Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/211

 was granted on his retirement a pension of 4,000l. a year, but he did not apply for it until June 1744, compelled no doubt by his embarrassments (Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, 18 June 1744, Letters, i. 307). He died 40,000l. in debt (ib. viii. 423), and as late as 1778 his creditors still remained unpaid (ib. vii. 132). Whatever else they show, the facts at least clear his character from the suspicion of peculation. So little grasping was his disposition that he never received any presents of money from George II (ib. viii. 449), and in 1738 he refused the king's offer as a gift of the house afterwards occupied by him in Downing Street (, i. 759).

Walpole was, even Chesterfield admits, ‘good-natured, cheerful, social’ (Letters, iii. 1417). He was chairman of a small club of six members who met in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden (, London, ii. 208), and he also belonged to the Kit-Cat Club. Pope has left some fine lines testifying to the charm of his hospitality (Works, iii. 459). His friends loved him. He was coarse in his conversation, even for that age (, Letters, iii. 226). ‘His prevailing weakness was to be thought to have a polite and happy turn to gallantry’ (, Letters, i. 66), which made him, according to the same authority, ‘at once both a wagg and a boaster’ (, Memoirs, p. 246). This kind of conversation was to the taste of the queen, whence Swift satirised him as ‘a prater at court in the style of the stews’ (Suffolk Corr. ii. 32). He laughed loudly, ‘the heart's laugh,’ said his admirers (, Works, i. 206); ‘the horse-laugh,’ according to Pope (Works, iii. 460). He was ‘certainly a very ill-bred man,’ said the courtier, Lord Hervey (ii. 350; cf. Duchess of Marlborough's Corr. ii. 157), to whom ‘the queen once complained that he had tapped her on the shoulder in chapel’ (iii. 265). He was ridiculed by Gay as Bluff Bob in the ‘Beggar's Opera’ (, Pope, vii. 117). But this ‘hearty kind of frankness’ had its political value, for it ‘seemed to attest his sincerity’ (, Letters, iii. 1417). It is said by Coxe that ‘he never entirely lost the provincial accent’ (i. 749).

Walpole's first wife died at Chelsea on 20 Aug. 1737 (Gent. Mag. 1737, p. 514), and was buried in King Henry VII's chapel, Westminster. By her he had three sons and two daughters. The sons were Robert, who succeeded as second Earl of Orford, and died on 1 April 1751, leaving an only son, George, third earl, who died unmarried on 5 Dec. 1791; Sir Edward Walpole, K.B., who also died unmarried on 12 Jan. 1784, leaving, by Maria Clements, three illegitimate daughters, of whom the eldest, Laura, married Bishop Frederick Keppel [q. v.], and the second, Maria (d. 1807), married, firstly, James, second earl Waldegrave [q. v.], and secondly, William Henry, duke of Gloucester, while the youngest, Charlotte, was wife of Lionel Tollemache, fourth earl of Dysart; and Horatio or Horace Walpole [q. v.], who succeeded his nephew George as fourth Earl of Orford. Of the daughters, Mary married (14 Sept. 1723) George, third earl of Cholmondeley. She died at Aix in Provence in 1731, and was buried at Malpas (, Peerage, ed. Brydges, iv. 34). The other, Katherine, died young (Gent. Mag. 1745, p. 164).

During his first wife's lifetime Sir Robert maintained an irregular connection with a Miss Maria Skerrett or Skerritt. She was Irish by birth, the daughter of Thomas Skerrett, a merchant living in Dover Street (d. 1734; ib. 1734, p. 50;, Memoirs, i. 115; , Works, iii. 141 n. 1; Gent. Mag. 1738, p. 324). She was a woman of wit and beauty, with a fortune of 30,000l. (Bishop Hare to F. Naylor, 9 March 1738, Hare MSS. p. 238). She moved in fashionable society. Under the name of Phryne she was scandalously associated by Pope with Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu (Works, iii. 141), who writes of her as ‘dear Molly Skerritt’ (Letters, i. 480). Her connection with Walpole began some time before 1728 (, Memoirs, i. 115), and his suppression of ‘Polly’ is said to have been due to resentment at her identification by the public with Polly, the heroine of the ‘Beggar's Opera’ produced in that year [see ]. She lived at his house in Richmond Park, where he spent Saturdays and Sundays (ib. ii. 267), and occasionally at Houghton (ib. i. 339). As early as November 1737 there were rumours that he had married her (, Works, xix. 104; Carlisle MSS. p. 190). The marriage was privately celebrated by Walpole's confidential friend, the Rev. H. Etough, early in March 1738 (, Lit. Anecd. viii. 262; Sir T. Robinson to Lord Carlisle, 16 March 1738, Carlisle MSS. p. 194; Horatio Walpole to Robert Trevor, 18 March 1738, Buckinghamshire MSS. p. 13). She was at once welcomed by society (ib.), and was introduced at court (Hare MSS. p. 238). She died on the following 4 June of a miscarriage (Gent. Mag. 1738, p. 323). She was, Walpole had declared, ‘indispensable to his happiness’ (Life of Shelburne, i. 36), and her loss plunged him into a ‘