Fox's Necessary Response To The Demise Of The Whigs

The demise of the Whigs was rather a consequence of the ideological homogeneity that had escaped them. Portland was driven away from Fox because their priorities did not allow common ground. He was to become aligned with Pitt because theirs did. Whilst Fox valued liberty above all else, Portland did not; he was anxious for the maintenance of social order. The French Revolution made this impossible to go on ignored for, in the face of the tumult over events in France, the new political scene, as set by Burke’s Reflections, was rapidly drawn into an ordered spectrum of radical and conservative thought. Across this the Whig party found itself divided and dissonance inevitably turned into discord, separating Portland and Fox. Whereas Fox believed
Portland, however, saw only an unparalleled assault on property and legitimacy. These are diametrically opposed views and a central source of inter-party conflict. This conflict is again evident in Fox’s dismay over Portland’s support for the Royal Proclamation of 21st May 1792. The Whig grandees were delighted over this necessary response to Paineite radicalism, but, Fox opposed it as an attack on civil liberty. Again, over the issue of reform, with the formation of the Association of the Friends of the People on 11th April 1792, opinion was divided. Fox was by no means pleased with his colleagues for he insisted that the timing of the venture was dreadful, but, he still voted for the parliamentary reform bills presented to the Commons on 30th April 1792. Portland, meanwhile, was deeply disturbed by the formation of the Association and the discussions over reform, even organising resistance to the reformers by holding a meeting of conservative Whigs at Burlington House on 29th April
It is misleading to use the term ‘Tory’ in this context for not a single politician in this period accepted the label, the revival of the term in the 1790s being driven primarily by the Foxite use of it as a form of abuse. The features that define Toryism, support for the royal prerogative and Anglican Church, were not prevalent in the Pitt-Portland coalition of 1794. The sentiment that aligned Portland with Pitt can be said to be of a Tory nature only in its concern for the defence of property and maintenance of order. Pitt, though often seen as inseparable from Toryism, never ceased to refer to himself as an ‘Independent Whig’ and those who joined him from the opposition did not see themselves as abandoning their Whig principles. The coalition was Tory only in juxtaposition to the Foxites who were eager to emphasise their position as ‘true’ Whigs and Portland’s abandonment of Fox should be understood only as a consequence of his belief that he, not Fox – he who had ‘prostituted and counterfeited’ the term Whig to the extent that it merited a re-affirmation of its essentials - was a more faithful guardian of the Whig