Add MS 70987-70989

Correspondence, and related papers, of Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, and George Montagu; 1736-1770, 1784, n.d. Partly French. Walpole (b.1717, d.1797), author and wit, was the son of Sir Robert Walpole. Montagu (b.1713?, d.1780) was for ten years MP for Northampton and held the sinecure post of Private Secretary to his cousin, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord North. All the letters have all been published in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, vols 9 and 10 (1941), edited by W. S. Lewis and R. S. Brown. See also the article by C. J. Wright in Friends of the National Libraries Annual Report for 1991. After Montagu's death, Walpole's letters passed to Frederick Montagu, George's second cousin and sole executor. It appears that Montagu's letters to Walpole were also given to Frederick Montagu. After the latter's death in 1800, his kinsman, Lord Frederick Montagu, the brother of the fifth Duke of Manchester, took possession of the letters, and when he died, unmarried, in 1827 they found their way to Kimbolton Castle, the seat of the Dukes of Manchester. The letters contain discussion of the great political issues and personages of the day, and matters of a social and personal nature, and are written in a familiar style engendered by the long friendship between the two men, which stretched back to Eton in the 1720s. This friendship, and therefore the correspondence, petered out a full 10 years before Montagu's death, a combination of political differences and what Lewis calls 'Montagu's apathy' spelling the end. Sold at Sotheby's, 23 July 1987, lot 29. Purchased from Burgess Browning with funds provided by The Friends of the National Libraries, the Pilgrim Trust, the Esmée Fairbairn Trust, the J. Paul Getty Jr Charitable Trust, the Dulverton Trust, the Friends of the British Library, an anonymous private benefactor, and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, 28 Nov. 1991.

Paper. Three volumes.