The political atmosphere was charged with electricity, and the breaking of the storm was not delayed. Rockingham died on the 1st of July (1782). That very day the King entrusted the Treasury to Shelburne, who evidently counted on Pitt, and had, it is clear, good reason for doing so. Shelburne received the royal letter on the 2d, and at once communicated the King's mandate to the Cabinet. There was no ambiguity about its reception. The Fox party declared that the nomination of First Minister should rest with the Cabinet; and, to the mortification of the able but impracticable Richmond, recommended Portland for the post.

To this pretension the King at once refused to accede. For two days the contest raged. On the third there was a Court. Fox came with the seals in his pocket, and at once took Shelburne aside, asking him if he was to be First Lord of the Treasury. On Shelburne's affirmative reply, Fox merely said, "Then, my lord, I shall resign," went into the closet, and left the seals with the King.

This rupture was a crisis in the lives of Fox and Pitt, for it marks the commencement of their undying political hostility. Had it not been for Pitt, Fox must now have triumphed -- a fact that neither statesman could ignore or forget.

Of Fox's resignation it may be said that he was right to resign, but wrong in the manner of his resignation. It was impossible for him, after what had passed in the Rockingham Cabinet, to remain; he could not have continued to serve with, much less under, Shelburne. It does not signify which of the two was to blame for this mutual mistrust; that it existed is sufficient. It would be too much to maintain that all the members of a Cabinet should feel an implicit confidence in each other; humanity -- least of all political humanity -- could not stand so severe a test. But between a Prime Minister in the House of Lords and the leader of the House of Commons such a confidence is indispensable. Responsibility rests so largely with the one, and articulation so greatly with the other, that unity of sentiment is the one necessary link that makes a relation, in any case difficult, in any way possible.

The voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau may effect a successful imposture, but can hardly constitute a durable administration. But as regards the effort to impose Portland on the King, the case is widely different. It was part of the political system that rendered the narrow selfishness of the close Whia corporation even more odious to the people than the tortuous absolutism of the King. To the men of that day, for whom prerogative was a living force, it was not less distasteful than to us, for whom an oligarchy is odious for opposite reasons.

For Fox it may be urged that a dummy Prime Minister offered the only means of keeping the Government together, for he would not serve under Shelburne, nor Shelburne under him. Be that as it may, the attempt to procure the succession of a dull, dumb duke to the vapid virtue of Rockingham, whom George III had ranked among the meanest intellects in his household, did not recommend itself to any large section of the community, and tended further to alienate from Fox the jealous sympathies of the people.

It is clear that Shelburne would not have undertaken in July the post from which he had shrunk in March, had he not relied upon Pitt. Fox, with rare sagacity, had foreseen this even at the time when Pitt was achieving distinction as a parliamentary reformer and denouncer of the influence of the Crown, and had written of him on the 18th of May:

"He is very civil and obliging, profuse of compliments in public; but he has more than once taken a line that has alarmed me, especially when he dissuaded against going into any inquiries that might produce heats and differences. This seemed so unlike his general mode of thinking, and so like that of another, that I confess I disliked it to the greatest degree. I am satisfied he will be the man that the old system revived in the person of Lord S. (Shelburne) will attempt to bring forward for its support. I am satisfied that he is incapable of going into this with his eyes open; but how he may be led into it step by stop is more than I can answer for. I feel myself, I own, rather inclined to rely upon his understanding and integrity for resisting all the temptations of ambition, and especially of being first, which I know will be industriously thrown in his way, and contrasted with that secondary and subordinate situation to which they will insinuate, he must be confined while he continues to act in the general system."

Chancellor of the Exchequer

Pitt was not now to be first. But he accepted the great office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, with practically the lead of the House of Commons. His own letters betray no exultation; they speak the indifference not of affectation or satiety, but of long preparation and habitual self-control. "Lord Rockingham's death took place yesterday morning. What the consequences of it' will be to the public cannot yet quite be foreseen. With regard to myself, I believe the arrangement may be of a sort in which I may, and probably ought, to take a part. If I do, I think I need not say you pretty well know the principles on which I shall do it. In this short time nothing is settled, and I only saw what were the strong wishes of some who foresaw the event."

These sentences are remarkable not merely for their serene simplicity, but also because they show that Pitt the very day after Rockingham's death wrote of his accession to office as a settled affair between himself and those who had foreseen the event. Both parts of the administration, indeed, had long been preparing for it. Fox and Burke on the one side, who were ready with their candidate for the succession ; on the other Shelburne and the King, with Pitt as their trump card. Both sides concealed their hands.

"Lord Shelburne," wrote the King, on the morning of Rockingham's death, " must see, I am certain, with no small degree of resentment the total ignorance that those who have governed Lord Rockingham cautiously try to keep both me and him in as to the desperate state of that Lord, which certainly is with a view to some arrangement of their own. From the language of Mr. Fitzpatrick it would seem that Lord Shelburne has no chance of being able to coalesce with Mr. Fox; it may not be necessary to remove him at once, but if Lord Shelburne accepts the Head of the Treasury, and is succeeded by Mr. Pitt as Secretary for the Home Department and British Dominions, then it will be seen how far he would submit to it."

While Fox, then, by a resignation which bore too much the appearance of pique, was alienating the sympathies of the public, which by further indiscretion he was within a few months to lose altogether, Pitt, by blameless accession to high office when just twentythree years of age, was further to attract popular interest and confidence.

It is impossible, henceforth, to separate the lives of the two men: and here, where they first come into collision, there is, as George Selwyn said at the time, so much of the contrast of the Idle and Industrious Apprentice between them, that one is irresistibly reminded of Hogarth's famous designs. It is so rare to detect the disciplined youth of Pitt in a slip of judgment. He moves steadily and almost irresistibly onwards, with a cold calmness which seems to govern where perhaps it only skilfully adapts itself to events.

On the other hand, Fox, ten years older in age, and fully twelve in political life, who at twenty-three was not less famous, was still, by headstrong impulses and a generous tendency to extremes, committing and recommitting all the errors of his youth. Pitt perhaps was never young, and Fox certainly could never have been old.

So close is the connection of the two lives that it is impossible to sketch the career of Pitt without describing the character of Fox, if for this reason alone, that had it not been for that character and its faults Pitt could certainly not have retained, and possibly could not have obtained, the premiership. It may be said once for all that Fox was the most transcendent of all debaters, the most genial of all associates, the most beloved of all friends.

He was moreover, after Burke, the most lettered politician in a generation that affected literature. His public career had been one of expansion. Beginning life as a High Tory, he rebounded briskly into the ranks of Whiggery and ultimately of Radicalism. This final phase may have been partly due to his long exclusion from office and to resentment at the unconstitutional vindictiveness of his sovereign, but it was mainly owing to the genial kindness and warm sympathies of his nature: "large was his bounty and his soul sincere."

His was in truth a large, bountiful, outspoken soul. Wherever he saw what he believed to be oppression, he took part with the oppressed-the American, the Irishman, the Negro: he could not side with what he thought wrong against what he thought right, even though they who seemed to him in the right were the enemies of his country. This extreme abstraction of principle was perhaps unconsciously aided by the fact that his country in these contests was often guided by his political foes.

Hence his private correspondence is not always pleasant reading. "An expedition is, after all, gone to France, under General Doyle, consisting of 4000 British, besides emigrants, etc. . . . I think nothing can show the complete infatuation of our Government so much as this desperate expedition, which, I believe as well as hope, has not the smallest chance of success."

And of Trafalgar he has nothing better to say than that, "by its solid as well as brilliant advantages, it far more than compensates for the temporary succour which it will certainly afford Pitt in his distress."

To complete these painful extracts, he writes in 1801: "To tell the truth, I am gone something further in hate to the English Government than perhaps you and the rest of my friends are, and certainly further than can with prudence be avowed. The triumph of the French Government over the English does in fact afford me a degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise."

The cosmopolitan character of his liberalism was thus either above or below humanity, either superhuman or not human enough. This exaggeration was probably due to his oratorical temperament. His nature, apt to extremes, was driven with an excessive reaction to the most violent negative of what lie disapproved. We see the same excess to a still greater degree in his still greater master Burke. It is this force of extremes that makes orators, and for them it is indispensable.

Few supreme parliamentary speeches have perhaps ever been delivered by orators who have been unable to convince themselves, not merely that they are absolutely in the right, but that their opponents are absolutely in the wrong,, and the most abandoned of scoundrels to boot for holding a contrary opinion. No less a force, no feebler flame than this will sway or incense the mixed temperaments of mankind. The mastering passion of Fox's mature life was the love of liberty: it is this which made him take a vigorous, occasionally ail intemperate, part against every man or measure in which he could trace the taint or tendency to oppression: it is this which sometimes made him write and speak with unworthy bitterness: but it is this which gave him moral power, which has neutralised the errors of his political career, which makes his faults forgotten and his memory sweet.

Fatal Defect

His fatal defect as a statesman was want of judgment: he was vehement, passionate, carried away by the impulse of the day, without a thought of the morrow, still less of the day after.

"The present day," Metternich used to say, "has no value for me except as the eve of tomorrow: it is with tomorrow that my spirit wrestles."

This sublime disregard of to-day can have no place in the politics of a parliamentary country, but the disregard of tomorrow is scarcely less dangerous. Fox could, indeed, lay down principles for all time, but, the moment the game was afoot, they ceased to govern his conduct. Had it not been for this, he would have been the most powerful and popular minister that this country has ever known: as it was, he scarcely held office at all. A life of dissipation, hardly paralleled in that dissipated age, did not leave him the coolness or balance which would have made him a match for Pitt: his private life too much influenced his public conduct. At the gaming table he had indeed learned to endure with dauntless bearing the frowns of fortune, whether in politics or at hazard. He had too discovered the charms of that fascinating freemasonry which made the members of Brooks's patiently pay his card debts: but his experience of play had also taught him a low estimate of human nature, a sort of gambling spirit in public affairs.

It is necessary to recall some of Fox's failings and drawbacks, because otherwise it is not possible to understand how, in a country like England, so great a political force did not obtain political supremacy. To comprehend the full prodigy of his parliamentary powers a single example will suffice: it is enough to read Pitt's great speech of the 3d of February 1800, and the reply which Fox delivered the moment that Pitt sate down.

The first is a magnificent effort, but the second in dissolvent and pulverising power is superhuman. This is not the place to inquire whether, in these days of verbatim reports and greater pressure on time, Fox would have done so much; but it is clear that, under every imaginable condition of discussion, he must have been a giant, and that powers which could make an audience forget his coarse features, his unwieldy corpulence, his slovenly appearance, his excessive repetition, and his ungraceful action, would have overcome any obstacles.

Putting his fashionable vices aside, he reminds one of another colossal figure ; another reformer who, though religious rather than political, was not less bold, not less stormy, not less occasionally wrongheaded. To some it may appear a profanation to compare Fox with the German Apostle of light and freedom. But with his passion, his power, his courage, his openness, his flashes of imagination, his sympathetic errors, above all his supreme humanity, Fox was a sort of lax Luther, with the splendid faults and qualities of the great reformer.

Whether he would have been a great administrator, we cannot tell; he had no opportunity and we have, no experience: his marvellous abilities were almost always exercised in opposition.

In him, therefore, we have only a portion of the life of a statesman: we judge of him as the limb of a fossil monster or the torso of a Greek god; and it is difficult, in judging from the part we possess, to place any bounds on our estimate of the possibilities of the whole.

It has been said that his private life was conspicuously disordered. And yet even when it was blamable it was lovable, and it mellowed into an exquisite evenings. Whether we see him plunged in Theocritus after a bout at faro which has left him penniless; or cheerfully watching the bailiffs remove his last stick of furniture; or drinking with the Jockey of Norfolk; or choosing wild waistcoats at Paris; or building with his own hands his little greenhouse at St. Anne's; or sauntering down its cool glades with a book and a friend; or prone without either under a tree in the long summer afternoons; or watching the contests of Newmarket with the rapt frenzy of a boy; or chatting before the races with Windham on the horses of the ancients and the precise meaning of argulum caput; or corresponding with Gilbert Wakefield about innumerable other niceties of classical reading; or, when crippled and aged, playing trapball with the children and with more than a child's keenness; or speechless with generous tears in the House of Commons when quivering under the harsh severance of Burke; or placid on his deathbed reassuring his wife and his nephew; he still exercises over us something of the unbounded fascination which he wielded over his contemporaries.

Scarce one of those contemporaries, whose records we know, but mourned his death as a personal loss. He charmed equally the affections of Carlisle and Fitzpatrick, the meteoric mind of Burke, the pedantic vanity of Parr, the austere virtue of Horner, and the hedgehog soul of Rogers. His nephew, the third Lord Holland, converted his matchless palace at Kensington into a sort of temple in honour of Fox's memory, where historians and poets, and authors and statesmen, vied with each other in burning incense before his shrine. It may fairly be said that the traditional estimate of Fox owes something to Holland House. But without such advenurous aids, he stands forth as the negation of cant and humbug, a character valuable then, invaluable now; as an intellectual Titan; and as the quick and visible embodiment of every lovable quality in man.

The new splendour of his position did not for a moment affect the head of the young minister. He watched with the same cool vigilance the intoxication of his new chief. Shelburne could not conceal his joy. He had dished Fox. He had retained Richmond and Conway, Camden, Grafton, and Keppel. He had secured the champion who was alone capable of being matched against Fox. The negotiation of the peace would rest with him alone. He believed that he enjoyed the complete favour and confidence of the King, and so would be in reality prime, if not sole, minister.

Thus infatuated he proceeded to act alone, and to disgust his colleagues, without securing the King. The astute occupant of the throne never trusted Shelburne, but his reasons for supporting him at this juncture are clear.

In the first place, it enabled him to knock the beads of the hated Whigs together, and so compass their destruction. In the next place, the man he most detested was Fox, and the selection of Shelburne would be sure to preserve him at any rate for the time from Fox.

In the third place, he had some hopes, real or fanciful, of Shelburne's assisting him to resist the concession of American independence, which Fox was determined to declare. On the very day on which Rockingham died and Shelburne succeeded him, the King wrote to his new minister: "I am apprised that Lord Shelburne, though he has gone great lengths at the expense of his opinion in giving way as to American independence, if it can effect peace, would think he received advice in which his character was not attended to, if he intended to give up that without the price set on it, which alone could make this kingdom consent to it. Besides, he must see that the great success of Lord Rodney's engagement has again roused the nation so far that the peace which would have been acquiesced in three months ago would now be matter of complaint."

The first sentence is as obscure in construction as a speech of Cromwell's, but the general meaning is clear enough. The suspicion of contemporary politicians pointed in the same direction, probably without reason. But Shelburne's habitual ambiguity, and his resistance to the proposition of Fox that the independence of America should be recognised as a preliminary, and not as an accompaniment of negotiation, gave some colour to the hopes of the King.

Parliament adjourned almost immediately after the new ministers had taken their seats. There was indeed one animated debate in each House. In the Lords, the Duke of Richmond announced his reasons for remaining in office, and Shelburne took advantage of the discussion to make his ministerial statement. Already there seemed a rift in the lute. Richmond had said that the influence of the Crown in Parliament was to be diminished; this was one of the great principles on which the administration was formed. But Shelburne announced that he was there to defend the King's prerogative. He would not submit to see the King of England converted into a King of the Mahrattas, with a peishwah elected by a few great chiefs.

As regards the independence of America, he had been charged with changing his opinion. That was untrue. It had indeed been even his opinion that the independence of America would be a dreadful blow to the greatness of this country, and that when it should be established the sun of England might be said to have set. To nothing short of necessity, therefore, would he give way on that head. As regards the sunset of England which would follow concession, it was his resolution so to take advantage of the twilight that the country might yet see its orb rise again.

The debate in the Commons was already over. Two days previously, in a crowded house, Coke of Norfolk, who was to refuse from Pitt in 1784 that earldom of Leicester which he was to accept from Melbourne in 1837, called attention to the pension of Barr& It cannot be denied that Shelburne's party, though it hardly numbered a dozen persons, had reason to congratulate itself on the partiality of its leader. To Barre had been given a pension of £ 3200 a year, and though this enormous sum would not after the payment of taxes and fees net above £ 2100, enough remained to be, even in those days, a fair subject for parliamentary inquiry.

Advantage was also taken of the discussion to allude to the acquisitions of Shelburne's other main supporter, Dunning, who in the course of the three months' administration had, through his patron, pocketed a pension, a peerage, the duchy of Lancaster for life, and a seat in the Cabinet.

Fox made of these grants an opportunity for praising Lord Rockingham, whose only two jobs had been for men unfriendly to him in politics. Thence he diverged into the larger question of his resignation. He seems already to have been conscious that he had made a mistake.

Four days before, he had written to Thomas Grenville at Paris: "I feel that my situation in the country, my power, my popularity, my consequence, nay, my character, are all risked." and Temple, a day earlier, had pointed out to him the invidiousness of resigning on a personal question.

In his present speech, therefore, he placed his resignation on grounds of public policy-grounds which can hardly be sustained by evidence. But on Conway's challenging him to show in what respect the principles upon which Rockingham had accepted office had been disregarded, and expressing his own adherence to the principle of measures, not men, Fox rose again, and frankly avowed that one of his main reasons for withdrawal was the handing over to Shelburne of the Treasury and its patronage.

To Burke, however, fell the more conspicuous discredit of debate. His tirade against Shelburne outstripped both sense and decency. "He was a man that he could by no means confide in, and he called heaven and earth to witness, so help him God, that he verily believed the present Ministry would be fifty times worse than that of the noble Lord (North) who had lately been reprobated and removed....He meant no offence, but he would speak an honest mind. If Lord Shelburne was not a Catiline or a Borgia in morals, it must not be ascribed to anything but his understanding."

Pitt took but little part in the discussion, and that not as a minister. He charged Fox roundly with a dislike to men and not to measures. The uneasiness of Fox was apparent. Again and again did he rise. and explain, without apparently satisfying himself or his audience. And so closed the first round between these two great combatants of the political ring.

The summer and autumn months were spent in negotiations. Those in Paris were carried on mainly by Shelburne himself. The retention of Gibraltar was the one point in dispute which appears to have been hotly discussed in the Ministry. George III was in favour of ceding Gibraltar for some substantial equivalent, on the ground that no settled peace was possible while it was withheld from Spain. Grafton and Shelburne adhered to this view; Richmond, Keppel, and Pitt were hostile to any cession of the monumental fortress.

Before Parliament met, the disputes had risen so high that negotiation of another kind was seen to be necessary. Richmond, Grafton, and Keppel were on the brink of resignation. Camden and Temple were extremely discontented, and it was evident that, if the Government was to continue, it must seek reinforcement from the followers of North or the followers of Fox. Shelburne appears to have remained in a sort of fool's paradise to the last.

If he had to conclude an alliance with either chief ' it would be with North; Pitt, on the other hand, who always declined to associate himself with North, leaned to Fox. But in truth the negotiations were carried on with little spirit. Shelburne may well have felt that combination between North and Fox was impossible, and that by their division he might govern. Moreover, he was a little weary of his colleagues, and they were heartily sick of him. No one, indeed, ever trusted him; no one ever cared to be long associated with him.

The languid overtures of Shelburne were soon obliterated by arrangements of a more practical character. Adam, George North, and Lord John Townshend, under the sinister supervision of Eden and Loughborough, were actively reconciling the two chiefs of Opposition. Already in the previous August Fox had sent civil messages to North.

On the 14th of February they met, and the preliminaries of the treaty were agreed upon. In four and twenty hours the Coalition was complete, and within four days a resolution of censure on the Peace had been carried by a majority of 16. Pitt's speech on this occasion was perhaps the least effective of his life; he had the bad taste to taunt Sheridan with his connection with the stage, and brought on himself the famous retort that the dramatist would be tempted to try an improvement on the Angry Boy in the Alchemist. Strangely enough, however, it was the victor in this encounter who seems never to have forgotten or forgiven it.

For some unexplained reason Shelburne did not at once resign, though in a conversation with Dundas on the 12th he had intimated that he considered his ministry as over.

On the 21st, the battle was renewed. The allied forces, led by their stalking-horse, the worthy but insipid Cavendish, made another assault. On this occasion Pitt made one of the great speeches of his life. While Fox spoke, the Chancellor of the Exchequer stood holding open with one hand the door behind the Speaker's chair to hear the attack, while he held the basin into which he vomited with the other. But, when Fox sate down, Pitt at once replied in a speech of nearly three hours. His defence of the Peace as a work of necessity, though it does not concern this story, was convincing the cutting sarcasm with which he denounced the Coalition -- an unnatural union of which in the public interest he forbade the banns -- is classic; and the quotation with which he closed -- the probamque pauperiem sine dote quaero -- is memorable not only for its appositeness, but for the modesty of its omissions: though public opinion supplied the virtute mea me involvo.

Nor did he forget a dignified, yet not extravagant, eulogy of Shelburne. But the opposition again triumphed. Their majority of 17, when viewed in connection with the calculated strength of parties, does not seem exorbitant. Eden, no bad judge, had reckoned the forces under North at 120, those under Fox at 90, and those of the Government at 140. It is clear then that the Coalition must have alienated, or the Peace secured, a considerable number of independent votes.

Shelburne, however, lost no time in resigning, and recommended Pitt to the King as his successor. Every effort was employed to induce the young barrister to accept the first place. But he saw that the fruit was not yet ripe. For a moment he seems to have hesitated. It was urged on him that the allied forces could not long hold together. But it was obvious that when once they had so far forgotten the past as to unite at all, there was nothing in public principle that need afterwards dissever them.

To the angry disappointment of the King, who described himself as "one on the edge of a precipice," and as apparently resolved to abdicate rather than submit, he declined the proud post.

This is the first epoch of his career. He had already obtained a first place as an orator; he had held all but the highest office. That, though he was but twenty-three, was now not merely within his grasp, but pressed on him, with authority and with enthusiasm, by Dundas and the King, the most acute political tacticians of their time. With a judgment which can only be described as consummate, and a self-control which few by any experience attain, the young statesman, able, eloquent, and courageous as he was, refused the splendid prize, and prepared to resume his practice at the bar.

In the meantime the monarch was desperate. He caught at any hint that would save him from Fox. He even pressed the Treasury on North, with the condition that North should break with Fox. Gower suggested to him that Pitt's cousin, Mr. Thomas Pitt, might be a capable minister. The King replied that he was ready to apply to Mr. Thomas Pitt or Mr. Thomas Anybody.

For five weeks did George III hunt for a Premier. At last he was compelled to yield. Portland became Prime Minister; Fox and North joint-Secretaries of State. They had pressed Pitt to join them, but in vain. As they kissed hands, a humorous bystander predicted their early fall, for he observed George III turn back his ears and eyes, just like the horse at Astley's when the tailor was mounting whom it had determined to throw.

Thus was formed the Coalition Ministry of which it is hard to say which was the most complete -- the infamy of the proceeding, or the retribution that followed.

Fox in 1782 had said of North's government : "From the moment when I shall make any terms with one of them, I will rest satisfied to be called the most infamous of mankind. I would not for an instant think of a coalition with men who in every public and private transaction as ministers have shown themselves void of every principle of honour and honesty. In the hands of such men I would not trust my honour for a minute."

He had declared that he could not believe even North's announcement of his own resignation without corroborative evidence. He had urged that North and his colleagues should be brought to trial, and if possible to the scaffold. Later, again, on Shelburne's becoming Prime Minister, he had declared his anticipation that the Government would refrain from no corrupt method of maintaining themselves in power even to the extent of allying themselves with the party of North. Political digestion is tough, but it could not stomach these things.

What is also notable, though less remarkable, Fox and North at once assimilated and concluded the very conditions of peace on which they had moved a vote of censure -- censure which a cool examination of the articles and of the situation must pronounce factious, and, as coming jointly from the incapable administrator and the fierce opponent of the war, grotesque. Grattan once observed that none had heard Fox at his best who had not heard him before the Coalition. Afterwards, the ability remained, but he felt that he had done something that required defence; the mouth still spoke great things, but the swell of soul was no more.

Chapter III: Accession to Power