Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/176

 ness which formed part of his nature must frequently have been out of season. Yet his mind was of no ordinary calibre, and his moral courage was, like his intellectual capacity, fully worthy of Walpole's brother. In domestic politics he was consistent, save when under the pressure of exceptional considerations affecting his party and its chief. In foreign affairs, which were the main business of his life, he was alike far- and clear-sighted, and may without hesitation be held to have been one of the most experienced and sure-footed as well as sagacious diplomatists of his times, not a few of whom were trained under his eye. Moreover, both at Versailles and at The Hague he understood how to win complete confidence in the most important quarters. He seems to have been an effective but the reverse of a fastidious speaker in the House of Commons. His writings have the merit of unmistakable lucidity, and often of argumentative strength. In addition to the pamphlets by him already mentioned, two—on the question of war with Spain, and on the Spanish convention (1738)—evidently from his pen, were discovered at Wolterton by his biographer. He also printed in 1763 an ‘Answer to the Latter Part of Lord Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study of History.’ His ‘Apology,’ written towards the close of his life, and dealing with his transactions from 1715 to 1739, the ‘Rhapsody of Foreign Politics’ occasioned by the pacifications of 1748 and 1750, and two manuscripts on his favourite project of a good understanding with Prussia (1740), remained unpublished; but of the first named of these the greater part is reproduced by his biographer.

Horace Walpole the elder married, in 1720, Mary, daughter of Peter Lombard—the ‘Pug’ of Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams's elegant satire (, Works, ed. Horace Walpole, 1822, i. 48, and note). By her he had four sons and three daughters. The eldest son, Horatio (1723–1809), succeeded as second Baron Walpole of Wolterton, and was created Earl of Orford on 10 April 1806. His third son, George, is separately noticed.



WALPOLE, HORATIO or HORACE, fourth (1717–1797), author, wit, and letter-writer, was born in Arlington Street (No. 17) on 24 Sept. 1717 (O.S.), being the fourth son of Sir Robert Walpole, first earl of Orford [q. v.], by his first wife, Catherine Shorter, eldest daughter of John Shorter of Bybrook, near Ashford in Kent. He was eleven years younger than the rest of his father's children, a circumstance which, taken in connection with his dissimilarity, both personally and mentally, to the other members of the family, has been held to lend some countenance to the contemporary suggestion, first revived by Lady Louisa Stuart (Introduction to Lord Wharncliffe's edition of the Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), that he was the son, not of Sir Robert Walpole, but of Carr, lord Hervey, the elder brother of John, lord Hervey, the ‘Sporus’ of Pope. His attachment to his mother and his lifelong reverence for Sir Robert Walpole, of whom he was invariably the strenuous defender, added to the fact that there is nowhere the slightest hint in his writings of any suspicion on his own part as to his parentage, must be held to discredit this ancient scandal. His godmother, he tells us (Corresp. ed. Cunningham, 1857–9, vol. i. p. lxi), was his aunt, Dorothy Walpole, lady Townshend; his godfathers the Duke of Grafton and Sir Robert's younger brother, Horatio (afterwards Baron Walpole of Wolterton) [q. v.] It was probably in compliment to his uncle that he was christened Horatio; but, as he told Pinkerton (Walpoliana, i. 62), he disliked the name, and wrote himself ‘Horace’—‘an English name for an Englishman.’ He received the first elements of his education at Bexley in Kent, where he was placed under the charge of a son of Stephen Weston (1665–1742) [q. v.], bishop of Exeter. But he spent much of his boyhood in his father's house ‘next the college’ at Chelsea, a building now merged in the hospital. One of the salient events of his youthful days was his being taken, at his own request, to kiss the hand of George I, then (1 June 1727) preparing to set out on that last journey to Hanover on which he died. Of this Walpole gives an account in his ‘Reminiscences of the Courts of George I and George II’ (Corresp. vol. i. pp. xciii, xciv; see also Walpoliana, p. 25).

On 26 April 1727 he went to Eton, where his tutor was Henry Bland, the headmaster's