nor to consent to the surrender of Sicily, which Napoleon insisted upon, unless full compensation could be obtained for King Ferdinand. The later stages of the negotiation were not directed by Fox, but by colleagues who took over his work at the foreign office when his health began to fail in the summer of 1806. He showed symptoms of dropsy, and operations only procured him temporary relief. After carrying his motion for the abolition of the slave trade on the 10th of June, he was forced to give up attendance in parliament, and he died in the house of the duke of Devonshire, at Chiswick, on the 13th of September 1806. His wife survived him till the 8th of July 1842. No children were born of the marriage. Fox is buried in Westminster Abbey by the side of Pitt.
The striking personal appearance of Fox has been rendered very familiar by portraits and by innumerable caricatures. The latter were no doubt deliberately exaggerated, and yet a comparison between the head of Fox in Sayer’s plate “Carlo Khan’s triumphal entry into Leadenhall,” and in Abbot’s portrait, shows that the caricaturist did not depart from the original. Fox was twice painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, once when young in a group with Lady Sarah Bunbury and Lady Susan Strangeways, and once at full length. A half-length portrait by the German painter, Karl Anton Hickel, is in the National Portrait Gallery, where there is also a terra-cotta bust by Nollekens.
Authorities.—The materials for a life of Fox were first collected by his nephew, Lord Holland, and were then revised and rearranged by Mr Allen and Lord John Russell. These materials appear as Memoirs and Correspondence of C. J. Fox (London, 1853–1857). On them Lord John Russell based his Life and Times of C. J. Fox (London, 1859–1866); Sir G. O. Trevelyan’s Early History of C. J. Fox (London. 1880) brings new evidence; Charles James Fox, a Political Study, by J. L. Le B. Hammond (London, 1903), is a series of studies written by an extreme admirer. His Speeches were collected and published in 1815. The newspaper articles (e.g. in The Times) published on the occasion of the centenary of his death contain interesting appreciations. See also Lloyd Sanders, The Holland House Circle (1908). (D. H.)
FOX, EDWARD (c. 1496–1538), bishop of Hereford, was born
about 1496 at Dursley in Gloucestershire; he is said on very
doubtful authority to have been related to Richard Fox (q.v.).
From Eton he proceeded to King’s College, Cambridge, and after
graduating was made secretary to Wolsey. In 1528 he was sent
with Gardiner to Rome to obtain from Clement VII. a decretal
commission for the trial and decision of the case between Henry
VIII. and Catherine of Aragon. On his return he was elected
provost of King’s College, and in August 1529 was the means of
conveying to the king Cranmer’s historic advice that he should
apply to the universities of Europe rather than to the pope. This
introduction led eventually to Cranmer’s promotion over Fox’s
head to the archbishopric of Canterbury. After a brief mission
to Paris in October 1529, Fox in January 1530 befriended
Latimer at Cambridge and took an active part in persuading that
university and Oxford to decide in the king’s favour. He was
sent to employ similar methods of persuasion at the French
universities in 1530–1531, and was also engaged in negotiating a
closer league between England and France. In April 1533 he
was prolocutor of convocation when it decided against the validity
of Henry’s marriage with Catherine, and in 1534 published his
treatise De vera differentia regiae potestatis et ecclesiae (second
ed. 1538, English transl. 1548). Various ecclesiastical preferments
were now granted him, including the archdeaconry of
Leicester (1531) and the bishopric of Hereford (1535). In 1535–1536
he was sent to Germany to discuss the basis of a political
and theological understanding with the Lutheran princes and
divines, and had several interviews with Luther, who could not
be persuaded of the justice of Henry VIII.’s divorce. The
principal result of the mission was the Wittenberg articles of
1536, which had no slight influence on the English Ten Articles
of the same year. Bucer dedicated to him in 1536 his Commentaries
on the Gospels, and Fox’s Protestantism was also
illustrated by his patronage of Alexander Aless, whom he defended
before Convocation. Fox is credited with the authorship of
several proverbial sayings, such as “the surest way to peace is a
constant preparedness for war” and “time and I will challenge
any two in the world.” The former at any rate is only a variation
of the Latin si vis pacem, para bellum, and probably the latter is
not more original in Fox than in Philip II., to whom it is usually
ascribed. Fox died on the 8th of May 1538 and was buried in the
church of St Mary Mounthaw, London. His chief distinction is
perhaps that he was the most Lutheran of Henry VIII.’s bishops,
and was largely responsible for the Ten Articles of 1536.
See Letters and Papers of Henry VIII., vols. iv.-xiv.; Cooper’s Athenae Cantabrigienses; Dict. Nat. Biogr.; R. W. Dixon’s Church History; G. Mentz, Die Wittenberger Artikel von 1536 (1905). (A. F. P.)
FOX, GEORGE (1624–1691), the founder of the “Society of
Friends” or “Quakers,” was born at Drayton, Leicestershire,
in July 1624. His father, Christopher Fox, called by the neighbours
“Righteous Christer,” was a weaver by occupation;
and his mother, Mary Lago, “an upright woman and accomplished
above most of her degree,” was “of the stock of the
martyrs.” George from his childhood “appeared of another
frame than the rest of his brethren, being more religious, inward,
still, solid and observing beyond his years”; and he himself
declares: “When I came to eleven years of age I knew pureness
and righteousness; for while a child I was taught how to walk
to be kept pure.” Some of his relations wished that he should
be educated for the ministry; but his father apprenticed him to
a shoemaker, who also dealt in wool and cattle. In this service
he remained till his nineteenth year. According to Penn, “he
took most delight in sheep,” but he himself simply says: “A
good deal went through my hands. . . . People had generally
a love to me for my innocency and honesty.” In 1643, being
upon business at a fair, and having accompanied some friends
to the village public-house, he was troubled by a proposal to
“drink healths,” and withdrew in grief of spirit. “When I
had done what business I had to do I returned home, but did
not go to bed that night, nor could I sleep, but sometimes
walked up and down, and sometimes prayed and cried to the
Lord, who said unto me, ‘Thou seest how young people go
together into vanity and old people into the earth; thou must
forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be a
stranger unto all.’ Then, at the command of God, on the ninth
day of the seventh month, 1643, I left my relations and broke
off all familiarity or fellowship with old or young.”
Thus briefly he describes what appears to have been the greatest moral crisis in his life. The four years which followed were a time of great perplexity and distress, though sometimes “I had intermissions, and was sometimes brought into such a heavenly joy that I thought I had been in Abraham’s bosom.” He would go from town to town, “travelling up and down as a stranger in the earth, which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber to myself in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes a month, more or less, in a place”; and the reason he gives for this migratory habit is that he was “afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young man, he should be hurt by conversing much with either.” The same fear often led him to shun all society for days at a time; but frequently he would apply to “professors” for spiritual direction and consolation. These applications, however, never proved successful; he invariably found that his advisers “possessed not what they professed.” Some recommended marriage, others enlistment as a soldier in the civil wars; one “ancient priest” bade him take tobacco and sing psalms; another of the same fraternity, “in high account,” advised physic and blood-letting.
About the beginning of 1646 his thoughts began to take more definite shape. One day, approaching Coventry, “the Lord opened to him” that none were true believers but such as were born of God and had passed from death unto life; and this was soon followed by other “openings” to the effect that “being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ,” and that “God who made the world did not dwell in temples made with hands.” He also experienced deeper manifestations of Christ within his own soul. “When I myself was in the deep, shut up under all [the burden of corruptions], I could not believe that I should ever
