CHESTERFIELD, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of (1694-1773), the son of Philip Stanhope, the third earl, and Elizabeth Savile, daughter of the marquis of Halifax, was born in London. Deprived at an early age of his mother, the care of the little Lord Stanhope devolved upon his grandmother, the marchioness of Halifax, a lady of culture and connection, whose house was frequented by the most distinguished Whigs of the epoch. He soon began to prove himself possessed of that systematic spirit of conduct and effort which appeared so much in his life and character. Divined by Ruvigny, earl of Galway, who perceived in him a nascent aptitude for pleasure and politics overlaid with a strong natural tendency to indolence, he was advised by that nobleman, if he would become a man of mark, to rise early; he acquired the habit, and kept it. His education, commenced under a private tutor, was continued (1712) at Trinity Hall, Cambridge; here he seems to have read hard, and to have acquired a considerable knowledge of ancient and modern languages. The great orators of all times were a special object of study with him, and he describes his boyish pedantry pleasantly enough, but by no means without a touch of self-satisfaction in the memory. His university training was supplemented (1714) by a Continental tour, untrammelled by a governor; at the Hague his ambition for the applause awarded to adventure made a gamester of him, and at Paris he began, from the same motive, that worship of the conventional Venus, the serious inculcation of which has earned for him the largest and most unenviable part of his reputation.

The death of Anne and the accession of George I. opened, up a career for him and brought him back to England. His relative James Stanhope, the king’s favourite minister, procured for him the place of gentleman of the bedchamber to the Prince of Wales. In 1715 he entered the House of Commons as member for St Germans, and when the impeachment of James, duke of Ormond (June 21, 1715), came before the House, he used the occasion to put to proof his old rhetorical studies. His maiden speech was youthfully fluent and dogmatic; but on its conclusion the orator was reminded, with many compliments, by an honourable member, that he wanted six weeks of his majority, and consequently that he was amenable to a heavy fine for speaking in the House. Lord Stanhope quitted the Commons with a low bow, and started for the Continent. From Paris he rendered the Government important service by gathering and transmitting information respecting the Jacobite plot; and in 1716 he returned to England, resumed his seat, and took frequent part in the debates. In that year came the quarrel between the king and the heir apparent. Stanhope, whose politic instinct obliged him to worship the rising rather than the setting sun, remained faithful to the prince, although the ministry made several attempts to win him over. In 1723 a vote for the Government got him the place of captain of the yeomen of the guard; his happy reply to his predecessor, Lord Townshend, is a fine example of spirituel urbanity, and is valuable as indicating, among other examples, his contempt for the money-jobbing system that obtained at court. In 1725, on the revival of the Bath, the red riband was offered to him, but was declined.

In 1726 his father died, and Lord Stanhope became earl of Chesterfield. He took his seat in the Upper House, and his oratory, never effective in the Commons by reason of its want of force and excess of finish, at once became a power. In 1727, on the accession of George IL, Chesterfield was sent to the Hague as ambassador. In this place his tact and temper,his dexterity and discrimination, enabled him to do good service, and he was rewarded with Walpole’s friendship, a Garter, and the place of Lord High Steward. In 1732 there was born to him, by a certain Madame du Bouchet, the son, Philip Stanhope, for whose advice and instruction were afterwards written the famous Letters. In the same year, being somewhat broken in health and fortune by his sojourn abroad, he resigned his embassy and returned to England. A few months’ rest enabled him to resume his seat in the Lords, of which he was one of the acknowledged leaders. He supported the ministry, but his allegiance was not the blind fealty Walpole exacted of his followers. The Excise Bill, the great premier’s favourite measure, was vehemently opposed by him in the Lords, and by his three brothers in the Commons. Walpole bent before the storm, and abandoned the measure; but Chesterfield was summarily dismissed from his Stewardship. For the next two years he led the opposition in the Upper House, leaving no stone unturned to effect the downfall of the man who had wronged him. In 1742 Walpole fell, and Carteret reigned in his stead. The new ministry, however, had not Chesterfield either in its ranks or among its supporters. He remained in opposition, distinguishing himself by the courtly bitterness of his attacks on George II, who learned to hate him violently. In 1744 the king was compelled to abandon Carteret, and the coalition or “Broad Bottom” party, led by Chesterfield and Pitt, came into office. In the troublous state of European politics the earl’s conduct and experience were more useful abroad than at home, and he was sent to the Hague as ambassador a second time. The success of his mission was complete; and on his return a few weeks afterwards he received the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland, a place he had long coveted.

Short as it was, Chesterfield’s Irish administration was of great service to his country, and is unquestionably that part of his political life which does him most honour. To have conceived and carried out a policy which, with certain reservations, Burke himself might have originated and owned is indeed no small title to regard. The earl showed himself finely capable in practice as in theory, vigorous and tolerant, a man to be feared, and a leader to be followed; he took the government entirely into his own hands, repressed the jobbery traditional to the office, established schools and manufactures, and at once conciliated and kept in check the Orange and Popish factions. In 1746, however, he had. to exchange the lord-lieutenancy for the place of Secretary of State. With a curious respect for those theories his familiarity with the secret social history of France had caused him to entertain, he hoped and attempted to retain a hold over the king through the influence of Lady Yarmouth, though the futility of such means had already been demonstrated to him by his relations with Queen Caroline’s “ma bonne Howard.” The influence of Newcastle and Sandwich, however, was too strong for him; he was thwarted and over-reached; and in 1748, he resigned the seals, and returned to cards and his books with the admirable composure which was one of his most striking characteristics.

The dukedom offered him by George II., whose ill-will his fine tact had overcome, was refused. He continued for some years to attend the Upper House, and to take I>art in its proceedings. In 1751, seconded by Lord Macclesfield, President of the Royal Society, and Bradley, the eminent mathematician, he distinguished himself greatly in the debates on the calendar, and succeeded in making the new style a fact. Deafness, however, was gradually affecting him, and he withdrew little by little from society and the practice of politics. In 1754 occurred the famous dispute with Johnson over the dedication to the English Dictionary. This quarrel (to which are owing the doctor’s noble letter and some half dozen of his roughest mots, and the earl’s clever portrait of the “intelligent Hottentot ”), with the neglect it assumed on Chesterfield’s part, has been fatal to his reputation as a man of heart. During the twenty years of life that followed this episode, Chesterfield wrote and read a great deal, but went little into society. In 1768 died Philip Stanhope, the child of so many hopes; and the earl, who had no children by his wife, Melusina von Schulemberg, illegitimate daughter of George I., whom he married in 1733, adopted his godson the heir to the title and estates. His famous jest (which even Johnson allowed to have merit),—“Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years, but we don’t choose to have it known”—is the best description possible of his humour and condition during the latter part of this period of decline. To the deafness was added blindness, but his memory and his fine manners only left him with life; his last words (“Give Dayrolles a chair ”) prove that he had neither forgotten his friend nor the way to receive him. He died on the 24th of March 1773.

Chesterfield was selfish, calculating, and contemptuous; he was not naturally generous, and he practised dissimulation till it became part of his nature. In spite of his brilliant talents, and of the admirable training he received, his life, on the whole, cannot be pronounced a success. His anxiety and the pains he took to become an orator have been already noticed, and Horace Walpole, who had heard all the great orators, preferred a speech of Chesterfield’s to any other; yet the earl’s eloquence is not to be compared with that of Pitt. Samuel Johnson, who was not perhaps the best judge in the world, pronounced his manners to have been “exquisitely elegant;” yet as a courtier he was utterly worsted by Robert Walpole, whose manners were anything but refined, and even by Newcastle. He desired to be known as a protector of letters and literary men; and his want of heart or head over the Dictionary dedication, though explained and excused by Croker, none the less inspired the famous change in a famous line—“Toil, envy, want, the patron, or the jail.” His published writings have had with posterity a very indifferent success; his literary reputation rests on a volume of letters never designed to appear in print. The son for whom he worked so hard and thought so deeply failed especially where his father had most desired he should succeed, becoming, not a fine gentleman, but a commonplace book-worm. As a politician and statesman, Chesterfield’s fame rests on his short but brilliant administration of Ireland. As an author he stands or falls by the Letters to his Son, first published by Stanhope’s widow in 1774. The Letters are brilliantly written,—full of elegant wisdom, of keen wit, of admirable portrait-painting, of exquisite observation and deduction. Against the charge of an undue insistence on the external graces of manner Chesterfield has been adequately defended by Lord Stanhope (History, iii. 34). Against the often iterated accusation of immorality, it should be remembered that the Letters reflected the morality of the age, and that their author only systematized and reduced to writing the principles of conduct by which, deliberately or unconsciously, the best and the worst of his contemporaries were governed.

See Chesterfield’s Miscellaneous Works, London, 1777-8, 2 vols. 4to; and Letters to his Son (edited by Lord Mahon), London, 1845- 51, 5 vols. See also Lord Mahon (Stanhope), History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Pease of Versailles.