As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate disclosure.

Home / People / Charles James Fox

Historical person

Charles James Fox

1749–1806

Charles James Fox was a British Whig politician born in 1749 who entered the House of Commons in 1768 and became one of the great parliamentary speakers of his generation. Although his earliest politics were not consistently radical, opposition to Lord North’s conduct of the American War helped make him a leading critic of royal influence and government coercion. In 1782 he served briefly as foreign secretary, and the following year his controversial coalition with North brought him back into office before George III dismissed the ministry.

For much of the next two decades Fox was the principal parliamentary rival of William Pitt the Younger. He supported religious toleration, reform and the cause of the American colonists, welcomed the early French Revolution before breaking politically with Edmund Burke, and opposed Britain’s long war with revolutionary France. His private life of gambling and debt became part of his public image but should not obscure his constitutional politics. Returning as foreign secretary in 1806, he backed a parliamentary resolution against the slave trade shortly before his death that September.

Winston Graham’s Warleggan and The Angry Tide place Charles James Fox within the parliamentary and electoral world surrounding Ross Poldark’s political development. Fox’s Whig opposition and rivalry with Pitt help anchor the novels’ fictional Cornwall and Westminster scenes in the real politics of the 1790s. Graham’s use of a recognisable statesman supplies historical atmosphere, but particular conversations or encounters with fictional characters remain novelistic inventions.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Charles James Fox (1 series)

Poldark in Order

by Winston Graham 12 books 4.4(68,383)

The Poldark novels follow Ross, Demelza and their family in Cornwall from the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and into the Regency aftermath. The series combines mining, gentry politics, coastal smuggling, marriage, family conflict and the pressure of war on…

All books in this series