Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/445

Rh Whig connections, the Grenvilles, the Bedfords, and the Pelhams, which at the beginning of the reign had ruled the country, two had joined the Court, and the third, diminished in numbers and in credit, was engaged, like the Greeks of Byzantium, in domestic quarrels while the enemy stood at the gates.

The only question on which the Opposition could act together was that of the Falkland Islands, and here their own violence defeated the objects they had in view. By the convention with Spain a practical return to the  had been made. The attack on Port Egmont was disavowed, and the settlement itself restored, while at the same time any claim of right which the Spanish King might have to the islands was allowed to be reserved. There were indeed many objections to be urged against this settlement, as Shelburne pointed out in a speech of great force during the debate in the House of Lords on February 14th. It could fairly be said that a reservation similar to that just mentioned had never before appeared in any public instrument between independent nations, that any assertion whatsoever of an English right of sovereignty had been studiously avoided in the convention, that the whole question was liable to be reopened at any moment, that the conduct of the Government had been a mixture of weakness and violence throughout the whole negotiation, that the Manilla Ransom had been entirely forgotten, that the Spanish reparation might have been more complete, and that more advantageous arrangements might have been concluded without precipitating the country into the calamities of war. But these and similar arguments, which Shelburne and the other Opposition peers embodied in an elaborate protest against the congratulatory address to the Crown moved by the Duke of Newcastle, scarcely justified their description of the concession made to the King of Spain in terms which might have been applied to the surrender of the Isle of Wight to France, but not to the reservation of a