The Right Honorable Charles James Fox

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_James_Fox

His wife: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Armistead

Charles James Fox PC (24 January 1749 – 13 September 1806), styled The Honourable from 1762, was a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spanned thirty-eight years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and who was particularly noted for being the arch-rival of William Pitt the Younger. The son of an old, indulgent Whig father, Fox rose to prominence in the House of Commons as a forceful and eloquent speaker with a notorious and colourful private life, though his opinions were rather conservative and conventional. However, with the coming of the American Revolution and the influence of the Whig Edmund Burke, Fox's opinions evolved into some of the most radical ever to be aired in the Parliament of his era. He came from a family with radical and revolutionary tendencies and his first cousin and friend Lord Edward Fitzgerald was a prominent member of the Society of United Irishmen who was arrested just prior to the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and died of wounds received as he was arrested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Edward_FitzGerald

Fox became a prominent and staunch opponent of George III, whom he regarded as an aspiring tyrant; he supported the revolutionaries across the Atlantic, taking up the habit of dressing in the colours of George Washington's army. Briefly serving as Britain's first Foreign Secretary in the ministry of the Marquess of Rockingham in 1782, he returned to the post in a coalition government with his old enemy Lord North in 1783. However, the King forced Fox and North out of government before the end of the year, replacing them with the twenty-four-year-old Pitt the Younger, and Fox spent the following twenty-two years facing Pitt and the government benches from across the Commons.

Though Fox had little interest in the actual exercise of power and spent almost the entirety of his political career in opposition, he became noted as an anti-slavery campaigner, a supporter of the French Revolution, and a leading parliamentary advocate of religious tolerance and individual liberty. His friendship with his mentor Burke and his parliamentary credibility were both casualties of Fox's support for France during the Revolutionary Wars, but he went on to attack Pitt's wartime legislation and to defend the liberty of religious minorities and political radicals. After Pitt's death in January 1806, Fox briefly became Foreign Secretary in the 'Ministry of All the Talents' of William Grenville, before dying himself on 13 September 1806, aged fifty-seven.

American Revolution

Fox became possibly the most prominent and vituperative parliamentary critic of Lord North and the conduct of the American war. In 1775, he denounced North in the Commons as

“ the blundering pilot who had brought the nation into its present difficulties ... Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost—he has lost a whole continent.”

Fox, who occasionally corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and had met Benjamin Franklin in Paris, predicted that Britain had little practical hope of subduing the colonies, and interpreted the American cause approvingly as a struggle for liberty against the oppressive policies of a despotic and unaccountable executive. It was at this time that Fox and his supporters took up the habit of dressing in buff and blue: the colours of the uniforms in Washington’s army. Fox's friend, the Earl of Carlisle, observed that any setback for the British Government in America was "a great cause of amusement to Charles." Even after the American defeat at Long Island in 1776, Fox stated that

“ I hope that it will be a point of honour among us all to support the American pretensions in adversity as much as we did in their prosperity, and that we shall never desert those who have acted unsuccessfully upon Whig principles.”

On 31 October the same year, Fox responded to the King's address to Parliament with "one of his finest and most animated orations, and with severity to the answered person", so much so that, when he sat down, no member of the Government would attempt to reply.

Private life

Fox's private life (as far as it was private) was notorious, even in an age noted for the licentiousness of its upper classes. Fox was famed for his rakishness and his drinking; vices which were both indulged frequently and immoderately. Fox was also an infamous gambler, once claiming that winning was the greatest pleasure in the world, and losing the second greatest. Between 1772 and 1774, Fox's father had – shortly before dying – had to pay off £120,000 of Charles' debts; the equivalent of around £11 million at today's prices. Fox was twice bankrupted between 1781 and 1784, and at one point his creditors confiscated his furniture. Fox's finances were often "more the subject of conversation than any other topic." By the end of his life, Fox had lost about £200,000 gambling.

In appearance, Fox was dark, corpulent and hairy, to the extent that when he was born his father compared him to a monkey. His round face was dominated by his luxuriant eyebrows, with the result that he was known among the Whigs as 'the Eyebrow.' Though he became increasingly dishevelled and fat in middle age, the young Fox had been a very fashionable figure; in particular, he had been the leader of the 'Maccaroni' set of extravagant young followers of Continental fashions. Fox enjoyed riding and cricket but, in the latter case, the combination of his impulsive nature and considerable weight led to his often being run out between wickets.

Fox was also probably the most ridiculed figure of the 18th century – most famously by Gillray, for whom he served as a stock Jacobin villain. The King regarded Fox as beyond morality and the corrupter of his own eldest son, and the swelling late eighteenth-century movements of Christian evangelism and middle-class 'respectability' also frowned on his excesses. However, Fox was apparently not greatly bothered by these criticisms, and indeed kept a collection of his caricatures. His friend, Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle, said of him that, since "the respect of the world was not easily retrievable, he became so callous to what was said of him, as never to repress a single thought, or even temper a single expression when he was before the public." Indeed, particularly after 1794, Fox could be considered at fault for rarely consulting the opinions of anyone outside of his own circle of friends and supporters.

Fox was also regarded as a notorious womaniser in a period when a mistress was a practical necessity for a London gentleman. In 1784 or 1785, Fox met and fell in love with Elizabeth Armistead, a former courtesan and mistress of the Prince of Wales who had little interest in politics or Parliament. He married her in a private ceremony at Wyton in Huntingdonshire on 28 September 1795, but did not make the fact public until October 1802, and Elizabeth was never really accepted at court. Fox would increasingly spend time away from Parliament at Armistead's rural villa, St. Ann's Hill, near Chertsey in Surrey, where Armistead's influence gradually moderated Fox's wilder behaviour and together they would read, garden, explore the countryside and entertain friends. In his last days, the sceptical Fox allowed scriptural readings at his bedside in order to please his religious wife. She would survive him by some thirty-six years, dying on 8 July 1842, at the age of ninety-one.

Despite his celebrated flaws, history records Fox as an amiable figure. The Tory wit George Selwyn wrote that, "I have passed two evenings with him, and never was anybody so agreeable, and the more so from his having no pretensions to it". Selwyn also said that "Charles, I am persuaded, would have no consideration on earth but for what was useful to his own ends. You have heard me say, that I thought he had no malice or rancour; I think so still and am sure of it. But I think that he has no feeling neither, for anyone but himself; and if I could trace in any one action of his life anything that had not for its object his own gratification, I should with pleasure receive the intelligence because then I had much rather (if it were possible) think well of him than not". Sir Philip Francis said of Fox: "The essential defect in his character and the cause of all his failures, strange as it may seem, was that he had no heart". Edward Gibbon remarked that "Perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood." Central to understanding Fox's life was his view that "friendship was the only real happiness in the world." For Fox, politics was the extension of his activities at Newmarket and Brooks's to Westminster. "Fox had little or no interest in the exercise of power." The details of policy – particularly of economics – bored him, in contrast with the intensity of Burke’s legal pursuit of Warren Hastings, and of Pitt’s prosecution of the war against France. Moreover, the Foxites were "the witty and wicked" satellites of their leader, as much friends as political allies. Indeed, Fox's generous nature (helped by his earlier over-indulgence by his father) made him a rather hopeless political party-leader, often seeming quite unwilling to cajole or discipline his unruly supporters, especially in the case of the young, who were disproportionately represented among the Foxites. Perhaps one great testament to Fox's character is that subscriptions to the old Whig club of Brooks's would decline on the rare occasions when he was called away to government office, because one of the prime entertainments would no longer be available.

Other References

• "Charles James Fox", Westminster Abbey