Fox and North came to power in April
1783 despite the King's resistance; although the
Duke of Portland actually headed the government, the two men were both secretaries of state. The ambitions of both Fox and North were blunted by the active efforts of the King and they angered him further with their open support of the
Prince of Wales, future Prince Regent. They were both driven from office by the efforts of the King's supporters following the failure of Fox's
East India Bill in December. The
1784 general election was a sad defeat for the opposition. In his own constituency of Westminster the contest was fierce with Fox facing defeat and a massive campaign in his favour was run by
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. In the end Fox was re-elected by a very slender margin, but legal challenges prevented a final declaration of the result for over a year. In the meantime, Fox sat for the Scottish
pocket borough of
Tain or Northern Burghs, for which he was qualified by being made an unlikely burgess of
Kirkwall in
Orkney (which was one of the Burghs in the
district).
He was reputed to be the anonymous author of
An Essay Upon Wind; with Curious Anecdotes of Eminent Peteurs. Humbly Dedicated to the Lord Chancellor (1787).
He remained a force in the Whigs, and his support of the
French Revolution (
1789) led to a split in the Whigs between the supporters of the revolution and the others who joined
William Pitt the Younger, leaving the opposition as no more than sixty MPs. Fox had become convinced that the King and the establishment were more of a threat to the constitution than radical politics and protested against the curtailment of liberties associated with the war against France. In
1792 Fox saw through the only piece of substantial legislation in his career, the
Libel Act, which restored to juries the right to decide what was libel and whether a defendant was guilty. Fox married his mistress,
Elizabeth Armistead, in
1795 but did not make this fact public until
1802.
Fox and much of the opposition deliberately withdrew from Parliament from
1797. He returned following the
Treaty of Amiens of
1802 and having assisted in the replacement of
Henry Addington, when Pitt was succeeded by
Grenville he was made Foreign Secretary in the "
Ministry of all the Talents".
Fox died in
Chiswick, while still in office; though he wished to be laid to rest in
Chertsey where he had lived, the nation demanded that he be buried in
Westminster Abbey. He is remembered in Chertsey by a
bust on a high
plinth, erected in 2006 in a new development by the
railway station. Fox is also commemorated in a termly dinner held in his honour at his
alma mater Hertford College, Oxford by students of English, History and the Romance Languages.
