What do the complaints of Walpole’s political tergiversation amount to? It was certainly not a wise act of Horace to hang up in his bedroom an engraving of the death warrant of Charles I. with the inscription “Major Charta.” But the Whig essayist, while reproving Walpole’s strange fancy that, without the instrument in question, the Great Charter would have become of little importance, might have recollected that he had himself professed his inability to see any essential distinction between the execution of the Royal Martyr and the deposition of his son. Again, there was inconsistency, no doubt, between Walpole’s admiration of the Long Parliament, and his detestation of the National Assembly; yet it should be borne in mind that, in the midst of his disgust at the excesses of the French Revolution, he protested that he was very far from subscribing to the whole of Burke’s “Reflections.” Why then should we be told that “he was frightened into a fanatical royalist, and became one of the most extravagant alarmists of those wretched times?” We may surely ask on his behalf the question which Macaulay put when the consistency of his own master, Sir James Mackintosh, was impugned: “Why is one person to be singled out from among millions, and arraigned before posterity as a traitor to his opinions, only because events produced on him the effect which they produced on a whole generation?” When the critic tells us that Walpole was a mischief-maker who “sometimes contrived, without showing himself, to disturb the course of Ministerial negotiations, and to spread confusion through the political circles,” we cannot avoid seeing in these words a resentful reference to the part taken by Conway on the occasions above referred to. It was not Walpole’s fault that the party conflicts of his time were mainly about persons. We have seen the importance which Fox attached to these personal questions. We may safely say that this great man’s disapproval of Walpole’s conduct did not spring from any difference on matters of principle. If Horace was an opponent of Parliamentary Reform, this was an open question among Fox’s most intimate associates. If he objected to the enfranchisement of the Roman Catholics, most Whigs of his time did the same. In the dispute with America, as we shall see, he maintained, from the first, the right of the Colonies to liberty and independence. Nor did he retract his expressions of sympathy with the American Republic when the horrors of the French Revolution made him a supporter of Tory policy in England and on the Continent. He always lamented as one of the worst effects of the French excesses that they must necessarily retard the progress and establishment of civil liberty.[12]