SOURCE: “The Political Career of Richard Brinsley Sheridan,” in Sheridan Studies, edited by James Morwood and David Crane, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 131-50.

[In the following essay, Clayton recounts Sheridan's actions and reputation as a Whig politician and a member of Parliament.]

When Thomas Moore was preparing his biography of Sheridan he was told by Lord Thanet that Sheridan never liked any allusion to his being a dramatic writer.¹ Outstanding success as a playwright eased, and arguably enabled, Sheridan's introduction to the society of the Westminster political world, but his theatrical work, both as writer and manager, was a potent reminder that Sheridan had to work for a living and did not spring from a background of landed wealth and aristocratic leisure. This background remained the most powerful qualification for political leadership amongst the Whig élite—far more powerful than the recommendation of talent by itself. Charles James Fox could offer both talent and aristocratic pedigree, and in that fact lies the single most important explanation of why Fox could lead the Whigs, in spite of his manifest lack of judgement on occasion, and why Sheridan could never be seen as a legitimate Whig leader. Not only did allusions to Sheridan's theatrical background carry a clear message of his status as a parvenu on the political stage, but association with the theatre carried with it a distinctly disreputable aura. As the young George Canning explained to his mother, an actress: ‘there is perhaps no subject on which public opinion decides more positively than on the respectability or disrespectability of different pursuits and occupations … the world is capricious and unjust—but it is peremptory—and to explain myself fully—need I do more than ask you—to what cause is Mr Sheridan's want of success and popularity to be attributed?’²

Had Sheridan been prepared to sacrifice his views on matters connected with the constitution, the problems of Ireland, the removal of religious disabilities and the plight of the poor and politically unenfranchised, he too, by joining his talents to those who served Pitt, might, like Canning, have achieved high office, but at the cost of sacrificing political principles and political friendship. Refusal to sacrifice either tied Sheridan's political fortunes to a set of politicians whose prejudices were aristocratic and exclusive. Sheridan's political career can thus be seen as a demonstration of the limited opportunities available to a non-aristocratic ‘man of talent’ in the Whig party of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This has wider implications concerning both the development of political parties in this period and the progress of liberal reform. In particular, the weakness of the Whig party in the first decades of the nineteenth century can be explained by the deflection of ambitious, talented non-aristocrats of liberal temperament into the Tory camp, where their liberal aspirations were frustrated, often by monarchical prejudice. Sheridan's experience in politics at the hands of the Whig leadership can help to explain why this happened. This essay seeks to show why Sheridan's political career was a failure in comparison with his brief, glittering success as a playwright in the 1770s. It is also contended that his was not a dishonourable failure; he did remain loyal to political friendships and principles.

Sheridan's political career can be divided into four, broadly distinct, chronological periods. During the first decade of his parliamentary career Sheridan rose steadily to a position of considerable prominence in the House of Commons, making his mark as a notable exponent of the Rockingham/Foxite Whig thesis that the events of these years demonstrated an alarming growth of executive power. There were occasional flashes of independence, as when he disagreed with Fox on the latter's Bill to replace the existing Marriage Act on 15 June 1781,³ and when he objected to Pitt's Irish commercial propositions in 1785 from a perspective that was specifically defensive of Irish constitutional rights rather than of British manufacturers' rights. Speaking in the debate of 30 May 1785 he declared that ‘he was the mouth of no party … nor was he the tool of any party’.⁴ This was perhaps to protect his arguments from the odium in which the Foxites were then held as a result of Pitt's victory in 1784. But that he was a party man was acknowledged by his sister, Betsy Sheridan, who commented ‘he acts on this occasion from his own feelings, totally independent of any wish his party may have to harass the Minister’ (my italics).⁵

The second period dates from 1789-90, when the impact of the French Revolution began to be felt on British politics. Sheridan acquired an unjustified reputation for dangerous radicalism and acted as a catalyst in the process which led to the break-up of the Whig party in 1794. During the 1790s Sheridan steadfastly supported Fox in his stand against the war with France and in his belief that the real danger to British liberties derived from the growth of executive power and not from popular radicalism. But from 1797, the third period of his career, Sheridan appeared to follow a much more independent line, refusing to join the Foxite secession from Parliament in 1797 and calling for a united, patriotic resistance to the danger of a French invasion. During Addington's ministry he was in open disagreement with Fox's parliamentary tactics, although after 1804 he appeared to be reconciled again with his political colleagues. The fourth period encompasses the years 1806-12. The disappointment of Sheridan's political ambitions when the Ministry of All the Talents was formed in 1806 produced the final estrangement from the Whigs, led after Fox's death by Grey and Grenville. From 1807 he owed his seat in Parliament to the Prince of Wales's patronage. From 1809 he seemed to be moving closer to George Canning, who, before serving in Pitt's ministry, had been a protégé of Sheridan. Sheridan's career ended in 1812 when he failed to win back his seat in Stafford.

In thirty-two years in Parliament Sheridan enjoyed three brief spells in government: as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the short-lived Rockingham administration of 1782; as Joint Secretary to the Treasury in the Fox-North coalition in 1783 and finally, in January 1806, as Treasurer of the Navy in the Ministry of All the Talents. This was a post vacated by the much younger George Canning which Sheridan had been promised almost twenty years previously at the time of the first Regency Crisis.⁶ This was the rather feeble reward for having been ‘Thirty years a Whig Politician and six and twenty years in Parliament, and having expended full £20,000 of my own money to maintain my seat there and in all the course of political life struggling thro’ great di[f]ficulties and risking the existence of the only Property I had’.⁷ That Sheridan did not have more opportunities to serve in government is due to his party loyalty and the antagonism of George III to the Rockingham/Foxite Whigs. But that Sheridan did not rise higher within the party when the opportunity afforded is due in large measure to the conservative aristocratic ethos of the leaders of that party, including Fox. Why and how Sheridan became a Foxite Whig is, therefore, a central question.

The evidence concerning Sheridan's earliest political thinking indicates little common ground with the Rockingham Whigs. A letter published in the Public Advertiser on 16 October 1769, chiefly intended to criticize the style of a correspondent who signed himself ‘Novus’, contained an oblique defence of Lord Bute, who was regarded by the Newcastle/Rockingham Whigs as the tool of George III and the means of their downfall in 1762.⁸ A draft for an essay entitled Essay on Absentees, probably written about 1778, criticized the behaviour of Irish landlords, such as the Marquis of Rockingham and other Whig landowners, for the problems which their absenteeism caused in Ireland.⁹ Jottings made probably in 1776 for a reply to Johnson's Taxation No Tyranny had, however, shown sympathy for the Whig point of view on the issue of America, in that Sheridan sought to show that taxation of the American colonists could not be justified by theories of virtual representation.¹⁰

Sheridan was drawn first into metropolitan Whig social life, and then into Whig politics, for two principal reasons. First, his marriage to the beautiful singer, Elizabeth Linley, who was much sought after for private recitals in the homes of the nobility, obtained for Sheridan an entry to Devonshire House society, at the heart of the Whig élite. Subsequently, in 1780, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, a member of the Spencer family, was to exert the Spencer interest in Stafford to help secure Sheridan's election to the House of Commons.¹¹

The second factor was Sheridan's developing friendship with Charles James Fox. Thomas Moore relates that Fox was immediately impressed by Sheridan's wit on first meeting him, probably in 1776 or 1777.¹² At that time Fox himself was only just moving towards political co-operation with the Rockingham Whigs under the influence of Edmund Burke.¹³ As a former member of North's government, and the son of Henry Fox, who loomed almost as large as Bute in the Whig demonology, Fox was hardly an orthodox Whig. Fox presided over Sheridan's election to the Literary Club on 11 March 1777 and after the success of The School for Scandal later that year was known to regard Sheridan as ‘the first Genius of these times’.¹⁴ Apart from mutual admiration there was their shared family connections with the deposed Stuart dynasty to draw them together. Fox, whose first two names were more than usually significant, could trace his ancestry back through his mother and the Dukes of Richmond to Charles II. In contrast with Sheridan, Fox could lay claim to high aristocratic pedigree, but the uncle of Sheridan's grandfather had been secretary to James II in exile and his grandfather's cousin had been knighted during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion by the Young Pretender.¹⁵

From a letter written on 4 January 1773, it is clear that Sheridan had been contemplating a career in politics. Rejecting a life of private enjoyment he asked, ‘Was it meant that we should shrink from the active Principles of Virtue, and consequent[ly] of true Happiness … ?’¹⁶ It was not surprising that Sheridan's ambition was kindled by the admiration of members of the political élite. Sheridan now saw a political life as the means to social elevation and personal satisfaction. As he put it in another letter, written on 24 February 1773,

The Track of a Comet is as regular to the eye of God as the orbit of a planet … as God very often pleases to let down great Folks from the elevated stations which they might claim as their Birthright, there can be no reason for us to suppose that He does not mean that others should ascend etc.¹⁷

Speaking in the House of Commons in June 1804 he uttered similar sentiments: ‘there is nothing of honour, emolument or wealth which is not within the reach of a man of merit … I would call on the humblest peasant to defend his son's title to the great seal of England.’¹⁸

Such views were too advanced for the Whig party to which Sheridan became attached through his connection with Fox. But Sheridan's talents were useful assets to the forces fighting Lord North's alleged incompetence and the supposed growth of executive power which threatened to unbalance the constitution. In particular, Sheridan was able to provide a link between the Whig leaders in Parliament and the sources of extra-parliamentary discontent. He contributed to a periodical, The Englishman, addressed to the ‘freeholders of England’, urging them to turn against the alleged corruption of the North ministry. Along with other Whigs, Sheridan was present at the founding meeting of the Westminster Committee of Association, established to join the pressure for parliamentary reform being exerted by Christopher Wyvill's county association movement; two months later he was present at the inaugural meeting of the Society for Constitutional Information. Under Sheridan's chairmanship a sub-committee of the Westminster Association, established to enquire into the ‘state of the Representation’, produced a report which considered that the representative system was even more unfair at representing property (assessed through regional land tax contributions) than electors. It was perhaps because of the influence of Sheridan and Fox that the Westminster Committee was diverted from more radical solutions than those being advocated by Wyvill's country gentlemen, but as popular pressure for reform began to decline, so Sheridan's attendances at committee meetings became fewer.¹⁹ When Sheridan entered the House of Commons in September 1780 he was already an established Foxite. A promising political future seemed to beckon as North's ministry tottered.

In Parliament Sheridan consolidated his position as a loyal Foxite. He was at least as vehement as Fox in his condemnation of Shelburne's behaviour during the Rockingham administration and did not hesitate to follow Fox into opposition when Shelburne succeeded Rockingham as First Lord of the Treasury. There is some doubt as to what he really thought about the wisdom of the Fox-North coalition and of introducing the East India Bill at that time,²⁰ but Sheridan later played a prominent part in attacking Pitt's own Bill, introduced in 1784, and in the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, in each case with the intention of vindicating Fox's coalition government and its actions.²¹ In 1788 Sheridan wrote A Comparative Statement of the Two Bills for the Better Government of the British Possessions in India, which contained a systematic attack on the principles underlying Pitt's style of government. He was central to the Foxites' attempts to create a favourable impression of themselves in the newspapers and he took over the difficult, but vital, brief of opposition spokesman on financial and taxation affairs, in which Fox had no interest at all.²² He was a zealous proponent of the view that the manner in which Pitt and the King were able to overwhelm the Fox-North coalition in 1783-4 was proof of a constitutional crisis, in which the House of Commons was losing power and influence as a result of the contrivances of a wily, ambitious king and unscrupulous ministers. Although he supported parliamentary reform when the question was brought forward in Parliament, Sheridan did not offend the conservative aristocratic Whigs by unnecessarily pressing the issue. When he was asked to bring forward the question of reform of the notoriously corrupt Scottish burghs by a committee of delegates from the burghs in 1787, he brought forward his motion very late in the session. Even after 1789, when there was more political capital to be gained from supporting such a measure, as popular interest in reform revived under the impact of the French Revolution, Sheridan was cautious in his approach, prompting the historian John Cannon to comment that his campaign on behalf of the burghs had ‘the impetuosity of a slow bicycle race’.²³ Parliamentary reform was never a fundamental principle of Foxite belief. Sheridan, more than most politicians of his generation, was aware of the value of courting extra-parliamentary opinion, but even he was reported to have said in November 1794 ‘in the hearing of Lord Fitzwilliam’ at Brooks's that it was ‘the present intention of the Friends of the People to abandon all thoughts of Parliamentary Reform unless called for by two-thirds of the People’.²⁴ If this is true, Sheridan was obviously trying to conciliate those aristocrats whose fear of reform in the context of the French Revolution was driving them into alliance with Pitt.

In spite of Sheridan's manifest loyalty and usefulness, tension was generated within the party by Sheridan's equally manifest ambition. He believed his talents entitled him in due course to a position of leadership. This did not fit the Whig view that for liberty to survive in the balanced constitution established at the Glorious Revolution, the leading parts in government must be undertaken by men of wealth, property and education, who could be relied upon to be independent and were thus immune to the blandishments of ambitious kings.²⁵ Such men could only be aristocrats and they took on governmental office as an obligation and not primarily as an object of ambition.

Particularly worrying to the other Foxites was Sheridan's closeness to the Prince of Wales. In 1786 Sheridan had been involved in trying to sort out the Prince's finances—a grave embarrassment to the Foxites who had so clearly attempted to secure the Prince's favour. It was Sheridan who managed to save the situation in 1787, after Fox had denied there was any truth in the rumour of a marriage between the Prince and Mrs Fitzherbert. This exploit enhanced Sheridan's position at Carlton House and irritated Fox. Fox was further irritated by Sheridan's assumption of a leadership role in November 1788 when the Regency Crisis developed while Fox was abroad. The Duchess of Devonshire recorded two quarrels between Fox and Sheridan at this time—on 20 December and 2 January.²⁶ Fox was not the only one to be alarmed at Sheridan's assumption of a position of eminence. Charles Grey believed Sheridan had deliberately humiliated him in front of the Prince.²⁷ Later in 1789 another quarrel between Grey and Sheridan nearly produced a duel.²⁸ The Duke of Portland was reported to be offended by the close consultation between the Prince and Sheridan in November 1788²⁹ and at the end of January 1789 Portland declared his determination ‘not to act with Mr Sheridan in council’.³⁰

More significantly for the events to come, Sheridan's relations with Burke were deteriorating. Burke was deeply irritated by the manner in which both Sheridan and Fox began to lose interest in the impeachment of Warren Hastings once it became clear that it would not undermine Pitt. To Burke, the Hastings trial was a moral issue, not a question of party politics. Sheridan's advance presented a direct challenge to Burke's own influence over Fox; the fact that Burke's advice during the Regency Crisis was ignored seemed to demonstrate the effects of Sheridan's rise. Fox's enthusiastic support for the removal of the legal penalties on the Dissenters seemed to show that Fox was being pushed in the direction of more radical and dangerous ideas and this was ascribed to Sheridan's influence. This impression was confirmed by the enthusiastic reception that Fox and Sheridan gave to the French Revolution.

Burke's resentment exploded on 9 February 1790 in the debate on the Army Estimates, when Burke and Fox clashed openly on the subject of the French Revolution. Sheridan then vehemently disagreed with Burke.³¹ Although Sheridan seems ‘to have expressed some contrition for his conduct on the very evening the conversation passed’,³² there was no wish for reconciliation on Burke's part. From this point on, there was an open struggle for the nature of the Whig party's beliefs. Sheridan was depicted by Burke and his son—and others alarmed at his apparent influence over Fox—as a dangerous demagogic manipulator. In Burke's opinion ‘They who cry up the French Revolution, cry down the [Whig] Party’, which was ‘an aristocratic Party … a Party, in its composition and in its principles connected with the solid permanent long possessed property of the Country.’³³ Sheridan and others in the party were said to be ‘running into Democracy’.³⁴

In reality, Sheridan, and others like Charles Grey, whose social origins were more elevated, sought a moderate parliamentary reform for conservative reasons. Moderate reform was the best means of restoring the constitutional balance framed in the Revolution Settlement of 1689 and of conciliating the extra-parliamentary reformers to the substance of that settlement. Nor were the aristocratic Whig leaders to whom Burke was appealing taken in by Burke's claim that Fox and Sheridan had become the leaders of the ‘New French Whigs’ who cared not at all for the traditional Whig approach. There was a degree of resentment at the way in which Burke seemed to polarize the situation, pushing Fox into a more determined defence of the French Revolution and benefiting Pitt's government by dividing the opposition. But Sheridan's humble origins and rapid rise to political prominence, together with his connections with the popular societies, made him ideal for fostering the aristocrats' fears. The satirical prints delighted in portraying Sheridan as a revolutionary regicide.³⁵ Burke's claim that Sheridan intended to put himself at the head of a spirit of innovation and to gain by the resulting confusion had plausibility. This propaganda, articulated in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution, derived from antecedent tensions and rivalries based on resentment of Sheridan as a parvenu who did not know the proper limits to set to his own political ambition.

Sheridan's radicalism in the 1790s consisted of support for a measure of parliamentary reform to reverse the growth in executive power when there was sufficient popular support for such a measure; resistance to Pitt's innovatory, repressive legislation of the 1790s; and rejection of the war against France as unnecessary and insidious, designed to extend executive power in Britain and restore despotism in France. With all this Fox could agree. Where they differed might have been in Sheridan's stated belief that Britain's constitution helped to create ‘a people among whom all that is advantageous in private acquisition, all that is honourable in public ambition [is] equally open to the efforts, the industry and the abilities of all—among whom no sullen line of demarkation (sic) separates and cuts off the several orders from each other’.³⁶ Fox, on the other hand, told Lord Holland, just before the Whig split in 1794, ‘You know I am one who think both property and rank of great importance in this country in a party view’.³⁷ By 1799, regarding the political situation in Britain with despair, he wrote that he could not ‘help feeling every day more and more, that in this country at least, an aristocratic party is absolutely necessary to the preservation of liberty’.³⁸ Although Fox carried little or no ideological baggage, he recognized that the only way to power after Pitt's resignation in 1801, and then after his death in 1806, was through broadening the party to bring in those aristocratic elements whose prejudices were not compatible with Sheridan's ambition. Sheridan was to reap little reward for continuing the parliamentary fight against Pitt during the Foxite secession.

Lord Holland told James Mackintosh that Sheridan's failure to reach the highest levels of party leadership was due to his ‘peculiarities’ rather than to Whig snobbery. He claimed that if distinctions based on birth mattered ‘They were in fact less in the real and practical estimation of the Party called Whigs than of that of the Society in which they lived’.³⁹ For a party that claimed to stand for the public interest, aristocratic exclusivity was hard to admit openly. Lady Bessborough stated that she ‘should approve of a great deal in his [Sheridan's] language and conduct … but then a great deal is quite disgusting and it is impossible to trust him for a moment’.⁴⁰ Before the French Revolution Sheridan had been portrayed as Bardolph or compared with Joseph Surface.⁴¹ But behind-the-scenes intrigue, whether at Carlton House or in Grub Street, was one way in which Sheridan had made himself useful to the Whigs. And there was an argument, conceded even by Lady Holland, that Sheridan was driven to intrigue to overcome the prejudice he encountered.⁴² In the early nineteenth century, when the Whigs maintained their unity through the long years of opposition by developing a Foxite cult,⁴³ there was a need to denigrate Sheridan because detailed examination of his career could expose serious shortcomings in Fox's. In 1818 Lord Byron told Thomas Moore, who was preparing his biography: ‘The Whigs abuse him; however, he never left them, and such blunderers deserve neither credit nor compassion … Don’t let yourself be led away by clamour, but compare him with the coalitioner Fox, and the pensioner Burke, as a man of principle, and with ten hundred thousand in personal views and with more in talent for he beat them all out and out.’⁴⁴ How justified was Whig exclusion of Sheridan on the basis of ‘peculiarity’?

Sheridan's refusal to join the secession from Parliament in 1797, his advocacy of a united patriotic resistance to the danger of a French invasion and his willingness to support the Volunteer movement set up to counteract this threat—all this irritated his colleagues.⁴⁵ The apparently loyalist and aggressively anti-Napoleonist sentiments given voice in Pizarro bewildered them; Fox described it as the ‘worst thing possible’.⁴⁶ More significantly, Fox was greatly exasperated by Sheridan's attempt to bolster the Addington government against the possibility of Pitt's return to office and consequently his rejection of the idea of an understanding with the Grenvilles in opposition to Addington. Sheridan was not alone in opposing an arrangement of political co-operation with the Grenvilles, however informal,⁴⁷ but in opposing such a link Sheridan exposed the Foxites and the Grenvilles to the same sort of condemnation that had been so damaging to the Fox-North coalition—that an unprincipled alliance was trying to restrict the king's choice of ministers. Sheridan and other anti-Grenville Foxites believed such an alliance would damage their reputation. But a sub-text to this argument was a battle for influence over Fox and the Prince of Wales. Grey was a keen supporter of co-operation with the Grenvilles, even if it meant co-operation with Pitt.⁴⁸ Fox was not in the best of health and such was his diffidence about politics that he could retire at any time. Sheridan was known to be keen to take over the prestigious constituency of Westminster in this event. Battle had been joined for the succession to Fox as leader and Sheridan had the audacity to regard himself as a realistic contender. But in the quarrel over parliamentary tactics between 1801 and 1804 Sheridan lost the battle for Fox's ear and confidence to Grey and consequently lost any hope of asserting his right to a leading position in any ministry the Foxites and their new allies might form.

Sheridan's behaviour during this quarrel provided some evidence to those who wished to prove that he lacked integrity and could not be trusted. In December, 1802, he was accused of inserting in the newspapers ‘puffs’ of himself alongside ‘the most violent abuse’ of Fox.⁴⁹ Fox claimed that he remained sympathetic to Sheridan in spite of the provocations afforded by his behaviour both in and out of Parliament, and indeed he expressed willingness for Sheridan to succeed him in Westminster. Referring to Sheridan's alleged interference in the newspapers, he told Denis O’Bryen ‘that what I most feel in it is the advantages it gives to those who hate him … to justify suspicions which in my conscience I believe to be wholly unfounded’.⁵⁰ Yet Fox himself described Sheridan as ‘mad with vanity and folly’⁵¹ just two days before the latter made a speech calling upon Members of Parliament to show unanimity and ‘not to waste that time and those talents in party spirit and intrigue, which might be so much more worthily employed in performing the sublime and animated duties of patriotism’.⁵² On hearing this, Fox considered that Sheridan had ‘outdone his usual outdoings. Folly beyond all the past’.⁵³

Sheridan's relations with Fox reached their lowest point in early 1804, just before Pitt returned to power. Unwisely he allowed Thomas Creevey to overhear him ‘damning Fox in the midst of his enemies’.⁵⁴ Creevey believed that Sheridan was ‘basely playing an under game as Fox's friend in the event of defeat to him and his Dr’.⁵⁵ Although Sheridan admitted to his wife that he saw ‘Fox every day—and Addington almost every evening’,⁵⁶ he had never made any secret of his goodwill towards Addington's government, once it had become clear that Addington was no mere Pittite stooge. Sheridan's conduct did possess integrity, however galling it was to his colleagues. Opposition to Pitt provided a connecting thread of consistency through his conduct. Although he had called for a spirit of patriotic unity to resist French aggression in 1798, he had at the same time stated his ‘irreconcilable’ enmity to Pitt's government as well as his ‘unaltered and unalterable’ attachment to Fox and his political principles.⁵⁷ The rationale of his support for Addington was that he had made peace with the French and destroying him would only produce Pitt's return to power. Pitt was damnable in Sheridan's eyes. He practised a debased, cynical and unprincipled form of politics for the purposes of personal advancement. He had fatally weakened the cause of reform in British politics by allowing the king to defy the majority of the House of Commons in 1783, and the combined effect of the revolutionary war and the accompanying repressive legislation had been to undermine British liberties and the balanced constitution itself. Sheridan's support for Addington was only the converse of hostility to Pitt. Sheridan was scrupulous in refusing any position for himself or his son in Addington's ministry unless the Foxites came in as a body—unlike George Tierney who accepted the post of Treasurer of the Navy, but nevertheless, because of his friendship with Grey, later went on to become a leader of the Whigs in the House of Commons. Once the return of Pitt to government was assured, Sheridan could with consistency resume co-operation with Fox, even in concert with the formerly Pittite Grenvilles. Sheridan might, with justification, claim that he had remained loyal to Foxite principles, even if that had involved friction with Fox himself. He did, however, continue to differ from Fox in believing that Napoleon was motivated by a desire for territorial conquest and not for peace. He also believed it was unwise to agitate the issue of Catholic emancipation for the purpose of embarrassing Pitt while George III remained on the throne, because the only result would be to raise Catholic hopes, simply to have them dashed against the king's intransigence, with possibly disastrous consequences in Ireland. In both these judgements he was arguably more astute than Fox and Grey. When the Foxites finally took office in 1806, with the Grenvilles and the followers of Sidmouth, the Whig leaders could easily claim that Sheridan was too much of a maverick to claim the senior position in the ministry which his long service to the party and his abilities deserved. Consequently Sheridan felt no qualms about opposing his own government's plans for the country's defences in July 1806.⁵⁸

Having crushed Sheridan's aspirations for high office, the Whig leaders, Grey and Grenville, made sure that Sheridan did not inherit Fox's seat in Westminster after his death in September 1806. Although Sheridan successfully insisted on his candidature in the general election held shortly after the by-election, the Whig party leaders did not over-exert themselves in Sheridan's interest, although he was elected. He was not so fortunate in the general election of May 1807, after the collapse of the Talents Ministry. Westminster's independent electors could no longer trust the Whigs or their representatives to support the cause of reform and Sheridan was only able to return to Parliament as Member of Parliament for a pocket borough in the gift of the Prince.⁵⁹

Thereafter, the Whigs and Sheridan drifted further apart. Significantly, when Grey moved to the House of Lords on the death of his father in November 1807, Grenville placed an absolute veto on any aspirations Sheridan, Whitbread and Windham might have had to take over Grey's role as leader of the Whigs in the House of Commons.⁶⁰ All three were non-aristocrats. In July 1808, Grey would tell Lady Holland ‘As to Sheridan's conduct in a party view that is past praying for; and in truth it is of no consequence.’⁶¹ By 1810 Sheridan had acquired an amused detachment from the squabbles over leadership among the Whigs in the Commons. He told Lady Bessborough that the struggle for pre-eminence ‘threaten’d to subdivide the subdivisions of Op[position] till they became like Atoms known to exist, but too numerous to count—and too small to be felt’.⁶² After Canning's resignation from the Portland ministry in 1809, Sheridan tried to establish closer relations with him. Lady Holland described Canning as one who ‘abhors titles and the aristocracy of hereditary nobility’.⁶³ In 1810 Sheridan claimed that he would defend Canning ‘thro’ thick and thin’.⁶⁴ Alliance with Canning was a means of maintaining liberal principles while at the same time challenging the exclusive, aristocratic ethos represented by Grey and Grenville.

Any remaining connection Sheridan might have had with the party led by Grey and Grenville was shattered by the events of 1810-12. With the onset of the King's terminal illness in November 1810, proceedings were set in train for the establishment of a regency. Grenville and Grey were thoroughly angered when their proposed draft for the Prince's reply to the terms of the regency offered by Perceval was altered by Sheridan. Haughtily, Grey told his wife that he had remonstrated ‘on the impropriety of having the advice which Ld. Grenville and I were called upon to give subjected in this manner to the examination of an inferior council’.⁶⁵ Sheridan was accused of undermining the Prince's official advisers in the manner of Bute or Shelburne, but even Lord Holland had to admit that there was nothing official in the position of Grey and Grenville.⁶⁶ Inevitably, Sheridan was blamed for the failure of the Whigs to gain office when the limited regency came to an end and George III's incapacity seemed permanent. Holland was aware, however, that Sheridan had hoped for the non-cabinet post of Chief Secretary to Ireland in a ministry headed by Grey and Grenville. This was ‘peremptorily rejected by Lord Grenville … Lord Grenville and Lord Grey showed upon that and every other occasion a repugnance to consult or to court him’.⁶⁷ Grey said that sending Sheridan to Ireland would have been like sending a man with a lighted torch into a magazine of gunpowder, but if it were merely a question of ‘giving him a place, however high, with large emoluments, nobody would be more ready to consent to it than I should be’.⁶⁸ This was precisely the stipulation that Fitzwilliam had made in 1792 when he had said that Sheridan ‘might have a lucrative place, but never could be admitted to one of trust and confidence’.⁶⁹ Finally the Whig leaders claimed that they had been deliberately misled by Sheridan into thinking that they would not be able to have control of appointments within the Prince's Household if they came into office after the assassination of Perceval in May 1812. Acting under this impression the Whig leaders refused to form a government. Sheridan was therefore given the blame for the re-establishment of a ministry unsympathetic to Catholic emancipation, under the leadership of Lord Liverpool. Thus Sheridan's reputation for double-dealing and untrustworthiness was assured.⁷⁰ But Sheridan had written to the Prince to tell him that ‘a proscription of Lord Grey in the formation of a new administration would be a proceeding equally injurious to the estimation of your personal dignity and the maintenance of the Public Interests’.⁷¹ Sheridan seems to have worked towards a coalition of groups united in their policy on the war, on the Catholic question and on Ireland; what he called ‘that extended and efficient administration which the country was desirous of having’.⁷² Sheridan did not want to see the continuation of an anti-Catholic administration and he refused to consider playing any part in such an administration.

In the summer of 1812 Sheridan declared his determination to work with Canning in politics from then on.⁷³ Anxious to prove his independence from the Prince of Wales and his ministers, he offered himself once again for his old constituency of Stafford at the general election held in October. He came bottom of the poll. The Staffordshire Advertiser claimed that there had been ‘groundless reports’ spread to injure his cause by ‘vulgar and illiterate people’.⁷⁴ Sheridan claimed he had been denied money he was owed by the Drury Lane Theatre trustees under Samuel Whitbread's chairmanship.⁷⁵ Possibilities of a return to the House of Commons as representative for Wootton Bassett and subsequently Westminster came to nothing. Sheridan's political career, including his influence with the Prince, was at an end.

Writing to William Eden on 16 January 1789, the Archbishop of Canterbury, noticing the rivalries among the Foxite Whigs, drily observed that ‘it is thought that things are not yet ripe enough for the manager of Drury Lane to be manager of the House of Commons’.⁷⁶ The anonymous writer of a political pamphlet published in 1794 perceptively pointed out that Sheridan had ‘quit a path [in the theatre] which must have led to honest fame and competence, to prostitute his talents to a faction, who, though they pretend to reject the pretensions of illustrious extraction, still are secretly so much swayed by ancient prejudice, that they will never acknowledge the son of an actor as their leader, however superior may be his capacity’.⁷⁷ Making sure that his message was quite clear, the author added that it was Sheridan's fate ‘to live for ever the drudge of a party who distrust him while they employ him; who despise his obscure birth, while they avail themselves of his talents’.⁷⁸

The party into which Sheridan was drawn by his friendship with Charles Fox was an aristocratic party. For those who constituted the Rockingham Whig party, known after 1782 as the Foxite Whig party, the preservation of political liberty was essentially a matter of balancing out powers within the state and particularly of preventing the development of an over-mighty executive, especially monarchical, power. The Rockinghams, descendants of the ‘Old Corps’ Whigs who had monopolized governmental office in the previous two reigns, had adopted and adapted the arguments of the opposition to their predecessors. In the Rockingham view, however, aristocrats were cast as the guardians of constitutional liberty because not only did they possess a physical stake in the country, through the ownership of land, but they possessed the independent means to guarantee their capacity to act independently, and thus to withstand the tendency inherent in a monarchy to degenerate into despotism. Fox's objection to Pitt and Addington was that they lacked the personal fortune to be anything other than royal puppets, whereas Grenville, by contrast, had the wealth and intelligence which gave him the freedom to challenge the Crown, if the need arose. Unlike Pitt, the Grenvilles were seen as capable of becoming good party men.

Sheridan could happily agree, especially after the events of 1783-4, that the overwhelmingly important question in British politics was the danger of a growth in executive power at the expense of Parliament and the country's liberties. He could support the Whigs out of conviction, not just because of personal connections. In Shelburne's machinations in 1782 Sheridan could sense the motions of an ambitious king; the installation of Pitt in power in 1783 evinced a contempt for Parliament; Pitt's reforms of the government in India and of the trading relationship with Ireland betrayed a system hostile to constitutional rights. The repressive legislation of the 1790s convinced Sheridan that there was a deep-laid plot to introduce despotism into the country.⁷⁹ Even as late as February 1810 Sheridan could state his belief that the source of the downfall of the nations of Europe, under the Napoleonic flail, was ‘the want of that salutary controul (sic) upon their governments, that animating source of public spirit and national exertion’, provided by a free press.⁸⁰ All this could be accepted by the most aristocratic of Whigs. What could not be accepted was Sheridan's blithe assertion that ‘it was the most amiable and valuable fruit of our happy constitution, that every path of honourable ambition was open to talents and industry, without distinction of ranks’.⁸¹ Sheridan's views on liberty went beyond the traditional Whig view to something more akin to the nineteenth-century Liberal belief in equality of opportunity. Equally unsettling to his more traditional colleagues was his recognition that politics could not be confined to the Palace of Westminster. Sheridan was assiduous and adept at cultivating a wide range of political contacts outside Parliament, particularly among the popular societies and within the journalistic field.

Professor John Cannon has shown that between 1782 and 1820 sixty-five individuals held Cabinet office of whom forty-three were peers and of the remaining twenty-two fourteen were sons of peers. By his reckoning only six were genuinely non-aristocratic.⁸² Of these, only William Windham could put forward any claim to having been a Rockinghamite/Foxite Whig. Significantly, two of the others on the list, Addington and George Canning, were linked politically with Sheridan. It is true that in 1806-7 the Whigs were prepared to admit Addington—a man whose origins and abilities they had previously scorned—to the Cabinet table, but on this occasion it suited their own political ambition to do so; Addington had already been raised to the peerage as Lord Sidmouth and he was from outside the party, which somehow made it more acceptable. Sheridan and Whitbread, both non-aristocratic Foxites, were excluded. Sheridan was forced to accept that cultivating the Prince of Wales and acquiring influence in the extra-parliamentary world would not be enough to overcome Whig social prejudices. By 1812 Sheridan was of the opinion that only a new party could cater for the man of talent with liberal convictions. Pittite ‘Tories’ were unwilling to force reform on unwilling, reactionary monarchs, although men of humble extraction could prosper well enough in their ranks if they possessed enough talent and were prepared to sacrifice any reforming proclivities. Whigs had the right ideas about civil, religious and political liberties, but remained wedded to traditional ideas of rank and deference.

In one of his last speeches in Parliament, Sheridan declared that he would never ‘endure that this great country must be suffered to go drooping to perdition, because there are none but those two parties competent to direct its energies’.⁸³ But, failing to be elected in 1812, he never had the opportunity to see whether forging a political alliance with that other scion of the theatrical world, George Canning, would produce anything of substance in a party view. After his death in 1816 he was buried in Poets' Corner. Even in death the Whigs insisted on keeping him in his proper place.

Notes

1. Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, ed. Lord J. Russell (London, 1853-6), iii, 233.

2. W. Hinde, George Canning (London, 1973), p. 21 (quoting from Leeds City Archives, Harewood MSS. 2: George Canning to his mother, 13 June 1791.)

3. The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, ed. W. Cobbett (London, 1806-20), xxii, 415 (cited hereafter as PH).

4. PH, xxv, 766.

5. Betsy Sheridan's Journal: Letters from Sheridan's Sister 1784-86; 1788-90, ed. W. LeFanu (London, 1960), p. 58 (15-20 June 1785).

6. British Library Add. MSS. 41579 fo. 4; The Journal of Lady Elizabeth Foster.

7. The Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. C. Price (Oxford, 1966), ii, 260: To the Duke of Bedford, 12 February 1806.

8. Ibid. i, 6-11. Sheridan's father had been granted a pension by the Bute government and Henry Fox, the father of Charles James, led for the government in the House of Commons when Bute was First Lord of the Treasury.

9. T. Moore, Memoirs of the Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (single volume edition, London, 1825), pp. 205-10.

10. Ibid., pp. 110-12.

11. Price, Letters, i, 135: to the Duchess of Devonshire, 19 September 1780.

12. Moore, Life of Sheridan, p. 211.

13. L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford, 1992), pp. 25-45. In view of Sheridan's later difficulties with the Whigs' aristocratic ethos, and the fact that Sheridan's primary political attachment was to Fox, not the Rockinghamite leadership, it is significant that Mitchell states (p. 25) that ‘In 1782, Fox was not a Whig in the sense that he had foreclosed on all other options … The lack of firm principle, which had marked his early years, still gave him total flexibility.’

14. The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. C. Price (Oxford, 1973), i, 331, quoting from Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, Folger MS. Wb. 478 opp. p. 254.

15. I am grateful to Professor Ian Christie for drawing my attention to the Jacobite connections in Sheridan's family; W. Sichel, Sheridan (London, 1909), i, 209-18.

16. Price, Letters, i, 72: to Thomas Grenville, 4 January 1773. Thomas Grenville was the elder brother of William Wyndham Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville, who led the Whig party jointly with Grey after Fox's death. Thomas Grenville had been a pupil in Sheridan's father's school of oratory at Bath.

17. Price, Letters, i, 77: to Thomas Grenville.

18. The Parliamentary Debates from the year 1803 to the present time, ed. T. C. Hansard (London, 1812-20), ii, 728-38. (Hereafter PD).

19. BL Add. MSS. 38593-5: Minutes of the Westminster Committee of Association.

20. Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, ed. Lord J. Russell (London, 1853-7), ii, 21-5: Lord John Townshend to Lord Holland, 15 June and 23 June 1830; PH, XXIV, 490; J. Watkins, Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of the Rt Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, with a particular account of his family and connections (London, 1817), i, 240-50; Moore, Journal, ii, 316; PH, xxvi, 187.

21. PH, xxiv, 1199; xxvi, 274-302.

22. L. T. Werkmeister, The London Daily Press 1772-92 (Nebraska, 1963), pp. 10-12, 69-70. A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press c. 1780-1850 (London, 1949), pp. 271-2; Scottish Record Office, Blair Adam MSS: W. Woodfall to W. Adam, 24 February 1784.

23. J. A. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640-1832 (Cambridge, 1972), p. 113.

24. Political Memoranda of the 5th Duke of Leeds, ed. O. Browning (Camden Society, 1884), pp. 209-10.

25. See E. A. Smith, Lord Grey 1764-1845 (Oxford, 1990), p. 11.

26. Sichel, Sheridan, ii, 418, 422-3.

27. Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, MSS. Journal of Lady Elizabeth Foster, 2 December 1788.

28. Ibid., 5 June 1789.

29. Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George III, from original family documents (London, 1853), i, 451.

30. The Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland, ed. Bishop of Bath and Wells (London, 1861-2), ii, 279.

31. PH, xviii, 344-72.

32. The Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, 1st Earl of Minto, 1750-1806, ed. Countess of Minto (London, 1874), i, 351.

33. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, general ed. T. Copeland (Cambridge, 1958-70), vii, 52-63: Burke to W. Weddell, 31 January 1792.

34. Ibid., 409: R. Burke to Fitzwilliam, 16 August 1793.

35. M. D. George, English Political Caricature: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda, 1793-1832 (Oxford, 1959), pp. 213-21.

36. PH, xxxi, 1072.

37. Russell, Memorials and Correspondence, iii, 67.

38. Ibid., 149.

39. L. G. Mitchell, Holland House (London, 1980), p. 67.

40. The Private Correspondence of Lord Granville Leveson Gower, 1781-1821, ed. Castalia Countess Grenville (London, 1916), i, 427: Lady B to GLG, 17 August 1803.

41. M. D. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires preserved … in the British Museum (London, 1978), vi, nos. 6974; 7380; 7528; Morning Post, 14 August 1788.

42. The Journal of Elizabeth, Lady Holland (1791-1811), ed. Earl of Ilchester (London, 1908), i, 221-2.

43. Mitchell, Fox, p. 262; Mitchell, Holland House, chapters 2 and 3.

44. Byron: A Self-Portrait. Letters and Diaries 1798 to 1824, ed. P. Quennell (Oxford, 1990), p. 432.

45. PH, xxxvi 1698; Morning Chronicle, 9 February 1804.

46. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, ed. A. Dyce (3rd edition, London, 1856), p. 97.

47. Moore, Sheridan, pp. 607-8. Beinecke Library, Yale University, Im. Sh. 53+w825a.

48. Smith, Grey, pp. 89-91.

49. BL Add. MSS. 47566 fos. 134-5: Fox to D. O’Bryen, 24 December 1802.

50. Ibid.

51. Russell, Memorials and Correspondence, iii, 412.

52. PH, xxxvi, 1698.

53. Russell, Memorials and Correspondence, iv, 11.

54. The Creevey Papers: A Selection from the Correspondence and Diaries of the late Thomas Creevey M.P. 1768-1838, ed. Sir H. Maxwell (London, 1903), i, 21: Creevey to Currie, 21 January 1804.

55. Ibid., i, 25: Creevey to Currie, 2 April 1804. Addington was disparagingly referred to as ‘the Doctor’ because his father had been a mere physician.

56. Price, Letters, ii, 215-6: to his wife 27 February 1804.

57. PH, xxxiii, 1427.

58. PD, vii, 1115.

59. See C. A. Clayton, The Political Career of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1992), chapter VI.

60. J. J. Sack, The Grenvillites, 1801-1829. Party Politics and Factionalism in the Age of Pitt and Liverpool (London, 1979), p. 135.

61. Durham University Library, Grey MSS: Grey to Lady Holland, 2 July 1808.

62. Granville, Private Correspondence, ii, 353: Lady B to GLG, 1810.

63. Lady Holland's Journal, i, 217.

64. Granville, Private Correspondence, ii, 353.

65. Grey MSS: Grey to Lady Grey, 12 January 1811.

66. Lord Holland, Further Memoirs of the Whig Party, ed. Lord Stavordale (London, 1905), p. 84.

67. Ibid., p. 73.

68. Grey MSS: Grey to Lady Grey, 29 January 1811.

69. The Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury, ed. by his grandson (London, 1844), ii, 465.

70. See Sir J. Barrington, Personal Sketches of his Own Times (London, 1827), i, 298-9.

71. Price, Letters, iii, 158: To the Prince of Wales, 1 June 1812.

72. PD, xxiii, 623.

73. Granville, Private Correspondence, ii, 444: G. Canning to GLG, 18 August 1812.

74. Staffordshire Advertiser, 17 October 1812.

75. Price, Letters, iii, 163: to Samuel Whitbread, 1 November 1812.

76. Auckland Correspondence, ii, 267.

77. The Whig Club or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age (London, 1794), p. 19.

78. Ibid., p. 24.

79. PH, xxxii, 665.

80. PD, xv, 341.

81. PD, xvi, 33. Speech of 23 March 1810.

82. J. Cannon, Aristocratic Century, The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984), p. 117.

83. PD, xxiii, 612.