the use of every opportunity of securing the good will of Prussia is attested by numerous passages in his correspondence.
On the downfall of Sir Robert Walpole in 1742 (February), Horace thought it prudent to burn a large part of their private correspondence. He rendered a conspicuous service both to the late prime minister and to the existing government by defending in the House of Commons (December), doubtless much against the grain, his brother's very doubtful step of taking sixteen thousand Hanoverians into British pay. When among the pamphlets published on the subject one by Lord Chesterfield and Waller, entitled ‘The Case of the Hanover Tories,’ had created much attention, he was prevailed upon to write an answer to it under the title of ‘The Interest of Great Britain steadily pursued’ (April 1743), which ran through three editions, but which, according to his own account, met with so little encouragement from ministers that he abandoned his intention of following it up with a second part (see his amusing letter to Trevor in Buckinghamshire MSS. p. 87). During the ensuing years, while taking no part in the contests for power and place, he remained a close observer of events and men, displaying his usual courage by a letter to the king in which he urged the appointment of Pitt as secretary at war (January or February 1746), and by a series of letters to the Duke of Cumberland, as well as by an interview (20 Dec. 1747), in which he sought to impress upon the duke, and through him upon the king, that nothing but an alliance with Prussia could insure the conclusion of a satisfactory peace (COXE, ii. 185 seq.). The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) left the Prussian alliance apparently still out of the question. Walpole printed some comments on it, under the title of ‘A Rhapsody of Foreign Politics,’ in which he advocated the exchange of Gibraltar for Porto Rico or St. Augustin. In 1749 (March) he delivered an able speech, concurring, with the reverse of enthusiasm, in the grant to the Empress Maria Theresa, and subsequently he repeated its substance in a paper entitled ‘A Letter to a Friend,’ which remained unpublished. His ‘Observations on the System of Affairs in 1751,’ which dwell with rhetorical bitterness upon the impolicy of ‘subsidiary treaties in time of peace to German princes,’ he had the boldness to lay before the king (printed ap. Coxe, ii. 307 seq.). In 1752 he, according to his nephew, excited the ridicule of the House of Commons by voting for the subsidy treaty with Saxony, against which he had delivered a convincing harangue (Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of George II, i. 241 sqq.). Although Walpole's long intimacy with Henry Pelham had ended in a suspension of their political connection, he was eagerly courted by the Duke of Newcastle on his succeeding as head of the government (1754), and early in 1755 read to some of the chief members of the duke's cabinet a remarkable expression of his opinion on the inexpediency of the king's going abroad, and of the desirability, in the case of his absence, of appointing the Duke of Cumberland regent (Coxe, ii. 372 seq.). His advice was only partially followed, and later in the year he failed in his efforts to effect a reconciliation between Newcastle and Pitt.
On 1 June 1756 Walpole, who chiefly on account of the recent marriage of his eldest son to a daughter of the Duke of Devonshire had solicited this rise in rank, was created a peer by the title of Baron Walpole of Wolterton (his seat near Aylsham in Norfolk). He survived the grant of this honour for less than a twelvemonth. In former years he had been much afflicted by the stone, but he had thought himself cured by a remedy of which he sent an account to the Royal Society. The return of the disease early in 1757 proved fatal. He died on 5 Feb. of that year, and was buried in the chancel of the parish church of Wickmere, near Wolterton.
Horace Walpole has been far from kindly dealt with by historical writers, partly perhaps in consequence of the dicta of his amiable nephew and namesake, who described him as ‘a dead-weight’ in his brother's ministry, and ‘one who knew something of everything but how to hold his tongue or how to apply his knowledge,’ besides adding further amenities as to the homely style of his language and oratory (Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of George II, i. 140). But the younger Horace had in 1756 been involved in a violent personal quarrel with his uncle, in which the right seems to have been on the younger man's side. It concerned the establishment, against Lord Orford's will, of a so-called mutual entail of the Houghton and Wolterton estates, and the consequent exclusion from the former estate of his grandchildren and daughter (see Horace Walpole, Letters, ed. Cunningham, ix. 485). Cardinal Fleury qualified a compliment to his effective eloquence by allowing that it was clothed in bad French. His English speeches are described as delivered with a Norfolk accent, and he himself jested in parliament on the slovenliness of his dress. The engraving of Van Loo's portrait of him, formerly at Strawberry Hill, suggests a gross and unpleasing presence. Moreover, it is easy to perceive that at court and elsewhere the outspoken-
