CHAPTER XII
THE DIVIDED OPPOSITION
1770-1771
Losses, dissensions, profligacy, and folly were the causes, according to Walpole, which in the course of 1770 ruined the prospects of the Opposition.[1] Their dissensions alone, even if unaided by other circumstances, would have been sufficient to produce that result. The extreme violence of the language of the Old Whigs—especially in the House of Commons[2]—the savage attacks of Junius[3] on the King, and the want of character of Wilkes, were together beginning to produce their inevitable consequence—a reaction. "Not a dozen counties and only a few
- ↑ Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George III., iv. 40.
- ↑ Ibid. iv. 42.
- ↑ It is not my intention to enter into the controversy about the authorship of Junius (which will probably cease at the same time as that about the man in the Iron Mask), more especially as I believe that all the attempts which have been made at various times to fix the authorship either on Lord Shelburne himself or on one of his entourage have hopelessly failed. The statements made by Mrs. Serres in her Life of Dr. Wilmot, in which she tries to prove an intimate connection between that gentleman and Lord Shelburne, the former of whom is put forward as the true Junius, I believe to be entirely false. There are no letters at Lansdowne House from Dr. Wilmot, and the documents which appear in the Appendix to Mrs. Serres' book were considered by the late Mr. Twisleton to have been, if not forged, at least tampered with. I may mention that in a conversation which I had with Mr. Twisleton he told me that he had sometimes been puzzled at the abuse of Lord Shelburne by Junius as contrasted with his praise of Lord Chatham (e.g. the letter of Junius to Chatham, January 2nd, 1768). It was clear, Mr. Twisleton said, that Junius could not have known the friendship which existed between the two statesmen. If, however, the view put forward above, viz. that from the end of 1767 to the middle of 1770 a certain coolness existed between them, the difficulty at once disappears; while assuming Junius, as was most likely the case, to have been under the influence of Lord Temple, nothing would have been more characteristic of the latter than to attempt to widen the breach between his brother-in-law, whose friendship he was at that time sedulously courting, and his only dangerous rival in that brother-in-law's favour.
Whether Lord Shelburne knew who the author of Junius was is a separate question. The only evidence of any importance bearing upon it, is that mentioned further on in this work, which, without attaching too much importance to particular words, it is impossible to put summarily out of court, except on the supposition that Sir R. Philips
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