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as a connoisseur of human nature.
    There was another side to this intelligent, worried, poised and slightly pedantic young woman – an irresistible pull towards those things she professed to dislike: wit, recklessness, bustle and ambition. ‘I don’t think wit a necessary ingredient at all,’ she said severely. But wit fascinated her, and so did excess, that quality of her grandfather’s which her father had worked so hard to suppress in himself and his family. While she wrote peevishly, ‘I am apt to grudge people their victuals,’ she secretly found appetite – a hunger for women, for power, for food, for cards, for the latest extravagant fashions – overwhelmingly attractive.
    This horrified fascination for what she thought of as wickedness was encapsulated in Caroline’s attitude towards Voltaire. Voltaire had come into the acquaintance of her family circle during his exile in England between 1726 and 1729, when Caroline was a little girl. As a young woman she read his Lettres philosophiques , which appealed to her love ofaphorism and of explanations of the human condition. When Candide appeared, Caroline couldn’t put it down or stop thinking about it. The book was a satire on optimism, and as such in tune with Caroline’s own sense that life was fraught with dangers. She felt she shouldn’t like it but she did, and therein lay its peculiar fascination. ‘Candide is a wicked book to be sure, but infinitely clever in my opinion, and diverts me vastly.’ And again, see-sawing backwards and forwards between disgust and delight, ‘there is wit in it, but the plan of it is gloomy and wicked to a degree. I think there are some droll things in it; its mighty entertaining.’
    Round about 1742, when she was nineteen years old, reckoned a beauty and destined by her parents for a great match, Caroline met a Voltaire of her own, Henry Fox, and fell deeply and passionately in love with him. In 1742 Henry Fox was thirty-seven years old, an ambitious and able Member of Parliament, obsessed with politics and particularly with managing the tricky affairs of the House of Commons.
    The Duke and Duchess could not decide whether it was Fox’s antecedents or his behaviour that they disapproved of most. Fox’s father, Sir Stephen Fox, had been a Tory servant of the Crown who had made his name and fortune as Paymaster General of Charles II’s forces at the end of the previous century. At first Fox looked set to follow his father’s footsteps. After Eton and Oxford (where he astonished fellow students by reciting reams of Latin verse from memory) he travelled on the Continent. By the 1730s his sights were set on Parliament. But by then to be a Tory was to be condemned to the back benches. After the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, which was supported by a sprinkling of Tories, Toryism was tainted with treachery and disloyalty towards the Hanoverian dynasty; it offered no hope for an ambitious politician. Nothing daunted, Fox changed sides and put himself under the tutelage of the Duke of Richmond’s fellow courtier Lord Hervey (who shortly afterwards began a long affair withFox’s brother Stephen). In 1735 Fox was elected Whig MP for Hindon. He moved quickly up the Whig hierarchy, impressing everyone with his command of detail, ability to manage men and cynical approach to political problems. In 1743 Fox was given a position at the Treasury, the first rung on the ladder to power.
    Fox was not a handsome man. He was short, stout and pear shaped, weighing in at over twelve stone. His face was dominated by a double chin, a heavy black jaw and eyebrows that jumped out of his face like rippling caterpillars. But this ungainliness was offset by qualities that Caroline found very attractive. He read widely, wrote verses and had a talent for friendship and domesticity. Even his reputation for atheism, gambling and womanising (made flesh in an illegitimate child of a year and another not yet out of the womb, who was born in 1744) were