WILLIAM, EARL OF SHELBURNE.
Among the English statesmen of a century ago, William, earl of Shelburne, seems to us to have a peculiar claim upon the recollection of citizens of the United States—one, too, that involves none of those offensive associations that cluster round the names of, let us say, Grenville and North. For in looking at Lord Shelburne's career we see a man whose clear-sighted judgment from the first, and consistently, protested against that system of high-handed imperialism which drove thirteen reluctant colonies into a war of independence; who both in office and out of office did his utmost, first to avert, by a policy never of cowardly concession, but of just expediency, the impending storm, and then, when it had burst, to withstand and counteract its fury; and the last great act of whose public life was to conclude the struggle which he had always deprecated and deplored.
It is therefore with no ordinary interest that we welcome the first installment of a work[C] whose promise—and, we at once cordially add, performance—heralds a really satisfactory account, a realizable flesh-and-blood portraiture, of the English prime minister under whose administration the peace preliminaries of 1782 were signed. The present biographer comes before us with advantages for the treatment of his subject never before possessed. He has enjoyed access not only to his great-grandfather's papers at Lansdowne House, but to those of two other most important actors in the British drama of a century ago—Lord Bute, "the favorite," and Henry Fox; and these documents, pieced together and set side by side, throw upon the events to which they relate, and the motives and objects of their authors, that light, unquestionable and convincing, which is the peculiar and happy characteristic of this kind of evidence. It is all very well for an acrid Walpole, or in our own day a scandal-mongering Greville, to draw, with plausibly life-like touches, his version of this or that historical transaction—to tell us, with the authority of one seemingly in the secret, that in such and such a matter Lord A. was scheming for this, and that we are to find the key to Mr. B.'s conduct in the knowledge that he was all along intriguing for that; but how often it happens that when, by good luck, the contemporaneous documentary evidence of correspondence, private memoranda and the like is forthcoming, the off-hand allegations of the memoir-writer are in infinite particulars tried and found wanting in correctness, and sometimes fall refuted altogether! More than one notable instance of this will strike the historical student in reading this first volume of Lord Shelburne's Life; and in the eventful and disputed years which Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice has yet to chronicle it may safely be assumed that he will have plenty to say in the way of correction and explanation of previous histories of the time.
An autobiographical fragment, composed by Lord Shelburne in his closing years, and found among the Shelburne papers at Lansdowne House, presents with a vividness of detail and verisimilitude that leaves nothing to be desired the outlines of the first twenty years of his life. The Second George had been ten years on the throne, the Young Pretender, alike the bugbear and the consolidator of the House of Hanover, was a stripling of seventeen, when, in the summer of 1737, William Fitzmaurice, afterward earl of Shelburne (the name by which history best knows him) and marquis of Lansdowne, was born in Dublin. "I spent the four first years, of my life" (he tells us) "in the remotest part of the south of Ireland, under the government of an old grandfather [Thomas Fitzmaurice, earl of Kerry], who reigned, or rather tyrannized, equally over his own family, and the neighboring country as if it was his family, in the same manner as I suppose his ancestors, lords of Kerry, had done for generations since the time of Henry II., who granted to our family one hundred thousand acres in those remote parts in consideration of their services against the Irish, with the title of barons of Kerry.... My grandfather did not want the manners of the country nor the habits of his family to make him a tyrant. He was so by nature. He was the most severe character which can be imagined—obstinate and inflexible: he had not much understanding, but strong nerves and great perseverance, and no education except what he had in the army, where he served in his youth, with a good degree of reputation for personal bravery and activity. He was a handsome man, and, luckily for me and mine, married a very ugly woman, who brought into his family whatever degree of sense may have appeared in it, and whatever wealth is likely to remain in it." In 1741 the stern grandfather died, and in the course of the next ten years the grandson picked up such bits of education as an Irish public school of the period, supplemented by a clerical private tutor, might afford. At sixteen he went to Christ Church, Oxford (in those days boys were commonly taking their degrees at the universities at an age when they would now be well content to have won their way into a school sixth form), and there read law, history, Demosthenes, and "by myself a great deal of religion."
And here our autobiographer abruptly turns aside from the incidents of his own story to sketch the antecedents, existing condition and character of the politics and politicians of the time of his first entry into public life. No one, we take it, will be disposed to quarrel with the interruption, for it gives us, in the space of a few pages, a picture of men and manners which, painted as it is by the mature hand of a shrewd contemporary observer, cannot but form a most important addition to our stock of knowledge of those times. The literary style of this piece of writing shows Lord Shelburne to have had in him the making of a successful memoirist. Gossip, anecdote, passages of sarcasm and epigram are mingled in skillful proportions; and there is certainly no waste of the milk of human kindness. Pitt (Lord Chatham) is dissected with ruthless elaboration: half a dozen minor statesmen are scarified with a single sentence apiece. Horace Walpole himself, with all his sinister acidity, nowhere hits harder—we had almost said more bitterly—than does Lord Shelburne in this short sketch of his. But just as an English House of Commons loves nothing so well as a "personal explanation," so the personalities of literature have a way of attracting us in the direct ratio of their piquancy and severity. Lord Shelburne has quite a gift of killing two birds with one stone in his trenchant criticisms. He cannot crush George III.'s father without demolishing poor Lord Melcombe en passant. "The prince's life (he says) may be judged in some degree from the account given of it in Lord Melcombe's diary—a man who passed his life with great men whom he did not know, and in the midst of affairs which he never comprehended, but recites facts from which others may draw deductions which he never could. The prince's activity could only be equaled by his childishness and his falsehood. His life was such a tissue of both as could only serve to show that there is nothing which mankind will not put up with where power is lodged."
The elder Pitt—with whom, it will be remembered, Lord Shelburne acted in the memorable events that immediately preceded and accompanied the beginning of the war of independence—comes in for his full share of severe animadversion, but the portrait is undeniably vigorous and alive. Here is a specimen: "It was the fashion to say that Mr. Pitt was insolent, impetuous, romantic, a despiser of money, intrigue and patronage, ignorant of the characters of men, and one who disregarded consequences. Nothing could be less just than the whole of this, which may be judged by the leading features of his life, without relying on any private testimony. He certainly was above avarice, but as to anything else, he only repressed his desires and acted; he was naturally ostentatious to a degree of ridicule; profuse in his house and family beyond what any degree of prudence could warrant. His marriage certainly had no sentiment in it. The transaction at the time of his resignation does not carry with it an absolute indifference as to money or other advantages, nor did there appear in any of his subsequent negotiations, in or out of power, that he went beyond what was necessary to satisfy the people at the time or to secure his wished-for situation. In truth, it was his favorite maxim that a little new went a great way.... I was in the most intimate political habits with him for ten years, the time that I was secretary of state included, he minister, and necessarily was with him at all hours in town and country, without drinking a glass of water in his house or company, or five minutes' conversation out of the way of business. I went to see him afterward in Somersetshire, where I fell into more familiar habits with him, which continued and confirmed me in all that I have said. He was tall in his person, and as genteel as a martyr to the gout could be, with the eye of a hawk, a little head, thin face, long aquiline nose, and perfectly erect. He was very well bred, and preserved all the manners of the vieille cour, with a degree of pedantry, however, in his conversation, especially when he affected levity, I never found him when I have gone to him—which was always by appointment—with so much as a book before him, but always sitting alone in a drawing-room waiting the hour of appointment, and in the country with his hat and stick in his hand."
All this, it must not be forgotten, was written in the year 1801, long after the writer had finally retired from the battlefield of politics, upon which, at the period when his own account of his youth breaks off, he had not yet made his first essay. Some practical experience of actual battlefields was to be gained by the future statesman before his appearance in the parliamentary arena. Just before the time when, between nineteen and twenty years of age, he was leaving Oxford, the Seven Years' War broke out, and finding "home detestable, no prospect of a decent allowance to go abroad [he had a trifling six hundred pounds a year from his father, though], neither happiness nor quiet," he joined the army and went on foreign service. Here he had the good-fortune to come under the chivalrous General Wolfe, whom he eulogizes in terms the genuine warmth and heartiness of which is all the more striking from the contrast with his generally severe judgments upon his contemporaries. At the battle of Minden in 1759, and again at Kloster Kampen in the following year, he displayed conspicuous personal courage, which was rewarded, on his return to England, with the rank of colonel and the court appointment of aide-de-camp to the new king, George III.
Hardly had camp been exchanged for court when circumstances offered the young Lord Fitzmaurice his first introduction to a kind of political employ which was to be thenceforward, through a series of years, his frequent and peculiar function. Lord Bute, the favorite, had begun to climb the ladder of ministerial office, and had cast his eyes upon that unscrupulous and greedy but undeniably able politician, Henry Fox, as the man most desirable for his purpose by way of a House-of-Commons ally. Owing, very possibly, to the fact that there existed some connection between Fox and Fitzmaurice's father, Lord Fitzmaurice fell into the place of intermediary between the parties to this negotiation, which had hardly passed out of its first stage when the death of his father removed him, now Lord Shelburne, to the House of Lords before he had ever taken the family seat, into which he had been elected at the last general election, in the lower House. The negotiation was successfully carried through. Fox named his price—a peerage for his wife—and after considerable haggling got it, and in return undertook a position which Shelburne announced to Bute in a letter dated October 31, 1761, as follows: "Mr. Fox will attend [the House of Commons] every day, and will, either by silence or by speaking, as he finds it prudent according to the occasion, do his best to forward what your lordship wishes, and will enter into no sort of engagement with any one else whatever." But before the year was out Bute found himself in want of a closer and more positive support on the part of Fox than he had in the first instance contracted for. The peace party, which he (Bute) headed, had at last the close of the continental war full in sight, peace preliminaries were about to be laid before Parliament, but there was a prospect of the war party fighting over the terms proposed by ministers, and Bute felt that he must have a strong leader to champion his treaty in the House of Commons. Fox was his man for the place, and Shelburne was again commissioned to treat with him. The details of a negotiation of this kind are not of a character to call for very particular attention a century afterward, but the letters between the parties—many of them now for the first time published—are not without considerable interest from the light they throw upon the characters and motives of their writers. The position of a go-between is always more or less perilous; his task, however well performed, is generally a thankless one; nor in such matters can the adeptest diplomacy, joined to the most thorough bona fides, always ensure the conduct of the common agent against misapprehension and sore feelings. Of this the particular negotiation of which we are now speaking is a typical instance. Bute's offer (through Shelburne) to Fox was the leadership of the Commons, with a peerage for himself to follow. Fox at the time held the very lucrative post of paymaster-general—lucrative, because in those days it was deemed a perfectly legitimate practice for the paymaster to make a private profit out of the investment of the public moneys for the time being under his control. Shelburne appears to have assumed—and so, indeed, it was only natural to assume—that Fox would not dream of accepting high office in the ministry without at the same time resigning his extra-ministerial berth at the Pay Office; and there is evidence that such—at first, at any rate—was Fox's own intention. The king was given to understand that Fox's resignation of the Pay Office would be a term of the proposed arrangements, and consented to them on that footing; and then all at once Fox came out in the character of Injured Innocent, protested that he had never meant to resign, that he had all along intended to have his cake as well as eat it, and that Shelburne had entrapped and betrayed him. The story goes, but on what authority history saith not, that Bute afterward owned to Fox that Shelburne's conduct in this transaction had been a "pious fraud," and that Fox retorted, "I can see the fraud plainly enough, but where is the piety?" The correspondence and the other evidence which, with a pardonable jealousy for his ancestor's fair fame, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice sets out with much detail in his biography, requires, we think, at the very least, that a verdict of "Not proven" should be entered in Shelburne's favor; but a man who chooses to make personal negotiation his specialty must not be surprised to find his tact sometimes called trickery, and his double agency set down as double dealing. It is certain that the part he played in the Bute-Fox negotiations entailed upon Shelburne imputations of duplicity which he never succeeded in entirely dissipating. The king himself wrote of him as "the Jesuit of Berkeley Square," alluding, no doubt, to the nickname "Malagrida" (the name of a prominent Italian Jesuit of the day) which somebody had fastened upon him, and which served Goldsmith as the text of that deliciously maladroit remark of his to the earl: "Do you know, I never could conceive the reason why they call your lordship Malagrida, for Malagrida was a very good sort of man."
Bute, however, obviously retained undiminished confidence in his favorite agent, for in his arrangements for the formation of a new ministry under the ostensible headship of George Grenville in the spring of 1763, he not only employed Shelburne in negotiations with no less than seven politically important personages, but he even wished to get him the seals of secretary of state. This, however, was more than Grenville would consent to. He objected that the old peers would be jealous of the elevation of the representative of a family which, however great its note in Ireland, was a comparatively recent addition to the peerage of Great Britain; and also—reasonably enough, one is inclined to say—that Shelburne's youth and total inexperience of office rendered it advisable that he should at least try his 'prentice hand in one of the lower administrative offices. Shelburne was at this time, it must be remembered, only five-and-twenty years of age. A man of his parts and rank and opportunities might rise rapidly in those days, but he had hitherto had absolutely no official training; and the English Parliament had not yet seen, what it was soon to see in the younger Pitt, a chancellor of the exchequer of the almost undergraduate age of three-and-twenty. However, Bute persisted in forcing upon his friend—who appears to have been not unwilling to stand for the time aside—a place in the new ministry, and he accordingly accepted the presidency of the Board of Trade, was sworn a privy councillor, and entered the cabinet of the so-called "Triumvirate" administration. Immediately he found himself called upon to face American questions in which he was destined to play so important a part. Some time before he took office, Fox, in one of his shrewd letters to Bute, had marked out Shelburne as a man pre-eminently fitted to effect "that greatest and most necessary of all schemes, the settlement of America;" and he had hardly been a month at the Board of Trade when a communication from Lord Egremont, the "Southern" secretary of state, directed his particular attention to this subject.