He was taken out of school by his father in 1761 to attend the coronation of George III, who would later go on to become one of his most bitter enemies, and once more in 1763 to visit the Continent; to Paris and Spa. On this trip, Charles was given a substantial amount of money with which to learn to gamble by his father, who also arranged for him to lose his virginity, aged fourteen, to a Madame de Quallens. Fox returned to Eton later that year, “attired in red-heeled shoes and Paris cut-velvet, adorned with a pigeon-wing hair style tinted with blue powder, and a newly acquired French accent”, and was duly flogged by Dr. Barnard, the headmaster. These three pursuits – gambling, womanising and the love of things and fashions foreign – would become, once inculcated in his adolescence, notorious habits of Fox’s later life.
Fox entered Hertford College, Oxford in October 1764, although he would later leave without taking a degree, rather contemptuous of its “nonsenses”.
