Dear Grenville,
I am exceedingly obliged to you for your kind letter; and
indeed, if political transactions put one out of humour with
_many_, they make one love the _few_ who do act and think right
so much better that it is some compensation. I understand a
messenger is just going, by whom I send this letter; he will
bring you others, from whence you will learn that your brother
is going Lord-Lieutenant to Ireland. If you go with him as
Secretary, I hope you will be so good as to endeavour to serve
my friend Dickson, who by this change has for the third time
missed a Bishopric.
I called upon your brother yesterday, and left with him the
letters that passed between you and me, explaining that it was
at your desire that I did so. I was very glad to have your
authority for this step, for to tell you the truth, I was very
much inclined to take it even of my own when it was supposed he
was to be my successor; now that he knows the whole of the
narration, if he still chooses (as I fear he will) to go into
this den of thieves neither you nor I have anything to answer
for. If this transaction had been withheld from him, he might
have had reason to complain of me, but much more of you. I have
not heard from him since he has been _au fait_. His expressions,
both to me personally and to the party, were so kind, that I am
far from considering him as lost; but whether he is or not, and
whatever part your situation may make it right for you to take
in politics, I shall always depend upon your friendship and
kindness to me as perfectly unalterable; and I do assure you
that this consideration is one of the things that most
contributes to keep up my spirits in this very trying situation.
Yours affectionately,
C. J. Fox.
Grafton Street, July 13th, 1782.
Lord Temple entered upon the Government of Ireland at a crisis of
serious agitation. A short time before, under the Duke of Portland's
Administration, a Bill had passed the Imperial Parliament, recognizing
in full and in the most explicit manner the sole and exclusive right of
the Parliament of Ireland to make laws for Ireland--establishing and
affirming, in fact, the perfect independence of Ireland, legislative,
judicial and commercial. This Bill had given complete satisfaction to
the popular leaders. Even the Volunteers declared themselves appeased,
and adopted final resolutions to that effect. But the factious and
jealous spirit of the Irish was subsequently disturbed by indications on
the part of the English Legislature of a disposition to depart in some
particulars from this settlement, and by the unfortunate incident of
some Irish appeals which lay over for judgment in England, the authority
to adjudicate them having been relinquished, or disavowed, by the
measure alluded to. The whole matter turned upon distinctions, but they
were sufficient to influence the distrust of the turbulent, who were
ready to seize upon any excuse for expressing their impatience of
English authority. The introduction of a singular Bill by Lord Abingdon,
having for its object the assertion of the sole and exclusive right of
Great Britain to regulate her external commerce, and that of all
countries under her sovereignty, and repealing so much of the former
Bill as took that power out of the Parliament of Great Britain and
vested it in the Parliament of Ireland, had the effect of affording an
abundant pretext to the uneasiness which was now beginning to grow up in
Ireland, and which Mr. Grattan exerted his utmost influence to dispel.
Want of confidence, also, in the sincerity of Lord Shelburne's Ministry
yielded an additional ground for national discontent. "Things were never
more unsettled than they are at present," Mr. Perry writes to Mr.
Grattan, in October, 1782; "some of the Ministry here are at open enmity
with each other, and everybody seems to distrust the head." Such was the
state of their affairs when Mr. William Wyndham Grenville came over to
London to communicate confidentially with the Government on the part of
his brother, the Lord-Lieutenant. The correspondence in which he details
from day to day the results of his interviews with Ministers, and his
observations upon the net-work of small difficulties in which he was
involved by the want of unity in the Cabinet--especially between Mr.
Townshend and Lord Shelburne on the Irish questions--is minute and
voluminous; and only a few letters have been selected from the mass to
show the course of ministerial diplomacy in reference to the equivocal
relations subsisting at that period between the two countries. They form
a running commentary upon a curious passage in Irish history; and
although the circumstances to which they relate have long been
completely disposed of, the Union having obliterated all the matters in
dispute, the insight which they give us into the detail of Cabinet
discussions, the occasional traits they bring to light of the characters
of public men, and the calm and luminous views they develope of the
distracting politics of Ireland, confer a permanent interest upon them.
Two facts, by no means unimportant, are established in these
letters--namely, the lively and judicious anxiety Lord Temple and his
brother uniformly felt in their endeavours to restore the tranquillity
of Ireland, and the impediments they met in their strenuous efforts to
preserve the faith and honour of England in her transactions with that
country.