Charles James Fox, (born Jan. 24, 1749, London, England—died Sept. 13, 1806, Chiswick, Middlesex [now in Hounslow, London]), Britain’s first foreign secretary (1782, 1783, 1806), a famous champion of liberty, whose career, on the face of it, was nevertheless one of almost unrelieved failure. He conducted against King George III a long and brilliant vendetta; for this reason he was almost always in political opposition and, in fact, held high office for less than a year altogether. He achieved only two important reforms, steering through Parliament a resolution pledging it to abolish the slave trade speedily and, in the 1792 Libel Act, restoring to juries their right to decide not merely whether an allegedly libellous article had, in fact, been published but also what constituted libel in any given case and whether or not a defendant was guilty of it.
Early life
Fox was the third son of Henry Fox, afterward 1st Baron Holland, by his wife, Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of the 2nd duke of Richmond. Through his mother he was descended from Charles II of England and Henry IV of France. He was educated at Eton and at Hertford College, Oxford, where he acquired an extensive knowledge of the classics, to which he remained devoted for the rest of his life. His father brought him up without the least regard for morality and encouraged him, while still a schoolboy, to acquire extravagant and dissolute habits. He lost vast sums at gambling, and in 1774 his father, just before his death, paid the young man’s gambling debts to the amount of £140,000. Almost 20 years later political friends not only freed him from debt but settled on him a comfortable income. He then showed his gratitude by abandoning forever both racing and gambling.
Entry into politics
Fox was procured a seat in Parliament by his father in 1768. Two years later he was appointed a junior lord of the Admiralty but gave up his office in February 1772 in order that he might be free to oppose a bill (eventually the Royal Marriage Act) designed to prevent marriages of members of the royal family unless authorized by the king or ratified by the Privy Council. He reentered the government the following December as a junior lord of the Treasury, but the King, who already disliked him for his recent opposition, accused him of insubordination and dismissed him in February 1774.
Already a friend of Edmund Burke, he naturally gravitated into the Whig group and before long was their accepted leader in the Commons. He went into opposition just when the controversy with the American colonies was becoming acute. Believing that the colonial policy of the prime minister Lord North was unjust and oppressive, he opposed it with unrestrained violence, but he later admitted that the American war was popular in England. The series of disasters sustained by the British troops in America, culminating in the capitulation of the army led by Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown (October 1781), eventually brought down North’s government (March 1782). The King had to call in a Whig ministry, of which Lord Rockingham became prime minister, and Lord Shelburne (later marquess of Lansdowne) colonial secretary; Fox became the first foreign secretary in English history.
Fox believed, erroneously, that the negotiations for peace with the Americans came within the province of the foreign secretary, and he wished to recognize the independence of the former colonies immediately and unconditionally. Shelburne wanted to withhold this recognition until the peace treaties with the European countries with which Britain had also been at war were ready for signature; and he maintained that, since the independence of America had not yet been formally recognized, he, as colonial secretary, had the right to conduct the negotiations. Fox, therefore, notified his intention to resign (June 30), but before he could implement it Rockingham died (July 1).
When the King offered the premiership to Shelburne, Fox and his friends maintained that it was for them, not for the King, to choose Rockingham’s successor. This was unconstitutional; the King had the undoubted right to choose the minister. Fox and some of his friends at once resigned, but others remained to support Shelburne. The historian Sir George Otto Trevelyan described Fox’s refusal to serve under Shelburne as the fatal and irreparable mistake of his life. Though his suspicions of Shelburne were far from groundless, they were exaggerated; moreover, Shelburne was in some respects the most enlightened statesman of his time.
The Fox–North coalition (1783)
Fox always had a liking for coalitions; on Feb. 14, 1783, he joined with his old enemy North to eject the new government and accomplished his object 10 days later. Defending an action that was undoubtedly unpopular and damaging to his reputation, Fox maintained that it was wise and candid to end the hostility between North and himself now that its sole cause, the American war, was over.
After trying desperately for five weeks to withstand “the most unprincipled coalition the annals of this or any other nation can equal,” the King had to grant it office (April 2). The Duke of Portland, a nonentity, became the nominal prime minister; Fox and North, the two secretaries of state. Although the King withheld from the ministers various customary marks of royal confidence, they had no difficulty in retaining the vote of the independent country gentlemen in the House of Commons. The new ministers did not improve their position at court by proposing to give the Prince of Wales (later George IV) an income of £100,000 a year. By remaining the intimate friend of this dissolute young man, who was detested by his father and who ostentatiously supported the coalition, Fox further outraged the King’s feelings.
The coalition fell because of its India bill. Fox and North had no wish to evade their responsibility for ending a system of misgovernment in India that had alarmed and disquieted English statesmen of all parties. Their bill proposed to change the whole constitution of the East India Company, which effectively controlled British India, by transferring control of the company’s territories, revenues, and commerce to seven commissioners who were to be nominated by the British government and removable only upon a vote of either house of Parliament. But vested interests took alarm, and the House of Lords rejected the bill on December 17 after the King had made it known that he would consider as an enemy anyone who voted for it. The coalition was dismissed next day, and the young politician William Pitt (the Younger) accepted an invitation to form a government.
Fox increased his unpopularity by attacking the sovereign’s right to choose his ministers and to appeal to the electorate to confirm his choice. Fox’s opponents could now plausibly maintain that he would not even submit his case to the judgment of the nation. Many of the coalitions’s supporters changed sides, and the dissolution of Parliament (March 1784) completed the discomfiture of the opposition, which found itself with only about 145 members in the new House of Commons. Fox himself, however, was reelected for the great popular constituency of Westminster, defeating the ministerial candidate.
Opposition to Pitt and Addington
Had he been even a little accommodating, Fox could have joined William Pitt’s government on honourable terms in 1784, to the great advantage of the cause of reform. But his attacks on Pitt’s proposed commercial concessions to Ireland in 1785 and on a commercial treaty made with France in 1787 damaged his reputation. He blundered again in 1788–89, when the King was temporarily insane, by supporting the claim of the Prince of Wales to the regency as a right—whereas Pitt maintained that Parliament alone had the right and competence to appoint a regent. Party interests, of course, were deeply involved in the constitutional dispute; the Prince’s first act of power would have been to dismiss Pitt and bring in the Whigs.
Fox welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. War with Revolutionary France broke out in 1793, and a large part of the opposition, headed by Portland, went over to the government in 1794. The minority (50–60) adhering to Fox became one of the weakest oppositions ever known in England, and in about 1797 many opposition members even ceased to attend Parliament. Fox was dismissed from the Privy Council in 1798 for reaffirming in a public speech the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people; yet eight years later the King had to reinstate him without exacting any retraction of principle.
In 1795 Fox had secretly married Elizabeth Armitstead, with whom he had been living for many years and to whom he always remained devoted; the marriage was revealed only in 1802. In their country house, St. Anne’s Hill, near Chertsey in Surrey, he indulged his tastes for classical literature and a rural existence and found there ample compensation for all the disappointments and stresses of public life. Mrs. Fox, who bore him no children, died on July 8, 1842.
Fox approved of the peace negotiations that resulted in the treaty signed at Amiens (1802) but spoke of the “shameful surrender of all our conquests” to Napoleon. He was critical of the ministry (1801–04) of Henry Addington (afterward Viscount Sidmouth) for its failure either to preserve the peace or to put the country into an adequate state of defense to meet Napoleon’s invasion threat, which followed the renewal of war in 1803. Though his motion, virtually one of censure (April 23, 1804), was defeated by 256 votes to 204, Addington’s government resigned a few days later.
Pitt now wished to form a coalition government on a broad base but failed to persuade George III to waive his objections to Fox as a minister (he would have been foreign secretary), though the King was prepared to give him a foreign mission. Fox, with his usual generosity, acquiesced in this proscription, said that he was too old (at 55) to care about office, and advised his friends to join the coalition; but both they and the followers of Lord Grenville (with whom they had recently collaborated) rejected the suggestion and went into opposition.