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Saturday, 12 July 2008
Charles James Fox

image

This is the statue of Charles James Fox in Chertsey, Surrey.  He lived from 1749 to 1806 and his wikipedia entry describes him as being a Whig politically.

He came from a family with radical and revolutionary tendencies and his first cousin and friend Lord Edward Fitzgerald was a prominent member of the Society of United Irishmen who was arrested just prior to the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and died of wounds received as he was arrested.

Fox became a prominent and staunch opponent of George III, whom he regarded as an aspiring tyrant, and a supporter of the revolutionaries across the Atlantic, taking up the habit of dressing in the colours of George Washington’s army. Fox served briefly as Britain’s first Foreign Secretary in the ministry of the Marquess of Rockingham in 1782, and returned to the post in a coalition government with his old enemy Lord North in 1783. However, the King forced Fox and North out of government before the end of the year, replacing them with the twenty-four-year-old Pitt the Younger, and Fox spent the following twenty-two years facing Pitt and the government benches from across the Commons.

Though Fox had little interest in the actual exercise of power and spent almost the entirety of his political career in opposition, he became noted as an anti-slavery campaigner, a supporter of the French Revolution, and a leading parliamentary advocate of religious tolerance and individual liberty.

I am guessing that the nearby Fox Lane in Chertsey is named after Charles James and not Martha Lane-Fox.

Posted by bigblue on 12/07/2008 at 07:38 AM
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