E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
Fletcher The Not Quite Prime Ministers
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78590-836-1
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Leaders of the Opposition 1783-2020
E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78590-836-1
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Dr Nigel Fletcher is a political historian, lecturer and writer. He teaches politics and contemporary history at King's College London and is the co-founder of the Centre for Opposition Studies. His previous books include How to Be in Opposition: Life in the Political Shadows (Biteback, 2011).
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Charles James Fox was a big figure. In the history books, as in life, he looms large, a substantial presence in every sense. Unusually for someone who did not become Prime Minister, his name is more familiar to many historians than some of those who did. Having commanded the floor of the old House of Commons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, his imposing physical presence remains there, immortalised in marble with his right hand raised mid-speech, as one of the statues lining what is now St Stephen’s Hall in the Palace of Westminster, the site of the old chamber. There he faces his old adversary William Pitt the Younger, their political rivalry frozen in time.
Completed in 1856, fifty years after his death, it is not the most flattering of statues. His coat is held together at his chest by a single button, which strains to contain the ample stomach pushing his waistcoat out beneath. His size had been a signature target for cartoonists of his age such as James Gillray, but even the more formal pictures showed off his bulging waistline, with a 1782 portrait by Joshua Reynolds showing his coat similarly parted. These visual representations captured a key aspect of his character, as someone whose private excesses and enjoyment of life’s material pleasures were notorious. But he was also a huge figure in the politics of the age, and it is this which has kept his name echoing down the centuries.
He was born on 24 January 1749 in London, the second son of Henry Fox (later 1st Baron Holland). His mother was Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of the 2nd Duke of Richmond, whose father was the illegitimate son of King Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth. Fox was therefore the biological great-great-grandson of the ‘merry monarch’, whose colourful private life he was in many ways destined to emulate.
His family links to the Stuart royal line were not confined to these maternal genes, however. His paternal grandfather Sir Stephen Fox had been a pageboy to Charles I at the time of his execution 100 years earlier, and it is no coincidence that he was himself given the very Stuart names Charles and James. That someone with such a royalist pedigree should have spent most of his political life criticising a king is something of an historical irony, though of course the Hanoverian George III was from a different royal line.
The baby Charles seems initially not to have impressed his father, who described him as ‘weakly’ and observed, ‘His skin hangs all shrivell’d about him, his eyes stare, he has a black head of hair, and ’tis incredible how like a monkey he look’d before he was dressed.’1 Despite this inauspicious start, father and son soon developed a close relationship, with Henry finding the young boy ‘infinitely engaging & clever’ and greatly enjoying spending time with him.
Throughout his childhood, Charles was constantly indulged by his father, in whose eyes he could do no wrong. It was said the elder Fox once forgot a promise to his son that he could watch a wall being demolished and ordered it to be rebuilt purely so Charles could watch it being knocked down again. Similar stories began circulating in London society, including the occasion when Charles walked into his father’s room whilst he was working, picked up one of his papers, declared that he didn’t like it and threw it onto the fire. Instead of punishing this insolence, his father quietly wrote it out again.
His relationship with his mother was more distant, though even she recognised his precocious intelligence and praised how ‘infinitely engaging’ he was, entering into his parents’ conversations, reading with them and being ‘in every respect the most agreeable companion’. Despite this, she recognised that his excessive self-confidence might not endear him to others, writing to her sister, ‘These same qualities, so pleasing to us, often make him troublesome to other people. He will know everything … and is too apt to give his opinion about everything.’2 This astute observation certainly pointed towards a career in politics.
He was educated at Eton, where he made a number of lifelong friends who he called ‘the gang’. His achievements as a Latin scholar impressed his tutors, but it was another form of education that was perhaps to have a greater effect on his later life. At the age of just fourteen he was taken to Paris by his father, given a large amount of money and allowed to indulge himself for the first time in the pleasurable vices of gambling and sex. Returning to Eton somewhat more worldly, he was asked to leave the college early the following year, having been judged to be ‘too witty’ and ‘a little too wicked’ to stay on.3
Instead, he went up to Oxford, where he studied mathematics and classics but left without a degree. He was soon back in Paris, where he stayed a while before embarking on a grand tour of Europe that took in Italy and Switzerland. It was in these early years that he developed his love of French fashion and became friends with many of the country’s leading society figures. Travelling with his gang of Etonian friends, he met intellectual figures including Voltaire, partied with the Duc d’Orléans and bedded a succession of mistresses and prostitutes, cheerfully writing home to his friends about the collection of ‘poxes and claps’ he picked up along the way.4
Having been a precocious child, it was fitting that his entry into Parliament should have been equally premature. He was elected in 1768 at the age of nineteen, which was technically too young for him to have been legally eligible, though this does not seem to have impeded him. His seat of Midhurst had been secured for him by his father, whose own political career had come to an end three years earlier when, shortly after accepting a peerage as Lord Holland, he was forced from his post as Paymaster of the Forces. In those days it was not unusual for holders of such public offices to use them to line their own pockets, but Holland was viewed as having done so excessively, embezzling large sums of public money to make himself a fortune.
Having been a much-indulged son, Fox spent much of his political career repaying the favour by publicly defending his father’s honour – a rather thankless task, given the circumstances. As well as deflecting questions about financial propriety, anther long-running battle he took up was on the question of his parents’ marriage. They had eloped, with the wedding being against the wishes of the bride’s parents, the Duke and Duchess of Richmond. In 1753 Lord Hardwicke had brought forward legislation which became the Clandestine Marriages Act, designed to help aristocratic parents prevent such romantic scandals, and Henry Fox had understandably taken the measure as a personal affront.
Nearly twenty years later, as an offspring of that marriage, Charles James Fox sought to remove the taint from his parentage by proposing a repeal of Hardwicke’s Act. He had by this time developed a reputation as a talented orator, making frequent contributions in the chamber, which marked him out as a young man of great ability. These skills were all the more impressive given he spent a large part of his time gambling, betting on horses and drinking. The circumstances in which he introduced his marriages bill in 1772 were a prime example, as one of his biographers vividly described:
On the 7th of April Fox’s bill for the repeal of Lord Hardwicke’s Act came on for discussion. The day before Fox had been at Newmarket, losing heavily as usual on the turf. On his way back to town to introduce his first important measure into Parliament – a bill which was to alter the social arrangements of the country, and remove a stigma from his family – he fell in with some friends at Hocherel. Characteristically enough, he spent the night drinking with them instead of preparing for the struggle of the morrow, and arrived on the next day at the House without having been to bed at all, without having prepared his speech, and without even having drafted his bill. Nothing but the most consummate talent could have saved him.5
Luckily for him, he possessed such talent and produced a masterful performance. He briefly introduced his bill, then sat down to allow the Prime Minister Lord North and Edmund Burke to make their case against it. According to Horace Walpole, who witnessed the scene, Fox seemed barely to have listened to them but then rose and ‘with amazing spirit and memory’ ridiculed and refuted their arguments and won the day. As Walpole commented, ‘This was genius.’6
It was a short-lived triumph, however. Having won its first reading by a majority of one, the bill came up again the following month for debate. Fox was absent, the call of the racecourse having once again been too much to resist, and by the time he had hurried back from Newmarket, the bill had been thrown out by a large majority. This episode neatly illustrates the tension between his reputation as a brilliant parliamentarian and...
