it was of him, when the doctor said: “My lord, he is in a bad way,
for I was obliged to make use of the lancet this morning,” that the
witty Alvanley remarked: “You should have _tapped_ him, Doctor, for I
am sure he has more claret than blood in his veins.” Another was the
eccentric Twistleton Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, a famous epicure,
who drank large quantities of absinthe and curaçoa. Gronow recommended
him a servant, who, arriving as Fiennes was going to dinner, asked his
new master if he had any orders, only to receive these instructions:
“Place two bottles of sherry by my bedside, and call me the day after
to-morrow!”
Gambling vied with drinking as an amusement of the aristocracy, and
the one was as ruinous to their purses as the other to their health.
Everyone played cards in those days, and even ladies gambled with as
much zest as their husbands and brothers. There was much card-playing
in private houses, but more in the clubs, especially at White’s,
Brooks’s and Almack’s.
“As the gambling and extravagance of the young men of fashion has
arrived now at a pitch never heard of, it is worth while to give some
account of it” (Walpole wrote in 1772). “They have a club at Almack’s
in Pall Mall, where they played only for rouleaus of fifty pounds each
rouleau; and generally there was ten thousand pounds in specie on the
table. Lord Holland had paid about twenty thousand pounds for his two
sons. Nor were the manners of the gamesters, or even their dresses for
play, undeserving notice. They began by pulling off their embroidered
clothes, and put on frieze great-coats, or turned their coats inside
outwards for luck. They put on pieces of leather (such as is worn by
footmen when they clean knives) to save their lace ruffles; and to
guard their eyes from the light and prevent tumbling their hair, wore
high-crowned straw hats with broad brims, and adorned with flowers and
ribbons; masks to conceal their emotions when they played at quinze.
Each gamester had a small, neat stand by him, with a large rim, to
hold their tea, or a wooden bowl with an edge of ormolu to hold their
rouleaus. They borrowed great sums of the Jews at exorbitant premiums.
Charles Fox called his outward room, where those Jews waited till he
rose, the Jerusalem Chamber. His brother Stephen was enormously fat;
George Selwyn said he was in the right to deal with Shylocks, as he
could give them ‘pounds of flesh.’”
[Illustration: _Charles James Fox_]
It is not exaggeration to say that during the long sittings at macao,
hazard, and faro many tens of thousands exchanged hands.
Fox was a magnificent player of piquet and whist, but in the evenings,
when he had dined well and wined well, he would play only games of
chance, at which he was always unlucky.
“At Almack’s of pigeons I’m told there are flocks,
But it’s thought the completest is one Mr Fox.
If he touches a card, if he rattles a box,
Away fly the guineas of this Mr Fox.”
Once, before delivering a speech in defence of the Church, he played
for twenty-two hours, and lost five hundred pounds an hour; and then
declared that the greatest pleasure in life, after winning, was losing!
His bad luck was notorious, but again and again his intimates came
to his assistance, and Walpole wondered what he would do when he had
sold the estates of all his friends! It was noticed that he did not do
himself justice in a debate on the Thirty-Nine Articles (6th February
1772), and Walpole thought it was not to be wondered at.
“He had sat up playing at hazard at Almack’s from Tuesday evening, the
4th, till five in the afternoon of Wednesday, 5th. An hour before,
he had recovered twelve thousand pounds that he had lost, and by
dinner, which was at five o’clock, he had ended losing eleven thousand
pounds. On the Thursday he spoke in the above debate, went to dinner
at half-past eleven at night, from there to White’s, where he drank
till seven the next morning, thence to Almack’s, where he won six
thousand pounds, and between three and four in the afternoon he set
out for Newmarket. His brother Stephen lost ten thousand pounds two
nights after, and Charles eleven thousand pounds more on the 13th, so
that in three nights the two brothers, the eldest not twenty-four, lost
thirty-two thousand pounds.”
The wonder is, not that Fox spoke ill, but that he spoke at all.
They were good losers in those days, and stoicism was a very necessary
quality to be possessed by the majority, since all played and few won.
One night, when Fox had been terribly unfortunate at the faro-table,
Topham Beauclerk followed him to his rooms to offer consolation,
expecting to find him perhaps stretched on the floor bewailing his
losses, perhaps plunged in moody despair. He was surprised to see
him reading Herodotus. “What would you have me do?” Fox asked the
astonished visitor. “I have lost my last shilling.” “Charles tells me
he has not now, nor has had for some time, one guinea,” Lord Carlisle
told George Selwyn, “and is happier on that account.”
“But hark! the voice of battle shouts from far,
The Jews and Macaronis are at war;
The Jews prevail, and, thund’ring from the stocks,
They seize, they bind, they circumcise Charles Fox.”
The money-lenders were most obliging to Fox at the time when he was
heir-apparent to the barony of Holland, but the holder of the title had
an heir, which destroyed his prospects; whereupon Fox, unperturbed,
made it the subject of a joke against his creditors: “My brother Ste’s
son is a second Messiah, born for the destruction of the Jews.” He
lived on credit for some time, and so notorious was this fact that when
he gave a supper-party at his rooms in St James’s Street, close by
Brooks’s Club, Tickell addressed verses thereon to Sheridan:
“Derby shall send, if not his plate, his cooks;
And know, I’ve bought the best champagne from Brooks,
From liberal Brooks, whose speculative skill
Is hasty credit and a distant bill;
Who, nursed on clubs, disdains a vulgar trade,
Exults to trust, and blushes to be paid.”
Lord Holland had already paid his son’s debts on several occasions,
and apparently some remonstrance was addressed to the latter.
“In regard to what you say of my father’s feelings, I am sure if you
could have known how very miserable you have made me you would not have
said it” (Fox wrote in 1773 to Lady Holland, in a letter in which there
is the true note of sincerity). “To be loved by you and him has always
been (indeed, I am no hypocrite, whatever I may be) the first desire of
my life. The reflection that I have behaved ill to you is almost the
only painful one I have ever experienced. That my extreme imprudence
and dissipation has given both of you uneasiness is what I have long
known, and I am sure I may call those who really know me to witness
how much that thought has embittered my life. I own I lately began to
flatter myself that, particularly with you, and in a great measure with
my father, I had regained that sort of confidence which was once the
greatest pride of my life; and I am sure I don’t exaggerate when I say
that, since I formed those flattering hopes, I have been the happiest
being in the universe. I hate to make professions, and yet I think I
may venture to say that my conduct in the future shall be such as to
satisfy you more than my past. Indeed, indeed, my dear mother, no son
ever loved a father and mother as I do. Pray, my dear mother, consider
how very miserable you have made me, and pity me. I do not know what
to write, so have to leave off writing, but you may be assured that no
son ever felt more duty, respect, gratitude, or love than I do for both
of you, and that it is in your power, by restoring me to your usual
confidence and affection, or depriving me of it, to make me the most
unhappy or contented of men.”
Once again Lord Holland took upon himself the settlement of Charles’s
debt, and just before his death, in 1774, satisfied his son’s
creditors--at a cost of £140,000! Even this was not a sufficient lesson
to the young man, who incurred fresh liabilities, to pay which he sold
a sinecure place of £2000 a year for life--the Clerkship of the Peels
in Ireland, and the superbly decorated mansion and estate at Kingsgate
in the Isle of Thanet, both of which had been left him by his father.
Fox in his twentieth year entered Parliament as member for the pocket
borough of Midhurst in Sussex, and, at his father’s request, supported
the Duke of Grafton’s administration. He took his seat in May 1768, and
distinguished himself in the following year by a speech opposing the
claim of Wilkes to take his seat as member for Middlesex. “It was all
off-hand, all argumentative, in reply to Mr Burke and Mr Wedderburn,
and excessively well indeed,” Lord Holland said proudly. “I hear it
spoken of as an extraordinary thing, and I am, as you see, not a little
pleased with it.” This was the age of young men, for Fox’s lifelong
antagonist, Pitt, entered the House when he was twenty-two, accepted
the Chancellorship of the Exchequer twelve months later, and became
Prime Minister in his twenty-fifth year! The careers of these statesmen
must have delighted another precocious genius, Benjamin Disraeli, who
reverenced youth. “The only tolerable thing in life is action, and
action is feeble without youth,” he wrote. “What if you do not obtain
your immediate object? You always think you will, and the detail of the
adventure is full of rapture.” The blunders of youth, that great man
thought, are preferable to the triumph of manhood or the successes of
old age.
In February 1770 Fox took office under Lord North as Lord of the
Admiralty, when, owing to his attitude in the debates on the Press
laws, he became so unpopular with a section of the public as actually
to be attacked in the streets, and rolled in the mud. It has already
been mentioned how, in February 1772, he spoke against the clerical
petition for relief from subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles;
and later, in the same month, he resigned his office so as to be
free to oppose the Royal Marriage Bill, which was introduced by the
King’s command after the announcement of the Duke of Cumberland’s
marriage with Mrs Horton. The King was determined, so far as it lay
in his power, to prevent the occurrence in his family of another
_mésalliance_, and the principal clauses of the Royal Marriage Act
forbade the marriage of a member of the royal family under the age
of twenty-five without the consent of the monarch, and above that
age, if the King refused consent, without the permission of both
Houses of Parliament. The Bill was fiercely contested in both Houses
of Parliament; Fox, Burke, and Wedderburn were its most strenuous
opponents in the Commons; Lord Folkestone, in person, and Lord
Chatham, by letter, in the Lords. It was denounced by its opponents
as “un-English, arbitrary, and contrary to the law of God”; and the
objection raised was that it would set the royal family as a caste
apart. So unpopular was it that, in spite of the King’s influence
being exerted in its favour, an amendment limiting it to the reign of
George III. and three years longer was negatived only by a majority of
eighteen. The Bill became law in March 1772.
Fox began to be recognised as a power in the House, and Lord North soon
made overtures to his erstwhile colleague to rejoin the ministry as a
Lord of the Treasury. This Fox did within a year of his resignation,
but his independence soon brought about another rupture; and when, on a
question of procedure, he caused the defeat of the ministry by pressing
a motion to a division, the King wrote to Lord North: “Indeed, that
young man has so thoroughly cast off every principle of common honour
and honesty that he must become as contemptible as he is odious, and
I hope you will let him know you are not insensible of his conduct
towards you.” The Prime Minister took the hint, and dismissed Fox in
a delightfully laconic note: “Sir, His Majesty has thought proper to
order a new Commission of the Treasury, in which I do not see your
name.”
In opposition Fox was a vigorous opponent of Lord North’s policy in
connection with the American colonies. In April 1774 he voted for the
repeal of the tea duty, declaring that the tax was the mere assertion
of a right that would force the colonists into open rebellion; and
he attacked the subsequent proceedings of the English government on
account of their manifest injustice. Against the war that ensued he
protested with might and main, and to the utmost of his power tried to
force the ministry into a pacific path.
“The war of the Americans is a war of passion” (he declared on 26th
November 1778); “it is of such a nature as to be supported by the most
powerful virtues, love of liberty and of country, and at the same time
by those passions in the human heart which give courage, strength and
perseverance to man; the spirit of revenge for the injury you have
done them, of retaliation for the hardships inflicted on them, and of
opposition to the unjust powers you would have exercised over them;
everything combines to animate them to this war, and such a war is
without end; for whatever obstinacy enthusiasm ever inspired man with,
you will now have to contend with in America; no matter what gives
birth to that enthusiasm, whether the name of religion or of liberty,
the effects are the same; it inspires a spirit that is unconquerable
and solicitous to undergo difficulties and dangers; and as long as
there is a man in America, so long will you have him against you in the
field.”
And in the following year he compared George III. with Henry VI.--“both
owed the Crown to revolutions, both were pious princes, and both lost
the acquisitions of their predecessors”--and so earned the enmity of
the King, who could not differentiate between doctrine and action;
and because Fox supported the rights of the Americans looked upon him
henceforth as a rebel. Later, when of all the colonies only Boston
remained in the hands of the English, and Wedderburn with foolhardy
audacity ventured in the House of Commons to compare North as a War
Minister with Chatham, Fox created a sensation by declaring that “not
Lord Chatham, nor Alexander the Great, nor Cæsar ever conquered so much
territory in the course of all their wars as Lord North had lost in one
campaign!” In January 1781 he made a further effort, in which he was
supported by Pitt, to compel Lord North to abandon the war and make
peace with the colonies.
“The only objection made to my motion” (he declared) “is that it must
lead to American independence. But I venture to assert that _within six
months of the present day_, Ministers themselves will come forward to
Parliament with some proposition of a similar nature. I know that such
is their intention; I announce it to the House.”
Of course his resolution was defeated, and the colonies were for ever
lost to the Crown. “I that am born a gentleman,” said George III. to
Lord Thurlow and the Duke of Leeds, “shall never lay my head on my last
pillow in peace and quiet as long as I remember the loss of my American
colonies.” Not the less, the King never forgave Fox for that attitude
which might have averted the disaster.
Fox, who had declined office in 1780, was two years later appointed
Foreign Secretary when Lord Rockingham became Prime Minister, and in
this position he won golden opinions.
“Mr Fox already shines as greatly in place as he did in opposition,
though infinitely more difficult a task” (Walpole wrote to Mr Horace
Mann). “He is now as indefatigable as he was idle. He has perfect
temper, and not only good humour and good nature, but, which is the
first quality of a Prime Minister in a free country, has more common
sense than any man, with amazing parts that are neither ostentatious
nor affected.”
Lord Rockingham died a few months later, when Lord Shelburne was
appointed in his place, and soon after Fox, with some of his
colleagues, withdrew from the Ministry. The cause of his secession
was said to be that Fox wished to grant independence to the American
colonies as a boon, and Lord Shelburne would regard it only as a
bargain; but the underlying reasons were Fox’s hatred of the man and
jealousy aroused by the exclusion from office of the Duke of Portland.
It was to Lord Shelburne, who was most unpopular and suspected of
insincerity, that Goldsmith made his singularly _mal à propos_ remark:
“Do you know, I could never conceive the reason why they call you
Malagrida, for Malagrida was a very good sort of man!”
Fox allied himself with Lord North, and as they had a large majority
in the House of Commons, Lord Shelburne resigned in February 1784. The
King was furious, but being powerless, was compelled to appoint as
First Minister of the Crown the Duke of Portland, under whom Pitt and
Lord North held office as Secretaries of State.
In the previous year the Prince of Wales had come of age, and had at
once attached himself to the Opposition, who naturally welcomed so
powerful an ally.
“The Prince of Wales has thrown himself into the arms of Charles, and
this in the most indecent and undisguised manner” (Walpole wrote to
Sir Horace Mann). “Fox lodged in St James’s Street, and as soon as
he rose, which was very late, held a _levée_ of his followers, and
of the members of the Gambling Club at Brooks’s, all his disciples.
His bristly, black person, and shagged breast quite open, and rarely
purified by any ablutions, was wrapped in a foul linen night-gown, and
his bushy hair dishevelled. In these cynic weeds, and with epicurean
good humour, did he dictate his politics, and in this school did the
heir to the Crown attend his lessons and imbibe them.”
Fox told his new adherent that a Prince of Wales should have no party,
but, his advice being disregarded, when the opinion was expressed that
the Prince should not attend the debates in the House of Commons, he
intervened in defence of his friend.
“Is the mind, which may at any hour, by the common changes of
mortality, be summoned to the highest duties allotted to man, to be
left to learn them by accident?” (he asked). “For my part I rejoice to
see this distinguished person disdaining to use the privileges of his
rank and keep aloof from the debates of this House. I rejoice to see
him manfully coming among us, to imbibe a knowledge of the Constitution
within the walls of the Commons of England. I, for my part, see
nothing in the circumstance which has called down so much voluntary
eloquence.”
There were many, however, who disapproved of this alliance, and many
attacks were made upon Fox, who was the subject of many lampoons.
“Though matters at present go cross in the realm,
You will one day be K----g, Sir, and I at the helm;
So let us be jovial, drink, gamble and sing,
Nor regard it a straw, tho’ we’re not yet the thing.
Tol de rol, tol, tol, tol de rol.”
The principal act of the Administration was the introduction of Fox’s
India Bill, by which powers were sought to take away the control of the
great dominion that Warren Hastings had built up from the Honourable
East India Company and transfer it to a board of seven Commissioners,
who should hold office for five years and be removable only on an
Address to the Crown from either House of Parliament. This was bitterly
opposed by the merchant class, who saw in it a precedent for the
revocation of other charters; but the clause that aroused the greatest
bitterness was that in which it was laid down that the appointment of
the first seven Commissioners should be vested in Parliament, and
afterwards in the Crown. This was, of course, equivalent to vesting
the appointments and the enormous patronage attaching thereto in the
Ministry, and “it was an attempt,” said Lord Thurlow, “to take the
diadem from the King’s head and to put it on that of Mr Fox.” The
Bill was fought with every weapon, but it passed the Commons, only,
however, to be defeated by the Lords, upon whom the King had brought
his personal influence to bear. Thereupon, in December 1783, the King
contemptuously dismissed the Ministry.
In the following May there was a General Election, the chief interest
of which centred round the City of Westminster, for which Fox and Sir
Cecil Wray had sat in the dissolved Parliament. The King, who had
plotted the downfall of the Ministry, had determined to do his utmost
to prevent Fox from sitting in the new Parliament, but the latter, who
had, however, already been elected for Kirkwall, audaciously carried
the war into the enemy’s camp by having himself nominated for his old
constituency.
“It may fairly be questioned” (Mr Sidney said) “whether any of
the electoral contests of the eighteenth century equalled that
of Westminster in point of the prevalence of corrupt practices,
drunkenness, tumult and disorder. The polling lasted forty days, and,
during the long period over which it extended, the entire western
quarter of the Metropolis and Covent Garden, the immediate vicinity
of the hustings, presented a scene of uproar and disorder which it
is difficult to describe. The latter locality might have been styled
‘Bear Garden’ for the time being, so flagrant were the outrages against
decency, and so riotous was the violence of which it was the scene.”
At first the two Ministerial candidates, Admiral Hood and Sir Cecil
Wray, forged ahead, and left Fox so far behind that the prospect of his
return appeared hopeless. Then the influence of the many ladies of rank
and fashion who canvassed for the latter made itself felt. The Duchess
of Portland, Countess Carlisle, Countess of Derby, Lady Beauchamp, and
Lady Duncannon were among Fox’s assistants, but the greatest service
was rendered by the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, whose charms have
been chronicled by every contemporary memorist.
“Array’d in matchless beauty, Devon’s fair
In Fox’s favour takes a zealous part;
But oh! where’er the pilferer comes, beware:
She supplicates a vote, and steals a heart!”
A reaction in favour of Fox set in, and when, at three o’clock on 17th
May, the poll closed, the High Bailiff of Westminster declared the
results:
“Lord Hood 6694
Hon. C. J. Fox 6234
Sir Cecil Wray 5998
----
Majority for Fox 236”
Great were the rejoicings when it became known that “the man of the
people” had snatched the victory from the Court candidate. The Prince
of Wales, who had thrown his influence into the scale, went the same
evening to a supper-party given by Mrs Crewe, where all present were
arrayed in buff and blue, the victor’s colours. The Prince proposed
the health of the hostess with felicitous brevity, “True Blue and Mrs
Crewe,” to which the lady wittily replied, “True Blue, and all of you”;
and the hero of the hour returned thanks to all and sundry.
It was to Mr Fox and Mrs Armitstead (with whom Fox was then living and
whom he married in 1795), at the latter’s house at St Anne’s, Chertsey,
that the Prince repaired to pour out his woes when, to evade his
compromising attentions, Mrs Fitzherbert went abroad.
“Mrs Armitstead has repeatedly assured me” (Lord Holland relates in his
“Memoirs of the Whig Party”) “that he came thither more than once to
converse with her and Mr Fox on the subject, that he cried by the hour,
that he testified to the sincerity and violence of his passion and his
despair by the most extravagant expressions and actions, rolling on the
floor, striking his forehead, tearing his hair, falling into hysterics,
and swearing he would abandon the country, forego the Crown, sell his
jewels and plate, and scrape together a competence to fly with the
object of his affections to America.”