en the parties--many
of them now for the first time published--are not without considerable
interest from the light they throw upon the characters and motives of
their writers. The position of a go-between is always more or less
perilous; his task, however well performed, is generally a thankless
one; nor in such matters can the adeptest diplomacy, joined to the most
thorough _bona fides_, always ensure the conduct of the common agent
against misapprehension and sore feelings. Of this the particular
negotiation of which we are now speaking is a typical instance. Bute's
offer (through Shelburne) to Fox was the leadership of the Commons, with
a peerage for himself to follow. Fox at the time held the very lucrative
post of paymaster-general--lucrative, because in those days it was
deemed a perfectly legitimate practice for the paymaster to make a
private profit out of the investment of the public moneys for the time
being under his control. Shelburne appears to have assumed--and so,
indeed, it was only natural to assume--that Fox would not dream of
accepting high office in the ministry without at the same time resigning
his extra-ministerial berth at the Pay Office; and there is evidence
that such--at first, at any rate--was Fox's own intention. The king was
given to understand that Fox's resignation of the Pay Office would be a
term of the proposed arrangements, and consented to them on that
footing; and then all at once Fox came out in the character of Injured
Innocent, protested that he had never meant to resign, that he had all
along intended to have his cake as well as eat it, and that Shelburne
had entrapped and betrayed him. The story goes, but on what authority
history saith not, that Bute afterward owned to Fox that Shelburne's
conduct in this transaction had been a "pious fraud," and that Fox
retorted, "I can see the fraud plainly enough, but where is the piety?"
The correspondence and the other evidence which, with a pardonable
jealousy for his ancestor's fair fame, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice sets out
with much detail in his biography, requires, we think, at the very
least, that a verdict of "Not proven" should be entered in Shelburne's
favor; but a man who chooses to make personal negotiation his specialty
must not be surprised to find his tact sometimes called trickery, and
his double agency set down as double dealing. It is certain that the
part he played in the Bute-Fox negotiations entailed upon Shelburne
imput