A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 11

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CHAPTER LVI.

TWO NEW MEN.

[Sidenote: 1780--The younger Pitt and Brinsley Sheridan]

The year 1780 that witnessed the Gordon riots welcomed into political life two men, both of whom were young, both of whom bore names that were already familiar from an honorable parentage, and both of whom were destined to play very conspicuous parts in the House of Commons.

One of the two men was known to his family alone, and his intimates, as a youth of great promise and great knowledge, which gave to his twenty years the ripened wisdom of a statesman and a scholar. The other, who was eight years older, had been for some years in the public eye, had been the hero of a romantic scandal which had done much to make his name notorious, and had written some dramatic works which had done more to make his name famous. It was a fortunate chance that when the House of Commons stood in need of new blood and new men the same time and the same year saw the return to Parliament of William Pitt and of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

It has been said that every reader of the "Iliad" finds himself irresistibly compelled to take sides with one or other of the great opposing camps, and to be thenceforward either a Greek or a Trojan. In something of the same spirit every student of the reign of the third George becomes perforce a partisan of one or other of two statesmen who divided the honors of its prime between them, who were opposed on all the great questions of their day, and who represented at their best the two forces into which English political life was then, and is still, divided. The history of England for the closing years of the eighteenth century and the early dawn of the nineteenth century is {212} the history of these two men and of their influence. Those who study their age and their career are separated as keenly and as hotly to-day as they were separated keenly and hotly a hundred years ago into the followers of Charles James Fox or the followers of William Pitt.

The record of English party politics is a record of long and splendid duels between recognized chiefs of the two antagonistic armies. What the struggle between Gladstone and Disraeli, for example, was to our own time, the struggle between Fox and Pitt was to our ancestors of three generations ago. All the force and feeling that made for what we now call liberal principles found its most splendid representative in the son of Lord Holland: all the force and feeling that rallied around the conservative impulse looked for and found its ideal in the son of Lord Chatham. The two men were as much contrasted as the opinions that they professed. To the misgoverned, misguided, splendidly reckless boyhood and early manhood of Fox Pitt opposed the gravity and stillness of his youth. The exuberant animal vitality of Fox, wasting itself overlong in the flame of aimless pa.s.sions, was emphasized by the solid reserve, the pa.s.sionless austerity of Pitt. The one man was compact of all the heady enthusiasms, the splendid generosities of a nature rich in the vitality that sought eagerly new outlets for its energy, that played hard as it worked hard, that exulted in extremes. The other moved in a narrow path to one envisaged aim, and, conscious of a certain physical frailty, husbanded his resources, limited the scope of his fine intellect, and acted not indeed along the line of least resistance but within lines of purpose that were not very far apart.

The one explored the mountain and the valley, lingered in gardens and orchards, or wandered at all adventure upon desolate heaths; the other pursued in patience the white highway to his goal, untempted or at least unconquered by allurements that could prove irresistible to his adversary.

[Sidenote: 1780--The character of the younger Pitt]

The two men differed as much in appearance as in mind. The outer seeming of each is almost as familiar as the forms and faces of contemporaries. Fox was ma.s.sively {213} corpulent, furiously untidy, a heroic sloven, his bull throat and cheeks too often black with a three days' beard, infinitely lovable, exquisitely cultured, capable of the n.o.blest tenderness, yet with a kind of grossness sometimes that was but a part, and perhaps an inevitable part, of his wide humanity. Pitt was slender, boyish, precise, punctilious in attire, his native composure only occasionally lightened by a flash of humor or sweetened by a show of playfulness, old beyond his years and young to the end of his short life, sternly self-restrained and self-commanded, gracious in a kind of melancholy, unconscious charm, a curiously unadorned, uncolored personality, that attracted where it did attract with a magnetism that was perhaps all the more potent for being somewhat difficult to explain. Fox was always a lover in many kinds of love, fugitive, venal, illicit, honorable, and enduring. Pitt carried himself through temptations with a monastic rigor. There was a time when his friends implored him for the sake of appearances, and not to flout too flagrantly the manners of the time, to show himself in public with a woman of the town. His one love story, strange and fruitless, neither got nor gave happiness and remains an unsolved mystery.

There were only two tastes held in common by the two men, and those were tastes shared by most of the gentlemen of their generation and century, the taste for politics and the taste for wine. Men of the cla.s.s of Holland's son, of Chatham's son, if they were not soldiers and sailors, and very often when they were soldiers and sailors, went into political life as naturally as they went into a university or into the hunting field. In the case of the younger Fox and of the younger Pitt the political direction was conspicuously inevitable from the beginning. The paths of both lay plain from the threshold of the nursery to the threshold of St. Stephen's. The lad who was the chosen companion of his father at an age when his contemporaries had only abandoned a horn-book to grapple with Corderius, the boy who learned the principles of elocution and the essence of debate from the lips of the Great Commoner, were children very specially fostered in the arts of {214} statesmans.h.i.+p and curiously favored in the knowledge that enables men to guide and govern men. From the other taste there was no escape, or little escape, possible for the men of that day. It would have been strange indeed if Fox had been absolved from the love of wine, which was held by every one he knew, from his father's old friend and late enemy Rigby to the elderly place-holder, gambler, and letter-writer Selwyn, who loved, slandered, and failed to ruin Fox's brilliant youth. It would have been impossible for Pitt, floated through a precarious childhood on floods of Oporto, to liberate his blood and judgment from the generous liquor that promised him a strength it sapped. It was no more disgrace to the austere Pitt than to the profligate Fox to come to the House of Commons visibly under the influence of much more wine than could possibly have been good for Hercules. Sobriety was not unknown among statesmen even in those days of many bottles, but intoxication was no shame, and Burke was no more commended for his temperance than Fox, or Pitt, or Sheridan were blamed for their intemperance.

[Sidenote: 1759-80--The youth of the younger Pitt]

William Pitt was born in 1759, when George the Second still seemed stable on his throne, and when the world knew nothing of that grandson and heir to whose service the child of Chatham was to be devoted. He was the fourth child and second son; the third son and last child of Chatham was born two years later. William Pitt was delicate from his infancy, and by reason of his delicacy was never sent to school. He was educated by private tuition, directly guided and controlled by his father. From the first he was precocious, full of promise, full of performance. He acquired knowledge eagerly and surely; what he learned he learned well and thoroughly. Trained from his cradle in the acquirements essential to a public life, he applied himself, as soon as he was of an age to appreciate his tastes and to form a purpose, to equipping himself at all points for a political career. When the great Chatham died he left behind him a son who was to be as famous as himself, a statesman formed in his own school, trained in his own methods, inspired by his counsels, and guided by {215} his example. A legend which may be more than legend has it that from the first destiny seemed determined to confront the genius and the fame of Fox with the genius and the fame of Pitt. It is said that the Foxes were a.s.sured by a relative of the Pitts that the young son of Chatham, then a child under a tutor's charge, showed parts which were sure to prove him a formidable rival to the precocious youth who was at once the delight and the despair of Lord Holland's life. It is certain that the young Fox was early made acquainted with the ripe intelligence and eager genius of the younger Pitt. It was his chance to stand with the boy one night at the bar of the House of Lords, and to be attracted and amazed at the avidity with which Pitt followed the debate, the sagacity with which he commented upon what he saw and heard, and the readiness with which he formulated answers to arguments which failed to carry conviction to his dawning wisdom. Pitt loved the House of Commons while he was still in the schoolroom; it was inevitable that he should belong to the House of Commons, and he entered it at the earliest possible moment, even before he was legally qualified to do so, for he was not quite of age when he first took his seat.

The qualities of fairness and fitness which Greek wisdom praised in the conduct of life were characteristic of Pitt's life. In its zealous, patient preparation for public life, its n.o.ble girding of the loins against great issues, its wistful renunciation of human hopes, its early consciousness of terrible disease, its fort.i.tude in the face of catastrophes so unexpected and so cruel; in its pensive isolation, in the richness of those early successes that seemed as if in antic.i.p.ation to offer compensation for the early death, his life seems to have been adorned with certain ornaments and ordered by certain laws that make it strangely comely, curiously symmetrical. In that youth of his which was never quite young, and which was never allowed to grow old, in his austere att.i.tude to so much that youth holds most dear, in the high pa.s.sion of his patriotism with its eager desire, so often and so sternly thwarted, to add to England's glory, he stands apart from {216} many greater and many wiser men, in a melancholy, lonely dignity. It has been given to few men to inspire more pa.s.sionate attachment in the minds of his contemporaries; it has been given to few statesmen to be regarded abroad, by eyes for the most part envious or hostile, as pre-eminently representative of the qualities that made his country at once disliked and feared. His political instincts were for the most part admirable, and if it had been his fortune to serve a sovereign more reasonable, more temperate, and more intelligent than George the Third his name might have been written among the great reformers of the world. At home an unhappy deference to the dictates of a rash and incapable king, abroad an enforced opposition to one of the greatest forces and one of the greatest conquerors that European civilization has seen, prevented Pitt from gaining that position to which his genius, under conditions less persistently unhappy, would have ent.i.tled him. To have gained what he did gain under such conditions was in itself a triumph.

The new-comer who entered Parliament at the same period as William Pitt was as curiously unlike him as even Fox himself. If few knew anything of Pitt every one knew something of Sheridan, who had already made fame in one career and was now about to make fame in another. It may afford consolation to the unappreciated to reflect that the most famous English dramatist since Shakespeare's day, the brightest wit of an age which piqued itself into being considered witty, the most brilliant orator of an age which regarded oratory as one of the greatest of the arts, and whose roll is studded with the names of ill.u.s.trious orators, the most unrivalled humorist of a century which in all parts of the world distinguished itself by its love of humor, was looked upon in his nonage as a dull, unpromising boy, chiefly remarkable for his idleness and carelessness.

[Sidenote: 1751-80--The parents of Brinsley Sheridan]

The quality which we now call Bohemianism certainly ran in Sheridan's blood. His grandfather, Dr. Thomas Sheridan, the friend of Swift, the Dublin clergyman and schoolmaster, was a delightfully amiable, wholly reckless, {217} slovenly, indigent, and cheerful personage. His father, Thomas Sheridan, was a no less cheerful, no less careless man, who turned play-actor, and taught elocution, and married a woman who wrote novels and a life of Swift. At one time he could boast the friends.h.i.+p of Dr. Johnson, who seems to have regarded him with an ill-humored contempt, but Dr. Johnson's expression of this contempt brought about a quarrel. The most remarkable thing about him is that he was the father of his son. Neither he nor his wife appears to have had any idea of their good fortune. Mrs. Sheridan once declared of her two boys that she had never met with "two such impenetrable dunces."

None the less the father contrived with difficulty to sc.r.a.pe together enough money to send his boys to Harrow, and there, luckily, Dr. Parr discerned that Richard, with all his faults, was by no means an impenetrable dunce. Both he and Sumner, the head-master of Harrow, discovered in the schoolboy Sheridan great talents which neither of them was capable of calling into action.

Richard Sheridan came from Harrow School and Harrow playgrounds to London, and, later on, to Bath. London did not make him much more industrious or more careful than he had been at Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was far pleasanter to translate the honeyed Greek of Theocritus, with its babble of Sicilian shepherds, its nymphs and waters and Sicilian seas, than to follow the beaten track of ordinary education. It was vastly more entertaining to translate the impa.s.sioned prose of Aristaenetus into impa.s.sioned verse, especially in collaboration with a cherished friend, than to yawn over Euclid and to grumble over c.o.c.ker.

The translation of Aristaenetus, the boyish task of Sheridan and his friend Halhed, still enjoys a sort of existence in the series of cla.s.sical translations in Bohn's Library. It is one of the ironies of literature that fate has preserved this translation while it has permitted the two Begum speeches, that in the House of Commons and that in Westminster Hall, practically to perish. What little interest does now cling to the early work belongs to the fact of its being a collaboration. Halhed, who worked {218} with Sheridan at the useless task, was a clever young Oxford student, who was as poor as he was clever, and who seemed to entertain the eccentric idea that large sums of money were to be readily obtained from the reading public for a rendering in flippant verse of the prose of an obscure author whose very ident.i.ty is involved in doubt. Aristaenetus did not become the talk of the town even in spite of an ingeniously promulgated rumor a.s.signing the authors.h.i.+p of the verses to Dr. Johnson. Neither did the plays and essays in which the friends collaborated meet with any prosperous fate.

From the doing of Greek prose into English verse Sheridan and Halhed turned to another occupation, in which, as in the first, they were both of the same mind. They both fell in love, and both fell in love with the same woman. All contemporary accounts agree in regarding the daughter of Linley the musician as one of the most beautiful women of her age. Those who knew the portrait which the greatest painter of his time painted of Sheridan's wife as St. Cecilia will understand the extraordinary, the almost universal homage which society and art, wit and wealth, and genius and rank paid to Miss Linley. Unlike the girl in Sheridan's own poem, who is a.s.sured by her adorer that she will meet with friends in all the aged and lovers in the young. Miss Linley found old men as well as young men competing for her affection and for the honor of her hand.

Sheridan and Halhed were little more than boys when they first beheld and at once adored Miss Linley. Charles Sheridan, Richard's elder brother, was still a very young man. But Miss Linley had old lovers too, men long past the middle pathway of their lives, who besought her to marry them with all the impetuosity of youth. One of them, whom she wisely rejected on the ground that wealth alone could not compensate for the disparity in years, carried off his disappointment gracefully enough by immediately settling a sum of three thousand pounds upon the young lady.

There is an air of romance over the whole course of {219} Sheridan's attachment to Miss Linley. For a long time he contrived to keep his attachment a secret from his elder brother, Charles, and from his friend Halhed, both of whom were madly in love with Miss Linley, and neither of whom appears to have had the faintest suspicion of finding a rival, the one in so close a kinsman, the other in his own familiar friend. It must be admitted that Sheridan does not appear to have behaved with that uprightness which was to be expected from his gallant, impetuous nature. Not merely did he keep his secret from his brother and his friend, but he seems to have allowed his friend to look upon him as a confidant and ally in pressing Halhed's suit upon Miss Linley. Halhed reproached him sadly, but not bitterly, in a poetical epistle, the value of which is more personal than poetical, when he discovered the real mind of his friend. Then, like a wise man if a sad one, Halhed went away. He sailed for India, the golden land of so many wrecked hopes and disappointed ambitions; he long outlived his first love and his successful rival; he became in the fulness of time a member of Parliament, and he died in 1830. He is dimly remembered as the author of a grammar of the Bengalee language and of a work on Gentoo laws translated from the Persian.

[Sidenote: 1771--Marriage of Sheridan and Miss Linley]

Sheridan's courts.h.i.+p progressed more and more romantically. The persecutions of a married rake named Matthews drove Miss Linley to fly to France with Sheridan, to whom she was secretly married at Calais.

The revengeful and disappointed Matthews inserted a libellous attack upon Sheridan in the _Bath Chronicle_. Sheridan extorted at his sword's point a public apology from Matthews. Further and baser mendacity on the part of Matthews provoked a second duel, in which the combatants seem to have fought with desperate ferocity, and in which Sheridan, badly wounded, refused to ask his life at the hands of his antagonist and was only rescued by the seconds. A long period of separation followed, full of dark hours for Sheridan, hours only brightened by occasional meetings of the most eccentric kind, as when the wild young poet, quaintly {220} disguised in the complicated capes of a hackney coachman, had the tormenting privilege of driving his beloved from Covent Garden Theatre, where her voice and beauty were nightly charming all London. At last the opposition of Linley was overcome, and on April 13, 1773, the most brilliant man and most beautiful woman of their day were for the second time and more formally married, and a series of adventures more romantic than fiction came to an end.

The romance, it is agreeable to think, did not conclude with the marriage ceremony. Sheridan seems to have offered his wife as devoted an attachment after her marriage as he had shown in the days of duelling and disguising that preceded it. He wrote verses to her, and she wrote verses to him, long after they had settled down to serene domesticity, which breathe the most pa.s.sionate expressions of mutual love. And yet there is a legend--it is to be hoped and believed that it is only a legend--which ends the romance very sadly. According to the legend young Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Sheridan's close friend, felt more than a friend's admiration for the wife of his friend. According to the legend Elizabeth Sheridan returned the pa.s.sion, which by the unhappiness it brought with it shortened her life. According to the legend Lord Edward only married the fair Pamela, Philippe Egalite's daughter, because of the striking resemblance she bore to the St.

Cecilia of his dreams. The legend rests on the authority of Madame de Genlis, who was probably Pamela's mother and who is no infallible authority. It is possible that the undoubted resemblance of Pamela to Mrs. Sheridan is the origin of the whole story. Lord Edward was always falling in love in a graceful, chivalrous kind of way. But there is no serious proof that his friends.h.i.+p for Mrs. Sheridan was anything more than the friends.h.i.+p an honorable man may entertain for the wife of his friend. The graver and more authentic story of Fitzgerald's life has yet to be told in these pages.

[Sidenote: 1775--Sheridan as dramatist and politician]

For a brief period after his marriage Sheridan thought of devoting himself to the law. But his thoughts and {221} tastes were otherwise inclined, and on January 27, 1775, not quite two years after his marriage, "The Rivals" was produced at Covent Garden and a new chapter opened in the history of dramatic literature. It is curious to think that the clumsiness of the player to whom the part of Sir Lucius O'Trigger was given came very near to d.a.m.ning the most brilliant comedy that the English stage had seen for nearly two centuries. The happy subst.i.tution of actor Clinch for actor Lee, however, saved the piece and made Sheridan the most popular author in London. How grateful Sheridan felt to Clinch for rescuing Sir Lucius is shown by the fact that his next production, the farce called "St. Patrick's Day; or, the Scheming Lieutenant," was expressly written to afford opportunity for Clinch's peculiar talents. In 1777 came "The School for Scandal,"

Sheridan's masterpiece, which was followed by Sheridan's last dramatic work, "The Critic." Never probably before was so splendid a success gained so rapidly, so steadily increased in so short a time, to come so abruptly to an end in the very pride of its triumph.

Quite suddenly the most famous English author then alive found opportunity for the display of wholly new and unexpected talents, and became one of the most famous politicians and orators alive. There had, indeed, always been a certain political bent in Sheridan's mind.

He had tried his hand at many political pamphlets, fragments of which were found among his papers by Moore. He had always taken the keenest interest in the great questions which agitated the political life of the waning eighteenth century. The general election of 1780 gave him an opportunity of expressing this interest in the public field, and he was returned to Parliament as member for the borough of Stamford. It is difficult to find a parallel in our history for the extraordinary success which attended Sheridan in his political life as it had already attended him in his dramatic career.

Just on the threshold of his political career Sheridan lost the wife he loved so well. He was profoundly afflicted, but the affliction lessened and he married a Miss {222} Ogle. There is a story told in connection with this second marriage which is half melancholy, half humorous, and wholly pathetic. The second Mrs. Sheridan, young, clever, and ardently devoted to her husband, was found one day, according to this story, walking up and down her drawing-room apparently in a frantic state of mind because she had discovered that the love-letters Sheridan had sent to her were the same as those which he had written to his first wife. Word for word, sentence for sentence, pa.s.sion for pa.s.sion, they were the same letters. No doubt Sheridan made his peace. It is to be presumed that he thought the letters so good that they might very well serve a second turn; but this act of literary parsimony was not happy. Parsimony of his written work was, however, Sheridan's peculiarity. Verses addressed to his dear St.

Cecilia make their appearance again and again, under altered conditions, in his plays. It is singular enough, as has been happily said, that the treasures of wit which Sheridan was thought to possess in such profusion should have been the only species of wealth which he ever dreamed of economizing.

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CHAPTER LVII.

FOX AND PITT.

[Sidenote: 1781--Fall of the Lord North Administration]

Pitt entered public life the inheritor of a great name, the transmitter of a great policy, at a time when the country was in difficulty and the Government in danger. In the January of 1781 North was still in power, was still supported by the King, had still some poor shreds of hope that something, anything might happen to bring England well out of the struggle with America. In the November of the same year North reeled to his fall with the news of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. In those ten months Pitt had already made himself a name in the House of Commons. He was no longer merely the son of Pitt; he was Pitt. He had attached himself to an Opposition that was studded with splendid names, and had proved that his presence added to its l.u.s.tre. The heroes and leaders of Opposition at Westminster welcomed him to their ranks with a generous admiration and enthusiasm. Fox, ever ready to applaud possible genius, soon p.r.o.nounced him to be one of the first men in Parliament.

Burke hailed him, not as a chip of the old block, but as the old block itself. The praises of Burke and of Fox were great, but they were not undeserved. When the Ministry of Lord North fell into the dust, when the King was compelled to accept the return of the Whigs to office, Pitt had already gained a position which ent.i.tled him in his own eyes not to accept office but to refuse it.

Rockingham formed a Ministry for the second time. The new Ministry was formed of an alliance between the two armies of the Rockingham Whigs and the Shelburne Whigs. Rockingham represented the political principles that dated from the days of Walpole. {224} Shelburne represented, or misrepresented, the principles that dated from the days of Chatham. The King would very much have preferred to take Shelburne without Rockingham, but even the King had to recognize that it was impossible to gratify his preference. Even if Shelburne had been a much better leader than he was he had not the following which would ent.i.tle him to form a Ministry on his own account. And Shelburne was by no means a good leader. To the Liberal politician of to-day Shelburne seems a much more desirable and admirable statesman than Rockingham. Most of his political ideas were in advance of his time, and his personal friends.h.i.+ps prove him to have been a man of appreciative intelligence. He had proved his courage in his youth as a soldier at Campen and Minden; he had maintained his courage in 1780 when he faced and was wounded by the pistol of Fullarton. But his gifts, whatever they were, were not of the quality nor the quant.i.ty to make a leader of men. He could not form a Ministry for himself, and he was not an element of stability in any Ministry of which he was a member.

The Administration formed by the alliance of Rockingham and Shelburne could boast of many brilliant names, and showed itself laudably anxious to add to their number. In an Administration which had Fox for a Secretary of State, Burke for Paymaster-General of the Forces, and Sheridan for Under-Secretary of State, the Vice-Treasurers.h.i.+p of Ireland was offered to Pitt.

[Sidenote: 1782--Fox's quarrel with Pitt]

Pitt declined the offer. He had made up his mind that he would not accept a subordinate situation. Conscious of his ability, he was prepared to wait. He had not to wait long. During the four agitated months of life allowed to the Rockingham Administration Pitt distinguished himself by a motion for reform in the representative system which was applauded by Fox and by Sheridan, but which was defeated by twenty votes. Peace and reform were always pa.s.sions deeply seated at the heart of Pitt; it was ironic chance that a.s.sociated him hereafter so intimately with war and with antagonism to so many methods of reform in which he earnestly believed. When the quarrels {225} between Fox and Shelburne over the settlement of the American war ended after Rockingham's death in July, 1782, in the withdrawal from the Ministry of Fox, Burke, and the majority of the Rockingham party, Pitt rightly saw that his hour had come. Fox resigned rather than serve with Shelburne, Pitt accepted Shelburne, and made Shelburne's political existence possible a little longer. With the aid of Pitt, Shelburne could hold on and let Fox go; without Pitt, Fox would have triumphed over Shelburne.

From this moment began the antagonism between Fox and Pitt which was to last for the remainder of their too brief lives. At the age of twenty-three Pitt found himself Chancellor of the Exchequer, and one of the most conspicuous men in the kingdom. Fox, who was ten years older, was defeated by the youth whose rivalry had been predicted to Fox when the youth was yet a child.

Pitt's triumph lasted less than a year. Fox, conscious of his own great purposes, and eager to return to office for their better advancement, was prepared to pay a gambler's price for power. To overthrow Shelburne and with Shelburne Pitt, he needed a pretext and an ally. The pretext was easy to find. He had but to maintain that the terms of the peace with America were not the best that the country had a right to expect. The ally was easy to find and disastrous to accept. Nothing in the whole of Fox's history is more regrettable than his unnatural alliance with Lord North. Ever since the hour when Fox had found his true self, and had pa.s.sed from the ranks of the obedient servants of the King into the ranks of those who devoted themselves to the principles of liberty, there had been nothing and there could have been nothing in common between Fox and North. Everything that Fox held most dear was detestable to North, as North's political doctrines were now detestable to Fox. The political enmity of the two men had been bitter in the extreme, and Fox had a.s.sailed North with a violence which might well seem to have made any form of political reconciliation impossible. Yet North was now the man with whom Fox was content to throw in his lot in order to obtain the {226} overthrow of Shelburne and of Pitt. And Fox was not alone among great Whigs in this extraordinary transaction. He carried Burke with him in this unholy alliance between all that was worst and all that was best in English political life. The two men whose genius and whose eloquence had been the most potent factors in the fall of North a year before were now the means of bringing the discredited and defeated statesman back again into the exercise of a power which, as none knew better than they, he had so shamefully misused. Fox and North between them swept Shelburne out of the field. Fox and North between them were able to force a Coalition Ministry upon a reluctant and indignant King. The followers of Fox and the followers of North in combination formed so numerous and so solid a party that they were able to treat the sovereign with a lack of ceremony to which he was little used. Fox had gone out of office rather than admit that the right to nominate the first minister rested with the King instead of with the Cabinet. Now that he had returned to office, he showed his determination to act up to his principles by not permitting the King to nominate a single minister.

[Sidenote: 1783--Fox's coalition with Lord North]

The King's contempt for North since the failure to coerce America, the King's dislike of Fox since Fox became an advanced politician, were deepened now into uncompromising and unscrupulous enmity by the cavalier conduct of the coalition. The King, with his doggedness of purpose and his readiness to use any weapons against those whom he chose to regard as his enemies, was a serious danger even to a coalition that seemed so formidable as the coalition between Fox and North. Fox may very well have thought that his unjustifiable league with North would at least have the result of giving him sufficient time and sufficient influence to carry into effect some of those schemes for the good of the country which he had most nearly at heart. The statesman who makes some unhappy surrender of principle, some ign.o.ble concession to opportunity in order to obtain power, makes his unworthy bargain from a conviction that his hold of office is essential to the welfare of the State, and that a little {227} evil is excusable for a great good. The sophistry that deceives the politician does not deceive the public. Fox gravely injured his position with the people who loved him by stooping to the pact with North, and he did not reap that reward of success in his own high-minded and high-hearted purposes which could alone have excused his conduct.

The great coalition which was to stand so strong and to work such wonders was destined to vanish like a breath after accomplis.h.i.+ng nothing, and to condemn Fox with all his hopes and dreams to a career of almost unbroken opposition for the rest of his life. If anything in Fox's checkered career could be more tragic than the degradation of his union with the politician whom he declared to be void of every principle of honor and honesty, it was the abiding consequences of the retribution that followed it. Fox had fought hard and with success to live down the follies of his youth. He had to fight harder and with far less success to live down what the world persisted in regarding as the infamy of his a.s.sociation with North.

It is difficult to realize the arguments which persuaded Fox, which persuaded Burke, to join their forces with the fallen minister whom their own mouths, but a little while before, had, in no measured terms, declared to be guilty of the basest conduct and deserving of the severest punishment. All that we know of Fox, all that we know of Burke--and it is possible to know them almost as well as if they were the figures of contemporary history--would seem to deny the possibility of their condescending to any act of conscious baseness. Stained and sullied as the youth of Fox had been with some of the more flagrant vices of a flagrantly vicious society, his record as gambler, as spendthrift, and as libertine seems relatively clean in comparison with this strange act of public treason to the chosen beliefs of his manhood, of public apostasy from those high and generous principles by whose strenuous advocacy he had redeemed his wasted youth. Fiery as Burke's temper had often proved itself to be, fantastic and grotesque as his obstinacy had often showed itself in {228} clinging defiantly to some crotchet or whimsey, that seemed to the spectator unworthy the adhesion of his great intellect, his most eccentric action, his most erratic impulse, appeared sweetly reasonable and serenely lucid when contrasted with the conduct that allowed him to guide or be guided by Fox in a course that proved as foolish as it looked disgraceful, to lead or to follow Fox into packing cards with their arch-enemy of the American war.

On the face of it there is nothing that seems not merely to justify, but even to palliate, the conduct of Fox and Burke. Ugly as the deed seemed to the men of their day, to the men who believed in them, trusted them, loved them, it seems no less ugly to those who at the distance of a century revere their memories and cherish their teachings. One thing may be, must be, a.s.sumed by those before whom the lives of Fox and Burke lie bare--that men so animated by high principles, so illuminated by high ideals, cannot deliberately, of set purpose, have sinned against the light. They must have felt, and strongly felt, their justification for entering on a course which was destined to prove so disastrous. Their justification probably was the conviction, nursed if not expressed, that to statesmen whose hands were so full of blessings, to statesmen whose hearts were so big with splendid enterprises, a trivial show of concession, a little paltering with the punctilio of honor, a little eating of brave words, and a little swallowing of principle, was a small price to pay and a price well worth paying for the immeasurable good that England was to gather from their supremacy.

Whatever may have been the motives which induced Fox and Burke to ally themselves with a discredited and defeated politician like Lord North, the results of that alliance were as unsatisfactory to the high contracting parties as the most rigid believer in poetic justice could desire. The Coalition Ministry was unlucky enough in its enterprises to satisfy George himself, who had talked of going back to Hanover rather than accept its services, and had only been dissuaded from self-exile by the sardonic reminder of Lord Thurlow that it might be easier for the {229} King to go to Hanover than to return again to England. Burke inaugurated his new career at the Pay Office by an unhappy act of patronage. He insisted upon restoring to their offices two clerks, named Powell and Bembridge, who had been removed and arraigned for malversation, and he insisted upon defending his indefensible action in the House of Commons with a fury that was as diverting to his opponents as it was distracting to his colleagues. Fox, who had earned so large a share of public admiration for his advocacy of what now would be called liberal opinions, was naturally held responsible by the public for the successful opposition of the Coalition Ministry to Pitt's plan of Parliamentary reform.