ion ran to an
incredible excess. The whole community was divided into two hostile
camps. Broadly speaking, the cause of France was espoused, with
different degrees of fervour, by all lovers of civil and religious
freedom. To the Whigs the humiliation of Pitt was a more cherished
object than the defeat of Napoleon. Fox wrote to a friend: "The triumph
of the French Government over the English does, in fact, afford me a
degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise;" and I have
gathered that this was the prevalent temper of Whiggery during the long
and desperate struggle with Republican and Imperial France. What Byron
called "The crowning carnage, Waterloo," brought no abatement of
political rancour. The question of France, indeed, was eliminated from
the contest, but its elimination enabled English Liberals to concentrate
their hostility on the Tory Government without incurring the reproach of
unpatriotic sympathy with the enemies of England.

In the great fight between Tory and Whig, Government and Opposition,
Authority and Freedom, there was no quarter. Neither age nor sex was
spared. No department of national life was untouched by the fury of the
contest. The Royal Family was divided. The Duke of Cumberland was one of
the most dogged and unscrupulous leaders of the Tory party; the Duke of
Sussex toasted the memory of Charles James Fox, and at a public dinner
joined in singing "The Trumpet of Liberty," of which the chorus ran--

"Fall, tyrants, fall!
These are the days of liberty;
Fall, tyrants, fall!"

The Established Church was on the side of authority; the Dissenters
stood for freedom. "Our opponents," said Lord John Russell, in one of
his earliest speeches--"our opponents deafen us with their cry of
'Church and King.' Shall I tell you what they mean by it? They mean a
Church without the Gospel and a King above the law." An old Radical
electioneer, describing the activity of the country clergy on the Tory
side, said: "In every village we had the Black Recruiting-Sergeant
against us." Even within sacred walls the echoes of the fight were
heard. The State Holy-days--Gunpowder Treason, Charles the Martyr, the
Restoration and the Accession--gave suitable occasion for sermons of the
most polemical vehemence. Even the two Collects for the King at the
beginning of the Communion Service were regarded as respectively Tory
and Whig. The first, with its bold assertion of the Divine Right of
Sovereign