to the lord-lieutenant, a position which he held for one year only; and on his return to England he received a court appointment, having already been promoted major-general. In 1757 he was associated with Sir John Mordaunt in command of an abortive expedition against Rochfort, the complete failure of which brought Conway into discredit and involved him in a pamphlet controversy. In 1759 he became lieutenant-general, and served under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick in the campaigns of 1761–1763. Returning to England he took part in the debates in parliament on the Wilkes case, in which he opposed the views of the court, speaking strongly against the legality of general warrants. His conduct in this matter highly incensed the king, who insisted on Conway being deprived of his military command as well as of his appointment in the royal household. His dismissal along with other officers was the occasion of another paper controversy in which Conway was defended by Horace Walpole, and gave rise to much constitutional dispute as to the right of the king to remove military officers for their conduct in parliament—a right that was tacitly abandoned by the Crown when the Rockingham ministry of 1765 reinstated the officers who had been removed.
In this ministry Conway took office as secretary of state, with the leadership of the House of Commons. In the dispute with the American colonies his sympathies were with the latter, and in 1766 he carried the repeal of the Stamp Act. When in July of that year Rockingham gave place to Chatham, Conway retained his office; and when Chatham became incapacitated by illness he tamely acquiesced in Townshend’s reversal of the American policy which he himself had so actively furthered in the previous administration. In January 1768, offended by the growing influence of the Bedford faction which joined the government, Conway resigned the seals of office, though he was persuaded by the king to remain a member of the cabinet and “Minister of the House of Commons.” When, however, Lord North became premier in 1770, Conway resigned from the cabinet and was appointed to the command of the royal regiment of horse guards; and in 1772 he became governor of Jersey, the island being twice invaded by the French during his tenure of command. In 1780 and 1781 he took an active part in opposition to Lord North’s American policy, and it was largely as the result of his motion on the 22nd of February in the latter year, demanding the cessation of the war against the colonies, when the ministerial majority was reduced to one, that Lord North resigned office. In the Rockingham government that followed General Conway became commander-in-chief with a seat in the cabinet; and he retained office under Shelburne when Rockingham died a few months later. On Pitt’s elevation to the premiership, Conway supported Fox in opposition; but after the dissolution of parliament in 1784 he retired from political life. He was made field marshal in 1793, and died at Henley-on-Thames on the 9th of July 1795. Conway married in 1747 Caroline, daughter of General Campbell (afterwards duke of Argyll), and widow of the earl of Aylesbury. He had one daughter, Anne, who married John Damer, son of Lord Milton, and who inherited a life interest in Strawberry Hill under the will of Horace Walpole.
Conway was personally one of the most popular men of his day. He was handsome, conciliatory and agreeable, and a man of refined taste and untarnished honour. As a soldier he was a dashing officer, but a poor general. He was weak, vacillating and ineffective as a politician, lacking in judgment and decision, and without any great parliamentary talent. In his later years he dabbled in literature and the drama, and interested himself in arboriculture in his retirement at Henley-on-Thames.
See Horace Walpole, Letters, edited by P. Cunningham (9 vols.,London, 1857), many of the letters being addressed to Conway;Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of George II. (2 vols., London, 1822); Memoirs of the Reign of George III., edited by Sir D. le Marchant (4 vols., London, 1845); Journal of the Reign of George III., 1771–1783 (2 vols., London, 1859). See also the duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George III. (4 vols., London, 1853). Much information about Conway will also be found in the biographies of his leading contemporaries, Rockingham, Shelburne, Chatham, Pitt and Fox. (R. J. M.)
CONWAY, HUGH, the nom-de-plume of Frederick John Fargus (1847–1885), English novelist, who was born at Bristol on the 26th of December 1847, the son of an auctioneer. He was intended for his father’s business, but at the age of thirteen joined the training-ship “Conway” in the Mersey. In deference to his father’s wishes, however, he gave up the idea of becoming a sailor, and returned to Bristol, where he was articled to a firm of accountants till on his father’s death in 1868 he took over the family business. While a clerk he had written the words for various songs, adopting the nom-de-plume Hugh Conway in memory of his days on the training-ship. Mr Arrowsmith, the Bristol printer and publisher, took an interest in his work, and Fargus’s first short story appeared in Arrowsmith’s Miscellany. In 1883 Fargus published through Arrowsmith his first long story, Called Back, of which over 350,000 copies were sold within four years. A dramatic version of this book was produced in London in 1884, and in this year Fargus published another story, Dark Days. Ordered to the Riviera for his health, he caught typhoid fever, and died at Monte Carlo on the 15th of May 1885. Several other books from his pen appeared posthumously, notably A Family Affair.
CONWAY, MONCURE DANIEL (1832–1907), American clergyman and author, was born of an old Virginia family in Stafford county, Virginia, on the 17th of March 1832. He graduated at Dickinson College in 1849, studied law for a year, and then became a Methodist minister in his native state. In 1852, owing largely to the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, his religious and political views underwent a radical change, and he entered the Harvard Divinity School, where he graduated in 1854. Here he fell under the influence of “transcendentalism,” and became an outspoken abolitionist. On his return to Virginia this fact and his rumoured connexion with the attempt to rescue the fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, in Boston aroused the bitter hostility of his old neighbours and friends, and in consequence he left the state. In 1854–1856 he was pastor of a Unitarian church at Washington, D.C., but his anti-slavery views brought about his dismissal. From 1856 to 1861 he was a Unitarian minister in Cincinnati, Ohio, where, also, he edited a short-lived liberal periodical called The Dial. Subsequently he was an editor of the Commonwealth in Boston, Mass., and wrote The Rejected Stone (1861) and The Golden Hour (1862), both powerful pleas for emancipation. In 1862–1863, during the Civil War, he lectured in England in behalf of the North. From 1863 to 1884 he was the minister of the South Place chapel, Finsbury, London; and during this time wrote frequently for the London press. In 1884 he returned to the United States to devote himself to literary work. In addition to those above mentioned, his publications include Tracts for To-day (1858), The Natural History of the Devil (1859), Testimonies Concerning Slavery (1864), The Earthward Pilgrimage (1870), Republican Superstitions (1872), Idols and Ideals (1871), Demonology and Devil Lore (2 vols., 1878), A Necklace of Stories (1879), Thomas Carlyle (1881), The Wandering Jew (1881), Emerson at Home and Abroad (1882), Pine and Palm (2 vols., 1887), Life and Papers of Edmund Randolph (1888), The Life of Thomas Paine with an unpublished sketch of Paine by William Cobbett (2 vols., 1892), Solomon and Solomonic Literature (1899), his Autobiography (2 vols., 1900), and My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (1906). Conway died on the 15th of November 1907.
CONWAY, SIR WILLIAM MARTIN (1856– ), English art
critic and mountaineer, son of the Rev. William Conway, afterwards canon of Westminster, was born at Rochester, and was educated at Repton and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He became interested in early printing and engraving, and in 1880 made a tour of the principal libraries of Europe in pursuit of his studies, the result appearing in 1884 as a History of the Woodcutters of the Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century. His later works on art included Early Flemish Artists (1887); The Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer (1889); The Dawn of Art in the Ancient World (1891), dealing with Chaldaean, Assyrian and Egyptian art; Early Tuscan Artists (1902). From 1884 to 1887 he was professor of art at University College, Liverpool; and in
