Tinker Fox

Colonel John "Tinker" Fox (1610–1650), confused by some sources with the MP Thomas Fox, was a parliamentarian soldier during the English Civil War. Commanding a garrison at Edgbaston House in Warwickshire – a location that guarded the main roads from strongly parliamentarian Birmingham to royalist Worcestershire – Fox operated largely independently of the parliamentarian hierarchy, all factions of which tended to view him with suspicion. Though lauded by the parliamentarian press for his "continual motion and action", to royalist propagandists Fox became an icon of dangerous and uncontrolled subversiveness, being decried as a "low-born tinker" whose troops "rob and pillage very sufficiently". By 1649 Fox's notoriety was such that he was widely, though wrongly, rumoured to be one of the executioners of Charles I.

Life and career

Fox was baptised in the parish church of Walsall, Staffordshire on 1 April 1610 and is recorded marrying in the same church 1634. He probably worked in the metal trades of nearby Birmingham – the origin of his caricature as a tinker – before serving as a captain in the Roundhead cavalry under Lord Brooke from February 1643.