sted less than a year. Fox, conscious of his own great
purposes, and eager to return to office for their better advancement, was
prepared to pay a gambler's price for power. To overthrow Shelburne and
with Shelburne Pitt, he needed a pretext and an ally. The pretext was
easy to find. He had but to maintain that the terms of the peace with
America were not the best that the country had a right to expect. The
ally was easy to find and disastrous to accept. Nothing in the whole of
Fox's history is more regrettable than his unnatural alliance with Lord
North. Ever since the hour when Fox had found his true self, and had
passed from the ranks of the obedient servants of the King into the ranks
of those who devoted themselves to the principles of liberty, there had
been nothing and there could have been nothing in common between Fox and
North. Everything that Fox held most dear was detestable to North, as
North's political doctrines were now detestable to Fox. The political
enmity of the two men had been bitter in the extreme, and Fox had
assailed North with a violence which might well seem to have made any
form of political reconciliation impossible. Yet North was now the man
with whom Fox was content to throw in his lot in order to obtain the
{226} overthrow of Shelburne and of Pitt. And Fox was not alone among
great Whigs in this extraordinary transaction. He carried Burke with him
in this unholy alliance between all that was worst and all that was best
in English political life. The two men whose genius and whose eloquence
had been the most potent factors in the fall of North a year before were
now the means of bringing the discredited and defeated statesman back
again into the exercise of a power which, as none knew better than they,
he had so shamefully misused. Fox and North between them swept Shelburne
out of the field. Fox and North between them were able to force a
Coalition Ministry upon a reluctant and indignant King. The followers of
Fox and the followers of North in combination formed so numerous and so
solid a party that they were able to treat the sovereign with a lack of
ceremony to which he was little used. Fox had gone out of office rather
than admit that the right to nominate the first minister rested with the
King instead of with the Cabinet. Now that he had returned to office, he
showed his determination to act up to his principles by not permitting
the King to nominate a single minister.