Rockingham's friends, must induce to make him act cordially with them." "To cement you more," he went on to say, "I forbore to make the Bottom wider. It is for the same purpose that I am now earnest to assure you, that I shall receive your advice and recommendation with great attention, but certainly the more if it meets with Lord Shelburne's concurrence, and vice versa. My opinion was to have the Administration consist of the ablest men without selection or party descriptions; Participation, not Division."[1]
Men in general anticipated a long tenure for the new Ministers; others who were behind the scenes knew that the crew of the Whig ship was divided against itself and that the captain was dying. On the 25th of March, Shelburne met Fox going down to the House and told him that Dunning would move an adjournment to allow the final arrangements to be made. Fox curtly replied "that he perceived the Administration was to consist of two parts, one belonging to the King, the other to the public."[2] These unconciliatory words were the sure presage of the internal differences, which were now to be added to external difficulties in themselves quite sufficient to try even a united Cabinet; for no English Ministry had as yet entered on so arduous a task as that which in 1782 lay before Rockingham and his friends. They had either to end a disgraceful and disastrous war, or to carry it on with the impaired resources and diminished prestige of a country of which the army had been directed by Lord George Germaine and the fleet by Lord Sandwich. In the East Indies the Bailli de Suffren was almost a match for Admiral Hughes; in the West Indies the large armament, commanded by De Grasse, would it was feared prove equally dangerous to Admiral Rodney; Gibraltar was beleaguered by sea and land; Mahon had already fallen; England herself might before long be invaded. Sea and land were strewn with the wreck of previous defeats, and the sky was black with clouds presaging a
