‘Bonaparte, of a small and by no means commanding figure, dressed plainly though richly in the embroidered consular coat, without powder in his hair, looked like a private gentleman, indifferent as to dress, and devoid of all haughtiness in his air. The English ambassador, after the presentation of some English noblemen, announced to him Mr. Fox. He was a good deal flurried, and after indicating considerable emotion said—“Ah, Mr. Fox; I have heard with pleasure of your arrival, I have desired much to see you. I have long admired in you the orator and friend of his country, who, in constantly raising his voice for peace, consulted that country’s best interests, those of Europe, and of the human race. The two great nations of Europe require peace. They have nothing to fear [from each other]. They ought to understand and value [esteem] one another. In you, Mr. Fox, I see with much satisfaction that great statesman who recommended peace because there was no just object of war, who saw Europe desolated to no purpose and who struggled for its relief.”’
Trotter adds that Fox, averse to compliments, neither replied to nor reciprocated them, and that a few questions and answers respecting his tour terminated the interview.
Napoleon afterwards invited Fox to a dinner of two hundred guests, to which he went unpowdered. John King, of whom we shall presently hear, thought it inconsistent of Fox to accept such attentions, which acceptance he attributes to a desire to please his wife; but Fox obviously could not decline an invitation from the ruler of the land whose hospitality he was enjoying, though he felt perfectly free to refuse to lunch with the brewer Santerre, notorious for his part in the execution of Louis XVI. According to the Rev. Stephen Weston, Napoleon complimented Fox as the greatest man of a great nation. Fox, as was to be expected, combated Napoleon’s accusations against Pitt, and especially against Windham, of complicity in the infernal-machine plot of 1800. Thiers gives an account of Fox being taken by Napoleon to the Industrial Exhibition at the Louvre, when a courtier sarcastically pointed on a globe to the small space occupied by England, whereupon Fox, spreading his arms round the globe, said, ‘Yes, but though we all spring from there we grasp the whole world.’ The truth is that though Napoleon and Fox happened to be simultaneously at the Exhibition they did not come across each other.[34] It was Chaptal who conducted Fox over the Exhibition, and he tells us that Fox admired the specimens, but thought them too dear for common use, upon which Chaptal took him to the cutlery department, where Fox filled his pockets with cheap knives, and then to a watch stall, where he bought half a dozen watches at 13 f. a piece.[35] He frequented the theatres. Not only, however, was his French very imperfect, but he committed a great breach of decorum by not calling on the two minor consuls, Cambacérès and Lebrun. He had to apologise through Merry. Lebrun overlooked the blunder and received Fox on his reparatory visit, but Cambacérès was ruffled, and insisted that Fox should make an unceremonious call as though he had been before.
We learn this from a secret agent of the Bourbons,[36] who also tells us that Fox, after his conversation with Napoleon, said, ‘It’s all up with liberty.’ He could scarcely, however, have needed that conversation to form this judgment, for Napoleon on the 2nd August had been elected consul for life. Fox must have felt much more at home with Lafayette, with whom he spent a fortnight at La Grange, planting ivy round the newly-erected towers as a memento. He dined in Paris with Talleyrand and Junot, and went shooting with General Berthier. Madame Junot thought he looked with his dark grey coat like a Devonshire farmer, but when talking his countenance was radiant with intelligence, sagacity, and eloquence.[37] On the 16th September he attended a sitting of the Tribunat, when the captain on guard, Boyer, thanked him for having in 1795 obtained the unfettering, and all but the liberation, of two hundred French officers at Porchester, a benefit which they would never forget. ‘Our chains were broken,’ said Boyer: ‘we were almost free.’[38] At Versailles, on entering a room which he was told had long been shut up, he found his own bust, along with those of Algernon Sidney, Hampden, Chatham, and Washington.[39] But was this a stratagem of Napoleon to flatter him? Curiously enough, Napoleon on his dressing-table at the Tuileries had, as the Edgeworths noticed, the bust not only of Fox but of Nelson, for whom he also entertained great admiration. He asked Mrs. Damer for a second bust of Fox, a commission which the lady could not execute till 1815.
Fox was criticised in England for taking tea with Helen Maria Williams, for it had been erroneously imagined, by Boswell among others, that she had marched exultantly over the bodies of the Swiss massacred in 1792. He was also twitted with meeting Arthur O’Connor, the United Irish exile. The fact was that he and Erskine went to dine with Madame Tallien without knowing that O’Connor would be there. Fox with great tact made the best of what he considered an unlucky incident by treating O’Connor exactly like the other guests, but Erskine was more embarrassed, for as counsel on his trial at Maidstone in 1798 he had vouched for O’Connor’s loyalty, whereas the latter had since made a confession of conspiracy.
Fox remained till the 11th November. ‘I have certainly,’ he wrote, ‘seldom spent a time pleasanter than at Paris, but I never in my life felt such delight in returning home.’ In 1806 he reciprocated the civilities shown him by sending word to Talleyrand that a Frenchman called Guillet had called on him and offered to kidnap Napoleon. Guillet was consequently arrested in Paris, and consigned, not to prison, but to Bicêtre lunatic asylum, where he died twelve months afterwards. Canning was guilty of the bad taste, not to say ignominy, of censuring Fox in Parliament for giving this warning, the generosity of which was warmly appreciated by Napoleon, as he told Lord Ebrington at Elba in 1814.
The general election had come rather inopportunely for visits to Paris, Parliament being dissolved on the 29th June, and the new House meeting on the 16th November. Elections, moreover, were much less expeditiously despatched than nowadays. Nevertheless about eighty M.P.’s, mostly Foxites, as Liberals were then called, but some Pittites or Ministerialists, went over either before or after the elections. Some of these M.P.’s are entitled to notice.[40]
Acheson, who in 1807 became Lord Gosford, revisited Paris in 1814, and became Governor of Canada. Adair, as we have seen, was the friend of Fox, and indeed was destined to be his last surviving friend. When visiting St. Petersburg in 1791 his letters home were in cipher, but forwarded through Whitworth, the ambassador, and he was absurdly suspected of having been sent thither by Fox to thwart Pitt’s policy.[41] Barclay, as already mentioned, was a diplomatist, and had been a prisoner in France. He had just married a German lady at Hamburg. Baring was the famous banker, and though deaf from his youth sat and voted in Parliament. Benfield and Boyd not only come together alphabetically, but had been partners in a London bank which was wound up in 1799. Paul Benfield went out to India in the Company’s service, and there made a fortune, partly by trade, partly by fortification contracts and by loans. He advanced money to the Nawab of the Carnatic, on conditions for which Burke afterwards, with his customary vehemence, branded him as ‘a criminal who ought long since to have fattened the kites with his offal.’ In 1777 he was ordered to quit India, but he was subsequently reinstated in his post, and returned to Madras. In 1780 he became M.P. for Cricklade, and in 1796 he exchanged that seat for Shaftesbury, another of his five pocket-boroughs. He was also recorder for Shaftesbury, such appointments being sometimes conferred on or sold by corporations to men not even lawyers. In 1796 he assigned the second seat to Walter Boyd, whose sleeping partner he had become in 1793. Boyd had had a bank in Paris, and had been an agent for the French Revolutionary Government in paying for corn from England; but threatened with arrest in October 1792 he had fled, with his partner Walter Ker. It was alleged in December 1794 that he had sold to the French Treasury drafts for ten million francs on London, boasting that they would be dishonoured; but the Finance Committee, on investigation, declared the charge unfounded. In 1795 Boyd contracted for an English loan, but in 1797 his bank fell into difficulties. Boyd had entered into imprudent speculations, and when he went to Paris, calculating on the restitution of his property, the change of government there frustrated his hopes, and he was expelled. In 1799 Pitt, apparently in order to extricate him from his embarrassments, concluded a second loan with him without inviting tenders from any other firm, on the plea that this had been promised him in 1793. A select committee of inquiry severely condemned this transaction, but an obsequious House of Commons condoned it. It did not, however, avert Boyd’s bankruptcy. The two partners were now among the earliest visitors to Paris. They went at the close of 1801, Boyd still hoping to recover property. They were on the point of losing their seats for Shaftesbury, Benfield having sold that borough for £40,000 to a Colonel Wood. We shall see by and by how they sped in France.
Best, who became successively Serjeant Best, Sir Thomas Best, and Lord Wynford, reached the judicial bench in 1818, and in 1824 was made Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas. Originally a Whig, he ended as a violent Tory. Brodrick was Secretary to the (India) Board of Control. Burdett speaks for himself, as when, on being greeted at Calais as the friend of Fox, he exclaimed, ‘No, the friend of liberty.’ In the summer of 1793 he had attended the clubs and the Convention. Father of Lady Burdett-Coutts, he began as a demagogue and ended as a reactionary. He boasted of his election for Middlesex having cost him £100,000. He, with his friend Bosville, called on Thomas Paine, giving him £240 to clear off his debts and return to America. He also called, with his old tutor Lechevalier, on La Réveillère Lepaux, the theophilanthropist, on whom he made no favourable impression.[42] Burdett, who had witnessed the early stage of the Revolution with more curiosity than sympathy, told Arthur Young, who had likewise seen something of that upheaval, that the Consulate was the completest military despotism that had ever existed.[43]
Lord George Cavendish became in 1831 Earl of Burlington, and succeeded his brother as Duke of Devonshire. Alderman Combe had been Sheriff of London in 1792 and Lord Mayor in 1799. Fox and Sheridan were godfathers to the son born to him during his mayoralty. Napoleon, according to Weston, said to him, ‘You were Lord Mayor in a year of dearth. I know what it is to have to keep people quiet when bread is dear.’ Unsuccessful at a by-election for the City in 1795, he had been elected in 1796. In 1800 he had convened a common hall to petition for peace. In 1805 he gave a dinner in his brewery to the Duke and Duchess of York, the Duke of Cambridge, Lady Anne Fitzroy, and other aristocratic guests. He ultimately resigned his aldermanic gown and seat in Parliament and confined himself to his business. He died in 1818.