Pitt the Younger went to Cambridge at 14 and led Britain at 24
William Pitt became prime minister in 1783 at just 24, the youngest in British or world history. He then held the job for nearly nineteen years in total, a span beaten only by Robert Walpole, steering Britain through the French Revolution and war with Napoleon while also acting as his own chancellor of the exchequer.
Pitt was born in 1759 in Hayes, Kent, into politics on both sides: his father was William Pitt the Elder, later Earl of Chatham, and his mother's brother George Grenville had also been prime minister. A sickly boy, he was taught at home and mastered Latin and Greek early. His father drilled him in translating classical texts aloud on the spot and speaking impromptu on unfamiliar subjects, training that shaped a formidable parliamentary speaker.
He entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, a month before his fourteenth birthday. There he met William Wilberforce, who became a lifelong friend and ally, and his tutor George Pretyman, whom he later made a bishop. Still in poor health, he used a privilege reserved for noblemen's sons to graduate without sitting exams. As a younger son he inherited little when his father died in 1778, and at 19 he publicly rebutted a rival family's claims about his father's politics until they dropped them. He was called to the bar in 1780.
Though usually labelled a Tory, Pitt called himself an independent Whig and disliked rigid party politics. He was admired as an efficient, reforming administrator who recruited capable officials, raised taxes to fund the war against France and suppressed radicals. Fearing Irish support for France, he pushed through the Acts of Union of 1800, becoming the first prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1801, but failed to win the Catholic emancipation he wanted alongside it, and left office that March. He returned in 1804 and died in office in 1806.
The historian Asa Briggs found him too solitary and aloof to be loved, yet friends described a gentle wit. When a traveller praised Polish nobles for their French cooks, Italian confectioners and Tokaji wine, Pitt punned on the Polish diet, the name of that country's parliament. His revival of Toryism kept the party in power for a quarter of a century.
Source: William Pitt the Younger
