minute of the transaction, and to write a civil note to Mr. Alderman Curtis, requesting him to second the motion he should make on Tuesday, for leave to bring in a Bill for the better supplying his Majesty's Ministers with ideas, in the present embarrassing posture of their affairs with the Public.
By the end of 1798 the relations between Lord Lansdowne and Fox had become cordial. "The circumstances of the time," the latter wrote to Lord Holland, "will of themselves bring Lansdowne and me together far better than any explanations or messages or communications etc. We are indeed now upon a very good footing, and quite sufficiently so to enable us to act cordially together, if any occasion offers to make our doing so useful."[1] In the popular mind they were now intimately associated as the leaders of Opposition, and as such were the constant butt of the caricaturists of the day. Gillray drew Lord Lansdowne as the centre of a group of revolutionists including Fox, now weighing the crown by the new French weight, now presiding over the guillotine from the balcony of Brook's, or waving the wig of the decapitated Chancellor to the crowd, or firing a gun in at the windows of the Royal carriage. Sometimes he is represented as a bat or an owl, with Fox as his companion, fleeing before the rays of the rising sun; sometimes he appears with the Duke of Grafton and the Duke of Norfolk, as a member of the Council of the Ancients of the Republic. Elsewhere he is depicted as an old news boy stealing out of the back gate of his house in Berkeley Square, to disseminate "Malagrida's latest lie from Paris," or as training up Jekyll, represented as a bull terrier, to fly at a bust of Pitt placed at the end of an arbour in his garden, or dancing in a ring with the other leading members of the Opposition and shouting "Vive Barère."[2]
- ↑ Memorials of Fox, iii. 129.
- ↑ In a Paper printed in the Fortescue Papers, iv. 69-70, entitled "Secret Intelligence from France," and purporting to contain "the French rulers' " plan for the government of England, it is stated that "the Directory of England is to consist of Paine, Tooke, Sharpe, Thclwall, Lansdowne." Among the condemned to deportation are nearly the whole of the nobility and rich proprietors. Among those condemned to transportation is Mr. Fox, with the remark: "Faux patriote: ayant souvent insulté la nation française dans ses discours, et particulièrement en 1786" (January 1798).
