fr / "if JOHN DB SAUg. B. H. Blackwf.ll, The Statesmen Series Edited by LLOYD C. SANDERS CHARLES JAMES FOX 1 749 — 1 806 In Monthly Vols., One Shilling net NEW ISSUE OF THE Statesmen Seiies With PORTRAITS and INDEXES 1. FOX By H. O. Wakeman, M.A. [July 2. WELLESLEY By Col. G. B. Malleson, C.S.I. [Aug. 3. O'CONNELL By J. A. Hamilton [Sept. 4. PALMERSTON By Lloyd C. Sanders [Oct. 5. DERBY By T. E. Kehbel [Nov. 6. BEACONSFIELD By T. E. Kh-bbel [Dec. To be followed 6y — Gladstone— Bismarck— Dalhousie—Metteknich— Prince Consort— Bolingkkoke— Peel — Gambetta — Grattan etc. Charles James Fox BY HENRY OFFLEY WAKEMAN, M.A. THIRD EDITION JOHN DE SAWS. London GIBBINGS AND COMPANY, LIMITED 18 Bury Street, W.C. 1909 LrlLSKAKI UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA f ' j W '*.. PREFACE. To 'WTite an adequate biography of Charles James Fox would be to write the history of the reign of George III., in its social as well as its political aspects. The mag- nitude of the task is perhaps the chief reason why no one has ret done for Fox what Lord Stanhope has done for Pitt, and Mr. Stapleton for Canning. To some extent, however, Fox has undoubtedly suffered for leavins- behind him too obvious a biographer. The breath had scarcely left his body before a crowd of Memoirs and Reminiscences made their appearance, of which the volumes of Mv. Fell and Colonel Trotter are the best known, but no one ventured to interfere with the un- doubted prerogative of the third Lord Holland — the Young One of Fox's correspondence — to write the bio- graphy of the great Whig leader which should be a«T>}yLta e? aei A series of misfortunes prevented the work from ever being begun, and it was not till 1853 that the mate- rials, which liord Holland had collected and Mr. Allen had annotated, were given to the woild by Lord Russell, under the title of IMemoirs and Correspondence of C. J. Fox. Thirteen vears afterwards, at the fas; end of a busv political career. Lord Russell was able at last to publish vi PREFACE. the long-promised Life, when Fox, had been in his grave nearly sixty years. Much of the personal and political interest in his career had by that time died away, and Lord Eussell himself would have been the first to acknow- ledge that the work when published was very different m scope and character to that which was originally conceived. 8ince then the brilliant and attractive essay of Sir George Trevelyan upon English politics and society at the beginning of the reign of George III., published under the title of the Early History of Charles James Fox, has been the only serious historical work which has dealt with the subject. It would soeni indeed as if interest in Charles James Fox had in recent years been steadily decreasing. The references to him in Lord Macaulay's writings are extremely few, while in modern periodical literature his name hardly ever appears except as the hero of an anecdote. While Burke has become the storehouse of political wisdom to poli- ticians of all parties, references to Fox's opinions and quotations from his speeches are rarely found. Under such circumstances I hope it will not be deemed presumptuous in me to attempt to present in a short and condensed form a sketch of the political career of Fox as a statesman, which may serve to recall to men's minds the part which he played at a very important crisis of his country's history. It is obviously impossible to com- press within the limits of a work like this a complete history of the times or of the man. Much has necessarily to be left out, and, remembering that in this series I am specially called to deal with my subject as a statesman, PBEFACE. vii I have accordingly endeavoured to fix my attention par- ticularly upon his public life, and upon those parts of his private life and traits of his private character, which had a definite influence upon his public career. The con- nection between the two in the case of Fox is obvious enough, and I do not pretend to do anything more in the following pages than to elucidate and illustrate it. Among the authorities on which I have mainly relied may be mentioned ' Memoirs and Correspondence of C. J. Fox/ and ' The Life and Times of C. J. Fox,' by Lord Russell; 'Fox's Collected Speeches;' Sir C Trc- vclyan's ' Early History of Charles James Fox ; ' Colonel Trotter's ' Memoirs of Fox ; ' Rogers' ' Recollections of C. J. Fox ; ' ' Gilbert Wakefield's Correspondence with C. J. Fox ; ' Horace Walpole's ' Memoirs and Journals ; ' ' Burke's Speeches and Correspondence : ' ' Selwyu's Lile and Letters ; ' Moore's ' Life of Sheridan ; ' ' Memoirs of the Court Cabinets of George JII.,' by the Duke of Buckingham ; ' Memoirs of Lord Minto ; ' Sir G. Corne- wall Lewis's ' Administrations of Great Britain ; ' Stan- hope's 'Life of Pitt;' Gillray's 'Caricatures;' Lord Albemarle's 'Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham ;' Fitzmaurice's 'Life of Shelburne ;' 'The Correspondence of George III., and Lord North;' Lord Holland's ' Memoirs of the Whig Party ; ' ' The Diaries of the first Earl of Malmesbury ; ' &c. I need hardly add that during- the period which he has as yet covered, the guidance of Mr. Lecky's clear sight and comprehensive mind has been indispensable. H. 0. W. OXKORD, 1S90. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Fox AS A Tory 1 CHAPTEU 11. The American Wau ....... 25 CHAPTEIl III. The Fall of Lord North 37 CHAPTEll IV. The Ministry of 1782 59 ClIAPTiill V. The Coalition . . ^^ 80 CHAPTER VI. The Ln-dia Bill 100 CHAPTER VII. Ten Years of Opposition Hi^ CHAPTER VIII. Thk War with France ^''^ CHAPTER I.\:. St. Asns Hill 1'^ CHAPTER X. The Ministry of all the Talents . . . .104 CHARLES JAMES FOX. CHAPTER I. FOX AS A TORY. 1749-1774. "Mr. Fox never had any principle," — "II n'a nul espece de principes, et il re^arde avec pitie tons ceux qui en ont." Such were the criticisms passed on the public and private conduct of Charles James Fox, in the height of his parliamentary fame, by no mean judges of human nature, George III. and Madame du Deffand. From the damaging effect of those criticisms Fox's reputation never yet has been, nor indeed can be, wholly freed. Despite his brilhant services to the Whig party, despite the magic sway of his eloquence, despite the rare gifts of his singularly winning nature, there hangs across his career from first to last, like a storm-cloud on a sunny April sky, the dark shadow of an unprincipled life. The reason is not far to seek. He was a spoiled child from the cradle to the grave. Petted and indulged by his father in his childhood, he was petted and indulged by his party in his maturity. Even his opponents could hardly believe him to be in earnest, and after having been for an hour B 2 CHABLES JAMES FOX. the object of his most trenchant vituperation, Lord North would be content to reply with a good-humoured joke. It was not to be wondered at, that under such circum- stances Fox found it difficult to take politics seriously, and to look at them in any other light than a game as interesting and less expensive than faro or quinze. A gambler at Brookes's, he was a gambler at St. Stephen's. He played as recklessly in one place as in the other. In both places much of his recklessness was due to the training he had received from his father. Never was son more obedient, never had son less cause for his obedience. Deliberately educated in vice from a schoolboy, laughed out of any scruples which might struggle to the surface, encouraged to indulge every whim and every desire, he could not but lose the niceness of moral judgment, and could not but fail to appreciate the importance of moral prin- ciple. To Lord Holland belongs the infamous distinction of having been among the most corrupt of fathers as well as the most corrupt of the statesmen of his time. Born on the 24th of January, 1749, Charles Fox was sent to Eton in the autumn of 1758, but he had not been five years at school before he was taken by his father on a tour to Spa and Paris, and at the age of fourteen was introduced by him to the witty and abandoned society of gamblers and debauchees in which Lord Holland then lived. In 1764 he attained the dignity of a sixth-form boy, but in the autumn of that year he left Eton for Oxford, and matriculated as a commoner of Hertford College at what would now be considered the ridiculously early age of fifteen. Two years more, divided between hard work at Oxford and dissipation at Paris, sufficed to complete his education as far as the University was concerned. Another two years of Continental travel, chiefly spent in Paris and Italy, gave him a considerable knowledge of FOX AS A TOBY. 3 foreign languages, and a thorough acquaintance with the lower aspects of Parisian life. At the age of nineteen, when most men now-a-days are just entering on their University career, and are beginning to realise the existence of Logic and of Ethics, Charles Fox was returned for the pocket borough of Mid hurst, and stepped out on the parliamentary arena in the spring of 1769 an accomplished scholar, a versatile man of the world, and a finished rake. He had many of the qualifications necessary for a successful politician. Gifted by nature with a fine presence, and a figure, which, if portly, was not as yet gross, he had done much to improve his natural advan- tages. His voice, rich, melodious, and strong, had been carefully trained on the amateur stage to express the nicest gradations of thought and feeling. His reason, vigorous and clear, had acquired at Oxford enough of the discipline of mathematics to become logical, and not enough to become narrow. His taste, formed by Eton scholarship and his own lifelong preference on the great classical writei's, was enriched by an extensive and intimate acquaintance with French and Italian literature. His memory was singularly keen and retentive. Even Pitt could not more aptly point his arguments with the appropriate classical sentence, so dear to the man of education of those days, or turn the laugh against his adversary by a well-capped quotation. No one could ruffle the even serenity of his temper, few could resist the attractiveness of his address. Such was Charles James Fox at his entrance into political life in 176*.). With all a young man's heedlessness of consequences, and love of excite- ment, with more than his share of generous instincts and ambitious aims natural to his time of life, he at once plunged impetuously into the fray, espoused without 132 4 CHAELES JAMES FOX. thought the party of his father, took the House by storm by his first important speech, and soon pushed himself into the front rank of the most uncompromising defenders of the King and the Prerogative. The champion was sorely needed. For nine years George HI. had been working with stubborn pertina- city to effect the overthrow of the Whig oligarchy, which had for so long ruled England in the name of the King. The atteiipt at first sight seemed hopeless enough. What could a young- man of narrow intellect and limited experience do against a party, bound together by every tie of political tradition and family connection, and resting securely on a basis of scientific parliamentary organization ? What could even a king do, whom all the world believed to be a tool in the hands of a profligate mother and her unprincipled favourite, against a statesman who had just added two continents to the dominions of the British Crown, and was the greatest orator England had known since the days of Pym ? But George III. was not the man to be dazzled by the glory of a career even like that of Chatham. He had the perseverance and the courage of a typical John Bull, Curiously unable to understand the motives or feelinos of others, he looked upon all those who disagreed with him or thwarted him as personal enemies. His mind, limited but tenacious, was singularly alive to his own interests. His pluck, largely compounded of pride and of obstinacy, forbade him to know when he was beaten. But ver these lower qualities ruled with absolute sway a conscience which, if always narrow and often ignorant, was at any rate true and sincere. Honesty of purpose is the distinguishing characteristic of George III. It is easy to point out the deficiencies of a character which, from a high sense of moral duty, soiled itself in shameless FOX AS A TOBY. 5 and conspicuous corruption. It is easy to sneer at a conscience which, on principle, excluded from its trust a Chatham and a Rockingham, and folded to its breast Sir Francis Dashwood and Lord Sandwich. It is easy to say that consistency In politics is a virtue often closely allied with stupidity and prejudice. To such criticisms George III. must fairly plead guilty. Stupid, prejudiced, and narrow, he was utterly unable to rise either in moral or intellectual conception above the opinions of his age, but he never deliberately sank below them. He did honestly and fearlessly what he conceived to be right, and never once did, in the course of one of the longest political lives known to English history, what he knew to be wrong. There are not many statesmen of the eighteenth century of whom the same can be said. To George III. the Whig oligarchy was a tyrant which was slowly crushing the life out of the constitution. Chatham was an all-powerful dictator who overshadowed the legitimate influence of the Crown. As long as the two were united, the liberties of Englishmen and the rio-hts of the Crown were alike at stake. There was something to be said for this view. With the passing away of all chance of a Stewart restoration, had passed away the necessity for Whig ascendency. There was no longer any reason why half the nation, and possibly the larger half, should be denied all opportunity of serving a dynasty to which it was thoroughly loyal. At the same time the principles which had been inscribed on the ^Vhig banner of 1688, and which had been entrusted as a sacred deposit of political truth to the loving care of the great Revolution families, had been carried into effect. Civil and religious liberty in the Whig sense of the words had, under the governments of Stanhope and of Walpole, ceased to form the programme of a party, and had 6 GHABLES JAMES FOX. become the common heritao^e of all Englishmen. Not even the most ardent of Tories seriously proposed to revive the Schism Act, or disputed the right of the nation to settle the succession to the Crown. The questions at issue between statesmen were of a much narrower kind. Whether the King should have the determining voice in the choice of his advisers and in the direction of affairs, was the crucial question of the day ; and to take the side of George III. on such a subject was at least as much open to the Whig who revered the memory of William III., as to the Tory who observed the death day of King Charles the Martyr. And if the divisions which had once divided parties had become obsolete, the new divisions which had taken their place had become unreal. They were personal not political, and represented cliques not principles. Walpole,/ in order to assure his own power, and to establish th^ Hanoverian dynasty upon the throne, had raised corruptiotj to the dignity of a science. The Ministerial majority, nominated for the most part by a few Whig borough- owners, was kept together by an elaborate system of places and pensions. It was idle to say that a House of Commons so returned reprfesented the nation. It repre- sented the great Whig families, the Pelhams, the Cavendishes, the Bentincks and the Eussells, and it represented the great Whig families alone. When on the fall of Walpole they assumed the reins of government, they used their power to further the interests of their connection. To a prescient statesman at the death of , George II. England might well have seemed already 1 a Venice of the North, slowly sinking under the deaden- ; ing rule of a selfish and suspicious oligarchy of noble families. From such a danger England was saved by George III. FOX AS A TOEY. 7 He saw clearly enough that the weakness of the great families lay in their mutual jealousies, and he set himself to sow dissensions between them. The haughty in- dependence of Chatham, the mystery in which he loved to conceal his real thoughts, and his evident determination never to bend his neck to the yoke of party, rendered it a comparatively easy task to separate his interests from those of Newcastle, who was a party leader and nothing more. The weapon of corruption, which had proved so effective in the hands of Walpole against the Tories, was wielded with still more telling effect by the King and Bute ao-ainst the Whigs. Unexpected success attended their efforts. The Russells, ever greedy of place, and already at enmity with the Pelhams, drew nearer to the King. The Grenvilles separated from Newcastle, though not wholly from Chatham. The unpopularity of a fresh war brought about the resignation of the great Minister in 1761. Slielburne, soft, oily, and unscrupulous, placed his admitted talents at the disposal of the Crown. Henry Fox, ever venal and ever shameless, undertook the congenial task of managing the bribery department, and the ratification of the Peace of Paris by Parliament in 1763 won for Lord Holland his tainted peerage, and for the King his first o-rciit triumph over the Whig families. But the emancipation of the Crown was by no means completed by the substitution of Bute and Fox for Chatham and Newcastle. Seven more weary years of ])l()t and countei'plot were to pass away before the King could obtain a ]\Iinister after his own heart. Bute soon quailed before a storm of unpopularity and calumny, such as had not assailed an English Minister since the time of Strafford, and George lU., thrown back upon the discon- tented Whigs, found the scorpions of Grenville and of J^)edford worse than the whips of Chatham. Restlessly he 8 CHABLES JAMES FOX. turned from party to party, from leader to leader, from clique to clique, in the vain hope of freedom. To save him- self from the thraldom of Grenville's tedious and insolent harangues, he surrendered at discretion to Rockingham and the Whig oligarchy. To escape from them he put himself in the hands of Chatham and his personal Ministry. In the chaos which resulted from the retirement of the dictator owing to his strange attacks of nervous prostration, the weary King lent his support by turns to Grafton or to Shelburne or to North as occasion seemed to offer. Yet through all this apparently aimless shifting to and fro he had never lost sight of his main object. With dogged pertinacity he had gone on steadily building up his own party. Every change of Ministry served to divide further the discordant sections of the once formid- able Whig phalanx. Every session increased the numbers of the King's friends. Every act of patronage was dictated by a single eye to his political advantage. In the great questions which had arisen, especially those relating to Wilkes and to the American Colonies, he probably had with him the majority of the nation as well as the majority of Parliament. At last in 1770 came the opportunity he had been waiting for so long and so patiently. The reappearance of Chatham in Parhament tinally broke up the Administration which still nominally owned the rule of Grafton. But neither Chatham, nor Bedford, nor Rockingham, were strong enough by them- selves to claim the seals of office. Mutual jealousies were too rife to admit of a coalition, and so amid tlie divided ranks of his enemies George marched safely to victory. In Lord North he found a servant able and trustworthy, in the House of Commons a majority of placemen and pensioners obsequious and contented. The threads of policy were in his own hands, patronage 20 CHABLES JAMES FOX. could preside over the finances and over the navy of England, yet no one thought that Grafton, or Dashwood, or Sandwich should be debarred from the counsels of an English King because they were debauchees. Charles Fox was not so degraded a libertine as Sandwich. He was not so confirmed a drunkard as Carteret or as Diuidas. Even as a gamester he was no worse than his friend Carlisle, though he might be more unlucky. What then was it that singled out Fox as the one statesman of the eighteenth century who must retrieve his character before he could be trusted, in whose case alone moral failure was to be a bar to political advancement? The answer to the question is to be found in the fact that Charles Fox's faults were faults of character, not of passion — faults which vitiated his whole life, and not merely one department of it. A man might be a libertine or a drunkard, but, when free from his particular temptation, might have as Cool a judgment and as far- seeing an eye as the most blameless of politicians. But no one can play fast and loose with men and parties, can treat measures as dice to be shuffled about for his own advantage, and refuse to be bound by the ties of party discipline, without showing that he is bringing the spirit of a gambler into the counsels of the nation, and playing with the honour and welfare of the country as stakes in the game of his own ambition. And those who attentively studied Charles Fox in his youth saw how impossible it was to trust him in any matter of importance. His leading characteristic was exaggeration, which sprung partly from inordinate animal spirits and partly from overweening vanity. He was always in extremes. All that he did was over-done. As a macaroni he was over dressed. On the turf he had more bad horses in traininjj and backed them for higher sums than any one else. As a FOX AS A TOBY. 21 man of fashion he would sit up all night over the bottle and hold his own in the morning against any one in the House or on the racecourse. \\ hen at Oxford he walked fifty-six miles in a day ; during a tour in Ireland he swam twice round the Devil's Punchbowl at Killarney. In the House his invective was so unmeasured as to defeat its own object. Men were amused at his insolence, charmed with his dash, but not convinced by his argument. His idleness was fully equal to his recklessness ; many of his speeches even on the most important subjects were delivered without previous thought, and his opinions decided by his personal dislikes. At Brookes's no name appeared so frequently in the betting-book, no one played so high or lost so carelessly at the gaming table. It was the excitement of the game that captivated him, not the desire' to win. The largeness of the stake merely added to the excitement, and, with a true gambler's instinct, he cared not a button whether he lost or won provided he had enough to stake on the next round. The cha- racteristic way in which he prepared himself for making his first appearance in Parliament as the champion of relio-ious liberty is thus described by Horace Walpole : — " He did not shine in the debate, nor could it be wondered at. He had sat up playing hazard at Almack's from Tuesday evening, 4th, till five in the afternoon of Wednesday, 5th. An hour before he had recovered £12,000 that he had lost, and by dinner, which was at five o'clock, he had ended losing £11,000. On the Thursday he spoke in this debate ; went to dinner at past eleven at night ; from thence to "White's, where he drank till seven the next morning ; thence to Almack's, where he won £6000, and between three and four in the afternoon he set out for Newmarket. His brother Stephen lost £11,000 two nights after, and Charles £10,000 more on the 13th; so that in three nights the two brothers, the eldest not yet twenty-five, lost £32,000." Charles Fox complained of the quiet of the session, and said the House of Commons was always up before he was. Well might Selwyn congratulate the landlord 22 CHABLES JAMES FOX. of the lodgings where the two Foxes lived, on keeping in his house the finest pickles in London. He was a willing victim to the aristocratic sharpers who filled the saloons of Paris and of London in the early days of George III. The harpy crew of ladies, in whose degraded minds avarice took the form of gambling, found in him a perfect El Dorado — a gold mine always ready to yield its treasures without ever demanding them back. He knew that he was cheated, but he would rather lose his money than his game. "At Almack's of pigeons I am told there are flocks, But it is thought the completest is one Mr. Fox ; If he touches a card, if he rattlps a box. Away fly the guineas of this Mr. Fox. In gaming 'tis said he's the stoutest of cocks, No man can play deeper than this Mr. Fox." During the three years which elapsed before the outbreak of the American War the passion for gaming was at its height. Fox himself said he had known as much as £70,000 lost in one night. There was hardly an elder son among the men of fashion who had not parted with his reversion to the Jews to obtain money with which to gamble. Friends like Lord March and George Selwyn put all they had into a common bank, and each stood surety for the losses of the other. Lord Carlisle alone had at one time lent Charles Fox as much as £17,000, and each morning, while the profligate was in bed, his Jerusalem chamber, as he wittily called his waiting-room, was thronged by the money-lenders anxious to suck yet dep})er into the fruits of Lord Holland's corruption. Society, determined not to treat him seriously either as a politician or a man of pleasure, looked on with a smile, half of pity, half of contempt, as FOX AS A TOBY. 23 the debts rolled up, and speculated when the crisis would come: It came in 1774, soon after his quarrel with Lord North. The birth of a son to his elder brother added a o-ood life to the one bad one which stood between him and Lord Holland's fortune. The boy was born, said Charles Fox profanely, like a second Messiah, for the destruction of the Jews. He was mistaken. At once those worthies, hitherto so long-suffering, began to show their teeth. His ftither came nobly to the rescue, and of tlie untold wealth which in the days of his political power Lord Holland had filched from his country, no less than £140,UOO went at one blow to preserve his son from bankruptcy and ruin. How was it possible for the little aristocratic world which held the reins of power in the time of George IlL to distinguish between the gamester of St. Stephen's and the gamester at Brookes's ? In every department of life they saw in Charles Fox the same qualities. Profligacy, vanity, and extravagance inspired his speeches and marked his actions both private and public. His friends knew that behind the love of notoriety which prompted his worst excesses was to be found a clear head and a warm and unselfish heart,, untiring patience and a sunny- temper, and could look forward to the time when the energy and self-assertion, which now spent itself on political and social extravagance, would be concentrated and disciplined by a cause worthy to enlist alike his heart and his judgment in its service. But the world which knew him partly, and the world which knew him not at all, could not be expected to look below the surface for qualities which he had hitherto carefully concealed. To most men he was still the chip of the old block, tlii^ unscrupulous son of an unscrupulous father, the political fis well as the social libertine. There is no mistaking 24 CHARLES JAMES FOX. file venomous hatred which assailed him on all sides, and found expression in verses such as these : — "Welcome hereditary worth, No doubt, no blush belies thy birth, Prone as the infernal fiends to evil ; If that black face and that black heart Be not old Holland's counterpart Holland himself's unlike the devil." ( 25 ) CHAPTER IT. THE AMERICAN WAE. 1774-1777. It was fortunate for Charles Fox that his quarrel with the Court party, the crisis in his own financial position, and the climax of the American difficulties, all came in the same year. Forced by insolvency into some measure of respectability, completely independent of all past political ties, he found ready made to his hand a cause important enough to demand the full exercise of all his talents, and honest enough to give him an opportunity of retrieving his character. It is not often that a young politician who leaves his party from petulance and wrongheadedness can so soon hide his faults under the aegis of liberty and justice. "When Fox quarrelled with Lord North it was certain that the chief motive of his conduct in the inmiediate future would be hatred of the man whom he had wronged. His early speeches on the American question show that he took it up, as he had before taken up the case of Wilkes, because it was obviously the next move in the political game. He espoused the cause of the Colonies because Lord North led the battle ayainst them. But, fortunately for him and his country, in the new policy which he adopted 26 CRABLES JAMES FOX. Burke was at his side to prompt, and Chatham before him to lead. The more he studied the question, and the more he fought the question, the more his warm heart and clear mind were touched by the principles at stake. He saw that, below the legal questions of the nature and the extent of the power to tax the Colonies, lay far more important principles of right and wrong ; and before the year of his defection was over the Tory champion of the prerogative, who had wantonly trampled upon the liberty of the press, had become the Whig champion of the right of resistance, and the denouncer of arbitrary rule. The year 1774 was the critical year of the American struggle. On the policy adopted by the Home Grovern- ment, and especially on the means chosen by which to carry out that policy, depended the action of the vast majority of American citizens — men who were attached to the Crown, did not desire independence, and hated fanaticism, but who would unhesitatingly prefer their liberty to their loyalty, if loyalty meant submission to what they believed to be unjust In England the whole question was wofully misunderstood, and the jealousies of English parties made it impossible to unravel the knot. Chatham and Burke agreed that England must render justice before she could demand obedience. As lono- ago as the debates upon the repeal of the Stamp Act Chatham had boldly exclaimed, " I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest ; " but neither Burke nor Chatham werg quite agreed as to what justice really meant, and the latter declared in a letter to a correspondent, in 1774 :— \ " If I could persuade myself that the Americans entertained the \most distant intentions of throwing off the legislative supremacy and / TEE AMERICAN WAR. 27 great constitutional superintending power and control of the British Legislature, I would be the very first person to enforce that power by every exertion the country was capable of making." The clerg-y and the landowners did not look deeper intc the matter than to notice that the colonists were for the most part Dissenters, and were in declared opposition to the King. The commercial classes, followino^ as usual their pecuniary interests, were for or against the Americans, according as their particular trades were affected by the dispute. Even in the Ministry itself opinion was much divided. Mansfield and the lawyers were all for the assertion ol legal right, and the punishment of those who ventured to disobey the law. The Duke of Grafton and Lord Dartmouth led a smaller section who wished for con- ciliation. Lord North, indolent and amiable, shrank from pushing matters to an extreme, and yet shrank more from offending the King. So he allowed England to drift aimlessly into a war, which, begun by misunderstanding, was carried on with incapacity, and ended in disgrace. There were two courses, and two courses only, open for the Mini try to adopt, and even as late as 1774 either of them, if pursued with sufficient vigour, might have been suc- cessful. The one was the policy of Burke, a full and frank repudiation of England's claim to raise a revenue from America, and a generous recognition of the capacity of the Colonies to a large share of self-government. The other was the policy of the King, a prompt and swift suppression of all opposition by irresistible force. Lord North adopted neither the one nor the other, but a mixture of both. By slow and hesitating threats without the power to punish, by weak efi'orts to punish when punishment had become not deterrent, but exasperatino-, he made conciliation and repression alike impo.-sibk'. 28 CHARLES JAMES FOX. Half-hearted coercion, ill-conceived and feebly executed, cannot but stand self-condemned. During the year 1774, Fox was undergoing a course of })olitical education. His quarrel with Lord North by no menus meant that he had become a Whig. But gradually the change came over him which has been common enough in later political history, and the man who separated from his party leader for personal reasons soon adopted the principles of his political opponents. With Fox the change was probably far more sincere than it usually is. He had been a Tory in politics without ever having been a Tory by conviction. Flis quarrel with Lord North and the King freed him from party ties and put him in opposition to the Tory Minister. The proposals of the Government to close the harbour of Boston, to alter the constitution of Massachusetts by Act of Parliament, and to try Massachusetts prisoners in other colonies, or possibly even in England, were suificiently startling to make even the most careless of politicians look well to his compass before he cast himself loose from his moorings in so stormy a sea. Against the Boston Port Bill, on March 23, 1774, Fox merely objected that it gave too much power into the hands of the Crown. A month later, when the Massachusetts Charter Bill was before the House, he denounced the attempt to tax the colonists without their consent, and urged the House to pause before it passed a bill of pains and penalties which began with a crime and ended with a punishment, and to consider whether it was not more proper to govern by military force or by management ? Just before this speech he had given his first vote with the Whig party in favour of repealing the duty on tea. Burke, whose great speech on American Taxation was delivered on this occasion, had during the session become his political instructor. In TEE AMERICAN WAR. 29 July, the death of Lord Holland severed the last tie which bound him to the Court, and in the Oct(jber of the same year, in a private letter to Burke, he avows himself not merely a Whig-, but a devoted follower and adviser of Lord Rockingham. Eeferring to some success achieved by General Gage's soldiers over the Boston mob, he says : — " What a dismal piece of news ! I do not know that I was ever so affected with any public event either in history or in life. The intro- duction of great standing armies into Europe has there made all mankind irrevocably slaves, but to complain is useless, and I cannot bear to give the Tories the triumph of seeing how dejected I am at heart. I have written to Lord Eockingham to desire hun to lose no time in adopting some plan of operations in consequence of this event I am clear that a secession is now totally unadvisable ; and that nothing but some very firm and vigorous step will be at all becoming ; whether that or anything else can be useful I am sure I do not know." For the next nine years English politics were wholly dominated by the American War. Its first direct result was to divide parties at last upon an intellia:ible basis. The war was acknowledged to be the King's war. Lord North was well known to be half-hearted from the first, but obedient. The King became a party leader, the Minister was seen to be but his servant, the party became the King's party, the policy the King's policy, and its failure the King's defeat. Parties became necessarily divided into the party for the King and the party against him. All the better part of Fox's nature impelled him to enlist himself on the side against the King. He learned from Burke to dread and to detest royal influence in politica He believed with Chatham in the essential injustice of the English claim to tax the colonists. His logical mind grasped with ease the key of the situation. Whether the claims of England were technically legal or illegal mattered but little. An attempt to coerce the colonists could nut but drive them to assert their / 30 CEABLES JAMES FOX. independence. The assertion of" independence could not but enlist all Europe on their side. How could England stand up single-handed against the world ? What sort of relations could she establish, even if she was successful, with a colony which she had conquered with the sword ? In his speech on the A.ddress delivered at the beginning of the session of 1776 he put this with his accustomed force : — " We have been told that it is not for the interest of Spain and France to have America independent. Sir, I deny it, and say it is contrary to every principle of common sense. Is not the division of the enemy's power advantageous ? Is not a free country engaged in trade less formidable than the ambition of an old corrupted govern- ment, their only formidable rival in Europe? The noble lord who moved the amendment said that we were in the dilemma of couquering or abandoning America : if we are reduced to that, I am for abandoning America. What have been the advantages of America to the kingdom ? Extent of trade, increase of commercial advantages and a numerous people growing up in the same ideas and sentiments as ourselves. Now, sir, would those advantages accrue to us if America was conquered ? Not one of them. Such a possession of America must be secured by a standing army ; and that, let me observe, must be a very considerable army. Consider, sir, that that army must be cut off from the intercourse of social liberty here, and accustomed, in every instance, to bpw down and break the spirits of men, to trample on the rights, and to live on the spoils cruelly wrung from the sweat and labour of their fellow-subjects ; such an army employed for such purposes, and paid by such means, for supporting such principles, would be a very proper instrxunent to effect points of a greater, or at least more favourite, importance nearer home ; points perhaps very unfavourable to the liberties of this country." As the years went on, events proved that Fox was in the right and George III. in the wrong. The half- heartedness and ignorance of the Ministers combined with the incapacity of the generals to render conspicuous the failure of the war. Nation after nation joined in the hue and cry against England in the hour of her necessity, as jays chatter and peck round a stricken eagle. The THE AMEBICAN WAB. 31 storm-eloud settled lower and lower upon the head of the brave and patient King as he fought blindly and use- lessly on in sheer despair. The more hopeless became the struggle, the more men turned in anxious expectation of relief to the faithful few, who had kept unstained from the first the banner of opposition to the Crown. The rights of nations, and opposition to prerogative government, became the watchwords of the Whigs as they reformed themselves under Fox and Burke out of the chaos of existing parties during the American War. In the enunciation of these principles Fox found the means to obliterate from men's memories the records of his older self, and stood forward in the eyes of his countrymen, no longer the political gambler and the insolvent rhetorician, but the trusted leader of the vounger Whigs, and the acknowledged champion of Whig principles. Yet the attentive observer of the public utterances of Fox during the famous Parliament of 1774 will look in vain for any signs of that political insight which is the highest, as it is the rarest, giit of statesmanship. His contemporaries used to say that Fox was at his best during the American War, that he never surpassed the speeches he made on that subject; but this is really but another way of saying that Fox excelled in the power and rush of his invective. No politician whose strength lay in the destructive force of his attack could wish for a better opportunity for the exercise of his particular talent than that atibrded by a hateful and disastrous civil war, in which every step was a blunder weakly adopted by a reluctant Minister, and carried by a mechanical majority. During the six years of the War Parliament Fox never threw away an opportunity. Night after night he exposed with pitiless veliemence the folly of 32 CHARLES JAMES FOX. the Ministers and the hopelessness of their policy. Again and again he turned upon Lord North and Lord George Germaine with a fierceness of personal attack which was almost too strong for the nerves of that not over- squeamish assembly. Negligence, incapacity, inconsistency, un- exampled treachery and falsehood, are flowers of invective culled from a single speech directed in 1775 against the former. In December, 1777, he turned upon the latter : — " For the two years that the noble lord has presided over American affairs, the most violent scalping tomahawk measures have been pursued ; bleeding has been his only prescription. ' If a people deprived of their ancient rights are grown tumultuous, bleed them : if they are attacked by a spirit of insurrection, bleed them ; if their fever should rise into rebellion, bleed them,' cries the State physician ; ' more blood, more blood, still more blood I ' " In April, 1779, he moved for the removal of Lord Sandwich from the ofHce of First Commissioner of the Admiralty. In June, stung by an accusation thrown out in the debate on the bill for doubling the militia, that he had allied himself with the Ministers, he burst out into a torrent of passion afterwards often remembered against him. " What, enter into an alliance with those very Ministers who have betrayed their country, who have prostituted the public strength, who have prostituted the public wealth, who have prostituted what is still more valualile, the glory of the nation ? The idea is to > monstrous to be admitted tor a moment. Gentlemen must have foregone tljeir principles, and have given up their honour before they could have upproachel the threshold of an alliance so abominable, so scandalous, and so disgraceful. Does the noble lord think it possible that I can ally myself with those Ministers who have led us on from one degree of wretchedness to anotlier, till at length they have brought us to the extreme moment of peril — the extreme verge of destruction? Ally myself with those JSIini^ters who have lost America, ruined Ireland, tlirowii Scotland into tumult, and put the very existence of Great Britain to the hazard ? Ally myself with those Ministers who have, as tliev now con'ess, foreseen iLe Spanish war, the fatal mischief which •o.uls us to destruction, and yet have from time to time told Parlia- THE AMERICAN WAB. 33 ment that a Spanish war is not to be feared ? ... To ally myself with men caiMbJe of such conduct would he to 'A\y myself to disgrace and ruin. I beg therefore, for myself and my friends, to disclaim any such alliance, and T am the rather inclined to disavow such a connection, because from the past conduct of Ministers I am warranted to declare and to maintain that sucli an alliance would be something worse than an alliance with France and Spain — it would be an alliance with .those who pretend to be the friends of Great Britain, but are in fact and in truth her worst enemies." He read again the philippics of Demosthenes to perfect himself in the arts of vindictive declamation. He was the most effective and popular of the Opposition speakers. The whisper that Charles Fox was on his legs would fill the House in a moment. The rich sweep of his passion, the quick thrust of his retort, the sharp edge of his sarcasm, afforded to every member of the House a keen intellectual pleasure, for Fox was never dull and never involved. His arguments were intelligible to the meanest understandinof, his excitement wa? catchinof to those moulded in the dullest clay, and the House, which, when his speech was over, was going to outvote him by an enormous majority, roared with applause as each shaft sped home to its mark. Yet in all the flood of eloquence which Fox poured forth in this Parliament, there is singularly little which could at all help to put an end to the evils of which he complained. His speeches must be searched through and tiirou these hopes as chimerical as such hopes usually are. 'J'he first acts of the Kevolution in France were conceived dis- tinctly on constitutional lines. An influential party in the Assembly deliberately adopted the English constitution as their model. It was the hourr/eoisie not tiie populace, that reaped the fruits of the destruction of the Bastille. It was they who ascended the throne left vacant by the abdication of Louis. It was tiiey who bargained witii their King abnnt tlie terni.< on which moiiarchv nu^-ht be 156 CHARLES JAMES FOX. preserved. There was nothing to an English mind necessarily dangerous or revolutionary in all this. The party who were superseding Louis in France belonged to just the same class as those who made Parliament supreme over the King in England in 1640. The abolition of feudal rights, voted on the memorable 4th of August, merely did at one blow what England had long ago done by gradual steps. Even the civil constitution of the clergy would seem a step in the right direction to a Whig of the rehgious school of Hoadly; and the declaration of the rights of man, with its inflated and magniloquent language, would seem a mere piece of French rhetoric inspired by the example of the American colonists and on that account more than pardonable. Fox was not alone in this view of affairs. All Whigs, and indeed most Tories, agreed with him in the cordial sympathy which they extended to their neighbours in their struggle to be free. They were flattered by the evident respect with which England was looked upon as the pattern of free States. They considered that a constitution, based upon popular election, in which the King was head of the executive, chose bis Ministers, and had a suspensive veto on legisla- tion, was an eminently sensible and practical scheme well calculated to give to France the blessing of free institutions. But by the beginning of the session of 1791 a con- siderable change had passed over English opinion. The violence of the Paris mob, the occasional outbreaks of unreasoning and cruel fury, the brutal disrespect shown to the royal captives at the Tuileries, made the tide of sympathy to ebb. Revolutions, if they are to receive the applause of England, must be conducted on the English model, and be decorous, restrained, and perhaps even dull. To the close observer far more serious symptoms THE WAB WITH FRANCE!. 157 were sliowlng- themselves. The doctiines of the rijThts of man, taught by Rousseau and embodied in the dechiration of 1789, were seen to be no mere fanfaronade, but a solemn and earnest political faith, which the clubs of Paris were prepared not merely to hold but to enforce. The seizure of the property of the Church, the application of the principle of election to all ecclesiastical offices, the imposition of the oath to the civil constitution upon all clergy, appeared like deliberate attacks upon the oldest institution in France, if not a declaration of war ag^ainst reliffion itself. Men asked themselves anxiouslv, Was the connection between the revolution of 1789 and that of 1688 so close after all? With the King a prisoner, the Cliurch an enemy, the rights of property threatened, the old landmarks of the nation swept away, the doctrine of the natural equality of man proclaimed as the cardinal principle of the revolution, France seemed to have cut herself off from her past history altogether, and to he sliding down the inclined plane of revolution into the abyss of anarchy, without hope of safety, and without possibility of recovery. When doubts such as these were in men's minds, the pub- lication of Burke's ' Reflections on the French Revolution ' turned those doubts into certainties. Never did political pamphlet have so immediate and striking an effect. It was not mainly because the principles of government which Burke laid down were so convincing, because the rich stores of illustration at his command were so com- prehensive, or because his prophecies of future evil seemed so probable, that the pamphlet had such an extraordinary effect ; but because he put into words, clear, telling, and unanswerable, what other people were trying to think out vaguely and clumsily for themselves. Fox, naturally enough, was not impressed by his arguments. They were 158 CHARLES JAMES FOX. opposed to his whole method of political thought. But he must have seeu quite clearly from the moment of its publication, that it could not fail to cost him the political support of its author, and might not improbably endanger the allegiance of his friends. Yet, so far from smoothing matters over, he went out of his way to hasten the catastrophe. On the ] 5th of April, in a debate upon the foreign policy of the Government, he praised the new Government and Constitution of France " as the most glorious fabric ever raised by human integrity since the creation of man." On the 21st, in a debate upon a bill introduced by Pitt for providing a new constitution for Canada, known as the Quebec Bill, he took occasion to throw down a challenge to the world on the subject of his opinions on the French Revolution, and, referring pointedly to Burke, concluded his speech by saying, sorry as he was to differ from some of his friends, he would never be backward in delivering his opinion, and he did not wish to recede from anything he had formerly advanced. A challenge so offered could not be denied, and Burke accordingly, when the Quebec Bill reached its next stage, began to deliver a very carefully reasoned exercise on the principles of the rights of man, and their results as evidenced in France. The actual motion before the House was that the Quebec Bill be read clause by clause, and it was certainly rather a stretch of parliamentary order to found upon so slender and distant a basis an arraignment of the French Revolution. But Burke evidently conceived that he had been challenged, and that he was in honour bound to reply at the earliest possible moment. He looked upon it as an intellectual disputa- tion, not as a party fight, and seems to have chosen this means of defending his opinions in order to keep as far as he could from the regions of passion. But directly he TEE WAB WITH FRANCE. 159 reached the subject which he had at heart, interruptions began to be made. He was called to order. He tried to explain. He was called to order again. The inter- ruptions came from his own party. He thought they were instigated by Fox, Evidently there was a de- termination on the part of the Whigs not to let him speak. Under such circumstances even the coldest temper -will assert itself, but not yet did he give free rein to the passion which was boiling within him. Turning round on the pack of snarling curs yapping at his heels with sublime dignity and bitter sarcasm he likened him- self to Lear. "The little dogs and all — Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart — see they bark at me," and then sat down awaitino^ the decision of the House. But even then Fox'was not satisfied. If malice was possible with Fox, it was malice that continued to goad and to spur him ou. Speaking to the question of order, he said tauntingly that on that day it was impossible for any one to be out of order, it was a day of privilege, when any gentleman might get up, select his mark and abuse any Government he pleased — then launching forth into the very subject which he and his friends had forbidden to Burke, he complained that he had been unjustly traduced as a Re- publican, repeated again and justified his opinion that the Revolution was one of the most glorious events in the historv of mankind, and then, addressing himself to Burke, he said : — " When the proper period of discussion comes, feeble as my powers comparatively are, I will he ready to maintain the principle I have asserted even against my right honourable friend's superior eloquence — to maintain that the rights of man, which he has ridiculed as chimerical and visionary, are in fact the basis and foundation of every rational constitution, even of the British constitution itself. Ilavmg been taught by him that no revolt of a nation was ever caused without pro- vocation, I cannot holj) feeling joy ever since the constitution of France 160 CH ABIES JAMES FOX. became founded on the rights of man. To deny this is neither more nor less than to libel tlie British constitution, and no book that my honourable friend can cite, no words he can deliver in debate, can induce me to change or abandon that opinion. I differ from him on that subject toto coelo." Burke rose slowly to reply. With a great effort to keep full control over himself, he began in grave and quiet tones, but as he proceeded to deal with the personal attack now made upon him by his friend, as he repelled the mis- representation of his opinions and words, as he recalled the interruptions of a few hours ago, and pictured Fox " supported by a corps of well-disciplined troops, expert in their manoeuvres, obedient to the word of their commander," banded against him, he could no longer restrain his emotions. Every word he spoke made him realise with more intense vividness the irreparable character of the bvea^h now opening between the friends of twenty-five years of close political life, every moment as it passed strung his nerves up to the height of the sacrifice he knew must come, till he could bear it no longer. Bursting into a tempest of passion, he declared that, if the ciioice had now come to him between his personal friend- ship and his love for the Constitution, with his last breath he would cry, "Fly from the French Constitution." — "There is no loss of friendship," whispered Fox. "Yes there is." said Burke, " I know the price of my conduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. Our friendship is at an end." Fox, when it was now too late, was overwhelmed with orief. He could hardly speak for some time through the intensity of his emotion. He realised at last the thouo-htlessncss with which he had pushed matters to a crisis. He must have foreseen that Burke would not be lono- alone in his isolation. But there was no possibility of undoinor the past. The 'lifference between them had THE WAB WITH FRANCE. 161 far greater issues than those of a personal quarrel. It marks the watershed between the old Whig's and the new Radicals. Burke, on the one side, attached to institutions, eager for administrative reform, suspicious of general principles, with an unquestioning faith in gradual develop- ment as the truest political wisdom, reaches back into a glorious past, and forms one of the noble line of constitu- tional statesmen who have developed by steady growth the British oak of liberty under the fostering care of the Crown, the educated classes, and the Church. Fox, on the other side, with a clear faith in abstract rights, strono- in humanitarian sympathy, with a hearty hatred of class interests, and a real belief in the essential goodness and wisdom of human nature, looked forward to the golden age when personal liberty should be secured, and class oppression vanish, and religious intolerance be crushed, under the beneficent rule of the sovereign people, who, knowing their own best interests, will insist upon main- taining them. This difference of view had existed in the Whig party ever since the American War, but as lono- as liberty, equality, and fraternity were confined to the Declaration of Independence, and were entrusted to the guardianship of a highly business-like people, nobody paid very much attention to them. When in the hands of one of the first of European nations, as impulsive in action as it is logical in mind, these principles took the form of the confiscation of Church property, the suppression of the monarchy, and a clean sweep of all pre-existing institutions, men had to make up their minds on the subject, whether they wished it or not, and to regulate their jjolitical conduct accordingly even at the cost of personal friendship and party ties. The immediate result of the quarrel between Fox and Burke was njerely to def)rive the Wiiig party of Burke's M 162 CHABLES JAMES FOX. services. For some time he remained isolated and alone, belonging to neither party though respected by both. The old Whigs were not yet prepared to renounce their allegiance. They remained in doubt, unable wholly to believe in the prophecies of Burke, or to acquiesce in the panegyrics of Fox. But by the close of the year 1792, a good many of the doubts then felt had become solved. The change was attributable chiefly to two things. The French had made a great step forward from constitutional monarchy to militant republicanism, and the monarchies of Europe had altered their attitude to France from one of suspicious neutrality to that of organised repression. While the quarrel between Burke and Fox was absorb- ing the attention of all Englishmen, Mirabeau had died, and with Mirabeau died the last chance of preserving for Louis XVI. any of his political authority. The failure of the ill-managed flight to Varennes, which occurred a few months afterwards, deprived him even of personal influence. For the ten months that the monarchy was still permitted to exist in name, he was but a phantom King who enjoyed his dignity so long, and so long only, as he exercised no independent judgment. In September, 1791, the Con- stituent Assembly came to an end, and the new constitution, that work of genius which had so excited the enthusiasm of Fox, came into being with the meeting of the Leofis- lative Assembly on the 1st of October. This " stupendous monument of human integrity " lasted not quite a year. The lead in the Assembly was taken by the parties of the Girondists and of the Jacobins, who, mucli as they hated each other, hated still more the old Constitutionalists. They were one and all the apostles of the rights of man, the children of the sovereign people, and they were perfectly prepared to enforce their principles upon a veltict'a'nt Europe by the sword. " Let us tell Europe." THE WAR WITH FRANCE. 163 cried "the Girondist Isnard, " that if Cabinets eno-ao-e Kings in war against peoples, we will engage peoples in war against Kings." The growth of military enthusiasm among all sections of Republicans in France is the distinguishing mark of the vear 1792. And on the other hand, while the military spirit was thus developing in France, a corresponding spirit of fear was spreading among the Courts of Europe, which led them to think of uniting to support the common interests of monarchy against the revolutionary doctrines. But as yet not one single Power, except perhaps Spain, really wished for war. The Emperor, the brother of Marie Antoinette, clung to peace so stubbornly as to make men doubt his affection. The King of Prussia and Catherine II. of Russia were intent only upon dividing the last morsel of Poland. Pitt absolutely refused to interfere in any way. Yet all of them were at war in less than two vears. Just as in France it was the fear of internal traitors, and of foreign intimidation, which led to the horrors of the Reign of Terror, and the determination to spread the doctrines of the Revolution throughout Europe- so among the Great Powers of Europe, it was the fear of the revolutionary proselytism which led them unwillingly into war. At the conference of Pilnitz in August, 1791, • the Emperor and the King of Prussia agreed to undertake JL,<*^ an aruK'd intervention in Friince if the rest of Europe ^ would join them. The Girondist Ministry, irritated at the threat, issued a sentence of death against ail emigrants, demand^^d the withdrawal of the declaration of Pilnitz, and finally declared war against the Emperor in Jaimarv, ] 792. A joint invasion of France by Austria and Prussia was the natural result of the French foolhardiness. but, as if on purpose to put the worst possible light on the iritiirventiou, the Duke of Brunswick who couniiandofl the M 2 164 CHABLES JAMES FOX. Allies issued a proclamation in which he demanded un- conditional surrender to Louis, and threatened to treat all who resisted as rebels. It was impossible to put more clearly the fact that it was a royal army, come in the interests of monarchy, to suppress in another country political opinions which it did not like. One crusade naturally produced another. The invasion led directly to the victory of the Jacobins, the overthrow of the monarchy, and the death of the King. The repulse of the invasion led no less directly to the occupation of Savoy and Belpium, to the opening of the Sch-^ldt, to the threat of an invasion of Holland, to the order to the French generals to establish a republic wherever they could, and to the declaration of the war against England in February, 1793. In this way acts of aggression on both sides plunged Europe into the most terrible of all modern wars, strongly against the wishes of all except the rulers of France ; but in England matters could never have reached the crisis which they did in 1793, had not the sentiments and opinions of the English people, as well of the English Government, undergone a great change. At the begin- ning of 1791 Englishmen had begun to retract somewhat • of the delight in which they hailed the overthrow of the ancien regime in 1789. They had begun to reflect more upon the dangers which Burke had found lurking in the plausible phrases of the declaration of rights. They had begun to distrust a movement which seemed to be so much at the mercy of the Parisian mob. The complexion of the Legislative Assembly, the war fever, and the ad- ministrative incapacity which characterised the Girondists, frightened the Tories into sympathy, though not yet into alliance, with the policy of armed intervention. They followed the movemetits of tlie Duke of Brunswick vith THE WAB WITH FBANCE. 165 anxiety, hoping that ho would put an end to what threatened to become a nuisance to Europe. " Tlie Duke of Brunswick's progress," writes Lord Grenville, then Foreign Minister, to his brother on September 20th, " does not keep pace with the impatience of our wishes ; " and on the 11th of October, when the news of his retreat had arrived, he adds : — '• We are all much disappointed with the result of the great expectations that had been fomied from the Duke of Bruu\vick"s campaign. Whatever be the true cause of his retreat, the effect is equally to be regretted.'' VVlien the Foreign Minister of a Ministry pledged to neutrality wrote thus, it may be taken for granted that the opinions of most of his party were not less strong in favour of the Allies. At the same time the growth of revolutionary sympathies in England, and the ill-advised language in which they were expressed, made Tories begin to fear lest the revolutionary propaganda instituted by the Keimblic might not after all disturb the peace of society at home. The publicatioa of Paine's ' Ptiglits of Man,' the formation of the " corresponding societies " all over England, consisting of men who openly avowed re- publican principles, and delighted in using the catchwords of French politics, increased suspicion far out of proportion to the intrinsic importance of their movements. They were accepted in France as the voice of the English people, and in England as representing the real oj)inions of tlie Whig leaders. In the caricatures of the time Fox and Sheridan almost universally appear in the guise of conspirators and republicans, whether discovered by Burke in the act of blowing up the constitution with French powder, or joining with Paine and Priestley in riotous and seditious orgies. In reality the Whigs were by no means so confident about the Revolution as they had been. Fox himself 106 CHARLES JAMES FOX. never faltered in his splendid if unreasoning faith in the ultimate goodness of the movement, but he was sickened and horrified at the mob violence of the 20th of Juno, and the massacres of September 2nd. On the 3rd of September, 1792, he writes to his nephew Lord Holland : — " I do not think near so ill of the business of the 10th of August (i.e. the overthrow of the monarchy), as I did upon first hearing it. However, it is impossible not to look with disgust at the bloody means which have been taken even supposing the end to be good, and I cannot help fearing that we are not yet near the end of these trials and executions." A few days later he writes :— " I had just made up my mind to the events of the 10th of August, when the horrid accounts of the 2nd of this month arrived, and I really consider the horrors of that day and night as the most heart-breaking event that ever happened to those who, like me, are fundamentally and unalterably attached to the true cause. There is not, in my opinion, a shadow of excuse for this horrid massacre, not even the possibility of extenuating it in the smallest degree." Thus deprived by the action of the French themselves of any possible sympathy for their internal administration, and alienated and disgusted, more and more as time went on by the wickedness and cruelty of the Terror, Fox turned his attention mainly to the external relations of France, and strove with all his power to avert the threatening danger of a war with England. He took as his great principle the absolute wickedness of any attempt to force upon the people of France a government of which they disapproved. The invasion of the Allies in 1792 was in his eyes an act of pure tyranny, the Duke of Brunswick's proclamation he described as " revolting to the feelings of mankind ; " of his retreat after Valmy he writes : — "No public event, not excepting Saratoga and Yorktown, ever happened that gave me so much delight. The defeats of great armies THE WAR WITH FRANCE. 1G7 of invaders always gave me the greatest satisfaction from Xerxes' time downwards, arid what has happened in America and France will, I hope, make what Cicero says of armed force be the opinion of all mankind, Invidiosum, detestahile, imbedllum, caducum In this spirit he capplied all his energies to the preven- tion of war. " I shall think the Ministry mad," he writes, " if they sutfe'- anything to draw them into a war with France, though I really do think Pitt in these businesses is a great bungler." That England should go to war in alliance with the tyrants of 1792 was in his eyes, not merely unjustifiable, but an abdication of her position as the chief of the free States of Europe. He agreed that the violation of the Scheldt by France formed a casus foederis, and that if Holland claimed our help, and France refused redress, war could not be avoided : but he maintained that a direct and friendly negotiation with the French Government, and an evident separation of the interests of England from those of the Allies, would easily prevent a rupture, and alford the only chance of preserving the life of Louis XVI. With these objects, at the beginning of the session of 1792-93, he moved an amendment to the Address, and proposed that a Minister should be sent to Paris to negotiate. The numbers in the division showed that the rupture in the Whig party was now complete. The events of 1792 had convinced the older section of Whigs that the principles of the Revolution were incompatible with monarchical institutions, and dangerous to the welfare of Europe. Only fifty members followed Fox into the lobby, and they comprised entirely the left wing of the party. The rest either remained away or voted against him. Windham, once the staunchest of his supporters, spoke strenuously on the Ministerial side;. Directly the measures of defence spoken of in tlie King's speech were 168 CHARLES JAMES FOX. introduced into the House, the breach was made still more evident. Fox throughout the session spoke with great vigour and more than ordinary earnestness, in eloquent condemnation of a war, as he phrased it, against opinion, but the whole of the older Whigs were now against him. The Duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, Sir Gilbert Elliot, Mr. Thomas Grenville, each one of whose names recalled the trusted ally of a great conflict in the past, could no longer follow him into the regions of abstract principle, but took their places with Burke within the rampart of time-honoured institutions. The old Whig party of 1688 had ceased to be. One Revolu- tion had destroyed the child of the other. It was inevitable that it should be so, for the principles of the old Whig party had worked themselves out, and its aristocratic framework had fallen to pieces. With the French Revolution new men and new principles had come into being. The youthful democracy, recently born, was still in the nursery ; — an infant Hercules, terrible in its strength, ungoverned in its passion, attractive and re- pellent by turns, a prodigy too ill regulated as yet to be obeyed by men of sober judgment. Against it were arrayed the forces of society enlisted under the banner of existing institutions. The Throne, the Church, the Con- stitution, formed the natural watchwords of defence, and gathered round them all, whether Tory or Whig, who were opposed to democracy. Fox, strictly speaking, belonged to neither side. In his love for the Revolution he was a democrat, in his love for the constitution he was almost a Tory. The principles of democracy were to him always much more of an ideal than they were a political programme. Still, as events worked themselves out, he became enough of a democrat to form the rock on which the wave of English parties was irretrievably to THE WAB WITH FRANCE. 169 split', and with his diminished band of fifty followers to lay the foundation of modern radicalism in twelve long ■weary years of opposition. Fortunately for England the IVench would not wait tor the slowly increasing pressure of public opinion to have its due effect. On February 1st, 1793, they declared war against England on their own account. The establish- nient of the Terror, the execution of the Queen, the repudiation of Christianity, following quick upon the declaration of war, removed any lingering doubts which mav still have existed in the minds of law^-abiding and God-fearing Englishmen. All that Burke had prophesied was in the act of accomplishment. The aristocracy, the Church, the Monarchy, political and personal liberty, and even Christianity itself, had been thrown overboard one after another in the mad frenzy of revolution. Jacobin- ism stood out clearly to the eyes of all who prized the blessings of civilisation as the enemy and the scourge of the human race, not less destructive, and in its nature more immoral, than the barbarism of Attila or the rehgion of Islam. Pitt therefore had the nation at his back when he took up the glove of battle thrown down by France in February, 1793. War had been quite inevitable ever since France had determined to carry the principles of the Revolution into other countries. Pitt and Grenville, if left to themselves, would have put off the evil day as long as possible, but their hands were forced by public opinion in England and republican enthusiasm in France. There was no similarity to English minds between the action of the Allies in 1792 and the action of England in 1793. The former was a war undertaken to compel France to accept a form of government which was distasteful to her ; the latter was a war undertaken to prevent France from imposing Jacobin opinions and democratic irovernment 170 CHARLES JAMES FOX. upon other nations. The system of revolutionary prose- lytism adopted in the autumn of 1792 exactly reversed the whole condition of affairs. It was to England what the dpclaration of Piluitz was to France ; and it was not until that system was carried into effect in Savoy, and was on the point of being- carried into effect in Belgium, that Pitt began unwillingly to arm. This was the weak point of Fox's position. It was all very well eloquently to denounce the war as one waged against opinion. It was a fair party charge to make that Pitt had surrendered his principle of neutrality, and hatl made common cause with despotism against freedom of opinion. It was reasonable enough to maintain that there was no logical halting place between complete disregard of Jacobinism and the forcible restoration of the ancien regime. But every educated man could see perfectly clearly that there was all the difference in the world between the right of a nation to adopt what- ever form of government it pleased, and profess whatever opinions it preferred without let or hindrance, and the right of a nation to try and establish that form of govern- ment, and preach those doctrines, in the territories of neighbouring States. This was a distinction which Fox wholly ignored, but it is ono which Englishmen at once comprehended, which Pitt acted upon, and which forms the justification of England in the war of 1793. The history of the years which elapsed between the out- break of the war in 1793 and the Whig secession in 1797 form Fox's best title to fame as an Opposition leader. He was in a hopeless minority. He had lost the support of many of his closest and dearest friends. Hardly more than fifty or sixty members still owned his leadership, and of those some, like Grey, were in his eyes injudicious, others, like Sheridan, of no moral weight. Almost alone he had THE WAB WITH FRANCE. 171 to bear the burden of directing a steady and vigorous opposition to a policy, which from the bottom of his heart he beheved to be both suicidal and wicked, with no reward before him except the possible gratitude of after times. There can be nothing more dispiriting to a politician than the obligation of spending session after session in hopeless warfare against organised stupidity. That this was Fox's position no one could dispute. Whatever opinions may be held as to the necessity and the justice of the war, there is an universal agreement as to the folly and incapacity which signalised its conduct. What can be said for a finance minister who continued to borrow year after year £1,000,000 at high interest to put it away in a sinking fund in order to pay itself off? who obtained loans by issuing bonds of £100 for £50 to £60 which were certain to rise in value when the strain of war was over? who in four years added 80 millions to the national debt ? What can be said for a War Minister who twice placed the English army under the imbecile leader- ship of the Duke of York ? who w-asted the resources of the country upon small expeditions over all parts of the world ? and who in seven years of warfare never discovered a capable general or won a great victory ? What can be said of a Home Minister who in abject terror of a few blatant and self-important democratic orators took away one after another most of the safeguards of personal liberty ? Against these measures Fox directed an unremitting attack. He divided the House again and again on the conduct of the war and the subsidising of the German powers. He sought to enlist on his side the growing feeling of distrust which naturally attended continued failure in thv.» field. He made energetic appeals in favour of peace whenever opportunity offered. He tiu'ew all iiis 172 CHABLES JAMES FOX. strength into the denunciation of the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act and the Seditious Meetings Act and the rest of Pitt's code of executive terror. " We have had wann and good debates in Parliament," he writes in 17'J4, " in which, if my partiality does not deceive me, our advantage in speaking has been as great as that of the enemy in voting, especially upon the suspension of the Habeas Corpus and on my motion for peace. I believe the country is heartily tired of the war, but men dare not show themselves. I think, of all the measures of the Government, this last nonsense about conspiracy is the most mischievous, and at the same time the most foolish." Again, in 1795 he says: — "I think there is something more truly diabolical in the part we are acting now, than in the conduct of any nation in history. Peace is the wish of the French, of Italy, Spain, Germany, and all the world, and Great Britain is alone the cause of preventing its accompli-shmeiit. and this not for any pomt of honour or even of interest, but lest there should be an example in the modem world of a great and powerful Eepublic. Everybody says the country is nearly unanimous for peace, the Ministers as warlike as ever." Again, a few weeks later, he writes of the Seditious Meetings Bill : — " There appears to me to be no choice at present but between an absolute surrender of the liberties of the people and a vigorous assertion, attended, I admit, with considerable hazard at a time like the present. My view of things is, I own, very gloomy, and 1 am convined that in a very few years this Government will become absolute, or that confusion will arise of a nature almost as much to be deprecated as despotism itself. That the Ministers mean to bring on the first of these evils appears to me so clear, that I cannot help considering any man who denies it as a fool or hypocrite, and I cannot disguise from myseK that there are but too many who wish for the second." In this criticism Fox does but scant justice to Pitt. The inroads upon personal liberty made by Pitt during the progress of the French Revolution, arose from too great a dread of the influence of the democratic propa- ganda, not from a desire to found a despotism. They THE WAB WITH FRANCE. 173 were, like the war itself, defensive, not agressive in their character, and they passed away easily with the terror which orave them birth. Pitt's obstinate continuance of the war in spite of failure, and in spite of desertion, sprang also from the same belief, but in this case its results were more disastrous. England had gone to war to prevent Europe being revolutionised by the sword ; but all danger of the success of democratic proselytism passed away with the fall of the Jacobins in 179'!:. By that time the spirit which ruled France had quite altered. The victories of the French armies had revived the old love for military glory, and before that the star of abstract democracy paled. Frenchmen were no longer mainly anxious to emancipate the world, they were much more anxious to win battles, and to extend the frontiers of France. It was the ghost of Louis XIV". which Europe had to deal with in 1795, not the red spectre of Jacobinism. The other nations of Europe perceived this. They had long ago given up the idea of forcing the Bourbons upon a reluctant nation. They would be quite content to retire from the position of champions of monarchical orthodoxy, and take up once more the old familiar task of rearranging the map of Europe, so that everyone should have a bit of what he wanted, enough to stimulate the appetite, but not enough to satisfy the craving. Prussia made a separate peace in April, 1795. Spain followed her example in June. The Emperor was only prevented from doing the same by the bribes of Pitt. Just at this moment, in tiie interval between the fall of the Jacobins and the rise of Napoleon, peace was possible on honourable and satisfactory terms. Fox saw this at once, and redoubled his efforts. Pitt could not see it. The red spectre still dazzled him. To plod steadily on, doggedly and determinedly, undeterred by failure, uii- 174 CHABLES JAMES FOX. elated by success, alontr the path of resistance, until France was crushed and Jacobinism was killed, seemed to him the plain duty which patriotism dictated. And so the opportunity was lost. Jacobinism as a danger to Europe had indeed committed suicide in the Terror, but France had a greater curse still in her womb. Pitt insisted on the continuance of the war, and the war gave birth to Napoleon. Military despotism, brutal, selfish, and unscrupulous, soon ousted Jacobinism as the bugbear of Europe, and England, which had cheerfully, if blindly, obeyed Pitt in refusing peace in 1795, had to fight on almost singlehanded against the tyrant, until she received her reward as the champion of the freedom of Europe in the triumph of 1815. ( 170 CIIAPTEll IX. ST. ANN'S HILL. Amoxg the many disappointments of Fox's life, there was none which touched him more poignantly than the diftierence which sprmig up between himself and the older \Yhigs on the subject of the French Eevolution. AVon- derful as were his spirits, he was too warmhearted not to feel deeply his separation from old friends such as Elliot and Thomas Grenville, too sensitive not to understand the grave rebuke conveyed by the withdrawal of the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam. A Whig party, which no longer numbered in its ranks the Cavendishes and the Bentincks and the Wentworths, seemed indeed, in the eyes of a j)olitician of the eighteenth century, to be but a maimed and mutilated trunk. On the 9th of March, 1794, Fox writes non-owfuUy to his nephew on tlie subject: — "You will easily imagine how much I felt the separation from persons with whom I had so long heen in the hahit of agreeing; it seemed some way as if I had the world to hcgin anew, and if I could have done it with honour what T should best have liked would have been to retire from politics altogether; but this could not be done, and there remains nuthing but to get together the remains of our party, and begin, like Sisyphus, to roll the stone up again, which long before H reaches the summit nmy probiiblj roll down again." 176 CHARLES JAMES FOX. Tn tlie August of the same year he breaks out with still greater pathos : — " I have nothing to say for my old friends, nor, indeed, as politicians have they any right to anj tenderness from me ; but I cannot forget how long I have lived in friendship with them, nor can 1 avoid feeling the most severe mortification when I recollect the certainty I used to entertain that they never would disgrace themselves as I think they have done. I cannot forget that ever since I was a child, Fitzwilliam has been in all situations my warmest and most affectionate friend, and the person in the world of whom decidedly I have the best opinion, and so in most respects I have still, but as a politician I cannot reconcile his conduct with what I, who have known him for more than five-and-thirty years, have always thought to be his character. There is a sentiment of Lord Rochester that I have always much admired, and which I feel the truth of very forcibly upon this occasion ; it is this : To be ill-used by those on whom we have bestowed favours is so much in the course of things, and ingratitude is so conmion, that a wise man can feel neither much surprise nor pain when he experiences it, but to be ill-used by those to whom we owe obligations which we never can forget, and towards whom we must continue to feel affection and gratitude, is indeed a most painful sensation. I think they have all behaved very ill to me, and for most of them, who certainly owe much more to me than I do to them, I feel nothing but contempt, and^do not trouble myself about them ; but Fitzwilliam is an exception indeed, and to my feelings for him everything Lord Eochester says applies very strongly indeed. I hope you will come home soon, it will make amends to me for everything, and make me feel alive again about politics, which I am now quite sick of and only attend to because I think it is a duty to do so, and feel that it would be unbecoming my character to quit them at this moment." It is clear from the letters which contain his most private thoughts, that Fox was utterly dispirited by the schism of 1793, and only persevered in the up-hill fight because he believed it was his duty to his country to do so. But the struggle, though manfully maintained, grew year by year more distasteful. His heart was ever at St. Ann's Hill when his bodily presence was at West- minster. " Here we are in this cursed place," he begins one letter from the manager's box in Westm.inster Hall, "very diftercnt from St. Ann's Hill or from Tivoli, where ST. ANN'S HILL. 177 perhaps you now are." Throughout the years 1793-94, his mind evidently recurred again and again to the dis- carded plan of 1784, and he positively longed to find an argument which would justify to his conscience a with- drawal from regular attendance in Parliament. In 1795 he discusses the question in a letter to Lord Holland, but most reluctantly decides that to quit public business would be too open to the misconstruction that — " Having lost all hope of place, we left the country to take care of itself. I am so sure that secession is the measure a shabby fellow would take in our circvmistances, that I think it can scarcely be right for us. But as for wishes, no man ever wished anything more." As the years passed on, and the policy of the Ministry seemed to become more and more obstructive and tyrannical, and their position more and more assured, the cry for a secession from Parliament began to make itself heard among most of the Opposition leaders. Grrey, im- pulsive and irritable, was anxious for it. Erskine and the Duke of Bedford were willing to try it, and Fox on personal grounds longed for it, but could not disabuse his mind of the idea that it was ill-advised. " He ac- quiesced in it," says Lord Holland, " more from indolence than from judgment." Eventually, a meeting was held in 1797, at which all the chiefs of the Opposition were present, and it was agreed by all, except ISheridan and Tierney, to leave Parliament if Grey's motion for Reform was thrown out. Fox was anxious that too nmch im- portance should not be attributed to the step. In the House he only spoke of devoting a larger portion of his time to his literary pursuits, and in a letter to Lord Holland he wrote : — " Pray if you have an opportunity of talking about the Secession say what is the truth, that there was not agreement of opinion enough upon the subject to make it possible to take what one may call a measure N 178 CHARLES JAMES FOX. upon the subject, but that most of us thought that after the proposition for Reform we might fairly enough stay away, considering the preceding events of the Session and the behaviour of Parliament upon them." Fox had warned his friends that if he once left Parlia- '' ment it would be very difficult to get him back again, and so it proved. From May 26th, 1797, the day of Grey's motion, to March 3rd, 1806, the day on which iie received office in the Ministry of all the talents, he only addressed the House nineteen times, while before the secession he had usually spoken more than that number of times in one year. There were, indeed, many reasons why he should prefer the quiet seclusion and lettered ease of St. Ann's to the turmoil of St. Stephen's. He was now getting well into middle age, had outgrown the passions and the excitement of youth, and was beginning to long for the full enjoyment of domestic peace congenial to his time of life. His marriage with Mrs. Armistead in 1795 had hallowed a love in which for many years he had found his chief delight. His letters are full of the most natural and tender allusion to her, which could only spring from the realisation through her of unalloyed domestic happiness. " If there ever was a place which might be called the seat of true happiness," he writes in 1794, "St Ann's is that place ;" and again in 1795 : — " I am perfectly happy in the country, I have quite resources enough to employ my mind, and the great resource of all, literature, I am fonder of every day ; and then the Lady of the Hill is one continual source ot happiness to me. I believe few men, indeed, ever were so happy in that respect as I." And in another letter : — " I declare I think my affection for her increases every day. She is a comfort to me in every misfortune, and makes me to enjoy doubly every circvmistance of life. Tliere is to me a charm and a delight in her society, which time does not in the least wear off, and for real goodness of heart if she ever had her equal, she certainly never had a superior." ST. ANN'S HILL. 179 Besides his delight in his domestic life, his private affairs made Fox anxious if possible to avoid the expense of a house in London. Owing to the recklessness of his youth, and his natural indolence about money matters, he had always been in embarrassed circumstances, and usually owed a good deal of money to his friends. In 1787 he was as much as £5000 in debt to Coutts the banker; but in 1793, by the exertions of his political friends, a sum was raised sufficient to clear him from debt, and to purchase an annuity for him. Naturally, therefore, he was anxious not to get into embarrassments again, and exercised for the rest of his life the strictest economy in order to live within his means. Attracted by the pleasures of home, and urged by the dictates of economy, Fox found another inducement to leave public life in the virulence of the attacks made upon him by the Tory press. No man, however even-spirited, can be wholly unati'ected by continuous abuse, and Fox must have been all the more sensitive to the attacks made upon him because, unscrupulous as they were in their misrepre- sentation, many of them had some colour of excuse in his own folly. After the outbreak of the war, Fox was one of the best abused meu in England. He was looked upon by a large section of the community as unpatriotic and untrustworthy, little better than a traitor. In Gillray's caricatures he figures as the leading member of the party who were conspiring with the French to overthrow the constitution of England, and establish in its place a republic on the French model. ^Vith the unerrinjr instinct on such matters which is the life blood of the caricaturist, Fox is always the central figure, the head and front of the offending. Sheridan is the faithful henchman when anything mure than usually extravagant is to be done, but he always plays a N 2 180 CEABLES JAMES FOX. subordinate, often a mean part. Stanhope, Erskine, Grey, fill up the picture, but it is upon Fox that attention is concentrated. It is he that is held up to the scorn and the hatred of patriots. It is he who is depicted as the arch-enemy of his country. To be cari- catured by Giliray was a very different matter to an appearance in the pages of Mr. Punch. There is nothing of wit, of banter, of good temper, seldom even anything of the ludicrous in the acrid work of Giliray. The blows he directs are straight from the shoulder, deliberately brutal in conception, intended to inspire hatred, and to destroy reputation. We are so accustomed to the delicate handling of political caricature by Mr. Punch, to look under his guidance at the ludicrous side of serious politics, and to enjoy a laugh at the expense of both our friends and foes, that we are apt to forget what a terrible engine of misrepresentation and calumny political caricatures may become, if meant to hurt and not to amuse. Giliray is not the predecessor of Leech and Tenniel, he is the successor of Hogarth, a satirist of the school of Churchill, whose satires were all the more powerful because they were conveyed in pictures, and required no intellectual effort to be understood. The popular idea of Fox is to this day largely formed upon a vague remembrance of Giliray 's caricatures. We know him so well as Guy Fawkes, just about to apply the torch of the liights of Man to the gunpowder, which was to blow up the King and House of Lords, when arrested by the searching gleam of Burke's lantern ; or acting as headsman, with a mask on his face, at the execution of George III., while Sheridan holds the King's head steady for the stroke of the axe ; or pre- senting the neadofPittas the choice dish to be set before the demon of Revolution. After the war broke out, the ST. ANN'S HILL. 181 satire grew more virulent than ever. Fox was depicted at the night signal set up to draw the French fleet to the sack of London ; as the agent of the French, smuo-frlino- provisions over to France, and so causing a famine in England ; as the devotee before the images of Robespierre and Buonaparte at the shrine of St. Ann's Hill ; as the French brigand soldier crivino' the death-stroke to Kin"-, Lords, and Commons. He was, as all his speeches show, exceedingly sensitive about the charge of holding republican sentiments. It was that, more than anything else, which goaded him on to the quarrel with Burke, After the quarrel he took great pains to explain the importance he attached to an aristocracy, and to announce his belief that no Government could be a fit one for British subjects to live under, which did not contain its due weight of aristocracy, as the proper poise of the (Constitution. He had in fact an immense, almost superstitious love, for the British Constitution, with its system of checks and balances, with its due proportion of monarchical, aristocratlcal, and popular elements. It was of course not to be a fixed and stereotyped Constitution. The relations between the different elements required continual adjustment. It was always most necessary to take care that the popular element was not unduly suppressed, and the monarchical unduly prominent. It was to represent the whole nation and not only certain sections of the nation. But advocacy of a Republic, as even the ideally best form of Government, was wholly foreign to his mind. He had no sympathy whatever with the doctrines that the uneducated masses were collectively wiser than the educated few, or that universal sufl'rage flowed necessarily from the rights of man. The fact was that he was so delighted at the overthrow of the ancien rejime, that he did not scan narrowly the 182 CHABLES JAMES FOX. principle upon which that overthrow proceeded. When enunciated in the vague form of abstract principles, such as Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the Rights of Man, the Sovereignty of the People, he always found himself perfectly able to put an interpretation upon them abso- lutely consistent with his political creed. When different interpretations were put upon them in France, he lamented them as momentary aberrations, or justified them on the general ground of the liberty which must always be accorded to a nation to be allowed to know what is best for itself. He never grapp]*^d with the question whether there was not really a fundamental ditlerence between the English and the French theory of liberty, and whether a democratic Republic was not the only political organi- sation which fully expressed the French theory? In answer to Burke's strictures upon the rights of man and the sovereignty of the people, he said that to attack them was to attack the British Constitution, for since the Hanoverian succession the British Constitution had depended upon the rights of men and the sovereignty of the people. An answer like that was possible in 1791, if the new constitution in Ffance might be taken as an honest attempt to secure Parliamentary government with a constitutional King and a constitutional Church. It was not possible as a justification of the formula in 1798, after Jacobinism had, in its name and under its authority, swept away the Crown and the Church, and established universal suffrage. Yet after the Duke of Norfolk had been dismissed from his Lord Lieutenancy, for giving the toast of "The People Our Sovereign" at a complimen- tary dinner, Fox did not hesitate to go down to the Whig Club a few nights later and propose the same toast, justifying it on the ground that George HI. owed his crown to the will of the people. To claim that a ST. ANN'S HILL. 183 constitutional meaning might be placed on the formula, at a moment when in the minds of every one in Europe it had become associated with the Jacobin principles of democracy, was either elaborate trifling or criminal folly. It was inevitable that men should take Fox at his word, judge of his opinions by the ordinary meaning of the words he used, and put him down as a Republican, since he chose to .use, and go out of his way to justify, Republican sentiments. It was not to be wondered at if political opponents hurled at him the charge of unpatriotic conduct, and pictured him in league with England's enemies. There was truth in the charge. As the war went on, ruinous and criminal as it was in his opinion, he wrote and he acted as no true patriot in a crisis of his country's fate should write and act. The Duke of Bedford, a staunch opponent of the war, subscribed £100,000 to the patriotic loan in 1796. Fox, on the other hand, took advantage of the mutiny at the Nore to embarrass the Ministers. As in the American war he had rejoiced over Saratoga and Yorktown, so now he rejoiced over French victories. In 1801, he writes to Grrey, who had remonstrated with him : — " The truth is, I am gone something further in hate to the English Government than perhaps you and the rest of my friends are, and certainly further than can with prudence be avowed. The trimnph of the French Government over the English does in fact afford me a degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise." When Fox was a young man, it happened that a criminal, bearing exactly the same name, was hanged. George Selwyn, who was a great friend of his, and had a passion for attending executions, was asked if lie had been to the hanging of Fox. " No," said Selwyn ; " I make a point of never attending rehearsals." The prophecy of the joke did not remain wholly unfulfilled. For more than ten years Fox was looked upon by the majority of 184 CEABLES JAMES FOX. Englishmen as a criminal and a traitor at heart. Gillray drew a sketch to show that there was no hope for England until his head was treated French fashion, as the ornament for the top of a pike. His own indiscretion in conversation and letters deepened the general conviction. It was not to be wondered at, therefore, tliat he fled from Parliament and politics, when the opportunity came, with the zest of a schoolboy flying from school. At St. Ann's Hill Fox found the perfect rest which his tired nature most required, the loving tenderness which his warm affections so strongly demanded, the inner society of intimate friends, which is the real solace amid the anxieties of life to all generous natures, and, above all things, time, that inestimable boon to the bookish man, time that may be wasted in busy idleness. " When I am here," he says, in a phrase which goes straight to the heart of every man who knows what a holiday ought to be, " every hour and minute of idleness grows to have a double value, and as one knows one is so soon to have so little of it, one likes to enjoy it while it lasts pure and unmixed." What his idea of idleness was, we can easily see from a subsequent letter, where he says : — " Mrs. A. tells me it is a long time since I wrote to you, I thought not ; but yet I recollect that when I wrote last I was in the Ninth Book of the Odyssey, which I have since finished, and read eighteen books of Iliad, so that it must be a good while since." The date of the letter shows that just over a month had elapsed. Thirty-three books of Homer in a month is no bad record for a man who thought of writing up over the door of his house — " How various his employments whom the world Calls idle."' St. Ann's was, indeed, a perfect place of retirement for the statesman, who, freed at last from the turmoil of ST. ANN'S HILL. 185 politics, was eagerly longing to devote the remainder of his life to literature. The house was small but comfort- able, standino- on the side of a hill which overlooked the Thames. About thirty acres of ground went with it, part of which was carefully planted and formed the garden and shrubbery, and part reaching up to the top of the hill was left to grow wild with heather and gorse. The garden was Fox's chief delight. He loved flowers and shrubs with an intensity which came only second to his love of Homer. He was his own gardener, and thoroughly understood the science of old-fashioned Eno-lish o^ardenino-. Nothing gave him more unalloyed pleasure than an afternoon spent in training the honeysuckle and the roses, and deciding, with the help of ]\[rs. Fox, where to plant the new shrubs from tlie nursery. So fond was he of his o-arden that he made a cataloo^ue in his own handwritino- O O o of all the flowers which grew in it. His life at this chosen home was equally characteristic in its simplicity, and forms a welcome contrast to the town life of earlier days. An early breakfast and the newspaper began the day. After breakfast an hour spent with ]\Irs. Fox in reading some Italian poet led to the more serious studies of the day, which lasted till dinner at three o'clock. These varied of course, according to the work upon which he was engaged, but they usually took the form of the critical study of some great poet. After dinner the care of the garden occupied him till tea, and when that was over, he generally worked at his projected history of the reign of James H. until bed-time came at half-past ten. tSuch was the ordinary routine of life at St. Ann's. Simplicity was its characteristic, love its inspiration, literature its occupation. Happiness reigned everywhere in the statesman's paradise, until politics, like sin, entered in to tempt and to destroy. 186 CHARLES JAMES FOX. Literature was the serious work of Fox iu his retirement. From his earliest youth he had acquired a love for poetry, and an admiration for the classics. His knowledge of the classical authors had often stood him in good stead among the vagaries of his youth, and amid his triumphs in Parliament. They had been both a solace and an amusement. But until now he had never had the opportunity of applying himself to the critical study of literature, and of comparing the authors of one age with those of another. That opportunity now presented itself, and he fastened on it with avidity. Fortunately, he numbered among his friends the three men who could best help him in his undertaking. In Dr. Parr, a Warwickshire clergyman, he found the width of reading and extent of knowledge in classical subjects, which could illustrate and explain any point which might arise. In Gilbert Wakefield, the Nonconfortnist and the Jacobin, lay hid an instinct for scholarship and an enthusiasm for classical literature which could make even questions of grammar interesting. From these Fox was content to learn ; but in Lord Holland, his nephew, he found a pupil apt, thoughtful, and receptive," in whose independence of judgment he could rely, and to whom he was not afraid to pour out his crudest thoughts. Yet with his intense love for literature, Fox was extraordinarily limited in his grasp of it. He had no knowledge of philosophy, of law, or of political economy, and no great command of history. Poetry was the chief, almost the only object of his worship, and his knowledge of all the greater poets of the world (except of Germany) was intimate and profound. Poems of action pleased him more than poems of thought, and his affections, however widely they strayed, were sure to come back before long to the great epics of Homer and VirfTll. His criticisms on poetry are always distinguished ST. ANN'S HILL. 187 by taste. He had an instinctive sense ofwhat was proper and fitting, an instinctive loathinfr for what was unreal or overdone, and he never fell into the trap, so fatal to many a writer of the eighteenth century, of mistaking perfection of form for correctness of taste. In all that he writes there is a healthy manly vigour of mind which comes like a sea-breeze, before which falsity and affectation cannot live. Among English poets, following his usual rule, Fox preferred the earlier to the later. Chaucer was his special favourite, " What a genius the man has," he exclaims. Spenser gave him more pleasure than Milton, partly, he confesses, because of his close relations with Italian poetry, but chiefly because the " Paradise Lost " seemed to him, in spite of grand and stupendous passages, to have " a want of flow, of ease, of what the painters call a free pencil." Shakespeare, strange to say, he never criticises, but in his occasional references to him assumes his superiority as unquestioned. Of more modern poets Dryden certainly is the one whom he admired most, especially in his imitative work. He had caught more, he thought, of the spirit of Juvenal in his satires, while Gift'ard, who had distinctly aimed at it, was unreadable. Pope was too artificial to please Fox's robust taste, nor were the subjects he treated such as to rouse any interest in one who, it must be confessed, delighted in something exciting and imaginative. Of Wordsworth he had no great opinion, which was a poor return for the poet's fjiithful admiration, but oddly enough he admired Cowper, His sympathy with the opj)ressed and his ardent love of peace made amends for his Methodism, and Fox frequently instanced the opening lines of " The Task " as among the finest poetry of the English language. Among foreign authors he gave the palm to Racine and Ariosto ; the classical imitations of 188 CHARLES JAMES FOX. the former, and the romantic grace of the latter especially charmed him. " I observe," he writes to Lord Hollaud, " that Goodwin shows his stupidity in not admiring Racine. It puts me quite in a passion : ' je veux contre eux faire un jour un gros livre,' as Voltaire says. EvenDryden, who speaks with proper respect of Corneille and Moliere, vilipends Eacine. If ever I publish my edition of his works I will give it him for it, you may depend. What can you mean by saying there is little good of the new poetry of Cowper ? What not the triplets to Mary ? Not the verses about his early love in the first part ? Not one of the sonnets ? Not the Shipwreck or Outcast ? Pray read them over again and repeat your former judgment, if you dare ! " But after all Fox's heart was in the classics, and his judgment upon modern poetry, in spite of his excellent taste, was somewhat warped by his gi-eat predilection for the classical models. That he did not appreciate religious and thoughtful poetry, and seems only to have seen in Dante and Milton a collection of brilliant and strikino- passages in a cumbersome and heavy setting, probably sprang largely from the sense that they were moving in a totally different sphere from the great classical poets. Want of connection and interest certainly seems to us a strange charge to bring against the " Divina Commedia," probably the most philosophically arranged poem in literature. Of the ancient writers the Greeks were to his mind far superior to the Romans. Among the many Latin poets whom he admits having read, he only singles out for special praise Ovid and Virgil. The Odes of Horace pleased him for their grace and sweetness of ver-iification, but he does not mention the Satires or the Epistles. In Greek dramatic poetry he had read only two plays of ^schylus and nothing of Aristophanes ; but Euripides he greatly admired, and more than once recommended a study of him as the best training for a public speaker. ST. ANN'S HILL. 189 " He appears to me," he says to Colonel Trotter, " to have much more of facility and nature in his way of writing than Sophocles. Of all Sophocles' plays I like Electra clearly the best. In the Antigone there is a passage in her answer to Creon that is perhaps the sublimest in the world. I suppose you selected Hipp, and Iph. in Aulis on account of Racine ; and I hope you have observed with what extreme judgment he had imitated them. In the character of Hipp, only I think has he fallen short of his original. The scene of Phaedra's discovery of her love to her nurse he has imitated pretty closely, and if he has not surpassed it, it is only because that was impossible." Homer and Virgil were the subjects of his minutest and most constant study. He once read through the Odyssey for the purpose of noting any peculiarities in prosody, with the triumphant result that there was only " one line (and I do not know what that is) which I could not reconcile to the common rules." His correspondence with Mr. Wakefield mainly turns upon points of Homeric prosody and philology. It is worth notice that the parts which attracted him most were those which appealed to the affections and to family relations. In the Iliad nothing pleased him more than the brotherly feeling between Agamemnon and Menelaus, and the amiable character of Menelaus, " whom Homer, by the way," he says, " seems to be particularly fond of" The interview between Priam and Achilles, where the old man un- attended seeks the Grecian ships and with his arms " Embraced those knees, and kissed those fearful hands Bloodstained, which many of his sons hath slain ! " entreating Achilles to grant him Hector's body, that it miffht receive due funeral rites — " For thy father's sake look pitying down On me more needing pity ; since I bear Such grief as never man on earth hath borne, Who sto*p to kiss the hands that slew my sen " — he pronounces to be the finest passage of the whole poem. 190 CHABLES JAMES FOX. lie constantly refers to the description of the anxious family council among the Greek leaders at the beginning of the Tenth Book as being particularly fine. " If you will not read the Iliad through," he writes to Lord Holland, in 1797, " pray read the Tenth Book, or rather the first half of it. It is a part I never heard particularly celebrated ; hut I think the beginning of it more true in the description of the un^^asiness in the Greek army, and the solicitude of the different chiefs, than anything almost in the poem. It is one of those things which one cannot give an idea of by any particular quotation, but which is excellent beyond measure in placing the scene exactly before one's eyes ; and the characters, too, are remarkably well distinguished and preserved. I think Homer always happy in his accounts of Menelaus, remarkably so, you know, in the Odyssey : but I think he is so always, and in this place too particularly. You see I have never done with Homer, and, indeed, if there was nothing else except Virgil and Ariosto, one should never want reading." If Homer was the poet Fox admired most, Virgil was the poet whom he loved. He loved him all the more because he was so distinctly on a lower level than Homer, and yet so consummate an artist. " Read him," he says in one place, "until you get to love him for his very faults." Fox, too, had one point in common with Virgil which he could not have with Homer— he was a great defender of imitation on principle, and in Virgil's works he found plenty of argument for his favourite thesis. Once he read the Fourth Book of the ^Eneid through, marking carefully all the passages which were borrowed, and was delighted to find that they were nearly all greatly improved by their transplantation. In Wakefield he found a supporter of his theory, and he writes to him in great delight : — " Your notion with respect to poets borrowing from one another seems almost to come up to mine, who have often been laughed at by my friends as a systematic defender of plagiarism. Indeed, I got Lord Holland, when a school -boy, to write some verses in praise of it, and in truth it appears to me that the greatest poets have been the most guilty, if guilt there be in such matters." ST. ANN'S HILL. 191 His favourite passages in Virgil as in Homer were in the episodes rather than in the main texture of the work. The story of Nisus and Euryahis, the address of Evander to Pallas, the episode of Dido, were the parts which ho loved best. Of ^neas himself he had a very just contempt, and wonders if Virgil really intended anything else. In a letter to Wakefield, written in 1801, he thus ,sums up his opinion upon Virgil : — " The verses you refer to are indeed delightful ; indeed, I think that sort of pathetic is Virgirs great excellence in the ^neid, and in that way he surpasses all other poets of every age and nation, except perhaps (and only perhaps) Shakespeare. It is on that account that I rank him so very high, for surely to excel in that style which speaks to the heart is the greatest of all excellence. lam glad you mention the Eighth Book as one of those which you most admire. It has always been a peculiar favourite with me — Evander's speech upon parting with his son is, I think, the most beautiful thing in the whole, and is, as far as I know, whollv unborrowed. What is more remarkable is, that it has not, I believe, been often attempted to be imitated. . . . The passage, ' Sin aliquem infandum casum ' is nature itself. And then the tenderness in turning towards Pallas : ' Dum te care puer,' &c. In short, it has always appeared to me divine. On the other hand, I am surprised and sorry that among the capital books you should omit the Fourth. AU that part of Dido's speech that foUows Num fletu ingemuit nostro ? is surely in the highest style of excellence, as well as the description of her last impotent efforts to retain .^Eneas, and of the dreariness of her situation after his departure " In a letter to Mr. Trotter he gives the other side of the picture. " Though the detached parts of the .^neid appear to me to be equal to anything, the story and characters appear more faulty every time I read it. My chief objection (I mean to the character of .S^neas) is of course not so much felt in the first three books : but afterwards he is always either insipid or odious, sometimes excites interest against him, and never foi him. One thing which delights me in the Iliad and Odyssey, of which there is nothing in Virgil, is the picture of manners, which seem to be sc truly delineated. The times at which Ilomer lived undoubtedly gave him a great advantage in this respect, since from his nearness to the times of which he writes what we always see to be invention in Virgil appears like the plain truth in Ilumer. But exclusive of this advantage. Homer certainly attends to character more than his imitator." 192 CHABLES JAMES FOX. Then he adds in his postscript, " Even in the First Book iEneas says, ' Sura pins ^neas fama super fethera notus.' Can you bear this?" Criticism of this sort mi<(ht be multiplied from Fox's correspondence almost without limit. His range of reading in his special department of poetry was exceed- ingly wide, and he brought to the study of classical poetry a taste trained in the best school of scholarship which but rarely failed him when dealing with the litera- ture of later times. His strong, vigorous, and clear intellect gives a turn of sound common sense to all his opinions. He has the faculty, so rare and so precious in a literary critic, of self-restraint. Enthusiastic he always is, but he never permits himself to gush. Yet, in spite of the sound judgment, the powerful mind, the clear state- ment, the trained taste, the self-restrained method, the subdued enthusiasm which appear in every line of his letters or literary subjects, it is impossible not to feel that there is something wanting. His judgment on poets does not, it is true, deal only with the outside, with the form and the expression, yet it does not pierce into the inside. He fastens upon passages, episodes, scenes, and criticises them. He never deals with a great work as a whole, or attempts to penetrate into the motives which produced it, and the circumstance which moulded it. He is always interesting, never profound, always tasteful, never intel- lectual. He criticises each author, as he studies him, from the standpoint of his own personality. He judges him by his own likes and dislikes ; he looks for the passages which, by their tender sentiment, their true sympathy, their artistic management, fall in with his own feelings and appeal to his own nature. He never tries to put himself into his author's place, and try to realise how his work appeared to him, and what it was meant to be. ST. ANN'S HILL. 193 Perhaps the conditions under which he wrote his criticisms did not admit of this. It is too much to expect that a statesman, who is able to devote but the fag-end of a busy life to the claims of literature, and from circumstances throws most of his literary criticism into letter form, should do more than bring' the force of a vig^orous under- standing and a trained taste to bear upon the art-work of his favourite authors. Yet the complete failure of his own literary effort, the " History of James II.," gives rise to the suspicion that his defects lay deeper than in the outward circumstances of his life. He lived, it is true, at a peculiarly unfortunate time for a literary critic who had not the opportunity of being original. At the time when his literary tastes were forming, there was no school of English poetry worth the name. The old artificial school of Pope had become so thin and attenuated as to be scarcely visible. The romantic and imaginative school inspired by the French Revolution was hardly born before Fox's death, the intellectual school of modern days was yet to be. For a literary prophet it was perhaps an opportunity, but prophets are rare in literature as elsewhere, and certainly there was not in Fox enough of moral stamina or of intellectual depth to make one. O iiii CifABLES JAMES FOW CHAPTER X. THE MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS. The unexpected resignation of Pitt at the beginning of 1801 put an end to the idyll of St. Ann's. At once, of course, there was a ferment among the Opposition, and rumours of all sorts began to fly about. Gradually, however, the truth came out and every one began to feel disappointed. Fox at first could not understand it. He thought there must be something behind, some dark intrigue, or, as he expressed it, "a notorious juggle." The substitution of Addington for Pitt could only be believed on the principle quia incredihile. In reality, it was only one of the King's party triumphs, carried a little further than he or his Minister intended. Pitt had begun at last to realise the necessity of peace, but he had not yet schooled himself into the determination to propose it. He had promised to the Roman Catholics of Ireland complete freedom from religious disability in return for their su])port of the Union ; but he had not yet nerved himself to the effort of obtaining the King's consent to introduce the measure. When he did begin to lay siege to that fortress, he found it well manned and armed at all points, thanks to the diligent care of Lords Lough- borough and Auckland. George IIL had got firm hold. TEE MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS. 190 in his narrow but singularly honest mind, of the convic- tion that to grant Catholic Emancipation was contrary to his Coronation oath, and the Ahitophel was not born who by argument or by guile could move him from that position. Pitt's pledges to the Irish were too distinct and stubborn to be got rid of wholesale, and so there was nothing for it but a resignation, which was equally dis- tasteful to the King and to the Minister. The fruits of victory, however, lay with the King. He found in Adding- ton and Eldon Ministers after his own heart, honest, stupid, and accommodating. A slight return of his old complaint, occasioned by the anxiety of changing his Ministers, redoubled his popularity, and brought Pitt to iiis knees. lie consented to withdraw the question of Catholic Emancipation during the King's lifetime ; and so George III. found himself in the hands of a Minister, whom he regarded with more perfect confidence than any Minister since North, and able, if necessary, to recall the most popular and trusted statesman in England to his councils on his own terms, whenever he chose to do so. To Fox the change was of little practical importance. Pitt supported Addington, looking upon him merely as a stop-gap until such time as it might be convenient for him to resume the cares of office, and the majority followed Pitt. It was thought worth while, on the part of the Opposition, to muster their forces and challenge the new Ministry on their formation ; but they were beaten by nearly three to one, and though Fox appeared at Westminster on this occasion, and craved in his speech the usual privilege given to a new Member, he did not vet consider the secession as over. The first work of the new I\Iinistry was the negotiation of the peace with France. That was a measure upon which there were not two opinions in the whole of England, and while that was 2 196 CHABLES JAMES FOX. in progress all party warfare vva.s hushed. In the autumn the treaty was concluded, and accepted by Parliament and the nation with enthusiastic joy, and so the curtain fell )on the first act of the great' war drama. Fox immediately -determined! to seize the opportunity to pay a visit to Paris, partly to collect materials for his history, and partly to see for himself the victorious general who had, as Fox ."expressed it, "like most military men, reformed' the' country by taking the power into his own hands."; E ; ' ■ On his return he found the Ministers in a most anomalous condition. One section of Pitt's old majority, led by the GrenVilles, had declared strongly against the peace, and directed a furious onslaught upon Addington on the terms of the Treaty. The Whigs, on the other hand, were loverjoyed! at ithe peace, arid supported the Government staunchly when that was in danger.' On all other matters, of course, they could have nothing in common with an administration formed on a purely reactionary basis. Pitt, who still held the strings in his own hands, and might have forced himself upon the King whenever he pleased, withdrew altogether from Parlia- ment, though it was understood that he gave a qualified support to the Ministry. A state of aflPairs like this clearly could not last long. It was necessary for the Whigs to keep a sharp eye upon what .was going on, and Fox could no longer, resist the importunities of his friends to put a formal end to the ill-advised secession. On June 27th, 1802, m a letter to Lauderdale, he reluc- tantly gave it its coiip cle grdce^-"l h'dve at last made up my mind to come in, not convinced by reason, but finding the wish, among my friends so general ; I am sure I am wrong, but I cannot go against the tide." ■ The crisis was, indeed, one which demanded that^ the THE MINISTBY OF ALL THE TALENTS. 197 - country should have the benefit of the coainsel of all true patriots. She' was on the verge of a war witk the greatest military genius whom the world has ever seen, while her affah's were directed by a crazy King and an incapable Minister, and the two tlblest men in I^ngland were sulking in their respective tents. Buonaparte had never intended the peace of Amiens to bq anything else ' * than a breathing-space. As he frankly confessed to • M. Gallois a few months later^ his power in France was not sufficiently consolidated, nor was his ambition suffi- ciently satisfied, to permit him to allow such a splendid weappn as the army of France to rust' in disuse. He ■" used the peace of Amiens, just as Louis XIV. had used ''■ the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and the peace of Nimeguen,- < simply as a period of quiet in which he could prepare for 'the next move in tbe game of ambition. During the- - latter part of the year 1802 despatch afier despatch, each i treading on the heels of its predecessor, came pouring in • upon the British Government, bringing news of fresh . French aggressions. In August Buonaparte seized upon. • Elba, in October upon Parma and Piaceuza, a few weeks- laterhe occupied Switzerland^ He demanded from the- ■ English, Government the expulsion of the emigrants, the- .banishment of the Bourbon princes, the suppression of - newspapers hostile to himself". Finally, in January, 1803, he -published a report of Colonel Sebastiani upon Egypt, the object of which was to show how easily it could be reconquered. In fact, liy the time the campaigning season of 1803 had begun", he had made all his prepara- tions and was ready for action. All that remained was to bring about a declaration of war upon a point which should put England technically in the wrong. The feeble Government, under its pompous and stupid head, did all it could to second his efforts. Without ever laying 198 CHARLES JAMES FOX. before Europe a remonstrance against the obvious aggressions of France, Addington called out the Militia in March, 1803, and thus enabled Buonaparte, at the celebrated interview with Lord ^Yhitworth which followed. to represent England as showing a desire for war. By refusinon to restore Malta to the Knights of St. John, he allowed the quarrel nominally to arise out of an infrac- tion of the treaty of Amiens by the English Government. Well might Fox say: "Addington by his folly has contrived to lay bare the injustice of our cause." Directly it became clear that the country was drifting again into war, a determined effort was made to put the helm of state into more secure hands. Lord Grenville, who perhaps alone among English statesmen fully realised the character and genius of Buonaparte, w-as anxious to form a Ministry on a broad bottom, which should include both Pitt and Fox. Canning and the younger followers of Pitt, with whom were the bulk of the nation, looked upon Pitt as the only man capable of steering the country safely through the perils which encompassed her. The wits turned their batteries upon Addington and tried fairly to lauo-h him out of ofHce. Never was Minister more unmercifully ridiculed. Endless were the jests pointed at his father's profession. " The Medici Administration," they called it. " The Pills for himself and the Pells for his son," they sang, when the valuable sinecure of the Clerk of the Pells was kept in the family. " As London is to Paddington, So is Pitt to Addington," was the less good-humoured comparison of Canning. But the Minister, wrapped up in sublime self-conceit, was im- pervious to argument or witticism. He was quite acute enough to know that the royal favour was his, and his alone ; THE MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS. 199 and trusting to that he could afford to treat even Pitt with some degree of independence. When war became un- avoidable, he actually had the impertinence to think that he could make his own terms with Pitt. Throuefh the instrumentality of Dundas, now Lord Melville, he proposed that Lord Chatham should become the nominal leader of a coalition between Pitt and himself, but stipulated as an essential condition for the exclusion of the Grenvilles. He was speedily undeceived. Pitt put a summary stop to the negotiation. " I really had not the curiosity to inquire what I was to be," he said afterwards to a friend. Addington, nothing disconcerted, declared war on the 16th of May, and to mark the occasion came down to Parliament dressed in full Windsor uniform. Unfortunately for his dignity the business before the House at that very moment was the Medicine Bill, The House, of course, at once saw the joke, and a roar of laughter greeted the martial appearance of " the Doctor," which broke out again irrepressibly as Sheridan, in his best manner, alluded to him as the " right honourable gentleman who has appeared this evening in the character of a sheep in wolfs clothing." The debate of the 23rd of May on the policy of the war, showed the strange divisions of parties at the time. Pitt, Fox, and Grenvllle were all personally opposed to Addington on the ground of his incapacity. Pitt, never- theless, supported the Minister in his war policy, and made one of his most brilliant speeches in his favour. Grenville, too, was eager for war, but far too virulent against Addington to support his conduct of it. Fox, though he thought war inevitable, yet clung fondly to a hope that Buonaparte was not really so ambitious and unscrupulous ;-.s he was thought to be, and steadily maintained that if the negotiations had been better conducted, peace might . 200 , . CHARLES JAMES FOX. have been preserved. In this, however, some of his followers, notably Grey, seem to have disagreed with him. When once war had been declared all parties agreed that it must be carried on vigorously, and Lord Grenville approached Fox to see if they could not find a ground for commctn action, if not for coalition, in their common oppo- sition, to . the Minister. After some negotiation, which mainly passed through the hands of Thomas ijrenville, Fox's old friend and agent in 1782, an agreement for common opposition was arrived at. , Efforts were m.ade to i get Pitt to join ; but he, though reserving to himself full liberty to question and criticise any measures of the Ministers which seemed to him to be bad or wanting in vigour, would not definitely range himself on the side of the Opposition. He saw clearly enough that he had the game in his own hands if Jie waited, and did not want to be encumbered by ties which might prove inconvenient. The event proved that he was right The relations 1 between Grenville and Fox grew closer. The Opposition gre,w stronger and more consolidated as the months crept on. When Pitt chose to oppose the Ministry, their majority was doubtful ; when he supported it, it was assured. Slowly, however, it dwindled away. Eventually by April, 1804j it was reduced to 36. Addington resigned, and Pitt resumed office, with the acquiescence of the King and the support of the vast majority of the country, wholly un- fettered by any promises to Grenville or to Fox. At last there seemed a chance that the nation, as she was entering on the crisis of her fortunes in the death struggle with France, might be able to gather to her assistance all the talent in her service.' The war of 1803 was a very different one to that of 1793. No one could pretend that it was a war against opinion, or a war of sheer unmanly terror, least of all a war to restore the THE MINIS TBY OF ALL THE TALENTS. '. 201 • ancie'n regime. \ATiatever had been the case in 1793, no one doubted now that the cause of Buonaparte was the , cause of absolutism a!nd tyranny, and the cause of England was the cause of liberty. Military despotism was no new danger to' Europe, no new factor in English politics. Among the noblest of England's claims to the gratitude of Europe, was the remembrance of the part which she had played in breaking the European tyranny of Louis XIV. But Louis, at any rate, was the representative of a great tradition, had a definite national policy, and was in his : own way a champion of civilisation as well as of despotism, The ambition of Buonaparte on the contrary was personal, not national. His tyranny represented nothing but his own sword, it rested purely and nakedly on force. What enemy of the human race could be imagined mOre deadly - than: a military adventurer, cruel, faithless, and unscrupu- lous, gifted with extraordinary talents, restrained by no law : human or Divine, who looked upon human beings simply as the playthings of his ambition, upon nations as ministers to his glory ? Fox perhaps was the only statesman in England who was still inclined to hope, who still believed that the ogre might be^ tamed jby dexterous treatment ; but .neither he nor any one else denied for a moment the absolute duty of England to spend her last man and her last shilling in 'the cause of the liberation of Europe, should Buonaparte prove the tyrant which his enemies believed him to be. Once more the best hopes of England were doomed to b& wrecked by the narrow-minded honesty of the Kino-. To Greorge III., Addington was still the best Minister be had ever had, Fox was still the unprincipled roue who had taught his son to hate him. George III. had enough Stewart blood in his veins to learn nothino: and to forget nothing. Pirectly Pitt proposed to him a Coalition 202 CHABLES JAMES FOX. Ministry, a Ministry in fact of the national defence, wliolly apart from party, which was to include Fox, Grenville, Fitzwilliam, Grey, and Canning, the King resolutely refused to agree to Fox. On hearing this, Fox, with characteristic good temper, at once asked not to have his own claims pressed, but insisted on the inclusion of some of his followers, if it was in any real sense to be a Coalition Ministry. His followers, with equally charac- teristic loyalty, refused to serve if their chief was not to lead them ; and the Grenville?, true to their policy of co-operation with the Whigs, refused to join unless the Whigs came in too. The result was that the King was victorious all along the line. "Never in any conversation that I have had with him has he so baffled me," said Pitt. The old Ministry of incapables was reconstituted, but with the addition of Pitt and Dundas; the old policy of organising coalitions against France with English gold was taken up, and Sisyphus began once more to roll the stone up the hill. All that zeal could do was done. The record of Pitt's second Ministry is a noble story of energy and vigour, unsuccessful though it was. The threat of invasion roused the patriotism of every Englishman, and defences not formidable in themselves, but useful in quieting apprehension, sprung up on the coast of Kent. Lord Melville worked so hard at the reorganisation of the fleet that it is said he added no less than one hundred and sixty-six vessels to the navy in a year. The principle of the conscription for national defence was introduced by the Additional Forces Bill. Abroad the murder of the due d'Enghien, the assumption of the title of Emperor by Napoleon, his virtual annexation of Italy, Holland, and Switzerland, were powerful arguments in Pitt's favour, and by April, 1805, he had the satisfaction of seeing Austria anil THE 3nNISTEY OF ALL THE TALENTS. 203 Eussia again allied against the tyrant. In August, 1805, the superiority of Nelson and Calder over Villeneuve at sea eftectually relieved England of any fear of invasion. The victory of Trafalgar in October annihilated the French navy for the rest of the war. But in all other respects the story is one of continued disaster. Pitt's own health was breaking down under the strain. He spoke at times with his old fire, but the effort became visibly greater. The attack upon Lord Melville for malversation, carried in the House of Commons by the Speaker's casting vote, simply broke his heart. The news of the capitulation of Ulm, and the total failure of the coalition at Austerlitz, brought him to his grave. On January 23rd, 1806, he died, murmuring, it is said, with his last breath a prayer for his country. The death of Pitt left literally no one in England to lake his place except Fox and Grenville. Pitt and ^lelville had been the only able men in the Cabinet. Addington had been tried and found wanting, and it was impossible even for the King to explore the depths of the kinsdom of dulness which stretched below the feet of Addington. He fully understood the state of affairs, sent for Lord Grenville and entrusted the government to him. Grenville at once replied that the first person he should consult would be Fox. " I understood it to be so," said the King, "and I meant it to be so." Not two years before Georore III. had taken care to let it be known that Fox had been excluded from the Ministry by the King's personal action, but a few months previous he had written that he would run the risk of civil war rather than admit Fox. No one knew better than George 111. when ojjposition was hopeless. He struggled to the very end, but always gave way when It was absohitely necessary, and so it was in this case. After an interval of twenty- 204 ; CHABLES JAMES FOX. three year^, Fox again kissed his hands on his appoint- ment as' Foreign Secretary, and in no period of his hfe in which he had been Minister did he find the King more cordial and accommodating. _ ' '. . The Ministry of All the Talents, as, that of Grenville and Fox was called by the wits, was based upon the idea long urged by the Grenvilles, that in ■. a combination of parties alone could be found sufficient national strength to withstand' Napoleon. But the nomination of Fox as Foreign Secretary of course implied that an attempt to restore peace would at once be made. Fox had always maintained that Napoleon did not really wish for the renewal of war. His objects, Fox thought, at that time were' mainly to consolidate his own power 'in France, aiid had the English Ministers met him straightforwardly^, and shown them that they had no intention, of disturbing his authority at hom6, he would have manifested a very different disposition towards England. ' Napoleon, when First Consul^ had either taken a great fancy to Fox, or he had thought it prudent to try and make so influential a man his friendl, and Foxi^ could not bring himself to believe that one, who had treated him so courteously and so openly, could really be playing a double game. He had hardly settled himself in his new office when an opportunity for opening negotiations presented itself. A man called on Fox and detailed to him a plan, for the Emperor's assassination. Fox, in a tempest of indignation, drove him from the room, and at once jacquainted Napoleon with the plot. Probably he might have save mapping out central Euifope afresh, with the double object of consolidating his own authority, . and of b^in^ing the whole of Europe to bear upon England in order to crush her trade. ' The only question really was, how long it would take Fox to tind this out? i By the summer he still had hopes of an accommodation, but they had become, very faint, as Napoleon, in spite of' his promise to the contrary, had amiexed Sicily to the new ' kingdom of ' Naples — created for his brother Joseph — and by the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine had broken his engagement to Yarmouth that the constitution of Germany should not be altered. Fox, whose health was- beginning to break down, hoped to hand over the Foreign Office to his nephew Lord Holland directly the neg-otiation was finished, and a conversation between them, which occurred at this time, shows that he had practically given up all hope of peace. " We can," he says, " in honour do nothing without the full and bond fide consent of the Queen and Court of Naples ; but even exclusive of that consideration and of the great importance of Sicily which you, young one, very much underrate, it is not so much the value of the point in dispute as the manner in which the French fly from their word that disheartens me. It is not Sicily, but the shuffling, insincere way in which they act, that shows me that they are playing a false game ; and m that case it would be very' imprudent to make any concessions, which by any possibility could be thought inconsistcntjwith our honour, or could furnish, our allies with a plausible pretence for suspecting, rep'roachiug, or deserting us." Thef negotiations did not actually cease till after Fox's 206 CJIABLES JAMES FOX. death, but it is evident from this letter that Grey did not much misrepresent Fox's opinion when, a few months later, he said : " There never was any opportunity of procuring any such terms as would have been adequate to the just pre- tensions, and consistent with the honour and interests of this country." Fox had always maintained that the chances of peace and war depended entirely upon the good faith of Napoleon. He had always persuaded himself that Napoleon was actuated more by patriotism than by ambition. Seven months of negotiation disabused him of this idea, and before his death he had sorrowfully reached the conclusion that war was not only unavoidable but desirable as long as Napoleon claimed the right to ride roughshod over the liberties of Europe. If Fox could not restore peace to Europe, he could do something at least to remove from England the stain of an unnatural and cruel traffic. lie was not the man to reckon up the magnitude of the interests affected, when he was called upon to do an act of simple justice to suffering humanity. Year after year, as long as he attended Parliament, his voice had been raised against the detestable trade in slaves, and now that he had the power, he at once seized the opportunity of showing that his sympathy, unlike that of Pitt, was not confined to words. In June, 1806, Fox pledged himself to introduce a measure of total abolition. It was his last speech in Parliament. He did not live to carry out his pledge, but the bill drawn on the lines which he had sketched out, was introduced by Grey in January, and became law in March, 1807. By it the trade in negroes was absolutely forbidden to British subjects after January 1st, 1808. Three years later it was made a felony to take part in it. So was accomplished this great act of social reform, which Fox had strenuously urged for so many THE JIINISTBY OF ALL THE TALENTS. 207 years in apparently hopeless opposition, but which he was not permitted to see pass into law. The end came very quickly. In January 1806 he accepted oflEice, and set about the work of his department with unabated energy ; but bis attendance at the House, and his anxiety about the peace and the abolition of the slave trade soon told on him, and he determined to give up the seals to Lord Holland directly those questions were settled. " Don't think me selfish, young one," he wrote, " the slave trade and peace are such glorious things I can't give them up, even to you." In June, however, came a change for the worse. His malady was now declared to be dropsy, and he was obliged to give up all business. It soon became so serious that operations had to be resorted to for his relief, and he, as well as his wife and friends, understood that the end could not be far off. At the beginning of September he rallied a little, and was removed to Chiswick, but on the 7th he began plainly to get weaker. Lord Holland and General Fitzpatrick, who were always with him, read to him constantly. It was his great delight. Virgil, Dryden, and Crabbe were the authors he asked for oftenest, and his favourite passages of Virgil were read and re-read, as if he could not bring himself to part with so old a friend. At length he became too weak to understand what was read, and during the morning of the 13th of September he lay motionless and almost unconscious, with a sweet smile of happiness on his face. At last, at six in the evening, he passed away, sinking to rest quite quietly and peacefully, surrounded by those whom he loved best in the whole world, undisturbed by anxious thought or touch of pain. Sir Walter Scott, in the well-known lines of the prelude to " Marmion," has given lasting expression to the thought which was uppermost in the minds of most Englishmen 208 CHARLES JAMES FOX. when they heard of the death of Fox. It was that of thankfuhiess that one, who was in so many things essentially English, should at last be found acting in harmony with the bulk of his countrymen on the great subject of the day. Yet it may be questioned whether praise thus limited did not really do an injustice to Fox's memory ? It implied a want of patriotism in previous years, which, if true, would be most detrimental to his character as a statesman. It suggested a fault in his nature which his friends certainly would have most energetically repudiated. Those who look upon Fox as having anything foreign in his sympathies or turn of mind, totally misread his character. He was English to the backbone, a product of the England of the eighteenth century just as typical as was Pitt, though representative of a different type. There was nothing in him of the finesse of a Frenchman, of the suppleness of an Italian, of the brutality of a German. His love of home, his simplicity of life, his straightforward directness of speech and thought, his stubbornness of will, his steadfastness of affection, his very indolence, and yet the sense of duty which obliged him to work against his will, were all quaUties essentially English. It was because he was so essentially English that he acquired the hold which he did over the country. Men recognised instinctively that he was one of themselves. They could understand him. In his good qualities and his bad qualities there was nothing outside the sphere in which they themselves moved. It was just because they knew him so well that they hated him so relentlessly or loved , him so passionately. Even his worst enemies, those who really believed that he wished to establish a republic in England on tiie Jacobin model, never accused him of hitting below the belt. They knew perfectly well what they had to meet, the THE MINISTRY OF ALL TEE TALENTS. 2oi» war'between them was open and above board. What Fox meant he said, and he did not mean any more than he said, xis a matter of fact he usually meant a great deal less. In the most truculent attacks which were made upon him, such as those of Gillray, there was nothing kept in r,eserve, no suggestion of things worse than what appeared, no allusions to dark designs which were not avowed. It was a fair stand-up tight on both sides, conducted according to the most approved principle of the English prize ring. The attacks on Fox in this respect are very different to those directed against his father. Comi)are Gillray 's caricature of Fox cutting off the head of Georore III. with Gray's venomous lines on Lord Holland at Kino-s- gate : '• Old and abandoned by each venal friend, Here Holland formed the pious resolution To smuggle a few years, and strive to mend A broken character and cout^titutioii. •Ah,' said the sighing peer, 'had Bute been true, Nor Mungo's, Kigbys, Bradshaw's friendship vain. Far better scenes than these had blest our view, And realised the beauties which we feign.' Purged by the sword and purified by fire, Then had we seen proud London's hated walls ; Owls Mould have hooted in St. Peter's choir, And foxes stunk and littered in St. Paul's." Or compare again the spirit which attached to Shelburne the name and characteristics of Malagrida with the wave of popular feeling which deprived Fox of his majority in 1784. In the one there is the distrust which is born of fear, and which is all the more formidable because it cannot easily be explained, because it is felt rather than expressed ; the other was the distrust of a healthy moral sentiment, which punished appropriately what it considered jp •210 C SABLES JAMES FOX. to be an obvious outrage to political morality. To most Englishmen undoubtedly, the support given by Fox to the French Revolution was a severe shock. They were at that time too much under the influence of fear themselves to be able to judge impartially of the conduct of one who, on the contrary, was inspired, not by fear, but by sympathy ; and he was too much of a partisan to make allowance for their prejudices. The judgment passed on both sides was much too harsh. Party feeling became more exacerbated than it had ever been before, and yet even in the height of the flood of public opinion which overwhelmed him, in spite of all the abuse which was showered upon him, no one really could bring himself to believe that Fox had set himself to destroy the institutions of his country. They believed iiim to be wrong, but they believed him to be honest, and when the time came for him to stand forward in their helialf against Napoleonic aggression, they rejoiced, not because the prodigal had returned home from the Jacobin swine troughs, but because the line of patriotic duty as understood by Whig and Tory had converged in common action for their country's good. The question then naturally arises, Is there in the public life of Fox any evidence that he had a distinct political ideal, which he followed as consistently as his circumstances and his temperament admitted ? Was this patriotism, which it is now on all hands acknowledged that he possessed, a vague sentiment or a considered policy ? The circumstances of Fox's political life almost forbid a direct answer to the question. It is the business of an Opposition to oppose, and no one expects that the attack will always be made from the same quarter or in the same way. By the conventions of politics a good deal of latitude is allowed to an Opposition, both as to the principles they lay down, and the arguments they use. It TUE MIXISTBY OF ALL THE TALENTS. 211 is when a statesman or a party is in office that their political ideal is seen, and Fox never while in office had any chance whatever of carrying political principles into legislation, except in his India Bill, which did not pass. In 1782 and 1806 his time was almost entirely occupied witii negotiations for peace. His political principles, therefore, have to be drawn mainly not from what he did do, but from what he blamed others for not doing, which is a test far more severe than that applied to any other great statesman of the century, and which, if applied to modern statesmen — '' who would escape whipping ? " Fox himself steadily maintained throughout his career a consistent appeal to Whig principles as the kernel of his political faith. He rarely made a speech in the House of Commons in which he did not profess his intense, almost blind admiration for the British Constitution ; but these were phrases which by the end of the eighteenth century had become little more than phrases. To a politician of Walpole's day. Whig principles meant distinctly the su))remacy of Parliament over the prerogative, party government, and religious toleration. It was summed uj) in the motto of the Revolution of 1688 — Civil and Religious Liberty. The British Constitution had an equally distinct meaning. It meant a government in which political power was divided between the Crown, the Ministers, and Parliament, but in which the aristocracy had the real ascendency. But by the end of the eighteenth century the phrases understood in this sense liad become unreal. No Tory, however reactionary, thought of disputing the supremacy of Parliament, the necessity of party government, or the advisability oi religious toleration ; and although opinions differed as to the exact limits which should be placed on tlu; influence of the Crown, or of the j)('<)ple, in the government, no one V 2 212 CHARLES JAMES FOX. doubted that the chief control should be vested in the aristocracy. Thirty years later, on the contrary, they had again become intensely real. They had acquired a new meaning. In the cold shade of opposition the Whig party had learned the doctrines of Free Trade from Adam Smith, and of Utilitarianism from Bentham ; they had seized Parliamentary Reform from the nerveless hands of Pitt, and in the mouths of Grey and of Russell and of Althorp, there time-honoured phrases meant the ousting of the Crown from political power, the supremacy of the middle classes, the domination of commercial objects in politics, and religious equality. Fox bridges over the gulf which separates these two conceptions of Whig principles. He it is who enables the programme of 1832 to be carried out by the same party which was overthrown by George III. in 1770. He it is who forms the link between Rockingham and Burdett. And the very indefiniteness of his own views, the fact that sentiment entered so largely into his political judgments, enabled him to discharge the function with the greater ease. He brought to the work of politics the talents of an orator, rather than of a statesman,, and he never made any definite scheme his own for placing the government of tuc country upon a more popular basis. He had in fact no enlarged conceptions of politics. He was too indolent to work out problems for posterity to settle. He was content to deal with the present, with the resources which the present supplied. He never laid before Parliament on any subject a carefully reasoned out scheme of political conduct, based upon principle and applied to the facts in question, except the India Bill, and it must always be doubtful how much of the India Bill was due to the inspiration of Burke. Hard political thinking he invariably avoided. In the American War TEE MINIS THY OF ALL THE TALENTS. 213 he could denounce the folly of the Ministry and demand the acknowledgment of independence, but he never had any scheme of his own to propound based upon a reasonable theory of colonial politics. He could cut the Gordian knot, but not untie it. The same thing is observable in his struggle with Pitt in 1784. He could denounce in Parlia- ment the unconstitutional appointment of the Ministers, he never could outvote them on questions of confidence, but he attempted to present his case to the constituencies, who after all must be eventually the arbiters, as one between the prerogative and the independence of Parliament. The same defect is still more conspicuous in his way of ] dealing with the war of 1793. Again and again he / attacked Pitt for not making clear the object of the war,*^*^/^ and sought accordingly to prove that it must be either a / war against opinion, or a war to restore the Bourbons. But he on his side never had any clear idea of the principle on which friendly relations with France could be maintained. He admitted that the violation of the Scheldt was a necessary cause of war by treaty, if the Dutch chose to make it so. He allowed that the French proclamation, inciting rebellion in monarchical countries, could not be passed over without demanding an explana- tion. But he refused to face the question of what should be done if the Dutch did call upon us to act, if the French, as of course they would, declined to explain. It was merely his own belief in the good sense and faith of the French that he opposed to the traditional policy of civilised nations in pursuance of treaty obligations. So again in 1803 he opposed the renewal of the war because he believed in the good faith of Buon.aparte, and knew that Addington was a blunderer and an incapable, but in 18U(J he found that he was wrong. It was just that preference of personal conviction to the 214 CHARLES JAMES FOX. resiPits of hard political thinking as the motive of policy, which made matter-of-fact Englishmen distrust Fox as a political leader, and made them sometimes think that he had no political principles. In that they did him a grievous injustice. He used the time-honoured formulae of party politics so frequently, at a time when to most men they had shrunk and withered into mere skeletons, that people could not realise that he was reclothing them again with flesh and blood, and inspiring them with new life for a fresh struggle under the old banners. The independence of Parliament — civil and religious liberty — the glorious constitution of 1688, had got to be formulae as hollow as the immortal principle of '89 sound to us now. Their original meaning had become ex- hausted, and they were usually intended to mean just what anybody chose. But in Fox's mouih they had a very definite meaning. They meant the crushing of the royal influence in government, the establishment of a responsible Prime Ministership, the reform of Parliament, and the removal of political disabilities from Non- conformists. But here again, as in matters of external policy, he stopped short just where he should have gone on. He contented himself with the principle, he shrunk from translating his principle into action. In all these questions he was content to play the second part, to follow where others led. The scheme for the Pieforra of Parliament belonged to Pitt, and was appropriated by Grey. That for the removal of Nonconformists' dis- abilities Fox inherited from Beaufoy, that for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was Wilberforce's own. In no one of these measures, which are the best evidence of Fox's insight as a statesman, which are the great historical triumphs of the \Vhig party, did Fox himself take the initiative. He did not even g-ive himself the THE MINISTitr OF ALL THE TALENTS. 215 trouble to place them before Parliament, in reasoned and considered legislative form. It is not too much to say that at his death, not one of them had definitely taken rank as essential parts of the Whig policy. Yet these are the measures upon which depends the reputation of Fox as the statesman, to whom the policy brought to such a glorious conclusion in 1829 and 1832 is mainly due. If Fox is to be considered as the author of a new departure in Whig policy, if his separation from Burke is to mean anything in the history of political principle, if in any sense whatever he is to be looked upop as the father of the Whigs of '32, these are the measures by which that claim will be judged. It is fatal to his reputation as a serious statesman, that not one of them was during- his lifetime permanently associated with his name. It is to his honour as a politician that they all received his support. It was to the advantage of his party, that by his support he was enabled to pass them to his followers as a legacy of which they could make better use than he liad done. There is in fact a real want of political ambition iii Fox. It was that which made him recoil when the true test of statesmanship, as of everything else great in this world, presented itself to him — the imperative necessity for taking trouble. Great political successes are not won on th(! floor of the House of Commons amid the plaudits of an excited crowd, they are won in the office, or the study, amid statistics and reports. Fox never could bring him- self to understand this. Eager, impulsive, and impetuous, he would throw himself into the fray when the debate came on, and speak with a conviction all the more positive because it was born of the necessities of the moment, but when the excitement had pa-^^ed it was very difficult to get him to attend to the humdrum business of preparing 216 CHARLES JAMES FOX. and arranging for the next step. Sir Gilbert Elliot tells us that he was curiously vacillating and hesitating in making up his mind. " This I fear," he says, " is a habitual defect in Fox, who has a great difficulty or backwardness in resolving as if he had no interest or no judgment in the affairs that are depending, and at last lets anybody else decide for him." 3is Indecision sprang not from want of will bnt from real want of interest. He could take trouble enough about a disputed reading in Homer, he would not decide whether the Opposition should start a candidate for the office of Speaker, until the day before that on which Parliament was to meet. Indolence was a fault which ran through the whole of Fox's life, political and social. Perhaps it was too much to demand of a statesman, who was always in a hopeless minority, that he should master details and apply principles with the avidity of one for whom the gates of power are just opening in the distance, but the result was none the less disastrous. Fox called in sentiment to supply the place of knowledge — sentiment, it Is true, which sprang from a healthy and sound English heart, and was checked by dn eminently sensible mind, but still sentiment which was very dangerous as an important element in a statesman's policy at the time of the French Revolution. What England wanted was a leader with the political sympathies of Fox, and the philosophical depth and practical mind of Burke. What she got was, on the one side the conventional common- place selfishness of Pitt, and on the other side in Fox, a real zeal for liberty, which was inspiring and essentially true, but which could do nothing to solve the difficulties of the hour. To tell the English nation that the revolu- tion of 1789 was a great step on the path of liberty, at a time when it had led to the overthrow of all the Institutions THE MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS. 217 with which in England liberty had been bound up, was as pernicious as it was useless. It sprang from an opinion which had its root in sentiment, not in reason. It destroyed the confidence of" the British nation in Fox as a practical politician, and it did much to hand England over, as the only alternative, a victim to the terror of the Tories. Where then is the secret of Fox's great influence over contemporaries, of his position in the page of history ? It is to be found in his oratory ;md in his personal attractive- ness. Undistinguished as a statesman, except in the department of foreign politics, a failure as a party leader, he was unrivalled in debate. On the floor of the House of Commons he never met his match. Sheridan had more wit, Pitt more declamatory power, Erskine more elegance, Tierney more polish, but the oratory of Fox outshone them all in the qualities which go straight to the heart. Robustness and earnestness were its two main characteristics. In the whole range of Fox's speeches there is not to be found a mean thought or an affectation. No doubt the charm of his personality greatly assisted the effect of his oratory. His speeches were rarely prepared beforehand. The words and expressions came straight out of a mind inspired by a strong mascu- line reason, and corrected by a faultless taste. " Nature and simplicity," said Sir G. Elliot, " were the true characteristic qualities of his eloquence." The manner- isms and the self-consciousness of a trained orator were exceedingly distasteful to him. Even Sheridan's prepared impromptus grated against his ear. The very openness, and complete absence of reserve, with which he poured out his whole heart to his audience took them by storm. The presence of the reporter, the vision of next morning's paper would have been fatiil to him, if he had 218 CHARLES JAMES FOX. stopiied to think of them. It is the whole personality of the man, not this or that particular quality, that gave him his power. The generosity of his heart, the openness of his mind, the simplicity of his nature, the robustness of his intellect, the felicity of his expression, the fire of his indignation, the earnestness of his sympathy, the vigour of his conviction, — all these combined in a personality which men might fly from in questioning doubt, or might woi-ship in trusting love, but could not criticise. "There are but forty of them," said Thurlow of the Opposition of 1793, ''but there is not one of them who would not be willingly hanged for Fox." A tribute such as this, coming too from an enemy, is not lightly to be disregarded. When the grave closed over Fox many thousands in England who had never seen him and never heard him felt that they had lost a friend. All Englishmen knew that a light had gone from the world, and England was the debtor to nature for the loan of one of those rare spirits who sum up in themselves the gifts and the powers of many types of ordinary men. "A power is passing from the eaith To breathless Nature's dark abyss, But when the great and good depart, What is it more than this? That Man who is by God sent forth, Doth yet again to God return : Such ebb and flow must ever be, Then wherefore should we mourn ? " / INDEX. Adam Smith, 50, 83, 127. Addiugton, 123, 195, 198. America, question of independ- ence of, 39. American War, The, policy of Fox, 29, 39 ; speeches of Fox upon, 30, 31 ; mismanagement of, 37 ; effect of, on English parties, 29 ; opinion in the country about, 41. Amiens, Peace of, 196. Armed Neutrality, Tiie, G9. Arraistead, Mrs., 122. 178. Austerlitz, Battle of, 303. B. Beauolerk, Topham, 56. Bedford, Duke of, 177, 183. Boston Port Bill, I he, 28. Brookes's Club, 2, 21, 5G. Brunswick, Duke of, 163, 105. Burke, Edmund, position of, in P.irliament, 51 ; views of, on tlie American War, 27, 34. 40 ; oratory of, 52 ; opiniuns of, on the French Revolution, l'>l: quarrel of, with Fox, 159. Bute, Earl of, 7. c. Ca-mden, Lokd, 34, 61, 88. Canada, proposed cession of, 74. Canning, George, 198. Carlisle, Earl of, 20. 22. 57.05,80. Catholic Einanciputiou, ipiestiou | of, 195. ! Calliolic Belief Acts, 147. i Cavendish, Lord John, 61, 81. Chatham, first Earl of, 4, 7, 26, 29. Chatham, second Earl of, 199. Churcli and State, Relations be- tween, 149. Clive, Lord, I G. Coalition Ministry, The, nego- tiations about, 90 ; criticism U|jon, 92. Commercial Treaty with Franco The, 127. Conway, General, 77. Cornwallis, ihe Marquis, 102,107. Grill m, 70. Crosby, Lord I\rayor, 9. Cumberland, Duke of, 11 D. Dashwood. Sir Francis, 5, 20. Declaratory Act of George I., The, 65. Detfand, Madame du, 1, De Grasse, 70. 85. Dowdc swell, 12, 16. Dundas, Lord Jlelville, 20, 69,90, 102, 130, 202, 203, Dunning, Lord Ashburton, 62, 74. E. Economical Reform, Burke's bill for, 66. Eden, 6.i, 195. Eliiut,SirGilljert, 83,110,168 216 Erskine, 177, 180. F. FiTZHKiiBKUT, Mrs., 133. Fitzwdliam, Lord, 110, 168. Flood, 146. >20 INDEX. Fox. Henry Lord HollanJ, 2, 7, 10. 29. Fox, Charles James, early life of, 2; early character of, 10, 18; change of principle* of, 25. 28 ; oratory of, 31, 217; position of in 1782. 54, G4 ; foreign policy of, 69 ; Indian policy of, 100 ; home policy of, 146; opinions of, on the French Revolution, 154, 16G, 181 ; quarrel of, with Burke, 159; literai7 criticisms of, 187; estimate of career of, 207. France, The great war with, 164, 169. Franklin, 73. French Revolution, effect of, on English politics, 161, 167. G. Geokge III., character of, 4 ; policy of, towards the Whigs, 5, 7. 45 ; responsibility of, for Ihe American War, 27 ; conduct of, to the Coalition Ministry, 91, 97, 111 ; opinion of, on Fox, 13, 19, 132. Germaine, Lord George, 32. Gibraltar, 85. Gillray, James, 179. 184. Girondins, The, 162. Gloucester, Duke of, 11. Gordon, Lord George. 47. Grafton, Duke of, 8, 19, 27, 81, 89. Gratton, Henry, 65. Grenville, George, 7. , Thomas, 73, 168, 200. „ , William Wyndham, Lord, 140, 165, 169, 196. Grey, 127, 170, 177, 180, 200, 206. H. Habkas Corpus Suspension Act, The, 172. Hastings, Warren, 101, 107, 128. Holland, third Lord, 166, 177. 186. 207. Home Tooke, 16. I. India Bill, The, of Fox, 104 ; of Pitt. 107. Ireland, grant of self-government to, 66. J. Jacobins, The, 162, 173. Johnson, Dr., 117. K. Keppel, Lord, 61, 88. Kingsgate, 56, 209. Libel Act, of Fox, 152. Louis XVI. of France, 155, 162. M. Malagrida, 51, 209. Mansfield, Lord, 9, 11. Marriage Act, Lord Hardwicke'e, 11, 14; The R®yal, 11, 134. Massachusetts Charter Act, The, 28. Mirabeau, 162. N. Napoleon Buonaparte, 173, 197, 201, 204. Newcastle, Duke of, 7. Newmarket, 10, 14, 15. Newnham, Alderman, 135. Nore, mutiny at the, 183. North, Lord, early relations of to Fox, 8, 11, 15, 16 ; policy of, on the American War, 27, 38, 47 ; resignation of, 49 ; coalition of, with Fox, 90. Northington, Lord, 100. Norton, Sir Fletcher, 9, 16. 0. OssoRY, Lord, 12. Oswald. 73. INDEX. 221 P. Pabliamentaky Reform, 42, 67, 146. Parr, Dr., 186. Pilnitz, conference at, 163. Pitt, William, views of, on tlie American War, 41 ; conduct of, . to Shelburne, 89 ; ministry of, in 1783, 112; talents of, as minister, 123 ; war of, witli France, 169, 171 ; resignation of, 194 ; second ministry of, 200, 202. Portland, Duke of, 66, 81. 135. 168. Poynings Law, repeal of, 66. Price, Dr., 50. Prince of Wales, The, 131. Q. Quebec Act, The, of 1774, 86 ; of 1791, 158. R. Regenot Bill, Ttie, 137. Religious disabilities, removal of, 147, 151. Richmond, Duke of, 40, 67, 81, 89. Rockingham, Marquis of, 8, 9, 29, 40, 61, 80. Rodney, Aduiirul, 71, 85. Rolle, 135. s. Sandwich, Earl of, 5, 9, 20. Saratoga, 37, 42. Secession, the Whig, 177. 196. Seditious Meetings Act, The, 172. Sclwyn, George, 22. 183. Shelbuine, Earl of, 7, 40, 50, 60, 74, 77, 82. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 41, 83, 130, 179. Slave Trade, abolition of, 152, 206. St. Ann's Hill, 120. 184. Stanhope, Earl, 180. Talents, The Ministry of All the, 203. Temple, Earl, 91, 111. Thurlow, Lord, 11, 61. 143. Trafalgar, Battle of, 203. Trotter, Colonel, 189, 191. Vergennes, 70. Versailles, negotiations for peace of, 86. w. Wakefield, Gilbert, 186, 189. Walpole, Sir Robert, 6, 44. Walpole, Horace, 13, 15, 19, 53> 57,64. Wedderbuni, Sir William (Lord Loughborough\ 9, 11, 90, 191. Wellesley, The MarquLs, 107. Westmin.ster Election, The, 119. Whig Club, The, 182. Whig Party, state of, at beginning of reign of George III., 6 ; in 1782, 61 ; schism of the, 167, 175. Wilberforce, William, 41- Windham, 127, 167. Woodfall, 9, 16. Y. YOKK, DCKE OF, 138, 171. Yorktown, 47. MAT.rOMSON AM) <•'.. 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