“Charm is a quality which often evades the historian.” So wrote John W. Derry in his biography of Charles James Fox. James Grant’s imaginative attempt to follow the “friendship” between Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke might be seen as an attempt to challenge that deficiency. In Friends Until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution, Grant assembles a structure of networks and characters that moves beyond the abstract discussion of ideas and concepts to help explain the temporary alliance between these two giants of politics.
Grant is not a historian by profession, but he offers here a highly accessible account of the relationship between two of the most powerful orators in the British parliament during a period anchored by the turbulent revolutionary events in the American colonies, in India, and in France. Despite the subtitle of his book, he achieves this effect because he covers much more than what the phrase “Age of Revolution” might indicate. Far from a direct focus on the approaches of Fox and Burke to the American and French revolutions, those readers broadly familiar with Burke and, perhaps, Fox, will benefit from the author’s precise discussion of a variety of peripheral, but converging, issues that helped to bring the two figures together: the first steps in the development of an organized political “party” during the years following the Seven Years’ War, through such apparently tangential matters as Admiral Sir George Rodney’s cruel “scourging” of the Jews in St Eustatius, and the imprisonment of the Revolutionary War leader Henry Laurens, to Burke’s pursuit of economic reform as Paymaster General, the shock of the Regency Crisis, and the extended effort to further reform the East India Company, with the consequent impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal.
Each episode Grant covers is well-sourced, both from contemporary correspondence and from the works of highly reputable historians. It was good, for example, to see Jonathan Clark’s critical edition of Reflections on the Revolution in France employed, and references to the most recent work from P. J. Marshall, the outstanding scholar on Burke and his connections to the Caribbean and to India. (What a pity, though, to be reminded how publishers still set themselves against placing footnotes where they belong—at the foot of their appropriate page.)
While the intention of the work inclines away from this next point, it is also very good to see such contextual description supported by lucid and plausible (if necessarily brief) assessments of key figures who helped, intentionally or not, to engineer the friendship between Fox and Burke: John Wilkes, the Marquis of Rockingham, Lord North, William Pitt the Younger, Edmund Burke’s younger brother Richard, Warren Hastings’ nemesis Philip Francis, among others.
That intention itself—the charting of an improbable “friendship” between two statesmen (the ultimate consequence of which appears to have been, primarily, the sundering of Whiggery at the end of the eighteenth century) is an intriguing one, and Grant is not hesitant about highlighting the character differences that intruded into such a “friendship.” In matters of character, while they shared a love of literature and the classics, a talent for oratory, and “a chronic shortage of ready money,” as Grant observes, “one was a happily married family man, the other, a definitely dissolute bachelor; the one, an Irish émigré, the other, a descendant (down an illegitimate line) of Charles II. They were farmer and horse player; home-rooted Briton and Francophile man of the world; devout member of the Church of England and no churchman at all.”
Indeed, though Cicero stated that “he who looks upon a true friend, looks, as it were, upon a sort of image of himself,” it could be argued that the similarities between the men hardly keep pace with the contrasts, and that is no different when we turn to ideas and political principles. Here Grant identifies the similarities as “a devotion to justice especially for the downtrodden[,] … an abhorrence of the American war and, more broadly, of the North government[, and] jealousy of the encroaching power of the crown over Parliament.” The first of these cries out for greater clarification. The other principles were clearly bound by time and events, and so it lies with the author to explain how the issues raised by the unanticipated revolution in France exposed under these apparent similarities a deeper level of divergence that brought about the dramatic, public, and final split between the two statesmen in the House of Commons on May 6, 1791.
In that concatenation of events, “Whiggery” itself is strained beyond breaking point. Burke’s Whig principles, which were firmly rooted in preserving the legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and the Revolution Settlement that followed, have been described succinctly by Peter Stanlis as designed to preserve and confirm England’s “constitutional hereditary monarchy limited in its powers and prerogatives by the balanced orders of the Commons and Lords.” Fox was similarly committed to the legacy of the Glorious Revolution, but to a more malleable legacy that followed burgeoning theories of the primacy of popular liberty while holding fast to an enduring suspicion of monarchical overreach.
Burke’s animosities could be seen to have arisen out of his grasp of fundamental principles, whereas Fox’s principles, as described by Grant, seem rather to have emerged from his attempt to order his animosities.
Burke and Fox were “friends until the end”—but, then, what kind of friendship? And until the end of what—since it was clearly not until the end of their lives? While Fox, who was the younger by some twenty years, met and came to admire Burke before he ever entered parliament himself, Grant argues that it was the American Revolution that first brought the two together in political alliance. Through Burke’s agitation for a party “based on principle,” presented in his Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770) and brought to reality under Lord Rockingham, there seemed to emerge between the two a concurrence of common principles which might be carried on, after the fall of Lord North’s administration, through vital matters such as economic reform, the impeachment of Hastings, and the Regency Crisis.
But while the two worked to produce a method of effective opposition in parliament, they had differing views of the significance of principles and association in that process. Fox looked at party as, in the words of Leslie Mitchell, “often an extension of friendship,” whereas Burke stretched for “principles and integrity” within a “general scheme” of common action that extended beyond the vagaries of foreign affairs. Both appeared in agreement on the essential preservation of liberty and on protecting the constitution, although Fox’s early defense of the revolutionaries in France indicated how both had different views of the relationship between the two. Could Burke, who appears to have understood the British constitution as emanating from a higher constitution of humankind, ever have accepted Fox’s assertion in the debate on the Quebec bill of 1791 that “the rights of man … were in fact the basis and foundation of … the British constitution itself”? Both defended the hereditary principle, but, in fact, they understood its significance in the context of natural justice quite differently, as Fox’s conflation of privilege and inalienable right in his support for Prince George’s claim for the regency would seem to suggest.
Perhaps most significant of all, both Fox and Burke were energized by particular animosities. In this narrative, Burke’s somewhat puzzling obsession with condemning Hastings carries similar weight to Grant’s comment that “hatred of Pitt was [Fox’s] eternal flame”; yet even here, the evidence suggests that there was an important difference. Burke’s animosities could be seen to have arisen out of his grasp of fundamental principles, whereas Fox’s principles, as described here, seem rather to have emerged from his attempt to order his animosities.
In his treatise On Friendship (which we can assume was well known to both Burke and Fox), Cicero wrote that, “Friendship is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection.” Given that Fox was not of a religious disposition (and I would place more significance on this than on all the other comparisons), one might think that a word like “fellowship” would be a more accurate description for their relationship. In any case, the split in 1791 comes as no surprise (and can, as Grant does, be traced back to tensions shortly after the early death of Lord Rockingham). Indeed, the contours of their friendship appear in many ways to have been carved out by the ambitions and actions of others—of Rockingham and Pitt, in particular. With Rockingham dead, and Pitt a (largely fortunate) beneficiary of the Regency Crisis seven years later, it is hard to see what was left to hold Fox and Burke together much longer.
The three points of focus indicated in the book’s subtitle the “Age of Revolution”—the American Revolution, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and the French Revolution—fade somewhat in their significance through the narrative structure of the format, and this is not necessarily a problem unless one was wishing to see the author plumb the conceptual differences that the narrative exposes more deeply. Grant does usefully highlight some of the issues that helped to define the split in 1791: Fox’s persistent reference to the Glorious Revolution as a hopeful precedent for events in France, and to an unfavorable comparison of the Bourbons and the Hanoverians over a general fear of the expansion of monarchical power; differences in an understanding of the words prescription and innovation; Burke’s reaching for a transcendent plane in his criticism of the French revolutionary program; and indeed, despite his less-travelled life, Burke’s superior knowledge of many aspects of the condition of society in France.
The publishers claim in their blurb that the book will suggest “lessons for our divided present.” That would seem to rest upon greater imagination than I can muster, except that the moral of Grant’s engrossing presentation of this unlikely friendship between Fox and Burke is not that it was meant forever but simply that it happened at all. In that spirit, let us pray for a modern imitation of one of the great alliances of British parliamentary history.