Charles James Fox - Bloomsbury Square, London, UK - Statues of Historic Figures on Waymarking.com

Erected in 1816 the statue shows Charles James Fox sitting in a chair, dressed in robes and holding a book. Wikipedia has a long article on this important man part of which is quoted below:

'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 eighteenth and early nineteenth 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.

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.

1806: Final year
After Pitt’s resignation in February 1801, Fox had undertaken a partial return to politics. Having opposed the Addington ministry (though he approved of its negotiation of the Peace of Amiens) as a Pitt-style tool of the King, Fox gravitated towards the Grenvillite faction, which shared his support for Catholic emancipation and composed the only parliamentary alternative to a coalition with the Pittites. Thus, when Pitt (who had replaced Addington in 1804 to become Prime Minister once more) died on 23 January 1806, Fox was the last remaining great political figure of the era, and could no longer be denied a place in government. When Grenville formed a "Ministry of All the Talents" out of his supporters, the followers of Addington and the Foxites, Fox was once again offered the post of Foreign Secretary, which he accepted. Though the administration failed to achieve either Catholic emancipation or peace with France, Fox’s last great achievement would be the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Though Fox would die before abolition was formalized, he oversaw a Foreign Slave Trade Bill in spring 1806 that prohibited British subjects from contributing to the trading of slaves with the colonies of Britain’s wartime enemies, thus eliminating two-thirds of the slave trade passing through British ports.

On 10 June 1806, Fox offered a resolution for total abolition to Parliament: "this House, conceiving the African slave trade to be contrary to the principles of justice, humanity, and sound policy, will, with all practicable expedition, proceed to take effectual measures for abolishing the said trade…" The House of Commons voted 114 to 15 in favour and the Lords approved the motion on 25 June. Fox said that:
“So fully am I impressed with the vast importance and necessity of attaining what will be the object of my motion this night, that if, during the almost forty years that I have had the honour of a seat in parliament, I had been so fortunate as to accomplish that, and that only, I should think I had done enough, and could retire from public life with comfort, and the conscious satisfaction, that I had done my duty.”

Death
Fox died – still in office – at Chiswick House, west of London, in 1806, not eight months after the younger Pitt. An autopsy revealed a hardened liver, thirty-five gallstones, and around seven pints of transparent fluid in his abdomen. Fox also left £10,000-worth of debts, though this was only a quarter of the £40,000 that the charitable public had to raise to pay off Pitt's arrears. Although Fox had wanted to be buried near his home in Chertsey, his funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on 10 October 1806, the anniversary of his initial election for Westminster in 1780. Unlike Pitt's, Fox's funeral was a private affair, but still the crowds who turned out to pay their respects were at least as large as those at his rival's service.

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 corruptor 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." 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 "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.

Legacy
Although in modern times Fox is a less well remembered historical and political figure, especially when compared with his rival Pitt, he had been a quasi-deified presence in the Whiggism of the early nineteenth century, which kindly tended to gloss over his unwholesome habits and equivocation over parliamentary reform. Strikingly, particularly after 1794, the word 'Whig' gave way to the word 'Foxite' as the self-description of the members of the opposition to Pitt. In many ways, the Pittite-Foxite division of Parliament after the French Revolution established the basis for the ideological Conservative-Liberal divide of the nineteenth century. Fox and Pitt went down in parliamentary history as legendary political and oratorical opponents who would not be equalled until the days of Gladstone and Disraeli more than half a century later. Even Fox’s great rival was willing to acknowledge the old Whig’s talents. When, in 1790, the comte de Mirabeau disparaged Fox in Pitt's presence, Pitt stopped him, saying, "You have never seen the wizard within the magic circle."

As Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey asked a Newcastle-upon-Tyne Fox dinner in 1819: "What subject is there, whether of foreign or domestic interest, or that in the smallest degree affects our Constitution which does not immediately associate itself with the memory of Mr Fox?" Fox's name was invoked numerous times in debates by supporters of Catholic Emancipation and the Great Reform Act in the early nineteenth century. John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford kept a bust of Fox in his pantheon of Whig grandees at Woburn Abbey and erected a statue of him in Bloomsbury Square. Sarah Siddons kept a portrait of Fox in her dressing room. In 1811, the Prince of Wales took the oaths of office as regent with a bust of Fox at his side. Whig households would collect locks of Fox's hair, books of his conflated speeches and busts in his likeness. The Fox Club was established in London in 1790 and held the first of its Fox dinners - annual events celebrating Fox's birthday - in 1808; the last recorded dinner taking place at Brooks's in 1907. "Charles James" or simply "Charlie" is to the present day a common nickname applied by practitioners of the sport to the quarry pursued by packs of foxhounds.

In addition, the town of Foxborough in Massachusetts was named in honour of the staunch supporter of American independence. Fox is remembered in his home town of Chertsey by a bust on a high plinth (pictured right), erected in 2006 in a new development by the railway station. Fox is also commemorated in a termly dinner held in his honour at his alma mater, Hertford College, Oxford, by students of English, history and the romance languages.

Fox featured as a character in the 1994 movie The Madness of King George, portrayed by Jim Carter; in the 2006 movie Amazing Grace, played by Michael Gambon; and in the 2008 movie The Duchess, played by Simon McBurney.'

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