The Union was considered a great triumph for Pitt, but it was the cause of his immediate fall. He was anxious not to delay an instant in pushing forward the large and liberal policy of which the Union had only been the prologue. The Act of Union received the royal assent on the 2d of July 1800. At the first Cabinet (September 30, 1800,) after the summer recess, Pitt developed his Irish policy. It included the substitution of a political in lieu of a religious test for office, a commutation of tithes, and a provision for the Catholic and Dissenting clergy.

Pitt had now to learn that, in choosing a successor for the impracticable Thurlow, he had managed to find an even more treacherous colleague. Loughborough, as he sate at council with him, had already betrayed him. During this month of September, while staying at Weymouth, the Chancellor had received a confidential letter from Pitt with reference to these different points, and had at once handed it to the King, whose prejudice on this subject had already been revealed in connection with the Fitzwilliam episode.

Thus fortified, the Chancellor at the Cabinet of the 30th of September proclaimed his virtuous scruples. The question was adjourned for three months, during which time it was hoped that the good man would reconsider his objections and prepare a complete measure on tithes. Loughborough had no idea of thus wasting his time. He spent this interval in working on that royal conscience of which he was the titular keeper.

He sought the congenial alliance of Auckland, a valuable accomplice, not merely on account of remarkable powers of intrigue, but as brother-in-law to Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury.

That prelate was now stirred by some occult inspiration to address a letter of warning to the King. Stuart, the primate of Ireland, was moved by a simultaneous impulse to exert his pastoral influence on his sovereign. Pitt was undermined. His colleagues began mysteriously to fall away. Chatham and Westmorland, Portland and Liverpool commenced to side against the Catholics in a Cabinet which had been supposed to be unanimous in their favour.

In January 1801 the mine was sprung. At a levee in that month, the King stormed audibly against the proposals, which neither the First Minister nor the Cabinet had laid before him. He sent Addington, the Speaker, to remonstrate with Pitt, who indeed could not have failed to hear at once of the scene at Court. Pitt immediately addressed a statement of his policy to the King, tendering his instant resignation if he were not allowed to bring forward these different plans as Government measures. The King in reply begged him to remain and be silent. Pitt at once resigned, and the King with apparent anguish acquiesced.

The parting honour that he awarded his minister is notable. He knew that it was of no use to offer Pitt money or ribbons or titles. So he began a letter to him "My dear Pitt": a circumstance which throws a little light on the character of both men.

The transaction has brought bitter censure upon Pitt; it is not easy to see why. What more could he do? What war is to kings, resignation is to ministers: it is the ultimate ratio. He was, perhaps, open to censure for not having himself prepared the King at an earlier stage of the proceedings for the projected policy, instead of leaving it to others with a hostile bias. But a minister who had served George III for seventeen years may be presumed to have understood the King's times and seasons better than any retrospective intelligence. It must be remembered also that, after the adjournment in September to promote union in the Cabinet, he was obliged to wait, in order to speak on behalf of a united Government.

Further, it may well have been that, from his knowledge of the King, he thought that the best chance of obtaining his consent was to lay before him a completed measure, and not a projected policy. Nor could he foresee the black betrayal of Loughborough.

It is not, however, necessary to dwell on the charge of negligence, for the real accusation is much graver than one of negligence: it is one of treachery. The accusation, so far as it can be ascertained, (for it is vaguely and diffusely expressed), imports that Pitt held out hopes to the Irish Catholics by which he secured their support to the Union, and that, instead of fulfilling these pledges, or doing his best to fulfil them, he resigned: a mock resignation which he endeavoured to recall. But when and how were these hopes hold out?

There is absolutely no trace of them-none, at least, of any Cabinet authority for them. Cornwallis and Castlereagh were indeed strongly pro-Catholic. What they did on their own responsibility is not known, nor is it now in question. But the most recent and the best informed of historians of the Union, and the most hostile to Pitt, expressly admits that: "It is in the first place quite clear that the English Ministers did not give any definite pledge or promise that they would carry Catholic Emancipation in the Imperial Parliament, or make its triumph a matter of life and death to the Administration. On two points only did they expressly pledge themselves. The one was, that, as far as lay in their power, they would exert the whole force of Government influence to prevent the introduction of Catholics into a separate Irish Parliament. The other was, that they would not permit any clause in the Union Act which might bar the future entry of Catholics into the Imperial Parliament; and the fourth article of the Union accordingly stated, that the present oaths and declaration were retained only until the Parliament of the United Kingdom shall otherwise provide."

The actual hopes held out were these. Castlereagh on returning from London in 1799, where he had gone to gather the sentiments of the Cabinet on the Catholic question, had written to Cornwallis that he was authorised to say that the opinion of the Cabinet was favourable to the principle of relief, though they did not think it expedient to make any public promise or declaration to the Catholics, or any direct assurance to the Catholics; but that Cornwallis would be justified, so far as the sentiments of the Cabinet were concerned, in soliciting their support. And, in his speech of the 5th of February 1800, Castlereagh had further said that "an arrangement for the clergy, both Catholic and Protestant Dissenters, had long been in the contemplation of His Majesty's ministers."

These were the pledges -- what was the performance? That at the very first Cabinet, held after the passing of the Union Bill, Pitt produced his policy, which more than embodied them; that he urged it on his colleagues with all his influence; that the King learned it surreptitiously, and opposed his veto to it; and that Pitt thereupon promptly and peremptorily resigned.

It is difficult for the most acute critic to perceive what more he could have done. It was impossible to convince or compel the King; his mind was too fixed and his position too strong. But, it is urged that, had Pitt insisted, the King, who had given way to him before, would have given way to him again. The answer is simple; he did insist, and the King did not give way, and would never have given way. For in this case, unlike the others, George III was convinced that he would incur the personal guilt of perjury under his Coronation oath; and he knew that he would be supported in his resistance by the great mass of his subjects.

Under the strain of this agony, for it was no less, torn by the separation from Pitt and by the pangs of his conscience, his mind once more gave way. The new ministry was already formed; and so, clear of all suspicion of interest, Pitt allowed the Kin, S physician to soothe his old master's shattered mind by the assurance that the Catholic question should never more be raised by him in the King's lifetime. The promise was natural; George II was old and breaking fast (two years later he was in fact at the point of death); the promise would probably not long be operative.

But it has been insinuated that this was a mere renunciation on Pitt's part of a high principle in order to retain office; and that he was only too glad to be rid of an embarrassing pledge by a resignation which he hoped in this way to recall. Those who take this somewhat paltry view omit to state that Pitt's successor was appointed, that he himself declined to lift his finger to return to office, and promoted in every way the strength and efficiency of the Government that replaced him.

Facts of this kind can of course be always dismissed by a knowing wink or a sarcastic smile. But it is not possible even thus to dismiss the letter written, late in December 1801, by Bishop Tomline. The Bishop tells his correspondent, with a groan, that he had just had a long conversation with Pitt; who had told him that he looked forward to the time when he might carry Catholic Emancipation, and that he did not wish to take office again unless he could bring it forward. "Upon the Catholic question our conversation was less satisfactory. He certainly looks forward to the time when he may carry that point, and I fear he does not wish to take office again, unless be could be permitted to bring it forward and to be properly supported."

This, the striking testimony of a most reluctant witness with regard to Pitt's innermost views, ten months after he had resigned and given his pledge to the King, must convince all those who are capable of conviction, that Pitt's Catholic policy and consequent resignation were not less steadfast and straightforward than the rest of his career. It seems also clear from this significant narrative that Pitt's promise to the King was given under the persuasion that the King had not long to live, though George III survived his great minister just fourteen years. So much for human computation.

On the other hand, if the King's death or madness could be attributed to the Catholic question, that reform would be indefinitely postponed. If the mooting of the question renewed the Regency discussions or produced a Regency, it would be too dearly bought. Compassion, nature, and policy pointed in the same direction.

So obvious was the necessity of the pledge that Fox gave it at once and spontaneously on assuming office in 1806; though he had ten months before pressed the Catholic petition in a long speech, raising a fierce debate and division. "I am determined," he said, "not to annoy my sovereign by bringing it forward."

This promise on the part of Fox, after harassing his rival with the question a short time previously, has always been held to be venial, and perhaps chivalrous; but, given by Pitt, it forms an item in this inscrutable impeachment.

Another is this. The resignation was a sham, because Pitt urged his friends to join and support the new ministry. The reason, however, is obvious enough. We were at war, and the first necessity of that state of things was to form the strongest possible government. It could not be strong, for the best men of Pitt's Government were out of it, and the area of choice was in no wise extended. But it was the only possible Government; and as it was by Pitt's act that the Government of the country was so weakened, a heavy responsibility lay on him. His critics appear to think it was his duty to have declared war on the new Administration; to have harassed it with Catholic resolutions; to have bidden his friends hold aloof; and to have presented to France the spectacle of a political chaos, of fierce faction fights for power at the moment of vital struggle with a foreign enemy.

Fox was impossible. No sane minister could have recommended as his successor in the midst of a war the fiercest opponent of that war, a leader of some fifty or sixty followers at the moment when the most powerful Administration available was required, to a monarch who less than two years before had struck him off the Privy Council with his own hand. Pitt could only be followed by a Government formed out of his own party; one which he could support, putting the Catholic question aside.

The choice lay between making his successors strong or weak. His paramount duty was to the war, and he preferred to make them strong. It surely requires a lively prejudice to blame him for this, and the mere formulation of the charge implies considerable ingenuity. As for Catholic Emancipation, that did not enter into the calculation; for, if Pitt could not carry it at that time, it would have been mere folly for any one else to attempt it. We may leave the whole transaction with the words in which Sir James Graham admirably summed it up: "Mr. Pitt was prepared to do the right thing at the right moment: but genius gave way to madness; and two generations have in vain deplored the loss of an opportunity which will never return."

Addington, the new Prime Minister, was a friend of the King's, and a sort of foster brother of Pitt's. The son of the respected family physician, who had prescribed colchicum. to the elder and port to the younger Pitt, Addington carried into politics the indefinable air of a village apothecary inspecting the tongue of the State. His parts were slender, and his vanity prodigious. A month after Pitt's resignation, but before he had given up the seals, some of his ardent followers, cognisant of his pledge to the King on the Catholic question, attempted a negotiation to keep him in office.

Among them was Canning, who sang

Pitt is to Addington
As London is to Paddington

This was true, and the minimum of truth; but Addington did not see the matter in that light. The emissaries found him happy and immovable. After a short tenure of high office, the holder almost invariably thinks himself admirably fitted for it. But this was a strong case.

Addington had never held political office at all, not an Under Secretaryship, not a Lordship of the Treasury; and yet, before he had even received the seals, be felt himself a meet successor for Pitt. To counterbalance this deficiency in modesty, he had a handsome presence and warm family affections. It must also in fairness be laid to his credit that he was, Heaven knows why, the favourite minister of Nelson. All that can be advanced on his behalf has been forcibly urged in the valuable vindication which Dean Milman addressed to Sir George Lewis. But it amounts mainly to this, that many country gentlemen preferred him to Pitt, because he had bland manners, and because they were not oppressed by his intellectual superiority.

It is lamentable to think that, if Pitt had to resign his power, it should devolve on Addington and not on Fox to succeed him. It is, however, pleasant to know that Loughborough received his due reward. The seals were taken from him. Still the wrQtched man hung on. He continued to attend the Cabinet, until Addington was forced to tell him plainly to begone. He continued to haunt the Court, with the result that on his death George III composed this epitaph for him: "He has not left a greater knave behind him in my dominions."

Pitt's retirement from office lasted three years. His first duty, like that of most ex-ministers, was to examine his private affairs; and, like most ex-ministers, with a distressing result. He was heavily in debt. He had to sell Hollwood. That Tusculum. was heavily mortgaged, and realised little surplus. His distress became known; for he was in danger of arrest. It was proposed to ask Parliament for a grant. The merchants of London offered him a free gift of £ 100,000. Pitt instantly put an end to such projects. He could not hold office again with the consciousness of such obligations.

The King begged him to accept £ 30,000 from his Privy Purse. Pitt, with some emotion, declined this offer also. Finally, he condescended to take a loan of some &163 12,000 from a few personal friends. This discharged the most clamant and petty creditors. But it left a heavy balance, and the loan Was never paid off ; for nearly all the contributors refused to include it in the debts paid by Parliament at Pitt's death. And to the last day of his life executions were threatened and even levied in his house.

This is not altogether a pleasant picture. He had enjoyed fully £ 10,000 a year for many years from his various offices; although it is only fair to remember that at his death his salary as First Lord of the Treasury, was no less than seven quarters in arrear. He had no expenses except those of homely hospitality. But his ideas of public and private finance differed widely. We are told that, when he could not pay his coachmaker, he would order a new carriage, as an emollient measure. And so with the other tradesmen. His household was a den of thieves. While he watched over the Treasury like Sully, he conducted his own affairs like Charles Surface.

In other respects, this year redounded greatly to his credit. He not merely gave an ardent support to Addington, but conducted the negotiations for a peace. By this he pledged himself to the preparation and defence of a treaty, any honour from which would entirely benefit his successor, and of which the blame only could devolve on himself : an episode surely rare in the annals of ex-ministers.

The preliminary articles were signed on the 1st of October 1801. We restored all the colonies that we had taken, except Trinidad and Ceylon. We agreed to give up Malta to the Knights of St. John. The fisheries in Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence were to be replaced on the same footing as before the war. Egypt, from which an expedition, despatched by Pitt, had driven the French just after his resignation, was given back to Turkey. In return, the French did little more than withdraw from Southern Italy. It was a treaty which could only, be justified on the plea of imperious necessity.

Much was conceded, for it was necessary to concede much. A prolonged armistice -- for with Napoleon it could be little more -- was absolutely needed. At any rate, it was hailed by the public with rapture, and it greatly strengthened Addington's Administration.

Grenville and Windham were, however, furious. They were joined by Spencer. Pitt's following was rapidly breaking up. Already Auckland, who was under every 'Conceivable obligation to Pitt, and whose daughter Pitt had nearly married, had snapped and yelped at the heels of the departing minister.

The new Government had succeeded to Pitt's majority, which they maintained at a general election in 1802; he had, indeed, pressed all those whom he could influence to join or support the Administration. Consequently, his personal following consisted only of those adherents, such as Rose and Canning, who would not take his advice.

The years of Pitt's retirement were mainly spent at Walmer, with occasional excursions to London and Bath. From April 1802 to May 1803 he does not appear to have entered the House of Commons.

In May 1802, he received the greatest compliment that has ever been paid to an English statesman. Sir Francis Burdett had moved an indirect, and Nicholls, the author of some paltry Recollections, a direct vote of censure on the late Government. Both were rejected by immense majorities. But such rejection did not satisfy the House; a mere negative was insufficient. By an overwhelming majority, against a minority of 52, it was carried: "That the Right Hon. William Pitt has rendered great and important services to his country, and especially deserved the gratitude of this House."

And immediately afterwards, there took place that spontaneous celebration of his birthday, which was repeated for a full generation afterwards. It was for that first banquet that Canning composed the exquisite verses, "The Pilot that weathered the Storm."

Under honours so unparalleled, Pitt could well remain in contented quiet at Walmer. That repose was greatly needed for his health, which, as has been seen, gave way in 1798, and now continued slowly declining to the end. He who had been at work by nine had become a late riser, he had ceased to answer letters; and the visits to Bath, commenced in October 1802, became a frequent and periodical necessity. In September 1802 he was again seriously ill.

But his enjoyment of Walmer was intense. No "disencumbered Atlas of the State" ever returned to country life with a keener relish. Shooting, and laying out his grounds, and the society of a very few old friends were his main amusements, and perhaps he was equal to no more. But, in the summer of 1803, the apprehensions of a French invasion gave a novel employment to his active mind; for he construed his office of Lord Warden in its ancient and most literal sense.

In August of that year he raised and drilled a volunteer corps of 3000 men. Amid the derision of his enemies and the apprehensions of his friends, he spent his days in feverish activity, riding and reviewing and maneuvering along the coast committed officially to his charge. He would not even go to London, unless the wind was in a quarter that prohibited a hostile landing.

Meanwhile, Addington and his colleagues drew their salaries with regularity, and, so long as peace lasted, there was no objection to the process. Pitt, indeed, pricked his ears at Addington's budgets; but he had promised support as long as possible, and remained silent rather than disapprove. It was not, however, in the nature of things that these relations could continue. Both men were surrounded by friends, whose interest it was to set them against each other.

Addington's followers saw that they could only keep their places, under his Administration, and by the exclusion of Pitt. Pitt's followers were indignant that his post should be so inadequately filled. There were, moreover, little causes of irritation; want of zeal in defence, inspired pamphlets, the petty political smarts so easily inflamed into blisters by the timely assistance of toadies. The Whigs of course stimulated Addington with extravagant eulogy to prevent his thinking of making way for Pitt; and the minister purred under the process.

When, however, it became clear that there was no possibility of preserving peace with Napoleon, all eyes, even Addington's, instinctively turned to Pitt. Men, so different as the Russian Ambassador and Wilberforce, spoke of ministers with undisguised contempt.

"Their weakness is lamentable," wrote the philanthropist. "Si ce ministere dure, la Grande Bretagne ne durera pas," remarked the more caustic Woronzow.

In March 1803, Addington sent Dundas (become Lord Melville) to Pitt, to propose that he should enter the ministry. Lord Chatham was to be Prime Minister,-a recognition of primogeniture which may fairly be called extravagant; Addington and Pitt joint Secretaries of State. Pitt, however, never learned the post destined for himself, for Melville never got so far. Already, no doubt, sufficiently conscious of the absurdity of the proposition, he broke down at the beginning.

"Really," said Pitt with good-natured irony, "I had not the curiosity to ask what I was to be."

It was profoundly galling to Addington to admit that Pitt could be more than his equal, and might possibly be his superior. But under stress of circumstance he went that length. In the ensuing month (April 1803) he renewed the negotiations in person. He offered the Premiership to Pitt; who in exchange requested Addington, with cruel ignorance or heedlessness of the Prime Minister's opinion of his own qualifications, to return to the Speakership, the duties of which he had so admirably discharged; but, as the Speakership of the House of Commons was filled, he proposed to create a similar position for him in the House of Lords.

Addington concealed his mortification; but begged that Grenville, Spencer, and Windham should not be included in the new Cabinet, as they had spoken disrespectfully of himself. Pitt declined all exclusions. On this the negotiation broke off, and with it all friendly relations between the principals.

In the succeeding month, war was declared against France, and a few days later Pitt resumed his attendance in the House of Commons to defend that measure. His reappearance created a unique sensation. There were some 200 new members in the House of Commons who had never heard him; many of whom had never seen him. As he walked up to his seat; the feeling was irrepressible, and there was a cry of I I Pitt, Pitt," as if proceeding from the very helplessness of showing emotion in any other way. Whitbread and Erskine were heard with impatience, and then he rose, greeted with a renewed storm of acclamation.

He spoke for two hours and a half, and the termination of his speech was received with round upon round of enthusiastic applause. But keen observers noted with pain his altered appearance and the sensible signs of his weakened health. The House immediately adjourned. On the succeeding night, Fox delivered a speech of three hours in reply, of which he says simply, "The truth is, it was my best."

There is little doubt that Pitt was at his best also, and that the fortunate members who sat in the House of Commons on the 23d and 24th of May 1803 heard the highest expression of English eloquence. During Pitt's speech, however, the reporters were unluckily excluded, and we have only a jejune abstract of Fox's. Our regret must be for ourselves and not for the orators: as few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record.

Some days afterwards, a vote of censure was moved on the ministry. Pitt interposed, and proposed that the House should proceed to the Orders of the Day, for he would not censure and could not defend. He found himself in a mortifying minority of 34 against 275, a curious contrast to his triumph less than a fortnight before. The same motion was defeated in the House of Lords by 106 to 18. Such was the influence of the King; for, in truth, Addington represented nothing else.

The strange contrast was between the moral and the voting power. A few days before this last division, Fox had proposed to accept the mediation of Russia. Hawkesbury, the Foreign Secretary, followed him and warmly opposed the proposition. Then Pitt rose and supported it. On which Hawkesbury at once assured the House that the Government would readily agree to it. A month later, Addington brought forward a plan for a renewal of the income tax, which he had abolished on the conclusion of peace. On this Pitt moved an instruction, aimed at a distinction that Addington had drawn between landed and funded property on the one hand, and all other forms of property on the other. Addington resisted this instruction with vigour; sharp words passed between the minister and his predecessor;

Pitt was beaten on a division by three to one. But the next day Addington came down to the House and accepted Pitt's suggestion. "His influence and authority in the House of Commons," writes Romilly, a strong opponent, "exceed all belief. The Ministry seems in the House of Commons, in comparison with him, to be persons of no account."

In the session which began in November 1803, the predominance of Pitt was equally apparent. On the question of the Volunteers he made some drastic proposals; and, the next evening, the Secretary at War brought in a Bill embodying them. But his relations to the Government were becoming more and more tense. He declined, however, to ally himself with others in opposition; for he felt that his position was unique and must be maintained free from unnecessary complications. Grenville, always more extreme in hostility, and anxious, some thought, to be independent of his late leader, entered into a definite alliance with Fox, and pressed Pitt to do the same. Pitt steadily refused. This was in January 1804, and was in fact the last confidential communication that passed between them; for the interchange of letters in May was of a very different character.

In February 1804 the King's mind once more gave way. Meanwhile, Addington's Ministry was drawing steadily to an unlamented end. He became peevish and irritable; his majority began to waver; the Whigs, formerly so friendly, openly ridiculed him; and his Chancellor, with the prescience then inherent in the woolsack, prepared for a change.

In March, Eldon sent a communication to Pitt, and they met. In the ensuing month Addington himself sent a message to Pitt, begging him to state through a common friend what could be done. Pitt haughtily replied that to the King alone, or to any person deputed by the King, would he make such a communication.

This was Addington's last signal of distress; it occurred on the 17th or 18th of April (1804). He now agreed to advise the Sovereign to commission Eldon to see Pitt.

On the 21st of April Pitt sent a long letter to the King, which was put into the royal hands on the 27th. By that time the division had taken place, which was to end the Ministry. On the 25th of April their majority had shrunk to 37-a majority, which many administrations would hail with pious rapture, but which betrayed so great a shrinkage as to convince, Addington that his position was untenable. On the 26th of April he communicated this decision to the King, and on the 29thto his colleagues. They concurred; and on the 30th Eldon called on Pitt, by the King's orders, to furnish a written scheme for a new Government.

In reply, Pitt urged the claims of Fox. He had drawn up the scheme of a cabinet on a broad basis, which still exists in his autograph. He was to hold the Treasury; but two out of the three Secretaryships of State were to be made over to Fox and Fitzwilliam, and Grey was to become Secretary at War, while for Grenville he reserved the significant sinecure of Lord President. But he had also formally stated in a letter to Melville, dated on the 29th of March 1804, that he could not force the King, recovering from an almost mortal malady, mental and bodily, to take as ministers persons he had so long proscribed.

"From various considerations, however," he wrote, "and still more from this last illness, I feel that a proposal to take into a share of his councils persons against whom he has long entertained such strong and natural objections ought never to be made to him, but in such a manner as to leave him a free option, and to convince him that if he cannot be sincerely convinced of its expediency there is not a wish to force it on him, I should therefore at the same time, let His Majesty understand distinctly, that if after considering the subject, he resolved to exclude the friends both of Mr. Fox and Lord Grenville, but wished to call upon me to form a government without them, I should be ready to do so, as well as I could, from among my own immediate friends, united with the most capable and unexceptionable persons of the present Government; but of course excluding many of them, and above all, Addington himself, and Lord St. Vincent."

This passage has been given at length; because it succinctly defines Pitt's position in Pitt's own words. Once more his kindness for the aged King, slowly sinking into permanent darkening of sight and mind, was to prove a cruel obstacle in his path.

The monarch himself received Pitt's letter with cold displeasure; he answered it in a letter, which betrayed the lingering influence of mental disease, in its violence and want of courtesy. He at once saw the weak joint in Pitt's armour -- the tenderness for himself; and loudly refused to have anything to do with Fox or Grenville; the mere proposal of their names was an insult. He even ignored Pitt's request for a personal interview. He could not get over the separation from Addington; poignant indeed must have been the parting between those congenial mediocrities.

At last, by the intervention of Eldon, a meeting with the King was arranged. The Sovereign, who had passed his former minister without notice the year before, now received him with astute cordiality. But, when they came to discuss the formation of the new Government, they were both put on their mettle. The contest raged for three hours. Never was Pitt more urgent; he seems to have forgotten in the heat of argument the limitations which he had set himself in his letter to Dundas. But never was the Kino, more stubborn. The contest ended in a compromise, which was in reality a victory for the sovereign. Grenville was admitted, but Fox excluded, though it was conceded that Fox might receive a foreign embassy. The monarch afterwards went so far as to say that he should prefer civil war to Mr. Fox. But the exclusion of the one confederate entailed the exclusion of the other, and so the King carried both points.

The now Minister at once communicated the result to Fox and Grenville. Their answers were characteristic. The lifelong enemy said that he did not care for office, but that he hoped his friends would join Pitt. The lifelong friend, colleague, and kinsman, persuaded Fox's friends to stand aloof, and stood aloof himself. It was the finest moment of Fox's life, and not the most auspicious of Grenville's.

It is fair to say that Grenville might well be sensitive to the charge that would have been brought against him of having used Fox as a ladder to return to power. But from this imputation he was released by Fox himself. The very objection urged against Addington's Administration was that the crisis required the strongest possible Administration. Grenville's action rendered the new one deplorably weak. Had he entered it with Fox's friends, it would have been exceptionally powerful -- a ministry of all the talents save one -- and the admission of Fox himself must soon have followed. These considerations would make Grenville's action difficult to explain; but there is another circumstance which makes it wholly inexplicable.

Exactly a year before, he had urged upon Pitt precisely the course which he now resented, and which Pitt now proposed to adopt. At the end of March, or the beginning of April, 1803, he went down to see his former chief at Walmer; and had a conversation or negotiation so elaborate that he himself wrote out and preserved an account of it.

"After this," he says, "I suggested to Mr. Pitt the great advantage which, in my view of the state of the country, he would derive from endeavouring to form a government on a still more extensive foundation than that of which he had spoken, and from trying the experiment of uniting in the public service, under circumstances of extreme public danger as the present, the leading members, not of the three parties who had been in his view, but of all the four into which public men were now divided. I stated the reasons I had for believing that, with regard to the old Opposition, this might be done by including in his arrangement only Lord Moira and Grey, and perhaps Tierney (the latter in some office subordinate to the Cabinet), and that Fox would be contented not to take any personal share in the government so formed; and on a subsequent day . . . I took occasion from that circumstance to renew this suggestion."

It is clear, then, that the plan of forming a Cabinet of all parties, excluding Fox, was so far from being repugnant to Grenville that it was his own proposal. It was supported by Fox's own wishes; it was at the moment the only practicable method of forming an efficient Administration. Grenville, however, threw over his own plan, and put every possible obstacle in the path of his old chief, who the year before had refused the Premiership at the price of Grenville's exclusion.

In this gloomy crisis of the fortunes of his country, be thought that the proper course was to hunt down the new Ministry with inveterate hostility, so that he might succeed it at the head of a mongrel, dubious assortment, of all the extremes of politics, and with the public men whom he had most bitterly denounced. But Pitt was not to be cowed.

"I will teach that proud man," he said, "that in the service and with the confidence of the King, I can do without him, though I think my health such that it may cost me my life." As indeed it did.

It must also be borne in mind as one of Pitt's greatest difficulties that the inclusion of Fox would have been profoundly repugnant to his own followers both in Parliament and in the country. It would have been a coalition enough to try any faith. In Scotland this feeling was strangely strong. Nothing less than Pitt's authority could have restrained it. Nevertheless, he persevered again and again in attempting to persuade the King to receive Fox.

To all such efforts, however, if politics be indeed an affair of principle and not a game to be played, there is an obvious limit. There is, moreover, a point of honour involved. A minister may find it necessary to yield to political forces beyond his control, and to change his policy. In doing so, he may ask for the admission to office of the representatives of that policy. It is a very different matter, however, for a minister pursuing consistently the po.icy which he has carried out for years, to demand, as an administrative necessity, the inclusion of his principal opponent in a Cabinet of which that opponent has been the inveterate enemy during its entire duration; who has criticised and resisted its every measure, tooth and nail, in letter and substance, in sum and in detail.

Such a proceeding is lacking in common dignity and common sense; it is a surrender in the present and a reproach to the past; no hostile vote can carry a deeper condemnation than so self -inflicted a blow. In an acute crisis, and for the pressing purpose of some supreme juncture, such a sacrifice may be made. But Pitt, who had administered Government for eightteen years, not merely without Fox, but under the unrelenting fire of Fox's opposition, could hardly say in the nineteenth that he could not and would not enter office without him. Such a declaration, carried to extremes, would have been a confession of previous error and present impotence that would have gone far to prove he was not fit to be a minister at all.

Chapter XIV: The End