Pitt the elder

The story begins with the naval battle in Quiberon Bay, where a fleet under Admiral Sir Edward Hawke caught and destroyed French warships that had been gathering for a planned invasion of Britain in 1759. The victory helped decide the Seven Years' War and left Britain as the leading imperial power of the world. Central to that conflict was William Pitt, later the first Earl of Chatham and a future Prime Minister, whom contemporaries described as having "an eye like a diamond." Edward Pearce combines military and political biography in this account, which also ties Pitt to the slave trade and to his conviction that war and British supremacy were essential.

The book moves between campaigns in Europe and North America and Pitt's political career, which was bound up with General James Wolfe at Quebec, with the American colonies' move toward independence, with the slow-thinking George III, and with John Wilkes, a dissolute outsider with a quick mind. Pearce also examines the legend that grew around Pitt, which portrayed him as a heroic titan and a brilliant statesman and strategist. He asks how much of Britain's military success and imperial expansion really belonged to Pitt, and how much to a network of commanders, naval administrators and foreign allies, including Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Pitt the man is shown in all his flaws: vain, ruthless, troubled by chronic illness, and eventually undone by mental collapse. The author presents him as perhaps the most powerful minister ever to direct Britain's foreign policy, and places him within an era that set the balance of power in Europe and beyond for nearly two centuries. The book suits readers of eighteenth-century history, military history and political biography.