HENRY FOX, FIRST LORD HOLLAND, HIS FAMILY AND RELATIONS. By the Earl of Ilchester. In two volumes. Murray. 32s. net.
The deeplier we study eighteenth-century political history the more satisfied we become that there were but two figures in it with the gleam of statesmanship upon them, and but one with the light of genius. Sir Robert Walpole deserves his son's boast: He did "maintain this country in the enjoyment of the twenty happiest years that England ever enjoyed." Writing when he did, and so far as it goes, that is true. If his methods draw us to a cynical conclusion, the material to his hand—a German King, a discredited opposition, and a horde of rapacious place-hunters to keep fed—must be remembered and allowed for. Pitt was a much more scrupulous man, and a much more gifted man, but he was less successful for those very reasons. He had the honest man's scorn of iniquity, and he had less hold of himself. Sir Robert could keep his temper; Pitt never could. He knew the Duke of Newcastle to be a liar and an old fool, and as good as told him so. "Fewer words, if you please, my lord, for your words have long lost all weight with me." There is not much accommodation about that. Sir Robert suffered fools gladly: he could work with them better. Pitt was fastidious, and would not soil his fingers with the only things they wanted of him. As for all the rest they were a venal crew, timid as rats and greedy as dogs. A month or two ago there came under review in these pages the life of one of them, George Bubb Dodington—remarkable only because, a thorough-paced rogue, he turned himself inside out for the admiration of posterity. Here, at much greater length, done with conspicuous judgment and ability, is the life, in two volumes, of another, Henry Fox, the founder of Holland House and its line of peers.
If a word were needed to explain the rise of the brothers Stephen and Henry Fox, the sons of a creature (whom Horace Walpole called "a footman") of Charles II.'s, it would be the word which explains the whole of eighteenth-century statecraft, the word Patronage. From the King, fountain of honours, this sacred river ran to the Peers, disposers of places, and from them broadened out into a pool where swam the borough-mongers and jobbers, owners of the House of Commons. As for the electorate, wherever there was one, "the business of the people is to choose Us," said young Charles Fox, while he was yet under the influence of his father; and although the capital letter is ours, and not upon record, we may be sure that it was not wanting in delivery. It is indeed but an echo of Henry Fox himself.
Our elections, thank God! do not depend upon the giddy mob. They are generally governed by men of fortune and understanding, and of such our ministers, for this twenty years past, have been so happy as to have a majority in their favour. Therefore, when we talk of people with regard to elections, we ought to think only of those of the better sort, without comprehending the mob or mere dregs of the people.
Such was the nursery-ground of the hero of Lord Ilchester's volumes, from which that hero's son was able to lift himself.
By sitting still and stolidly manipulating his boroughs Stephen Fox served himself better than his more able brother. He did not become so rich, though he never lacked. He had money, he married money, and became an earl. He suffered none of the mortifications and humiliations of the active politician, who made himself the most unpopular man in England, and, after serving his King at the expense of his country, was thrown out and thrown over. To be sure he was Paymaster for eight years, during which time a sum of £46,000,000 passed through his hands to his immeasurable profit; but to do justice to Fox, his riches weighed as nothing beside his sense of the ingratitude of the Rigbys and others of the sort whom he had loved and tried to serve. Though he did not begin so well off as his elder brother, he cannot be said to have been badly off. At twenty-one he dropped into a sinecure office of £450 a year and a capital sum which brought his whole income to something like £900. His first political acquaintance of note was Lord Hervey, and his next, from whom, to his credit, he never swerved, was Sir Robert Walpole. "Fox really loved that man," was said of him, and truly said; and when Sir Robert fell and he was handed over to Henry Pelham he was found faithful again. In all this he differed widely from Bubb Dodington, having a heart as well as a stomach, and if not principles, at least passions. Dodington was merely a merchant of himself, but Fox suffered his feelings to act and react, often to his temporal detriment. As Lord Ilchester shows, he was not wise in his attachments, nor always temperate in his actions. He alienated Scottish sympathies by his vehemence after the Porteous riot; he made an enemy of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke by his opposition to the Clandestine Marriages Act—an opposition which may have been grounded upon the fact that his own marriage had been of that order; he became the friend and ally of the Duke of Cumberland, and obnoxious on that account to Leicester House and the heir-apparent. When George III. succeeded, and Lord Bute became the all-powerful minister, he attached himself there, just in time to lose the friendship of the Duke and to share in the hatred and distrust which the whole nation turned upon the administration. In these mischances his heart rather than his head played him false. Yet, for all his pains, neither of his masters liked him. George II. owned that Fox had never told him a lie, and added that he was the only man who had not. But he never trusted him in spite of that. George III., having after much hesitation given him a barony, steadily refused to advance him higher, though no man had worked harder in his service or, it must be added, more discreditably. It was Henry Fox who set to work, by methods which can only be called flagrant, to form a party in Parliament to be known as "the King's friends." That he did not succeed was not his fault.
Fox directly attacked two separate members of the House of Commons, and with so little decorum on the part of either buyer or seller that a shop was publicly opened at the Pay Office, whither members flocked, and received the wages of their venality in bank bills, even to so low a sum as two hundred pounds for their votes on the treaty. Twenty-five thousand pounds, as Martin, Secretary of the Treasury, afterwards owned, were issued in one morning; and in a single fortnight a vast majority was purchased to approve the peace.
It is perhaps going far to say that nothing more disgraceful was ever done in Parliament, but it is not too much to affirm that no greater act of treachery was ever attempted against the theory of popular representation by a member of the supposed popular House. But he had his barony, and received it three years later than Bubb Dodington obtained his.
It is not Lord Ilchester's fault that much of the intrigue he elucidates is rueful reading. The wonder is that he has found the spirit with which to achieve it. When one's native country, its neighbour states and colonial dependencies, when King, Lords, Commons, Army, Navy, and Church are all seen to have been counters in a great game of grab; when patriotism is as much an unknown quantity as even a rudimentary civic sense, and the only certainty is that of one's own and one's rivals' common dishonesty, it is no wonder that the accidents of his book count for more than the substance. What we get of Charles Fox makes amends for Henry. Everything that Lord Ilchester has to tell us of Charles is good. We have him first as a baby. "He is weakly, but likely to live. His skin hangs all shrivell'd about him, his eyes stare, he has a black head of hair, and 'tis incredible how like a monkey he look'd before he was dress'd." Then he is at a preparatory school, in 1757, where it seems that Charles has more emulation than any boy almost ever had; next at Eton, where he and his brother Stephen entertained their father at a dinner "bespoke from the Christopher: ... boil'd mutton and broth, three large fowls, and a leg of mutton roasted." It was at Eton in 1758, when he was nine years old, that he thus announced his philosophy of life. The father is writing to the mother:
That odd dog Charles said, with a smile, he wish'd his life was at an end. I asked the reason. "Why," says he, "it is a troublesome affair, and one wishes one had this thing or that thing, and then one is not the happier; and then one wishes for another thing, and one's very sorry if one can't get it, and it does not make one happier if one does."