been asserted that the interest on the balances which were outstanding when he left the office brought him no less than a quarter of a million pounds. He tried several times to obtain an earldom, but isolated from all parties in the state, and out of favour at court, he asked for it in vain. Disappointed in ambition and broken down in health, he divided most of his time in travelling on the continent, and in constructing at Kingsgate, near the North Foreland, a fantastic habitation purporting ‘to represent Tully's Formian Villa.’ He died at Holland House, near Kensington, on 1 July 1774, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, and was buried at Farley in Wiltshire. During Fox's last illness George Selwyn called at Holland House and left his card. Glancing at it, and remembering his old friend's peculiar taste, Fox humorously said: ‘If Mr. Selwyn calls again show him up: if I am alive I shall be delighted to see him; and if I am dead he would like to see me.’ Fox married, on 2 May 1744, Lady Georgiana Caroline Lennox, eldest daughter of Charles, second duke of Richmond. The marriage was secretly solemnised at the house of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, the lady's parents having refused their consent. The stir which this wedding made in the town is amusingly recorded in ‘Walpole's Letters’ (i. 303), and it was not until after some years that the duke and duchess became reconciled to their daughter. The match was a peculiarly happy one, and the correspondence between Fox and his wife is a remarkable record of conjugal felicity. Lady Caroline was created Baroness Holland of Holland, Lincolnshire, in the peerage of Great Britain, on 6 May 1762. She survived her husband only a few weeks, and died on 24 July 1774. They had four sons, viz. Stephen, Henry, Charles James [q. v.], and Henry Edward [q. v.] Stephen succeeded to the two baronies of Holland, and died 26 Nov. 1774. Henry died an infant. The last Lady Holland was the widow of Henry Fox's great grandson, Henry Edward, fourth baron Holland, upon whose death in 1859 the titles became extinct. Fox was a man of many talents, of indomitable courage and extraordinary activity. Gifted with great sagacity and shrewdness, he was confident in manner and decisive in action. Though not a great orator, he was a formidable debater. ‘His best speeches,’ says Lord Waldegrave, ‘are neither long nor premeditated, quick and concise replication is his peculiar excellence’ (Memoirs, p. 25). Devoid of principle, and regardless of the good opinion of his fellow-men, he cared more for money than for power. Chesterfield declares that ‘he had not the least notion of, or regard for, the public good or the constitution, but despised those cares as the objects of narrow minds, or the pretences of interested ones’ (Letters, ii. 467). Though at one time the rival of Pitt, Fox never rose above the rank of a political adventurer. His jovial manners and many social qualities gave him much influence in society, but his unscrupulous conduct during the five months which he spent in Bute's cabinet made him the best hated minister in the country. Churchill in his ‘Epistle to William Hogarth,’ Gray in his ‘Stanzas suggested by a View of the Seat and Ruins at Kingsgate in Kent, 1766,’ Mason in his ‘Heroic Epistle,’ as well as the political writers of the day, all bear witness to his great unpopularity. In appearance he was unprepossessing, his figure was heavy, and his countenance dark and lowering. Portraits of him by Hogarth and Reynolds are preserved at Holland House, where there are also several portraits of his wife, and a small collection of his poems. The authorship of a short-lived periodical entitled ‘The Spendthrift,’ which commenced on 29 March 1766, and lasted through twenty weekly numbers, has been attributed to him. On the first page of the copy of ‘The Spendthrift’ in the British Museum is the following manuscript note: ‘These papers are supposed to have been written by Lord Holland. Mr. Nichols, who printed them, informs me that the copy always came from that nobleman's house.—Ic. Reed.’ Holland House was bought by Fox in 1767, having previously rented it since 1749.
[Coxe's Memoirs of Horatio, Lord Walpole (1802); Coxe's Memoirs of the Pelham Administration (1829); The Grenville Papers (1852); Diary of the late George Bubb Dodington (1784); Chatham's Correspondence (1838–40); Correspondence of John, fourth Duke of Bedford (1842–6); Memoirs from 1754 to 1758, by James, Earl Waldegrave (1821); Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George II (1847); Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George III (1845); Walpole's Letters (ed. Cunningham); Fitzmaurice's Life of the Earl of Shelburne (1875), vol. i.; Lecky's Hist. of England, vols. i. ii. iii.; Lord Mahon's Hist. of England (1858), vols. iii. iv. v.; Trevelyan's Early Life of Charles James Fox (1881); Macaulay's Essays (1885), pp. 301–6, 309, 762–4, 767; Jesse's George Selwyn and his Contemporaries (1844); Sir Edward Creasy's Memoirs of Eminent Etonians (1876), 308–11; The Fox Unkennelled, or the Paymaster's Accounts Laid Open (1769); Princess Mary Liechtenstein's Holland House (1874); Chester's Westminster Abbey Registers (1876), pp. 262, 473; Collins's Peerage (1812), iv. 538, vii. 308–10; Foster's Peerage (1883), p.
