The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave 1742–1763
The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave 1742–1763
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USDThe 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.
Product details
July 2002Paperback
9780521526890
356 pages
229 × 152 × 20 mm
0.52kg
Available
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Textual conventions
- Introduction
- 1. The court society
- 2. The family background
- 3. The political career of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, 1741–1763
- 4. The publication of the memoirs
- 5. The historical influence of the memoirs
- 6. The text of the memoirs
- Index.
