The early history of Charles James Fox

Contents

CHAPTEE I.

Stephen Fox. — His Career Abroad and at Home. — His Wealth, and the Use he made of it. — His Domestic History. — Henry Fox. — His Marriage.— His Opposition to the Marriage Act. — His Style of Speaking. — Outbreak of the Seven Years' War. — Fox in the Pay-office, and Pitt Master of the Nation. — Accession of George the Third, and Downfall of Newcastle and Pitt. — Bute's Unpopularity. — Fox undertakes to carry the Peace through Parliament. — The Methods by which he made good his Promise. — He Retires from the House of Commons with the Title of Lord Holland. — His Quarrel with Lord Shelburne and with Rigby. — Hatred with which Lord Holland was regarded by the Country Page 1

Lord Holland in his own Family. — Birth of Charles James Fox. — His Childhood. — Wandsworth. — Eton and Paris. — Dr. Barnard. — The Musa3 Etonenses. — Picture at Holland House. — Lady Sarah Lennox. — Fox at Oxford. — Tour in Italy. — Fox's Industry and Accomplishments. — His Return to England 35

Chapter I

Stephen Fox. — His Career Abroad and at Home. — His Wealth, and the Use he made of it. — His Domestic History. — Henry Fox. — His Marriage. — His Opposition to the Marriage Act. — His Style of Speaking. — Outbreak of the Seven Years' War. — Fox in the Pay-office, and Pitt Master of the Nation. — Accession of George the Third, and Downfall of Newcastle and Pitt. — Bute's Unpopularity. — Fox undertakes to carry the Peace through Parliament. — The Methods by which he made good his Promise. — He retires from the House of Commons with the Title of Lord Holland. — His Quarrel with Lord Shelburne and with Rigby. — Hatred with which Lord Holland was regarded by the Country.

CHARLES JAMES Fox, our first great statesman of the modern school, was closely connected with scenes which lie far back in English history. His grandfather, if not the most well-graced, was at any rate one of the best-paid, actors on the stage of the seventeenth century. Sir Stephen Fox was born in 1627. " The founder of our family," says the third Lord Holland, " seems, notwithstanding some little venial endeavors of his posterity to conceal it, to have been of a very humble stock ;" and Sir Stephen's biographer and panegyrist, writing within a year of his death, has very little to tell which can destroy the effect of this frank confession.1 As a boy,

1 It is difficult to overrate the value of the " Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox," which Lord Holland commenced, and Lord Russell continued, to edit. But for their labor of love, a biography of

Fox is said to have been in the choir of Salisbury Cathedral ; and (what proved more to* the purpose with reference to his future career) he was well and early grounded in the art of book-keeping. At the age of fifteen his " beauty of person and towardliness of disposition" recommended him to the notice of the Earl of Northumberland, High Admiral of England. Thence he passed into the household of the earl's brother, Lord Percy, and had, no doubt, his share in the good living for which, even at the height of the Civil War, that nobleman's table was famous.1 Fox, who was a cavalier as soon as he was anything, was employed on the staff in an administrative capacity during the campaign which ended at Worcester ; and after the battle was over he took an active part in assisting the escape of Prince Charles to Normandy.

The prince passed the next few years at Paris in great distress. In 1652 the French Court relieved his more pressing necessities by an allowance of six thousand francs a month — a pension very much smaller, and less regularly paid, than that which, as King of England, he afterwards enjoyed from the same quarter. As time went on, it began to be understood at the Louvre that Cromwell would be better pleased if the royal fugitive could be induced to shift his quarters. Charles was made to perceive that he had outstayed his welcome, and gladly entered into an arrangement by which he was enabled to leave Paris out of debt, and to settle elsewhere with a fair prospect of paying his way if his household could only be managed with the requisite economy. At this juncture Clarthe great "Whig would be an ungrateful, if not an impossible, task. The " Memoirs of the Life of Sir S. Fox, Kt., from his First Entrance upon the Stage of Action under the Lord Piercy till his Decease," were published in the year 1717. With regard to Sir Stephen's extraction, the writer is content to say, " As it is not material to enter into the genealogy of the family on the side of his father, who was of substance enough to breed up his son in a liberal education, so it is altogether needless to ransack the Heralds' Office for the origin and descent of his mother."

1 Clarendon tells us of Lord Percy that " though he did not draw the good fellows to him by drinking, yet he ate well ; which, in the general scarcity of that time, drew many votaries to him."

CHAP.!.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 3

endon, as true a friend as prince ever had, did his master the inestimable service of persuading him to put his affairs unreservedly into the hands of Stephen Fox, " a young man bred under the severe discipline of the Lord Peircy, very well qualified with languages, and all other parts of clerkship, honesty, and discretion that were necessary for the discharge of such a trust." Fox thoroughly answered the expectations of his patron. At whichever of the German capitals or Low- Country watering-places the prince preferred to fix his modest court, he never was without the means of living in comfort and respectability, and from that day forth he knew nothing more of the lowest humiliations of exile. Fox was the first to bring his employer the news of Cromwell's death, and to salute him as the real King of Great Britain, " since he that had caused him to be only titularly so was no longer to be numbered among the living." Very little else of a definite nature is told about him in his biography, and probably very little else was known to its author, as may be gathered from the fact that, of the hundred and forty-nine pages which the book contains, no less than sixty-seven are consumed in an account of the state reception which the Dutch authorities gave to Charles in 1660, when he was on his way to England to receive the crown.

As soon as the master had his own again, the servant's fortunes rose rapidly. Fox was appointed first clerk of the Board of Green Cloth, paymaster to two regiments, and, before long, pay master- general of all his Majesty's forces in England. Later on in his career he became Master of the Horse, and one of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury. He was knighted. He obtained the reversion of a rich sinecure. The people of Salisbury, "for the love they bore to a gentleman who did them the honor of owing his birth to their neighborhood," chose him as their member, and, when he retired from Parliament, transferred their loyalty to his son.1 When James acceded to the throne, the royal seduc-

1 Fox showed his gratitude to the church in whose precinct he was educated after a fashion which churchmen of our day would hardly aptions which prevailed over the faint Protestantism of Sunderland were tried upon Fox ; but he resisted the offer of a peerage, and stuck manfully to his religion. The priests intrigued to have him removed from the Commission of the Treasury ; but the king, who, with all his faults, understood public business as well as any man in the country, insisted on keeping Fox and Godolphin as coadjutors and instructors to the untrained Roman Catholic courtiers who formed the majority of the Board. When the Prince of Orange landed, the Bishop of London, whom a very moderate amount of persecution had converted from a preacher of non-resistance into a recruiting-officer for rebellion, endeavored to tamper with the fidelity of Fox ; but the old placeman refused to take part against a monarch " whose and his brother's bread he had so plentifully eaten of." Sir Stephen, however, was not a Hyde or a Montrose. The best that his biographer can find to say for his loyalty is that "he never appeared at his Highness' s court to make his compliments there till the king had left the country." William had no great difficulty in persuading him to take his seat once more at his accustomed boards. Thenceforward, whatever changes might occur at the Treasury, Fox's name was always on the new Commission. The veteran was sorely tried when Montague, who numbered only half his years, clambered over his head into the first position in the State ; but ere long the storm of faction and jealousy hurled Montague from office, and when the sky was clear again Sir Stephen still was at his post, unappalled and unscathed. A favorite with twelve successive parliaments and with four monarchs, it was not until Anne had mounted the throne that he at length retired into private life.

His places were enormously lucrative, and he was soon rolling in wealth, "honestly got, and unenvied," says Evelyn; "which is next to a miracle." Evelyn himself informs us how Sir Stephen contrived to escape the evil eye which or-

preciate. The canon who preached his funeral sermon tells us that " he pewed the body of the cathedral church at Sarum in a very neat manner, suitable to the neatness of that church, of which he was in many ways a great benefactor."

Chap. I.] Charles James Fox. 5

dinarily pursues a self-made man. At the height of his prosperity he continued " as humble and ready to do a courtesy as ever he was." He was honorably mindful of the source whence his opulence was mainly derived, and, after twenty years at the Pay-office, he bethought him of a magnificent device for restoring to the army some part of the fortune which he had got by it. He it was who inspired Charles with that idea of founding an asylum for disabled soldiers, the credit of which is generally ascribed to a less respectable quarter. Sir Stephen furnished much more than the first suggestion. He fostered the enterprise, through all its stages, with well-judged but unstinted supplies of money ; and if his original intentions were carried out, his contribution to the building and maintenance of Chelsea Hospital can have fallen little short of a hundred thousand pounds.

Sir Stephen's domestic annals were at least as remarkable as his public history. Somewhere about 1654, he married the sister of the king's surgeon, by whom he had nine children. In 1682 he made over the paymastership to .his eldest son, Charles, who, three years afterwards, at a great political crisis, preferred a clear conscience to the emoluments of his place, and, by the single act of his life which remains on record, proved that he was worthy of giving a name to his nephew.1 Sir Stephen married his eldest daughter to Lord Cornwallis, a nobleman who habitually " lost as much as any one would trust him, but was not quite as ready at paying," and whose gambling-scrapes sadly ruffled the serenity of one who is de-

1 In 1G85 the Opposition protested against granting money to James the Second until grievances had been redressed. When the division was taken, " to the dismay," writes Macaulay, " of the ministers, many persons whose votes the court had absolutely depended on were seen moving towards the door. Among them was Charles Fox, paymaster of the forces, and son of Sir Stephen Fox, clerk of the Green Cloth. The paymaster had been induced by his friends to absent himself during part of the discussion. But his anxiety had become insupportable. He came down to the Speaker's chamber, heard part of the debate, withdrew, and, after hesitating for an hour or two between conscience and five thousand pounds a year, took a manly resolution and rushed into the House just in time to vote."

6 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [CHAP. I.

scribed by Grammont, in terms which read oddly as applied to any of the name of Fox, as among (' the richest and most regular men in England." The old gentleman did not fail to profit by his dear-bought experience ; and Evelyn gives an amusing sketch of the grave and dexterous courtesy with which he foiled an attempt, on the part of Lady Sunderland, to saddle him with a second high-born and expensive son-inlaw. His sons were all childless ; and, at the age of seventy-six, after his retirement from the Treasury, " unwilling that so plentiful an estate should go out of the name, and being of a vegete and hale constitution," he took to wife the daughter of a Grantham clergyman, who brought him twins within the twelvemonth. Two more children were born before Sir Stephen's death, which took place at his Chiswick villa in the year 1716. He had attended Charles the First on the scaffold, and he lived to discuss the execution of Lord Derwrentwater. One of his daughters by the first marriage is said to have died while a baby. Lady Sarah Napier, the sister of his daughter-in-law, survived until the year 1826 ; and there is no reason to question the tradition that Charles Fox had two aunts who died a hundred and seventy years from each other.

Lady Fox outlived her husband only three years. Sir Godfrey Kneller, in the picture at Holland House, endows her with small and pretty features, and hair and complexion as dark as her grandson's. A fortnight before her death she called her children together, and made them a quaint little address which shows that she had already discerned the tendencies of the family character. " Don't be a fop, don't be a rake," she said to her eldest son. " Mind on your name — Stephen Fox ; that, I hope, will keep you from being wicked. You, Harry, having a less fortune, won't be subject to so many temptations; but withstand those you have when you grow up. Then you'll learn to swear, to rake about, to game, and at last be ruined by those you unhappily think your friends. Love your brother, Stephen ; I charge you all love one another. You have enemies enough ; make not one another so." In after-years Henry Fox, the most fiercely hated public man

CHAP. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 7

of his own, or perhaps of any other, generation, may have called to mind these affectionate forebodings, which can still be read in his own boyish handwriting.

Stephen became, in coarse of time, Earl of Ilchester, and the founder of a house which has steadily grown in prosperity and general esteem. Henry Fox had a stormy and dissolute youth, and did not turn to serious affairs until he had wasted some of his best years and the greater part of his patrimony. He was thirty when he entered Parliament, and thirty-two before he got office, an age at which his son was the first man in the House of Commons. Any chance of Henry Fox being a Jacobite was effectually extinguished by his early distaste for certain doleful ceremonies with which the 30th of January was honored in the paternal household. His principles, if they could be dignified by such a title, were Whig, and he owed his first place to Walpole, whose favor he repaid by a fidelity which that statesman seldom experienced, and never expected.1 To the end of his life, Fox made Sir Robert's quarrels his own. He could not forgive Lord Hardwicke for deserting their common chief, as the great chancellor in after -years had ample reason to know. "Mr. Fox," wrote Bubb Dodington, "had something very frank and open about him. If he had any dislike to me, it must be from my hating Sir Eobert Walpole ; for Fox really loved that man." He would have nothing to do with the administration which had profited by his leader's fall ; and it was not until Pelham became prime-minister, on the recommendation, and almost under the auspices, of Walpole, that Fox consented to return to public employment as a Commissioner of the Treasury.

The first exploit by which he attracted the attention of the world was not performed in his capacity of an administrator. Horace Walpole has left us the description of a ball given in the days when his father was still in power; and it must be

1 A colleague of Sir Robert Walpole said to him in the House of Commons, while Wilmington was speaking, " That young dog promised that he would always stand by us." "I advise my young men never to use ' always,' " was the quiet reply.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF [CHAP. I.

confessed that there are some features in the picture which modern London might copy with advantage. " There were one hundred and ninety-seven persons at Sir Thomas's, and yet nobody felt a crowd. He had taken off all his doors, and so separated the old and the young that neither were inconvenienced with the other. The ball began at eight. Except Lady Ancram, no married woman danced. The beauties were the Duke of Richmond's two daughters, and their mother, still handsomer than they. The duke sat by his wife all night, kissing her hand." It is strange to reflect that this pair of lovely girls, and a third sister whose turn to be the reigning toast was still in the future, were destined to be the mothers of Charles Fox, Sir Charles Napier, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Forcibly, indeed, does such a thought bring it home to the mind that the period of which this book will treat was the transition between the old order of things and the new.

A more curious illustration of the sentiments and manners of the past could not easily be found than the story of Henry Fox's marriage. Fox lost his heart to Lady Caroline Lennox, and won hers in return. He made a formal application for her hand, but the duke and duchess would not hear of it ; and Lady Caroline's relatives were already looking around for a more eligible suitor, when, early in the month of May, 1744, the town was convulsed by the intelligence that the lovers had settled the matter by a secret wedding, which, in those days, was a much less arduous operation than at present. The sensation was instant and tremendous. At the opera the news ran along the front boxes " exactly like fire in a train of gunpowder." It was said at the time that more noise could hardly have been made if the Princess Caroline had gone off with her dancing-master. All the blood royal was up in arms to avenge what was esteemed an outrage upon the memory of his sacred Majesty Charles the Second, who, if he had been alive to see it, would have been infinitely diverted by the catastrophe, and would doubtless have taken his great-granddaughter's part. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, who had lent his house for the marriage, found that his complicity was like to have cost him his red ribbon. The father and mother of the young lady put off their social engagements, and hurried away to hide their vexation at their country-seat. There is something irresistibly comical in the letters of condolence which came pouring in upon them at Goodwood. Lord IIch ester wrote to exculpate himself and his wife from any previous knowledge of his brother's designs. Lord Lincoln had heard, with the greatest uneasiness, that he and his sister had been " falsely and villanously" charged with being concerned in so unhappy and imprudent a business. The Duke of Newcastle buzzed round the court, mumbling and bewailing to every peer he met about "this most unfortunate affair," till he was unlucky enough to fall into the hands of Lord Carteret.1 "I thought," said Carteret, "that our fleet was beaten, or that Mons had been betrayed to the French. At last it came out that Harry Fox was married, which I knew before. This man, who is secretary of state, cannot be consoled because two people, to neither of whom he is any relation, were married without their parents' consent !" The prime-minister, who both liked and feared Fox, would have been very glad to have left the matter alone, and the more so because Miss Pelham stoutly refused to abandon her friend Lady Caroline, and, in the vigorous language which young women then allowed themselves to use, declared to any one who denied Mr. Fox's claim to be called a gentleman that if Lord Ilchester had been free to present himself, the duke and duchess would both have jumped at the match. She was now, she

1 Lord Carteret, afterwards Earl Granville, is the only person of whom we hear too little in the voluminous memoirs of his time. His flashes of jovial common-sense never fail to infuse some human interest into the dreary political period which coincided with the ascendency of the Pelhams. Unfortunately he loved his ease better than his country, and was only too ready to lounge away his life in the background, "resigned," says Mr. Carlyle, "in a big contemptuous way to have had his really considerable career closed upon him by the smallest of mankind," and known in history chiefly for " occasional spurts of strong rugged speech which come from him, and a good deal of wine taken into him." Two bottles of burgundy were his daily allowance.

said, in other people's power, but before long would be her own mistress and able to please herself; which meant that she was on the eve of being married to Lord Lincoln, who, no doubt, soon found occasion to repent that he had been in such a hurry to take the wrong side in so interesting a controversy. In order to keep on terms with the Duke of Eichmond, Pelham thought it necessary to speak with grave disapproval of his audacious subordinate, and, during at least a twelvemonth, continued to address him as " Dear Sir " instead of " Dear Harry." But the anger of a minister against a formidable member of Parliament is not an enduring or implacable emotion, and Fox soon discovered that his political future had gained a great deal more than it had lost by his having aspired to a duke's daughter. The parents remained obdurate from 1744 to 1748 ; but even they melted at last, and, in a letter which is extant, announced to their erring daughter that the conflict between reason and nature was over, and that tenderness had carried the day. The birth of a son, whom the duke candidly admits to be an " innocent child," contributed not a little to this change of feeling ; and, when Fox had for years been secretary at war, a privy-councillor, and the readiest speaker in the House of Commons, he was solemnly forgiven for having married above his station.

Charles Fox's mother, if pictures may be trusted (and in her day they spoke true), must, at each successive stage of life, have possessed in a high degree the charms appropriate to her years. Hogarth makes her the prettiest and most prominent figure in a delicious group of small actors and actresses just out of the nursery, who are playing the " Conquest of Mexico" by the fireside for the amusement of the Duke of Cumberland; and her latest portrait, taken when her hair was gray, is marked by a tranquil, serious expression, which is singularly winning. Fox and Lady Caroline were, from first to last, an enviable couple. They lived together most happily for more than thirty years, and the wife survived the husband not quite so many days. Neither of them ever knew content except in the possession, or the immediate expectation, of the other's company ; and their correspondence

CHAP. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 11

continued to be that of lovers until their long honeymoon was finally over. " Indeed, my dear angel," wrote Fox, twelve years after marriage, " you have no reason to be peevish with me. Ask yourself whether you know an instance of my want of confidence in you, or of your want of power with me. Upon my word, you do not. I wrote to you yesterday. I rode to town this morning; found six people in my house; went to court, Parliament, dined late, and am at this moment waited for at the Speaker's. What can I more than snatch this time to tell you that I am, for me, well, and that I love you dearly?" Perfect trust and passionate affection breathe through every page of the letters, so close upon each other in date, and so ungrudging in length, in which Henry Fox's easy, kindly, and humorous words

"Lie disordered in the paper, just As hearty nature speaks them."

Fox has left on the history of his times a testimony to his conjugal regard which is highly characteristic of the man. In the reign of George the Second the scandal of the old marriage laws had come to a head. Those facilities for extemporizing a wedding, which are not without inconvenience in the north of our island, had proved far too lax for the warmer and less provident temperament of Englishmen. The vision of a broken-down parson ready, without asking questions, to marry any man to any woman for a crown and a bottle was an ever-present terror to guardians and parents. Numerous were the cases in which boys of rank had become the prey of infamous harpies, and girls with money or beauty had found that the services of a clergyman were employed as a cloak for plunder or seduction. A sham marriage enters into the plot of half the novels of that period ; and the fate which in fiction poor Olivia Primrose suffered, and the future Lady Grandison narrowly escaped, became a terrible reality to many of their sex. Nor were the miseries entailed by such practices confined to a single generation. The succession to property was rendered doubtful and insecure ; every day in term-time produced hearings in Chancery, or appeals in the Lords, concerning the validity of a marriage which had been solemnized thirty years before in the back-parlor of a public-house, or in some still more degraded haunt of vice; and the children -might be ruined by an act of momentary folly committed when the father was a midshipman on leave from Sheerness, or a Westminster boy out for a half-holiday.

In the year 1753, Lord Hardwicke undertook to remedy the evil. He introduced a bill which made effectual provision for putting a stop to the Fleet marriages ; but his measure was so constructed as to inflict a new injustice upon a section of the community which had already endured enough from the partiality of our legislature. The chancellor insisted that everybody, including Roman Catholics and Dissenters, must either be married according to the ritual of the establishment, or not be married at all, whatever objections they might entertain to a service some passages of which cause even the most devout pair of Church people to wince when it is read over them. The bill got easily through the Lords; but as soon as it appeared in the House of Commons it aroused an opposition, vigorous, obstinate, and intensely clever, but in which it is difficult to discover a single trace of public spirit. Little or nothing was said about the grievance of the ISTon conformists— a grievance which, in our century, it took eight sessions to redress. Other grave defects, productive in coming years of infinite confusion and litigation, were left unnoticed by orators who lavished their flowers of rhetoric and wit upon prophecies that the bill would check population and reduce England to a third-rate power, and that fine ladies would never consent to be asked for three Sundays running in the parish church. Charles Townshend delighted the House, never very critical of a new argument, by a pathetic appeal on behalf of younger sons, whom Lord Hardwicke's bill would debar from running away with heiresses. "Were fresh shackles, he asked, to be forged in order that men of abilities might be prevented from rising to a level with their elder brothers?1 It was on this occasion that Townshend

1 Charles Townshend discovered, in the course of the next year, that

CHAP. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 13

first brought into successful play his rare personal advantages. His elegant and commanding figure, his vehement yet graceful action, his clear voice and cheery laugh, the art (said an acute observer) with which he disguised everything but his vanity, completely carried away with him an audience which thenceforward he always had at his command.

The encounter in which Charles Townshend won his spurs was only a preliminary skirmish. " The speeches," says Waipole, "had hitherto been flourishes in the air. At last the real enemy came forth, Mr. Fox, who neither spared the bill nor the author of it ; as, wherever he laid his finger, it was not wont to be light." A law which annulled a marriage made without consent of parents, and which treated the principals in the transaction as common felons, was, not unnaturally, resented by the hero of the most famous runaway match of the generation. Fired with indignation at what he regarded as an affront to the romance of his life — a sentiment which never died out of his family, for neither Charles Fox nor the third Lord Holland could speak of the Marriage Act with patience— he stood forth as the champion of oppressed lovers, and declared that it was cruel to force upon the country a measure which, from the first word to the last, was dictated by aristocratic pride and heartlessness. He had high words with his own leader on every clause, and almost on every sentence ; but, while striking at Pelham, he was really belaboring Lord Hardwicke in effigy. " I will speak so loud," he cried, " that I will be heard outside the House;" and heard he was to such effect that the lord chancellor's life became a burden to him as long as the bill remained in the Commons. Day after day the secretary at war made the highest lay dignitary in the kingdom a butt for his unsparing ridicule and invective ; until at length a ludicrous simile, applied to his lordship amidst the new act did not stand in the way of a younger son who wanted to make a great marriage, if only he would be content with a dowager. He proved an excellent husband, though he was rather too fond of amusing his company by congratulating his wife on her good-luck with a freedom suited ratlier to his century than to ours.