During Walpole’s absence he was returned to parliament in 1741 for the Cornish borough of Callington, over which his elder brother, through his marriage with the heiress of the Rolles, exercised supreme influence. He represented three constituencies in succession, Callington 1741-54, the family borough of Castle Rising from 1754 to 1757, and the more important constituency of King’s Lynn, for which his father had long sat in parliament, from the latter date until 1768. In that year he retired, probably because his success in political life had not equalled his expectations, but he continued until the end of his days to follow and to chronicle the acts and the speeches of both Houses of Parliament. Through his father’s influence he had obtained three lucrative sinecures producing at least £5000 a year, and for many years (1745-84) he enjoyed a share, estimated at about £1500 a year, of a second family perquisite, the collectorship of customs. The possession of these ample endowments and of a leasehold house in Arlington Street, which was left to him by his father, enabled him, a bachelor all his days, to gratify every expensive luxury and every costly taste. He purchased in 1747 the charmingly situated villa of Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, on the banks of the Thames, and six years later began a series of alterations in the Gothic style, not completed for nearly a quarter of a century later, under which the original cottage became transformed into a building without parallel in Europe. Some years after this purchase he established a printing-press there for the gratification of his literary tastes, and many of the first editions of his own works were struck off within its walls. At this press were produced in 1753 the clever, if eccentric, designs of Richard Bentley (the youngest child of the great doctor, and for some time a protegé of Horace Walpole) for the poems of Gray; and among the reprints of Strawberry Hill were the Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Memoirs of Grammont, Hentzner’s Journey into England, and Lord Whitworth’s Account of Russia. The rooms of this whimsical edifice were crowded with curiosities of every description, and the house and its contents were shown, by tickets to admit four persons, between 12 and 3 from May to October, but only one party was admitted on each day, and the owner, although enamoured of notoriety, simulated discontent at this limited intrusion into his privacy. His nephew, the reckless third earl, died in 1791, and Horace succeeded to the peerage, but he never took his place in the House of Lords, and sometimes signed his name as “the uncle of the late earl of Orford.” All his life long he was the victim of the gout, but he lived to extreme old age, and died unmarried, in Berkeley Square, London, March 2, 1797, when his body was buried privately at Houghton. The ancient estate of the family descended to the earl of Cholmondeley, whose ancestor had married Horace Walpole’s younger sister. All Walpole’s printed books and manuscripts were left to Robert Berry and his two daughters, Mary and Agnes; their friendship had been very dear to the declining days of Walpole, who, it has even been said, wished to marry Mary Berry. By his will each of the ladies obtained a pecuniary legacy of £4000, and for their lives the house and garden, formerly the abode of Kitty Clive, which adjoined Strawberry Hill. Strawberry Hill went to Mrs Anne Damer, daughter of his lifelong friend General Conway, for her life, but it was entailed on the countess dowager of Waldegrave and her heirs. Walpole died worth £91,000 in the three per cents, and gave the whole of it away, the chief legacy being £10,000 for his niece the duchess of Gloucester. The collections of Strawberry Hill, which he had spent nearly fifty years in amassing, were dispersed under the hammer of George Robins in 1842. They are described in a catalogue of that date, and in a series of articles in the Gentleman's Magazine for that year.

The pen was ever in Horace Walpole’s hands, and his entire compositions would fill many volumes. His two works of imagination, the romance of the Castle of Otranto and the tragedy of the Mysterious Mother, are now all but forgotten. The former, which purported to be a story translated by William Marshal, gent., from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, canon of the church of St Nicholas at Otranto, was often reprinted in England, and was translated into both French and Italian. By Sir Walter Scott it was lauded to the skies for its power in raising the passions of fear and pity; from Hazlitt it met with intense condemnation. The Mysterious Mother, a tragedy too horrible for representation on any stage, was never intended for performance in public, and only fifty copies of it were printed at Strawberry Hill. By Byron, who, like Horace Walpole, affected extreme liberalism, and like him never forgot that he was born within the purple, this tragedy was pronounced “of the highest order.” Several of Walpole’s antiquarian works merit high praise. The volume of Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third, one of the earliest attempts to rehabilitate a character previously stamped with infamy, showed acuteness and research. These doubts provoked several answers, which are criticized in a supplement edited by Dr Hawtrey for the Philobiblon Society. A work of more lasting reputation, which has retained its vitality for more than a century, is entitled Anecdotes of Painting in England, with some Account of the Principal Artists; collected by George Vertue, and now digested and published from his original manuscripts by Horace Walpole (4 vols., 1762-71). Its value to art students and to admirers of biographical literature demanded its frequent reproduction, and it had the good fortune to be re-edited with additions by the Rev. James Dallaway in five volumes (1826-28), and then again was revised and edited by R. N. Wornum in 1849. A cognate volume, also based on the materials of Vertue, is entitled the Catalogue of Engravers Bom and Resident in England, which, like its more famous predecessor, often passed through the press. On the Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors of England Walpole, whose professed liberalism only stopped short of the principles of republicanism, spent many hours of toilsome research. The best edition is that which appeared in five volumes, in 1806, under the competent editorship of Thomas Park, who carefully verified and diligently augmented the labours of the original author. As a senator himself, or as a private person following at a distance the combats at St Stephen’s, Walpole recorded in a diary the chief incidents in English politics. For twenty-seven years he studied, a silent spectator for the most part, the characters of the chief personages who trod the stage of politics, and when he quitted the scene he retained the acquaintance of many of the chief actors. If he was sometimes prejudiced, he rarely distorted the acts of those whom he disliked; and his prejudices, which lie on the surface, were mainly against those whom he considered the traitors of his father. These diaries extend from 1750 to 1783, and cover a period of momentous importance in the annals of the national history. The Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of George IT. was edited by Lord Holland; its successor, Memoirs of the Reign of King George III. , was published under the editorial care of Sir Denis Le Marchant, who poured into his annotations a vast store of information; the last volumes of the series, Journal of the Reign of George III. from 1771 to 1783, were edited and illustrated by Doran; aud to these works should be added the Reminiscences, which Walpole wrote in 1788 for the gratification of the Misses Berry. These labours would in themselves have rendered the name of Horace Walpole famous for all time, but his delightful Letters are the crowning glory of his life. His correspondents were numerous and widespread, but the chief of them were Cole the clerical antiquary of Milton, Robert Jephson, an obscure play-writer in Ireland, Mason the poet, Lord Hertford during his embassy in Paris, the countess of Ossory, Lord Harcourt, George Montagu, one of his earliest friends, Conway, and Sir Horace Mann. With most of these friends he quarrelled, but the friendship of the last two, in the former case through genuine liking, and in the latter through his fortunate absence from England, was never interrupted. The Letters were published at different dates, but the standard collection is that by Peter Cunningham (9 vols., 1857-59), and to it should be added the volumes of the letters addressed to Walpole by his old friend Madame du Deffand (1810, 4 vols.), and the publication of Dr Doran, Mann and Manners at the Court of Florence, which is founded on the epistles sent in return to Walpole by the envoy-extraordinary. A handsome little volume, Horace Walpole and his World, consisting of select passages from his letters, extracted and strung together in a simple narrative by Mr L. B. Seeley, was issued in 1884. Walpole has been called “the best letter-writer in the English language”; and few indeed are the names, possibly none save Swift and Cowper, which can compare with his. In these compositions his very foibles are penned for our amusement, and his love of trifles—for, in the words of another Horace, he was ever “nescio quid meditans nugarum et totus in illis”—minister to our instruction. To these friends he communicated every fashionable scandal, every social event, and the details of every political struggle in English life. The politicians and the courtiers of his day were more akin to his character than were the chief authors of his age, and the weakness of his intellectual perceptions stands out most prominently in his estimates of such writers as Johnson and Goldsmith, Gibbon and Hume. On many occasions he displayed great liberality of disposition, and he bitterly deplored for the rest of his days his neglect of the unhappy Chatterton.

Abundant information about Horace Walpole will be found in the Memoirs of him and of his contemporaries edited by Eliot Warburton, Jesse’s George Selwyn and his Contemporaries, and the extracts from the journals and correspondence of Miss Berry; and it would be unpardonable to omit mention of Macaulay’s sketch of Walpole's life and character.

WALPOLE, Sir Robert, Earl of Orford (1676— 1745), prime minister of England from 1721 to 1742, was the third but eldest surviving son of Robert Walpole, M.P., of Houghton in Norfolk, by Mary, only daughter and heiress of Sir Jeffery Burwell, of Rougham, in Suffolk. The father, a jolly old squire who revelled in outdoor sport and the pleasures of the table, transmitted to his son the chief traits in his own character. The future statesman was born at Houghton on 26th August 1676, and was sent to Eton and to King’s College, Cambridge, where he was admitted as scholar on 22d April 1696. At this time he was destined, as a younger son, for the church, but his two elder brothers died young and he became the heir to an estate producing about £2000 a year, whereupon in May 1698 he resigned his fellowship, and was soon afterwards withdrawn by his father from the university. His education lasted sufficiently long, however, to enable him to gratify the tastes of the county members in parliament with the usual quotations from Horace, though in classical attainments he was excelled by Pulteney, Carteret, and many others of his contemporaries in politics. On his father’s decease the electors of the family borough of Castle Rising returned him in January 1701 to the House of Commons as their representative, but after two short-lived parliaments he sought the suffrages of the more important constituency of King’s Lynn (1702), and was elected as its member at every subsequent dissolution until he left the Lower House. From the first he took a keen interest in the business of the House, and not many months passed away before his shrewdness in counsel and his zeal for the interests of the Whigs were generally recognized. In March 1705, according to the statement of Archdeacon Coxe, he was appointed one of the council to Prince George of Denmark, the inactive husband of Queen Anne, and then lord high admiral of England. Complaints against the administration of the navy were then loud and frequent (Burton’s Queen Anne, ii. 22-31), and the responsibilities of his new position tested his capacity for public life. His abilities proved equal to the occasion, and justified his advancement, in succession to his life-long rival Henry St John, to the more important position of secretary-at-war (February 1708), an office of recent creation but in time of war of great responsibility, which brought him into immediate contact with the duke of Marlborough and the queen. With this post he held for a short time (1710) the treasurership of the navy, and by the discharge of his official duties and by his skill in debate became admitted to the inmost councils of the ministry. He could not succeed, however, in diverting Godolphin from the great error of that statesman’s career, the impeachment of Sacheverell, and when the committee was appointed for elaborating the articles of impeachment Walpole was called upon to act as one of the managers for the House of Commons. On the wreck of the Whig party which ensued upon this fatal mistake, Walpole shared in the general misfortune, but neither cajolery nor menace could induce him to retain office, and he took his place with his friends in opposition. His energies now shone forth with irresistible vigour; both in debate and in the pamphlet press he took up the cause of the ejected ministry, and in revenge for his zeal his political opponents brought against him an accusation of personal corruption. On these charges, now universally acknowledged to have proceeded from party animosity, he was in the spring of 1712 expelled from the House and committed to the Tower. His prison cell now became the rendezvous of the Whigs among the aristocracy, while the populace heard his praises commemorated in the ballads of the streets. The ignominy which the Tories had endeavoured to inflict upon him was turned into augmented reputation. At the dissolution of 1713 the faithful electors of King’s Lynn again placed their trust in him, and during this parliament, the last summoned by Queen Anne, he took the leading part in defence of Steele against the attacks of the Tories.

With the accession of George, the Whigs regained their supremacy, and for nearly half a century they retained the control of English politics. The prizes fell to the victors, and Walpole obtained the lucrative if unimportant post of paymaster-general of the forces in the administration which was formed under the nominal rule of Lord Halifax, but of which Stanhope and Townshend were the guiding spirits. A committee of secrecy was appointed to inquire into the acts of the late ministry, and especially into the peace of Utrecht, and to Walpole was entrusted the place of chairman. Most of his colleagues in office were members of the House of Lords, and the lead in the Commons quickly became the reward of his talents and assiduity. Halifax died, and after a short interval Walpole was exalted into the conspicuous position of first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer (11th October 1715). Jealousies, however, prevailed among the Whigs, and the German favourites of the new monarch quickly showed their discontent with the heads of the ministry. Townshend was forced into resigning his secretaryship of state for the dignified exile of viceroy of Ireland, but he never crossed the sea to Dublin, and the support which Sunderland and Stanhope, the new advisers of the king, received from him and from Walpole was so grudging that Townshend was dismissed from the lord-lieutenancy (April 1717), and Walpole on the next morning withdrew from the ministry. They plunged into opposition with unflagging energy, and in resisting the measure by which it was proposed to limit the royal prerogative in the creation of peerages Walpole exerted all his powers. This display of ability brought about a partial reconciliation of the two parties among the Whigs. To Townshend was given the presidency of the council, and Walpole once again assumed the paymastership of the forces (June 1720). On the financial crash which followed the failure of the South Sea scheme, the public voice insisted that he should assume a more prominent place in public life. At this crisis in England’s fortunes Stanhope and Craggs were seized by death, Aislabie, the chancellor of the exchequer, was committed to the Tower, and Sunderland, though acquitted of corruption, was compelled to resign the lead. Walpole, as first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer (April 1721), became with Townshend responsible for the country’s government (though for some years they had to contend with the influence of Carteret), and during the rest of the reign of George I. they remained at the head of the ministry. The hopes of the Jacobites, which revived with these financial troubles, soon drooped in disappointment. Atterbury, their boldest leader, was exiled; Bolingbroke, in dismay at their feebleness, sued for pardon, and was permitted to return to his own country. The troubles which broke out in Ireland over Wood’s patent for a copper coinage were allayed through the tact of Carteret, who had been banished as its lord lieutenant by his triumphant rivals. The Continent was still troubled with wars and rumours of wars, but a treaty between England, Prussia, and France was successfully effected at Hanover in 1725. England was kept free from warfare, and in the general prosperity which ensued Walpole basked in the royal favour. His eldest son was raised to the peerage as Baron Walpole (10th June 1723), and he himself became a knight of the Bath in 1725, and was rewarded with the Garter in 1726. Next year the first King George died, and Walpole’s enemies fondly believed that he would be driven from office, but their expectations were doomed to disappointment. The confidence which the old king had reposed in him was renewed by his successor, and in the person of Queen Caroline, the discreet ruler of her royal spouse, the second George, the Whig minister found a faithful and life-long friend. For three years he shared power with Townshend, but the jealous Walpole brooked no rival near the throne, and his brother-in-law withdrew from official life to the groves of Norfolk in May 1730. Before and after that event the administration was based on two principles, sound finance at home and freedom from the intrigues and wars which raged abroad. On the Continent congresses and treaties were matters of annual arrangement, and if the work of the plenipotentiaries soon faded it was through their labours that England enjoyed many years of peace. Walpole’s influence received a serious blow in 1733. The enormous frauds on the excise duties forced themselves on his attention, and he proposed some arrangements by which the income resulting to the national exchequer from the duties on wine and tobacco might be largely increased. His opponents fastened on these proposals with irresistible force, and so serious an agitation stirred the country that the ministerial measure was dropped amid general rejoicing. Several of his most active antagonists were dismissed from office or deprived of their regiments, but their spirit remained unquenched, and when Walpole met a new House of Commons in 1734 his supporters were far less numerous. The Gin Act of 1736, by which the tax on that drink was raised to an excessive amount, led to disorders in the suburbs of London; and the imprisonment of two notorious smugglers in the Tolbooth at Edinburgh resulted in those Porteous riots which have been rendered famous in the Heart of Midlothian. These events weakened his influence with large classes in England and Scotland, but his parliamentary supremacy remained unimpaired, and was illustrated in 1737 by his defeat of Sir John Barnard’s plan for the reduction of the interest on the national debt, and by his passing of the Playhouse Act, under which the London theatres are still regulated. That year, however, heralded his fall from power. His constant friend Queen Caroline died, and the prince of Wales, long discontented with his parents and their minister, flung himself into active opposition. Many of the boroughs within the limits of the duchy of Cornwall were obedient to the prince’s will, and he quickly attracted to his cause a considerable number of adherents, of whom Pitt and the Grenvilles were the most influential. The leading orators of England thundered against Walpole in the senate, and the press resounded with the taunts of the poet and pamphleteer, illustrious and obscure, who found abundant food for their invectives in the troubles with Spain over its exclusive pretensions to the continent of America and its claim to the right of searching English vessels. The minister long resisted the pressure of the opposition for war, but at the close of 1739 he abandoned his efforts to stem the current, and with a divided cabinet was forced, as the king would not allow him to resign, into hostility with Spain. The Tory minority had seceded from parliament, but at the commencement of the session, in November 1739, they returned to their places with redoubled energies. The campaign was prosecuted with vigour, but the successes of the troops brought little strength to Walpole's declining popularity, and when parliament was dissolved in April 1741 his influence with his fellow-countrymen had faded away. His enemies were active in opposition, while some of his colleagues were lukewarm in support. In the new House of Commons political parties were almost evenly balanced. Their strength was tried immediately on the opening of parliament. The Bossiney election went against him by six votes; a member of the opposition was elected as chairman of committees by a majority of four; and the ministry was twice defeated over the Westminster election. The voting on the return for Chippenham was accepted as a decisive test of parties, and, as Walpole was beaten on a preliminary point in connexion with the return, he resolved upon resigning his places. On the 9th of February 1742 he was created earl of Orford, and two days later he ceased to be prime minister. A committee of inquiry into the conduct of his ministry for the previous ten years was ultimately granted, but its deliberations ended in nought, and Walpole was allowed to spend the rest of his days in retirement at Houghton. There he died 18th March 1745, and in its parish church he was buried on March 25. With the permanent places, valued at £15,000 per annum, which he had secured for his family, and with his accumulations in office, he had rebuilt the mansion at great expense, and formed a gallery of pictures within its walls at a cost of <£40,000, but the collection was sold by his grandson for a much larger sum in 1779 to the empress of Russia, and the estate and house of Houghton, a vast and gloomy edifice described in the Art Journal for March 1887, passed to Lord Cholmondeley, the third earl having married the premier’s younger daughter. Walpole was twice married,—in 1700 to Catherine, eldest daughter of John Shorter, who died in 1737, having had issue three sons and two daughters, and in 1738 to Maria, daughter of Thomas Skerret, a lady often mentioned in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague.

Civil wars at home and the protracted struggle with France on the Continent had produced in Englishmen an intense desire for peace, and, in their remembrance of the constant disputes under the previous two sovereigns over the succession to the throne, the great majority of them cheerfully consented to the rule of the electors of Hanover. Walpole knew the disposition of his countrymen, and he gratified their tastes by consistently acting both in ecclesiastical and civil affairs on the principle quieta non movere. He had profited by the lesson of the ill-fated prosecution of Sacheverell, and while he was prime minister the Church of England slept in peace without fear of danger from her enemies. The followers of dissent ranged themselves behind his banner, but they were fed by promises rather than by actual concessions, and the wisest among them were contented with permission to worship undisturbed. His aim ever was to maintain peace abroad and quiet at home, and tho chief blot on his ministerial career is that through love of office he allowed himself to be drawn into tho war with Spain. In business matters he was methodical; his judgment was sound in financial affairs; and his speeches were marked by clearness of expression. Pope, who loved him not, has borne witness to his merits “in the happier hours of social pleasure,” but neither in private nor in public life were his manners refined or his estimates of men and women exalted. “All these men have their price” was his estimate of members of the House of Commons, and although he gathered together at Houghton many of the masterpieces of painting he was not a lover either of art or of letters. All the eminent writers of the day were opposed to his rule, and at his fall his jealous spirit had driven into opposition every politician of repute. Great as his faults were, his character was suited to the temperament of the period within which he lived, and during his tenure of office his country advanced in prosperity by leaps and by bounds.

His life is written by Archdeacon Coxe in three ponderous folios, and has more recently been described in one volume by Mr Ewald.