Legacy of Charles James Fox

Fox had a genius for friendship, and the secret of his political influence was the uncalculating generosity of his mind. His charm could overcome the hostility of even the most inveterate of his foes. As a statesman he had great and manifest failings. He was often governed by prejudice, and he was not a profound political thinker. Above all, he hated anything that savoured of oppression, and his attitude on various colonial issues showed his passionate determination that the peoples of the empire were no longer to be exploited. His approval of the French Revolution shattered his friendship with the statesman and political writer Edmund Burke; although privately Fox showed himself far from insensible to the horrors perpetrated by the French Republicans, he gave these feelings no adequate public expression and opposed the war with republican France as a crusade against freedom in the interests of despotism. At home the excessive power of the crown was, in his view, the great source of all the country’s ills, and to the destruction of that overweening power he dedicated his life. He put forward the view, afterward accepted, that the crown must choose the prime minister from the party that commanded a majority in the House of Commons, irrespective of the sovereign’s personal inclinations. Yet he was no democrat, despising public opinion if he considered it prejudiced and intolerant. He would never have countenanced the notion that property, the security of which was one of the prime preoccupations of both Whig and Tory parties, would be safe in a democratic society in which the propertyless voters would obviously be in a majority. In his view property was the true foundation of aristocracy, and a country best prospered whose government was in such hands.

Fox had a strong European sense and a deep feeling for the responsibilities of his own country as a member of a greater society with mutual obligations. It was because he held these large and generous views that his influence endured, inspiring such measures as the Reform Act of 1832.