224 Chapter X
wealthy Whig family (he and his brothers had to be bailed out of £140,000 in
gambling debts in 1774), Fox was a man of warm and generous nature, who came
to sponsor all manner of liberal causes and was courageously to oppose the war
with Revolutionary France; but in his sympathy for parliamentary reform, he
seemed sometimes to lack a steadiness of cold conviction, and be less of a re-
former than either of the two Pitts or their friend, the Earl of Shelburne. In any
case, Shelburne (the elder Pitt being dead, the younger not yet in Parliament)
also now entered into the tumult of meetings and committees. With Fox and
Shelburne, the Rockinghamite and the Pittite Whigs, joining forces with a great
national upsurge of extra- parliamentary opinion, it seemed for a moment, in 1780,
as if their combined forces might both put an end to George III’s experiments
with personal rule, and bring about some measure of democratization of the House
of Commons. There were thoughts of a less baronial Magna Carta, a “second
Runnymede.”
Wyvil and the reformers, however, in their distrust of Parliament, regarded the
appearance of Fox and other members of Parliament in their midst as an infiltra-
tion. To a Parliament that had claimed independence of the people, they responded
by proposing an association independent of Parliament, an extra- parliamentary
but representative body that should act upon Parliament and reform it. Within the
various county and town meetings there thus took place a struggle for leadership,
between reformers who were members of Parliament and reformers who, from the
outside, did not believe that Parliament ever would or could really reform itself.
The call for a General Association, a veritable anti- Parliament, threw the re-
formers into disarray. The Rockingham Whigs (Shelburne showed more inclina-
tion to radicalism) now took alarm. They declared—rightly enough from a legal
point of view—that the deputies at London had no real representative character,
and no real representative powers. Meetings throughout the country were dubious
and divided. Gentry and freeholders were annoyed at corruption, taxes, extrava-
gance, and parliamentary subservience to the crown, but they could not bring
themselves to impugn the grandeur of the British constitution, or to believe that
Parliament should be dictated to by unauthorized persons like themselves. At the
Wiltshire meeting, to which both Fox and Shelburne belonged, the committee
cautiously decided that if any association ever met it should demand no more than
economical reform, and the full meeting would agree to no association at all. Not-
tingham, in county meeting, feared “self- created assemblies.” Sussex warned
against “General Associations apparently tending to overrule the legislature,” and
Hertfordshire did not want the legislature “overawed” by committees of correspon-
dence. America and Ireland, observed the Annual Register, had made the very
words “association” and “committee” sound suspicious. And even in Yorkshire,
where the movement to “overawe” Parliament had first gathered strength among
men boasting, £800,000 of income, there were sobering second thoughts. York-
shire, under the nominal four- shilling land tax, really paid only one shilling in the
pound of actual rents. Conservatives were quick to hint at the probable conse-
quences of reform.^8
8 Ibid., 246–51; W. R. Ward, English Land Tax in the 18th Century (London, 1953), 125.