we can never submit to remain inactive spectators of their ruin and your consequent aggrandizement."[1]
The language of Cardinal Fleury was exactly that with which Vergennes in a year's time was parrying the complaints of Lord Stormont.[2] Silas Deane had arrived in France by July, and was having frequent conferences with the French Ministers. Arrangements were made between them for the secret supply of war material to America, while numberless officers flocked over to take service under Washington, and the American privateers were received in the French ports. It was tolerably certain that where France led, Spain would soon follow, whatever the danger might be to her colonial empire from an active participation in the war. Under these circumstances, Shelburne said in a powerful speech in the House of Lords, a crisis having arrived, it was necessary that the supreme direction of affairs should be placed in the hands of the Earl of Chatham. "He was not influenced by any private motive in saying so; it would be vain and preposterous in him to insinuate that his connection with that noble Earl was anything but a political one. The disparity of their years rendered private friendship unattainable, but he considered the Earl of Chatham as the greatest ornament of the two Houses, in which he shone with such unrivalled lustre: the most efficient servant of the crown, and, while he had life in him, the nerve of Great Britain.[3] Unfortunately at this moment Chatham was again struck down by the same mysterious malady which had paralysed his energies in 1767; and was only able to declare, in a paper which he dictated to Dr. Addington, and sent to Shelburne as a species of political testament, "that he continued in the same sentiments, with regard to America, which he had always professed, and which stand so fully
- ↑ Parliamentary History, xviii. 673-675.
- ↑ Charles Gravier de Vergennes was born at Dijon in 1717. After holding several important diplomatic posts, including that of Ambassador to the Porte, he went on a special embassy to Sweden, and contributed largely to the success of the Revolution carried out in 1772 by Gustavus against the aristocracy. (See Le Comte de Vergennes, son Ambassade en Suède, par Louis Bonneville de Marsangy, Paris, 1898.) Soon afterwards he became Minister for Foreign Affairs. He died in 1787.
- ↑ Parliamentary History, xviii. 922, 1220.
