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THE GRAND WHIGGERY, Christopher Hobhouse

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To STEP ASIDE, Derek Verschoyle

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A WHIG CHRONICLE

By CHRISTOPHER HOBHOUSE Tins curious book consists of a chronicle of the doings of Whig society from the year 1774 to the year 1826—that is to say, from the marriage of Georgiana Spencer and the Duke of Devonshire down to the death of Lady Caroline Lamb. To each year of this period a separate chapter has been allotted, so that no really coherent treatment of the subject has been possible. Moreover, since each year averages only about eight pages, the effect of the whole is scrappy and dis- jointed. It is a book to be dipped into, like a keepsake, rather than to be read as a whole. Mrs. Villiers is careless as to historical details ; and she is prone to strange lapses of style. It is really not permissible to write about Lord Byron as " George Gordon " ; and there are limits to the misuse of adverbs. None the less, Mrs. Villiers has reduced a whole library of copious memoirs and correspondences into a manageable compass. The period is all too well documented : but to a stranger Mrs. Villiers' book would constitute a valuable guide and an interesting summary.

Grand though the Whig families undoubtedly remained, these were the years in which their sun was setting. The epoch of the " Venetian oligarchy " was ended ; a real King had succeeded after the two " Doges "; and during the whole half century and more of which Mrs. Villiers treats, the Whig party held office for less than three years. For their own consolation, this decline was easily explained as being due to the corrupt use of royal influence in favour of the Tories. Outsiders attributed it with more wisdom to the calamitous leadership of Charles James Fox, who was capable of piloting any vessel straight on to the rocks. But at this distance of time it is evident enough that the Whigs had ceased to rule the country merely because the country had ceased to require the Whigs. There is no need to look around for artificial causes. The King's influence, such as it was, never amounted to a decisive factor in the equilibrium of politics ; Fox's repeated misjudgements only expedited a dissolution which was naturally inevitable. Pitt and Liverpool were the men whom the country not only needed, but wanted also ; and the weight of public opinion held them in office, rather than the favour of the Crown or the accidents of an unreformed House of Commons.

Nothing remained to the Whigs but to enjoy the prodigious fruits of the preceding half-century of power. Their attempts at rehabilitation were unimpressive and never very hopeful. Lord Chatham had accepted the devotion of the mobile ; but he had never set himself to win it. The later generations of Whigs expected little and achieved less by their champion- ship of Wilkes or of Queen Caroline. It wounded their dignity to adopt these passing fashions, and their interests were never in the end advanced by them. When they were brought to the decisive question—whether or not they favoured an extension of popular representation?—only a small minority among them sincerely believed that the risk could be taken. The reform of Parliament was Pitt's cause, not Fox's. Fox had to ground his hopes of office on such contingencies as a regency of the Prince of Wales ; this possibility, and the endless prospects of patronage that it opened out, loomed larger in his eyes than the consideration of Pitt's enormous majority. The Prince himself could offer The Grand Whiggery. By Marjorie Villiers. (John Murray. r6s.) on his knees to make Canning his Prinie Minister if Lady Bessborough would become his mistress. But his first contact with the realities of government taught him that he was not living in the days of Robert Harley and Mrs. Masham. It was a realisation which never came to his Whig friends. They went on groping for the " backstairs " of old Whitehall long after the seat of government had moved.

The grandeur, therefore, of these Whigs was not that of public service and responsibility. It was a grandeur of Palladian villas and rounded periods and Gainsborough por- traits. It is their plumage for which they were admired ; and as time went on, even that faded a little. It is to be said in favour of Mrs. Villiers' chronological method that it enables the reader to follow a perceptible decline in the collective vitality of the Whigs. Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, who is naturally the central figure of the earlier years, did at least possess a certain reckless energy. Her gambling debts rose to nearly seven figures, and almost beggared the richest estate in England. Her own and her husband's infidelities did not peter out in little verses for the drawing-room ; they pro- duced their own lasting memorials in a whole population of bastards for the nursery. Her one excursion into the field of active politics was so vigorous that it entirely took the Tories by surprise ; and at her death twenty years later the Londoners had not forgotten the heroine of the Westminster Election.

Charles Fox was another such. The violence of his youthful dissipation might belong to any period. But the admirable courage, the Parliamentary skill, the persuasion and sincerity with which he defended the cause of the American rebels— these mark the last great effort of the Whigs. On the strength of that achievement, Fox continued to control the party for the remainder of his life. But the dividing point, at which the Whigs ceased to offer an alternative Government, came in the 179o's, when Fox attempted to repeat an earlier success by opposing to a war of self-preservation against France the same arguments which he had opposed to a war of prestige against America. From this time onwards the Whig Party was politically dead ; even in coalition with the less scrupulous Tories it could not cling to office for more than a few months.

The social repercussions of this tremendous collapse are very clearly shown in Mrs. Villiers' pages. In 1784, after the American War, it was with bravado and a certain chic that Mrs. Crewe and the Whig ladies sported the colours of General Washington. But in tilts nothing could be less smart, nothing more exasperating than Lady Holland being " very cross and absurd about Bonaparte, ' poor dear man' as she calls him." These sympathies, instilled by an uncle long since dead, were about as popular as those of Miss Unity Mitford at the present day.

Few recruits came to give allegiance to a party so entirely divorced from the feelings of the country. The Whiggism of William Lamb was a name only, just as the cheap antics of his wife merely travestied the patrician follies of the earlier generation. All the glamour had departed ; and not even the emergence of Byron could restore it. Fresh from the pro- vinces, he attached himself to Whig society because it was easy of access, and because of a leaning towards the elegant radicalism of Burdett. His was a very different code from that of the 1770's. He kissed and told ; every affair was the occasion for epigrams, amusing letters, discussions. At last Lord Melbourne could endure it no longer ; he complained to the Prince Regent himself ; Byron had not only ensnared his daughter-in-law, Caroline Lamb, but had entered into correspondence on the subject with her own mother and her husband's. The Prince was filled with wonder at this scheme of " taking the mother and mother-in-law as confidantes." He roared with laughter. " What would people have said if I had taken Lady Spencer into my confidence in the old days? " It was a just comment. The Whig society had become a set ; and when it lost its manners it had nothing left.

In none of them had time wrought a more lamentable change than in that Prince who had in r78o amazed the world with " the splendour of his youth and the majesty of his beauty." Of his early vices, it could be said that they lost half their evil by losing all their grossness. Forty years later, youth and beauty were the least of his deprivations. Little self-respect remained to the King who " never mentioned Mrs. Fitzherbert but with disgust and horror "—though at the last he wished to be buried with her miniature upon him.