William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, was a British politician and statesman, who served as the 5h Prime Minister of the Great Britain.
Background
William Cavendish was born on 8 May 1720 in Hardwike. William Cavendish had what might be described as a birthright to a place in politics, as the scion of a monarchist landed family that since 1688 had been a bulwark of the Revolution Settlement and the Whig party. Staunchly loyal to the Crown and to the Whig “old corps,” he could also be loftily independent as befitted a wealthy grandee. The Cavendishes of Chats-worth and Hardwick, extensive landowners in Derbyshire, had been earls of Devonshire (a nominal county title, for they held no land there) since the early seventeenth century, and the dukedom was granted the family by William III in 1694. The second duke was a zealous supporter of the Hanoverian succession, and from 1714 to 1764 without a break, the dukes of Devonshire were given the honor of being lords lieutenant of Derbyshire. Cavendish’s father, the third duke, was a loyal supporter of Sir Robert Walpole and served as lord lieutenant of Ireland from 1737 to 1743; he also had family ties with the Duke of Newcasde and the latter’s brother Henry Pelham.
Career
When William Cavendish came of age in 1741 as marquess of Hartington, he was at once elected M.P. for Derbyshire, a seat that he held for ten years. At the outset of his political career he acted vigorously to rally support for Walpole in the disputed elections that led to the minister’s fall in February 1742. In November 1742, Hartington was selected by Pelham to move the Address of Thanks in reply to the King’s Speech—an honor that marked him as a staunch ministerial supporter.
His father’s retirement from the royal court in 1749 did not hold back Hartington’s career. In April 1751, on the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, he was offered the post of tutor to Frederick’s son, the future Prince of Wales, which he declined. In June 1751, Pelham secured for him the more prestigious court post of Master of the Horse, which carried a place in the cabinet. In order to accept it, Hartington had to quit his Commons seat and enter the Lords, taking his father’s barony of Cavendish. Pelham died in March 1754, and Cavendish continued on the fringes of high politics as a supporter of Newcastle and of his good friend Henry Fox.
In March 1755 he was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland, despite his being an Irish landowner, with the mission of bringing to heel the increasingly resdess Dublin Parliament.
In May 1756 he left his Irish post to return to Westminster politics, at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. The loss of Minorca in June that year led Henry Fox to resign his post as secretary of state for the Southern Deparment (home secretary) in October rather than defend the ministry’s record in the new session of Parliament. Newcasde, who then headed the ministry, had lost public confidence and needed the support of William Pitt, the Elder, in order to form a stable government. The king, however, disliked and distrusted Pitt; and Pitt in turn would not join any ministry that included Fox, and therefore refused to support Newcastle.
To resolve this impasse, at Pitt’s suggestion, Devonshire was called away from Chatsworth to take the Treasury; as a Whig stalwart, he could take over without losing the support of Newcastle’s many “old corps” followers. Newcastle and Lord Chancellor Hardwicke resigned on 5 November 1756, and on the next day Devonshire became First Lord of the Treasury, with Pitt as his secretary of state for the south. This arrangement was from the first meant to be temporary; Devonshire had told the king that he would act only for this one parliamentary session.
As acting prime minister, Devonshire presided over the war effort, in which the most notable domestic development was the court martial and execution of Admiral Byng for having failed to relieve Minorca. The king continued to resist Pitt’s dominance, but such was Pitt’s popularity in the country that George was unsuccessful in his attempt to create an alternative ministry under Fox in the spring of 1757. In late June 1757 Devonshire was happy to step down, becoming lord chamberlain and a member of the cabinet in the new, compromise ministry led by Newcastle, with Pitt conducting the war as secretary for the south.
Though he found his court attendance as lord chamberlain tedious, Devonshire served on, supporting the Crown, even after the accession in 1760 of a new young king who did not favor him or his Whig allies, the Dukes of Newcastle and Bedford. The rising power of Lord Bute and the difficulties of negotiating an acceptable peace, together with various maneuvers to ease Pitt out of the ministry, fill the Duke’s fascinating political diary for the years from 1759 to 1762. Pitt resigned in October 1761, Bute taking the seals as secretary of state. On 26 May 1762, after a long, losing struggle against George III, Newcastle finally resigned, and Bute became the First Lord of the Treasury.
Instead of leaving office along with his ally and relative Newcastle, Devonshire maintained what he perhaps saw as his natural place at court, fre- quendy discussing political strategy with the king’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, and trying through him to defeat Bute. He no longer attended meetings of the Privy Council, however; and when in October 1762 George III summoned him to attend a meeting of the cabinet on the peace negotiations, he refused and was immediately dismissed from his post as lord chamberlain. Early in November, the king personally struck out Devonshire’s name from the list of privy councillors. A further rebuff was in store, when in February 1764 Devonshire was dismissed from the lord lieutenancy that his family had held so long. In October he suffered a stroke and went to try the cure at the famous German town of Spa, where he died on 2 November 1764, leaving four children between the ages of 10 and 14.
Connections
In March 1748, Hartington entered into a marriage that had been arranged years earlier, with Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Boyle, daughter and heir of the third Earl of Burlington. Hart- ington’s own parents had made a love match, his mother Catherine Hoskins being merely of modest gentry stock, and she separated from her husband in protest at the strategic match he had struck for his son. Nonetheless, Hartington’s was a happy marriage, bearing out the comment of Lady Mary Wortley Montague: “I do not know any man so fitted to make a wife happy: with so great a vocation for matrimony, that I verily believe if it had not been established before his time, he would have had the glory of the invention. The marriage also brought a great access of land and political power—not only property in London and Ireland but a huge Yorkshire acreage and the nomination of the two M.P.s for Knaresborough.
On Christmas Eve 1754 came the devastating blow of his young wife’s death, and Cavendish was left to bring up four young children.