As a constructive statesman, Charles James Fox had but little opportunity to shine.
“Charles is unquestionably a man of first rate talents, but so deficient in judgment as never to have succeeded in any object during his whole life” (said his “candid friend,” Boothby). “He loved only three things, women, play, and politics. Yet at no period did he ever form a creditable connection with a woman. He lost his whole fortune at the gaming table; and, with the exception of about eleven months of his life, he has remained always in opposition.”
This is a severe pronouncement upon a great man, who was a great orator and a splendid debater.
“Fox delivered his speeches without previous preparation, and their power lay not in rhetorical adornments, but in the vigour of the speaker’s thoughts, the extent of his knowledge, the quickness with which he grasped the significance of each point in debate, the clearness of his conceptions, and the remarkable plainness with which he laid them before his audience” (says Professor Harrison). “Even in the longest speeches he never strayed from the matter in hand; he never rose above the level of his hearers’ understanding, was never obscure, and never bored the House. Every position that he took up he defended by a large number of shrewd arguments, plainly stated and well ordered.”
His voice was poor, his actions ungainly, and he did not become fluent until he warmed with his subject; but in attack generally, and especially in connection with the American War, Grattan thought him the best speaker he had ever heard. Burke said he was “the most brilliant and accomplished debater that the world ever saw”; Rogers declared he “never heard anything equal to Fox’s speeches in reply”; while, when someone abused one of Fox’s speeches to Pitt, the latter remarked, “Don’t disparage it; nobody could have made it but himself.”
Fox, however, did not lay undue stress on eloquence, and in a well-known speech declared that one sometimes paid too dearly for oratory.
“I remember” (he said) “a time when the whole of the Privy Council came away, throwing up their caps, and exulting in an extraordinary manner at a speech made by the present Lord Rosslyn (Alexander Wedderburn), and an examination of Dr Franklin (before the Privy Council on the letters of Hutchinson and Oliver, the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts), in which that respectable man was most uncommonly badgered. But we paid very dear for that splendid specimen of eloquence, and all its attendant tropes, figures, metaphors, and hyperbole; for then came the Bill, and in the end we lost all our American colonies, a hundred millions of money, and a hundred thousand of our brave fellow subjects.”
Fox made mistakes occasionally, as when he asserted the right of the Prince of Wales to the Regency; but he was distinguished in the House of Commons for his “hopeful sympathy with all good and great causes.” In a day when politicians were not especially enlightened, he was a supporter of Parliamentary reform, a champion of Catholic Emancipation, and an opponent of the slave trade; and, indeed, it was by his advocacy of these measures that he earned the enmity of the King, and thus was prevented from carrying out these beneficial schemes.
It has already been admitted that he was a spendthrift, and had a passion for gaming which, when taxed with it by Lord Hillsborough in the House of Commons, he designated as “a vice countenanced by the fashion of the times, a vice to which some of the greatest characters had given way in the early part of their lives, and a vice which carried with it its own punishment.” His weaknesses, however, were more than balanced by his many splendid qualities. He was a noble antagonist, and when Pitt made his first speech, and someone remarked he would be one of the first in Parliament, “He is so already,” said Fox. Which recalls the story of the Prince of Wales’ remark, on hearing of the death of the Duchess of Devonshire: “Then we have lost the best-bred woman in England.” “Then,” said the more generous Fox, “we have lost the kindest heart in England.”
Fox was a great-hearted man, with a beautiful disposition, high spirits, unbounded good-humour, delightful conversation, a great affection for his friends, an undeniable loyalty to those who trusted him; and these qualities, combined with his great natural abilities and an indisputable charm, made him a great, commanding and fascinating figure. Gibbon, a political opponent, said he possessed “the powers of a superior man, as they are blended in his attractive character, with the softness and simplicity of a child,” adding that “perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity or falsehood”; but the greatest tribute came from Burke, who described him simply and, perhaps, sufficiently as “a man made to be loved.”