of Herr von Ruville's earlier study of the relations of Chatham and Bute. They are particularly interesting because Herr von Ruville never flinches from his own opinions. It takes a daring historian to defend Bute's letter to Choiseul in 1762, but Herr von Ruville's courage does not fail him. Similarly in treating Chatham's career he is never afraid of advancing explanations which strike the reader as less happy than eccentric. The result is that, though the writer is in one sense singularly qualified to appreciate Chatham-in the sense, that is to say, that he is, like Chatham, a Royalist-he contrives to leave a more disagreeable impression of Chatham's character as a domestic politician than a frankly hostile interpreter would have ventured to suggest. We do not find much to dissent from in Herr von Ruville's account of Chatham's constitutional wishes. Herr von Ruville thinks that Chatham wanted to be the mediator between Parliament and King: a Prime Minister who was not to be the Executive Minister of Parliamentary authority, but a leader of the whole body politic, a real ruler, with the King and Parliament standing in relation to him as limiting factors. It followed that Chatham and Bute were often in agreement, and Herr von Ruville makes much of the fact that when Bute retired in 1763 the new Ministers made the King more hostile to Chatham, and he contrasts the Rockinghams' behaviour to Bute and his friends with Chatham's praise of Bute in the House of Commons in March, 1761.

Up to this point Herr von Ruville's account does not differ from that of most historians, except that he is far more friendly to the King and to Bute than any Whig historian could be, and that he is less alive to the strength of the Whig case against the Court than any English historian could be. But he goes on to attribute Chatham's conduct in detail throughout to one of two passions: the passion for power and the passion for money. Thus Chatham retired in 1761 because he thought his successors would make a bad peace and thereby make him popular. His objections to a corrupt Parliament, governed by a king or by a group of nobles, arose not from the dislike of corruption but from its effect in destroying the influence that his oratory gave him. His zeal for Parliamentary reform was strictly limited to a consideration of the sort of Parliament in which he would be strong. He did not want serious Parliamentary reform, or an enlarged electorate, or a popular press, because all of these things might threaten his power. He wanted the

King's right to choose his Ministers to remain intact, because he thought the King would choose him, and he only approached the oligarchy when he thought the King's power was become so great as to be a danger to his ambitions. In all this Herr von Ruville seems to us to err as much on one side as Mr. Harrison errs on another in representing Chatham as a far more convinced and thorough reformer than Charles Fox.

But this part of Herr von Ruville's analysis is at any rate more plausible than his extraordinary use of his second explanation. Chatham's legacies seem to obsess his mind. He explains Chatham's strange conduct from his retirement in 1761 to 1765 as due to a dread of offending the King, who, he hoped, would restore him to power, or Sir William Pynsent, who, he thought, would leave him a legacy. As Chatham had never seen Pynsent, the legacy has generally been regarded as an unexpected tribute to his public services, but Herr von Ruville is convinced that Chatham knew of it beforehand, and that the reason he disliked Wilkes was that Pynsent had sometimes thought of making him his heir instead. Chatham, in fact, was trying to preserve an uneasy equilibrium, expecting favours at once from the Court and from an old politician who admired him for his disinterested resistance to the Court, a difficult pose which Chatham could only maintain by means of periods of silence and inaction. Pynsent's death in 1765 relieved Chatham from the intolerable strain, and he could openly return to his old idea of destroying all parties. This use, though it is the most fantastic, is not the only use that Herr von Ruville makes of his discovery that Chatham was governed by avarice. Before he died Chatham knew himself beaten, and he knew the cause. In the last days the breach with the Rockinghams was healed. The events of 1765-6 had left wounds on both sides. It is significant that Chatham, speaking to Grafton in 1767, said that if a junction was necessary it would be better to choose the Bedfords than the Rockinghams, though the Bedfords were the most violent opponents of the American claims. The same year, when there were negotiations going on between various sections, and Bedford and Rockingham met, it was noticed that 'Rockingham was more against Lord Chatham than any other.' But in 1770 the breach was healed. The Duke of Portland wrote to Rockingham on December 3, 1767, an account of a conversation Chatham had had with somebody whose name he does not give :

'He says that he united body and soul with Lord Rockingham and Sir George Savile in their measures (meaning, I suppose, the Middlesex election); that he thinks Sir George the most virtuous character in this country, and bows to his constitutional and private integrity; that he will go hand in hand with Lord Rockingham and his friends, who are, and have proved themselves to be, the only true Whigs in this country. "Former little differences must be forgotten when the contest is pro aris et focis.'

In a speech he made on January 22, 1770, seconding a motion of Rockingham's, he announced a union which, if it had come five years earlier, would have saved the country from some of its worst calamities :

'My lords, besides my warm approbation of the motion made by the noble lord, I have a natural and personal pleasure in rising up to second it. I consider my seconding his lordship's motion, and I would wish it to be considered by others, as a public demonstration of that cordial union which, I am happy to affirm, subsists between us-of my attachment to those principles which he has so well defended, and of my respect for his person. There has been a time, my lords, when those who wished well to neither of us, who wished to see us separated for ever, found a sufficient gratification for their malignity against us both. But that time is happily at an end. The friends of this country will, I doubt not, hear with pleasure that the noble lord and his friends are now united with me and mine, upon a principle which, I trust, will make our union indissoluble. It is not to possess, or divide, the emoluments of government; but, if possible, to save the State. Upon this ground we met, upon this ground we stand, firm and inseparable. No ministerial artifices, no private offers, no secret seduction, can divide us. United as we are, we can set the profoundest policy of the present ministry, their grand, their only arcanum of government, their divide et impera, at defiance.'

Chatham from this time adopted that fierce tone, in speaking of the Crown and its powers, which George III. often heard from his greatest subjects. He had learnt by this time that all the fine phrases and formulas about confounding and dissolving parties had been the disguise of the King's ambitions. Misled by this illusion, he had made war on the only set of men who had a definite public ground for uniting against the prerogatives of the Crown, and objects ampler and more respectable than the prizes or the pillage of governments.

In his first essay on Chatham's career Macaulay talks of his melancholy yet not inglorious close. Chatham died amidst disasters not less terrible than those that surrounded the death of his son. The forces that he dreaded

* Albemarle, ii. 143.

were stronger than ever. Unreason, anarchy, and passion were at the helm. There was as much hope that the schism in the Empire would be ended by the wisdom of an infatuated king and his obedient ministers as there had been that the great schism in the Church would be ended by the famous combination of the mad King, Charles VI., and the drunken Wenzel, King of the Romans. But the close of Chatham's career, however melancholy, was very far from inglorious. It was ennobled not only by the dramatic scene of his last speech in the Lords, but by seven years' brave and devoted championship of the great causes that his mistakes had injured. Before he died there had grown up and developed a party alive, if not yet adequate, to the necessities of the nation. It was weakened by the caution of Burke, and the respectable fears and prejudices of amiable mediocrities like Portland. Yet it had in it the spirit which was the secret of Chatham's power, and it was soon to be led and transformed by a Liberal with sympathies as wide and democratic as those of Chatham himself.

Chatham was a democrat. Rockingham and Burke had a superstitious faith in government by the Revolution families. During the days of their alliance, Chatham's was always the vigorous, incisive policy; Burke preferred moderate courses, and a reverent eye for custom and chartered privilege. The great characteristics of Chatham's politics were, first a real belief in the rights and power of the nation as against Crown or aristocracy; secondly, a stern refusal to put the interests or the pride of any class or set of men above what he conceived to be justice. He had not, like the Rockinghams, a consistent philosophy; he attacked each problem as it arose, with a savage zeal and integrity of mind and purpose. He defended against Burke the right of the British Parliament to control the excesses of the India Company. He defended against Rockingham the right of the Irish Parliament to tax its absentee landlords. He supported parliamentary reform: indeed he became a convert to triennial Parliaments, and more than any of his contemporaries he hoped and helped to acclimatise the idea of popular rule. His mad noisy City friends, as Newcastle called them, were often rhetoricians, but at least they reminded the Bedfords and the Portlands that government could not always remain the subject of bargains and diplomacy between one great house and another. The ardour and courage with which he had directed and inspired the conquering fleets and armies of his country was not greater

than the ardour with which he resisted his country's follies and the courage with which he blamed her crimes.

With Chatham there died the last hope of preventing the dissolution of the Empire; but those days of beaten resistance to tyranny had left traditions and inheritances as lasting as the legacies of his days of victorious power. His splendid patrimony was divided. The Rockinghams accepted and developed his policy of just dealing with India and Ireland. His son inherited his care for scrupulous honour in public offices. Even mistakes of which he had repented were repeated by his disciple Shelburne, whose services to the King were to find no greater gratitude than those of his master. His generous and democratic sympathies were resumed by Fox. Leslie Stephen said of Swift that the prejudices from which he freed himself were chiefly the prejudices of other people. Fox freed himself from the prejudices of the Rockinghams the more easily because they had never been his own. He applied throughout his life Burke's central principle of a Government formed to control the King, but he supplemented it with Chatham's doctrine of a people able to control Parliament. When the last of these men died the King was still in power, arresting all the liberal and enlightened influences of his time. Chatham might at one time have disarmed him. It must be counted a noble compensation for that disastrous failure that, after his disabling humours and vanities were forgotten, the echoes of his defiant eloquence remained, and in the coming tribulations of English freedom men were found who had not unlearned the lessons of his splendid anger.