Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N., A Memoir | Page 4

refusal of
Rockingham's invitation to join his Government, though they were
agreed on most of the important questions of the day, including that of
American taxation and the repeal of the Stamp Act; and Pitt, who then
(August 1766) became Lord Chatham, was commissioned to form a
new government in which, to Yorke's mortification, he offered the Lord
Chancellorship to Camden. Yorke thereupon resigned the

Attorney-Generalship, and during the devious course of the ill-starred
combination under Chatham's nominal leadership--for during the next
two years Chatham was absolutely incapacitated from all attention to
business, his policy was reversed by his colleagues, and America taxed
by Charles Townshend--he maintained an 'attitude of saturnine reserve,'
amusing himself with landscape gardening at his villa at Highgate,
doing its honours to Warburton, Hurd, Garrick and other friends, and
corresponding among others with Stanislas Augustus, King of Poland,
to whom he had been introduced by his brother Sir Joseph. Gradually,
however, Chatham made a recovery from the mental disease under
which he had been labouring, and in January 1770 he returned to the
political arena with two vigorous speeches in the House of Lords. His
first speech spread consternation among the members of the
Government and the King's party, led by the Duke of Grafton, who had
assumed the duties of Prime Minister; and one of the first effects of his
intervention was the resignation of Lord Camden, who had adhered to
Chatham, and openly denounced the Duke of Grafton's arbitrary
measures. This event placed the Court party in the utmost difficulty,
and no lawyer of sufficient eminence was available for the post but
Charles Yorke, who thus suddenly found within his reach the high
office which had been the ambition of his life. The crisis was his
undoing, and the whole story is of such interest from a family point of
view, that, although it is well known from the brilliant pages of Sir
George Trevelyan's 'Life of Fox,' I may be excused for telling it again,
mainly in the words of two important memoranda preserved at the
British Museum.
One of these was written by Charles Yorke's brother, the second Lord
Hardwicke, and dated nearly a year later, December 30, 1770; the other,
dated October 20, 1772, by his widow Agneta Yorke; and the effect of
them, to my mind, is not only to discredit the widely believed story of
Charles Yorke's suicide, which is not even alluded to, but also to place
his action from a public and political point of view in a more
favourable light than that in which it is sometimes presented.
Both the 'Memorials' to which I have alluded give a most vivid and
painful account of the struggle between ambition and political

consistency which followed upon the offer of the Chancellorship by the
Duke of Grafton to one who was pledged by his previous action to the
Rockingham party. Lord Hardwicke wrote:
'I shall set down on this paper the extraordinary and melancholy
circumstances which attended the offer of the Great Seal to my brother
in January last. On the 12th of that month he received on his return
from Tittenhanger a note from the Duke of Grafton desiring to see him.
He sent it immediately to me and I went to Bloomsbury Square where I
met my brother John and we had a long consultation with Mr. Yorke.
He saw the Duke of Grafton by appointment in the evening and his
grace made him in form and without personal cordiality an offer of the
Great Seal, complaining heavily of Lord Camden's conduct,
particularly his hostile speech in the House of Lords the first day of the
Session. My brother desired a little time to consider of so momentous
an affair and stated to the Duke the difficulties it laid him under, his
grace gave him till Sunday in the forenoon. He, Mr. Y., called on me
that morning, the 14th, and seemed in great perplexity and agitation. I
asked him if he saw his way through the clamorous and difficult points
upon which it would be immediately expected he should give his
opinion, viz. the Middlesex Election, America and the state of Ireland,
where the parliament had just been prorogued on a popular point. He
seriously declared that he did not, and that he might be called upon to
advise measures of a higher and more dangerous nature than he should
choose to be responsible for. He was clearly of opinion that he was not
sent for at the present juncture from predilection, but necessity, and
how much soever the Great Seal had been justly the object of his
ambition, he was now afraid of accepting it.
'Seeing him in so low and fluttered a state of spirits and knowing how
much the times called for a higher, I