Fox, Charles James

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Fox, Charles James

FOX, CHARLES JAMES. (1749–1806). British politician. Fox was born in London on 24 January 1749, the second son of the politician Henry Fox (later first baron Holland) and Caroline Lennox, daughter of the second duke of Richmond. Closely attached to his father and two brothers, Fox was brought up virtually without restraints, a background that is said to explain his later colorful lifestyle and his inability to provide firm leadership to others. Fox was educated, by his own choice, at a school in Wandsworth and (from June 1758) at Eton, where he began long friendships with a circle he called "the Gang" and that included Lord Carlisle. He also established a reputation as an able classical scholar. In 1763 he left school for a sojourn in Paris, where Henry Fox encouraged his fourteen-year-old son to gamble heavily and arranged for him to lose his virginity. It is hardly surprising that soon after his return to Eton in the autumn of 1764 young Fox was asked to leave. He went straight on to Oxford, where he enjoyed mathematics and classics, but was too ill disciplined to stay for a degree. His learning was then continued by another visit to Paris in the spring of 1765 and by a long grand tour through France, Switzerland, and Italy. On this journey he encountered numerous women, as well as Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, the duc d'Orleans, and Lafayette.

He began his political life as his beloved father's ally and protégé and therefore no friend of the Whigs, who had never forgiven Henry for accepting office under Lord Bute. In 1768, when he was nineteen and legally too young to be elected, Charles James entered Parliament as member for Midhurst in Sussex, a seat purchased by his father. Predictably he took up against the Rockinghamites and supported the ministries of Grafton and North. He supported the attempts to punish John Wilkes for defying Parliament over the Middlesex election and had no particular objection to either ministry's American policies until 1774. He got on well with North and in February 1770 became a lord of Admiralty at the age of twenty-one. His move toward a more radical stance came out of family considerations, not political principle.

The first problem was the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which required the immediate descendants of royalty to obtain the sovereign's consent before marrying. As Fox's mother was a direct descendant of Charles II, and especially as hers had been a runaway marriage, Fox may have felt it reflected on his own legitimacy. In 1753 Henry, for rather similar reasons, had opposed the earl of Hardwicke's marriage act against clandestine marriages. Now, on 15 February Charles James resigned from the Admiralty in protest. In December he was found a place on the Treasury board, only to resign that office in February 1774 after the North ministry failed to raise the Holland barony to an earldom. These flimsy, even capricious, grounds for the laying down of public office marked him down as a man who could not, for the moment at least, be taken very seriously.

Excluded from office by his own actions, from 1774 Fox drifted into the orbit of the Rockingham Whigs. This drift was not purely political opportunism; and it was very slow. One reason was a growing mutual dislike between himself and George III, who disapproved of Fox's libertine habits. Under the tutelage of Edmund Burke, Fox gradually came to share the Whig delusion that George was deliberately moving toward a royal absolutism. Fox now saw his friend North as the weak, possibly unwitting or unwilling, instrument of George's designs. Though still looking over his shoulder at fresh opportunities for office, Fox found himself publicly advocating more frequent elections and a wider franchise, ideas that in private he found only mildly appealing.

What really swung Fox into opposition was the approach of the War of American Independence, which from the first he feared would be a long and probably unsuccessful contest. In April 1774 he spoke and voted against the Coercive Acts and was not surprised when violence followed. As early as 1776 Fox began to think American independence better than a costly and humiliating war. He attacked the earl of Sandwich and Lord George Germain for incompetence and gradually began to associate the Americans with himself as fellow victims of George III: from there it was only a short step to perceiving a trans-Atlantic royal plot against liberty. As ever, Fox's changing opinions were shaped by personal contacts. He exchanged letters with Thomas Jefferson and met Benjamin Franklin in Paris in the winter of 1776–1777. General John Burgoyne, one of his high-living gambling cronies, wrote to him from America between 1775 and 1777. His brilliant speeches marked him as the leader of opposition to the war in the Commons, and in 1782 he concerted the moves that brought down North's government.

Fox now became foreign secretary in the short-lived Rockingham administration. It was not a happy experience. Fox found it nigh impossible to work with the earl of Shelburne, the home secretary, and, predictably, suspected George III of using the Lord Chancellor and Shelburne to frustrate the Paris peace negotiations. Fox's chief negotiator in Paris, Thomas Grenville, certainly met with obstruction from Shelburne's man Richard Oswald. Fox had already decided to resign when Rockingham's death on 1 July 1782 put an end to the ministry. The new Shelburne ministry negotiated separate treaties with France and the United States, but at a price, which allowed Fox and North to combine forces to bring Shelburne down in February 1783. The Fox-North coalition (MarchDecember 1783) was later vilified as a cynical union of convenience between sworn enemies, but at the time it was accepted as a partnership of men who had worked well together in the past and still held each other in high regard. They had no choice but to accept the peace terms they had just censured; the alternative was to restart the fighting, a political if not a military impossibility. They fell when George III intervened to have Fox's India bill defeated in the Lords, thus providing him with an excuse to sack his ministers and bring in the younger William Pitt.

Fox, already paranoid about royal plotting, was appalled at the king's behavior and blocked every ministerial measure he could until the election of 1784 gave Pitt a comfortable majority. Thereafter British politics resolved into a duel between the two. In 1788 Fox opened the prosecution of Warren Hastings as a means of protest against the king's destruction of his own India bill. He supported the prince regent's claims during the Regency crisis of 1788–1789 because he was at odds with George III. He opposed the war against revolutionary and Napoleonic France on the grounds that even a perverted liberty was preferable to a coalition of despots—particularly a coalition joined by George III and Pitt. His illusion that he could patch up a peace by chatting with his friend Talleyrand was rudely shattered when he became foreign secretary in the "ministry of all the talents" in January 1806, and only his death on 13 September saved him from total humiliation.

Fox's politics were always conditioned by family considerations, friendships, and his overwhelming distrust of George III, and his support for the American Revolution was based on expediency rather than principle. He was never a radical or convinced parliamentary reformer, and whatever political ideals he possessed did not run deep. His great oratory, unlike the younger Pitt's, was of an essentially destructive kind. These were hardly the qualifications of a great minister, but perhaps Fox's greatest talent lay elsewhere: as the supreme opposition spokesman of his age.