FOX, CHARLES JAMES, Whig statesman, was a son of Henry Fox, first Lord Holland, by Lady Georgiana Carolina, eldest daughter of the Duke of Richmond. He was born on the 24th January 1749, and was educated at Eton and Oxford, spending part of his vacations on the Continent in the gayest and wittiest circles of the French capital, and visiting Switzerland and Italy. Notwithstanding the irregular life which he led even as a schoolboy, he was very distinguished for ability both at school and college; and so high was his father's opinion of his talents that at the age of nineteen he had him brought into parliament as member for the borough of Midhurst, a step to which he is said to have been further incited by the fact that, even at this early age, Fox's energies had found an outlet in gambling and other forms of dissipation. His precocity in vice, as well as in intellectual development, is said to have been the result of the injudicious fondness of his very unprincipled but very gifted father. Till he attained his majority Fox prudently kept silent in the House, but immediately thereafter he appeared as a supporter of the administration of Lord North, and was rewarded with the office of one of the lords of the Admiralty. In 1772 he resigned that office owing to a difference with Lord North, but the following year was named a commissioner of the Treasury. From that post he was dismissed two years afterwards, in consequence of another quarrel with Lord North, and passed over to the ranks of the opposition. During the whole course of the American war he was the most formidable opponent of the coercive measures which were adopted by the government, and the most powerful advocate of the claims of the colonists; acting, to this extent at least, in accordance with the views which for many years before had been urged upon the country by the great Lord Chatham. The difference between them was that, whereas Lord Chatham urged conciliation in order to preserve the connection between the two countries, Fox foresaw and foretold the necessity and the advantages of complete separation.
In 1782, on the downfall of Lord North, Fox was appointed one of the secretaries of state, which office he held till the death of the Marquis of Rockingham. On the dissolution of the Shelburne administration in 1783 the North and Fox coalition was formed, and Fox resumed his former office; but the rejection of his India Bill by the House of Lords soon after led to the resignation of his government. It was now that Pitt came into power, and that the long and famous contest between him and Fox, who occupied the position of leader of the opposition, commenced. In 1788 Fox enjoyed a short respite from his public labours. Accompanied by his wife, he visited the Continent, and after spending a few days at Lausanne in the company of Gibbon, who was there engaged in writing his famous history, he set out for Italy. The sudden illness of the king, however, and the necessity of constituting a regency rendered it undesirable that he should be longer absent from England, and he hastened back to his post. The regency, the trial of Warren Hastings, the French Revolution, and the events which followed it gave ample scope to the talents and energies of Fox, and on all occasions he employed his influence to modify, if not to counteract, the policy of his great rival. He was a strenuous opponent of the war with France, and an advocate of those non-intervention views which find greater favour in our day than they did in his.
After the death of Pitt in January 1806, Fox was recalled to office, and endeavoured to realise his doctrines by setting on foot negotiations for a peace with France, the results of which he did not live to witness. He was on the point of introducing a bill for the abolition of the slave-trade, when he died at Cliswick, on the 13th September 1806, in his fifty-ninth year. In private life Fox was a genial companion, kindly and sincere in the closer relations of friendship, whilst his conduct to those to whom he was opposed in public was generous, and free from every trace of malignity or enmity. Lord John Russell, in the preface to his Memorials and Correspondence, speaks of the singular candour, boldness, simplicity, and kindness of his character; and of his oratorical powers it is enough to record that Burke called him 'the greatest debater the world ever saw,' and Sir James Mackintosh, 'the most Demosthenian speaker since Demosthenes.' His remains were interred in Westminster Abbey, near to those of Pitt.
See, besides the Life and Times and the Memorials and Correspondence, by Earl (then Lord John) Russell, the Character of the Late C. J. Fox, by Dr Parr (1809); the interesting Early History of C. J. Fox, by Sir George Trevelyan (1880); and the Life by H. O. Wakeman (1890).