Nathaniel William Wraxall

Background

He was born in Queen's Square, Bristol, on the 8th of April 1751. He was the son of a Bristol merchant, Nathaniel Wraxall, and his wife Anne, great niece of Sir James Thornhill the painter. His grandfather, Nathaniel Wraxall (1687-1731), merchant, was sheriff of Bristol in 1723, eight years previous to his death on 24 March 1731.

Education

He was educated in his native city.

Career

He entered the employment of the East India Company in 1769, and served as judge-advocate and paymaster during the expeditions against Guzcrat and Baroche in 1771.

In the following year he left the service of the company, and returned to Europe. He visited Portugal and was presented to the court, of which he gives a curious account in his Historical Memoirs; and in the N. of Europe he made the acquaintance of several Danish nobles who had been exiled for their support of the deposed Queen Caroline Matilda, sister of George III.

Wraxall at their suggestion undertook to endeavour to persuade the king to act on her behalf. He was able to secure an interview with her at Zcli in September 1774.

His exertions are told in his Posthumous Memoirs. As the queen died on the 11th of May 1775, his schemes came to nothing and he complained that he was out of pocket, but George III took no notice of him for some time.

In 1775 he published his first book, Cursory Remarks made in a Tour through some of the Northern Parts of Europe, which reached its fourth edition by 1807, when it was renamed A Tour Round the Baltic.

In 1777 he travelled again in Germany and Italy.

As he had by this time secured the patronage of important people, he obtained a complimentary lieuteranl's commission from the king on the application of Lord Robert Manners, which gave him the right to wear uniform though he never performed any military service. In this year he published his Memoirs of the Kings of France of the Race of Valois, to which he appended an account of his tour in the Western, Southern and Interior Provinces of France.

In 1778 he went again on his travels to Germany and Italy, and accumulated materials for his Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw and Vienna (1799). In 1780 he entered parliament and sat till 1794 for Ilinton in Wiltshire, Ludgershall and Wallingford, in succession.

As accredited intermediary in this affair Wraxall made several arduous journeys, the incidents of which lose nothing by his reporting in the pages of his Posthumous Memoirs. He had private interviews with the queen in the library and Jardin Anglais at Zell, and conveyed to her on 15 February 1775 a paper containing George III's qualified sanction of the scheme devised by her partisans. He returned to England in April, in the hope of obtaining a personal interview with the king, and a more definite assurance that he would countenance such action as might prove necessary at Copenhagen. But while he was anxiously waiting in Jermyn Street, London, for a favourable answer, the news reached him on 19 May of the sudden death of Caroline Matilda.

He appears to have been living in London in 1776, and he mentions meeting Dr. Dodd in this year, together with Wilkes, Sir William Jones, and De Lolme, at the house of Dilly the bookseller. Dodd invited the company to dine with him at his house in Argyll Street, and the invitation was accepted. In the following year Dodd, while lying in Newgate, made an urgent appeal to Wraxall to exert himself to procure a pardon through Lord Nugent. In the summer of 1777 Wraxall made some stay at The Hague, where he was presented to the Prince of Orange. Before leaving England he had received from George III a lieutenant's commission, granted upon the application of Lord Robert Manners, who then commanded the third regiment of dragoon guards.

In the uniform of this regiment Wraxall visited the theatre at Florence in 1779 and saw Prince Charles Edward. The chevalier was semi-intoxicated; but when ‘he approached near enough to distinguish the English regimental, he instantly stopped, gently shook off the two servants who supported him, one on each side, and, taking off his hat, politely saluted us. ’ He visited Dresden in 1778 and Naples in 1779. There he met Sir William and Lady Hamilton. Upon her authority he introduces into his ‘Memoirs’ some curious anecdotes of private executions, which have been frequently cited.

In 1780 he returned to England, and was elected M. P. for the borough of Hindon in Wiltshire.

In 1781 he was appointed on a committee to inquire into the causes of war in the Carnatic. Lord North was a member of this committee, and in June 1781 he unexpectedly asked Wraxall to spend the day with him at Bushey Park. The minister there told him that the king was most anxious to acknowledge in a proper manner his important services to the late queen of Denmark. Before entering parliament his persistent applications for recompense had been unanswered. The sum of a thousand guineas for his expenses was now awarded him and paid with alacrity, while he also obtained a promise (unfulfilled, owing to North's retirement) of a post in the administration. Early in this same year (1781) Horace Walpole, whose antipathy to rival memoir writers was instinctive, wrote to Mason of Wraxall as ‘popping into every spot where he can make himself talked of, by talking of himself; but I hear he will come to an untimely beginning in the House of Commons’.

This kind anticipation was not realised. In 1783 Wraxall obtained some credit for having despatched an extraordinary gazette to India containing the news of the peace of 1783, which reached Madras six weeks before the official intelligence.

In the same year he ceased to be a follower of Lord North, and, when the division was taken on Fox's ‘India Bill, ’ he joined the minority that followed Pitt. Re-elected for Ludgershall in the general election of 1784, he settled down in the new parliament into a pretty steady follower of Pitt. As such he came under the lash of one of the wittiest writers in the ‘Rolliad, ’ his claims to encylopedism, inferred from his ‘Northern Tour’ (1775), and his fondness for interspersing his speeches with geographical information being satirised in the ninth of the ‘Probationary Odes for the Laureateship. ’ Appended is a burlesque testimonial from Lord Monboddo, affirming his opinion that Wraxall is ‘the purest ourang-outang in Great Britain. ’

In January 1787 Wraxall published anonymously a pamphlet entitled A Short Review of the Political State of Great Britain, six editions of which, an estimated total of seventeen thousand copies, were rapidly circulated in England, while a French version (‘Coup d'eil sur l'état politique de la Grande-Bretagne’) appeared on 23 February. It is chiefly noteworthy for its frank delineation of the Prince of Wales, who is said to have menaced the publisher, Debrett, with a prosecution for libel, and as marking Wraxall's divergence from his leaders on the subject of the Warren Hastings trial; the authorship was actually ascribed to Hastings himself, and his agent, Major Scott, took the trouble to deny this presumption from his seat in the commons. Of the replies issued, one was attributed to Lord Erskine and another to Sir Philip Francis. The deduction one naturally draws from this success, even though it were anonymous, is that Wraxall's capacity and insight into politics were by no means so insignificant as his critics in the quarterlies subsequently assumed.

He was re-elected for Wallingford in 1790, but he had to accede to the wishes of the proprietor of this borough (Sir Francis Sykes) by resigning his seat in 1794. He had lost valuable friends in Lords Nugent and Sackville, and being a novus homo, without sufficient influence either in the country or in the best clubs, his parliamentary career was closed. For some years previous to his retirement from the House of Commons he acted as vakeel or agent for the nabob of Arcot, and was one of the small party of retired Indian officials known as the ‘Bengal squad. ’

Little is known of his later years except that he was made a baronet by the prince regent in 1813.

His Historical Memoirs appeared in 1815. Both they and the Posthumous Memoirs (1836) are very readable and have real historical value.

Wraxall died suddenly at Dover on the 7th of November 1831.

Achievements

• His striking ‘Reminiscences’ of the regent, first published in 1884, form a curious commentary upon this announcement. At Whitehall on 25 September 1813, upon the express nomination of the prince regent, Wraxall was created a baronet, as ‘of Wraxall, Somerset. ’ Two years later were published his ‘Historical Memoirs, ’ the first edition of which entertaining work was sold in the course of a month.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The history of France, under the kings of the race of Valois, from the accession of Charles the Fifth, in 1364, to the death of Charles the Ninth, in 1574.

    (This book, "The history of France : under the kings of th...)

  • Historical Memoirs of My Own Time: V.1

    (This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)

  • Posthumous Memoirs of His Own Time: Volume 2

    (This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 18...)

  • Posthumous Memoirs of His Own Time: Volume 3

    (This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 18...)

  • Historical Memoirs of my Own Time, Volume I

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The History Of France V1: Under The Kings Of The Race Of Valois (1807)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin Dresden Warsaw and Vienna in the Years 1777 1778 and 1779: V. 1

    (This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)

  • Historical memoirs of my own time. 2

    (This book, "Historical memoirs of my own time. 2", by Wra...)

  • Historical Memoirs of My Own Time - Vol. I

    (Historical Memoirs of My Own Time - Vol. I by Nathaniel W...)

  • The Historical and the Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, 1772-1784: Ed., With Notes and Additional Chapters From the Author's Unpublished Ms. (V.4 ) (1884)

    (Originally published in 1884. This volume from the Cornel...)

  • The Historical and the Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, 1772-1784: Ed., With Notes and Additional Chapters From the Author's Unpublished Ms. (V.2 ) (1884)

    (Originally published in 1884. This volume from the Cornel...)

  • The History of France, From the Accession of Henry the Third, To the Death of Louis the Fourteenth.: Preceded By A View of the Civil, Military, and ... at the Accession O Louis the Thirteenth. V.4
  • The Landowners of Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and Buteshire and Glasgow, Paisley & Greenock.: V. 3

Connections

Wraxall married Miss Jane Lascelles in 1789, and died suddenly at Dover on the 7th of November 1831.

His grandson, Sir F. C. Lascelles Wraxall (1828 - 1865), was a miscellaneous writer of some note. See preface to The Historical and Posthumous Memoirs of Sir N. W. Wraxall, bv H. B. Wheatley (London, 1884).

Father:

Nathaniel Wraxall

Mother:

Anne Wraxall

Wife:

Jane Lascelles

Grandfather:

Nathaniel Wraxall

Grandson:

Sir F. C. Lascelles Wraxall