Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/96

 vii. 511). This kind anticipation was not realised. In 1783 Wraxall obtained some credit for having despatched an extraordinary gazette to India containing the news of the peace of 1783, which reached Madras six weeks before the official intelligence. In the same year he ceased to be a follower of Lord North, and, when the division was taken on Fox's ‘India Bill,’ he joined the minority that followed Pitt. Re-elected for Ludgershall in the general election of 1784, he settled down in the new parliament into a pretty steady follower of Pitt. As such he came under the lash of one of the wittiest writers in the ‘Rolliad,’ his claims to encylopedism, inferred from his ‘Northern Tour’ (1775), and his fondness for interspersing his speeches with geographical information being satirised in the ninth of the ‘Probationary Odes for the Laureateship.’ Appended is a burlesque testimonial from Lord Monboddo, affirming his opinion that Wraxall is ‘the purest ourang-outang in Great Britain.’ In January 1787 Wraxall published anonymously a pamphlet entitled ‘A Short Review of the Political State of Great Britain,’ six editions of which, an estimated total of seventeen thousand copies, were rapidly circulated in England, while a French version (‘Coup d'œil sur l'état politique de la Grande-Bretagne’) appeared on 23 Feb. It is chiefly noteworthy for its frank delineation of the Prince of Wales, who is said to have menaced the publisher, Debrett, with a prosecution for libel, and as marking Wraxall's divergence from his leaders on the subject of the Warren Hastings trial; the authorship was actually ascribed to Hastings himself, and his agent, Major Scott [see, afterwards ], took the trouble to deny this presumption from his seat in the commons. Of the replies issued, one was attributed to Lord Erskine and another to Sir Philip Francis. The deduction one naturally draws from this success, even though it were anonymous, is that Wraxall's capacity and insight into politics were by no means so insignificant as his critics in the quarterlies subsequently assumed. He was re-elected for Wallingford in 1790, but he had to accede to the wishes of the proprietor of this borough (Sir Francis Sykes) by resigning his seat in 1794. He had lost valuable friends in Lords Nugent and Sackville, and being a novus homo, without sufficient influence either in the country or in the best clubs (at White's George Selwyn was wont to ask ‘Who is this Rascal?’), his parliamentary career was closed. For some years previous to his retirement from the House of Commons he acted as vakeel or agent for the nabob of Arcot, and was one of the small party of retired Indian officials known as the ‘Bengal squad.’ Upon leaving parliament and his house in Clarges Street, Wraxall seems to have devoted himself mainly to compiling his historical memoirs. The secret of his 1787 pamphlet must have been fairly well kept; for he managed to establish himself in favour at Carlton House, where in 1799 the regent ‘was pleased to designate him under official seal his future historiographer.’ His striking ‘Reminiscences’ of the regent, first published in 1884, form a curious commentary upon this announcement. At Whitehall on 25 Sept. 1813, upon the express nomination of the prince regent, Wraxall was created a baronet, as ‘of Wraxall, Somerset.’ Two years later were published his ‘Historical Memoirs,’ the first edition of which entertaining work was sold in the course of a month. Unfortunately for the author the sale was arrested by an action for libel, maintained in the court of king's bench before Lord Ellenborough by Count Woronzow, whom Wraxall had made responsible for the imputation that the Empress Catherine of Russia had caused the Princess of Würtemberg to be put to death. Wraxall was sentenced to pay a fine of 500l. and to go to the king's bench prison for six months—remitted to three by the regent at the instance of Woronzow himself (Morning Post, 2 Sept. 1816). In the meantime the ‘Memoirs’ had been attacked with the utmost ferocity in the ‘Quarterly’ (vol. xiii.), the ‘Edinburgh’ (vol. xxv.), and the ‘British Critic,’ and the book has the rare distinction of having brought Croker, Mackintosh, and Macaulay into substantial agreement upon the merits, or rather demerits, of a literary performance. The ‘Edinburgh’ cited an epigram, said to have been composed by George Colman, which has been widely misquoted— Men, measures, scenes, and facts all Misquoting, misstating, Misplacing, misdating, Here lies Sir Nathaniel Wraxall. Wraxall replied with success to some of the specific charges of garbling and deliberate unveracity in ‘An Answer to the Calumnious Misrepresentation of the “Quarterly Review,” the “British Critic,” and the “Edinburgh Review”’ (1815, 8vo), and he found disinterested supporters in Sir George Osborn—for fifty years equerry to George III, who wrote, ‘I pledge my name that I personally know nine parts out of ten of your anecdotes to be perfectly correct’—and in Sir Archibald Alison, who wrote in ‘Blackwood’ (lvii. 361) that nothing but truth could