Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/114

 a ‘head forsaken and alone’ (Auckland Correspondence, ii. 498).

On 1 Feb. 1793 Fox opposed Pitt's address to the crown, pledging the house to resist the aggrandisement of France. The position that he took with regard to the war then imminent was that it was an unjustifiable attempt to interfere with the internal affairs of another nation, that the ministers were taking advantage of the opening of the Scheldt to press on the war, that they should have asked for reparation for the decree of 19 Nov., and that their demand that the French troops should be withdrawn from the Austrian Netherlands was insolent; in short that they were seizing on excesses to begin what would be a ‘war of opinion’ (Speeches, v. 16). After war was declared, he moved on the 18th a series of resolutions condemning the policy of the ministers, and was defeated by 44 to 270. His conduct brought him much unpopularity, and he was attacked by Gillray in some bitter caricatures; in 1791 he was represented in the ‘Hopes of the Party’ as beheading the king; he is learning to fire in ‘Patriots amusing themselves,’ 1792, and is in sans-culotte dress in a drawing of 1793. To Grey's motion for reform he gave on 7 May a general support, and in the course of his speech said some things that, considering the special needs of the time, were violent and unstatesmanlike (ib. p. 115). Some trials and sentences for sedition deeply moved his indignation. He was in a small minority in moving an amendment to the address recommending peace in January 1794. Before the opening of parliament the more important of his former allies formally signified their intention of supporting the ministers. He wrote to his nephew, Lord Holland, on 9 March that if he could have done it with honour he should best have liked to retire from politics altogether (Memorials, iii. 65). Pitt's plan of subsidising Prussia to prevent its threatened defection drew forth an able and sarcastic speech from him on 30 April (Speeches, v. 261), and a month later he made another attack on the policy of the ministers, both as regards the grounds of the war and the mode in which it was prosecuted (ib. p. 307). Although separated from his former allies, unpopular with a large part of the nation, and in a hopeless minority in parliament, Fox was cheerful and unsoured. There was nothing small in his nature, and he felt no envy; he understood the delight of literary leisure, and enjoyed it thoroughly as far he could get it. During this period his letters to his nephew, whom he loved as a son, and who was then abroad, are full of the pleasure he derived from the society of Mrs. Armistead, the fine weather, and the beauties of St. Anne's Hill, of the pictures that pleased him most in Italy, and of his reading. He would have Lord Holland take note in the Pitti of Titian's ‘Paul III, the finest portrait in the world.’ Titian's masterpiece he holds to be his ‘Peter Martyr’ at Venice, and he speaks of his delight in the pictures of Guercino at Cento, and so on. Besides reading the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey,’ as he did constantly, he was studying Spanish literature. He was at last fairly at ease about money, for in 1793 his friends subscribed 70,000l. to pay his debts and buy him an annuity (Memorials, iii. 40; Life of P. Francis, ii. 443). On 28 Sept. 1795 he married his mistress at Wytton, Huntingdonshire, but kept the fact of his marriage secret until 1802 (Life, iii. 78;, History of Surrey, ii. 240). He continued his opposition to the war in 1795, and, regarding the Treason and Sedition Bills brought forward in November as a deathblow to the constitution, declared in the house that if such bills were vigorously enforced, he should advise the people ‘that their obedience was no longer a question of moral obligation and duty, but of precedence’ (Speeches, vi. 31). This remark was severely reprobated. In moving an address on the conduct of the war on 10 May 1796, he maintained that Austria and Prussia would not have moved in 1792 against the will of England, and that after the treaty of Pilnitz England should have taken a neutral position and become the moderator of peace; that the war had been conducted without any fixed aim, it was neither wholly for the restoration of the French monarchy nor wholly for English interests, and that it had caused the country to leave Poland to its fate. He was in a minority of 42 to 206. In May 1797 he censured the measures adopted to put an end to the mutiny at Spithead; his censure has been pronounced just, but it is impossible to agree with this opinion; indeed the line he took on this occasion, and his attack on the government the next month with reference to the mutiny at the Nore, seem to prove that he regarded the difficulties of the country mainly as opportunities for attempting to win a party triumph. To this year belongs Isaac Cruikshank's [q. v.] caricature of Fox as the ‘Watchman of the State.’ On 26 May he supported Grey's motion for reform, declaring himself in favour of household suffrage in boroughs (Speeches, vi. 339). On the close of the session he and several of his friends, without pledging themselves to a systematic secession, ceased to attend parliament.

For more than five years Fox seldom ap-