‘may really be said to have in some measure earned on that night the peerage which he soon afterwards obtained’ (Wraxall, ii. 424). It failed to save the government, which a few hours later was defeated by the combined votes of the followers of Fox and North. The king recognised Townshend's services by creating him Baron Sydney of Chislehurst on 6 March following.
While in opposition Sydney on 30 June 1783 protested in the lords against the rejection of a bill which Pitt had carried through the commons to check abuses in public offices (Rogers, Lords' Protests, ii. 213); and when in December George III entrusted Pitt with the task of ridding him of the hated coalition, Sydney became Pitt's secretary of state for the home department (23 Dec.). In the House of Lords, however, Sydney lost much of his vigour and reputation, and ‘seemed to have sunk into an ordinary man.’ Wraxall suggests that he owed his continuance in office to the fact that his daughter had married Pitt's elder brother, Lord Chatham; and Lord Rosebery says that he is ‘now chiefly remembered by Goldsmith's famous line’ (Pitt, p. 46), where in the ‘Retaliation’ he speaks of Burke: ‘Though fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.’ Sydney's tenure of the home department, with which the colonies were then united, was, however, marked by an episode that has given his name wider celebrity than Goldsmith's line. As early as 1785 a proposal had been under consideration for forming a settlement in New South Wales (Sir G. Young, Facsimile of a Proposal for a Settlement on the Coast of New South Wales in 1785, Sydney, 1888). The object was mainly to provide an outlet for the convicts who had previously been sent to America, and then after the war to the west coast of Africa, until it was found that that was almost always equivalent to a sentence of death. But a hope was also entertained from the first that the convict element when reformed would become the nucleus of a colony (LANG, Hist. of New South Wales, 4th edit. i. 12). Active preparations were begun in 1786, and the organisation and command of the expedition were entrusted to Arthur Phillip [q. v.] He sailed in May 1787, and on 26 Jan. 1788 founded a town in Port Jackson which was named Sydney in honour of the secretary of state (cf. Gent. Mag. 1791, i. 276; Geographical, Commercial, and Political Essays, 1813, pp. 193–5 et seqq.; Therry, New South Wales; Barton, New South Wales, 1892; Rusden, History of Australia; ‘The Making of Sydney’ in United Service Mag. viii. 336).
A year later Sydney ceased to be secretary of state. He had disagreed with Pitt's India bill of 1784; in 1787 he spoke, but did not vote, against his slave regulation bill, and Pitt was said to be anxious for more subservient colleagues. On 5 June 1789 he was succeeded as secretary by Grenville; his retirement was, however, solaced by his creation as Viscount Sydney and the grant of the chief-justiceship in eyre of forests north of the Trent, worth 2,500l. a year (Stanhope, Life of Pitt, ii. 33; Cornwallis Corresp. ii. 5). He was a governor of the Charterhouse, and from 1793 deputy-lieutenant of Kent, but henceforth took little part in politics. He died of apoplexy at Chislehurst on 30 June 1800. A portrait, engraved after G. Stuart, is given in Doyle.
Sydney married, on 19 May 1760, Elizabeth (d. 1 May 1826), eldest daughter and coheir of Richard Powys; by her he had issue two sons and four daughters, of whom the second, Mary Elizabeth, married in 1783 John Pitt, second Earl of Chatham; and the fourth, Harriet Katherine, married in 1795 Charles William Scott, fourth duke of Buccleuch [see under Scott, Henry, third Duke]. The eldest son, John Thomas Townshend (1764–1831), was under-secretary of state for the home department under his father from 1783 to 1789; was a lord of the admiralty from 1789 to May 1793; and a lord of the treasury from 1793 to June 1800, when he succeeded his father as second Viscount Sydney. He was lord of the bedchamber to George III from 1800 to 1810, and died on 30 Jan. 1831. He was succeeded as third viscount by his son, John Robert Townshend (1805–1890), who was lord of the bedchamber to William IV in 1835, lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria from 1841 to 1846, lord chamberlain of the household in Gladstone's first administration from 1868 to 1874, and was created Earl Sydney of Seadbury on 27 Feb. 1874. He was lord steward of the household in Gladstone's second and third administrations (1880–5 and 1886), and died without issue on 14 Feb. 1890, when the title became extinct.
[Burke, Doyle, and G. E. C[okayne]'s Peerages; Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George III, ed. Barker, and Letters, ed. Cunningham; Wraxall's Posthumous Memoirs, ed. Wheatley; Bedford Correspondence, ed. Russell, iii. 401; Jesse's George Selwyn and his Contemporaries, passim; Jesse's Mem. of the Life and Reign of George III, i. 407; Forster's Goldsmith; Cavendish's Parliamentary Debates; Annual Reg. 1800, p. 62; Gent. Mag. 1800, ii.
