[BUTLER, John].
Some Account of the Character of the late Right Honourable Henry Bilson Legge.
London: Printed for J. Almon … 1764.
4to., pp. 19, [1] publisher’s advertisements; a few spots, but a good copy, with generous margins; disbound.
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Some Account of the Character of the late Right Honourable Henry Bilson Legge.
First edition. Henry Bilson Legge (1708-1764), three times chancellor of the exchequer between 1754 and 1761, attracted both respect and censure. To Pitt, he was ‘the child, and deservedly the favourite child, of the Whigs’. Horace Walpole, on the other hand, thought him a man ‘of a creeping, underhand nature, [who] aspired to the lion’s place by the manoeuvre of the mole’. Legge had earlier been a favourite of Sir Robert Walpole, who got him into the Commons and then found him a place as Treasury secretary, until, in 1741, he overstepped the mark with a proposal of marriage to Sir Robert’s daughter, Maria.
Here, John Butler, a career clergyman with staunch Whig credentials (and likewise described with similar invective by Horace Walpole), defends Legge’s record as a statesman. They had become friends in the late 1750s, when Butler was chaplain to the princess dowager of Wales.
Goldsmiths’ 10043.
