66 Facts About Charles James Fox

Charles James Fox, styled The Honourable from 1762, was a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spanned 38 years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Charles James Fox 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.

However, with the coming of the American War of Independence and the influence of the Whig Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox's opinions evolved into some of the most radical to be aired in the British Parliament of his era.

Charles James Fox became a prominent and staunch opponent of King George III, whom he regarded as an aspiring tyrant.

Charles James Fox supported the American Patriots and even dressed in the colours of George Washington's army.

Charles James Fox spent the following 22 years facing Pitt and the government from the opposition benches of the House of Commons.

Henry Charles James Fox 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.

Charles James Fox 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.

On this trip Charles James Fox was given a substantial amount of money with which to learn to gamble by his father, who arranged for him to lose his virginity, aged fourteen, to a Madame de Quallens.

Charles James Fox returned to Eton later that year, "attired in red-heeled shoes and Paris cut-velvet, adorned with a pigeon-wing hair style tinted with blue powder, and a newly acquired French accent", and was duly flogged by Dr Barnard, the headmaster.

Charles Fox was once known as a macaroni, despite him being a tad too overweight to look decent in his tight clothing.

Charles James Fox went on several further expeditions to Europe, becoming well known in the great Parisian salons, meeting influential figures such as Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, the duc d'Orleans and the Marquis de Lafayette, and becoming the co-owner of a number of racehorses with the duc de Lauzun.

Charles James Fox was to address the House of Commons some 254 times between 1768 and 1774 and rapidly gathered a reputation as a superb orator, but he had not yet developed the radical opinions for which he would become famous.

Between 1770 and 1774, Charles James Fox's seemingly promising career in the political establishment was spoiled.

Charles James Fox was promised that Grieve could arrange a marriage for him to a West Indian heiress named Miss Phipps.

Charles James Fox was so taken in that he started to powder his eyebrows in order that he might appeal to her.

Charles James Fox drifted from his rather unideological family-oriented politics into the orbit of the Rockingham Whig party.

Charles James Fox became convinced that the King was determined to challenge the authority of Parliament and the balance of the constitution established in 1688, and to achieve Continental-style tyranny.

Charles James Fox had not been present in the House for the beginning of the Dunning debate, as he had been occupied in the adjoining eleventh-century Westminster Hall, serving as chairman of a mass public meeting before a large banner that read "Annual Parliaments and Equal Representation".

Charles James Fox now found himself in common opposition to Shelburne with his old and bitter enemy, Lord North.

Charles James Fox proposed an East India Bill to place the government of the ailing and oppressive British East India Company, at that time in control of a considerable expanse of India, on a sounder footing with a board of governors responsible to Parliament and more resistant to Crown patronage.

An energetic campaign in his favour was run by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, allegedly a lover of Charles James Fox's who was said to have won at least one vote for him by kissing a shoemaker with a rather romantic idea of what constituted a bribe.

Charles James Fox's suspicions had been confirmed; it seemed to him that George III had personally scuppered both the Rockingham-Shelburne and Fox-North governments, interfered in the legislative process and now dissolved Parliament when its composition inconvenienced him.

Charles James Fox was often caricatured as Oliver Cromwell and Guy Fawkes during this period, as well as Satan, "Carlo Khan" and Machiavelli.

Charles James Fox supported Pitt's reforms, despite apparent political expediency, but they were defeated by 248 to 174.

Charles James Fox had declared that Pitt was "a rascal" and Fox "his friend".

The King was placed under restraint, and a rumour went round that Charles James Fox had poisoned him.

Charles James Fox was incommunicado in Italy as the crisis broke; he had resolved not to read any newspapers while he was abroad, except the racing reports.

When Charles James Fox did make it into Parliament, he seemed to make a serious political error.

Charles James Fox's argument did indeed seem to contradict his lifelong championing of Parliament's rights over the Crown.

Charles James Fox believed that the King's illness was permanent, and therefore that George III was, constitutionally speaking, dead.

Charles James Fox welcomed the French Revolution of 1789, interpreting it as a late Continental imitation of Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Charles James Fox read the book and found it "in very bad taste" and "favouring Tory principles", but avoided pressing the matter for a while to preserve his relationship with Burke.

Charles James Fox's motion was defeated in the Commons by 294 votes to 105.

Later, Charles James Fox successfully supported the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791, extending the rights of British Catholics.

Charles James Fox explained his stance to his Roman Catholic friend, Charles Butler, declaring:.

Charles James Fox opposed the bellicose stances of Pitt's ministry in the Nootka Sound crisis and over the Russian occupation of the Turkish port of Ochakiv on the Black Sea.

Charles James Fox contributed to the peaceful resolution of these entanglements and gained a new admirer in Catherine the Great, who bought a bust of Charles James Fox and placed it between Cicero and Demosthenes in her collection.

Charles James Fox continued to defend the French Revolution, even as its fruits began to collapse into war, repression and the Reign of Terror.

Charles James Fox was not surprised when Pitt and the King brought Britain into the war as well and would afterwards blame the pair and their prodigal European subsidies for the long-drawn-out continuation of the French Revolutionary Wars.

Rather ironically, while Charles James Fox was being denounced by many in Britain as a Jacobin traitor, across the Channel he featured on a 1798 list of the Britons to be transported after a successful French invasion of Britain.

Charles James Fox still insisted on challenging the repressive wartime legislation introduced by Pitt in the 1790s that would become known as "Pitt's Terror".

In 1792, Charles James Fox had seen through the only piece of substantial legislation in his career, the Libel Act 1792, which restored to juries the right to decide what was and was not libellous, in addition to whether a defendant was guilty.

Charles James Fox argued against war measures like the stationing of Hessian troops in Britain, the employment of royalist French emigres in the British army and, most of all, Pitt's suspension of habeas corpus in 1794.

Charles James Fox argued that, according to the principles of the proposed legislation, Pitt should have been transported a decade before in 1785, when he had been advocating parliamentary reform.

Charles James Fox's following in Parliament had shrivelled to about 25, compared with around 55 in 1794 and at least 90 during the 1780s.

Charles James Fox believed that it was "impossible to support the Revolution [of 1688] and the Brunswick Succession upon any other principle" than the sovereignty of the people.

Charles James Fox confessed in December 1802 that he was "obstinate" in his belief that Napoleon's "wish is Peace, nay that he is afraid of war to the last degree".

When war broke out again in May 1803, Charles James Fox blamed the Prime Minister Henry Addington for not standing up to the King.

Charles James Fox was a close friend and colleague of Samuel Whitbread and supported by Fox, Whitbread in 1805, led the campaign to have Viscount Melville removed from office; Melville resigned.

When Pitt died on 23 January 1806, Charles James Fox was the last remaining great political figure of the era and could no longer be denied a place in government.

Charles James Fox was convinced that France desired a lasting peace and that he was "sure that two civil sentences from the Ministers would ensure Peace".

Charles James Fox was forced to agree that the King's belief was "but too well founded".

Charles James Fox was appalled at what he called this "extraordinary step".

When Yarmouth reported successive new French demands, Charles James Fox replied that the British government "continues ardently to wish for the Conclusion of Peace".

Unlike Pitt's, Charles James Fox's funeral was a private affair, but the multitude that turned out to pay their respects were at least as large as those at his rival's service.

Charles James Fox was famed for his rakishness and his drinking; vices which were both indulged frequently and immoderately.

Charles James Fox was an inveterate gambler, once claiming that winning was the greatest pleasure in the world, and losing the second greatest.

Charles James Fox was twice bankrupted between 1781 and 1784, and at one point his creditors confiscated his furniture.

Charles James Fox liked riding horses and watching and playing cricket, but his impulsive nature and considerable bulk led to his often being run out between wickets.

The King disliked Charles James Fox greatly, regarding him as beyond morality and the corrupter of his own eldest son, and the late eighteenth-century movements of Christian evangelism and middle-class 'respectability' frowned on his excesses.

Charles James Fox was apparently not greatly bothered by these criticisms and kept a collection of his caricatures, which he found amusing.

In 1784 or 1785, Charles James 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.

Charles James Fox 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.

Charles James Fox is remembered in his home town of Chertsey by a bust on a high plinth, erected in 2006 in a new development by the railway station.

Charles James Fox is 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.