Whitehall in 1698 (Luttrell, iv. 328, 531, 600; Ellis, Correspondence, ii. 11, 25). At various times he was engaged in many lawsuits; in 1696 with the Marquis of Normanby about the purchase of Berkely House by him, which, after discussion on the privilege of peers in the House of Lords (10 Dec.), he eventually won in the court of chancery by judgment of the lord chancellor and both chief justices, December 1697; in February 1698 and again in June 1699 against Mr. Frampton, about a horse-race, in which he obtained a verdict; in 1699 as ranger of Needwood Forest against the Earl of Stamford, who claimed a right to hunt there as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; and in 1707 at the suit of the Duke of Buckinghamshire for damages by a fire at Arlington House, which he lost (Luttrell, iv. 151, 224, 298, 340, 474, vi. 187).
In person the duke was tall and handsome, and of an engaging and commanding mien and courteous address. He was a good Latin scholar, and especially a student of Horace, acquainted with Homer and Plutarch, so fine a critic that Lord Roscommon entrusted to him his poems for correction, and an admirable judge of art and music. The philosophy of Hobbes had influenced his early education, but in a work ascribed to him, ‘Reasons for Passing the Bill for Exclusion’ (1681), he uses the social compact as an argument for submitting the will of the monarch to that of his people, and is said by his domestic chaplain, Mr. Griffiths, ‘to have publicly disowned Mr. Hobbes's principles as damnable.’ He wrote an ode on the death of Queen Mary, which Dryden praised as the best written on that subject, and a poem called ‘The Charms of Liberty;’ an allusion to the Archbishop of Cambray's ‘Telemachus,’ written in 1707, and published after his death. Lord Orford's character of him was, ‘a patriot among the men, a Corydon among the ladies.’ He was personally dissolute, leaving many natural children, among them being Mrs. Heneage, who married Lord Huntingtower, eldest son of the Earl of Dysart (Luttrell, 10 Dec. 1706; cf. Wentworth Papers, 19 July 1709), and is said to have taken Mrs. Anne Campion from the stage into keeping, but as he was then an old man this may be ill-authenticated; at any rate he erected a tomb to her memory, and gave her a private funeral. A poem, ‘by a lady,’ upon his death, says of him,
Whose awful sweetness challenged our esteem,
Our sex's wonder and our sex's theme;
Whose soft commanding looks our breasts assailed;
He came and saw and at first sight prevailed.
[Bishop Kennet's Memoir; Grove's Lives of the Earls and Dukes of Devonshire; Kennet's Funeral Sermon; Griffith's Funeral Sermon; Monthly Miscellany, i. 326; Braybrooke's Notes to Pepys, v. 251; Glover's Derbyshire, ii. 223; Akenside's Ode to the Earl of Huntingdon; Introduction to Danby's Letters, 1710; Commons' Journals; Von Ranke's History of England; Hazard of a Deathbed Repentance, London, 1728; Jacob's Complete Peerage, 1766, i. 247; Lodge's Portraits, vol. iv. (after the painting by Riley); Courtenay's Memoirs of Sir W. Temple.]
CAVENDISH, WILLIAM, fourth Duke of Devonshire (1720–1764), first lord of the treasury, and prime minister from November 1756 to May 1757, at the beginning of the seven years' war, eldest son of William Cavendish, third duke of Devonshire, K.G., and lord-lieutenant of Ireland from 1737 to 1744, was born in 1720. He was elected to the House of Commons as M.P. for Derbyshire in 1741, directly he came of age, and was re-elected in 1747, and on 20 March 1748 married Charlotte, baroness Clifford of Londesborough in her own right, only daughter and heiress of Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington and Cork, who brought him Lismore Castle and large estates in Ireland. This marriage greatly increased his political importance, and on 13 June 1751 the Marquis of Hartington, as he was then styled, was summoned to the House of Lords in his father's barony as Lord Cavendish of Hardwicke, and in the following month he was made master of the horse and sworn of the privy council. In March 1754 the Marquis of Hartington was made lord-treasurer of Ireland, and on 27 March constituted lord-lieutenant and general-governor of that island, and on 5 Dec. 1755 he succeeded his father as fourth duke of Devonshire. In Ireland he displayed no very great political ability, but succeeded very happily in pleasing all parties and making himself extremely popular. In 1756 the seven years' war broke out, and all England demanded that Mr. Pitt should be placed at the head of affairs; he absolutely declined to serve under the Duke of Newcastle, who had been prime minister ever since the death of his brother, Henry Pelham, in 1754, and the influence of the great whig families was strong enough to prevent the king from at once making Pitt prime minister. In this dilemma Devonshire was summoned from Ireland, and asked to become prime minister, with Pitt as secretary of state to manage the war. He was eminently a fit man for the post; his rank as a born leader of the whigs, his experience in the House of Commons, and his
