Charles the Third
By J. L. HAMMOND Mn. HOBIIOUSE has found an admirable theme for his buoyant and dashing pen. Fox made more tad and wilful mistakes
in the course of his career than might have been expected from a man of commonplace ability. He was, by universal admission, a remarkable man, with such qualities of mind and character that even when his parliamentary position was at its worst he was a great moral power. Mr. Hobhouse sees him as the victim of his bad inheritance. He
was the great-great-grandson of Charles the Second, and in every emergency that needed cold common sense
and self-control his Stuart blood let him down. With the thick desirous lips and heavy eyebrows of Charles the Second he had inherited the fatalism, the lack of judgement, the recklessness, the intemperance, the consistent bad luck, the unreliability, the unteachableness of a Stuart." There was enough here to sink most men. But what was there on the other side ? " Fox's real genius is something that cannot be put down to heredity, unless, like Burke, we
trace it back to Henry of Navarre. was his own con- tribution to his destiny ; it was a contribution to the history of his century, and to the development of the national character. The central thing about Fox was not his ability nor his fearlessness, but his largeness of heart."
Mr. Hobhouse, working on this plot, has composed a vivid and significant study. Unfortunately he has been tempted to heighten the effects of a dramatic contrast by exaggeration. He makes Fox blacker by making his surroundings whiter than they were. Fox's mistakes in 1782 and 1783 were gross, implying defects not only of judgement but of temper too, but Mr. Hobhouse does not give a fair or full account of the circumstances in which they were made. For he thinks that Shelburne gave Fox no cause at all for offence or misgiving and that the suspicion which pursued Shelburne all his life was created by the Fox faction. Mr. Hobhouse gives no authorities. It is only necessary, as Mr. Drinkwater has shown, to look at the correspondence of George the Third to see that this view is untenable. Shelburne differed from Fox and Burke on the question which Burke had made the chief object of Whig policy. Burke and Fox may have been right or wrong in wanting to put the Royal Power on the basis it has occupied since the time of Victoria, but they were not wrong in thinking the issue important. If they had succeeded Catholic Emancipation would have been passed at the time of the Union and English as well as Irish history would have been very different. On this issue Shelburne took a different view, and though Fox and Burke were wrong in thinking he was ready to be the King's instrument, his proceedings were partly to blame for their suspicion. As for the theory that Shelburne's reputation as a bad Cabinet colleague comes from the slanders of Fox and Burke, we have the evidence of Pitt, who was under great obligation to him and yet after one short experience of serving with him firmly refused to have him as a cabinet colleague, though the policy on which he was embarking was one in which Shelburne could help him better than anybody else. It was one of the calamities of the eighteenth century that Shelburne, in- some respects its most enlightened statesman, never held office after the age- of 46. But it was Pitt's deliberate choice and not the venom of the Whigs that kept him out. '
England had at her service between 1780 and the death of Pitt in 1806 four men of exceptional ability with liberal views : Pitt; •Fox, Shelburne, and Burke. Unhappily they spent most of their time obstructing and demoralizing each
Pox.. .B3/ Chitistopher Hobhouse. (Constable. 12s. 6d.) other. Fox was largely to blame for this catastrophe, but few who have studied all the evidence will deny that the blame must be shared by each of the other three and by the King. Mr. Hobhouse's readers, after enjoying his rapid and vivid pictures of the headlong follies of a great man, will do well to turn to the sober and balarieed study of these events in the pages of Mr. Davis' Age of Grey and Peel.
Mr. Hobhouse says nothing about the vast expenditure of public money which was used to deStroy the Fox-North coalition at the polls in 1784. Wilberforce complained that after 1785 Pitt was content to govern by influence rather than by principle. The truth is that Pitt had to work with inferior men because the best men were outside ; his own character inevitably suffered. Mr. Hobhouse has an admir- able analysis of the effect on Fox of the little world of flattery and intrigue in which he moved. Unfortunately his great rival also lived on such an island. Lady Bessborough, who had seen from close quarters the failure of two efforts to combine the best men in time of crises, when Pitt formed his Govern- ment in 1804, and when Fox and Grenville formed their Government in 1806, put this truth in a letter to Leveson Gower. " I think Mr. Fox to blame, as I us'd to do poor Mr. Pitt, for controverting the intention of Nature and allowing weak little minds to sway Nobler ones."
Mr. Hobhouse's account of Fox's opposition to the French War suffers from the violence of his own feelings. "The French Revolution," he says, "produced no single leader who was not detestable ; while it destroyed much that was bad, it substituted nothing that was not worse, and nothing that it created outlasted the decade." His analogy with the war of 1914 is on slippery ground. Aulard at the time drew just the opposite conclusion from Mr. Hobhouse. He argued that in 1792-1794, the question at issue was whether an experiment in democracy was to be allowed in Europe, and that the fate of democracy was again in suspense in 1914. The battle of Valmy over which Mr. Hobhouse thinks it was so " wonderfully inept " of Fox to rejoice, was an important event in the defeat of the attempt to crush that experiment. -Even an age so disillusioned as ours cannot be quite as sure as Mr. Hobhouse that the world would have been better if that battle had gone the other way.
But if Mr. Hobhouse is too uncritical of others in his picture of Fox's follies, he pays to his greatness a tribute as warm as he has ever received. He says of him that he " increased men's faith in human nature." " 'His success is no measure of his importance." If I have not acted much,' he said, 6 you will allow that I have spoken much and I have felt more.' It was what he had felt in all his years of political impotence that endeared him even to those who differed from him the most." Lord David Cecil in his attractive little character study of Fox put this truth in another way. Fox was an amateur in politics whose' instincts were strangely right. A good example is to be seen in his speech on a minimum wage for agricultural labourers. Pitt talked stiff political economy and made the House reject it. Fox said that he disliked compulsion but the alternative to a minimum wage was the growing dependence of the labourers on charity and that was worse. Fox was almost always beaten in his lifetime but he ' left a legend that was victorious after his death. He is one of three men, extraordinarily different, who by their sheer force of character made a home within their own class for ideas and sympathies that were uncongenial and unexpected ; the others were Shaftesbury and Gladstone. But Fox's achievement was in one sense the greatest, for he formed a liberal party amid the panic of the French Revolution.
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