He was taken out of school by his father in 1761 to attend the coronation of George III, who would become one of his most bitter enemies, and once more in 1763 to travel to the Continent (where he visited Paris and Spa). In later life he was said to have always carried a copy of Horace in his coat pocket. Given carte blanche to choose his own education, Fox in 1758 attended a fashionable Wandsworth school run by a Monsieur Pampellonne, followed by Eton College, where he began to develop his lifelong love of classical literature. In 1760, whilst at Eton College, Fox had developed a schoolboy crush on Susan and composed a prize-winning Latin verse describing a pigeon he found to deliver his love-letters to her "to please both Venus its mistress and him". Fox stands beside his first cousin Lady Susan Fox-Strangways (1743–1827), who holds a pigeon, while his aunt Lady Sarah Lennox (1745–1826) (his mother's youngest sister) leans out of a window above. Mezzotint, Ladies Sarah Lennox and Susan Strangeways, with Charles James Fox (1762) at Holland House after the original by Sir Joshua Reynolds, British Museum. On another occasion, when Henry had promised his son that he could watch the demolition of a wall on his estate and found that it had already been destroyed, he ordered the workmen to rebuild the wall and demolish it again, with Charles watching. It was said that Charles once expressed a great desire to break his father's watch and was not restrained or punished when he duly smashed it on the floor. The stories of Charles's over-indulgence by his doting father are legendary. įox was the darling of his father, who found Charles "infinitely engaging & clever & pretty" and, from the time that his son was three years old, apparently preferred his company at meals to that of anyone else. Charles James Fox's elder brother Stephen (1745–1774) became the 2nd Baron Holland, and his younger brother Henry (1755–1811) had a distinguished military career. Henry Fox (1705–1774) was an ally of Robert Walpole and rival of Pitt the Elder, and had amassed a considerable fortune by exploiting his position as Paymaster General of the Forces. After Pitt's death in January 1806, Fox served briefly as Foreign Secretary in the ' Ministry of All the Talents' of William Grenville before he died on 13 September 1806, aged 57.įox was born in London on 24 January 1749, the second surviving son of Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, and Lady Caroline Lennox, a daughter of Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond. His friendship with his mentor, Burke, and his parliamentary credibility were both casualties of Fox's support for France during the French Revolutionary Wars, but Fox went on to attack Pitt's wartime legislation and to defend the liberty of religious minorities and political radicals. 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. Fox spent the following 22 years facing Pitt and the government from the opposition benches of the House of Commons. However, the King forced Fox and North out of government before the end of the year and replaced them with the 24-year-old Pitt the Younger. Briefly serving as Britain's first Foreign Secretary during 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. He supported the American Patriots and even dressed in the colours of George Washington's army. However, with the coming of the American War of Independence and the influence of the Whig Edmund Burke, Fox's opinions evolved into some of the most radical to be aired in the British Parliament of his era.įox became a prominent and staunch opponent of King George III, whom he regarded as an aspiring tyrant. He was the arch-rival of the Tory politician William Pitt the Younger his father Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, a leading Whig of his day, had similarly been the great rival of Pitt's famous father, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham ("Pitt the Elder").įox rose to prominence in the House of Commons as a forceful and eloquent speaker with a notorious and colourful private life, though at that time with rather conservative and conventional opinions. The Viscount Stormont ( Northern Secretary)Ĭanting arms of Fox, Baron Holland: Ermine, on a chevron azure three fox's heads and necks erased or on a canton of the second a fleur-de-lys of the thirdĬharles James Fox (24 January 1749 – 13 September 1806), styled The Honourable from 1762, was a British Whig politician and statesman whose parliamentary career spanned 38 years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
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