A hero of Southey’s in the 1790s as the great radical Whig leader and ‘Friend of the People’ who opposed the anti-reform policies of William Pitt’s (1759–1806; DNB) government. Fox was an admirer of pastoral poetry and for this reason Southey sent him a presentation copy of Madoc (Wordsworth had done likewise with Lyrical Ballads). In semi-retirement from politics from 1797–1806, Fox became Foreign Minister in the government headed by Wynn’s uncle, William Wyndham, Baron Grenville, in 1806, dying the same year having seen the bill for the abolition of the slave trade, for which he had long campaigned, pass parliament.