Friends Until the End

A lively dual biography of the two great English orators of the eighteenth century, who cultivated a friendship across their political differences.

In eighteenth-century Britain, Edmund Burke and Charles Fox made common political cause for twenty-five years. They supported the rebellious American colonies, attacked the British slave trade, defended religious liberty, and attempted to shield Britain’s public credit from the crisis-prone East India Company. The two men did not share social position, a way of life, a political legacy, or even a generation—but improbably, they were friends. The hard-drinking, mistress-collecting Fox loved and admired Burke, feelings that the clean-living political philosopher and statesman warmly reciprocated.

Friends Until the End tells the story of two men who hailed from different worlds, yet thrived together in the London intellectual sphere. With wit and panache, James Grant traces their relationship through three great events: the American Revolution; the impeachment of the East India Company’s governor-general; and the French Revolution, which ended their political union and shattered their friendship. Fox, the cosseted heir of a rich English political family, sported George Washington’s colors in London during the American revolution, while Burke, the son of an Irish lawyer, opened Warren Hastings’s 1778 impeachment trial with remarks that lasted four days. Before their rupture, both men enthusiastically shared a love of language and literature, trading Latin tags and Shakespearean quotations between speeches in Parliament.

Today, Burke’s writing forms the intellectual core of modern conservativism, while Fox’s ideals and oratory inspired generations of nineteenth-century English Whigs and Liberals. As Grant shows, Fox and Burke were uniquely suited to their long, enduring careers marked by political opposition—they possessed the fluency, self-command, and principle that allowed them to resist, most often, what they regarded as an overreaching British crown. Along with the men’s two remarkable lives, Friends Until the End illuminates their era’s politics, economics, and lessons for our divided times.