Charles James Fox

Charles James Fox was the most magnetic orator of his age, a man who stood against the throne itself and refused to bend. This vivid Victorian biography captures a politician who championed the American colonists in their revolution, who fought decades for religious tolerance and the abolition of slavery, and who dared to oppose King George III when doing so meant political suicide. Offley Wakeman renders Fox not as a marble statue but as a living, contradictions and all: the notorious gambler and womanizer who nonetheless found enduring love with Elizabeth Armistead, the former mistress of the Prince of Wales, and discovered peace at their small estate of St. Anne's Hill. The book shines in its treatment of Fox's oratory, that legendary power to move audiences by sheer emotional honesty. 'In the whole range of Fox's speeches there is not to be found a mean thought or an affectation,' Wakeman writes. For readers drawn to theRomantic era, to political idealism tested against reality, or to the intimate lives of figures who shaped empire and parliament, this biography offers a window into a man who lost many battles but never his convictions.