May 28, 2008

Happy Birthday, Billy Pitt!

Billy Pitt.jpg

William Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister of Britain from 1783 to 1781 and again from 1804 to his death in 1806, was born this day in 1759 in the village of Hayes, Kent.

Pitt has always been one of my political heroes. Nominally a Tory but a pragmatic independant (he championed, among other things, the abolition of slavery and Catholic emancipation), he held the line during the turbulant times caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, fending off the Jacobin plottings of that rat-bastard Charles James Fox and then later joining Britain to the Third Coalition against that Napoleon. (He is said to have died in part as a result of the news of Napoleon's crushing defeat of the Coaltion at the Battle of Austerlitz.)

Posted by Robert at May 28, 2008 09:25 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Umm! Some fleeting use of spellcheck, please? Excellent post otherwise.

Posted by: Terrapod at May 28, 2008 05:57 PM

He put the Pitt in Burgh.

:-)

Posted by: stillers at June 1, 2008 03:46 AM