Free Rousseau's Dog by David Edmonds

colonel of his regiment. It was seen as foul play that he should be deprived of both.
    Soon after, in July 1765, when Grenville fell and the Marquess of Rockingham (known to his peers for his laziness and to the public for his zeal for horse racing) became prime minister, Conway received one of the two key offices outside the Treasury, secretary of state for the southern department, though his irresolution made him unsuitable for office and the dark skills of managing the Commons. He served under a series of fragile administrations, switching to the northern departmentin 1766. The king had come to depend on him. Walpole recorded that George III told Conway, “he hoped never to have an administration of which he should not be one.”
    Conway’s elder brother, the Earl of Hertford, was also a confidant of George III. Religious and good-natured, he was, thought Horace Walpole, a man of “unblemished morals.” But others disparaged him as self-interested, avaricious, and ambitious. A contemporary described him in 1767 as having a “constant appetite for all preferments for himself and family, with the quickest digestion and the shortest memory of past favours of any of the present noblemen.” He was swift to distance himself from his brother’s stand on general warrants; shortly after, he supplicated the king (unsuccessfully) for elevation from earl to marquess.
    To their cousin Horace Walpole, fourth and youngest son, and fierce defender, of Sir Robert Walpole, we could apply the phrase used by Walter Bagehot to describe Charles Dickens: “a special correspondent for posterity.” His letters and journals provide an invaluable insider’s commentary on the period—busy, well informed, unsentimental. He was a man of many parts: dilettante, wit and gossip, placeholder and M.P., a consummate expert in corridor intrigues. His father left him well provided with sinecures—to the tune of £3,400 a year—and a parliamentary seat: he is said to have visited his constituency and spoken in the House only once.
    His interests and accomplishments were multifarious. He invented the gothic novel with
The Castle of Otranto,
published in 1764; he was a diarist and scholar, and a printer. He had an acute, though narrow, taste for the arts and was a jackdaw collector—everything from the country’s finest collection of miniatures to a vulcanized date from Herculaneum to Cardinal Wolsey’s red hat. And, of course, he created his lasting monument as the decorator and gardener of his true love, his “little Gothick castle,” Strawberry Hill, the small box of a house in Twickenham, southwest of London, that he bought in 1747, adding Gothic features over the years.
    Walpole was warm, lively, generous and humane, and constantly fascinated by the ways of the world. He was patriotic, though he opined that “a good patriot is a bad citizen.” “Paris revived in me that natural passion, the love of my country’s glory. I must put it out: it is a wicked passion and breathes war.” He was also a man of causes. He spoke out against the execution of Admiral Byng in 1757 for “losing” Minorca to the French (or
pour encourager les autres,
as Voltaire quipped); he was a critic of general warrants, supported a free press, was for the American colonists, and rejected slavery—”that horrid trade … it chills the blood.”
    Despite these attributes, the picture that emerges of him from Parisian soirées in the freezing winter of 1765–66 is not altogether flattering. He comes across as gossipy and malicious, treating society, particularly when it involved intellectuals, as a source of sour amusement. Nonetheless, aged forty-eight, Walpole became the passion of the most formidable of Paris hostesses, his “blind, old,
débauchée
of wit,” seventy-year-old Mme du Deffand, with whom he had a correspondence of over eight hundred