LIBERTY AND FAME INTRODUCING FEMALE PATRIOTISM (DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE) TO BRITANNIA. 1784. BY T. ROWLANDSON.
“She smiles,
Infused with a Fortitude from Heaven.”—Shakespeare, The Tempest.
“Let envy rail and disappointment rage,
Still Fox shall prove the wonder of the age!
“Triumph and Fame shall every step attend
His King’s best subject and his country’s friend!”
[Page 285.
The party rejoicings and festivities at the conclusion of this election are felicitously related by Wraxall, who enjoyed the advantages of himself participating in the scenes he pictures. “Still the Whigs were not to be disappointed of their ovation. The exultation of those gay times forms a strange contrast to the grim monotony of our own. Fox, after being chaired in great pomp through the streets, was finally carried into the court-yard of Carlton House. The Prince’s plume was on his banners in acknowledgment of princely partisanship. A banner, inscribed ‘Sacred to Female Patriotism,’ recorded the services of the Duchess. The carriages of the Dukes of Devonshire and Portland, each drawn by six horses, moved in procession, and Fox’s own carriage was a pile of rejoicing Whiggism. On its boxes and traces, and where they could, sat Colonel North, afterwards Lord Guilford; Adam, who but a few years before wounded the patriot in a duel; and a whole cluster of political friends, followers, and expectants. The prince came to the balustrade before the house[64] to cheer him, with a crowd of fashionable people. Fox finished the triumph by an harangue to the mob, and they in return finished by a riot, an illumination, and breaking Lord Temple’s windows.
“But the festivities were scarcely begun. The prince threw open his showy apartments to the nobility, and gave them a brilliant fête in the gardens, which happened to be at its height just when the king was passing through St. James’s Park in state to open the new parliament. The rival interests were within a brick wall of each other, and their spirit could not have been more strangely contrasted than in their occupations. But nights and days to those graceful pursuers of pleasure and politics alike knew no intermission. On that very evening the celebrated beautiful and witty Mrs. Crewe gave a brilliant rout, in which ‘blue and buff’ were the universal costume of both sexes; the buff and blue were the uniform of Washington and his troops, and imprudently adopted by Fox to declare his hostility to the Government. The prince himself appeared in the party colours. At supper, he toasted the fair giver of the feast in the words ‘True Blue and Mrs. Crewe.’ The lady, not unskilfully, and with measureless applause, returned it by another, ‘True Blue and all of you.’”
With the enforced termination of the polling at the fortieth day, arrived the demand of Wray for a scrutiny, and the high bailiff’s unjustifiable attitude, for which he subsequently suffered severely, of declining to make a return, compelled Fox to look elsewhere for a seat, or find no place in the coming parliament, where, as Walpole said, could Fox have stood for every seat in the kingdom he would have represented the entire return in his own person, such was his influence and popularity. “The Departure,” (May 18, 1784), the day succeeding the close of the poll, shows Fox leaving behind him the palatial abode of his warm supporter, the Prince of Wales, and taking leave of his delectable champions, the Duchess of Devonshire and her sister, the fair Lady Duncannon, en route for “Coventry” or “Out-in-the-cold-shire.” Fox is observing on his retreat:—
“If that a scrutiny at last takes place,
I can’t tell how ’twill be, and please your Grace!”
Fox’s early ally, Burke, equipped as an outrider, is prepared to drive his friend away from the scene of his triumphs; under Edmund’s arm is a “plan of economy,” suggestive of necessary retrenchments in the Whig camp.