 CHAPTER X The Ministry of All the Talents, Part II The Ministry of All the Talents, as that of Grenville and Fox was called by the Whits, was based upon the idea long urged by the Grenvils, that in a combination of parties alone could be found sufficient national strength to withstand Napoleon. But the nomination of Fox as Foreign Secretary, of course implied that an attempt to restore peace would at once be made. Fox had always maintained that Napoleon did not really wish for the renewal of war. His objects, Fox thought at that time were mainly to consolidate his own power in France, and had the English ministers met him straightforwardly and shown them that they had no intention of disturbing his authority at home, he would have manifested a very different disposition toward England. Napoleon, when first counsel, had either taken a great fancy to Fox, or he had thought it prudent to try and make so influential a man as friend, and Fox could not bring himself to believe that one who had treated him so courteously and so openly could really be playing a double game. He had hardly settled himself in his new office when an opportunity for opening negotiations presented itself. A man called on Fox and detailed to him a plan for the Emperor's assassination. Fox in a tempestive indignation drove him from the room and at once acquainted Napoleon with the plot. Probably he might have saved himself the trouble, as there is good reason to suppose that the whole thing was concocted by Talaron. However this may be it answered the purpose. A friendly speech of the Emperor's was forwarded to Fox and negotiations began. At first they were carried on between Fox and Talaron. A little later Lord Yarmouth, who was one of the Englishmen seized by Bonaparte on the outbreak of the war, was used as agent and eventually Lauderdale was sent as full plenty potentiary. It did not make much difference through whose hands the negotiations passed. Napoleon was at that time busily engaged in mapping out Central Europe afresh, with the double object of consolidating his own authority and of bringing the whole of Europe to bear upon England in order to crush her trade. The only question really was, how long it would take Fox to find this out? By the summer he still had hopes of an accommodation but they had become very faint, as Napoleon, in spite of his promise to the contrary, had annexed Sicily to the new Kingdom of Naples created for his brother Joseph and by the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine had broken his engagement to Yarmouth that the Constitution of Germany should not be altered. Fox whose health was beginning to break down hoped to hand over the Foreign Office to his nephew Lord Holland directly the negotiation was finished and a conversation between them which occurred at this time shows that he had practically given up all hope of peace. We can, he says, in honour do nothing without the full and bona fide consent of the Queen and Court of Naples, but even exclusive of that consideration and of the great importance of Sicily which you, young one, very much underrate, it is not so much the value of the point in dispute as the manner in which the French fly from their word that disheartens me. It is not Sicily but the shuffling insincere way in which they act that shows me that they are playing a false game and in that case it would be very imprudent to make any concessions which by any possibility could be thought inconsistent with our honour or could furnish our allies with a plausible pretense for suspecting, reproaching or deserting us. The negotiations did not actually cease till after Fox's death, but it is evident from this letter that Gray did not much misrepresent Fox's opinion when a few months later he said, there never was any opportunity of procuring any such terms as would have been adequate to the just pretensions and consistent with the honour and interests of this country. Fox had always maintained that the chances of peace and war depended entirely upon the good faith of Napoleon. He had always persuaded himself that Napoleon was actuated more by patriotism than by ambition. Seven months of negotiation disabused him of this idea and before his death he had sorrowfully reached the conclusion that war was not only unavoidable but desirable as long as Napoleon claimed the right to ride roughshod over the liberties of Europe. If Fox could not restore peace to Europe he could do something at least to remove from England the stain of an unnatural and cruel traffic. He was not the man to reckon up the magnitude of the interests affected when he was called upon to do an act of simple justice to suffering humanity. Year after year as long as he attended Parliament his voice had been raised against the detestable trade in slaves and now that he had the power he at once seized the opportunity of showing that his sympathy unlike that of Pitt was not confined to words. In June 1806 Fox pledged himself to introduce a measure of total abolition. It was his last speech in Parliament. He did not live to carry out his pledge but the bill drawn on the lines which he had sketched out was introduced by Grey in January and became law in March 1807. By it the trade in Negroes was absolutely forbidden to British subjects after January 1st 1808. Three years later it was made a felony to take part in it. So was accomplished this great act of social reform which Fox had strenuously urged for so many years an apparently hopeless opposition but which he was not permitted to see pass into law. The end came very quickly. In January 1806 he accepted office and set about the work of his department with unabated energy. But his attendance at the house and his anxiety about the peace and the abolition of the slave trade soon told on him and he determined to give up the seals to Lord Holland directly those questions were settled. Don't think me selfish young one, he wrote, the slave trade and peace are such glorious things I can't give them up even to you. In June however came a change for the worse. His malady was now declared to be dropsy and he was obliged to give up all business. It soon became so serious that operations had to be resorted to for his relief and he as well as his wife and friends understood that the end could not be far off. At the beginning of September he rallied a little and was removed to Chiswick but on the 7th he began plainly to get weaker. Lord Holland and General Fitzpatrick who were always with him read to him constantly. It was his great delight. Virgil, Dryden and Crab were the authors he asked for oftenest and his favorite passages of Virgil were read and re-read as if he could not bring himself to part with so old a friend. At length he became too weak to understand what was read and during the morning of the 13th of September he lay motionless and almost unconscious with a sweet smile of happiness on his face. At last at six in the evening he passed away sinking to rest quite quietly and peacefully surrounded by those whom he loved best in the whole world undisturbed by anxious thought or touch of pain. Sir Walter Scott in the well-known lines of the prelude to Marmian has given lasting expression to the thought which was uppermost in the minds of most Englishmen when they heard of the death of Fox. It was that of thankfulness that one who was in so many things essentially English should at last be found acting in harmony with the bulk of his countrymen on the great subject of the day. Yet it may be questioned whether praise thus limited did not really do an injustice to Fox's memory. It implied a want of patriotism in previous years which if true would be most detrimental to his character as a statesman. It suggested a fault in his nature which his friends certainly would most energetically repudiated. Those who look upon Fox as having anything foreign in his sympathies or turn of mind totally misread his character. He was English to the backbone, a product of the England of the 18th century, just as typical as was Pitt, though representative of a different type. There was nothing in him of the finesse of a Frenchman, of the suppleness of an Italian, of the brutality of a German. His love of home, his simplicity of life, his straightforward directness of speech and thought, his stubbornness of will, his steadfastness of affection, his very indolence, and yet the sense of duty which obliged him to work against his will were all qualities essentially English. It was because he was so essentially English that he acquired the hold which he did over the country. Men recognized instinctively that he was one of themselves. They could understand him. In his good qualities and his bad qualities there was nothing outside the sphere in which they themselves moved. It was just because they knew him so well that they hated him so relentlessly or loved him so passionately. Even his worst enemies, those who really believed that he wished to establish a Republican England on the Jacobin model, never accused him of hitting below the belt. They knew perfectly well what they had to meet. The war between them was open and above board. What Fox meant, he said, and he did not mean any more than he said. As a matter of fact, he usually meant a great deal less. In the most truculent attacks which were made upon him, such as those of Gilray, there was nothing kept in reserve, no suggestion of things worse than what appeared, no illusions to dark designs which were not avowed. It was a fair stand-up fight on both sides conducted according to the most approved principles of the English prize ring. The attacks on Fox in this respect were very different to those directed against his father. Compare Gilray's caricature of Fox cutting off the head of George III with Gray's venomous lines on Lord Holland at Kingsgate. Old and abandoned by each venal friend, here Holland formed the pious resolution to smuggle a few years and strive to mend a broken character and constitution. Ah! said the sighing peer, had but been true, nor Mungo's Rigby's Bradshaw's friendship vain, far better scenes than these had blessed our view, and realized the beauties which we fain. Purged by the sword and purified by fire, then had we seen proud London's hated walls. Walls would have hooded in St. Peter's choir, and Fox's stunk and littered in St. Paul's. Or compare again the spirit which attached to Shelburne the name and characteristics of Malagrida, with the wave of popular feeling which deprived Fox of his majority in 1784. In the one there is the distrust which is born of fear, and which is all the more formidable because it cannot easily be explained because it is felt rather than expressed. The other was the distrust of a healthy moral sentiment which punished appropriately what it considered to be an obvious outrage to public morality. To most Englishmen undoubtedly the support given by Fox to the French Revolution was a severe shock. They were at that time too much under the influence of fear themselves to be able to judge impartially of the conduct of one who, on the contrary, was inspired not by fear but by sympathy, and he was too much of a partisan to make allowance for their prejudices. The judgment passed on both sides was much too harsh. Party feeling became more exacerbated than it had ever been before, and yet even in the height of the flood of public opinion which overwhelmed him, in spite of all the abuse which was showered upon him, no one really could bring himself to believe that Fox had set himself to destroy the institutions of his country. They believed him to be wrong, but they believed him to be honest, and when the time came for him to stand forward in their behalf against Napoleonic aggression they rejoiced not because the prodigal had returned home from the Jacobin swine-trops, but because the line of patriotic duty as understood by Wig and Tory had converged in common action for their country's good. The question then naturally arises. Is there in the public life of Fox any evidence that he had a distinct political ideal which he followed as consistently as his circumstances and his temperament admitted? Was this patriotism, which it is now on all hands acknowledged that he possessed, a vague sentiment or a considered policy? The circumstances of Fox's political life almost forbid a direct answer to the question. It is the business of an opposition to oppose, and no one expects that the attack will always be made from the same quarter or in the same way. By the conventions of politics a good deal of latitude is allowed to an opposition, both as to the principles they lay down and the arguments they use. It is when a statesman or a party is in office that their political ideal is seen, and Fox never while in office had any chance whatever of carrying political principles into legislation except in his India bill which did not pass. In 1782 and 1806 his time was almost entirely occupied with negotiations for peace. His political principles therefore have to be drawn mainly not from what he did do, but from what he blamed others for not doing, which is a test far more severe than that applied to any other great statesman of the century, and which if applied to modern statesmen who would escape whipping? Fox himself steadily maintained throughout his career a consistent appeal to wig principles as the kernel of his political faith. He rarely made a speech in the House of Commons in which he did not profess his intense, almost blind admiration for the British Constitution. But these were phrases which by the end of the 18th century had become little more than phrases. To a politician of Walpole's day, wig principles meant distinctly the supremacy of Parliament over the prerogative, party government, and religious toleration. It was summed up in the motto of the Revolution of 1688, Civil and Religious Liberty. The British Constitution had an equally distinct meaning. It meant a government in which political power was divided between the Crown, the Ministers, and Parliament, but in which the aristocracy had the real ascendancy. But by the end of the 18th century the phrases understood in this sense had become unreal. No Tory, however reactionary, thought of disputing the supremacy of Parliament, the necessity of party government, or the advisability of religious toleration. And although opinions differed as to the exact limits which should be placed on the influence of the Crown or of the people in the government, no one doubted that the chief controls should be vested in the aristocracy. Thirty years later on the contrary they had again become intensely real. They had acquired a new meaning. In the cold shade of opposition the Wig Party had learned the doctrines of free trade from Adam Smith and of utilitarianism from Bentham. They had seized Parliamentary reform from the nervous hands of Pitt and in the mouths of Gray and of Russell and of Valtrip, these time-honored phrases meant the ousting of the Crown from political power, the supremacy of the middle classes, the domination of commercial objects in politics, and religious equality. Fox bridges over the gulf which separates these two conceptions of Wig principles. He it is who enables the program of 1832 to be carried out by the same party which was overthrown by George III in 1770. He it is who forms the link between Rockingham and Burdett, and the very indefiniteness of his own views, the fact that sentiment, entered so largely into his political judgments, enabled him to discharge the function with the greater ease. He brought to the work of politics the talents of an orator rather than of a statesman, and he never made any definite scheme his own for placing the government of the country upon a more popular basis. He had, in fact, no enlarged conceptions of politics. He was too indolent to work out problems for posterity to settle. He was content to deal with the present, with the resources which the present supplied. He never laid before Parliament on any subject a carefully reasoned-out scheme of political conduct based upon principles and applied to the facts in question, except the India Bill, and it must always be doubtful how much of the India Bill was due to the inspiration of Burke. Hard political thinking he invariably avoided. In the American War he could denounce the folly of the ministry and demand acknowledgement of independence, but he never had any scheme of his own to propound based upon a reasonable theory of colonial politics. He could cut the Gordian knot, but not untie it. The same thing is observable in his struggle with Pitt in 1784. He could denounce in Parliament the unconstitutional appointment of the ministers. He never could outvote them on questions of confidence, but he attempted to present his case to the constituencies, who after all must be eventually the arbiters, as one between the prerogative and the independence of Parliament. The same defect is still more conspicuous in his way of dealing with the War of 1793. Again and again he attacked Pitt for not making clear the object of the war, and sought accordingly to prove that it must be either a war against opinion or a war to restore the bourbon. But he on his side never had any clear idea of the principle on which friendly relations with France could be maintained. He admitted that the violation of the Shelt was a necessary cause of war by treaty, if the Dutch chose to make it so. He allowed that the French proclamation inciting rebellion in monarchical countries could not be passed over without demanding an explanation, but he refused to face the question of what should be done if the Dutch did call upon us to act, if the French as of course they would declined to explain. It was merely his own belief in the good sense and faith of the French that he opposed to the traditional policy of civilized nations in pursuance of treaty obligations. So again in 1803 he opposed the renewal of the war because he believed in the good faith of Bonaparte, and knew that Addington was a blunderer and an incapable. But in 1806 he found that he was wrong. It was just that preference of personal conviction to the results of hard political thinking as the motive of policy, which made matter of fact Englishmen distrust Fox as a political leader, and made them sometimes think that he had no political principles. In that they did him a grievous injustice. He used the time-honored formulae of party politics so frequently at a time when to most men they had shrunk and withered into mere skeletons that people could not realize that he was re-clothing them again with flesh and blood, and inspiring them with new life for a fresh struggle under the old banners. The independence of parliament, civil and religious liberty, the glorious constitution of 1688, had got to be formulae as hollow as the immortal principle of 89 sound to us now. Their original meaning had become exhausted, and they were usually intended to mean just what anybody chose. But in Fox's mouth they had a very definite meaning. They meant the crushing of the royal influence in government, the establishment of a responsible prime ministership, the reform of parliament, and the removal of political disabilities from non-conformists. But here again, as in matters of external policy, he stopped short just where he should have gone on. He contented himself with the principle he shrunk from translating his principle into action. In all these questions he was content to play the second part, to follow where others led. The scheme for the reform of parliament belonged to Pitt, and was appropriated by Gray. That for the removal of non-conformist's disabilities, Fox inherited from Beaufoy. That for the abolition of the slave trade was Wilberforce's own. In no one of these measures, which are the best evidence of Fox's insight as a statesman, which are the great historical triumphs of the Whig party, did Fox himself take the initiative. He did not give himself the trouble to place them before parliament in reasoned and considered legislative form. It is not too much to say that at his death not one of them had definitely taken rank as essential parts of the Whig policy. Yet these are the measures upon which depends the reputation of Fox as the statesman, to whom the policy brought to such a glorious conclusion in 1829 and 1832 is mainly due. If Fox is to be considered as the author of a new departure in Whig policy, if his separation from Burke is to mean anything in the history of political principle, if in any sense whatever he is to be looked upon as the father of the Whigs of 32, these are the measures by which that claim will be judged. It is fatal to his reputation as a serious statesman that not one of them was during his lifetime permanently associated with his name. It is to his honor as a politician that they all received his support. It was to the advantage of his party that by his support he was enabled to pass them to his followers as a legacy of which they could make better use than he had done. There is in fact a real want of political ambition in Fox. It was that which made him recoil when the true test of statesmanship as of everything else great in this world presented itself to him, the imperative necessity for taking trouble. Great political successes are not one on the floor of the House of Commons amid the plaudits of an excited crowd. They are one in the office or the study amid statistics and reports. Fox never could bring himself to understand this. Eager, impulsive and impetuous he would throw himself into the fray when the debate came on and speak with a conviction all the more positive because it was born of the necessities of the moment. But when the excitement had passed it was very difficult to get him to attend to the humdrum business of preparing and arranging for the next step. Dr. Gilbert Elliott tells us that he was curiously vacillating and hesitating in making up his mind. This I fear, he says, is the habitual defect in Fox, who has a great difficulty or backwardness in resolving as if he had no interest or no judgment in the affairs that are depending, and at last lets anybody else decide for him. His indecision sprang not from want of will but from real want of interest. He could take trouble enough about a disputed reading in Homer. He would not decide whether the opposition should start a candidate for the office of speaker until the day before that on which parliament was to meet. Indolence was a fault which ran through the whole of Fox's life, political and social. Perhaps it was too much to demand of a statesman who was always in a hopeless minority, that he should master details and apply principles with the avidity of one for whom the gates of power are just opening in the distance. But the result was none the less disastrous. Fox called in sentiment to supply the place of knowledge. Sentiment it is true which sprang from a healthy and sound English heart and was checked by an eminently sensible mind. But still sentiment, which was very dangerous as an important element in a statesman's policy at the time of the French revolution. What England wanted was a leader with the political sympathies of Fox and the philosophical depth and practical mind of Burke. What she got was on the one side the conventional commonplace selfishness of Pitt, and on the other side in Fox a real zeal for liberty which was inspiring and essentially true, but which could do nothing to solve the difficulties of the hour. To tell the English nation that the revolution of 1789 was a great step on the path of liberty, at a time when it had led to the overthrow of all the institutions with which in England liberty had been bound up, was as pernicious as it was useless. It sprang from an opinion which had its root in sentiment, not in reason. It destroyed the confidence of the British nation in Fox as a practical politician, and it did much to hand England over as the only alternative a victim to the terror of the Tories. Where then is the secret of Fox's great influence over contemporaries, of his position in the page of history? It is to be found in his oratory and in his personal attractiveness, undistinguished as a statesman except in the Department of Foreign Politics, a failure as a party leader, he was unrivaled in debate. On the floor of the House of Commons he never met his match. Sheridan had more wit, Pitt more declamatory power, Erskine more elegance, Tyranny more polish. But the oratory of Fox outshone them all in the qualities which go straight to the heart. Robustness and earnestness were its two main characteristics. In the whole range of Fox's speeches there is not to be found a mean thought or an affectation. No doubt the charm of his personality greatly assisted the effect of his oratory. His speeches were rarely prepared beforehand. The words and expressions came straight out of a mind inspired by a strong masculine reason and corrected by a faultless taste. Nature and simplicity, said Sir G. Eliot, were the true characteristic qualities of his eloquence. The mannerisms and self-consciousness of a trained orator were exceedingly distasteful to him. Even Sheridan's prepared impromptu's graded against his ear. The very openness and complete absence of reserve with which he poured out his whole heart to his audience took them by storm. The presence of the reporter, the vision of next morning's paper would have been fatal to him, if he had stopped to think of them. It is the whole personality of the man, not this or that particular quality that gave him his power. The generosity of his heart, the openness of his mind, the simplicity of his nature, the robustness of his intellect, the felicity of his expression, the fire of his indignation, the earnestness of his sympathy, the vigor of his conviction. All these combined in a personality which men might fly from in questioning doubt or might worship entrusting love but could not criticize. There are but forty of them, said Thurlow of the opposition of 1793, but there is not one of them who would not be willingly hanged for Fox. A tribute such as this coming to from an enemy is not lightly to be disregarded. When the grave closed over Fox, many thousands in England who had never seen him and never heard him felt that they had lost a friend. All Englishmen knew that a light had gone from the world, and England was the deader to nature for the lone of one of those rare spirits who sum up in themselves the gifts and powers of many types of ordinary men. A power is passing from the earth to breathless natures dark abyss, but when the great and good depart, what is it more than this? That man who is by God sent forth doth yet again to God return? Such ebb and flow must ever be, then wherefore should we mourn? End of section 21, recording by Pamela Nagami in Encino, California, January 2020. End of Charles James Fox by Henry Offley-Wakeman.