Lord Chatham, His Early Life and Connections

by Earl of Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery

This called up Hampden, an intrepid buffoon, but the great-grandson of the patriot, and 'twenty-fourth hereditary lord of Great Hampden,' who attacked Pitt and his group with rancour. Here, again, we seem to discern traces of Buckinghamshire politics and jealousies. Temple and his belongings had, as we have seen, many enemies in their own county, and Hampden was one of them. Perhaps the Aylesbury affair still rankled. Pitt was visibly angered. Though Pelham warmly defended him, he was not appeased, and the affair would have ended in a duel had not the Speaker's authority intervened. In the succeeding year, it may be noted, the number of 10,000 was restored.

Though these hostilities were averted, the debate produced further friction between the brethren who controlled the Ministry. Newcastle was profusely grateful to Pitt for the line he had taken. He wrote to one of his vassals (January 30, 1750-1): 'As you can be no stranger (if you have attended the late debate) to the able and affectionate manner in which Mr. Pitt has taken upon himself to defend me, and the measures which have been solely carried on by me, when both have been openly attacked with violence, and when no other person opened his lips, in defence of either, but Mr. Pitt, I think myself bound in honour and gratitude to show my sense of it in the best way I am able. I must therefore desire that neither you nor any of my friends would give into any clamour or row that may be made against him from any of the party on account of his differing as to the number of seamen. For after the kind part he has acted to me, and (as far as I am allowed to be part of it) the meritorious one to the administration, I cannot think any man my friend who shall join in any such clamour, and who does not do all in his power to discourage it. I desire you would read this letter to' (here follow the names of seven forgotten men whom we may presume to have been his closest followers).[200] Pitt's attitude had alarmed Pelham, and this letter from the Duke, so formidable from parliamentary influence, made him sensible of imminent danger. He saw that he must either be reconciled to his brother or face that alarming coalition of Pitt and Newcastle which was afterwards effected with so much success. Once more there was a crisis, and Pelham's son-in-law Lincoln was called in as mediator. A treaty of peace of three articles was solemnly drawn up between the brothers, and apparent harmony restored. The King, however, broke out anew with emphatic anger against Pitt and the Grenvilles.

This was probably due to the rumour that Pitt and his connections were negotiating with the Prince of Wales. This is not improbable. We know indeed that Lyttelton was arranging through his brother-in-law Dr. Ayscough for a coalition between the forces of Stowe and those of Leicester House. The King was old, and ambitious politicians would not wish to be ill with his heir, if that could be avoided. But all such foresight was wasted, for Frederick was never to reign, and within two months of the vote on the seamen he was dead. Up to the last he was intriguing and securing adherents. On February 28 he was engaging Oswald, an able debater in the House of Commons, to his cause; on March 20 he died. Next morning his party was convoked by Egmont to consider the future. Many came, probably from curiosity, but dispersed without any conclusion. 'My Lord Drax,' writes Henry Fox in pleasant allusion to the promises of the Prince, 'my Lord Colebrook, Earl Dodington, and prime minister Egmont are distracted; but nobody more so than Lord Cobham, who cum suis has been making great court and with some effect all this winter. Do not name this from me. I fear they will not be dealt with as I would deal with them.'[201] In truth the purpose and bond of the party, the sole reason for its existence, had disappeared. Henceforth the courtiers who found no favour with the King kept their eyes on the Princess of Wales and her eldest son, a shy, sensitive boy, who was afterwards to be George III. Soon they began to perceive in this obscure court a handsome, supercilious Scotsman, who enjoyed the favour of the Princess and the veneration of her son, who was now a lord of the Prince's bedchamber, but was hereafter to head one ministry and become the bugbear of many others, John Earl of Bute.

The Heir Apparent was only thirteen, and a Regency Bill was required. This is only pertinent to our narrative in that it produced a fierce parliamentary duel between Pitt and Fox, the point at issue between them being the Duke of Cumberland, whom the King wished, but the Ministry did not dare, to nominate Regent. Indeed, one of the principal expressions of popular grief for the loss of the Prince of Wales had taken the form of regret that the death had not been that of the Duke. 'Oh! that it was but his brother! Oh! that it was but the Butcher!' Unfortunately, the speeches of neither Pitt nor Fox in this session have come down to us. All that we know is that Pelham declared that Pitt's was the finest speech that ever he heard. Pitt had strongly maintained that the Regency must be closely restricted, the vital contention of his son thirty-seven years later, and hinted that Cumberland, if unrestrained in his capacity as head of the Council of Regency, might be tempted to usurp the Crown. Hence the wrath of Fox, the close friend of the royal Duke; hence, too, the antipathy of Cumberland to Pitt, which was to cause complications thereafter.

Pitt and his family connections, whose allegiance to the Ministry had been under suspicion, and who had been in negotiation with the Prince's party, were rallied into apparent fidelity to the Ministry by the Prince's death, without, however, severing their renewed connection with Leicester House. But it was acquiescence rather than loyalty. Between the two ministerial orators in the House of Commons, Fox and Pitt, there had been cordial friendship. But it is evident that this had ceased. Fox, as we have seen, would have dealt with Pitt and the Grenvilles as traitors, and one would infer that it was the negotiation with the Prince of Wales which had angered him. The fact that Fox had sided with Pelham, and Pitt with Newcastle, had probably tended to division. Pitt, indeed, afterwards accused Pelham, poor soul, with having fostered their variance. Then there had been the affair of the Regency. There had, too, just previously to the Prince's death, been a sharp altercation between them in a small debate raised by the petition for compensation of an ill-used gentleman in Minorca. This Pelham had refused; while Pitt upheld the claim with his wonted energy, but with unusual absurdity. He would support the petition of a man so oppressed and of so ancient a family to the last drop of his blood. Fox ridiculed this extravagance, and Pitt was nettled. This is only notable as a symptom of prevailing temper.

But the facts of their personalities speak for themselves. They were rivals in Parliament, neither of them very scrupulous, both fierce in debate. What need of further explanation? Fox, moreover, viewed Pitt's overtures to Leicester House with distrust, not merely from the point of view of a minister, but from that of the Duke of Cumberland, to whom he was devoted, and who detested the Prince of Wales and his crew. So that on the Regency Bill it was the wrath between the two factions which broke into open war. It was in the main the devotion of Fox to Cumberland which originally divided and then estranged him from Pitt. They were afterwards to reunite for a time by the mutual attraction of brains opposed to imbecility.

This is perhaps the best opportunity to consider the character of this Henry Fox, who was now Pitt's rival. Strangely enough there is no real biography of this remarkable man, a vigorous and interesting figure, who has been to some extent obscured by his more popular and famous son.

It would almost be enough to say that Fox was everything that Pitt was not. He had not that wayward but divine fire which we call genius, and which inspired Pitt; but he had the saving quality of common sense which was wanting to his rival. He laid no claim to the oratory of Pitt; he was, we are told hesitating and inelegant, not indeed a good speaker; but he was plain and forcible, with a good business-like wear and tear style, which is in Parliament not less valuable than oratory; on occasions indeed he spoke with a vehemence and closeness of reasoning which almost anticipated the supreme faculty of his son. More than all, he thoroughly understood the House of Commons. He had the cordial manner, the veneer at least of good fellowship, the frankness savouring of cynicism, which make for an eminently serviceable sort of parliamentary popularity. In one respect, as a letter writer, he was greatly Pitt's superior. While Pitt was prancing fantastic minuets before his correspondents, Fox, without wasting a word, went straight to the point; and his letters are pregnant, graphic, and forcible. There are perhaps none better in the English language than those in which he describes the debates of December 1755. He was, what Pitt was not, a genial companion, fond of the bottle and the chase; he had, indeed, been a gambler and a debauchee. He was, what Pitt was not, a man of the world, and was closely allied with the choicest blood of the aristocracy by a marriage with a daughter of the Duke of Richmond. Pitt was a county gentleman, who had indeed married Temple's sister, but had thus entered a more limited and less exalted connection. They both had courage, but Fox minded the rebuffs of debate much less than Pitt. He was passionate, but with a passion less sublime than Pitt's. Pitt could sometimes feign passion; Fox could sometimes repress it. In later life, when it had been long smouldering, it was ungovernable. But at this time it only displayed itself in a not ungenerous resentment. In the race for success it would perhaps have been safer to back Fox than Pitt.

But Fox had one incurable flaw which was wholly wanting in Pitt: his aims were base and material. He was content for long years to be Paymaster, amassing a huge fortune from all the emoluments, legitimate and semi-legitimate, of that lucrative office, when a noble ambition would not have stooped to so gross an obscurity. And besides money he had another weakness. He longed to be a lord. In the moment of his rival's triumph and his own fall we find him writing to Lady Yarmouth soliciting a peerage in almost abject terms.[202] That was refused, and it was only after long years of unabashed solicitation that he obtained his object. At last a peerage was accorded to his wife, as if to mark the reluctance felt to giving it to himself. Then his chance came. Bute had to find a bold and unscrupulous agent to carry the Peace through the House, and Fox was his man. Not merely had Fox to earn his peerage but to wreak some vengeances.[203] He accepted the task readily, and had as his first reward the joy of removing Newcastle from the lieutenancy of three counties. And then, as if animated by a hatred of the whole human race, he expelled from their posts all, from the highest to the humblest, whom he suspected of opposition. It was a reign of terror, and by terror he accomplished the work he had been hired to do. Then he claimed his reward. He had earned and he received his peerage. But he had also earned and received a detestation, rarely accorded in England to a statesman, which lasted for the rest of his life, and which finds vent in the bitter lampoon which Gray, the gentlest of scholars, was moved to write.