Friends Until the End

Pistol-whipping snipers as they briefly aspired to be, Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox—both of whom either prepared for or participated in an actual duel at one point in their lives—nourished a poignant friendship throughout the eighteenth century that collapsed under the weight of the French Revolution debates in England. James Grant, a financial journalist whose published works include volumes on John Adams and Walter Bagehot, brings alive Burke’s and Fox’s personalities in Friends Until the End with force, finesse, and wit while displaying impressive fluency in the beautiful chaos of early modern English politics.

The principal strength of the book is Grant’s delicate blend of pith and verve that guides his presentation of the complex dimensions of Burke’s and Fox’s political and private lives. Avoiding the labyrinths of academic jargon, Grant depicts the historical evolution of their relationship using short, compact sentences that catch the essence of their inner temperaments and political principles. The author adopts an irreverent yet neutral tone, privileging neither Burke nor Fox in his descriptions of their glorious triumphs and ignoble foibles. Friends Until the End in this light is a rarity among books on eighteenth-century English politics, for it may actually qualify as a beach read in the best sense of the term: It is a vivid portrait of two consequential figures, accessible to the layman, that moves along at a breezy pace but still retains elements of depth and nuance.

In sixteen chapters braced by a preface and epilogue, Grant deftly chronicles key similarities and differences between Burke and Fox, twenty years his junior. Burke, the son of an Anglican father and Catholic mother hailing from a relatively modest background, swiftly attained prominence in Parliament as the leading philosopher-pamphleteer of the Rockingham Whigs and an eloquent orator on all subjects ranging from the Wilkes affair to the American colonies to economical reform. He was sagacious in thought, pious in outlook, and steadfast in family life.

No birdbrain himself, Fox was, according to Burke, “born to be loved” (p. 4). Loved, if not pampered, swaddled, and licked—he was famously coddled under the shade of his father, Henry Fox, who acquired considerable wealth as Paymaster of the Forces during the Seven Years’ War and lavished much of it on his son with casual indiscretion. With seemingly “not one religious bone” in his body (p. 1), as Grant notes, the younger Fox emerged as a promiscuous gambler and roving bachelor, fond of theater, revelry, and women, and not always in that order.

But Fox, like Burke a Whig, was a devotee of classical literature, a gifted debater, and a vigorous proponent of liberty. Both shone in opposition, resisting the Crown’s encroachment on the House of Commons using their silver tongues and Burke’s flowing pen. Grant characterizes them as the “greatest English orators of the eighteenth century” (p. 1). The force of Fox’s charisma, as Grant aptly demonstrates, in fact exceeded that of Burke’s, whose lyrical imagination at times swallowed him up. The latter’s powers of eloquence and intellect frequently overwhelmed listeners, flooding his speeches with biblical, literary, and philosophical allusions that periodically distracted attention from the political maxims he was striving to engrave in British hearts. (The interminable length of such addresses didn’t help.) Fox’s aggressive oratory was also flowery but more compressed, affecting yet unswerving.

With Burke serving as Fox’s mentor, the two developed an abiding admiration for one another, exceeding their status as political allies, that mingled their souls in the thick of political combat and private trials. Both were in chronic debt, not unusual among British statesmen in the eighteenth century, and yet Burke evidently was a generous creditor of Fox, subsidizing the latter’s Dionysian madness at the faro tables. The author’s background in business journalism helps explain his noticeable interest throughout the book in their tempestuous financial affairs.

Grant sprinkles in entertaining and overlooked episodes in Burke’s and Fox’s lives that capture the pungent flavor of their personalities and dispositions. The duels are a case in point. Burke and Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn nearly came to blows in 1777 after Wedderburn defended himself in Parliament against Burke’s insinuation that he was sacrificing his legal judgment for political expediency. Burke began to draft a note outlining the logistics of the duel, until Fox and others soothed his vindictive ambitions. Burke, alas, had no luck in his effort to do the same with Fox, who did duel William Adam, a parliamentarian, after Adam caught whiff of slanderous insults directed toward him that were attributed to Fox. Fox was hit in the midsection but otherwise remained unscathed. Both episodes illustrate that political conviction could slide into personal vendetta in the heated cauldron of eighteenth-century English politics.

Yet Grant’s narrative is largely inspired by the debate in Britain over American colonists’ fight for independence, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and the French Revolution. His discussion of the Hastings impeachment is particularly well executed and evenhanded, with his lucid account of the trial delivering flashes of suspense and intrigue. Grant provides clear summaries of the event’s historical context, the formal charges against Hastings, and the jagged trajectory of the impeachment proceedings—no easy feat considering the complex array of names, geographical locations, and titles embroidering Indian society at the time that escaped the minds of most Englishmen. (Burke himself was an exception; as Grant observes, his comprehension of Indian affairs exceeded that of most Britons who had lived on the subcontinent.) Grant acknowledges Hastings’s abuse of power but also highlights the exaggerations in Burke’s account of the governor-general’s maladministration in British India. The author’s command of the politics and precarious financial state of Britain’s East India Company is impressive as well, so much so that his commentary on the Company at times strays away from the book’s focus on Burke and Fox.

The reader yearns, however, for additional insight into the philosophical tensions between Burke and Fox that led to the rupture of their friendship during parliamentary debates on the French Revolution. It is clear that the aim of Friends Until the End, a noble one at that, is to yield a readable narrative of Burke’s and Fox’s political and private lives and not a dense treatise on Burkean and Foxite political philosophy. But any understanding of their relationship, intellectual and personal, requires deeper inquiry into a fundamental question: If Burke and Fox defended many of the same causes throughout the eighteenth century—such as American self-government, the institutional integrity of Parliament, and East India Company reform—how come their minds diverged so sharply on the Revolution?

Grant sketches a moving portrait of the fateful moment Burke and Fox broke ties: May 6, 1791, the day of the parliamentary debate over the Quebec Bill, during which Burke lit into Fox for his support for the new French revolutionary government. Fox responded in kind, guarding himself against Burke’s attacks but also breaking down in tears. The skirmish split the Whig Party—and disclosed a simmering fissure in Whig political doctrine. Fox held that the French Revolution was orchestrated in the image and likeness of Britain’s Glorious Revolution, birthing a new era of liberty unshackled from history’s cold chains. Burke interpreted the French Revolution as a perilous utopian experiment that, unlike the Glorious Revolution’s successful effort at recovering ancient English liberties, would introduce new and destructive forms of despotism in France and Europe.

Grant skillfully draws out the emotional drama in this collision of wills, but the reader wishes he probed the gravity of their split with more analytic rigor. Burke’s and Fox’s differences over the French Revolution were an explosive allegory for emerging tensions between protoconservative and protoliberal views concerning the wisdom of the past, the promise and limits of reason, the connection between liberty and order, the role of religion in the public sphere, the function of inherited ethical codes in civilizing man, and a host of other salient themes that would set the terms of debate for modern political discourse.

The same goes for Grant’s survey of Burke’s and Fox’s parliamentary activities regarding the American rebellion, East India Company reform, and the Hastings impeachment: What do these episodes, the reader wonders, reveal about the shared beliefs and principled disagreements in their respective imperial political thought and moral philosophies?

Closer scrutiny of the intellectual points of friction in Burke’s and Fox’s showdown over the French Revolution in particular would allow the reader to better comprehend the calculus that in the end proved to be the death knell for their relationship, which Grant does broach: Fox intuited that his support for the Revolution could be reconciled with his friendship with Burke, while Burke maintained that the two were a fatal mix, and in fact suggested that Fox had already begun to dissolve the friendship by criticizing Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and the supposed inconsistencies in his politics, which Burke adamantly denied. Additionally, in a twist to the general assumption that Burke cherished little platoons, in this case he prized duty to nation over duty to his little platoon—namely, his fellowship with Fox.

Cicero, Burke’s beau ideal of a statesman, would have approved: “[A]n upright man will never for a friend’s sake do anything in violation of his country’s interests or his oath or his sacred honour,” the Roman senator wrote in De Officiis, a text Burke imbibed. The question whether to synthesize friendship and duty was, accordingly, not a mere idiosyncratic quirk in Burke’s and Fox’s respective dispositions. It rather reflected their more profound philosophical disagreements about the enormity of the French Revolution in testing the limits of human imperfection and threatening the moral basis of European civilization. For Burke, if the severing of friendship was the price of civic duty—the duty in this case being to protect Christian Europe from extinction—so be it. Burke had even felt prior to the Revolution debates, beginning in the mid-1780s, that Foxite Whigs had slowly abandoned their political and moral principles. Not only allegiance to friend, then, but allegiance to political party, if standing as an obstacle to public justice, should be sundered. To gain fuller context for this clash of ideas, a book on late eighteenth-century political thought should be read as an addendum to Friends Until the End.

Speaking of the title: Were Burke and Fox in fact “friends until the end”? Clearly not, as the epilogue of Grant’s account strongly implies. Their star-crossed separation over the French Revolution prompted Burke to deny Fox’s offer to visit him in his final days, and Fox rebuffed a request to provide financial support for a national memorial in Burke’s honor following his death. Grant’s portrayal of this drama and the May 6 debate dangles a question at the conclusion of his eminent narrative that captures the warmth and complexity of Burke’s and Fox’s relationship, and distills the tragic condition of man: In a duel between friendship and duty, on which do you pull the trigger?