Family and Education

b. 27 Mar. 1627, 6th but 4th surv. s. of William Fox of Farley, Wilts. by Elizabeth, da. of Thomas Pavy of Plaitford, Hants.  educ. Salisbury Cathedral sch. 1633–40.  m. (1) 8 Dec. 1651, Elizabeth (d. 1696), da. of William Whittle of London, 7s. d.v.p. 3da. (2 d.v.p.); (2) 11 July 1703, Christian (d. 1718), da. of Francis Hopes, rector of Aswarby, Lincs. 1682–1705, 2s. 2da. (1 d.v.p.).  Kntd. 1 July 1665.1

Offices Held

Gent. of horse to Prince of Wales 1646; master of horse 1649–50; clerk of stables 1653–July 1654, kitchen July 1654–June 1660; clerk comptroller of Bd. of Green Cloth Aug. 1660–Jan. 1661, 2nd clerk Jan. 1661–71, 1st clerk 1671–8, 1679–89; paymaster of forces 1661–76, 1679–80; 1st commr. of stables 1679–82, Apr.–July 1702; ld. of Treasury 1679–85, 1687–9, 1690–1702; treasurer to Queen Catherine of Braganza 1697; commr. trade 1701; receiver of crown revenues, S. Wales 1701–d.2

Freeman, Salisbury 1661; recorder, Boston 1682–5.3

Commr. Chelsea Hosp. 1691–1703; dir. Greenwich Hosp. 1703–d.4

Biography

Fox’s transposition from the court of James II to that of William and Mary might have seemed merely the latest blessing of that ‘wonderful . . . providence’ to which he himself, in his moderately Calvinist piety, was wont to ascribe his phenomenal rise from an obscure upbringing in a Wiltshire ‘cottage’ to the distinction of being ‘the richest commoner in three kingdoms’. In reality he owed his continuing prosperity and influence after 1688 just as much to tact, and to the unrivalled expertise and experience in financial administration and in the management of public credit which made his presence at the Treasury indispensable in a period of continental war and fiscal emergency. Moreover, his private banking activities had won for him a number of valuable friends, not least the new King himself, to offset the enduring enmity of his old antagonist Lord Carmarthen (Sir Thomas Osborne†) and the ill-repute clinging to servants of the Jacobite regime. Although at several crises in the past he had courageously, or perhaps obstinately, voted in the Commons according to conscience and against the express desire of his royal master, discretion proved his better part in the circumstances of 1689, and by not seeking a seat in the Convention he escaped the necessity of committing himself publicly on any sensitive political issue. Indeed, even in private he recorded no opinion on the events of the Revolution, though he evidently found little difficulty in transferring his allegiance, a fact that Jacobite agents could put down only to malice, and which impressed King James so forcibly with the enormity of Fox’s ingratitude that Sir Stephen was among those excepted by name from the general indemnity promised in James’s declaration of 1692.5

All was not plain sailing, however. William wished to employ Fox, and did restore him as first clerk of the Board of Green Cloth in February 1689; but Fox wanted more than this. Specifically, he coveted the position of cofferer of the Household, which he regarded as his by dint of his long service and ‘by right’ of some previous arrangements made under Charles II, claiming in effect a reversionary interest in the office. The appointment of Lord Newport (Richard†) instead cut him to the quick, and set off one of those long-standing grudges to which his amour propre made him susceptible: two decades later he was still drafting memorials and petitions detailing this grievance. Apparently in consequence, he formed a resolution to retire from public business, ‘excusing himself’ on grounds of age from service not only in the Household but also in the Treasury, where his friend and former colleague Lord Godolphin (Sidney†) fretted for his assistance. Eventually he allowed himself to be won over by Godolphin’s entreaties. As he himself remembered it, ‘his lordship thought it necessary for him to be sometimes out of that commission whose absence could not be well dispensed with, as he told me, unless I would come in’. Thus ‘I did weakly alter my resolution of retirement’, at the price of a place on the Treasury board for himself and the potentially lucrative office of joint paymaster of the forces in Ireland for his son, Charles*. The effect of the return to the Treasury of the ‘grey fox’ (as one lampoonist dubbed him), a man renowned both for his wealth and his ‘regularity’, was soon apparent. Fox was himself willing to lend money to the crown, most notably in 1693 when an advance of £40,000 kept the Irish administration afloat, but his chief value was in the stability he brought to the government’s credit, inducing other City financiers to invest, although occasionally he and Godolphin had to resort to ‘underhand’ methods to secure loans, such as promising higher rates of interest than those stipulated officially. The two men worked closely together, and even if Godolphin seems to have made the running Fox was more than the mere hatchet-man for his younger colleagues, with whom on occasion he publicly disagreed. His role in administration seems to have been to provide prudent, and often severe, judgment rather than ingenuity, and while unfailing courtesy saved him from much of the personal unpopularity attendant upon harsh decisions, his slowness sometimes irritated the impatient.6

A return to the Commons was the almost inevitable corollary to Fox’s return to office, but it seems that when a suitable opportunity arose, at a by-election in 1691 for Westminster, a constituency in which there was a strong governmental and, more particularly, a Household interest, Fox required considerable persuasion to offer himself as a candidate. This could have been partly on account of the cost, his expenses in the end amounting to over £630; and partly because there were already several other candidates in the field, most of them Whigs, and Fox naturally shrank from factional conflict and too close an identification with a partisan cause. The fact that he had some interest of his own in the constituency, through possession of the Hungerford estate, may have helped him come to a decision. Pre-election manoeuvring had eventually resolved into a straight fight between Fox and the Dissenting lawyer Thomas Owen*, with Fox emerging victorious. Fox’s acceptance address was typically laconic:

I heartily thank you all for the honour you have done me; and if there be any occasions wherein I can serve you, either in relation to the community or a particular capacity, you shall always find me ready and willing to serve you faithfully.

Fox took his seat on 13 Nov. 1691 and his subsequent committee nominations and speeches in this Parliament reflected his position in the Treasury. On 3 Dec., in the debate arising from the report of the accounts commissioners, he began by speaking in his own justification, unnecessarily as it turned out, for neither the commissioners nor Country MPs generally made any complaint against him: ‘I only desire to appeal to the commissioners, whether I did not appear according to their summons.’ Then, as the attention of the House shifted, he intervened to defend the Treasury as a whole from criticism of its policy of issuing tallies on funds which had not yet come in. It was, he said, not only common practice but essential in this instance of ‘unavoidable’ necessity: ‘we had not done our duties to the nation if we had done otherwise’. On 12 Dec., on the motion that half the income of official salaries be paid towards the cost of the war, he urged the importance of a speedy provision of supply. In what was to become a standard refrain of his commentaries on subsidy debates, he pointed out that ‘the necessities of the government are so great, that they make the valiantest men tremble at the consequences of delay’. So often was this theme repeated that it was eventually picked up in popular satire, one ballad depicting Fox’s contributions to Treasury board meetings in the same terms:

          Sir Stephen next, in tears, laments our fate,
          And then declares the pinchgut kitchen’s state.

After one such speech on 15 Dec., in favour of agreeing with the estimates committee that the Dutch forces on the army establishment be paid at the same rate as the English, he spoke twice in the same committee on 2 Jan. 1692 to support his fellow Treasury lord Sir John Lowther, 2nd Bt. II*, in maintaining the number of regiments on station in Ireland, commenting on the second occasion, ‘I hope this House will not make this alteration at this time when the army there are so much in arrear, at least £400,000, that it is not safe to do’. Here and in subsequent debates he set himself to bring fiscal and budgetary reality home to the Members, often expressing himself in a tone of schoolmasterly resignation. On 6 Jan., for example, he spoke twice in ways and means to explain the Treasury’s calculation of land tax yields, and again in the same committee to expound another point of detail concerning the liability of the civil list. When the suggested levy on official salaries surfaced again, on 18 Jan., he opposed it, this time deploying the argument from urgency to make a case for doing nothing else that might hinder a prompt subsidy.

The revenue is already loaded sufficiently. You have now towards this year’s war charged it with £200,000. And the crown is also in arrears to the officers under it three quarters, so that if you trust to that nothing will be done and the King’s service will be totally disappointed. And I am afraid little of the arrears will be paid. And if the revenue were clear, I would not only give all my pension but a great part of my estate.

His last speech of the session occurred on 15 Feb., once more on the Court side, against the revival of the accounts commission, but his involvement in parliamentary business had not been entirely confined to the province of his office, for earlier in the session (on 17 Dec. 1691) he had presented a bill to divide the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and to ‘settle’ the various charities by ‘Dr Tennison’, presumably the future archbishop.7

Classed as a placeman in a list compiled between May and November 1692, Fox was a no less frequent speaker in the following parliamentary session. He made a characteristic contribution on 15 Nov. 1692, on a motion from the Country party leader Paul Foley I that the House postpone consideration of supply until grievances had been aired. ‘I observe it is the opinion of some gentlemen’, he replied,

that there is no present need of money and that things go on as well as if you gave money. I do assure you it is no such thing, for the Exchequer was never barer than now and we have nothing to live on but the clause of credit given by this House upon the Poll Act and the Act for the double excise, which now expires the 17th of this month. So that all things are at a stand till you set them going.

Ten days later he made the same plea almost verbatim for a speedy vote of supply – ‘some cheerful vote’, he called it – during a discussion of naval estimates, and on 2 Dec., in committee of supply, he pressed the matter of the army establishment in these familiar terms, that ‘money now falls short, and if you cannot pay them you must consider to disband them, else an unsatisfied army will be a dangerous thing’. He even managed to refer to the poverty of the Exchequer in a speech on 10 Jan. 1693 against an additional clause offered to the land tax bill for the suspension of payment of all pensions during the war unless allowed officially ‘upon good and valuable considerations’. Fox claimed that this amendment would wreck the bill, since ‘all the lords concerned’ would be heard by counsel.

Then upon these pensions there is very little paid, but just enough to keep body and soul together. And for many of them I know they are granted upon good considerations. So that upon the whole matter, if the bill be delayed . . . your service will be neglected and all things stand still. Your weekly payments to the army will cease, which amount to a great sum, and there is already hardly enough money in the Exchequer to carry on this service now.

Apart from an intervention on 22 Nov. 1692, against the opposition’s proposed address calling for a reconstruction of the Admiralty Board, all the other occasions on which Fox spoke in this session concerned fiscal issues: on 3 Dec., in a committee of supply, when he gave the Treasury’s computation of the likely shortfall in the yield of the poll tax; on 13 Feb. 1693, in ways and means, when he followed Sir John Lowther, 2nd Bt. II, in a motion to add two years to the term of the East Indian goods duties and to make them a collateral security for the continued impositions upon which a fund of £500,000 was being raised; and on 23 Feb., when he supported other Treasury lords in favour of going into committee the next day in order to extend the term of the customs duties beyond Christmas 1694.8

Fox was included as a placeman in three lists drawn up in 1693, and was also marked as a Court party man and an office-holder in Grascome’s list. In his capacity as a Treasury commissioner he was now attending some Cabinet meetings, but the gradually changing complexion of the ministry was beginning to create difficulties for him, an early indication of which may have been his colleagues’ refusal in 1693 to adjudicate between Fox and Lady Dorchester in a dispute over an annuity on the Irish civil list, to which both had a claim by purchase. Without reports of debates, we know little of Fox’s parliamentary activity in the sessions of 1693–4 and 1694–5, although he was listed in the latter session by Henry Guy* as one of his ‘friends’ in connexion with the Commons’ investigation of Guy for corruption. He continued to subscribe to government loans, largely to encourage other investors, and was a substantial buyer of stock in the newly established Bank of England, to the tune of between £4,000 and £10,000, but whether or not he played much part in the negotiations preceding the foundation of the Bank is unclear. This and other innovations in the field of public credit represented a striking departure from the traditional techniques employed in his own ‘undertaking’ of some 20 years before, and there is nothing in Fox’s parliamentary speeches or personal memoranda to indicate that he had thought much on the subject. What we know of his role in Exchequer business reflects his reputation as a ‘man of accounts’ rather than expedients. For example, his Household experience induced the board in May 1695 to require him to take responsibility for a retrenchment in expenditure on the royal gardens, and that same month he spoke strongly in the commission against a proposed grant of the lordship of Denbigh. His motives on this occasion were, however, almost certainly more than administrative, the intended recipient of the grant being the King’s Dutch favourite, Lord Portland. The strenuous opposition mounted by Fox, which Portland’s friends interpreted as wholly malicious, contrasting it with his own involvement in other such grants, succeeded in holding up the process long enough for Country party activists in Wales to mount a more public campaign. It says much for Fox’s force of character that he was prepared to press such a tender point, and much for his continued value to the King that William was prepared to overlook it.9

The 1695 general election saw Fox in a politically incongruous partnership with his Treasury colleague Charles Montagu* as Court candidates for Westminster. With strong official backing, the two placemen defeated the Tory oppositionist Sir Walter Clarges, 1st Bt.*, in a bitter contest. Tory electoral propaganda had coupled Fox with Montagu as ‘courtly upstarts’, but when the Parliament met, the refinements of Fox’s position became apparent. He was marked as ‘doubtful’ in the forecast for the divisions of 31 Jan. 1696 over the proposed council of trade, and in the event joined his son, a much more strongly partisan Tory, in opposing at least the imposition of an abjuration oath on the council’s members. He did, however, sign the Association promptly, and voted in March in favour of fixing the price of guineas at 22s., as befitted a Treasury lord and occasional Cabinet councillor. He also continued to give the government his personal financial support, acting as one of the securities for borrowing from the Dutch, and remained unwaveringly loyal to the King, as was demonstrated by his prompt attention to an information sent him of Jacobite intrigues.10

Godolphin’s snap resignation in November 1696, before the Parliament resumed, placed Fox in a difficult position. Portland’s anger at the frustration of the Denbigh grant threatened his own continuance in office, and without his closest ally on the Treasury commission he felt isolated and exposed. He began to be aware once more of his age and infirmity. His chaplain was reported to have announced at a dinner party that Fox was ‘unwilling to undergo the fatigue of that station, the whole trouble being like to fall upon him . . . He added, that it was high time for a man of his years to retire from business.’ As before, however, he relented; this time on being advanced to the position of acting first lord, where he brought his considerable authority to the task of presiding over the most desperate financial crisis faced by the English government since the Stop of the Exchequer in 1672. Not much is known of Fox’s individual contribution to the work of the Treasury in these months, other than that he attended board meetings more assiduously than any of his colleagues. He may well have had to speak more frequently in the House, on questions of supply at least, but no account of a speech survives. After his scruples over the attainder of Sir John Fenwick† had induced him to ‘go away’ from the House before the crucial vote on 25 Nov. 1696 (his son voting against the bill), he seems to have settled down again into his role as a stalwart of the Court interest. From being anxious to shrug off the burden of office he had become determined by the following spring to hold on to his newly won authority, and when after a struggle the King decided to give the post of first lord to Charles Montagu, Fox showed such pique that he first desired to resign and only permitted himself to be pacified by the promise (never actually fulfilled) of a seat on the Privy Council and a bizarre agreement by which Montagu’s promotion was not gazetted. Just as important to the mastering of his disgust, in all probability, was his unwillingness to sacrifice the influence a Treasury commissionership afforded him in matters of patronage, which he was far from shy of exploiting, and his concern too over Charles’s position as paymaster in Ireland now that Fox fils had openly defied administration in the Fenwick affair. As part of the settlement of May 1697 both father and son remained in office, and Sir Stephen sealed his renewed commitment to the ministry by subscribing £12,000 of his own money towards financing a further issue of Exchequer bills.11

For Fox the 1697–8 session was dominated by the Commons’ inquiry into the Exchequer bills scandal, in which his protégé John Knight was deeply involved, and in which he himself narrowly escaped being implicated. Knight had been a client of his for many years, and it was on Fox’s recommendation that Knight’s accomplice, Bartholomew Burton, had been brought into the business. When evidence of the scandal first came to the Treasury’s attention in the autumn of 1697, Fox offered himself as a security for Knight and, alone of the commissioners, defended Knight’s character at the board, while at the same time being obliged to admit that he himself and his son had given bills. Reginald Marriott’s testimony to the House in the following January reflected on him directly, with its claim, denied by Knight, that Fox’s name had been used by Knight as a guarantor of security, and in common with his Treasury colleagues Fox was forced to speak in his own vindication. But unlike them he went so far as to defend Knight, this time in public. Having survived this trial he almost perversely involved himself in another, and risked again the wrath of his ministerial colleagues in voting on 26 Feb. against passing the bill of pains and penalties against his old confederate Charles Duncombe*: an act of bravado perhaps, or a deliberate gesture from a man on the point of resignation.12

The evidence would seem to indicate that Fox had now made up his mind to leave the public stage. In June 1698 he declared that he would not seek re-election at Westminster, and put his interest there at the disposal of Secretary of State James Vernon I*. Nor at first did he think of standing elsewhere. He was named as a placeman in July, and in August his son’s dismissal as Irish paymaster, announced in William’s absence without prior warning, provoked him into offering his resignation from the Treasury. It had been a particularly bitter blow, but the King decided that Fox could not for the present be spared and so he returned from sulking in the country to resume his place at the board. Henceforth, however, his attendance became noticeably slacker. Listed as a Court placeman in about September 1698, he re-entered the Commons with ease in January 1699, taking the seat Charles had vacated at Cricklade when he had opted to sit for Salisbury, and without encountering any opposition in a borough his proprietorial interest had come to dominate. But in his obvious disgruntlement his parliamentary activity seems to have slowed almost to a standstill. At the end of the session there were rumours that he would be dismissed. Indeed it seems that Montagu was authorized by the King to canvass suitable replacements. In the absence of an alternative, Fox ‘stuck on’, and in the 1699–1700 session was roused to speak in the debate of 13 Feb. 1700 on the state of the nation. In reply to the attack launched by John Grobham Howe* upon the ‘exorbitant grants’ passed in favour of members of the current administration, he ‘spoke to Mr Howe’s grant, etc.’.13

The change of ministry, and the recall of Godolphin to high office, seems to have rekindled Fox’s zest for politics. He even contemplated a candidature at Westminster in the first general election of 1701, before backing off and settling for another return at Cricklade, though on this occasion at the unprecedentedly high cost of over £250. He was listed, predictably, with those Court supporters thought likely to agree with the committee of supply to continue the ‘Great Mortgage’. Meanwhile, he had endured a brief embarrassment on 14 Mar., during an inquiry into the electioneering activities of Samuel Shepheard I*. The Country Whig Sir Richard Cocks, 2nd Bt.*, had harked back to Fox’s evidence of secret service payments, given before the Commons in May 1679, in order to illustrate the long history of parliamentary corruption. Fortunately, sufficient Members came to Fox’s defence to preclude the necessity for him to respond directly. Chosen again for Cricklade in November 1701, he was classed with the Whigs in Robert Harley’s* list of the new House, presumably in reference to his lengthy association with the previous Whig administration, but from rumours of his impending removal from the Treasury in the following February we may infer that his credit with the temporarily resurgent Whig Junto was not especially high. His principal concern in this Parliament, however, seems to have been the successful passage of a private bill to allow him a longer time to enter his claim with the trustees for Irish forfeited estates for relief from the effects of the Resumption Act.14

With Godolphin’s appointment as lord treasurer after Queen Anne’s accession, Fox was at last able to leave the Treasury. Retirement, he wrote, ‘now happily came upon me’. This was an over-simplification. In fact, his reappointment as commissioner of the stables for the first few months of the new reign involved him in various ceremonial duties, some of them, at the coronation in particular, quite arduous for an elderly man. Moreover, he was asked to frame a new establishment for the royal household, with a view, as he thought, to some more permanent post there. But his uncompromising scheme for retrenchment antagonized vested interests. Not only was he disappointed in his renewed ambitions for the cofferership, but three of his dependants were dismissed from Household places and his own long-standing pension from the Board of Green Cloth (title to which he had recently purchased) was stopped. Although Charles Fox’s reinstatement as joint paymaster was some compensation, Sir Stephen took his own personal slight as badly as was customary with him. A series of querulous memorials denounced the ‘ill manners and . . . great injustice’ with which he had been treated, and as late as 1704 Godolphin was complaining that Fox continued to ‘persecute’ him over the cofferer’s place. Charles’s dismissal for voting for the Tack in 1704 added insult to injury and produced a further batch of complaints. It is noticeable, however, that Fox continued to exploit his ministerial contacts, especially with Godolphin and the Duke of Ormond (who owed the preservation of his estate to Fox’s financial help), to find patronage plums for his numerous relations and dependants. According to the anonymous biography that appeared shortly after his death, he now ‘set himself at work to wind up the bottom of his life with acts of piety and charity’, including the establishment of a hospital and charity school in his ancestral parish of Farley, other hospitals in Northamptonshire and Suffolk, and a school near his Somerset estate. He had severed one remaining official connexion with his resignation in 1703 from the commission for the Royal Hospital, in protest at having to serve under a younger chairman in an institution he had been principally responsible for inaugurating, but found himself nominated soon afterwards as a founding director of the naval hospital. His banking activities, both public and private, decreased perceptibly, though he remained, for instance, a substantial holder of Bank stock (with some £5,000 in about 1707–9), and he began to purchase real property once more, in order to consolidate the estate he would hand on to Charles. At the same time he proved he was far from his dotage by remarrying in 1703, at the age of 76, and producing four more children in old age, a demonstration of virility that led some envious observers to air doubts over his reputation for ‘gravity and wisdom’ and others to imply that he had received carnal assistance in the enterprise from his busy chaplain. That he had not forgotten his manifold grievances is clear from his resumed complaints of ill-treatment to Godolphin in the summer of 1710, as the lord treasurer’s administration tottered to its fall, and his attendance upon Queen Anne in 1712 in the fruitless pursuit of further petitions over the cofferer’s place and Chelsea Hospital, which he doubtless hoped would meet with a more sympathetic response under a Tory ministry.15

There was to be a brief coda to Fox’s parliamentary career. In 1714, following Charles Fox’s death, he allowed his name to be put forward for the vacancy at Salisbury, and, as the preacher at his own funeral remarked, it was a testimony to his reputation, and the local popularity he had for so long cultivated, that even at a crisis of party animosities he was returned unopposed and as ‘one with whom all were pleased’. While he is not known to have spoken in this session, ‘he was often seen to attend the House, as if not his life only, but his youth had been extended to that length’, being spoken of as ‘a prodigy for health and age’. He neither sought re-election in 1715, nor any personal advancement under the Hanoverians, but did continue his solicitations over minor matters of Treasury patronage.16

Fox died at Chiswick on 28 Oct. 1716 and was buried at Farley, leaving assets estimated by his modern biographer as having a capital value of over £174,000. These included property in five counties, besides his Whitehall apartments. According to a Grub Street panegyrist he

left behind him a character, by the means of which, the greatest favourite of his prince, the chiefest minister of state, and the wealthiest subject, may read and see with pleasure and advantage an example of the greatest modesty and condescension, the exactest justice, most consummate generosity, and the most extended humanity.

That this was a judgment with which most contemporaries would have concurred is a tribute to Fox’s genuine, if somewhat self-regarding, honesty in public affairs, and to the courtesy he invariably displayed towards friends and opponents alike. These qualities, together with a pride in efficient administration, made him an invaluable servant to successive monarchs, even in the Commons, where his contributions to debates on supply compensated in authority for what they lacked in élan. Though Fox’s greatest services had been performed in previous reigns, King William was fortunate that his continuing appetite for office surmounted for so long the handicap of age and the resentments the Whigs seemed at times to load upon him. Ambitious for influence rather than status, he had always refused a peerage himself. His two surviving sons, however, both obtained titles, the elder, Stephen†, becoming Earl of Ilchester, the younger, Henry†, whom Fox had wished to be ‘bred up for some honourable employment’, following him as Treasury lord and paymaster (though with a different approach to the ethics of public duty), and eventually being raised to the peerage as Baron Holland.17

Ref Volumes: 1690-1715

Author: D. W. Hayton

Notes

This article draws heavily on C. Clay, Public Finance and Private Wealth: The Career of Sir Stephen Fox, 1627-1716.

• 1. G. S. Fox-Strangways, Life of Henry Fox, 1st Lord Holland, i. 3–15.
• 2. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 191; v. 160, 192; Cal. Treas. Bks. xxviii. 29; CSP Dom. 1700–2, p. 475; 1703–4, p. 463.
• 3. Salisbury corp. recs. D35, f. 131; P. Thompson, Hist. Boston, 458.
• 4. C. G. T. Dean, R. Hosp. Chelsea, 125; Daily Courant, 8 Aug. 1704.
• 5. Westminster Diocesan Archs. Old Brotherhood mss iii/3/232, memo. by David Lloyd, 23 Mar. 1691; Clarke, Jas. II, ii. 485.
• 6. CSP Dom. 1689–90, pp. 5, 514; 1690–1, p. 242; Mems. of Sir Stephen Fox (1717), 86–87; Dorset RO, Fox-Strangways mss D124/238/25, petition from Fox, [?1704]; Add. 70314–15, Fox to Godolphin, 14 Aug. 1710; Luttrell, ii. 16, 22; DZA, Bonet despatch 18/28 Mar. 1690; Hamilton, Grammont Mems. ed. Scott, 209; Poems on Affairs of State ed. Cameron, v. 486; Dalrymple, Mems. iii(1), pp. 86, 252.
• 7. Bodl. Carte 79, f. 438; SRO, Breadalbane mss GD112/40/5/30, Countess of Caithness to Mrs Campbell, 10 Nov. 1691; Luttrell, ii. 304; Trinity, Dublin, Clarke mss 749/13/1329, Robert Yard* to George Clarke*, 12 Nov. 1691; Add. 51319, ff. 103–4; Luttrell Diary, 16, 77, 82, 105–6, 112–14, 137, 187; Grey, x. 195–6, 217; Poems on Affairs of State, v. 502; Mems. of . . . Fox, 87–88.
• 8. Luttrell Diary, 230, 248, 260, 283, 287, 360, 420, 445; Carte 130, f. 341; Grey, 281.
• 9. CSP Dom. 1693, p. 310; P. G. M. Dickson, Financial Revol. 258; Add. 17677 OO, f. 279; 42593, f. 40; Cal. Treas. Bks. x. 1370; Nottingham Univ. Lib. Portland (Bentinck) mss PwA 501, 507, 513, Guy to Portland, 17 May, 19 July, 20 Aug. 1695; Correspondentie ed. Japikse, ser. 1, ii. 58, 61–62.
• 10. Add. 51319, ff. 146–9; K. Feiling, Tory Party, 309; H. Horwitz, Parl. and Pol. Wm. III, 165; EHR, lxxviii. 108; Luttrell, iv. 92; Portledge Pprs. 236; HMC Downshire, i. 690.
• 11. Luttrell, iv. 134, 211; Add. 30000 C, f. 242; Bodl. Ballard 5, f. 101; Northants. RO, Montagu (Boughton) mss 46/27, Vernon to Shrewsbury, 26 Nov. 1696; Macaulay, Hist. Eng. vi. 2695–6; Shrewsbury Corresp. 476, 478, 480; J. P. Kenyon, Sunderland, 291; Vernon–Shrewsbury Letters, i. 227; HMC Downshire, i. 668.
• 12. HMC Finch, iii. 220; Cal. Treas. Bks. xiii. 16, 35–36; Add. 70018, f. 234; CJ, xii. 24, 27, 35–36; Montagu (Boughton) mss 46/175, Vernon to Shrewsbury, 4 Jan. 1697[–8]; Yale Univ. Beinecke Lib. Osborn coll. Manchester mss, Yard to Ld. Manchester, 22 Feb., 1 Mar. 1697[–8]; CSP Dom. 1698, p. 65; Horwitz, 235.
• 13. Montagu (Boughton) mss 47/49, Vernon to Shrewsbury, 25 June 1698; Add. 51324, ff. 57–59; CSP Dom. 1698, p. 331; Cal. Treas. Bks. xiv. 2, 109; Vernon–Shrewsbury Letters, ii. 143, 175, 293, 297; Luttrell, iv. 431; Horwitz, 258, 272; Som. RO, Sanford mss DD/SF4107(a), notes of debate, 13 Feb. 1699[–1700].
• 14. Carte 228, ff. 335, 341, 343; W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig, 60; Fox-Strangways mss, election expenses, Jan. 1701 (Horwitz trans.); Cocks Diary, 66; Luttrell, v. 140.
• 15. Fox-Strangways mss D124/237/17, memo. by Fox [c.1706]; Marlborough–Godolphin Corresp. 288; Mems. of . . . Fox, 90–91; Cal. Treas. Pprs. 1702–7, p. 53; Cal. Treas. Bks. xxvi. 310; HMC Ormonde, n.s. viii. 153; R. Eyre, Sermon Preached at the Funeral of Sir Stephen Fox (1716), 6, 12; Ballard 10, f. 118; Add. 70314–15, Fox to Godolphin, 14 Aug. 1710; Wentworth Pprs. 250; HMC Portland, x. 85.
• 16. Eyre, 10; Boyer, Pol. State, vii. 265; Ballard 31, f. 102; Cal. Treas. Pprs. 1714–19, p. 25.
• 17. Add. 51324, f. 25; Eyre, 11; Mems. of . . . Fox, 99; Fox-Strangways, Henry Fox, 23.