William Pitt the Elder was the first Earl of Chatham and Prime Minister of Britain. Groundbreaking in its approach, this is the definitive biography of a brilliant, yet tragic, British statesman who was born in 1708.
Weaving together military history and political biography, Edward Pearce provides a portrait of the man ‘with an eye like a diamond’ – a man who had close ties with the slave trade and who preached war and British supremacy on a world stage.
Alongside detailed descriptions of battles in Europe and North America, we follow Pitt’s career as a politician. Pearce also shows us Pitt the man – vain, ruthless, tortured with physical illness and one who succumbed to mental collapse.