Pitt, William

William Pitt the Elder (1708–1778), Earl of Chatham, was a Whig politician and Great Britain's prime minister from 1766 to 1768. He inspired a core principle of the Fourth Amendment: that the home is sacrosanct and must not be vulnerable to arbitrary government invasion. While Pitt was a member of the House of Commons during America's colonial period, he warned Parliament that the colonists were discontented with British taxes and hated the general warrants used to enforce them. General search warrants gave royal customs officers broad powers to search private homes and spaces for smuggled (and thus untaxed) goods. The colonists detested them because the warrants, also called writs of assistance, did not any require customs officials to specify where they could search or what they could seize.

Pitt argued eloquently in Parliament, even quoting American antitax pamphlets during debates, that general warrants violated English law:

It is a maxim of our law that every Englishman's house is his castle. Not that it is surrounded with walls and battlements: it may be a straw-built shed: every wind of heaven may whistle round it: all the elements of nature may enter it; but the king cannot; the king dare not.

In 1766, during a debate on a cider tax, Pitt stated, “The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the crown.” Pitt's statements that a man's home is his castle echoed earlier statements of English jurists such as Sir Edward Coke in Semayne's Case (1604), in which the Court recognized that private homeowners retain their rights against unlawful entry even when police have a valid warrant.

Pitt's alliance with American interests was not based solely on benevolence or constitutional theory. Pitt, war minister during the Seven Years' War and England's imperial expansion, believed that laws such as the Stamp Act and the Quartering Act, and the warrants used to enforce them, would drive the Americans to revolt. Warring with the colonies would drain British resources and encourage the colonists to align themselves with France, Pitt reasoned. Despite Pitt's rhetorical power, royal customs agents continued using general warrants. Pitt's concerns were well founded, as the colonists' resentment against general searches helped spark the American Revolution.

After the writing of the U.S. Constitution, Congress proposed an amendment forbidding general warrant searches, expressly prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures, and requiring that government officials show probable cause for searches and describe the places and the things to be seized with specificity before obtaining a search warrant. In interpreting the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court has cited Pitt's words about the sanctity of private homes.

Pitt was called “the Great Commoner” for his steadfast support of the will of the people and his long-standing reluctance to accept a seat in the House of Lords. The city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was named for Pitt in 1758.