‘Friends Until the End' Review: Left, Right and the Revolution

Wall Street Journal

6 days ago

The political use of the words 'left' and 'right' first emerged when the French Estates-General met in 1789. The clergy and nobility sat to the king's right, the 'third estate'—the commoners—to his left. The former sought to preserve the monarchy, the latter in effect to abolish it. Left and right took shape far more gradually in the Anglophone world, but there, too, the French Revolution precipitated the rift. Or so I reflected on reading 'Friends Until the End,' James Grant's account of the long-enduring political alliance and friendship between the British statesmen Edmund Burke (1729-97) and Charles James Fox (1749-1806).
Burke is commonly thought of as the father of modern conservatism, though the term 'conservative' wasn't in currency in his day; whereas Fox is remembered as one of British history's great liberals, especially on account of his eloquent opposition to the slave trade and crucial role in abolishing it. In fact, both Burke and Fox can fairly be called liberals. They both advocated religious toleration and reform to the penal laws in Ireland. Both sought freer commerce between nations, a more humane criminal code and a conciliatory policy toward the American colonies. Both inveighed against the abuses of India's native population committed by the East India Co. And both, though royalists by conviction, believed the crown's furtive influence on Parliament—handing out preferments and sinecures and so on—was baleful.
That their 22-year friendship shattered in 1791, publicly and irrevocably, grieved them both. But anyone who knew the two men's feelings about what was then happening in Paris—Burke made his thoughts known in his masterpiece, 'Reflections on the Revolution in France' (1790)—must have seen it coming.
Fox, 20 years Burke's junior, more than once credited his friend with teaching him everything he knew about politics. But apart from their Whiggish leanings and wide learning, the two had little in common. Fox was born in London and came from wealth and political prestige. He matriculated at Hart Hall, Oxford, remaining only two years. But he read prodigiously in the ancients and in English poetry and drama. 'The plays in which he had acted, the poetry he had memorized, and the Latin and Greek he had translated,' writes Mr. Grant of Fox, 'made up the intellectual capital on which he would build his reputation as Burke's rival for the unconferred title of the greatest political talker of the age.'