Not until January 1793 were his dearest wishes granted. “After clouds comes sunshine,” he writes to his wife from London. “The Admiralty so smile upon me, that really I am as much surprised as when they frowned. Lord Chatham yesterday made many apologies for not having given me a Ship before this time, and said, that if I chose to take a Sixty-four to begin with, I should be appointed to one as soon as she was ready; and whenever it was in his power, I should be removed into a Seventy-four. Everything indicates War....”
“_Duty is the great business of a sea officer_”
So far back as 1753 Lord Chesterfield prophesied a revolution in France. “All the symptoms,” he said, “which I have ever met with in history, previous to great changes and revolutions in government, now exist and daily increase in France.” Warning rumbles heralded the storm, disregarded and thought of no account by some, full of grave portent to others. It burst in 1789.
At first William Pitt, First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, steadily refused to believe that England was menaced by the Power which Fox had termed “the natural enemy of Great Britain.” In January 1792 he assured Parliament that “unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than we may at the present moment.” Either he was over anxious to persuade himself that things were as he would like them to be, or he was sadly mistaken. Pitt had by no means the pugnacious disposition of his father, the famous first Earl of Chatham. He thought that the fire would burn itself out, that it would be of short duration, whereas it steadily gained strength and eventually involved practically every country in Europe. Not until he was convinced that war was inevitable did the youngest Premier who ever handled the reins of a British government accept the French Revolution as of more than local consequence. Hitherto domestic and financial questions had occupied his attention and absorbed his energies. If France ignored the nation which he represented, if she refrained from poaching on British preserves or those of her allies, he was quite content to return the compliment. Then came the decree that the navigation of the river Scheldt should be thrown open. It had previously been guaranteed to the Dutch by Great Britain as well as by other Powers, including France. The execution of Louis XVI. followed, which led to Chauvelin, the French Ambassador, being given his passports. If Pitt had been slumbering he had wooed somnolence with one eye open since the annexation of Savoy. He was now fully awake, calm and self-reliant, for he recognised the inevitable. It came in a declaration of war by the French Convention against Holland and Great Britain on the 1st February 1793. Macaulay, writing from an essentially Whig point of view, states that Pitt’s military administration “was that of a driveller,” but to the impartial historian nothing is further from the truth. He abandoned his schemes of social reform to plunge whole-heartedly into the titanic struggle which was to cost him his life. That he made mistakes is obvious--what statesman has not?--but he fell in his country’s cause as nobly as Nelson at Trafalgar and Moore at Coruña.
