Charles James Fox

Charles James Fox (January 24, 1749 – September 13, 1806), styled The Honourable from 1762, is a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spans thirty-eight years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and who is the arch-rival of William Pitt the Younger.

His father Henry, a leading Whig of his day, had similarly been the great rival of Pitt's famous father.

He rises to prominence in the House of Commons as a forceful and eloquent speaker with a notorious and colorful private life, though his opinions are rather conservative and conventional.

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

Fox becomes a prominent and staunch opponent of George III, whom he regards as an aspiring tyrant; he supports the American Patriots, even dressing in the colors of George Washington's army.

Briefly serving as Britain's first Foreign Secretary in the ministry of the Marquess of Rockingham in 1782, he returns to the post in a coalition government with his old enemy Lord North in 1783.

However, the King forces 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 spends the following twenty-two years facing Pitt and the government benches from across the Commons.

Though Fox has little interest in the actual exercise of power and spends almost the entirety of his political career in opposition, he becomes 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 are both casualties of Fox's support for France during the Revolutionary Wars, but he goes 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 serves briefly as Foreign Secretary in the 'Ministry of All the Talents' of William Grenville, before he dies on September 13, 1806, aged fifty-seven.

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