Fox: The Life of Charles James Fox

Charles James Fox is among the most colourful adornments of the eighteenth century and of British political history. Of his considerable inheritance from his father he had dissipated much at Newmarket and at the gambling tables by the early 1770s, at the same time forfeiting his post as one of Lord North's junior ministers through his growing hostility to George III and the King's oppressive measures against the American colonists. He continued his opposition to the transatlantic war into the 1780s, establishing his reputation as a brilliant extempore speaker at Westminster when not running the faro bank at Brook's club in St James's. The resignation of North in 1782 saw Fox in office once more, but his own miscalculations and the bitter enmity of the King ensured that he was soon replaced by his great rival, William Pitt the Younger. He was soon to remain in opposition until the last six months of his life, overplaying his hand when calling for a Regency at the time of the King's temporary insanity, overplaying it again with his apparently uncritical support for the French Revolution, but always unswerving in his condemnation of slavery and support of religious freedom. Stanley Ayling's is a lively portrait of the man whom Horace Walpole calles 'the phenomenon of the age', with his twin genius for political misjudgment and personal friendship.