realm had just emerged have been described by no one
so forcibly as by Burke himself. No one was so convinced as Burke that
the only way of withstanding the arbitrary and corrupting policy of
the Court was to form a strong Whig party. No one knew better than he
the sovereign importance and the immense difficulty of repairing the
ruin of the last twelve years by a good peace. The Rockingham or
Foxite section were obviously unable to form an effective party with
serious expectation of power, unless they had allies. They might, no
doubt, from personal dislike to Lord Shelburne, refuse to work
under him; but personal dislike could be no excuse for formally and
violently working against him, when his policy was their own, and when
its success was recognised by them no less than by him as of urgent
moment. Instead of either working with the other section of their
party, or of supporting from below the gangway that which was the
policy of both sections, they sought to return to power by coalescing
with the very man whose criminal subservience to the king's will had
brought about the catastrophe that Shelburne was repairing. Burke must
share the blame of this famous transaction. He was one of the most
furious assailants of the new ministry. He poured out a fresh
invective against Lord Shelburne every day Cynical contemporaries
laughed as they saw him in search of more and more humiliating
parallels, ransacking all literature from the Bible and the Roman
history down to Mother Goose's tales. His passion carried him so far
as to breed a reaction in those who listened to him. "I think,"
wrote Mason from Yorkshire, where Burke had been on a visit to Lord
Fitzwilliam in the autumn of 1782, "that Burke's mad obloquy against
Lord Shelburne, and these insolent pamphlets in which he must have
had a hand, will do more to fix him (Shelburne) in his office than
anything else."

This result would have actually followed, for the nation was ill
pleased at the immoral alliance between the Foxites and the man whom,
if they had been true to their opinions a thousand times repeated,
they ought at that moment to have been impeaching. The Dissenters, who
had hitherto been his enthusiastic admirers, but who are rigid above
other men in their demand of political consistency, lamented Burke's
fall in joining the Coalition, as Priestley told him many years after,
as the fall of a friend and a brother. But Shelburne threw away
the game. "His falsehood