All this, it must not be forgotten, was written in the year 1801, long after the writer had finally retired from the battlefield of politics, upon which, at the period when his own account of his youth breaks off, he had not yet made his first essay. Some practical experience of actual battlefields was to be gained by the future statesman before his appearance in the parliamentary arena. Just before the time when, between nineteen and twenty years of age, he was leaving Oxford, the Seven Years' War broke out, and finding "home detestable, no prospect of a decent allowance to go abroad [he had a trifling six hundred pounds a year from his father, though], neither happiness nor quiet," he joined the army and went on foreign service. Here he had the good-fortune to come under the chivalrous General Wolfe, whom he eulogizes in terms the genuine warmth and heartiness of which is all the more striking from the contrast with his generally severe judgments upon his contemporaries. At the battle of Minden in 1759, and again at Kloster Kampen in the following year, he displayed conspicuous personal courage, which was rewarded, on his return to England, with the rank of colonel and the court appointment of _aide-de-camp_ to the new king, George III. Hardly had camp been exchanged for court when circumstances offered the young Lord Fitzmaurice his first introduction to a kind of political employ which was to be thenceforward, through a series of years, his frequent and peculiar function. Lord Bute, the favorite, had begun to climb the ladder of ministerial office, and had cast his eyes upon that unscrupulous and greedy but undeniably able politician, Henry Fox, as the man most desirable for his purpose by way of a House-of-Commons ally. Owing, very possibly, to the fact that there existed some connection between Fox and Fitzmaurice's father, Lord Fitzmaurice fell into the place of intermediary between the parties to this negotiation, which had hardly passed out of its first stage when the death of his father removed him, now Lord Shelburne, to the House of Lords before he had ever taken the family seat, into which he had been elected at the last general election, in the lower House. The negotiation was successfully carried through. Fox named his price--a peerage for his wife--and after considerable haggling got it, and in return undertook a position which Shelburne announced to Bute in a letter dated October 31, 1761, as follows: "Mr. Fox will attend [the House of Commons] every day, and will, either by silence or by speaking, as he finds it prudent according to the occasion, do his best to forward what your lordship wishes, and will enter into no sort of engagement with any one else whatever." But before the year was out Bute found himself in want of a closer and more positive support on the part of Fox than he had in the first instance contracted for. The peace party, which he (Bute) headed,