Elizabeth Armistead - Mistress and Wife of Charles Fox

Mistress and Wife of Charles Fox

It is not known what compelled Charles James Fox and Elizabeth Armistead to become lovers after nearly a decade of platonic friendship. Perhaps the newspaper gossip that he was involved with her rival courtesan, Mrs. Robinson, may have made her see her old friend in a different light. The relationship likely began with the expectation on both their parts that it would be temporary, but it soon became clear that Fox was smitten with his new mistress. When her exclusive attachment to him put her into debt, she tried to break it off but Fox refused to hear of it. “You shall not go without me, wherever you go,” he wrote. “I have examined myself and know that I can better abandon friends, country, everything than live without Liz.”

They retired to St. Ann’s Hill where they lived quietly and simply. She sold her annuities and her houses in London to help pay down his debts. In 1785, she purchased the house and land from the Duke of Marlborough, who granted them a mortgage of £100 a year. Fox and Mrs. Armistead had no children together but often had his nephew, Lord Holland, or his illegitimate children Harry Fox and Harriet Willoughby to stay at St. Ann’s Hill. They also appear to have practically adopted young Robert St. John, the grandson of Mrs. Armistead’s first keeper, Lord Bolingbroke. In 1795, after they had been together for more than ten years, Fox wrote to his nephew, “I think my affection for her increases every day. She is a comfort to me in every misfortune and makes me enjoy doubly every pleasant circumstance of life. There is to me a charm and delight in her society which time does not in the least wear off, and for real goodness of heart if she ever had an equal she certainly never had a superior.”

Not long after Fox wrote so glowingly of his unsanctified union with Elizabeth Armistead, their relationship was threatened when she learned that banker Thomas Coutts hoped Fox would marry his favourite daughter, Frances. Not wanting to stand in the way of such an advantageous match for him, Mrs. Armistead offered to step aside but Fox would not hear of it. “I cannot figure to myself any possible idea of happiness without you,” he wrote, “and being sure of this is it possible that I can think of any trifling advantage of fortune or connection as weighing a feather in the scale against the whole comfort and happiness of my life?”

To prevent her worrying that he might wed someone else, and to secure her future should any harm befall him, Fox resolved to marry his mistress. Mrs. Armistead understood what a scandal it would cause and insisted the marriage be kept secret. On 28 September 1795, the two were wed in the parish of Wyton by Rev. John Pery with her maid Mary Dassonville and the parson’s clerk Jeremiah Bradshaw as witnesses. For the next seven years they continued to live happily, to all appearances as mistress and keeper.

In 1802, when they were about to embark on a trip to France were he would be honoured by Napoleon, Fox insisted on making the marriage public. The announcement caused some gossip and social awkwardness but Mrs. Fox was generally accepted. When Fox returned to office as Foreign Secretary in the Ministry of All the Talents, his wife managed the expected social obligations with aplomb that may have confounded her critics. “Mrs. Fox is happy,” wrote Lady Elizabeth Foster, “but has the most perfect good sense as well as good nature in her new situation.”

Elizabeth and her husband had little time to enjoy her social triumph. In the summer of 1806, he grew very ill with dropsy, a symptom of his fatal liver disease, and died at Chiswick on 13 September 1806. The last word he spoke was her name. “If we had not known it before,” wrote his nephew Lord Holland, “his last hours would have convinced us that the ruling passion of his heart was affection and tenderness for her.”