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.”