It worried his doctor, although not enough for Sir Walter Farquhar to do anything more than limit Pitt to 'two Glasses of Madeira wine ... and nearly a Pint of Port ... but not quite' at dinner.[15]  It worried Pitt's friends. 'In his way [to Bath], at Wilderness, he drank very nearly three Bottles of Port to his own Share at Dinner & Supper; so Lord Camden told me,' Pitt's friend George Rose reported in 1802 when Pitt was in bad health and supposed to be cutting down.[16] It seems to have worried everyone except Pitt himself.

Some of the stories are amusing-- Pitt throwing up behind the Speaker's Chair; giving the clerk a headache with his wine-laced breath; 'oscillating like his own [exchequer] bills' in walking to his carriage[17]-- but the truth is he was an alcoholic, and eventually it helped kill him. It's not funny.

That's all for now ... but please do keep an eye out for my second Pitt post on 12 December 2013, in which I will deal with three more reasons why Pitt is so fascinating. *Actually, hold onto that one:

Pitt and the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street by Gillray

References 

[1] Rolliad (1812 edition), p. 27

[2] Quoted in Ehrman, The Younger Pitt III, 830

[3] Tomline, Life of Pitt (1821 edition) I, ix

[4] Morning Post, 10 July 1794

[5] Ehrman, The Younger Pitt III, 109

[6] Windham Papers I, 247

[7] Selections from the Letters and Correspondence of Sir James Bland Burges (1885), pp. 60-1

[8] Duffy, The Younger Pitt, p. 75

[9] Ehrman III, 326 n 5

[10] Wraxall, Historical Memoirs of my own time II, 469-70

[11] Pitt to Eliot, 15 October 1782, Ipswich Record Office HA 119/T108/39

[12] Ziegler, Addington (1965), p. 83 

[13] Life of Wilberforce I, 18 

[14] Ashbourne, Pitt: some chapters of his life and times (1898), p. 231 n 5 

[15] Sir Walter Farquhar to Pitt, 10 October 1798, National Archives PRO 30/8/134 

[16] George Rose to the Bishop of Lincoln, 21 November 1802, Ipswich RO Pretyman MSS HA 119/T108/44 

[17] Life of Wilberforce I, 26; Stanhope III, 137; Pellew, Life of Lord Sidmouth I, 91

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Jacqui Reiter has a PhD in 18th century British political history. She is currently working on her first novel, which deals with the 2nd Earl of Chatham's relationship with his brother, William Pitt the Younger. She blogs at http://alwayswantedtobeareiter.wordpress.com/ and also at http://alwayswantedtobeareiter.tumblr.com/.