ff. 242, 309, 434). They therefore did their utmost to push forward the negotiation with the four electors. This had hitherto made but little way; and Townshend had been equally baffled in the persistent efforts which during the spring and summer of 1729 he had made through Lord Chesterfield to animate the Dutch (King, Life of Locke, ii. notes, pp. 67 et seq.; Coxe, Walpole, ii. 524 et seq., 659 et seq.). Meanwhile the king of Prussia's relations with George II, strained by his practice of recruiting on Hanoverian soil and disputes arising out of his recent intrusion, as it was generally deemed, into the conservatorship of Mecklenburg (May 1728) under imperial letters patent, had been brought to the verge of rupture by a frontier fracas at Clamei (near Magdeburg) on 28 June 1729. Townshend had succeeded in averting war—the dispute was referred to arbitration (September; Carlyle, Frederick the Great, ii. 266 et seq.)—but in the following spring his Prussian majesty declared unequivocally for the emperor. Townshend then became urgent for immediate mobilisation for a campaign in the empire, as well as in Italy, upon a large and well-concerted plan. Fleury, however, remained obstinately pacific, and Walpole, whose lead Newcastle followed, was determined that the resources of diplomacy should be exhausted before the adoption of a bellicose attitude. Townshend, already offended with Newcastle on other grounds (Coxe, Walpole, ii. 623), now exerted all his influence with the king to procure his dismissal, designing, if possible, to replace him by Lord Chesterfield, who shared his views, or Sir Paul Methuen, whom he hoped to find pliant. This scheme, however, was frustrated by Walpole and the queen, and the defeat was followed by Townshend's resignation (15 May 1730) (ib. pp. 693 et seq.) Retiring to his Norfolk estate, Townshend devoted himself to the improvement of agriculture (Kent, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Norfolk, 1794, p. 17). At Rainham he carried on that series of agricultural experiments and improvements which gained him the nickname of ‘Turnip’ Townshend. He had long been interested in agriculture; in 1728 we find him, according to the journal of a contemporary agricultural peer, Lord Cathcart, listening with much attention to an account of the Scottish ‘improvers.’ Pope refers to Townshend's turnips (Imitations of Horace, bk. ii. ep. ii. 273), and in a footnote he informs us that ‘that kind of rural improvement which arises from turnips’ was ‘the favourite subject of Townshend's conversation.’ Of all Townshend's improvements, this introduction of turnip culture on a large scale (turnips had long been known in England as a garden vegetable) is most important, as without it the subsequent developments in the breeding of stock by Bakewell of Dishley, Curwen of Workington, and others would have been impossible. Yet the introduction of turnips, though the most important, was apparently not the only innovation of Townshend's. He is said to have introduced the practice of marling, to have advocated enclosures, and to have demonstrated the value of clover as well as of turnips as one of the pivots of agricultural progress.
Townshend died at Rainham on 21 June 1738 (Hist. Reg. Chron. Diary, 1738, p. 24). He was custos rotulorum and lord-lieutenant of Norfolk 1701–13 and 1714–30, and a governor of the Charterhouse (appointed 31 Oct. 1723).
Townshend was a handsome burly man, of brusque manners and hot temper, but a loyal friend, and with his friends a genial companion. In parliament he always spoke to the point, but without eloquence (Chesterfield, Letters, ed. Mahon, i. 368), and his haughty disposition rendered him inapt in the delicate art of managing men. An attempt which he made towards the close of his career to establish a party of his own entirely failed, and his differences with Walpole were aggravated by frequent ebullitions of ill-humour. A tradition of a fracas between the two statesmen arising out of a dispute on some point of policy is vague and ill authenticated, but may have some basis of fact (Coxe, Walpole, i. 335). Well versed in European politics, not without address as a diplomatist, a competent French scholar, and master of a style admirably adapted by its precision and perspicuity for correspondence on affairs of state, he was unfitted for their consummate conduct by a singular union of discordant qualities. With only moderate abilities, he had boundless confidence in his own capacity to play a principal part in the continental drama, and revelled in complicated combinations and what he supposed to be adroit strokes of policy. He was slow in making up his mind, but, once it was made up, he gave ready credence to whatever agreed with it, brooked neither contradiction nor demur, and was as precipitate in action as he had been cunctative in deliberation. These characteristics are apparent in the audacity which outran his instructions in the negotiation of the barrier treaty, in the credulity which accepted almost without inquiry the spurious secret treaty of Vienna, in the levity
