The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave 1742 1763

By J.C.D. Clark

Book Overview

The Memoirs of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave (1715-63) rank with those of Horace Walpole and Lord Hervey as classics of eighteenth-century political literature. They have an additional significance as a record of the momentous political crisis of 1754-7, which heralded the break-up of the early Hanoverian party system and laid the foundations for the pattern of alignments of the last half of the century. Waldegrave's Memoirs, first published in 1821, played a major part in the development of the Whig interpretation of the English past by apparently providing evidence in support of the Holland House thesis of a new royal absolutism, devised at Leicester House in the 1750s and implemented on the accession of George III in 1760. In an important introduction, Dr Clark unravels the nineteenth-century historiographical misconceptions of this problem and shows how Waldegrave's text was misused for polemical Whig purposes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521526892
• ISBN13: 9780521526890
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 356 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"