| Description | Includes reference to: the Catholic Question [9 Jan 1810 - 17 Feb 1810], other parliamentary business and political comments, including reference to Lord Wellington in Portugal [22 Feb 1810], attack on Lord Grenville [4 Apr 1810], reform [9 May 1810], Lord Wellington's battle with the French [21 May - 24 May 1811], [Spencer] Perceval [3 Jun 1811], patronage of parliamentary seats [27 Aug 1811] and agricultural improvements [22 Sep 1811]; removing lace from coat ('people would see that you had been tampering with the cloth, and you would cut a sort of shabby-genteel appearance') [17 Feb 1810]; review of Sydney Smith's sermon [4 Apr 1810]; Oxford [6 Oct 1810 - 9 Oct 1811]; Roscoe [13 Apr 1811]; the health of the King [1 Jun 1811 - 6 Aug 1811]; his father's financial affairs and reading a Book on Taste and Swift's political tracts, referring to 'Gulliver' and the 'Tale of a Tub' [27 Aug 1811]; Copleton's health [18 Sep 1811]; Miss Seward [22 Sep 1811]; Mr G. Cranstoun [21 Oct - 26 Oct 1811]; Giffard [Nov 1811]; and draft writings about Mr Fox [29 Dec 1811].
Includes letters written from Whitehall, Brighton and Tunbridge Wells.
Letter dated 27 Aug 1811: ‘My interference with my father’s affairs will not require much trouble or much arithmetic. I merely mean to undertake that very general superintendence which is sufficient to prevent boundless peculation, and palpable mismanagements. The resources are luckily very considerable, and we have nothing to fear but from that decline in manufactures & trade which must equally affect the whole country... My life ought, and I think, might have been a very happy one, for I was born not only to easy circumstances, but to what is infinitely better, to a strong constitution and to great gaiety of mind. But I was ill-used to a degree that is scarcely credible by those whom nature designed to be my protectors... the great object of those... was to turn me out into the world a pitiful degraded creation, void of every feeling and of every accomplishment that belongs to a gentleman... The effects of these misfortunes will last as long as I live. They have broken my spirits, soured my temper, impaired my health, and crushed me far beneath the level of those whose equal I might have otherwise been... it is a subject often uppermost in my mind...’ |