If Burke was responsible for the break-up of the Government, then he was the instigator of a blunder that must be pronounced not only disastrous but culpable.  It lowered the legitimate spirit of party to the nameless spirit of faction.  The dangers from which the old liberties of the realm had just emerged have been described by no one so forcibly as by Burke himself.  No one was so convinced as Burke that the only way of withstanding the arbitrary and corrupting policy of the Court was to form a strong Whig party.  No one knew better than he the sovereign importance and the immense difficulty of repairing the ruin of the last twelve years by a good peace.  The Rockingham or Foxite section were obviously unable to form an effective party with serious expectation of power, unless they had allies.  They might, no doubt, from personal dislike to Lord Shelburne, refuse to work under him; but personal dislike could be no excuse for formally and violently working against him, when his policy was their own, and when its success was recognised by them no less than by him as of urgent moment.  Instead of either working with the other section of their party, or of supporting from below the gangway that which was the policy of both sections, they sought to return to power by coalescing with the very man whose criminal subservience to the king’s will had brought about the catastrophe that Shelburne was repairing.  Burke must share the blame of this famous transaction.  He was one of the most furious assailants of the new ministry.  He poured out a fresh invective against Lord Shelburne every day Cynical contemporaries laughed as they saw him in search of more and more humiliating parallels, ransacking all literature from the Bible and the Roman history down to Mother Goose’s tales.  His passion carried him so far as to breed a reaction in those who listened to him.  “I think,” wrote Mason from Yorkshire, where Burke had been on a visit to Lord Fitzwilliam in the autumn of 1782, “that Burke’s mad obloquy against Lord Shelburne, and these insolent pamphlets in which he must have had a hand, will do more to fix him (Shelburne) in his office than anything else.”

This result would have actually followed, for the nation was ill pleased at the immoral alliance between the Foxites and the man whom, if they had been true to their opinions a thousand times repeated, they ought at that moment to have been impeaching.  The Dissenters, who had hitherto been his enthusiastic admirers, but who are rigid above other men in their demand of political consistency, lamented Burke’s fall in joining the Coalition, as Priestley told him many years after, as the fall of a friend and a brother.  But Shelburne threw away the game.  “His falsehoods,” says Horace Walpole, “his flatteries, duplicity, insincerity, arrogance, contradictions, neglect of his friends, with all the kindred of all these faults, were the daily topics of contempt and ridicule; and his folly shut his eyes, nor did he