RIDDLE OF LORD NORTH

Evening Star, Issue 23175, 26 January 1939, Page 2

RIDDLE OF LORD NORTH

PIE> GEORGE Hi. REFUSE TO LET HIM RESIGN? Lord North, the fat, comatose Minister of George 111. (to whom he bore a resemblance), is one of the historical characters of whom most people know; little and care less (writes Hugh Ross Williamson', in ‘ John o’ London’s Weekly’). His sole claim to popular remembrance is that he was “ the Minister who lost America.” With that exploit to his discredit and with colleagues and opponents such as Pitt, Fox, Sheridan. Burke, and Wilkes, what could be expected but contemptuous oblivion? That he introduced 14 consecutive Budgets and led the Commons for 15 years may be evidence less of statesmanship than of inertia, combined with corrupt politics managed by the King, whose tool ho was. Ho was witty, but, in an age of wits, hardly outstandng. Not a man easy to revitalise. Mr IV. Baring Pemberton, however, has made a gallant attempt in ‘ Lord North,’ alid has certainly succeeded in writing a lively book. It is a plea for revaluation rather than an, effort to cry greatness where greatness is So palpably absent. Lord North had “qualities well above the ordinary.” As George 111. said of him: “ Although he is not entirely to my mind and there are many things about him I wish were changed, I don’t know any who would do so well, and I have a great regard for him and a very good opinion of him” —the judgment of one mediocrity on another. “WORN OUT WITH FRETTING.’* The riddle of North was why, haying first precipitated the American War of Independence and then ensured that it should be lost, he did not resign. Ho wrote to his father : “ l am almost worn out with continual fretting. It may very possibly ho that my uneasiness proceeds from my own faults, but tho fact is that so long a continuance in a situation that I dislike, and for which! I am neither adapted by temper dr capacity, had sunk my spirits, weakened my understanding, impaired my memory, and filled my heart with % kind of uneasiness from which nothing can deliver me hut an honourable retreat.” But he did not make that retreat.: The usual theory is that ho could not. He was extravagant, as well as lazy and incompetent, and he wps at least £IB,OOO in debt. The King gave him £20.000 to pay it. How, then, could ho disobey the King? A QUESTION OF DUTY? Mr Baring Pemberton's refutation of the “ Gilded Cage Theory ” is not altogether convincing. He admits—as indeed he must—that North himself wrote to Thurlow: “I am under, such obligations to the King that I can never leave his service while ho desires me to remain in it and thinks I can. be of any use to him,” but suggests that the “ obligations ” are not merely gratitude for the gift of money. “ Duty to bis sovereign,” says his apologist, “ a sincerg belief that ha stood between an attempt, on the one hand, to carry on a just war in which honourable settlement seethed, for so long almost round the corner, and, oh the other, a surrender, humiliatinjjj alike to King, country, and Empire, prevailed over personal inclination and, as the war became more expensive and more hopeless, over private reservation. . . . He could not—his tradi-

tiou and training made it impossible—forsake his master in' the hour of need.”

Possibly that is how North justified himself to himself. To that extent his biographer is right to insist on it as a possible interpretation. But most people, judging North’s chanecter by Jiis actions, will still consider it what this century would call a “ rationalisa* tion.”-