What was the explanation of Pitt’s indebtedness? His private life seems to have been remarkably pure. His one dissipation was an extra bottle of port. He was a bachelor. A man of cold and shy manners, he had few friends—his nose, as Romney said, was turned up to all mankind—he mixed little in society, and he was not given to hospitality. Yet with £13,478 a year, and town and seaside houses, “free of coal, candles and taxes”—to quote the official phrase of the time—in each of which he maintained but a plain and inexpensive establishment, he died at the early age of forty-seven, owing £51,700. The only explanation of the mystery that has been advanced is that, so absorbed was Pitt in public life, and so indifferent was he to money, he neglected his private affairs and was robbed by his servants. It was an hereditary weakness, perhaps. His father, the first Earl of Chatham, of whose private life Lord Chesterfield wrote, “It was stained by no vices, nor sullied by any meanness,” died in debt to the extent of £20,000, which Parliament paid, as well as settling an annuity of £4,000 a year on his successors in the earldom. “Dispensing for near twenty years the favours of the Crown,” says Canning in the epitaph he wrote of William Pitt, “he lived without ostentation, and he died poor.” Further than this it is now impossible to carry the story of the material result to himself of Pitt’s official career. But these happy words are of general application as a tribute to the devotion, honesty, and self-sacrifice of the Ministers of the Crown. There is no instance of a Prime Minister who grew rich in office. Spencer Perceval, who was assassinated in the Lobby of the House of Commons, on May 11, 1812, left his family so ill-provided for that Parliament had to come to their assistance. As is usual in such cases, Parliament acted handsomely. It made a grant of £50,000 to the family, and voted to the widow a pension of £2,000 a year, which on her death was to be continued to the eldest son and increased to £3,000. 5