[Sidenote: 1775—The Continental Army]

Already insurgent America had an army, and an army of investment. The rebels, whom Gage affected to despise almost as much as he was himself despised by General Burgoyne, were massed in numbers unknown to the loyalists before Boston, and the English soldiers were cooped up in the city they had crossed the seas to command. The colonial army was rude and rough, but earnest and resolute, and it had evolved generals of its own making, rough and rude as itself, but able, daring, and fearless. Israel Putnam, who killed a wolf once with his own hands in his wild youth, gripping it by the throat till he had choked its life out, had come to fight against the flag beneath which he had fought so well in the French wars. Nathaniel Greene had flung down his military books and caught up the sword, had abandoned the theory for the practice, and was beginning to make a name. Benedict Arnold, after a life as varied, as shady, and as adventurous as that of any picaroon in a Spanish story, leaped into fame as a daring spirit by the way in which he and Ethan Allen, at the head of a mixed force of Vermonters and New Englanders, had taken Fort Ticonderoga, on the great lakes, by surprise, and had endowed the dawning army with its captured cannon. Prescott, the hero of Breed Hill, was now a veteran soldier; and the names of Artemas Ward, of Schuyler, of Pomeroy, Heath and Thomas, Sullivan and Montgomery, Wooster and Spencer were becoming more than mere names to Englishmen in Boston and in London. Two Englishmen held rank as generals in the crude colonial army—the adventurer Charles Lee, whom some foolish people believed to be the real Junius, and Horatio Gates. There were few thoroughly worthless men in the young army, but it is painful to record that Lee and Gates were eminent among them. These were the generals of what was now to be called the {180} Continental Army. Happy in most of them, happy in much, it was happiest of all in this: that it had for its commander-in-chief the noblest man, who was to prove the greatest soldier, then living in the world.

[Sidenote: 1775—George Washington]

When Braddock died, the hero of a hopeless fight and the martyr of his own folly, the funeral service was read over his body by the young Virginian soldier who had fought by his side and had warned him against his rashness. To men in later years there seemed to be something prophetic, with the blended irony and pathos of prophecy, in the picture of that dead Englishman, his scarlet coat torn and bloody with so many wounds, lying in his grave while his American lieutenant read over him the words that committed so much wasted courage to the earth. At the time and hour the thing signified no more than the price of a petty victory of allied French and Indians, which the Virginian soldier was soon to avenge. After planting the banner of King George on the ruins of Fort Duquesne, Captain Washington sheathed his sword and retired from military into civil life, with as little likelihood as desire of ever carrying arms again. All he asked and all he anticipated was to live the tranquil life of a comfortable colonial gentleman. After a youth that had been vexed by many experiences of the passion of love he had married happily and wisely, and had settled down to a gracious rural life at Mount Vernon, on the banks of the Potomac River. He wished no better than to be a country gentleman, with a country gentleman's pleasures and pursuits—farming, hunting, fishing—with a country gentleman's friendships for neighbors like himself. He was a dutiful servant of his State; he was a member of the Virginia Houses of Burgesses for fifteen years after the fall of Fort Duquesne, and though he seldom played any part in debate he commanded the confidence and the esteem of his colleagues and of his fellow-citizens. He lived and enjoyed a peaceful, honorable, useful, uneventful life, and might have lived it to its end in dignified obscurity if a rash and headstrong sovereign over-seas had not found ministers too servile or too foolish to say him nay.

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The Continental Congress, conscious of Washington's ability, offered him the command of its improvised army. Washington accepted the duty, well aware of its gravity, its danger, its awful responsibility. He refused any pay beyond his actual expenses, and he entered upon a struggle whose difficulties were not all or nearly all due to the enemy in the sternest and noblest sense of duty to his countrymen and to the principles of liberty. At first, in his own words, he loathed the idea of independence. He only took up arms to defend cherished rights; the day was not yet, though the day was not far off, when the Virginian soldier would renounce his allegiance to the King whose commission he had carried and to the country from which his race stemmed. Washington's military genius soon showed itself in the use he made of the loose, incoherent, disorganized mass of men which was called the Continental Army. It was fortunate for the Continental cause that the English generals, penned up within the walls of Boston, had little idea of the obstacles Washington had to overcome, the opposition he had to encounter, the sore straits to which the want of everything essential to a besieging army drove him. But his indomitable courage, his unfailing coolness, his unconquerable resource overcame a sea of troubles that might well have swept even a strong man and a brave soldier off his feet. With regiment after regiment quietly disbanding as their term of service expired; with a plentiful lack of powder, of arms, of provisions, of uniforms; with a force that at moments threatened to dissolve into nothingness and leave him with a handful of generals alone beneath his insurgent flag, Washington never allowed the enemy, and seldom allowed a friend, to guess how near at times he came to despair. He raised troops somehow; he got provisions somehow; somehow he managed to obtain powder; somehow he managed to obtain arms. The want of weapons was so great that many bodies of men were only provided with pikes, and that Franklin was driven to suggest, and partly in a spirit of humanity, that American farmers fighting for their liberty should be armed with the bows and arrows of the red {182} men, and should strive to renew upon the fields of Massachusetts the successes of their ancestors, the yeomen of Agincourt, with their clothyard shafts.

The generals shut up in Boston knew nothing of the cares that harassed the mind of Washington. All they knew was that they were closely beleaguered; that they were cooped up in Boston by a large if irregular army, and that they could not get out. They affected, of course, to despise their enemy. At the private theatricals which were given to divert the enforced leisure of Lord Howe an actor who came on as a caricature of Washington, attired like a military scarecrow, never failed to please. Burgoyne was confident that sooner or later he could find that "elbow-room" the ungratified desire for which has served to immortalize his name. But neither Howe nor Burgoyne nor any one else could dissipate the ragged regiments that invested Boston, nor baffle the plans of the great soldier who commanded them. For nearly a year the world saw with wonder the spectacle of an English army confined in Boston, and an English fleet riding idly in the Charles River. Then the end came. Washington, closing in, offered Lord Howe, the English general then in command, the choice of evacuation or bombardment. The English general chose the former. The royal troops withdrew from Boston, taking with them the loyalist families who had thrown in their lot with the King's cause. The English ships that sailed from Boston were terribly overcrowded with the number of refugees who preferred flight, with all its attendant sorrows, to remaining in a rebellious country. The English fleet sailed away from Boston and the Continental Army marched in. So far the cause of King George was going very badly indeed; so far the rebellious colonists had failed to justify the confident prophecies of Lord Sandwich. With any other king and with any other ministers one such year's work would have been enough at least to induce them to reconsider their position. But the King was George the Third, and his ministers were what they were, and it was resolved that the war must go on.

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[Sidenote: 1775-81—The Declaration of Independence]

The war did go on. It lasted for five years more, in spite of the protests of every truly patriotic Englishman, in spite of proof after proof that nothing could break the spirit or crush the courage of the colonists. While in England Fox arrayed himself in the blue and buff that composed the uniform of the Continental Army, while the Duke of Richmond made it a point to speak, and with excellent reason, of the Continental Army as "our army," while the eloquence of Chatham and the eloquence of Burke were launched in vain against campaigns as idle as they were infamous, the war went stubbornly on. The King and his ministers proposed new measures of repression and expended vast sums in the purchase of Hessian regiments to dragoon the defiant colonists. Soon all pretence of loyalty had to be abandoned by the Americans. The statue of King George was dragged from its place of honor in Bowling Green, New York, and run into bullets to be used against his German levies. In the summer that followed the evacuation of Boston the rebellious colonies proclaimed their independence in the most memorable declaration of a people's right ever made by men. This was in 1776. The disastrous war had still five years to run.

The fortunes of the war varied. The early victories of the Americans were followed by a series of defeats which left Philadelphia in the hands of the British, and which would have broken the heart of any man of less heroic mould than Washington. Hope revived with a series of Continental victories. Aid came to America from abroad. France, Germany, Poland sent stout soldiers to fight for freedom—Lafayette, Von Steuben, Kosciusko. The English general Burgoyne surrendered with all his army at Saratoga. After the winter of 1777, when Washington and his army suffered all the rigors of Valley Forge, France acknowledged the independence of America, the British evacuated Philadelphia, and Paul Jones made himself forever famous by the way in which he and his ship "Le Bonhomme Richard," carried the American war to the coast of England. Again came colonial reverses. A {184} steady succession of English successes scarcely struck so hard a blow at the Continental cause as the treason of Benedict Arnold, who entered into negotiations with the British to betray his command. Washington had trusted and loved Arnold like a brother. "Whom can I trust now?" he asked in momentary despair when the capture of an English officer. Major Andre, and the flight of Benedict Arnold to the British lines revealed to him an undreamed-of treason which had threatened to undermine the colonial cause. But Benedict Arnold's crime had for its only result the death of a better man than himself, of Major Andre, who had by the laws of war to suffer death as a spy. There were other traitors and semi-traitors in the American army: Lee was certainly the first; Gates was almost, if not quite, the second. But Lee and Gates failed to do the mischief to which their base jealousy of Washington prompted them. The right cause triumphed. In 1781 another British army surrendered, the army of Cornwallis, at Yorktown. Even North was forced to recognize that this crushing disaster to the royal hopes and the royal arms practically ended the war. It was suspended in the following year, and in 1783, after much negotiation, which at times threatened to come to nothing, a treaty of peace was signed in France, and the American Republic took its place among the nations of the earth. It was for these negotiations that Franklin, as we have said, brought out from its obscurity that gala suit which he had worn for the last time when he stood at the bar of the House of Commons and listened to the brutal and foolish assaults of Wedderburn. Many days had passed since that day.

So ended one of the most unjust and one of the most foolish wars ever waged by England. It must never be forgotten that the war was in no sense an English war. The English people as a whole had then no voice to express itself one way or the other. Of those Englishmen whose voices had to be heard, the best and the wisest were as angry in their denunciations of the crime of the King and the King's ministers, and as cordial in their {185} admiration of Washington and his companions, as if they had been members of that Continental Congress which first in Philadelphia proclaimed the existence of a new nation.

[Sidenote: 1778—Death of the Earl of Chatham]

The fatal war which had cost the English King the loss of his greatest colonies, which had spilt a vast amount of blood and wasted a vast amount of treasure in order to call into being a strong and naturally resentful rival to the power of England, must be said also to have cost the life of the greatest English statesman of the century. The genius of Chatham had never been more nobly employed than in protesting with all the splendor of its eloquence against the unjust war upon the Americans and the unjust deeds which had heralded the war. But time, that had only swelled the ranks of the wise and sane who thought as Chatham had thought and found their own utterance from the fire of his words, had wrought a change in the attitude of a great statesman. Harassed by the disease that racked his body, the mind of Chatham had altered. The noble views that he had maintained in defiance of a headstrong king and a corrupt ministry had changed in the face of the succession of calamities that had fallen upon his country. The success that he had desired for the insurgent arms had been accorded, and he came to despair at the consequence of that success. He had been granted his heart's desire in full measure, and the gratification choked him. When it came to be a question of conceding to the colonists that formal recognition of an independence which they had already won, the intellect of Chatham revolted against the policy himself had fostered. He forgot or he forswore the principles which animated Burke, which animated Fox, which guided the course of Rockingham and inspired the utterances of Richmond. All he could see was an England humiliated by many defeats, an England threatened by many terrible alliances, and in the face of humiliation and of menace he forgot that both alike were the inevitable, the well-deserved fruit of injustice. Remembering that he had helped to make England great, he refused to remember that England would have been still greater if she had {186} followed the honorable course his wisdom had made plain to her. His proud, unhappy spirit could not consent to her dismemberment, a dismemberment which seemed to his fading intellect to be the equivalent to her ruin. He came from his sick bed, a ghastly image of decay, to offer the desperate protest of a dying man against surrender to the mutiny his own eloquence had fanned. "Come the four quarters of the world in arms and we will shock them." The spirit of Faulconbridge was strong in the ruined body of the statesman who was carried to his seat in the House of Lords by the son who bore his name and by the Lord Mahon who had married his daughter. His eagle face was turned against the men who had been his colleagues. His trembling hand pointed at them in condemnation. He gasped out a few sentences, almost inarticulate, almost inaudible, before he reeled in a fit upon the arms of those about him. He was carried from the House; he was carried to Hayes, and at Hayes a few weeks later the great career came to an end. His last battle was at least heroic. If his stroke was struck on the wrong side and for a cause his prime had done so much to baffle, it is not necessary to attribute his perversion entirely to the insidious ravages of the malady that had clouded his whole life. He could not bear to see the country that was in so eminent and so intimate a sense his country yield even to claims that were conspicuously right and just at the command of a league between England's rebellious children and England's enemy, France. There broke his mighty heart. In Chatham England lost one of the greatest of her statesmen, one of the most splendid of her sons. His life was passionately devoted to his country, his career one long struggle against a peculiarly bigoted, stubborn, and unwise King. Always hated by his enemies, often misunderstood by his friends, he showed while he lived a steadfast front alike against the enemies of England abroad and those worse enemies of England at home who filled the throne and the places about the throne. He was buried with great pomp and honor at Westminster, leaving behind him not merely the memory of an illustrious name, {187} but a name that the second generation was still to make illustrious.

[Sidenote: 1781—England and her lost colonies]

The folly of the King and the servility of his ministers resulted in what seemed to be almost an irredeemable catastrophe for England. Even those Englishmen who most sympathized with the struggle for American independence could not but feel a regret that men who might have been among the most glorious citizens of a great and united empire should be thus recklessly forced into an enmity that had deprived England of its most splendid possessions. The enemies of England, many and eager, believed her day was done, that her sun was setting, that neither her power nor her prestige would ever recover from the succession of disasters that began at Lexington and that ended in Paris. But the vitality of the country was too great to be seriously impaired even by the loss of the American colonies. From a blow that might well have been little less than fatal the country recovered with a readiness and a rapidity that was amazing. Men who in their youth heard their elders speak with despair of the calamity that had befallen their country lived to old age to learn that the wound was not incurable, and that England was greater, richer, prouder, and more powerful than she had ever been before. If she had lost the American colonies she had learned a lesson in the loss. The blow that might have stunned only served to rouse her to a greater sense of her danger and a livelier consciousness of her duty. If she had suffered much from rashness she was not going to suffer more from inaction, and it seemed as if every source of strength in the kingdom knit itself together in the common purpose of showing to the world that England still was England, although a part of her empire had passed away from her forever. There was no glory to be got for England out of the American war; it was wrong from first to last, wrong, unjust, and foolish, but when it ended it did not find her crippled, nor did it leave her permanently enfeebled in temper or in strength.

We may gather some idea of what risk wise men felt they were running from a famous speech of Edmund {188} Burke. He was striving to stay the determination of the Ministry to declare war upon the American colonies. He wished his hearers to appreciate the progress that America had made within living memory. He called imagination to his aid. He spoke of a statesman then living in the late evening of an honorable life. He pictured that statesman in the promise of his early dawn, saluted by the angel of his auspicious youth, and given the power to see into the future, so far as to the hour when Burke was speaking. "What," said Burke, "if while he was gazing with admiration on the then commercial grandeur of England the genius should point out to him a little speck, scarce visible in the mass of the nation's interest, and should tell him, 'Young man, there is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners, yet before you taste of death will show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world. Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life!' If this state of his country had been foretold to him, would it not require all the sanguine credulity of youth and all the fervid glow of enthusiasm to make him believe it? Fortunate man, he has lived to see it." If the genius of prophecy could have stood by Burke's shoulder then, and illuminated his noble soul with the knowledge that is the common possession of mankind to-day, would it not have required all the sanguine credulity, all the divine enthusiasm of genius to make him believe it?

[Sidenote: 1732-99—The death of Washington]

The war that gave the world a new nation and a republic greater than Rome added one of the greatest names, and perhaps the noblest name, to the roll-call of the great captains of the earth. No soldier of all those that the eyes of Dante discerned in the first circle, not even "Caesar, all armored with gerfalcon eyes," adorns the annals of antiquity more than George Washington illuminates the {189} last quarter of the eighteenth century. His splendid strength, his sweet austerity, his proud patience are hardly to be rivalled in the previous history of humanity, and have perhaps only been rivalled since his day by children of the same continent and of the same southern soil, who sacrificed qualities much akin to his own on a cause that, unlike his, was not the cause of freedom. "First in peace, first in war, and first in the hearts of his country-men." The phrase of Lee has been worn threadbare with iteration since it was first uttered, but it always rings true of the high-minded, unfaltering soldier and honorable, simple gentleman whose genius in war and whose modesty in peace made the republic of America an enduring fact in history. Long after the great soldier and good man had been laid to rest an English poet did him justice, and no more than justice, by writing that "the first, the last, the best, the Cincinnatus of the West, whom envy dared not hate, bequeathed the name of Washington to make man blush there was but one." Washington was made the first President of the American Republic in 1789, after resolutely resisting all suggestions to make himself king of the new commonwealth. He served for two terms of four years each, and then retired into private life, unembittered by the cruel and stupid ingratitude of the few and unspoiled by the reasoned and grateful homage of the many. He died in 1799 in his quiet home in Mount Vernon, while the King who still regarded him as a rebel had many years of his unquiet reign to live.



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CHAPTER LV.

THE GORDON RIOTS.

[Sidenote: 1778-80—Sir George Savile's Catholic Relief Bill]

In the year 1778 Sir George Savile earned for himself an honorable distinction by passing his measure for the relief of Roman Catholics. Sir George Savile was a man of advanced views; he fought gallantly in the House of Commons through five successive Parliaments, in which he represented York County, for all measures which he believed to be sincerely patriotic, and against all measures which he believed to be opposed to the honorable interests of his country. He gained the laurel of praise from Burke, who, in one of his famous Bristol speeches, spoke of him as a true genius, "with an understanding vigorous, acute, relined, distinguishing even to excess; and illuminated with a most unbounded, peculiar, and original cast of imagination." The man whom Burke thus generously praised deserved the praises. He strove earnestly against the American war. He enthusiastically supported Pitt's motion in 1783 for a reform in Parliament. He was the author of an admirable Bill for the Limitation of the Claims of the Crown upon Landed Estates. But his name is chiefly associated with his Bill for Catholic Relief, both because of the excellent purpose of the measure itself, and because of the remarkable outburst of fanaticism which followed it.

Sir George Savile's measure did away with certain restrictions, certain barbarous restrictions, as they now seem, upon English subjects professing the Catholic faith. The famous Act of the eleventh and twelfth years of King William the Third, the Act known as the Act for the Further Preventing the Growth of Popery, had instituted certain very harsh penal enactments against Catholics. {192} That Act Sir George Savile proposed largely to repeal. This was a measure of relief of no great magnitude, but it did at least recognize the common humanity of Catholic Englishmen with Protestant Englishmen; it did at least allow to Catholic Englishmen some of the dearest and most obvious rights of citizenship. The savage penal laws which for so long afflicted the sister island of Ireland were tempered and abrogated in this measure as far as England was concerned, and rumor spread it abroad that a similar relief was soon to be extended to the Catholics of Scotland. Straightway a Bill which had passed both Houses without a single negative aroused the fiercest opposition beyond the Border. The announcement of the recall of the Stuarts could not have spread a greater panic through the ranks of the Scottish Protestants. A violent agitation was set on foot, an agitation which could not have been more violent if the Highlanders had once again been at the gates of Edinburgh. An alarmist spirit spread abroad. All manner of associations and societies were called into being for the defence of a faith which was not menaced. Committees were appointed to inflame faction and serve as the rallying points of bigotry. Sectarian books and pamphlets of the most exaggerated and alarming kind were sown broadcast all over the country. The result of this kind of agitation showed itself in a religious persecution, which gradually developed into a religious war. The unfortunate Catholic residents in Edinburgh, in Glasgow, and in other great Scottish towns found themselves suddenly the victims of savage violence at the hands of mobs incited by the inflammatory utterances and the inflammatory propaganda of the Protestant committees. In the face of the disorder which a suggestion of mercy aroused in Scotland, the Government seemed to take fright, and to abandon all thought of extending the clemency of the Relief Bill to Scotland.

But the Scottish agitation against the Catholics soon spread across the Border, soon directed itself, not against the imaginary Bill which it might be the intention of the Government to pass, but against the actual Bill which the {192} Government had passed for the benefit of English Catholics. The bigoted bodies, societies, and committees in Scotland soon found their parallels in England. The English Protestant Association rose into being like some sudden evocation of a wizard, and chose for its head and leader the man who had made himself conspicuous as the head and leader of the movement in Scotland—Lord George Gordon.

[Sidenote: 1750-80—Lord George Gordon]

Lord George Gordon lives forever, a familiar figure in the minds of the English-speaking race, thanks to the picture drawn by Charles Dickens. Englishmen know, as they know the face of a friend, the ominous figure "about the middle height, of a slender make and sallow complexion, with an aquiline nose, and long hair of a reddish brown, combed perfectly straight and smooth about his ears and slightly powdered, but without the faintest vestige of a curl." It is a living portrait of that solemn gentleman in the suit of soberest black, with those bright large eyes in which insanity burned, "eyes which betrayed a restlessness of thought and purpose, singularly at variance with the studied composure and sobriety of his mien, and with his quaint and sad apparel." It fits well with all that we know of Lord George Gordon, to learn that there was nothing fierce or cruel in his face, whose mildness and whose melancholy were chiefly varied by a haunting air of "indefinable uneasiness, which infected those who looked upon him and filled them with a kind of pity for the man: though why it did so they would have had some trouble to explain." Such was the strange fanatic whose name was destined to be blown for a season throughout England, who was fated to stand for a moment visible in the eyes of all men, the idol of intolerance, the apostle of violence, of murder, and of fire, and then to fall most pitiably, most pitifully into the dust.

Lord George Gordon was still a young man when he became leader of the anti-Catholic agitation. He would seem in our days a very young man, for, as he was born in 1750, he was only thirty when the agitation reached its height. But a man of thirty was counted older than he {193} would not be reckoned, in an epoch when it was possible for a young man just come of age to lead the House of Commons. Lord George Gordon had led a somewhat varied life. He had been in the navy, and had left the service from pique, while the American war was still in its earliest stages, in consequence of a quarrel with Lord Sandwich concerning promotion. The restless energy which he could no longer dedicate to active service he resolved most unhappily to devote to political life. He entered Parliament as the representative of the borough of Ludgershall, and soon earned for himself a considerable notoriety in Westminster. He had very fierce opinions; he attacked everybody and everything; his vehemence and vituperation were seasoned with a kind of wit, and he made himself, if not a power, at least an important factor in the House of Commons. Indeed, it passed into a kind of proverb at St. Stephen's that there were three parties in the State—the Ministry, the Opposition, and Lord George Gordon. Parliament had seen before, and has seen since, many a politician fighting thus like Hal o' the Wynd for his own hand, but no one so influential for a season or so pernicious in his influence as Lord George Gordon.

It seems quite clear to those who review so strange a career at this distance of time that Lord George Gordon was of deranged intellect. It does not need the alleged contrast between his professions and his practice to enforce this conclusion. Many men have affected the religious habit and the religious bearing while their lives were privately profligate without deserving to be called insane except in the sense in which any criminal excess may be regarded pathologically as a proof of madness. Even if it were true that the long-haired and black-habited George Gordon were the debauched profligate that Hannah More and Horace Walpole maintained him to be, he might find fellow-sinners of unquestioned sanity. But the conduct of his public life goes to prove that his wits were diseased. His behavior in the House, when it was not intolerably tedious, was characterized by a grotesque buffoonery which men looked upon as laughable {194} or pitiable according to their tempers, but which they had not yet learned to look upon as dangerous. When he denounced the King as a Papist, when he declared that the time would come when George Gordon would be able to dictate to the Crown and Parliament, when he occasionally interrupted his wild utterances to break into floods of tears, men sneered or yawned or laughed. They were soon to learn that the man was something more than divertingly contemptible.

In the excitement that followed on the passing of the relief measure Lord George Gordon found his opportunity for being actively noxious. A gloomy fanaticism in Scotland took fire at the fear lest kindred relief should be extended to the North Briton, and, as we have said, displayed itself in savage speech and savage deed. In the press and from the pulpit denunciations of the Catholics streamed. The Synod of Glasgow solemnly resolved that it would oppose any Bill brought into Parliament in favor of Scottish Catholics. In Edinburgh and in Glasgow houses were wrecked and lives menaced. In Glasgow a worthy potter, Mr. Bagnal, who had brought from Staffordshire its famous art, had his property wholly destroyed. In Edinburgh the house of a Catholic priest was wrecked in obedience to a brutal handbill which called upon its readers to "take it as a warning to meet at Leith Wynd, on Wednesday next, in the evening, to pull down that pillar of popery lately erected there." The "pillar of popery" was the dwelling occupied by the priest, which was duly wrecked in obedience to the bidding of the nameless "Protestant" who signed the manifesto. It is curious to note a postscriptum to the handbill, which ran thus: "Please to read this carefully, keep it clean, and drop it somewhere else. For King and country.—UNITY." The means which were adopted to spread fanaticism in Scotland were carefully followed when the time came for carrying the agitation into England.

[Sidenote: 1778-80—The English "Protestant Association"]

It was indeed not necessary to be a Catholic to call down the fury of fanatical persecution. To have expressed any sympathy for Catholicism, to have taken part in any way, {195} no matter how indirect, in the advocacy of the relief measure, was enough to mark men out for vengeance. Dr. Robertson, the historian, was threatened because he advocated tolerance in religious matters. A lawyer named Crosbie was denounced merely because he had in the way of his regular business drawn up the Bill intended for Parliament. It was inevitable that the action of intolerance in Scotland should come before the notice of Parliament. Wilkes, always ostentatious in the cause of liberty, called upon Dundas to bring in his relief measure for Scotland. When Dundas declared that it was better to delay the measure until cooler judgment might prevail, Wilkes denounced him for allowing Parliament to truckle to riot, and the denunciation found support in the actions of Burke and of Fox. Lord George Gordon had found his opportunity. He assailed Fox; he assailed Burke. He declared that every non-Catholic in Scotland was ready to rise in arms against Catholic relief, and that the rebels had chosen him for their leader. He raged and vapored and threatened on the floor of the House. But he did more than rage and vapor and threaten. Whether of his own motion, or prompted by others, he formed a "Protestant Association" in England. Of this, as of the similar Scottish Association, he was declared the head, and this accumulation of honors wholly overthrew his intelligence. An amiable writer has declared that "it would be much beneath the dignity of history to record the excesses of so coarse a fanatic but for the fatal consequences with which they were attended." The amiable defender of a detestable phrase does not understand that it was the excesses of the fanatic that led to the fatal consequences, and that Lord George Gordon, as the ostensible head and conspicuous cause of one of the gravest events of the history of England in the eighteenth century, is in no sense beneath the "dignity of history." The business of history is with him and with such as he, as well as with the statelier, austerer figures who sanely shape the destinies of the State. There was plenty of fanaticism abroad in England; it was reserved for Lord George Gordon to bring it together into {196} a single body, to organize it, and to employ its force with a terrible if temporary success. He issued an insane proclamation calling upon men to unite against Catholicism; he held a great meeting of the Protestant Association at Coachmakers' Hall, at which with a kind of Bedlamite-brilliancy he raved against Catholicism and lashed the passions of his hearers to delirium. It was resolved to hold a huge meeting of the Protestant Association in St. George's Fields on June 2. At its head Lord George Gordon was to proceed to the House of Commons and deliver the petition against Catholic relief. All stanch Protestants were to wear blue cockades in their hats to mark out the faithful from the unfaithful.

[Sidenote: 1780—The Lord George Gordon riots]

On June 2, 1780, the meeting was held. Lord George Gordon had announced in his speech at the Coachmakers' Hall that he would not deliver the petition if the meeting were less than twenty thousand strong. The number of Lord George's limit was enormously exceeded. It is said that at least sixty thousand persons were present in St. George's Fields on the appointed day, and some chroniclers compute the number at nearer one hundred thousand than sixty thousand. It is curious to note in passing that a Roman Catholic cathedral stands now on the very site where this meeting was held. After the meeting had assembled it started to march six abreast to Westminster. The hand of the great romancer who has made George Gordon live has renewed that memorable day, with its noise, its tumult, its tossing banners, its shouted party cries, its chanted hymns, its military evolutions, its insane enthusiasms, its dangerous latent passions. Gibbon, who was then a member of the House of Commons, declared that the assemblage seemed to him as if forty thousand Puritans of the days of Cromwell had started from their graves. The forty thousand Puritans were escorted by and incorporated with a still greater body of all the ruffianism and scoundrelism that a great city can contribute to any scene of popular agitation. What fanaticism inspired rowdyism was more than ready to profit by. The march to Westminster and the arrival at Westminster form one of {197} the wildest episodes in the history of London. By three different routes the blue-cockaded petitioners proceeded to Westminster, and rallied in the large open spaces then existing in front of the Houses of Parliament. The innate lawlessness of the assemblage soon manifested itself in a series of attacks upon the members of both Houses who were endeavoring to make their way through the press to their respective Chambers. It is one more example of the eternal irony of history that, while the mob was buffeting members of the Lower House, and doing its best to murder members of the Upper House, while a merciless intolerance was rapidly degenerating into a merciless disorder, the Duke of Richmond was wholly absorbed in a speech in favor of annual parliaments and universal suffrage. Member after member of the House of Lords reeled into the Painted Chamber, dishevelled, bleeding, with pale face and torn garments, to protest against the violence of the mob and the insult to Parliamentary authority. Ashburnham, Townshend and Willoughby, Stormont and Bathurst, Mansfield, Mountfort, and Boston, one after another came in, dismayed victims of and witnesses to the violence that reigned outside. Bishop after bishop entered to complain of brutal ill-treatment. But the Duke of Richmond was so wrapped up in his own speech and its importance that he could only protest against anything which interrupted its flow. It is agreeable to find that imbecility and terror did not rule unchallenged over the Upper House that day. One account, that of Walpole, who is always malicious, represents Lord Mansfield as sitting upon the woolsack trembling like an aspen. Another, more creditable and more credible, declares that Lord Mansfield showed throughout the utmost composure and presence of mind. About the gallantry of Lord Townshend there can be no doubt. When he heard that Lord Boston was in the hands of the mob, he turned to the younger peers about him, reminded them of their youth, and the fact that they wore swords, and called upon them to draw with him and fight their way to the rescue of their brother peer. It was at least a gallant if a hopeless suggestion. What could the {198} rapiers of a score of gentlemen avail against the thousands who seethed and raved outside Westminster Hall? The solemn Duke of Richmond interfered. If the Lords went forth to face the mob he urged that they should go as a House and carrying the Mace before them. On this a debate sprang up, while the storm still raged outside. A Middlesex magistrate, called to the bar in haste, declared that he could only offer six constables to meet the difficulty. A proposal to call upon the military power was fiercely opposed by Lord Shelburne. Under such conditions the Peers did nothing, and in the end retired, leaving Lord Mansfield alone in his glory.

[Sidenote: 1780—Lord George Gordon at Westminster]

If things went badly in the Upper House, they went still worse in the Lower House. While members trying to gain entrance suffered almost as much ill-treatment as the Peers at the hands of the mob, the Commons' House was much more closely leaguered than the House of Lords. For it was in the Commons' House that the petition was to be presented. It was in the Commons' House that Lord George Gordon, pale, lank-haired, black-habited, with the blue cockade in his hat, was calling upon the Commons to receive immediately the monstrous petition. Every entrance to the House was choked with excited humanity. The Lobby itself was overflowing with riotous fanatics, who thundered at intervals upon the closed doors of the Chamber with their bludgeons. Shrieks of "No Popery," and huzzas for Lord George Gordon filled the place with a hideous clamor strangely contrasting with the decorum that habitually reigned there.

Lord George Gordon did not cut a very heroic figure on that memorable day at Westminster. He was perpetually rushing from his place to the door of the House to repeat to rowdyism in the Lobby what different members had said in the debates. At one time he denounced the Speaker of the House; at another, Mr. Rous; at another, Lord North. Occasionally he praised a speaker, and his praise was more ludicrous than his condemnation. At one moment, when Lord George was at the door communicating with the crowd, Sir Michael le Fleming came up to him {199} and tried to induce him to return to his seat. Lord George immediately began caressing Sir Michael le Fleming in a childish, almost in an imbecile way, patting and stroking him upon the shoulders, and expressing inarticulately a pitiful kind of joy. He introduced Sir Michael le Fleming to the mob as a man who had just been speaking for them. A little later Lord George again addressed the crowd, this time from the little gallery, when he stimulated their passions by appeal to the example of the Scotch, who had found no redress till they had pulled down the Mass-houses. Probably no stranger scene has ever been witnessed at Westminster than this of the pale-faced fanatic and madman, with the blue cockade in his hat, running backward and forward from the Chamber to the door of the House, delivering inflammatory addresses to the mob that raged in the Lobby, and stimulating them by his wild harangues to persevere in their conduct, and to terrify the King and the Parliament into obedience to their wishes. The names of the members who spoke against the petition he communicated to the shrieking throng; their utterances he falsely reported.

It is deeply interesting to note a fact which has escaped the notice of not merely the most conspicuous historians of the time, but also the keen eye of the great novelist who studied the event. It is recorded in the "Annual Register" for the year 1780 that among the members whose names Lord George Gordon denounced to the raving crowd in the Lobby the name of Mr. Burke had especial prominence. It is curious to picture the imbecile fanatic standing upon the steps leading to the Strangers' Gallery and invoking the fury of the fanatic and the lawless against the greatest public man of his age.

For a while Lord George Gordon was suffered to rant unimpeded. At last Colonel Holroyd, seizing hold of him, threatened to move for his immediate committal to Newgate, while Colonel Gordon, with a blunter and yet more efficacious eloquence, declared that if any of the rioters attempted to force his way past the door of the House, he, Colonel Gordon, would run his sword through {200} the body, not of the invader, but of Lord George Gordon. As Colonel Gordon was a kinsman of Lord George's, it may be that Lord George knew sufficient of his temper to believe his word and was sufficiently sane to accept his warning. At least there came a pause in his inflammatory phrases, and shortly afterward the news of the arrival of a party of Horse and Foot Guards did what no persuasions or entreaties could effect. It cleared the Lobby and the approaches to the House. Under conditions of what might be called comparative quiet the division on Lord George Gordon's proposal for the immediate reception of the petition was taken, and only found six supporters against a majority of one hundred and ninety-two.

[Sidenote: 1780—Spread of the Gordon Riots]

But mischief was afoot and began to work. The mob that had been dispersed from Westminster broke up into different parties and proceeded to expend its fury in the destruction of buildings. The hustling of peers, the bonneting of bishops, the insulting of members of Parliament, all made rare sport; but the demolition of Catholic places of worship promised a better, and suggested exquisite possibilities of further depredation. The Catholic chapels in Duke Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and in Warwick Street, Golden Square—the one belonging to the Sardinian, the other to the Bavarian Minister—were attacked, plundered, set fire to, and almost entirely destroyed. The military were sent for; they arrived too late to prevent the arson, but thirteen of the malefactors were seized and committed to Newgate, and for the night the mob was dispersed. It was not a bad day's work for the rioters. Parliament had been insulted, the Government and the very Throne menaced. In two parts of the town Catholic buildings, under the protection of foreign and friendly Powers, stood stripped and blackened piles. Riot had faced the bayonets of authority—had for a moment seemed ready to defy them. Yet at first nobody seems to have taken the matter seriously or gauged its grave significance. Neither the Catholics, against whom the agitation was levelled, nor the peers and prelates and members of Parliament who had been so harshly treated seemed to understand the {201} sternness of the situation. There was a sense of confidence in law and order, a feeling of security in good administration, which lulled men into a false confidence.

This false confidence was increased by the quiet which reigned over Saturday, June 3. Parliament met undisturbed. An address of Lord Bathurst's, calling for a prosecution of "the authors, abettors, and instruments of yesterday's outrages," was carried after a rambling and purposeless debate, and the House of Lords adjourned till the 6th, apparently convinced that there was no further cause for alarm. This public composure was rudely shaken on the following day, Sunday, June 4. The rioters reassembled at Moorfields. Once again the buildings belonging to Catholics were ransacked and demolished; once again incendiary fires blazed, and processions of savage figures decked in the spoils of Catholic ceremonial carried terror before them. The Lord Mayor, Kennett, proved to be a weak man wholly unequal to the peril he was suddenly called upon to face. There were soldiers at hand, but they were not made use of. One act of resolution might have stayed the disorder at the first, but no man was found resolute enough to perform the act; and rapine, raging unchecked, became more audacious and more dangerous.

On the Monday, though the trouble grew graver, nothing was done to meet it beyond the issuing of a proclamation offering a reward of five hundred pounds for the discovery of the persons concerned in the destruction of the chapels of the Bavarian and Sardinian Ambassadors. The mob gathered again, bolder for the impunity with which it had so far acted. Large bodies of men marched to Lord George Gordon's house in Welbeck Street and paraded there, displaying the trophies stripped from the destroyed chapels in Moorfields. Others began work of fresh destruction in Wapping and in Smithfield. Sir George Savile's house in Leicester Fields, and the houses of Mr. Rainsforth of Clare Market, and Mr. Maberly of Little Queen Street, respectable tradesmen who had been active in arresting rioters on the Friday night, were sacked and their furniture burned in huge bonfires in the streets. The {202} Guards who had the task of escorting the prisoners taken on Friday to Newgate were pelted.

On the Tuesday authority seemed to have wakened up to a vague sense that the situation was somewhat serious. Parliament reassembled to find itself again surrounded and menaced by a mob, which wounded Lord Sandwich and destroyed his carriage. Lord George Gordon attended the House, but even his madness appeared to have taken alarm, for he had caused a proclamation to be issued in the name of the Protestant Association disavowing the riots. As he sat in his place, with the blue cockade in his hat, Colonel Herbert, who was afterwards Lord Carnarvon, called to him from across the House, telling him to take off the badge or he would cross the floor and do it himself, Lord George's vehemence did not stand him in good stead where he himself was menaced. He had no following in the House. Colonel Herbert was a man of the sword and a man of his word. Lord George Gordon took the cockade from his hat and put it in his pocket. If authority had acted with the firmness of Colonel Gordon on the Friday and of Colonel Herbert on the Tuesday, the tumult might have been as easily cowed as its leader. But still nothing was done. The House of Commons made a half-hearted promise that when the tumult subsided the Protestant petition would be taken into consideration, and a suggestion that Lord George ought to be expelled was unfavorably received.

From that moment, and for two long and terrible days, riot ruled in London. In all directions the evening sky was red with flames of burning buildings; in all directions organized bands of men, maddened with drink, carried terror and destruction. The Tuesday evening was signalized by the most extraordinary and most daring deed that the insurgents had yet done. Some of the men arrested on the Friday had been committed to Newgate Prison. To Newgate Prison a vast body of men marched, and called upon Mr. Akerman, the keeper, to give up his keys and surrender his prisoners. His firm refusal converted the mob into a besieging army.

{203}

[Sidenote: 1780—The burning of Newgate Prison]

Two men of genius have contributed to our knowledge of the siege of Newgate. Crabbe, the poet, was at Westminster on the Tuesday, and after seeing all the disturbance there he made his way with the current of destruction towards Newgate, and witnessed the astonishing capture of a massive prison by a body of men, unarmed save with such rude weapons of attack as could be hurriedly caught up. The prison was so strong that, had a dozen men resisted, it would have been almost impossible to take it without artillery. But there was nobody to resist. Mr. Akerman, the keeper, acted with great courage, and did his duty loyally, but he could not hold the place alone. Crowbars, pickaxes, and fire forced an entrance into the prison. "Not Orpheus himself," wrote Crabbe, "had more courage or better luck" than the desperate assailants of the prison. They broke into the blazing prison, they rescued their comrades, they set all the other prisoners free. Into the street, where the summer evening was as bright as noonday with the blazing building, the prisoners were borne in triumph. Some of them had been condemned to death, and never were men more bewildered than by this strange reprieve. The next day Dr. Johnson walked, in company with Dr. Scott, to look at the place, and found the prison in ruins, with the fire yet glowing. The stout-hearted Doctor was loud in his scorn of "the cowardice of a commercial place," where such deeds could be done without hinderance.

While one desperate gang was busy with the destruction of Newgate, other gangs, no less desperate, were busy with destructive work elsewhere. The new prison in Clerkenwell was broken open by one crowd, and its prisoners set free. Another assailed Sir John Fielding's house, and burned its furniture in the streets. A third attacked the house of Lord Mansfield in Bloomsbury Square. This last enterprise was one of the most remarkable and infamous of the bad business. Lord Mansfield and his wife had barely time to escape from the house by a back way before the mob were upon it. The now familiar scenes of savage violence followed. The doors were broken open, the {204} throng poured in, and in a comparatively short time the stately mansion was a ruin. Lord Mansfield's law library, one of the finest in the kingdom, and all the judicial manuscripts made by him during his long career, were destroyed. A small detachment of soldiers came upon the scene too late to prevent the destruction of the house or to intimidate the mob; although, according to one account, the Riot Act was read and a couple of volleys fired, with the result that several of the rioters were shot and wounded. It is curious to find that the reports of the intended purposes of the wreckers drew persons of quality and curiosity to Bloomsbury Square in their coaches as to a popular performance, and that the destruction of Lord Mansfield's house proved more attractive than the production of a new play.

[Sidenote: 1780—Public alarm in London]

The Wednesday was no less terrible than the Tuesday. The rioters seemed to think that, like so many Mortimers, they were now Lords of London. They sent messages to the keepers of the public prisons of the King's Bench, the Fleet, and to prominent Catholic houses, informing them of the precise time when they would be attacked and destroyed. By this time peaceable London was in a state of panic. All shops were shut. From most windows blue banners were thrust out to show the sympathy of the occupants with the agitation, and the words "No Popery" were scrawled in chalk across the doors and windows of every householder who wished to protect himself against the fanaticism of the mob. At least one enterprising individual got from Lord George Gordon his signature to a paper bidding all true friends to Protestants to do no injury to the property of any true Protestant, "as I am well assured the proprietor of this house is a stanch and worthy friend to the cause." But there were plenty of houses where neither fear nor fanaticism displayed blue banner or chalked scrawl, houses whose owners boasted no safeguard signed by Lord George Gordon, and with these the mob busied themselves. The description in the "Annual Register" is so striking that it deserves to be cited; it is probably from the pen of Edmund Burke: "As soon {205} as the day was drawing towards a close one of the most dreadful spectacles this country ever beheld was exhibited. Let those who were not spectators of it judge what the inhabitants felt when they beheld at the same time the flames ascending and rolling in clouds from the King's Bench and Fleet Prisons, from New Bridewell, from the toll-gates on Blackfriars Bridge, from houses in every quarter of the town, and particularly from the bottom and middle of Holborn, where the conflagration was horrible beyond description. . . . Six-and-thirty fires, all blazing at one time, and in different quarters of the city, were to be seen from one spot. During the whole night, men, women, and children were running up and down with such goods and effects as they wished to preserve. The tremendous roar of the authors of these terrible scenes was heard at one instant, and at the next the dreadful report of soldiers' musquets, firing in platoons and from different quarters; in short, everything served to impress the mind with ideas of universal anarchy and approaching desolation."

From the closing words of this account it is plain that at last authority had begun to do its duty and to meet force with force. Terrorized London shook with every wild rumor. Now men said that the mob had got arms, and was more than a match for the military; now that the lions in the Tower were to be let loose; now that the lunatics from Bedlam were to be set free. Every alarming rumor that fear could inspire and terror credit was buzzed abroad upon that dreadful day, when the servants of the Secretary of State wore blue cockades in their hats and private gentlemen barricaded their houses, armed their people, and prepared to stand a siege. Horace Walpole found his relative, Lord Hertford, engaged with his sons in loading muskets to be in readiness for the insurgents. Everybody now shared in the general alarm, but the alarm affected different temperaments differently. Some men fled from town; others loaded guns and sharpened swords; others put their hands in their pockets and lounged, curious spectators, on the heels of riot, eager to observe {206} and willing to record events so singular and so unprecedented.

It is pleasant to be able to chronicle that the King showed an especial courage and composure during that wild week's work. George the Third never lost head nor heart. To do his House justice, personal courage was one of their traditions, but the family quality never showed to better advantage than in this crisis. If indeed George the Second were prepared, as has been hinted, to fly from London on the approach of the young Pretender, George the Third displayed no such weakness in the face of a more immediate peril. The peril was more immediate, it was also more menacing. No man could safely say where bad work so begun might ultimately pause. What had been an agitation in favor of a petition might end in revolution against the Crown. Outrages that had at first been perpetrated with the purpose of striking terror only were changing their character. Schemes of plunder formed no part of the early plans of the rioters; now it began to be known that the rioters had their eyes turned towards the Bank of England and were planning to cut the pipes which provided London with water. With a little more laxity on the part of authority, and a few more successes on the part of the mob, it is possible that Lord George Gordon might have found himself a puppet Caesar on the shields of Protestant Praetorians.

[Sidenote: 1780—Stern action by the authorities]

That nothing even approaching to this did happen was largely due to the courage and the determination of the Sovereign. The Administration vacillated. The Privy Council, facing an agitation of whose extent and popularity it was unaware, feared to commit itself. George felt no such fear. Where authority fell back paralyzed in the presence of a new, unknown, and daily increasing peril, he came forward and asserted himself after a fashion worthy of a king. If the Privy Council would not act with him, then he would act without them. He would lead out his Guards himself and charge the rioters at their head. The courage which had shown itself at Dettingen, the courage which had been displayed by generations of rough German {207} electors and Italian princes, showed itself gallantly now and saved the city. The King lamented the weakness of the magistrates, but at least there was one, he said, who would do his duty, and he touched his breast with his hand. George the Third is not a heroic figure in history, but just at that moment he bore himself with a royal honor which ranked him with Leonidas or Horatius. If there are to be kings at all, that is how kings ought to behave. George was fortunate in finding a man to stand by him and to lend to his soldierly courage the support of the law. Wedderburn, the Attorney-General, declared, with all the authority of his high position, that in cases where the civil power was unable to restrain arson and outrage, it was the duty of all persons, civil as well as military, to use all means in their power to deal with the danger. The reading of the Riot Act was nugatory in such exceptional conditions, and it became the duty of the military to attack the rioters. Thus supported, the King ordered Wedderburn to write at once to Lord Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief, authorizing him to employ the military without waiting for authority from the civil powers. Wedderburn, who in a few days was to become Chief Justice and Lord Loughborough, wrote the order, kneeling upon one knee at the council table, and from that moment the enemy was grappled with in grim earnest.

It was high time. No less than two unsuccessful attacks had been made during that day upon the Bank of England, but precautions had been taken, and the successes of Newgate were not repeated in Threadneedle Street. The assailants were repulsed on each occasion by the military, who occupied every avenue leading to the Bank. Had the attack upon the Bank succeeded it is impossible to form any estimate of what the result might have been. But it failed, and with that failure the whole hideous agitation failed as well. But the crowning horror of the whole episode was reserved for that final day of danger. In Holborn, where riot raged fiercest, stood the distilleries of Mr. Langdale, a wealthy Roman Catholic. The distilleries were attacked and fired. Rivers of spirit ran in all the {208} conduits and blazed as they ran. Men, drunk with liquor and maddened with excitement, kneeled to drink, and, drinking, fell and died where they lay. By this time the soldiers were acting vigorously, driving the rabble before them, shooting all who resisted, as some did resist desperately. The fire that had grown during the week was quenched at last in blood. On the Thursday morning London was safe, comparatively quiet, almost itself again. The shops indeed were still closed, but mutiny had lived its life. There was a short, sharp struggle during the day in Fleet Street, between some of the fanatics and the Guards, which was stamped out by repeated bayonet charges which killed and wounded many. Everywhere were blackened spaces, smouldering ruins, stains of blood, and broken weapons, everywhere the signs of outrage and of conflict. But the incendiary fires were quenched and with them the fire of insurrection. The riots were at an end. The one wish of every one was to obliterate their memory as speedily as might be. The stains of blood were quickly removed from the walls of the Bank of England, from the roadway of Blackfriars Bridge. The marks of musket shots were swiftly effaced from the scarred buildings.

[Sidenote: 1780—Suppression of the Gordon Riots]

It was never fully known how far the rioters themselves suffered in the suppression of the disorder. The official returns give lists of 285 direct deaths, and of 173 cases of serious wounds in the hospitals. But this can only represent a small proportion of the actual casualties. Many dead, many wounded, must have been carried away by friends and hidden in hurried graves, or nursed in secret to recovery. Many, too, perished at Blackfriars Bridge, or were hideously consumed in the flames that rose from the burning of Langdale's distilleries. But if the number of those who suffered remains an unknown quantity, it is not difficult to approximate to the destructive power of the disturbances. The cost of the whole bad business has been estimated at at least 180,000 pounds. To that amount an imbecile insanity had despoiled London. But the imbecile insanity had incurred a deeper debt. In the wild trials that followed upon the panic and the violence forty-nine {209} men were condemned to death for their share in the riot, and twenty-nine of these actually suffered the last penalty of the law. It was not, in the eyes of some, a heavy sacrifice to pay. It did not seem a heavy sacrifice in the eyes of John Wilkes, who declared that if he were intrusted with sovereign power not a single rioter should be left alive to boast of, or to plead for forgiveness for, his offence. But Lord George Gordon was not worth the life of one man, not to speak of nine-and-twenty.

The folly of the Administration did not end with their victory. On the 9th they did what they ought to have done long before, and arrested Lord George Gordon. But even this necessary belated act of justice they performed in the most foolish fashion. Everything that the pomp and ceremonial of arrest and arraignment could do was done to exalt Lord George in the eyes of the mob and swell his importance. He was conveyed to the Tower of London. Though the rising was thoroughly stamped out, and there was practically no chance of any attempt being made to rescue the prisoner, Lord George was escorted to the Tower by a numerous military force in broad daylight, with an amount of display that gave him the dignity of a hero and a martyr. To add to the absurdity of the whole business, the poor crazy gentleman was solemnly tried for high treason. Many months later, in the early February of the next year, 1781, when the riots were a thing of the past, and their terrible memory had been largely effaced, George Gordon was brought to the Bar of the Court of King's Bench for his trial. His wits had not mended during his confinement. He had been very angry because he thought that he was prevented from seeing his friends. His anger deepened when he learned that no friends had desired to see him. The fanatic had served his turn, and was forgotten. He was not of that temper which makes men devoted to a leader. He was but the foolish figurehead of a fanatical outburst, and when he was set aside he was forgotten. But when he was brought up for trial a measure of popular enthusiasm in the man reasserted itself. He behaved very strangely at his trial, urging his right to read {210} long passages of Scripture in his defence. Happily for him, his defence was managed by abler hands than his own. The genius of Erskine, the gifts of Kenyon, were expended in his behalf. The unwisdom of the Government in prosecuting him for high treason was soon apparent. He was acquitted, to the general satisfaction of his supporters, and of many who were not his supporters. If public thanksgiving were returned in several churches for his acquittal, one grave manly voice was uplifted to swell the approval. Dr. Johnson declared that he was far better pleased that Lord George Gordon should escape punishment than that a precedent should be established for hanging a man for constructive treason.

Thus the great Gordon riots flickered ignominiously out. Lord George made occasional desperate efforts to reassert himself, trying to force himself upon the notice of the King at St. James's. In 1787 he was found guilty of libels upon the Queen of France and the French Ambassador. He fled to Holland, where he was arrested by the Dutch authorities, and shipped back to England. He was committed to Newgate, by curious chance, on the anniversary of the day on which it had been burned by his followers. In Newgate he lived for some years, adjuring Christianity, and declaring himself to be a follower of the Jewish faith. In Newgate the fanatic, renegade, madman, died of jail distemper on November 1, 1793. He was only forty-two years old. In his short, unhappy life he had done a great deal of harm, and, as far as it is possible to judge, no good whatever. Perhaps the example of the Gordon riots served as a precedent in another land. If the news of the fall of the Bastille and the September massacres reached Lord George Gordon in his prison, he may have recalled to his crazed fancy the fall of Newgate and the bloody Wednesday of the June of 1780.



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CHAPTER LVI.

TWO NEW MEN.

[Sidenote: 1780—The younger Pitt and Brinsley Sheridan]

The year 1780 that witnessed the Gordon riots welcomed into political life two men, both of whom were young, both of whom bore names that were already familiar from an honorable parentage, and both of whom were destined to play very conspicuous parts in the House of Commons. One of the two men was known to his family alone, and his intimates, as a youth of great promise and great knowledge, which gave to his twenty years the ripened wisdom of a statesman and a scholar. The other, who was eight years older, had been for some years in the public eye, had been the hero of a romantic scandal which had done much to make his name notorious, and had written some dramatic works which had done more to make his name famous. It was a fortunate chance that when the House of Commons stood in need of new blood and new men the same time and the same year saw the return to Parliament of William Pitt and of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

It has been said that every reader of the "Iliad" finds himself irresistibly compelled to take sides with one or other of the great opposing camps, and to be thenceforward either a Greek or a Trojan. In something of the same spirit every student of the reign of the third George becomes perforce a partisan of one or other of two statesmen who divided the honors of its prime between them, who were opposed on all the great questions of their day, and who represented at their best the two forces into which English political life was then, and is still, divided. The history of England for the closing years of the eighteenth century and the early dawn of the nineteenth century is {212} the history of these two men and of their influence. Those who study their age and their career are separated as keenly and as hotly to-day as they were separated keenly and hotly a hundred years ago into the followers of Charles James Fox or the followers of William Pitt. The record of English party politics is a record of long and splendid duels between recognized chiefs of the two antagonistic armies. What the struggle between Gladstone and Disraeli, for example, was to our own time, the struggle between Fox and Pitt was to our ancestors of three generations ago. All the force and feeling that made for what we now call liberal principles found its most splendid representative in the son of Lord Holland: all the force and feeling that rallied around the conservative impulse looked for and found its ideal in the son of Lord Chatham. The two men were as much contrasted as the opinions that they professed. To the misgoverned, misguided, splendidly reckless boyhood and early manhood of Fox Pitt opposed the gravity and stillness of his youth. The exuberant animal vitality of Fox, wasting itself overlong in the flame of aimless passions, was emphasized by the solid reserve, the passionless austerity of Pitt. The one man was compact of all the heady enthusiasms, the splendid generosities of a nature rich in the vitality that sought eagerly new outlets for its energy, that played hard as it worked hard, that exulted in extremes. The other moved in a narrow path to one envisaged aim, and, conscious of a certain physical frailty, husbanded his resources, limited the scope of his fine intellect, and acted not indeed along the line of least resistance but within lines of purpose that were not very far apart. The one explored the mountain and the valley, lingered in gardens and orchards, or wandered at all adventure upon desolate heaths; the other pursued in patience the white highway to his goal, untempted or at least unconquered by allurements that could prove irresistible to his adversary.

[Sidenote: 1780—The character of the younger Pitt]

The two men differed as much in appearance as in mind. The outer seeming of each is almost as familiar as the forms and faces of contemporaries. Fox was massively {213} corpulent, furiously untidy, a heroic sloven, his bull throat and cheeks too often black with a three days' beard, infinitely lovable, exquisitely cultured, capable of the noblest tenderness, yet with a kind of grossness sometimes that was but a part, and perhaps an inevitable part, of his wide humanity. Pitt was slender, boyish, precise, punctilious in attire, his native composure only occasionally lightened by a flash of humor or sweetened by a show of playfulness, old beyond his years and young to the end of his short life, sternly self-restrained and self-commanded, gracious in a kind of melancholy, unconscious charm, a curiously unadorned, uncolored personality, that attracted where it did attract with a magnetism that was perhaps all the more potent for being somewhat difficult to explain. Fox was always a lover in many kinds of love, fugitive, venal, illicit, honorable, and enduring. Pitt carried himself through temptations with a monastic rigor. There was a time when his friends implored him for the sake of appearances, and not to flout too flagrantly the manners of the time, to show himself in public with a woman of the town. His one love story, strange and fruitless, neither got nor gave happiness and remains an unsolved mystery.

There were only two tastes held in common by the two men, and those were tastes shared by most of the gentlemen of their generation and century, the taste for politics and the taste for wine. Men of the class of Holland's son, of Chatham's son, if they were not soldiers and sailors, and very often when they were soldiers and sailors, went into political life as naturally as they went into a university or into the hunting field. In the case of the younger Fox and of the younger Pitt the political direction was conspicuously inevitable from the beginning. The paths of both lay plain from the threshold of the nursery to the threshold of St. Stephen's. The lad who was the chosen companion of his father at an age when his contemporaries had only abandoned a horn-book to grapple with Corderius, the boy who learned the principles of elocution and the essence of debate from the lips of the Great Commoner, were children very specially fostered in the arts of {214} statesmanship and curiously favored in the knowledge that enables men to guide and govern men. From the other taste there was no escape, or little escape, possible for the men of that day. It would have been strange indeed if Fox had been absolved from the love of wine, which was held by every one he knew, from his father's old friend and late enemy Rigby to the elderly place-holder, gambler, and letter-writer Selwyn, who loved, slandered, and failed to ruin Fox's brilliant youth. It would have been impossible for Pitt, floated through a precarious childhood on floods of Oporto, to liberate his blood and judgment from the generous liquor that promised him a strength it sapped. It was no more disgrace to the austere Pitt than to the profligate Fox to come to the House of Commons visibly under the influence of much more wine than could possibly have been good for Hercules. Sobriety was not unknown among statesmen even in those days of many bottles, but intoxication was no shame, and Burke was no more commended for his temperance than Fox, or Pitt, or Sheridan were blamed for their intemperance.

[Sidenote: 1759-80—The youth of the younger Pitt]

William Pitt was born in 1759, when George the Second still seemed stable on his throne, and when the world knew nothing of that grandson and heir to whose service the child of Chatham was to be devoted. He was the fourth child and second son; the third son and last child of Chatham was born two years later. William Pitt was delicate from his infancy, and by reason of his delicacy was never sent to school. He was educated by private tuition, directly guided and controlled by his father. From the first he was precocious, full of promise, full of performance. He acquired knowledge eagerly and surely; what he learned he learned well and thoroughly. Trained from his cradle in the acquirements essential to a public life, he applied himself, as soon as he was of an age to appreciate his tastes and to form a purpose, to equipping himself at all points for a political career. When the great Chatham died he left behind him a son who was to be as famous as himself, a statesman formed in his own school, trained in his own methods, inspired by his counsels, and guided by {215} his example. A legend which may be more than legend has it that from the first destiny seemed determined to confront the genius and the fame of Fox with the genius and the fame of Pitt. It is said that the Foxes were assured by a relative of the Pitts that the young son of Chatham, then a child under a tutor's charge, showed parts which were sure to prove him a formidable rival to the precocious youth who was at once the delight and the despair of Lord Holland's life. It is certain that the young Fox was early made acquainted with the ripe intelligence and eager genius of the younger Pitt. It was his chance to stand with the boy one night at the bar of the House of Lords, and to be attracted and amazed at the avidity with which Pitt followed the debate, the sagacity with which he commented upon what he saw and heard, and the readiness with which he formulated answers to arguments which failed to carry conviction to his dawning wisdom. Pitt loved the House of Commons while he was still in the schoolroom; it was inevitable that he should belong to the House of Commons, and he entered it at the earliest possible moment, even before he was legally qualified to do so, for he was not quite of age when he first took his seat.

The qualities of fairness and fitness which Greek wisdom praised in the conduct of life were characteristic of Pitt's life. In its zealous, patient preparation for public life, its noble girding of the loins against great issues, its wistful renunciation of human hopes, its early consciousness of terrible disease, its fortitude in the face of catastrophes so unexpected and so cruel; in its pensive isolation, in the richness of those early successes that seemed as if in anticipation to offer compensation for the early death, his life seems to have been adorned with certain ornaments and ordered by certain laws that make it strangely comely, curiously symmetrical. In that youth of his which was never quite young, and which was never allowed to grow old, in his austere attitude to so much that youth holds most dear, in the high passion of his patriotism with its eager desire, so often and so sternly thwarted, to add to England's glory, he stands apart from {216} many greater and many wiser men, in a melancholy, lonely dignity. It has been given to few men to inspire more passionate attachment in the minds of his contemporaries; it has been given to few statesmen to be regarded abroad, by eyes for the most part envious or hostile, as pre-eminently representative of the qualities that made his country at once disliked and feared. His political instincts were for the most part admirable, and if it had been his fortune to serve a sovereign more reasonable, more temperate, and more intelligent than George the Third his name might have been written among the great reformers of the world. At home an unhappy deference to the dictates of a rash and incapable king, abroad an enforced opposition to one of the greatest forces and one of the greatest conquerors that European civilization has seen, prevented Pitt from gaining that position to which his genius, under conditions less persistently unhappy, would have entitled him. To have gained what he did gain under such conditions was in itself a triumph.

The new-comer who entered Parliament at the same period as William Pitt was as curiously unlike him as even Fox himself. If few knew anything of Pitt every one knew something of Sheridan, who had already made fame in one career and was now about to make fame in another. It may afford consolation to the unappreciated to reflect that the most famous English dramatist since Shakespeare's day, the brightest wit of an age which piqued itself into being considered witty, the most brilliant orator of an age which regarded oratory as one of the greatest of the arts, and whose roll is studded with the names of illustrious orators, the most unrivalled humorist of a century which in all parts of the world distinguished itself by its love of humor, was looked upon in his nonage as a dull, unpromising boy, chiefly remarkable for his idleness and carelessness.

[Sidenote: 1751-80—The parents of Brinsley Sheridan]

The quality which we now call Bohemianism certainly ran in Sheridan's blood. His grandfather, Dr. Thomas Sheridan, the friend of Swift, the Dublin clergyman and schoolmaster, was a delightfully amiable, wholly reckless, {217} slovenly, indigent, and cheerful personage. His father, Thomas Sheridan, was a no less cheerful, no less careless man, who turned play-actor, and taught elocution, and married a woman who wrote novels and a life of Swift. At one time he could boast the friendship of Dr. Johnson, who seems to have regarded him with an ill-humored contempt, but Dr. Johnson's expression of this contempt brought about a quarrel. The most remarkable thing about him is that he was the father of his son. Neither he nor his wife appears to have had any idea of their good fortune. Mrs. Sheridan once declared of her two boys that she had never met with "two such impenetrable dunces." None the less the father contrived with difficulty to scrape together enough money to send his boys to Harrow, and there, luckily, Dr. Parr discerned that Richard, with all his faults, was by no means an impenetrable dunce. Both he and Sumner, the head-master of Harrow, discovered in the schoolboy Sheridan great talents which neither of them was capable of calling into action.

Richard Sheridan came from Harrow School and Harrow playgrounds to London, and, later on, to Bath. London did not make him much more industrious or more careful than he had been at Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was far pleasanter to translate the honeyed Greek of Theocritus, with its babble of Sicilian shepherds, its nymphs and waters and Sicilian seas, than to follow the beaten track of ordinary education. It was vastly more entertaining to translate the impassioned prose of Aristaenetus into impassioned verse, especially in collaboration with a cherished friend, than to yawn over Euclid and to grumble over Cocker. The translation of Aristaenetus, the boyish task of Sheridan and his friend Halhed, still enjoys a sort of existence in the series of classical translations in Bohn's Library. It is one of the ironies of literature that fate has preserved this translation while it has permitted the two Begum speeches, that in the House of Commons and that in Westminster Hall, practically to perish. What little interest does now cling to the early work belongs to the fact of its being a collaboration. Halhed, who worked {218} with Sheridan at the useless task, was a clever young Oxford student, who was as poor as he was clever, and who seemed to entertain the eccentric idea that large sums of money were to be readily obtained from the reading public for a rendering in flippant verse of the prose of an obscure author whose very identity is involved in doubt. Aristaenetus did not become the talk of the town even in spite of an ingeniously promulgated rumor assigning the authorship of the verses to Dr. Johnson. Neither did the plays and essays in which the friends collaborated meet with any prosperous fate.

From the doing of Greek prose into English verse Sheridan and Halhed turned to another occupation, in which, as in the first, they were both of the same mind. They both fell in love, and both fell in love with the same woman. All contemporary accounts agree in regarding the daughter of Linley the musician as one of the most beautiful women of her age. Those who knew the portrait which the greatest painter of his time painted of Sheridan's wife as St. Cecilia will understand the extraordinary, the almost universal homage which society and art, wit and wealth, and genius and rank paid to Miss Linley. Unlike the girl in Sheridan's own poem, who is assured by her adorer that she will meet with friends in all the aged and lovers in the young. Miss Linley found old men as well as young men competing for her affection and for the honor of her hand.

Sheridan and Halhed were little more than boys when they first beheld and at once adored Miss Linley. Charles Sheridan, Richard's elder brother, was still a very young man. But Miss Linley had old lovers too, men long past the middle pathway of their lives, who besought her to marry them with all the impetuosity of youth. One of them, whom she wisely rejected on the ground that wealth alone could not compensate for the disparity in years, carried off his disappointment gracefully enough by immediately settling a sum of three thousand pounds upon the young lady.

There is an air of romance over the whole course of {219} Sheridan's attachment to Miss Linley. For a long time he contrived to keep his attachment a secret from his elder brother, Charles, and from his friend Halhed, both of whom were madly in love with Miss Linley, and neither of whom appears to have had the faintest suspicion of finding a rival, the one in so close a kinsman, the other in his own familiar friend. It must be admitted that Sheridan does not appear to have behaved with that uprightness which was to be expected from his gallant, impetuous nature. Not merely did he keep his secret from his brother and his friend, but he seems to have allowed his friend to look upon him as a confidant and ally in pressing Halhed's suit upon Miss Linley. Halhed reproached him sadly, but not bitterly, in a poetical epistle, the value of which is more personal than poetical, when he discovered the real mind of his friend. Then, like a wise man if a sad one, Halhed went away. He sailed for India, the golden land of so many wrecked hopes and disappointed ambitions; he long outlived his first love and his successful rival; he became in the fulness of time a member of Parliament, and he died in 1830. He is dimly remembered as the author of a grammar of the Bengalee language and of a work on Gentoo laws translated from the Persian.

[Sidenote: 1771—Marriage of Sheridan and Miss Linley]

Sheridan's courtship progressed more and more romantically. The persecutions of a married rake named Matthews drove Miss Linley to fly to France with Sheridan, to whom she was secretly married at Calais. The revengeful and disappointed Matthews inserted a libellous attack upon Sheridan in the Bath Chronicle. Sheridan extorted at his sword's point a public apology from Matthews. Further and baser mendacity on the part of Matthews provoked a second duel, in which the combatants seem to have fought with desperate ferocity, and in which Sheridan, badly wounded, refused to ask his life at the hands of his antagonist and was only rescued by the seconds. A long period of separation followed, full of dark hours for Sheridan, hours only brightened by occasional meetings of the most eccentric kind, as when the wild young poet, quaintly {220} disguised in the complicated capes of a hackney coachman, had the tormenting privilege of driving his beloved from Covent Garden Theatre, where her voice and beauty were nightly charming all London. At last the opposition of Linley was overcome, and on April 13, 1773, the most brilliant man and most beautiful woman of their day were for the second time and more formally married, and a series of adventures more romantic than fiction came to an end.

The romance, it is agreeable to think, did not conclude with the marriage ceremony. Sheridan seems to have offered his wife as devoted an attachment after her marriage as he had shown in the days of duelling and disguising that preceded it. He wrote verses to her, and she wrote verses to him, long after they had settled down to serene domesticity, which breathe the most passionate expressions of mutual love. And yet there is a legend—it is to be hoped and believed that it is only a legend—which ends the romance very sadly. According to the legend young Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Sheridan's close friend, felt more than a friend's admiration for the wife of his friend. According to the legend Elizabeth Sheridan returned the passion, which by the unhappiness it brought with it shortened her life. According to the legend Lord Edward only married the fair Pamela, Philippe Egalite's daughter, because of the striking resemblance she bore to the St. Cecilia of his dreams. The legend rests on the authority of Madame de Genlis, who was probably Pamela's mother and who is no infallible authority. It is possible that the undoubted resemblance of Pamela to Mrs. Sheridan is the origin of the whole story. Lord Edward was always falling in love in a graceful, chivalrous kind of way. But there is no serious proof that his friendship for Mrs. Sheridan was anything more than the friendship an honorable man may entertain for the wife of his friend. The graver and more authentic story of Fitzgerald's life has yet to be told in these pages.

[Sidenote: 1775—Sheridan as dramatist and politician]

For a brief period after his marriage Sheridan thought of devoting himself to the law. But his thoughts and {221} tastes were otherwise inclined, and on January 27, 1775, not quite two years after his marriage, "The Rivals" was produced at Covent Garden and a new chapter opened in the history of dramatic literature. It is curious to think that the clumsiness of the player to whom the part of Sir Lucius O'Trigger was given came very near to damning the most brilliant comedy that the English stage had seen for nearly two centuries. The happy substitution of actor Clinch for actor Lee, however, saved the piece and made Sheridan the most popular author in London. How grateful Sheridan felt to Clinch for rescuing Sir Lucius is shown by the fact that his next production, the farce called "St. Patrick's Day; or, the Scheming Lieutenant," was expressly written to afford opportunity for Clinch's peculiar talents. In 1777 came "The School for Scandal," Sheridan's masterpiece, which was followed by Sheridan's last dramatic work, "The Critic." Never probably before was so splendid a success gained so rapidly, so steadily increased in so short a time, to come so abruptly to an end in the very pride of its triumph.

Quite suddenly the most famous English author then alive found opportunity for the display of wholly new and unexpected talents, and became one of the most famous politicians and orators alive. There had, indeed, always been a certain political bent in Sheridan's mind. He had tried his hand at many political pamphlets, fragments of which were found among his papers by Moore. He had always taken the keenest interest in the great questions which agitated the political life of the waning eighteenth century. The general election of 1780 gave him an opportunity of expressing this interest in the public field, and he was returned to Parliament as member for the borough of Stamford. It is difficult to find a parallel in our history for the extraordinary success which attended Sheridan in his political life as it had already attended him in his dramatic career.

Just on the threshold of his political career Sheridan lost the wife he loved so well. He was profoundly afflicted, but the affliction lessened and he married a Miss {222} Ogle. There is a story told in connection with this second marriage which is half melancholy, half humorous, and wholly pathetic. The second Mrs. Sheridan, young, clever, and ardently devoted to her husband, was found one day, according to this story, walking up and down her drawing-room apparently in a frantic state of mind because she had discovered that the love-letters Sheridan had sent to her were the same as those which he had written to his first wife. Word for word, sentence for sentence, passion for passion, they were the same letters. No doubt Sheridan made his peace. It is to be presumed that he thought the letters so good that they might very well serve a second turn; but this act of literary parsimony was not happy. Parsimony of his written work was, however, Sheridan's peculiarity. Verses addressed to his dear St. Cecilia make their appearance again and again, under altered conditions, in his plays. It is singular enough, as has been happily said, that the treasures of wit which Sheridan was thought to possess in such profusion should have been the only species of wealth which he ever dreamed of economizing.



{223}

CHAPTER LVII.

FOX AND PITT.

[Sidenote: 1781—Fall of the Lord North Administration]

Pitt entered public life the inheritor of a great name, the transmitter of a great policy, at a time when the country was in difficulty and the Government in danger. In the January of 1781 North was still in power, was still supported by the King, had still some poor shreds of hope that something, anything might happen to bring England well out of the struggle with America. In the November of the same year North reeled to his fall with the news of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. In those ten months Pitt had already made himself a name in the House of Commons. He was no longer merely the son of Pitt; he was Pitt. He had attached himself to an Opposition that was studded with splendid names, and had proved that his presence added to its lustre. The heroes and leaders of Opposition at Westminster welcomed him to their ranks with a generous admiration and enthusiasm. Fox, ever ready to applaud possible genius, soon pronounced him to be one of the first men in Parliament. Burke hailed him, not as a chip of the old block, but as the old block itself. The praises of Burke and of Fox were great, but they were not undeserved. When the Ministry of Lord North fell into the dust, when the King was compelled to accept the return of the Whigs to office, Pitt had already gained a position which entitled him in his own eyes not to accept office but to refuse it.

Rockingham formed a Ministry for the second time. The new Ministry was formed of an alliance between the two armies of the Rockingham Whigs and the Shelburne Whigs. Rockingham represented the political principles that dated from the days of Walpole. {224} Shelburne represented, or misrepresented, the principles that dated from the days of Chatham. The King would very much have preferred to take Shelburne without Rockingham, but even the King had to recognize that it was impossible to gratify his preference. Even if Shelburne had been a much better leader than he was he had not the following which would entitle him to form a Ministry on his own account. And Shelburne was by no means a good leader. To the Liberal politician of to-day Shelburne seems a much more desirable and admirable statesman than Rockingham. Most of his political ideas were in advance of his time, and his personal friendships prove him to have been a man of appreciative intelligence. He had proved his courage in his youth as a soldier at Campen and Minden; he had maintained his courage in 1780 when he faced and was wounded by the pistol of Fullarton. But his gifts, whatever they were, were not of the quality nor the quantity to make a leader of men. He could not form a Ministry for himself, and he was not an element of stability in any Ministry of which he was a member. The Administration formed by the alliance of Rockingham and Shelburne could boast of many brilliant names, and showed itself laudably anxious to add to their number. In an Administration which had Fox for a Secretary of State, Burke for Paymaster-General of the Forces, and Sheridan for Under-Secretary of State, the Vice-Treasurership of Ireland was offered to Pitt.

[Sidenote: 1782—Fox's quarrel with Pitt]

Pitt declined the offer. He had made up his mind that he would not accept a subordinate situation. Conscious of his ability, he was prepared to wait. He had not to wait long. During the four agitated months of life allowed to the Rockingham Administration Pitt distinguished himself by a motion for reform in the representative system which was applauded by Fox and by Sheridan, but which was defeated by twenty votes. Peace and reform were always passions deeply seated at the heart of Pitt; it was ironic chance that associated him hereafter so intimately with war and with antagonism to so many methods of reform in which he earnestly believed. When the quarrels {225} between Fox and Shelburne over the settlement of the American war ended after Rockingham's death in July, 1782, in the withdrawal from the Ministry of Fox, Burke, and the majority of the Rockingham party, Pitt rightly saw that his hour had come. Fox resigned rather than serve with Shelburne, Pitt accepted Shelburne, and made Shelburne's political existence possible a little longer. With the aid of Pitt, Shelburne could hold on and let Fox go; without Pitt, Fox would have triumphed over Shelburne. From this moment began the antagonism between Fox and Pitt which was to last for the remainder of their too brief lives. At the age of twenty-three Pitt found himself Chancellor of the Exchequer, and one of the most conspicuous men in the kingdom. Fox, who was ten years older, was defeated by the youth whose rivalry had been predicted to Fox when the youth was yet a child.

Pitt's triumph lasted less than a year. Fox, conscious of his own great purposes, and eager to return to office for their better advancement, was prepared to pay a gambler's price for power. To overthrow Shelburne and with Shelburne Pitt, he needed a pretext and an ally. The pretext was easy to find. He had but to maintain that the terms of the peace with America were not the best that the country had a right to expect. The ally was easy to find and disastrous to accept. Nothing in the whole of Fox's history is more regrettable than his unnatural alliance with Lord North. Ever since the hour when Fox had found his true self, and had passed from the ranks of the obedient servants of the King into the ranks of those who devoted themselves to the principles of liberty, there had been nothing and there could have been nothing in common between Fox and North. Everything that Fox held most dear was detestable to North, as North's political doctrines were now detestable to Fox. The political enmity of the two men had been bitter in the extreme, and Fox had assailed North with a violence which might well seem to have made any form of political reconciliation impossible. Yet North was now the man with whom Fox was content to throw in his lot in order to obtain the {226} overthrow of Shelburne and of Pitt. And Fox was not alone among great Whigs in this extraordinary transaction. He carried Burke with him in this unholy alliance between all that was worst and all that was best in English political life. The two men whose genius and whose eloquence had been the most potent factors in the fall of North a year before were now the means of bringing the discredited and defeated statesman back again into the exercise of a power which, as none knew better than they, he had so shamefully misused. Fox and North between them swept Shelburne out of the field. Fox and North between them were able to force a Coalition Ministry upon a reluctant and indignant King. The followers of Fox and the followers of North in combination formed so numerous and so solid a party that they were able to treat the sovereign with a lack of ceremony to which he was little used. Fox had gone out of office rather than admit that the right to nominate the first minister rested with the King instead of with the Cabinet. Now that he had returned to office, he showed his determination to act up to his principles by not permitting the King to nominate a single minister.