Charles Roden Buxton was born on 27 Nov 1875 in London, England, and was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1897, he went to South Australia to act briefly as Private Secretary to his father, who was the Governor. He then visited India, Malaya (Malaysia), Japan, and China, and travelled to Texas, where he spent six months on a cattle ranch, before returning to London. In 1904, he married Dorothy Frances Jebb; they had two children, Eglantyne and David.

In 1901, Buxton began delivering lectures in English Literature at Morley College; he was Principal of the College from 1902 to 1910. He also began reading for the Bar, to which he was called in 1902, but felt increasingly drawn towards politics as the medium for promoting his social ideals. In 1906, he contested East Hertfordshire as a Liberal, but it was not until 1910 that he entered Parliament as Liberal Member for the Mid or Ashburton Division of Devon. In 1912, David Lloyd George invited him to become Honorary Secretary to the Land Enquiry Committee.

In 1917, Buxton joined the Independent Labour Party and became a Member for Accrington (1922-1923) and for Elland Division of the West Riding (1929-1931). In 1926, he was appointed Parliamentary Adviser to the Labour Party, a post he resigned in Oct 1939.

At the beginning of World War I, Buxton went on an unofficial mission to the Balkans with his brother Edward Noel Buxton, MP (Lord Noel-Buxton), with the object of securing the neutrality of Bulgaria and thus checking the spread of the war. In Nov 1914, with Ramsay MacDonald, Charles Trevelyan, and E.D. Morel, he founded the Union of Democratic Control to promote peace through negotiation on the basis of a settlement that was just to all those involved. From then until his death in 1942, he worked unremittingly for peace and the equitable distribution of the world's land and resources.