The Fox–North coalition was a government in Great Britain that held office during 1783. As the name suggests, the ministry was a coalition of the groups supporting Charles James Fox and Lord North. The official head was William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland, who took office on 2 April 1783.
Fox (left) and North (right)
Image: Charles James Fox by Karl Anton Hickel (cropped)
In A Block for the Wigs (1783), James Gillray caricatured the Fox–North coalition. Fox is pictured right; followed by North; and then by Edmund Burke, with a skeleton leg. George III is the blockhead in the centre.
Charles James Fox, styled The Honourable from 1762, was a British Whig politician and statesman whose parliamentary career spanned 38 years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was the arch-rival of the Tory politician William Pitt the Younger; his father Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, a leading Whig of his day, had similarly been the great rival of Pitt's famous father, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham.
Portrait by Karl Anton Hickel, 1794
Charles James Fox (1782) by Joshua Reynolds
1792 Portrait of Pitt the Younger, attributed to Gainsborough Dupont
Pitt facing Fox in Anton Hickel's The House of Commons, 1793–94