Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/63

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

gether easy in the cabinet, especially after the retirement of Keppel in January 1783. The ministry resigned on 24 Feb. following.

During the prolonged crisis that ensued on Pitt's acceptance of office, Conway, ever swayed by those around him, was infected by the prevailing violence. On the defeat of Pitt's East India Bill in January 1784, he taunted the minister with his silence, pressed him to state his intentions, declared that the conduct of the government was corrupt, and on 1 March supported Fox's motion for an address to the crown for Pitt's dismissal. Parliament was dissolved on the 25th, and Conway's political life ended. He resigned his military command, and retired to Park Place, keeping his governorship and occasionally visiting Jersey. The remainder of his life was pleasantly spent; he enjoyed the beauty of his place, where, among other pursuits, he propagated trees, raising poplars from a cutting brought from Lombardy by Lord Rochford. In 1778 he gave Crabbe [q. v.], the poet, a work on botany, along with other books: all through his life he appears to have been friendly with men of genius. His taste was good, and he has left an enduring monument of it in the bridge at Henley-on-Thames, about which he was busied in 1787 (Walpole, Letters, ix. 118). Before his retirement he invented a furnace for the use of brewers and distillers, for which he afterwards took out a patent. Part of the leisure of his last years was moreover devoted to literary work. In 1789 he sent Walpole a tale which his friend described as ‘very easy and genteel:’ it was evidently in verse. He wrote and printed a prologue to the play ‘The Way to keep him,’ acted by amateurs at the private theatre at Richmond House, in April 1787, and ‘altered from the French,’ the original being ‘Dehors Trompeurs’ of Louis de Boissy, a comedy entitled ‘False Appearances,’ which was first performed at Richmond House, and then published in 1789 with a long dedication to Miss Farren, who acted in it at Drury Lane; the prologue is by the author, the epilogue by Lieutenant-general Burgoyne. Conway's pamphlets in defence of his conduct of the Rochfort expedition have been already noticed. His speech on American affairs, delivered 5 May 1780, was published separately 1781. A collection of his private letters was made by C. Knight, with the intention of publishing a memoir of him, which was never carried out. This collection appears to be in private hands. Several letters to Walpole from 1740 to 1746 are in an appendix to the ‘Rockingham Memoirs,’ i., two or three of later dates are included in the ‘Letters’ of H. Walpole, and some extracts of letters written from Germany in 1774 are in Carlyle's ‘Frederick the Great,’ x. Several drafts and letters belonging to his official correspondence are in the British Museum, especially Addit. MSS. 12440 and 17497–8. On 12 Oct. 1793 he was appointed field-marshal. He died at Park Place on 9 July 1795, in his seventy-fifth year. His picture, painted by Eckardt in 1746 (he refers to it in a letter written to Walpole during the campaign in Scotland, Rockingham Memoirs, i. 447), is engraved by Greatbatch, and is given in Cunningham's edition of Walpole's ‘Letters,’ i. 38.

[H. Walpole's Letters, ed. Cunningham (1880), i–ix.; Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of George II (1822); Memoirs of the Reign of George III, ed. Sir Denis Le Marchant; Journal of the Reign of George III, ed. Doran; Earl of Albemarle's Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham; R. Grenville's (Earl Temple) Grenville Papers; [Conway's] Military Arguments, &c.; [H. Walpole's] Counter-Address, &c.; Burke's Works and Correspondence (1852); Lord E. Fitzmaurice's Life of the Earl of Shelburne; Chatham Correspondence, ed. Taylor and Pringle, iii. iv.; R. P. T. Grenville's (Duke of Buckingham) Courts and Cabinets of George III; Earl Russell's Life of C. J. Fox; Stanhope's Life of Pitt; Sir G. C. Lewis's Administrations of Great Britain; Return of Members of Parliament; Annual Register; Parliamentary History; Beatson's Political Register.]

W. H.

CONWAY, Sir JOHN (d. 1603), governor of Ostend, was the son and heir of Sir John Conway, knight-banneret of Arrow, Warwickshire, by Katherine, daughter of Sir Ralph Verney (Lipscomb, Buckinghamshire, i. 179). He was knighted in 1559 (Addit. MS. 32102, f. 122 a). As he was walking in the streets of London in 1578, Ludovic Grevil came suddenly upon him, and struck him on the head with a cudgel, felling him to the ground, and then attacked him with a sword so fiercely that, but for the intervention of a servant, who warded off the blow, he would have cut off his legs. The privy council sent for Grevil, and committed him to the Marshalsea. The outrage occasioned much excitement, because on the same day Lord Rich was also violently attacked in the streets (Strype, Annals, ii. 547, folio). Being a person of great skill in military affairs, Conway was made governor of Ostend on 29 Dec. 1586 by Robert, earl of Leicester, who was then general of the English auxiliaries in the United Provinces (Thomas, Hist. Notes, i. 408, 436). For some reason he was made a prisoner, as appears from an original letter addressed by him to Sir Francis Walsingham, dated at Ostend 8 Sept. 1588, concerning his imprisonment