not obtain the post of governor of the castle of St. Mawes, which Nugent applied for to George Grenville in 1764 in a remarkable letter printed in the ‘Grenville Papers,’ ii. 452–4. As Nugent owned a borough in Cornwall, a county where the Prince of Wales, the unhappy son of George II, was ever scheming to advance his parliamentary influence, and as the prince lacked money, while the rollicking Irishman was wealthy, they soon became fast friends. Nugent was made controller of the prince's household in 1747, and was always nominated to high office in his royal master's imaginary administrations, in return for which favours the needy prince condescended to borrow from him large sums of money. These debts were never repaid, but they were liquidated by George III in ‘places, pensions, and peerages.’ On the prince's death he made his peace with the Pelham administration, and was created a lord of the treasury (6 April 1754). This office he retained until 1759, and he owed his continuance in his place in Pitt's administration of 1756 to the influence of Lord Grenville. From 1760 to 1765 he was one of the vice-treasurers for Ireland; from 1766 to 1768 he held the post of president of the board of trade, and from the latter year until 1782 he was again one of Ireland's vice-treasurers. This exhausts his lists of places, but he was raised to the Irish peerage as Viscount Clare and Baron Nugent in 1766, and promoted to the further dignity of Earl Nugent in the same peerage in 1776, being indebted for his places and his peerages to the king's remembrance of the money lent to the Prince of Wales, and to his unbroken support of every ministry in turn. Nugent's third wife (1757) was Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Drax of Charborough in Dorset, and relict of Augustus, fourth earl of Berkeley, with whom he secured, as he did with his second wife, a large fortune, and failed to obtain happiness in married life. She outlived him, but they had been separated for some years, and he disowned the second of the two daughters whom she bore after their marriage. His last act in politics was an attempt in 1784, unfortunately a failure, to bring about a union between Pitt and Fox, and in that year he retired from parliamentary life, where his wit and humour had made him a popular figure. He died at the house of General O'Donnel, Rutland Square, Dublin, 13 Oct. 1788, when the title and real estate of about 14,000l. per annum passed to the Marquess of Buckingham, who, on marrying (16 April 1775) Mary Elizabeth, his elder daughter, assumed by royal permission the surnames of Nugent and Temple, and obtained the privilege of signing Nugent before all titles whatsoever. The personal property (200,000l.) was bequeathed to two relatives. Nugent was brought up as a Roman catholic, turned protestant, and, last stage of all, died in the bosom of the church which he had abandoned and ridiculed. Popular doubt as to the religion which he professed gave the sting to Oswald's retort to him, ‘What species of christianity do you claim to belong to?’
Nugent was endowed with a vigorous constitution and athletic frame, a stentorian voice, and a wonderful flow of spirits. His speeches in parliament, delivered as they were in a rich Irish brogue, often hovered on the borders of farce, but his unflagging wit usually carried him happily through his difficulties. As for convictions in politics he had none; from the first he laid himself out for the highest bidder, and as his knowledge was inconsiderable and his opinions changed with expediency, he was open to the censure of Lord George Sackville, who dubbed him ‘the most uninformed man of his rank in England,’ adding that nobody could depend upon his attachment (Hist. MSS. Comm. 9th Rep. pt. iii. p. 19).
Nugent's ode to William Pulteney obtained great fame throughout the last century. It described the poet's passage from the creed of Roman catholicism to a purer faith, and the belief which dwelt in his mind afterwards. Two quotations from it, the opening lines and a portion of the seventh stanza, became almost proverbial in literature. The first runs—
Remote from liberty and truth,
By fortune's crime, my early youth
Drank error's poison'd springs;
and the second asserts—
Though Cato liv'd, though Tully spoke,
Though Brutus dealt the godlike stroke,
Yet perish'd fated Rome.
Horace Walpole called this ode a glorious poem, but Gray, in a more critical spirit, writes to the owner of Strawberry Hill: ‘Mr. Nugent sure did not write his own ode,’ and the latest editor of Gray's works adds that ‘Earl Nugent was suspected of paying Mallet to write his best ode, that addressed to Pulteney, his later and obviously unaided efforts being contemptible.’ Many poems by Nugent, and this piece among them, are in ‘Dodsley's Collection,’ ii. 166, &c., and in the ‘New Foundling Hospital for Wit,’ a catalogue of which is given in ‘Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors’ (Park's ed.) v. 288–91. The ode was published separately and anonymously in 1739, and was included in the same year in two anonymous editions of his
