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 in 1806–7, Hull in 1807–12, and Midhurst from 1812 till his succession to the peerage on 15 Dec. 1816. He was elected F.R.S. on 8 Jan. 1807, was a president of the Medico-Botanical Society, and a vice-president of the Society of Arts; he died on 2 March 1855 (cf. Notes and Queries, 5th ser. vi. 229, 279, 295, 417). He inherited his father's eccentricities, and his adoption of the mysterious 'wild boy' of Bavaria, Kaspar Hauser, in 1832 gave him great notoriety (cf., True Story of Kaspar Hauler, 1893). His daughter, Catherine Lucy Wilhelmina, duchess of Cleveland, is mother of the present Earl of Rosebery.

The son, who was styled Viscount Mahon from 1816 till his succession to the peerage, was educated privately and at Christ Church, Oxford, matriculating on 19 April 1823, and graduating B.A. in 1827. In the same year he was elected F.R.S. On 30 Aug. 1830 he was elected M.P. for Wootton Bassett in the conservative interest; he was re-elected on 30 April 1831, but by the Reform Act of 1832 that constituency was disfranchised, and on 12 Dec. of that year he was returned for Hertford. He was, however, unseated on petition, but was again successful on 7 Jan. 1835. He sat continuously for that borough until 1852, being re-elected in 1837, 1841, and 1847. On 22 March 1831 he was appointed deputy lieutenant of Kent. On the same day he delivered his maiden speech in parliament, complaining of the misrepresentation to which the opponents of the Reform Bill were subjected, and offering a strenuous opposition to the second reading of that measure (Hansard, 3rd ser. iii. 719-727). Mahon continued his opposition in the new parliament which met in June; on the 21st of that month he denounced ministers for appealing to the country, and on 1 July presented a petition of 770 resident bachelors and undergraduates at Oxford against the bill. On 11 June 1834 he was created D.C.L. by the university. During Peel's brief first administration—December 1834 to April 1835—Mahon was under-secretary for foreign affairs under the Duke of Wellington, and in this capacity he had to face the attacks of Palmerston in the House of Commons. The fall of the ministry in April left Mahon once more at liberty to pursue his literary and historical work. On 28 Jan. 1841 he was elected F.S.A., of which he served as president from 23 April 1846 until his death.

When Peel returned to office in 1841 Mahon was not included in the ministry, and he now took up with energy Serjeant Talfourd's scheme for amending the law of copyright [seeTalfourd, Thomas Noon (DNB00)]. The law then protected an author's work either during his lifetime or during a period of twenty-eight years. In 1841 Talfourd proposed to extend the period to sixty years, but Macaulay procured the rejection of this proposal by forty-five to thirty-eight votes. After Talfourd's death Mahon, on 6 April 1842, in a speech rich in literary illustration (Hansard, 3rd ser. lxi. 1348-63), introduced a bill extending the period to twenty-five years after the author's death. Macaulay, who followed him, proposed a period of forty- two years, or the time of the author's life, whichever should prove the longer. Eventually a compromise was arranged, by which protection was given either for forty-two years or for seven years after the author's death, whichever period might prove the longer. With this proviso the bill became law in the same session (5 & 6 Vict. ch. xlv.; see Annual Register, 1842, pp. 399-404).

On 4 May 1844 Mahon was appointed a commissioner for promoting the fine arts, and on 5 Aug. 1845 he became secretary to the board of control for India. He followed Peel, with whom he was on intimate terms privately, in his conversion to free-trade principles, voted for the repeal of the corn laws, and left office on Peel's overthrow in July 1846. Nevertheless he voted with the protectionists against the repeal of the navigation laws in June 1849, and was perhaps in consequence defeated when he sought re-election for Hertford in 1852.

From this time Mahon took little part in politics. On 23 April 1846 he had been appointed a trustee of the British Museum, and from July 1850 he was occupied with Cardwell in arranging the papers of Sir Robert Peel, who had made them his literary executors. On 2 March 1855 he succeeded his father as fifth Earl Stanhope; in the same year he became honorary antiquary of the Royal Academy of Arts, acted as examiner in the new school of jurisprudence and modern history at Oxford, and founded there the Stanhope prize for undergraduates who have not completed sixteen terms from matriculation. It is of the annual value of 20l., to be given in books for an essay on some point of modern history, English or foreign, within the period 1300-1815; in the award 'merit of style was to be considered, no less than the clearness of the reasoning and the accuracy of the facts' (Oxford Univ. Cal. 1896, p. 63).

A more important scheme occupied him during the following year. On 26 Feb. 1856 he gave notice of a motion in the House of Lords, inviting public attention to the importance of forming a British national 