The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [116]
Intent on exposing abuses, Richmond harassed Army, Admiralty and Treasury with his searching questions, which did not make him popular. He could arrive in town on the morning of a debate, master the issues in a quick study and speak on them effectively the same afternoon. Defeat of his aims and purposes, however, turned him quickly sour, causing repeated threats to retire from politics altogether. He suffered periods of depression, one in 1769 of which he wrote to Rockingham, “I must for some time at least indulge myself in my present disposition which I will give no name to.” At home in Sussex he spent vast sums on new wings to Goodwood House, on dog kennels and race track, yacht, hunting and the local militia and, after inheriting a great estate worth £68,000 with an additional annual income of £20,000 from coal duties, found himself £95,000 in debt forty years later. His interest in government, like that of others of his kind, often slipped below other matters. It was unreasonable of Burke, Richmond once wrote to him, to want him to come down to London before Parliament convened. His opinion carried “little weight,” therefore for him to confer with political associates had no purpose. “No, let me enjoy myself here till the meeting, and then at your desire I will go to town and look about me for a few days.”
Unrestrained in the 1770 debate, he described ministerial conduct in America as that of either “artful knave or incorrigible fool” and either way, “the ministers are a disgrace to the very name of government.” He proposed eighteen resolutions of censure covering all acts and measures since 1768 and concluding that “these many and ill-judged proceedings have been a principal cause of the aforesaid disorders.” Goaded to reply, Hillsborough made the usual defense of the need to establish authority, and added a charge that “our patriots” of the opposition were stimulating colonial protest and “continually throwing obstacles in the way of reconciliation” out of “the patriotic wish of getting into place.… In fact, my lords, their whole patriotism is a despicable avarice of employment … so they can succeed to office.”
While obviously underrating the colonies’ native resistance, Hillsborough had a point about the motives of the opposition. Their “avarice” for office, however, was not as strong as their inertia of political organization. They were ineffectual because, owing to feuds and differences, they could not find common ground to form a solid front. “Dowdeswell [former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Rockingham] was devilish sulky at Lord Chatham,” wrote Richmond to Rockingham at this time, “and Burke is all combustible.” Burke could not take Chatham’s arrogance and Chatham could not endure a strong-minded intellectual equal as an ally. Although Rockingham tried to bring Chatham into a team that would work together under his captaincy, Chatham would accept only on conditions establishing his own dominion. Shelburne, disgusted with the helplessness of being in a perpetual minority, went abroad with Barré in 1771. Richmond and Rockingham were lured by their country acres and, as a contemporary satire put it,
With hound and horn her truant schoolboys roam
And for a fox-hunt quit St. Stephen’s dome*
In America, no heightened protest followed Parliament’s maintenance of