India, established the Pitt family fortune. After returning home the Governor was able to raise his family to a position of wealth and political influence: in 1691 he purchased the property of Boconnoc in Cornwall, which gave him control of a seat in Parliament. He made further land purchases and became one of the dominant political figures in the West Country, controlling seats such as the rotten borough of Old Sarum. William's father was Robert Pitt (1680–1727), the eldest son of Governor Pitt, who served as a Tory Member of Parliament from 1705 to 1727. His mother was Harriet Villiers, the daughter of Edward Villiers-FitzGerald and the Irish heiress Katherine FitzGerald. Both William's paternal uncles Thomas and John were MPs, while his aunt Lucy married the leading Whig politician and soldier General James Stanhope. From 1717 to 1721, Stanhope served as effective First Minister in the Stanhope–Sunderland Ministry, and was a useful political contact for the Pitt family until the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, a disaster which engulfed the government. Birth and Education William Pitt was born at Golden Square, Westminster, on 15 November 1708. His older brother Thomas Pitt had been born in 1704. There were also five sisters: Harriet, Catherine, Ann, Elizabeth, and Mary. From 1719 William was educated at Eton College along with his brother. William disliked Eton, later claiming that "a public school might suit a boy of turbulent disposition but would not do where there was any gentleness". It was at school that Pitt began to suffer from gout. Governor Pitt died in 1726, and the family estate at Boconnoc passed to William's father. When he died the following year, Boconnoc was inherited by William's elder brother, Thomas Pitt of Boconnoc. In January 1727, William was entered as a gentleman commoner at Trinity College, Oxford. There is evidence that he was an extensive reader, if not a minutely accurate classical scholar. Virgil was his favourite author. William diligently cultivated the faculty of expression by the practice of translation and re-translation. In these years he became a close friend of George Lyttelton, who would later become a leading politician. In 1728 a violent attack of gout compelled him to leave Oxford without finishing his degree. He then chose to travel abroad, from 1728 attending Utrecht University in the Dutch Republic, gaining a knowledge of Hugo Grotius and other writers on international law and diplomacy.