Horace Walpole and His World: Select Passages from His LettersWalpole, Horace
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Horace Walpole and His World: Select Passages from His Letters
Walpole, Horace
Walpole, Horace, 1717-1797 -- Correspondence
In 1782, the Duke of Richmond, Conway’s son-in-law, concurred with
Conway in declining to desert the new Premier; and we know that Walpole
stoutly supported, if he did not dictate, the joint resolution of his
two friends. Lord Holland tells us that Fox did not like Walpole at
all, and accounts for this dislike by suggesting that his uncle may
have imbibed some prejudice against Walpole for unkindness shown to the
first Lord Holland. But this seems going needlessly far back for an
explanation. There can be no doubt that Fox looked on Walpole as having
assisted to thwart his design of governing England in the name of the
insignificant Duke of Portland, and detested him accordingly. Nor did
subsequent events tend to soften Fox’s recollection of this passage
in his life, or of the persons concerned in it. Had he overcome his
jealousy of Lord Shelburne, or had he succeeded in compelling his rival
to bow before the “wooden idol”--so Lord John Russell himself calls
Portland--which he had set up, he would probably, in either case, have
avoided the ill-famed coalition with Lord North, which was the main
cause of his long-continued exclusion from power. Walpole had spoken
his mind very plainly on the subject. “It is very entertaining,” he
wrote, “that two or three great families should persuade themselves
that they have an hereditary and exclusive right of giving us a head
without a tongue.”[10] And he told Fox himself: “My Whiggism is not
confined to the Peak of Derbyshire.”[11] We can imagine with what
horror such utterances as these were received by the believers in the
Whig doctrine of divine right. No wonder that Mr. Fox did not like
Walpole. And what Mr. Fox disliked was, of course, anathema to every
true Whig, and especially to an Edinburgh Reviewer of 1833.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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