CHATHAM

HIS EARLY LIFE AND CONNECTIONS

CHATHAM

His Early Life and Connections

BY
LORD ROSEBERY

LONDON
ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS
187 PICCADILLY, W
1910

Second Impression.

To
BEVILL FORTESCUE
OF DROPMORE AND BOCONNOC,
THIS BOOK, WHICH OWES EVERYTHING TO HIM,
IS
GRATEFULLY DEDICATED.

PREFACE

My first words of preface must be of excuse for some apparent lack of gratitude in my dedication. For besides my debt to Mr. Fortescue, I owe my warmest acknowledgments to Mary, Lady Ilchester, and her son, for the permission to examine some of the papers of Henry Fox; a character of great interest, whose life is yet to be written. But I hope that this will soon be presented by Lord Ilchester, whose capacity for such work is already proved. I render my sincere thanks both to him and to his mother; but my dedication, written long before I had access to the Holland House papers, must remain unchanged; for without Mr. Fortescue's family collection of papers at Dropmore this book could never have been begun.

The life of Chatham is extremely difficult to write, and, strictly speaking, never can be written at all. It is difficult because of the artificial atmosphere in which he thought it well to envelop himself, and because the rare glimpses which are obtainable of the real man reveal a nature so complex, so violent, and so repressed. What is this strange career?

Born of a turbulent stock, he is crippled by gout at Eton and Oxford, then launched into a cavalry regiment, and then into Parliament. For eight years he is groom-in-waiting to a prince. Then he holds subordinate office for nine years more. Then he suddenly flashes out, not as a royal attendant or a minor placeman, but as the people's darling and the champion of the country. In obscure positions he has become the first man in Britain, which he now rules absolutely for four years in a continual blaze of triumph. Then he is sacrificed to an intrigue, but remains the supreme statesman of his country for five years more. Then he becomes Prime Minister amid general acclamation; but in an instant he shatters his own power, and retires, distempered if not mad, into a cell. At last he divests himself of office, and recovers his reason; he lives for nine years more, a lonely, sublime figure, but awful to the last, an incalculable force. He dies, practically, in public, as he would have wished; and the nation, hoping against hope, pins its faith in him to the hour of death.

And for most of the time his associations are ignoble, if not humiliating. He had to herd with political jobbers; he has to serve intriguing kinsfolk; he had to cringe to unworthy Kings and the mistresses of Kings; he is flouted and insulted by a puppet whig like Rockingham. Despite all this he bequeaths the most illustrious name in our political history; and it is the arduous task of his biographer to show how these circumstances led to this result.

Happily this task does not fall to the present writer, who has only to describe the struggle and the ascent; the consummation and glory of the career lie beyond these limits.

Further, it may be said that not merely is the complete life of Chatham difficult to write, but impossible. It is safe, indeed, to assert that it never has been written and never can be written.

This seems a hard saying, for it appears to be a reflection on his numerous biographers from Thackeray to Von Ruville, though it is nothing of the sort. The fact is that the materials do not exist. For the first time the Dropmore papers throw some light on the earlier part of his life. But it is tolerably certain that nothing of this kind exists to illuminate his later years. Of his conversations, of his private life nothing, or little more than nothing, remains. Except on the one genial occasion on which Burke saw him tooling a jim-whiskey down to Stowe, we scarcely see a human touch. After his accession to office in 1756, his letters of pompous and sometimes abject circumlocution, intended partly to deceive his correspondent and partly to baffle the authorities of the Post Office, give no clue to his mind. He wrote an ordinary note as Rogers wrote an ordinary couplet. Even his love-letters are incurably stilted. There is no ease, no frankness, no self-revelation in anything that he wrote after he embarked actively in politics. From that time he shrouded himself carefully and successfully from his contemporaries, except on the occasions when he appeared in public; for, strange to say, it was in his speeches that his nature sometimes burst forth. And yet even here, there is trouble. One of the difficulties of a life of Chatham lies in the rough notes of his speeches preserved by Horace Walpole. They are often confused, often dreary, sometimes incomprehensible; but they must be included, for there is nothing else; though they weigh heavy on a book. Sometimes, however, they reveal a flash of the man, and Pitt permits little else. Such being his deliberate scheme of life, adopted partly from policy, partly from considerations of health, there seems little more material for a biography of the man, apart from his public career, than exists in the case of a Trappist.

It is then, I think, safe to predict that the real life of Chatham can never be written, as the intimate facts are wanting. What survive were, as usual, exhausted by Macaulay in those two brilliant essays, in which with the sure grasp of historical imagination he depicted the glowing scenes of Chatham's career, and left to posterity the portrait which will never be superseded. For his instinct supplies the lack of evidence, and though there may be exaggeration of praise, that praise will not be seriously diminished. Lives of Chatham will always be written, because few subjects are more interesting or more dramatic, but they must always be imperfect. It is, of course, easy to record his course as a statesman, his speeches, his triumphs, his achievements; and these narratives will be called biographies. But will they ever reveal the real man?

There seems to be a constant tendency in writers to forget that the provinces of history and biography, though they often overlap, are essentially distinct; for history records the life of nations, and biography the life of individuals. To set forth the annals of the time in which the hero has existed, and to note his contact with them, is only a part of his life, though it is often held to be all that is worth remembering. The life of any man that ever lived on earth is far more than his public career. The life of a man is not his public life, which is always alloyed with some necessary diplomacy and which is sometimes only a mask; it is made up of a thousand touches, a multitude of lights and shadows, most of which are invisible behind the austere presentment of statecraft. We have probably all, and perhaps more than all, that Shakespeare ever wrote; we have so to speak all his public life. But would we not gladly give one or two of his plays to obtain some true insight into his private life, to realise the humanity of this superhuman being, to know how this immortal was linked to mortality? We want to know how a master man talked, and, if possible,