BOOKS OF THE WEEK
A Hero and History
Lord Chatham : A War Minister in the Making. By 0. A. Sherrard. (Bodley Head. 25s.) WHAT a magnet has Chatham been for the assayers, or what a blazing light against which the moths of history have dashed their wings ! There was the dark Von Ruville, who would extinguish this light ; Basil Williams, who saw in it the undying flame of Empire ; specialists in logistics, Colonial administration or family character. Macaulay, whose party destroyed him, cannot escape the magician's wand ; busts and statues deck the capitals of American States he could not preserve. But the enigma remains. They ask and ask ; he postures and is still. Their last recruit, Mr. Sherrard, seems firmly enrolled in the Williams brigade. The modesty of his acknowledgements to his predecessor, and the character of his observations, especially on foreign affairs, forbid us to take his book as a massive contribution if merely considered as original research. It has, on the other hand, a real degree of the virtues of good biography. He has lived long with his subject, thought deeply about him, and has the enthusiasm without which a biography flags or flops. To appreciate this ardent effort at understanding, it is not, of course, necessary to agree with every particular part of his analysis. Mr. Sherrard, for instance, explains Pitt's later tergiversations, his secretiveness and his nervous break-down by a supposition that he was " cowed " at Eton. So many things have been put on those playing-fields. But if Waterloo, why not Quebec and Minden, and why derive Pitt's dependence on Temple from an inferiority or snob-complex acquired at Eton, any more than from the ties of blood and Temple's large balance at the bank ? For all that—and his relations with Henry Fox give us another example—it is in such diagnosis of Pitt's affinity to, or repulsion from, other human beings that the stronger part of this work seems to lie. Yet I must confess that his prefatory pages fill me with appre- hension. The present volume, we read, should be—and may be— the first of a trilogy. This takes us to 1755 ; a second would cover the great ministry, " a monument of glory for Pitt and England, with an undercurrent of shame for the fainthearts and intriguers " ; a third would deal with Pitt and Empire, " when the bunglers and the pettifoggers " hemmed him in. But what an alarming number of questions are thus begged, assumed or dismissed ! It assumes that Pitt's method of peace-making was impeccable ; his view, for instance, that France must be stripped bare, and expelled neck and crop from a maritime existence. It assumes that he could, and would, have averted the loss of America. The glare from the great presence is so blinding that Mr. Sherrard seems to miss the figures in the background—Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, Edmund Burke, Choiseul, and Vergennes. So even in this first volume history is shaped, or retrospectively fashioned, to make all things ready for the entrance of the Great Actor. So we have the " sterile legacy " of William III, the " malign " Chamberlain-pacifist figure of Bedford, the petty " tramping the fields of Flanders " in contrast to the blazoned path of Empire. The stage-furniture must be shifted to make possible the heaven-destined decisions of Pitt. "After all, the original cleavage between Whig and Tory sprang out of divergent views of foreign alliances." Well, well as Mr. Asquith used to say, we are getting on. When and if Mr. Sherrard reaches his later volumes, there are some propositions surely worth his reflection—that Chatham's tariff policy for America was no solution ; that his opposition to the Quebec Act was cheap and partisan ; that his handling of the Indian problem was feeble ; that his treatment of Rockingham, and indeed of all party, was petulant and obsolete.
If we turn to the earlier phase before us, deeply though its structure is marked by the rhythm that the author has imposed on it, we meet with some judgements that astonish us, and with more that leave us hanging in the wind. Poor Caroline of Ansbach, most long- suffering of wives and mothers, has become a " virago." The Young Pretender is " half Ariel, half Caliban." Early eighteenth- century society is drawn in darkest ink ; upper classes " largely given over to gambling and debauchery," middle-class influence " practically non-existent," and lower classes " riddled with disease and permeated with violence." All alike, poor dears, waiting the advent of the Great Actors, Pitt and Wesley. As for the subject that gives this book its sub-title, war and foreign policy, Pitt's influence was, in fact, so slight and his interventions so few, that the whole theme in a sense involves a fallacy. But if his inter- mittent anti-Hanoverianisrmand zeal for a Prussian alliance are to be exalted to a policy, the discussion calls for more intensive study of the State papers. Few subjects are so specialised, and hardly another so unreadable, as British foreign policy between 1735 and 1754. Yet this almost knock-about picture of Carteret as Harlequin and Newcastle as Pantaloon will not, I believe, commend itself to experts. The passiveness of Pitt, rather than the vision found by his biographers, is what strikes a layman.
It is, then, the last fifty pages of this volume that most readers will appreciate and probably most historians commend. The chapter on Pitt's most happy marriage is true and excellent ; the disentanglement of the cross-threads that were spun in the memorable year following Henry Pelham's death is searching and skilful. Though even here one might argue that the influence of other men is unduly minimised, and almost certainly too little weight allowed to what was still the final force in politics, the rival courts of St. James's, the Duke of Cumberland and of the Princess at Leicester House.
So we leave the great actor, preparing to rule through " Tory gentlemen on Whig principles." "A War Minister in the Making"? Rather, perhaps, a Minister still wholly to be made by war.
KEITH FF.n LNG.
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