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Walpole, Horace, 4th earl of Orford (1717-97). The youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, Horace Walpole became the most gifted letter-writer in English history. When he entered Parliament in 1741 his father's long administration was tottering to its fall. Though he remained in the Commons until 1768 he made no mark and his preferred role was that of observer. The places and pensions provided by his father afforded him a comfortable bachelor existence and he lavished great attention on the Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill (Twickenham) which he purchased in 1748. Much of his time was devoted to correspondence with his many friends and acquaintances. But he also wrote substantial works. The Castle of Otranto (1764) was an early example of the Gothic horror novel and Historic Doubts on Richard III (1768) fathered a minor academic industry.

(1717–97)

English virtuoso and wit. His importance in the realm of architecture lies in his creation of Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Mddx. (from 1750), one of the earliest key buildings of the Gothic Revival, publicized in his A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill (1774 and 1778). This asymmetrical house set precedents for Picturesque composition. He also helped to make Gothic fashionable when he published his The Castle of Otranto, a ‘Gothic Romance’ (1764), an early work of Romanticism. He included notes on the works of architects in his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–71), and he furthered the study of medieval architecture by encouraging James Essex in his researches.

Bibliography

• M. Aldrich (1994)
• Germann (1972)
• W. S. Lewis (1960, 1973)
• M. McCarthy (1987)
• Mowl (1996)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Horatio, 4th earl of Orford, 1717–97, English author; youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he toured the Continent with his friend Thomas Gray from 1739 to 1741, when the two quarreled and parted. He was elected to Parliament in 1741 and served until 1767, confining himself largely to the role of spectator and defender of his father's memory. In 1747 he acquired a country house, Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, where he built a pseudo-Gothic castle, which became the showplace of England. He was reconciled with Gray in 1745 and later published his friend's Pindaric odes, as well as many first editions of his own works from the private printing press he started at Strawberry Hill in 1757. Walpole's literary reputation rests primarily on his letters, which have great charm and polish and are invaluable pictures of Georgian England. More than 3,000 of his correspondences are extant and cover a period extending from 1732 to 1797. Among his more famous correspondents are Gray, Sir Horace Mann, Thomas Chatterton, and Mme Du Deffand. Walpole succeeded to the earldom of Orford in 1791. Besides his enthusiasm for medieval architecture and trappings, he anticipated the romanticism of the 19th cent. with his Gothic romance The Castle of Otranto (1765). His other important works include Historic Doubts on Richard III (1768), an attempt to rehabilitate the character of Richard; Anecdotes of Painting in England (4 vol., 1762–71); and posthumous works, Reminiscences (1798) and memoirs of the reigns of George II (1822) and George III (1845, 1859).

Bibliography

See Yale edition of the letters ed. by W. S. Lewis (vol. 1–48; 1937–83).

British writer and historian whose correspondence and memoirs provide valuable information about his era. He wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764), considered the first Gothic novel in English.

Walpole, Horace (1717–1797), English statesman and man of letters. Although Horace Walpole sat in the House of Commons from 1741 to 1768, he did not pursue an orthodox career as a statesman. An intense and acutely sensitive man, Walpole was temperamentally unsuited to the cut and thrust of political battle, and preferred to work behind the scenes as a pamphleteer, a gossip, a networker and, ultimately, a historian.

Walpole was fiercely loyal to his family and friends, and herein lies the key to all his politics. He never failed to support his friend and cousin, Henry Seymour-Conway, while disliking all critics and enemies of his father (Sir Robert Walpole). All but one account of Horace Walpole's political career have been marred by a failure to recognize his homosexuality, without which it is impossible to understand the depth of his hatred for Henry Pelham and the duke of Newcastle, the brothers of Catherine Pelham, whose arranged marriage to Walpole's onetime lover Henry Fiennes-Clinton, earl of Lincoln, took place in 1744.

Horace Walpole's hostility to the Pelhams has usually been explained in terms of his belief in their disloyalty to Robert Walpole, whom they "deserted" when his ministry began to crumble. Although the Pelhams succeeded Robert as leaders of the Court Whigs, Horace did not join them after his father's death, aligning himself instead with Richard Rigby and Henry Fox. When Fox joined a ministry in partnership with Newcastle in 1756, Walpole operated behind the scenes to annoy and frustrate both while remaining on ostensibly friendly terms with Fox. Walpole's unsuccessful attempt to prevent the execution of Admiral John Byng for failing to prevent the loss of Minorca may have been partly motivated by the desire to embarrass Fox and Newcastle, suspected by many of having found a scapegoat for a more serious error of military judgment. At any rate, Walpole's Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his Friend Lien Chi at Peking (1757), which pithily summarized the hypocrisies of Byng's impeachment, established Walpole as a witty and dangerous pamphleteer.

Walpole was most active from 1763 to 1767, when he acted as a political mentor to Conway. Both men had voted against George Grenville's ministry to defend the freedom of the press, then threatened by government action against the opposition M.P. John Wilkes, an outspoken critic of the crown, and the North Briton, a newspaper that printed his articles. George III, angered by what he perceived as insubordination, ordered Conway's dismissal from his regiment and court position, whereupon Walpole joined the opposition and began intriguing to bring down the Grenville ministry. When the Rockingham Whigs took office in 1765, Conway became secretary of state for the Southern Department and leader of the House of Commons. Walpole, however, was offered nothing, and a brief estrangement took place between the two. In April 1766, he resumed his place as Conway's adviser, notwithstanding the latter's cooling enthusiasm for politics, and became an inside observer of the Rockingham and Chatham ministries. When Conway decided to resign the lead in the Commons at the end of 1767, Walpole also decided to leave political life, and returned to his other occupations as author, publisher, art critic, and antiquarian.

Although Walpole is one of England's greatest letter writers, whose correspondence is an invaluable source for the political, social, and cultural history of mid-Hanoverian England, his Memoirs of the Reign of George II and Memoirs of the Reign of George III, written for posterity and published after his demise, provide a lively narrative of political events and personalities from 1751 to 1772. Both were much maligned—unjustifiably so—by nineteenth-century critics. Of the two works, the Memoirs of the Reign of George III, written between 1766 and 1772, are the more valuable, for they describe events in which Walpole was a central participant. Although the Memoirs of the Reign of George II are less reliable, they still constitute the most important source in existence for the parliamentary debates of 1754–1761.

The memoirs are not without bias. Walpole's loathing of the Pelhams manifests itself in the representation of the Duke of Newcastle as a time-serving incompetent. Henry Fox was traduced as a greedy and unscrupulous careerist. Walpole was also responsible for creating the myth of a sinister plot hatched by the princess dowager and Lord Bute, George III's first prime minister, to revive the royal prerogative and employ it against opponents of the crown. The memoirs, in effect, encapsulated the Whig perspective on crown and Parliament usually attributed to English historians of the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Hunting, Warren Smith, ed. Horace Walpole: Writer, Politician and Connoisseur: Essays on the 250th Anniversary of Walpole's Birth. New Haven and London, 1967.

Ketton-Cremer, Robert Wyndham. Horace Walpole: A Biography. London, 1946.

Mowl, Timothy. Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider. London, 1996.

—JENNIFER MORI

Quotes:

"Old friends are the great blessings of one's later years. Half a word conveys one's meaning. They have a memory of the same events, have the same mode of thinking. I have young relations that may grow upon me, for my nature is affectionate, but can they grow [To Be] old friends?"

"I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one's tongue don't move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule."

"Oh that I were seated as high as my ambition, I'd place my naked foot on the necks of monarchs."

"Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel."

"It was said of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, that she never puts dots over her I s, to save ink."

"The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveler from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra."

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