n 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,
had at last the close of the continental war full in sight, peace
preliminaries were about to be laid before Parliament, but there was a
prospect of the war party fighting over the terms proposed by ministers,
and Bute felt that he must have a strong leader to champion his treaty
in the House of Commons. Fox was his man for the place, and Shelburne
was again commissioned to treat with him. The details of a negotiation
of this kind are not of a character to call for very particular
attention a century afterward, but the letters betwe