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".
[3] 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.
[7] The royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus quickly sought to capitalise on Fox's background: one Fox, a tinker of Walsall, in Staffordshire, having got a horse and his hammer for a poleaxe, invited to his society 16 men of his brethren … marched seven miles to Birmingham in Warwickshire near which Towne they fortified a house called Edgebaston House … In this house they have nestled so long that their 16 are swollen up to 200, which rob and pillage very sufficiently.Fox's garrison was highly active: his men probably took part in the attack on Aston Hall on 28 December 1643, removing the main royalist base in the Birmingham area,[8] and Fox's troops would regularly patrol local roads to intercept merchants heading towards royalist areas[9] On 22 March 1644, his brother led a raid in which they captured Stourton Castle.
[10] Undaunted on 3 May 1644 — in an escapade that in the opinion of historian J. W. Willis-Bund "reads far more like an incident out of 'The Three Musketeers', or some other of Dumas' novels than an actual event"[11] — sixty of Fox's troops raided the royalist garrison at Bewdley, taking forty prisoners including Sir Thomas Lyttelton, the royalist governor.
He was accused of having unruly soldiers and of embezzlement, but his lack of funding from the Warwick County Committee makes the behaviour hardly surprising.