Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/97

 i8o;.] From Irish Union to Dismissal of Grenville. 83 of the weakness of Fox. Ellenborough was supposed, with Sidmouth, to represent the King's feelings and opinions. He was at the time Lord Chief Justice of England a position which he, very prudently for his own interests, declined to vacate for the precarious post of Lord Chancellor. But the impropriety on all constitutional grounds of making the chief administrator of the law a member of the executive Govern- ment was glaring. It needed only to suppose' that when Home and Thelwall and other Liberals were prosecuted, a member of the Cabinet, one of the actual prosecutors, might sit as the highest judge on their trial, to prove how improper such an arrangement must be. The House of Commons, however, obediently accepted the plan, a motion condemning it being rejected by 224 to 64 votes. There was no question of home policy on which Fox, Grey, and their friends could hope to carry out their views. They would not, indeed, give any promise or undertaking not to bring forward the Catholic, claims, and distinctly declared that they should vote for any proposal of the kind which might be introduced by indepen- dent members ; but to enter a Cabinet with Sidmouth and Ellenborough was virtually to abandon the cause. Nor were the Tory members .of the Government the only ones by whom a liberal and progressive policy was opposed. The Whigs represented by Grenville and Windham were little less adverse to constitutional reforms. This division of sympathy has been well defined by the statement that " Mr. Fox was the head of the old opposition, which had opposed the war, advocated broad popular liberties, and appealed to broad popular sympathies ; and Lord Grenville the leader of the new, which, though Whig in its principles, had sup- ported the war as a painful necessity, and discountenanced any present extension of popular liberties." * This condition of affairs completely silenced the Radicals in Parliament. Under the leadership of Fox, they had kept up a constant if not a hopeful fight. They had protested against the oppressive and coercive policy of successive
 * "Introduction to the History of the Peace," p. cxlvi.