Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (41 page)

'Auckland, IV,
269;
Bland-Burgess,
319;
H. M. C. Dropmore, VII,
339;
Fcsting,
106;
Glenbervie, I,
209;
Granville, II,
55, 166, 177.

'"The Lord," wrote one indignant Pittite, "deliver us from Mr. Addington!"
Paget Papers,
II,
270.
See also Cornwallis-West,
504;
Wynne, III,
244;
Granville, II,
92, 160.

he would form no administration which did not include Fox. What George III had refused to Pitt, he therefore yielded to Pitt's cousin. Grenville became First Lord of the Treasury and Fox Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Leader of the Commons. Lord Spencer took the Home Office, Windham the joint War and Colonial Office and Charles Grey the Admiralty. Fitzwilliam became Lord President, young Lord Henry Petty Chancellor of the Exchequer, Erskine Lord Chancellor, and Moira Master-General of the Ordnance. Sidmouth, with the old family following, took the Privy Seal; every one, said Canning, had to have him once like the measles.
¹
It was a heterogeneous collection: "Grey First Lord of the Admiralty!" wrote Arthur Young, "is it possible?" But as it suggested strength, the country, after the first shock, accepted it; at Trinity, Cambridge, the Combination Room was soon drinking Fox's health with the same regularity with which it had drunk Pitt's for twenty years. Even royalty put a good face on it. "The Queen's civility to me to-day was quite marked," wrote Fox, "especially as it is the first time she spoke to me since 1788."

From the first the real leader of the Government was Fox. This giant of a man—the "incomparable Charley" to his devoted followers
²
—was still anathema to half the nation. "I could name you," wrote Fancis Horner, "gentlemen with good coats on and good sense in their own affairs who believe that Fox
did
actually send information to the enemy in America and
is
actually in the pay of France." Yet during the worst days of that terrible autumn Lady Bessborough found him the one person who could comfort her; things were bad, he said, but so long as the Government remained stout, all was not lost.

For Fox was too big for political definition ; too full and whole a man, as Home Tooke said, to be consistent, and too content and wise to be a failure. At one moment he would enrage opponents and antagonise moderate men by his partisanship, at another outrage his own followers by some spontaneous act of magnanimity. Whatever he did, he did with his whole heart ; so impetuous was he that, when he went shooting, he frequently put the shot into his gun before the powder.. "What," asked a child hearing him speak in Parliament, " is that fat gentleman in such a passion about ?" Campbell, dining at the same table, noted that in a conversation of eighteen persons nothing escaped his eager notice. Yet, with all his vitality, he could be more idle than any man: at his home at St. Anne's Hill he would lie for hours on a sunny bank against a wall

¹
Granville,
n,
180.

²
"My political creed was very simp
le—it was Devotion to Fox!"—Cree
vey, I,
22
.

covered with fruit trees, doing nothing. "Ah, Mr. Fox," a friend said to him, "how delightful it must be to loll along in the sun at your ease with a book in your hand." "Why the book? why the book?" was the reply.
¹

In his middle age this former rou6 and gambler had scandalised an easy-going society by marrying the mistress with whom he had lived for years. His unexpected domesticity was the wonder of his contemporaries. "You would be perfectly astonished," wrote Creevey, " at the vigour of body, the energy of mind, the innocent playfulness and happiness of Fox. The contrast between him and his old associates is the most marvellous thing I ever saw—they have all the air of shattered debauchees, of passing gaming, drinking, sleepless nights, whereas the old leader of the gang might pass for the pattern and the effect of domestic good order." A few weeks before he assumed office Minto met him with Mrs. Fox buying cheap china.

It was from this many-sidedness—this ability to live fully and cheerfully at half a dozen different levels—that Fox derived his surprising good-humour and tolerance. Fie never bothered to read what his enemies wrote about him and so was not annoyed by it. "No, no," he said, "that is
w
hat
they want me to do, but I won't." From the same cause, too, came his power of detachment; Lady Bessborough once found him during a national crisis playing chess and consigning the Politics of Europe to the bottom of the sea and all the politicians with them! He took important business in his stride with a lightness of touch that puzzled and sometimes appalled colleagues. As befitted a classical scholar and a considerable reader, he was a great patron of letters and learned men; the young poet Campbell, finding himself pacing the salon at Holland House arm in arm with the Demosthenes of his age and discoursing on Virgil, scarcely knew whether he was standing on his head or Ins feet. Even learned political opponents benefited by Fox's liberality; Scott wrote that, though his principles made him abhor his views, he was "proud of his approbation in a literary sense."

Above all, Fox was a champion of generous causes. Fie loved liberty and he loved peace, because he wished all men to be as happy, free and easy as himself. This gave him an' appeal to millions of ordinary men and women who were repelled by Pitt's outward austerity and official correctitude, and to whom the name of the recluse, Grenville, meant nothing. For years Fox had been the hero and champion of all who hoped for a speedy end to the European conflict. It was of him that Captain Codrington was thinking when

¹
Albemarle, I,
244-8;
Campbell, II,
84;
Broughton, I,
203.

he wrote from Cartagena that February: " If there be a new Ministry formed of all the abilities of the country . . . perhaps we may yet have a cessation of this horrid, gloomy din of war."

For with the autumn's hopes dashed, the struggle which had now gone on with one brief interval for thirteen years seemed never-ending.
"I
can't hear anything more of the death of Bonaparte," mourned Captain Fremantle; "I think if that dog was gone we might have a prospect of peace. How I should enjoy my jolly Swan-bourne!" But far from being dead, he was more formidable than ever; the world, the Bishop of Norwich noted sadly, seemed made for Caesar.

This attitude was loudly voiced by the Opposition leaders now in office. For, whether drawn from the little Englanders who followed Fox or from the disgruntled seceders who had once taken their stand under Burke's uncompromising banner, they were pessimists about military affairs. They thought, like the faint-hearted Auckland, that Napoleon was too much for Europe's statesmen and generals. " If," wrote Fox to Grenville, " Bonaparte does not by an attempt at invasion or some other great impudence give us an advantage, I cannot but think this country inevitably and irretrievable ruined. To be Ministers at a moment when the country is falling and all Europe sinking is a dreadful situation."

To such minds peace seemed the only course. Bonaparte's plans of universal empire could best be checked by giving him no further opportunities for fighting.
¹
To the new generation of Whigs who took their opinions from the
Edinburgh Review—
founded in the first year of the century by a group of brilliant young reformers to combat romantic prejudice—Pitt's creed of victory or death seemed irrational nonsense,, "I must say," wrote that rising cleric and popular lecturer, Sydney Smith, " he was one of the most luminous eloquent blunderers with which any people was ever afflicted. For fifteen years I have found my income dwindling away under his eloquence, and regularly in every session of Parliament he had charmed every classical feeling and stript me of every guinea. At the close of every brilliant display an expedition failed or a kingdom fell. . . . God send us a stammerer ! "
²

The spring following Trafalgar, therefore, saw the new rulers of England in search of peace. A few weeks after he took office Fox was approached by a refugee with an offer to assassinate Napoleon. He took the opportunity to send an unofficial warning to Talleyrand and so opened a channel of communication between the two coun-

¹
Grey to Windham,
13th
Dec,
1805.—
Windham Papers,
II,
276.
¹
Lady Charnwood,
An Autograph Collection,
162.

tries. The French responded by releasing from confinement several members of the Whig aristocracy, one of whom, Lord Yarmouth— a friend of Talleyrand—was given special diplomatic status. The King disapproved, but consented after the Cabinet had threatened resignation. The country was kept in ignorance.

Napoleon was delighted. For since Trafalgar—an event to which he had forbidden all allusion—he realised that only a stalemate peace could give him that access to the sea on which world dominion depended. "I want nothing on the Continent," he had told his Austrian prisoners after Ulm, "it is ships, colonies and commerce that I want." Nelson's victory had removed his last chance of gaining them by battle. His one way lay in a return to that policy of guile which he had abandoned in a fit of passion three years before.

But though, as in 1801, Napoleon offered—verbally—to allow Britain to retain all her conquests on the basis of
uti possidetis
and disarmed even the old King's opposition by proposing, unbeknown to Prussia, to restore Hanover, he remained a trickster. As soon as negotiations were joined, he began to raise his terms. Ignoring the
uti possidetis
he asked for the return of colonies and claimed Sicily to complete the Neapolitan kingdom that he had conferred on his brother Joseph. For it was only to secure overseas bases and control the Mediterranean that he was seeking peace at all; a truce that left England as strong as before was not worth having.

It was not long before Fox, an astute man, realised that his adversary was cheating. Grandiose proposals to divide the world between the conquerors of the sea and land
¹
made no appeal to him and his colleagues. All they wanted was a stable peace that would secure the just rights of weaker nations and some respect for international law. What they had failed to see and what the Tories, however stupid in other ways, had seen from the first was that no such peace was possible without Napoleon's overthrow and the restoration of the balance of power.

¹
"Lord Howick told me Bonaparte
did
propose to England to divide the world between them, to assist or at least not to oppose him, in any of his Continental conquests, and that he would do the same by us in all that concerns our colonics."—Granville,
n,
232.

The negotiations therefore hung fire. For several months the main stumbling block was Napoleon's refusal to treat with London and St. Petersburg jointly. His rule in dealing with more than one party was
divide et impera,
that of England loyalty to allies. In the end he gained his point by isolating Oubril, the Russian plenipotentiary, and so intimidating him that the wretched man signed a separate peace. Armed with this
document and an intimate know
ledge of Lord Yarmouth's
¹
private financial transactions, "the wily Talleyrand switched over the attack to that nobleman and on July 26th—a week after Oubril's surrender—secured his signature to a provisional agreement by which England was to hand over Sicily in return for Hanover.

Yet once again Napoleon had overreached himself. For Fox flatly refused to give up the chief gain of Trafalgar. In this hour of disillusionment, in Scott's words:

" dishonour’s
peace he spurned,

The sullied olive-branch returned,

Stood for his country's glory fast

And nailed her colours to the mast!"

While his countrymen, learning of the negotiations, raged at Russian cowardice and "the shabbiness, chicanery and double-dealing of the French," the Foreign Secretary dispatched a courier to St. Petersburg to urge the rejection of the treaty. At the same ^ time he appointed Lord Lauderdale, his most trusted friend, to supersede Yarmouth and restore the negotiation to its original basis.-

But no one now supposed that Lauderdale could succeed, least of all Fox. He told Lord Holland on August 4th that he had not the slightest expectation of peace. He had little of his own life. " Pitt died in January," he had remarked on taking office, " perhaps I shall go off before June." Since the spring he had been in constant pain with growing symptoms of dropsy. Yet, true to his lifelong rule, he persisted in doing as he wished; in his brief Easter recess at St. Anne's Hill he played at cricket with his nephews and nieces, batting from a wheeled chair and shouting cheerfully whenever he sent the ball into the bushes. Throughout the summer, ignoring his doctor's protests, he stuck to his desk and his seat in the House. " Let Charles be as full of faults as you please," wrote his old friend, Lady Sarah Napier, "it was the hand of Providence that placed him at the head of a sinking State." Before he died, fie knew that he had "two glorious things to do": to give his country peace, if it could be had on honourable terms, and to abolish the slave trade.
²