Charles James Fox Quotes
I cannot consent to the bloody consequence of so silly a contest about so silly an object, conducted in the silliest manner … from which we are likely to derive nothing but poverty, disgrace, defeat, and ruin.
There was a significant opposition in England who opposed the war against the rebellious colonies. Fox was one of the most outspoken who thought that England would not win.
Charles James Fox, 1749-1806, British Lord of the Treasury & Foreign Minister (Whig), Parliamentary Debate About the American Revolution, 1776
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Newport, Rhode Island, was a “hotbed” of patriots and was the 5th largest city in Colonial America. Wallace’s flag ship shelled military targets from the sea and threatened to bombard and destroy the town with naval gunfire. However, his superior, Admiral Graves, and he both thought that was too severe a step to take. So there was some restraint exercised by some British commanders in the American Revolution. The worst atrocities were in the South and committed by the British Army—the subject of the American motion picture, “The Patriot”.
Charles James Fox, styled The Honourable from 1762, was a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spanned 38 years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was the arch-rival of the Tory politician William Pitt the Younger; his father Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, a leading Whig of his day, had similarly been the great rival of Pitt's famous father, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham ("Pitt the Elder").
