presidential candidate of his party. In March 1807 he lost the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee. Possessing considerable wit, great readiness, and a showy if somewhat bombastic eloquence, he would undoubtedly have risen to high influence but for his strong vein of eccentricity and his bitter and ungovernable temper. The championship of state’s rights was carried by him to an extreme utterly quixotic, inasmuch as he not only asserted the constitutional right of Virginia to interpose her protest against the usurpation of power at Washington, but claimed that the protest should be supported by force. From December 1825 to March 1827 he served in the United States Senate, and in April 1826 he was forced to fight a duel with Henry Clay, on account of his violent abuse of that statesman in the course of a debate. In 1830 he was sent by President Jackson on a special mission to Russia, but remained in St Petersburg only ten days, then spent almost a year in England, and on his return in October 1831 drew $21,407 from the United States Treasury for his services. He died of consumption at Philadelphia on the 24th of June 1833. Though his political life was full of inconsistencies-he was even capable of advocating the passage of a bill on one day and of opposing the passage of the same bill on the next—he generally adhered to the principles enunciated by the Republican party in its earliest years, and throughout his later career, in numerous speeches, he laboured to bring about the identification of slavery with the theory of states' rights. In this he was the natural precursor of Calhoun. His last will was disputed in the law courts, and the jury returned a verdict that in the later years of his life he was not of sane mind. He was always in theory opposed to slavery, and by the will which was accepted by the courts, freed his own slaves.
The best biography is that by Henry Adams, John Randolph (Boston, 1882), in the “American Statesmen Series.” There is also a biography, which, however, contains many inaccuracies, by Hugh A. Garland (2 vols., New York, 1851).
RANDOLPH, PEYTON (1721–1775), American politician, was born at Tazewell Hall, Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1721, a son of Sir John Randolph (1693–1737), the king’s attorney for Virginia.[1] He graduated at the College of William and Mary, studied law at the Inner Temple, London, and in 1748 was appointed the king’s attorney for Virginia. Randolph wrote the address of remonstrance to the king in behalf of the Burgesses against the suggested stamp duties in 1764. His policy was conservative and moderate, and in May 1765 he opposed Patrick Henry’s radical “Stamp Act Resolutions.” In 1766 he resigned as king’s attorney and was succeeded by his brother John (1727–1784). In 1769 he acted as moderator of the privately convened assembly which entered into the non importation agreement, and in May 1773 he became chairman of the first Virginia inter colonial committee of correspondence. He presided over the provincial convention of August 1774, and was a member of the First Continental Congress, of which he was president from the 5th of September to the 22nd of October 1774. He was re-elected to Congress in March 1775, and on the 10th of May was again chosen to preside, but on the 24th he left to attend a meeting at Williamsburg of the Virginia Burgesses, He then returned to Congress, of which John Hancock had meanwhile been made president. Randolph died of apoplexy in Philadelphia on the 22nd of October 1775. He was provincial grand-master of the Masons of Virginia, and was an intimate friend of Washington.
RANDOLPH, THOMAS (1523–1590), English diplomatist, son of Avery Randolph, a Kentish gentleman, was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1549 became principal of Pembroke College, Oxford, then known as Broadgates Hall. During the reign of Mary, Randolph, who was a -zealous Protestant, sought refuge in Paris, where he cultivated the society of scholars. Returning to England after the accession of Elizabeth, he was soon employed as a confidential diplomatic agent of the English queen in Scotland. Here he succeeded in gaining the confidence of the Protestant party, with whom he became a person of great influence. Randolph’s dispatches from Scotland between 1560 and 1585 supply important materials for the history of the political intrigues of that period. Randolph, who had hitherto remained ostensibly on terms of friendship with Mary Queen of Scots, exerted his influence on instructions from Elizabeth to prevent Mary’s marriage with Darnley; but in 1566 he was driven from Scotland on the charge of having formented Murray’s rebellion, and he then obtained government employment of secondary importance in England. In 1568 he undertook a mission to Russia which resulted in the concession by Ivan the Terrible of certain privileges to English merchants; and in 1570 he returned to Scotland, where, after the murder of the regent Murray in January of that year, he “succeeded,” says Andrew Lang, “in making civil war inevitable; he himself was in high spirits, as always when mischief was in hand.” After carrying through certain diplomatic business in France in 1573 and 1576, Randolph returned in January 1581 to Scotland, where the earl of Morton, the regent, had been arrested a few days previously. Randolph, acting on Elizabeth’s instructions, intrigued with Angus and the Douglases in favour of a plot to seize the person of the young King James, and to save Morton by laying violent hands on the earl of Lennox. Douglas of Whittingham, who was employed in the intrigue, on being arrested made revelations which imperilled Randolph, and the latter prudently withdrew to Berwick before the execution of Morton in June 1581. In 1585, when he next visited Scotland, he was more successful, being instrumental in arranging a treaty between England and Scotland. For the next four years he was chancellor of the exchequer in England, and he died in London in June 1590. Randolph married, in 1571, Anne, daughter of Thomas Walsingham. He was a personal friend of George Buchanan, in whose History of Scotland he took a lively interest, and he has been credited, though on doubtful evidence, with the authorship of a Life of the historian in Latin.
See J. A. Froude, History of England (12 vols., London, 1881); Andrew Lang, History of Scotland, vol. ii. (4 vols., London, 1902–7); Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland (1509–1603), edited by M. I. Thorpe (2 vols.); Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series of the Reign of Elizabeth; Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses and Fasti, edited by P. Bliss (4 vols., London, 1813–20).
RANDOLPH, THOMAS (1605–1635), English poet and dramatist, was born near Daventry in Northamptonshire, and was baptized on the 15th of June 1605. He was educated at Westminster and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He took his B.A. degree in 1628, proceeded M.A. in 1632 and became a major fellow of his college in the same year. He soon gave promise as a writer of comedy. Ben Jonson, not an easily satisfied critic, adopted him as one of his “sons.” He addressed three poems to Jonson, one on the occasion of his formal “adoption,” another on the failure of The New Inn, and the third an eclogue, describing his own studies at Cambridge. He lived with his father at Little Houghton in Northamptonshire for some time, and afterwards with William Stafford of Blatherwick, at whose house he died before completing his thirtieth year. He was buried in Blatherwick church on the 17th of March 1634–35, and his epitaph was written by Peter Hausted, the author of The Rival Friends.
Randolph’s reputation as a wit is attested by the verses addressed to him by his contemporaries and by the stories attached to his name. His earliest printed work is Aristippus, Or, The Joviall Philosopher. Presented in a private shew, To which is added, The Conceited Pedlar (1630). It is a gay interlude burlesquing a lecture in philosophy, the whole piece being an argument to support the claims of sack against small beer. The Conceited Pedlar is an amusing monologue delivered by the pedlar, who defines himself as an “individuum vagum,
- ↑ In 1754 the Burgesses sent him to London to argue against the governor’s demand for a fee of one pistole on every land patent; his plea was successful, but the governor superseded him with George Wythe, who resigned in Randolph’s favour upon his return from England. The Burgesses voted Randolph £2500 with the grant of £20,000 to Governor Dinwiddie for Indian warfare; the governor would not approve this appropriation, however, until Randolph apologized for leaving his office without the governor’s permission.
