CHAPTER VIII
LORD SHELBURNE AND MR. PITT
1783-1785
"It is remarkable," Horace Walpole wrote to the Duchess of Gloucester, "that the counties and towns are addressing thanks for the peace which their representatives have condemned."[1] While Shelburne was abroad, popular indignation began to make itself strongly heard against the Coalition, as the conditions came to be dispassionately considered, and it became known that the new Ministers had no serious intention of trying to modify the terms of the treaties which they had condemned. The King was looked upon as a prisoner in his own palace, while the restoration by Burke of the two defaulting clerks, Powell and Bembridge, to their places at the Treasury, from which Barré had dismissed them, came as a strange commentary on his recent encomiums of his own party, and his denunciation of Shelburne as Borgia and Catiline: epithets which in the public mind would perhaps have been more properly applied to Fox and Sheridan. Everything pointed to a strong current of feeling setting in against the Government, and especially against Fox, the excesses of whose private life were becoming more than ever a cause of public scandal.[2]
- ↑ March 13th, 1783. Correspondence, viii. 351.
- ↑ "I was last night at supper with Charles (Fox)," George Selwyn writes to Lord Carlisle, "but not one syllable passed between us. He knows that I see him in a situation, when I cannot wish to see any one who has aspired to it, and obtained it by the means which he has used. No one aspires more or thinks more justly of his abilities than I do; no one could have loved him more, if he had deserved it. What his behaviour has been to the public, to his friends, and his family is notorious. Facts are too stubborn, and to those I appeal, and not to the testimonies of ignorant and
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