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 was eighteen. At that age he proceeded to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he developed, according to his own account, a pedantic veneration for the Latin classics, and was attracted by the mathematical lectures of the blind professor, Nicholas Saunderson [q. v.] In 1714 he left the university 'an absolute pedant' after a stay of little more than a year; but a tour in Flanders followed immediately, and transmuted him into a man of the world, whose interests were to outward appearances wholly divided between gallantry and gaming. But he found time for study, and developed an ambition to become an orator. His rank and connections secured for him a ready welcome in the best society at The Hague. At Antwerp he was the guest of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, and his ease of manner especially ingratiated him with the duchess. The death of Queen Anne brought his tour, which was planned to extend to Italy, to an abrupt conclusion. His kinsman, General James Stanhope, afterwards first earl Stanhope [q. v.], offered to introduce him to the new king, and a political career was thus opened to him under promising auspices.

In 1715 he was appointed gentleman of the bedchamber to the king's son, George, prince of Wales, and in the same year he entered the House of Commons as whig member for St. Germans, Cornwall. Some weeks were yet needed before he attained his legal majority. His political views embodied from the first much genuinely liberal sentiment, and he was never a staunch partisan. He supported, however, with exuberant energy the efforts of the whigs, who predominated in the new parliament, to push their advantage over their tory rivals. In his maiden speech, which he delivered on 5 Aug. in the debate on the articles of impeachment against the Duke of Ormonde, he denounced as traitors all the promoters of the peace of Utrecht. A member of the opposition privately warned him that if he voted in accordance with his speech the lawfulness of his election, owing to his being under age, would be called in question. Thereupon Stanhope discreetly retired to Paris. French manners and morals alike appealed to him and he proved an apt pupil in the school of the fashionable demi-monde of the French capital.

Settling within a year or two again in London, he found his chances of preferment hampered by the quarrel between the prince his master, and the king. With characteristic caution he took a middle course, and, while maintaining good relations with the prince avoided all show of hostility to the king. But it was obviously prudent for him to limit his political activity, and he spent his enforced leisure in the congenial society of men of letters or of fashion. With Pope he formed a close intimacy, and through Arbuthnot he came to know something of Swift. He cultivated, too, the acquaintance of Prince George's mistress, Henrietta Howard, afterwards countess of Suffolk, who was an accredited patroness of men of letters, and long maintained a lively correspondence with her. But her favour was a perilous possession. Although it helped Stanhope to maintain good relations with the court, it exposed him to the hostility of the Princess of Wales (afterwards Queen Caroline), who was an unrelenting foe. But Stanhope's tact stood him in good stead. He was elected for Lostwithiel in 1722, and in the king's interest supported a motion for augmenting the army by an addition of four thousand men. He was rewarded for his complaisance by his appointment on 26 May 1723 to the post of captain of the gentlemen-pensioners in succession to Lord Townshend. On presenting himself to his constituents for reelection he was defeated, and he did not sit in the House of Commons again. In the summer of 1725 his father's illness recalled him to the family seat of Bretby, where the rustic seclusion excited his spleen and whetted his appetite for active political work. The development of the political situation was not much to his taste. Sir Robert Walpole and Stanhope were constitutionally antipathetic, and the complete supremacy which Walpole maintained in parliament and the king's counsels from the date of his accession to power in 1721 roused Stanhope's ridicule and disgust. An open breach was not desired by Walpole. But when, in the spring of 1725, the minister offered Stanhope the ribbon of the newly revived order of the Bath, it was contemptuously rejected. Stanhope was displeased, too, with his brother William for accepting it; and in some satirical lines on the accidental loss of the badge by one of the new knights, Sir William Morgan of Tredegar, he laughed at the distinction as 'one of the toys Bob gave his boys.' Walpole resented the insult, and in May 1725 Stanhope ceased to be captain of the gentlemen-pensioners.

On 27 Jan. 1726 his father died, and he took his seat in the House of Lords. Although he cynically talked of the upper chamber as a hospital for incurables, he lost no time in manifesting a resolve to play on that platform an active part in the opposition to Walpole. His relations with the Prince of Wales, combined with his wit and