Thomas Stanhope

“ Henrietta Maria, eldest daughter and co-heir of Robert Vernon Atherton, Esq., of Atherton Hall, Co. Lancaster, married, 1797, Thomas, Baron Lilford, and had six sons and six daughters.
[12] Charles Bankes, Major in the Army, second son of Philip, 2nd Earl Stanhope, born 1785, killed at the Battle of Corunna, January 16th, 1809.
[13] Lord James Murray, son of the 4th Duke of Athol, a Major-General in the Army, who in 1821 became Lord Glenlyon. He then resided in Cumberland Place. He died in 1837, and his son succeeded as 6th Duke of Athol in 1846. ”

“ This Walter Spencer-Stanhope married Mary Winifrid, only daughter and sole heiress of Thomas Babbington Pulleine, of Carlton Hall, near Richmond, Esq., and his wife Winifred, daughter of Edward Collingwood, of Dissington Hall, Esq., by Mary his wife, daughter and co-heir of John Roddam, of Roddam, Esq.
Mr. Stanhope died April 4th, 1821: his widow survived him till Dec 16, 1850.
Their second son was the late John Spencer Stanhope, Esq., of Cannon Hall and Horsforth Hall, J.P., D.L., F.R.S., &c., who was born May 27th, 1787. He married Dec. ”

“ Educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Oxford, he accompanied his father, then British minister at Madrid, to Spain in 1690, and obtained some knowledge of that country which was very useful to him in later life. A little later, however, he went to Italy where, as afterwards in Flanders, he served as a volunteer against France, and in 1695 he secured a commission in the British army. In 1701 Stanhope entered the House of Commons, but he continued his career as a soldier and was in Spain and Portugal during the earlier stages of the War of the Spanish Succession. ”

“ In the midst of the general discontent, however, a ripple of merriment passed over Paris. Madame mère, who, of course, could not avoid following the new fashion, presented her horses as an offering to her son. They were at once, to the delight of the Parisians, returned to her as good for nothing! "Whether," says Stanhope, "she had selected her gift with a view to this verdict, or whether it represented the general state of her stud, I know not, but, from what I have seen, I conclude that the latter is not an unlikely case." ”

“ But save for the descriptions in the newspapers and the accounts sent to her by her sons, Mrs Stanhope saw nothing of the splendid spectacle which had been taking place. That year of general rejoicing had proved for her a year of seclusion and of mourning. After her return home the health of her husband had rapidly declined, and with the coming of April, 1821, while all England was awakening to a summer of festivity and gladness, Walter Stanhope, overborne with the burden of his seventy-one years, had peacefully breathed his last. ”

“ She was much sought after in society on account of her reputed wealth; and although stout and somewhat plain in appearance, she was a decided flirt, and extremely fond of amusement.
Partly owing to the fact that her mother was in delicate health, partly to the proximity of her father's house in Lower Grosvenor Street to that of Mr Stanhope, she was the constant associate of the young Stanhopes, and attended many balls and routs chaperoned by their mother. There was, indeed, much to recommend her companionship. ”

“ As a churchman, as a parent, as a landowner, as a politician he fulfilled each avocation with credit. As a man of the world he could toy with but remain unmastered by the foibles of his age. While a Fox and a Pitt rose to heights and sank to depths which Stanhope never touched; while a Wilberforce was imbued with religious fervour as with a permeating flame, Stanhope, to his contemporaries, presented something of an anomaly. ”

“ The North was deemed unsafe, and, abandoning all thoughts of visiting it, Mrs Stanhope, whose former home in Grosvenor Square had been sold, decided to settle in Langham Place. She therefore took a large house in that locality, which was entered by great gates and stood in the midst of a fine garden, and there her family swiftly resumed the old routine of their London life. Despite the mourning for the late King, Mrs Stanhope wrote: "Mrs Malcolm who called yesterday tells me there is a great deal of quiet society & that if you get into a set, you may be engaged every night." ”

“ Long before his son's year in Italy was completed, Chesterfield began preparing him for Paris. For the first six months Stanhope was to live in an academy with young Frenchmen of fashion; after that, to have lodgings of his own. The mornings were to belong to study, or serious conversation with men of learning or figure; the afternoons, to exercise; the evenings to be free for balls, the opera, or play. These are the pleasures of a gentleman, for which his father is willing to pay generously. But he will not, he points out frequently, subscribe to the extravagance of a rake. ”

“ No distortion of countenance, or aukward behaviour; no absence of mind; but to keep the Graces always in remembrance.
[8] Mr. Stanhope dined one day with some company at his father's, when the following circumstance happen'd, which so much enrag'd him, that he called for his servant to take him from table and wash him clean.
[9] A female polisher of manners.
[10] Have your stiffness remov'd.
[11] You should dress like a man of the great world.
[12] Always in the fashion, and your cloaths well put on.
[13] What success with the Graces. ”

“ Mirabeau the chief author of the French Revolution. He was godfather to this boy. Before you re-instate the Bourbons, should you not extirpate such a man?
Shortly after the return of the Stanhopes to town in 1807 they entertained a guest of a very opposite character, but nearly as remarkable for eccentricity as was the hermit of Whitley. In Walter Stanhope's journal for January 30th of that year is recorded a dinner party of strangely incongruous elements. "This night there dined with us Wilberforce, Wharton, Smedley, Skeffington, Sir Robert Peel and Ward." ”

“ July 7.—I returned to Dar Jôon.
July 8.—The day after my arrival, before breakfast, Lady Hester Stanhope being yet in bed, a servant came for me. “I hope I have not disturbed you,”232 said she, when I entered her room; “but I wanted you just for a minute to say a word about Logmagi, whom I am going to send home for a week or two. Poor man! he is all devotedness to my service, but I must not ride a willing horse to death. He is liberal-minded, too, and charitable; not as your fine my lord is, who gives his five guineas to a somebody, and never feels the loss of his money ”

“ Stanhope married, on 10 July 1834, Emily Harriet, second daughter of General Sir Edward Kerrison, bart., and by her, who died on 31 Dec. 1873, had issue one daughter Mary Catherine, who married, on 18 Feb. 1868, Frederick Lygon, sixth earl Beauchamp and four sons, of whom Arthur Philip is the present Earl Stanhope; Edward Stanhope, the second son, is separately noticed.
Few men have deserved better of the world of letters and art than Stanhope. ”

“ Young Stanhope is advised by his Father to avoid asserting any thing which, though he might himself know it to be perfectly true, was too surprising to be credible without authentic support, and would expose his veracity to be questioned, which no man likes. ”

“ The defects of his character were an incapacity to work with others and a lack of sympathy towards his children, all of whom he disinherited after subjecting them to much ill-treatment. But Stanhope's mother left everything to her 'dearly beloved son, Charles, Earl Stanhope, from my approbation of his private and public conduct' (Gent. Mag. 1812, i. 673) . By his will, made in 1805, Stanhope left all his disposable estate, after payment of a few legacies, among ten executors, of whom the best known were Lord Holland, Lord Grantley, Joseph Jekyll, George Dyer, and the Rev. ”

“ His tenure of the Canterbury deanery brought Stanhope into the lower house of convocation at a period of bitter conflict with the upper house under Atterbury's leadership. As a man of peace, in friendship with Robert Nelson [q. v.] on one side, and with Edward Tenison [q. v.] and Burnet on the other (Burnet's son William afterwards married Stanhope's daughter Mary) , Stanhope was proposed by the moderate party as prolocutor in 1705, but was defeated by the high churchman, Dr. William Binckes [q. v.] . ”

“ Stanhope, without being a model of grace, had the air of a man who had been well brought up, and was polite and agreeable. But do you not think that that is the most grievous part of all? It would have been better worth while, almost, to have totally failed, and to have only succeeded in making an original in the inverse sense, rather than with so much care and expense to have produced nothing more than an ordinary and insignificant man of the world, one of those about whom it suffices to say, there is nothing to be said of them ”

“ LADY HESTER STANHOPE.
Genius was the only inheritance she received from her father. Upon the death of her mother, which happened when she was young, she was received into the house of her uncle, William Pitt, the younger, and was there brought up. Between this minister and his brother-in-law there was little sympathy of opinion. Stanhope was an enthusiast for the improvement of social institutions, and hailed the French revolution as the beginning of the change which he hoped for. ”

“ An honest worker, desirous of using his own invention in peace, he was unfitted to struggle with the competitive world about him. After all his struggles, a miserable pittance was awarded to him, by the charity of pitying neighbours, enough to save him from hunger in his old age.
Lord Stanhope is not omitted: he is a man of the Cavendish stamp, but a mechanist instead of a chemist; yet with a mental warp that could not recognise greatness in other things than mechanism—a workman, with an hereditary fortune provided him, a man ill-fitted to the aristocratic sphere of his birth ”

“ Why won’t you let him be introduced to you?’—‘Because I don’t like people whose face is all oily, like a soap-ball,’ answered I. Now, doctor, upon my word, I no more knew he had made his fortune by oil, than I do what was the colour of the paper in your saloon at Nice; and when his friend said, ‘You are too bad, Lady Hester,’ I did not understand what he meant. However, they told me there would be all the royalties there, and so I consented.
“I have had an instinct all my life that never deceived me, about people who were thorough-bred or not ”

“ His position as an historian was already established when he succeeded to the earldom in 1855, and in 1872 he was made an honorary associate of the Institute of France. He was president of the Literary Fund from 1863 until his death. He died on the 24th of December 1875, being succeeded as 6th earl by his son Arthur Philip (1838–1905) , father of the 7th earl. His second son, Edward Stanhope (1840–1803) , was a well-known Conservative politician, who filled various important offices, and was finally secretary of state for war (1886–1892) . ”

“ Wharton thought fit to make himself the champion of public purity in the debates on the South Sea Company's ruin. He attacked the Ministers fiercely; he attacked Stanhope in especial. Stanhope replied to him with far greater warmth than the weight of any attack from Wharton would seem to have called for. Excited beyond measure, Stanhope burst a blood-vessel in his {199} anger. He was carried home, and he died the next day—February 5, 1721. His life had been pure and noble. He was a sincere lover of his country; a brave and often a successful soldier ”

“ Stanhope, a well-bred woman, accomplished in the art of rising in the world, had, with but a small fortune, contrived to live in the highest company. She prided herself upon having established half a dozen nieces most happily--that is to say, upon having married them to men of fortunes far superior to their own. ”

“ On the day when she was to land, greatly to the relief of the authorities who dreaded a riot, there was an unusually heavy storm. The Heavens themselves seemed in league against the unhappy woman. It poured on her first arrival in England, it poured on her return from her long exile, it was destined to pour during her last sad exit from the scene of so many humiliations. John Stanhope, who had last seen Caroline as she wrathfully turned her back upon his friend, Mr Maxwell, at Naples, was anxious to witness her reception in England as Queen. ”

“ You are like the sun when he first comes over the plain, or the moon at night, when it floats, white and shining, through the blue spaces!"
She sat sedately still, but her breast heaved under the straight, white tunic: her eyes were full of soft fire: her voice was low, and quivered with enthusiasm. Stanhope flushed scarlet. Confused and startled, he stared into her eyes, and so they sat, silent, gazing at each other.
That same afternoon there was a big fair or bazaar in the trampled mud square in the centre of the Soudanese village that lies higher up the river at the back of Khartoum. ”

“ Stanhope. “I’m going over to dine with our club at the Old Boar, and I want you just to cast your eye on those fellows in my home close; you can see them out of your parlour window.”—“Yes, to be sure, Sir,” replied Jacob “Hem!” quoth Mr. Stanhope, “have you any body indoors?”—“Yes, Sir, we have,” replied Jacob, “a strange gentleman, who seems to know a pretty deal about mining and them sort of things. I think he’s some great person in disguise, he seems regularly edicated, up to every thing.”—“Eh, ah! a great person in disguise!” exclaimed Mr. Stanhope ”

“ Thus, while the circle of acquaintance with which the lives of Stanhope and his family at this date mingled serves to throw into sharper relief his own divergence of character from that of many of his contemporaries— those men who to great abilities, and sometimes to great achievement, joined the pettiness of a fop and the follies of a mountebank—still more did the typical man-about-town, with his whims and his foibles, his shallow aims and his lost opportunities, compare strangely with the larger souls of his generation. ”