Leicester House Research Articles

Merlin's Mirror at Leicester House

This article investigates the transformation of Spenser’s image of himself as poet in the interval between the first and second instalments of The Faerie Queene. The poet’s habits of gazing are informed by the lessons Britomart learns about seeing, but Spenser also explores the issue in two other poems written during this period, The Epithalamion (1595) and The Prothalamion (1596). Both works clearly place the poet next to pictures of occluded male gazers, Spenser’s bridegroom as marginal and as crucial as the Essex who emerges only briefly from Leicester House. Both of these male figures are ultimately sidelined by other gazers, their vision finally irrelevant to the nuptial proceedings unfolded in each poem. The 1596 cancellation of the reunion between Amoret and Scudamour is accompanied by a revised representation of Britomart, too. Taught to move beyond the magic mirror she encounters early in Book 3, Britomart is guided to put herself in the larger world and – like the poet – to look away from the image reflected in and by her gaze.

Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original, and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball by David Block

Reviewed by: Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original, and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball by David Block Jason Cannon David Block. Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original, and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 320 pp. Cloth, $29.95. On November 14, 1748, Mary Lepel, known as Lady Hervey after her marriage to an English aristocrat, wrote a letter to her friend, the Reverend Edmund Morris, while visiting Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his family at their London home. She noted that "'the Prince's family is an example of innocent and cheerful amusements,'" and, on this particular winter day, the family "divert themselves at base-ball, a play all who are, or have been, schoolboys are well acquainted with" (16). Frederick's oldest son, ten-year-old George, joined his family to play baseball inside a "large room" of Leicester House (16). Twelve years later, following the deaths of his father and grandfather, the youngster became King George III, the nemesis of colonists in the New World seeking their independence from England. The story about George, player of English baseball, "mainly a country game, played casually in the towns and villages of the rural counties surrounding London," is just one of the remarkable discoveries detailed by historian David Block in his enlightening and engaging new book, Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original, and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball (xix). Block takes readers on a journey into the "curiously shrouded history" of English baseball (xx). He aims to "acquaint you with this long neglected original member of the baseball family," and Block hits the mark with aplomb (xxii). Initially, he theorized that "the eighteenth-century name baseball gradually gave way in England to the name rounders in the early nineteenth century;" however, his latest research has left him with "no doubt in [his] mind that English baseball and rounders were distinct games" (xx). The value of Pastime Lost goes beyond Block's excellent telling of the history of English baseball. Simultaneously, it provides an inside look at how a [End Page 258] historian goes about the craft of research. Block notes that, "For years my continuing research efforts had been turning up scads of new data, and I knew that I needed to devise a way to make those findings accessible to others" (xi). How to present them? Block considered several possibilities before landing on a "chronological history of English baseball" (xiii). However, he wisely incorporates aspects of his other ideas, particularly the lively descriptions of his "voyage of discovery," that creates a crackling analytical narrative that is both rigorous and accessible (xii). As a result, in addition to his search through newly digitized archival resources, readers join Block on his travels throughout England as he follows clues that lead him to unsuspecting places that yield surprising results. Block examines a variety of primary sources, including, amongst other items, letters, newspapers, children's literature, and a diary to determine that, indeed, "a game called baseball existed in England in the middle of the eighteenth century" (3). However, he confesses that the starting point for the sport is a little muddy. "The diversity of these references suggests to me that English baseball at the midpoint of the eighteenth century had not just freshly arrived," he notes (3). Block points out that he assumed the game developed over a period of time, but he allows that it is possible that "baseball was the inspired invention of some unknown genius" (3). Block's transparency regarding English baseball's starting point provides the reader access to his research process and demonstrates the unique challenge of hunting for puzzles pieces in order to piece together a historical mystery. Block's embedding of his search for clues within the chronological development of English baseball results in a stunningly informative and entertaining work. In a chapter titled "Two Weeks, Two Discoveries," he tells the story of visiting England in 2007 and learning about the existence of an eighteenth-century diary with a reference to baseball. Tricia St. John Barry, a resident in the county of Surrey, saw a news segment on Block's research trip and contacted BBC South...

Frederick, Prince of Wales, the ‘Court’ of Leicester House and the ‘Patriot’ Opposition to Walpole, c.1733–1742

The character and reputation of Frederick, prince of Wales, have long divided historians. His apparently piecemeal efforts at opposition have been dismissed as lacking in focus, while his mercurial character and early demise have left him difficult to assess. The aim of this article is to attempt once more to reappraise the Prince both as a man at the head of a specific political interest but also more broadly as the symbolic figurehead of a wider patriot movement within society. Through analysis of the contemporary press, and of some of the key members of the Prince's own household, this essay will argue that Prince Frederick was more than just a figurehead for the patriots, if impeded by circumstances and occasionally distracted by his own protean tendencies.*

The Religious Retinue of Leicester House: Chaplains of Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, 1729‐51

AbstractThis prosopographical study of the chaplains of Frederick Louis, prince of Wales (1707‐51), explores their political, cultural, theological and intellectual significance. It examines their dual allegiance to George II (as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England) and to Leicester House. It advances Frederick's credentials as a significant patron of the British Enlightenment and demonstrates that his clerical patronage made an important contribution to the cultural and intellectual dynamism of his rival court and to his conscious self‐fashioning as a connoisseur of the arts and as an enlightened Patriot Prince.

Half-History, or The Function of Cato at the Present Time

This essay examines three performances of Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713), each of which allegorizes George iii at different points in his life, in order to explore the relation of forgetting to the repertoire. I look at a famous 1812 portrait of John Philip Kemble in the role of Cato, painted by Thomas Lawrence, in order theorize a notion of “half-history,” and then turn to an earlier production of Addison’s play at the Prince of Wales’s residence at Leicester House in 1747. The future George iii, then age eleven, performed in this play as Cato’s son Portius, and I argue that the prologues and epilogues constitute a political future in opposition to George ii’s rule that resonates with the Prince of Wales’s political predicament. The essay next considers the famous performance of Cato at Valley Forge. Following the reading of these two private theatricals, I argue that Kemble’s revival of the play in the winter of 1811 reorients the allegory yet again in order to explore the complex politics of George iii’s madness and the Regency Bill of 1811. Kemble’s intervention in the play was “half-historical” in precisely the way presented in Lawrence’s painting.

Loyal Opposition? Prince Frederick and Parliament (1729–51)

This article seeks to reappraise the role of Prince Frederick as a parliamentarian and also to reconsider the size and significance of his association in both Lords and Commons. Previous studies of Prince Frederick and of the so‐called Leicester House grouping have tended to emphasize the prince's limitations as a political figure of real weight, to play down the extent of his activities as a parliamentary figure in his own right and have also paid scant attention to the role of the house of lords in Leicester House's schemes. By reconsidering some of the major political dramas of the 1730s and 1740s, this article aims to redress the balance, arguing that Prince Frederick was an active member of the Lords and that his association, though fluid, was more coherent and significant than is usually acknowledged.

Haywood’s Tabloid Journalism: Dalinda: or, The Double Marriage and the Cresswell Bigamy Case

... this long, tedious, and to all but the concerned, most trifling Tale, which you have forced me to make publick . . .-Cresswell, A Narrative of the Affair (1747)Dalinda: or, The Double Marriage, is a relatively unknown novel by Eliza Haywood, and perhaps deservedly so. Aesthetically, it's not that good. It is too long, its climax is a drawn-out epistolary correspondence between the main characters, and it is frustratingly slow and repetitive. Most Haywood scholars are familiar with its title from Thomas Lockwood's article about Hay- wood's 1748 pamphlet, A Letter from H[enry] G[orin]g, Esq., for which Haywood and her publisher, George Woodfall, were taken into custody for printing sedi- tious libel. Five months after the appearance of the Goring pamphlet, Wood- fall commissioned Haywood to write Dalinda (published 1749). Like the pamphlet, Dalinda may be read as a politically motivated work, revealing Hay- wood 's Jacobite sympathies because of its interest in broken vows and oaths, or at the very least it exhibits her anti-Whig sentiments. This essay, however, ex- plores the novel from a different perspective-that of its relation to scandal fiction and the popular press. Just as A Letter from H- G-g, Esq. uses the pamphlet form to imitate the secret, intercepted correspondence of one of the Young Pretender's closest aides, Dalinda, too, derives from a popular scan- dal, purporting to reveal insider information.Kathryn King notes in the Epilogue to her Political Biography of Eliza Hay- wood that Haywood's scandal fiction of the mid-1720s-works like Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia (1724) and The Secret History of Caramania (1727)-takes the classical satiric impulse to expose folly, vice, knavery, [and] corruption and in effect 'tabloidizes' it, serving up age-old human misbehaviour with a mixture of moral outrage, sex, and sensationalism that has much in common with today's tabloid exposure of wrongdoing in the private spaces of public (198). But in Dalinda, Haywood reverses her formula of the 1720s and serves up an already over-publicized story about private people- Thomas Estcourt Cresswell and Elizabeth Scrope-and their bigamous mar- riage. The main people in this media event had already been tabloidized : in letters to The General Evening Post in 1747, in entries in The Gentleman's Maga- zine under the heading Conjugal Treachery detected, and in a pamphlet war between Cresswell and Scrope themselves. When Haywood 's novel fictional- ized the scandalous case under assumed names, the story had already occupied the public's imagination for two years.So why would Haywood be interested in writing a story with which her readers were already so familiar? Her publisher may have been keen to cash in on the public's continuing infatuation with the scandal; but a closer look at Dalinda, and the print sources from which it is drawn, reveals that Haywood is engaging with more than the plot. Kathryn King writes that Conceivably [Haywood] hired by Leicester House [Opposition] to write the Goring pamphlet to help advance the cult of royalism (186). It is equally conceivable that she commissioned to write Dalinda-a story demonstrating the emp- tiness of spoken vows and written words-to advance the opposition's political agenda of focusing a critical eye on governmental corruption. Her novel em- phasizes the Scrope family's Whiggish greed that precipitates the clandestine marriage and bigamy plots. Haywood's narrator makes specific mention that the heroine of her piece, Dalinda, was trained up from her Infancy to love Money above all Things, and had besides, a Tincture of Avarice in her Nature (Dalinda 62). Culturally and politically, the novel can be connected with the debates over what would become, in 1753, Hardwicke's Marriage Act, purport- edly designed to protect women against the consequences of clandestine mar- riage but really designed to protect the propertied elite. …

State, Parliament and Empire in the Mid 18th Century: Hudson's Bay and the Parliamentary Enquiry of 1749

In 1749, the house of commons appointed a committee of enquiry into the lands and trade of Hudson's Bay. This was the climax to nearly 20 years' work by the Ulsterman, Arthur Dobbs, which focused first on renewed search for a northwest passage and later widened to attempt to expand trade and settlement by challenging the monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company. Dobbs's Irish patriotism, linked by support for union with Britain with his remarkably expansive vision of British empire, became concentrated on this campaign with a zeal and tenacity which overrode contrary evidence based on experience. Propaganda pamphlets, mobilisation of compatriots, merchant and political contacts, briefs for MPs, marshalling of evidence and witnesses for parliamentary committees, 30 petitions from a variety of places, organised by Liverpool and Bristol merchants who took the lead in the final campaign: all were used to attempt to influence parliament. This was an impressive mid-century effort to promote British commerce and manufactures, actively supported by the parliamentary opposition which was reviving under Leicester House leadership. Yet, while this campaign could shape the report of the committee of enquiry, the House itself was not so easily moved, especially when public expenditure was likely to be involved. A motion arising from the report was decisively defeated. The impressive campaign came to nought. While it indeed reveals powerful visions of commercial and imperial expansion in the mid 18th century, the outcome suggests that realism and scepticism prevailed at the heart of the state.

?No more to be said?? Reactions to the death of Frederick Lewis, prince of Wales

The untimely death of Frederick, prince of Wales, in 1751 has inevitably had an impact on the way in which he has been treated by historians. While some have considered the influence his opposition grouping at Leicester House had on the policies of his son, George III, most have been happy to rely on a few wellknown sources in considering the immediate repercussions of his death. This article seeks to reappraise the reaction to Prince Frederick's unexpected demise by considering the politics behind the ceremonial of his funeral, the debates in parliament over the drawing up of the Regency Bill, and the wider public response as revealed in newspapers, sermons and verse. © Institute of Historical Research 2007.

Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut

Poetry, once despaired W.H.Auden, makes nothing happen. That, however, is a modern condition, argues William Dowling, for in the 18th century poets helped topple corrupt governments and fuel revolutions. In this work on the creation and early days of the republic, Dowling revives the literary and intellectual atmosphere of the period by examining major works of four early poets of the circle known as the Connecticut Wits and their forerunners. Understanding the work of John Trumbull, David Humphreys, Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow, says Dowling, requires a knowledge of the underlying assumptions about poetry and society that gave their work meaning in their own time - namely that ideology was an autonomous and dynamic force in the historical process and that language and literature were potent ideological weapons. These Connecticut poets, he argues, saw themselves as the inheritors of the tradition of the English Opposition poets of the Augustan period. In fact, Opposition poets such as Pope, Swift and Thomson must be seen as the moving spirits of the Revolution, for their warfare against Sir Robert Walpole's government not only set an example for the Connecticut poets but also contributed to the political climate in England that allowed the revolution in the colonies to flourish. Like their Opposition predecessors, the Connecticut poets drew inspiration from the classical republican tradition of Horace, Livy and Virgil. They viewed their country as both new and old - as an original creation inspired by the vision of a virtuous past that served as a disinterested model for the moral regeneration of society. In addition to the classical republican tradition, Dowling discusses other ideologies and myths of the Opposition and Connecticut poets - from the alliance of commonwealthman, Tory and Leicester House opposition in England and the ideology of the enlightenment to the myth of translation and the Puritan mythology of the completion of the Reformation and the beginning of the millennium in America. As he traces the ideological connections between the Opposition and Connecticut poets, Dowling denies any distinctions between American and British 18th century-literature, claiming that the writers inhabited a single transatlantic universe of thought. Only when read in this light, he says, can one appreciate the power of the Connecticut poets' language and understand their linuistic and prosodic borrowings from the Opposition poets. It is also through this recovered significance of the Connecticut poets that one can best understand the importance of Joel Barlow's break from the group's Federalism to align himself with the Jeffersonians.

Spenser and Sidney at Leicester House

Previous articleNext article No AccessSpenser and Sidney at Leicester HouseS. K. Heninger Jr.S. K. Heninger Jr. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Spenser Studies Volume 81987 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/SPSv8p239 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright © 1990 AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The grass roots alternative

Before making up its mind on what changes to make in the statutory system of industrial training the Government, playing according to the rules, asked the Manpower Services Commission for its advice. In turn the MSC established a Review Body which eventually produced its report OUTLOOK ON TRAINING. Seen by some as an attempt to extend the MSC's own influence and by others as the mixture as before, the report has been regarded, outside the MSC itself, with universal disfavour and as totally irrelevant to the country's needs and so someone in industry had to do what the Review Body failed to do, namely look at other more pertinent and less costly remedies. This initiative was taken by EEMTEB (the Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Training and Education Board), through a small ad hoc working party with representatives of the motor manufacturers and the Society of British Aerospace Companies, which explored in some depth the pros and cons of the Industrial Training Board (ITB) and levy system and alternative solutions. The working party's recommendations are outlined below. Copies of the full Discussion Document on the National Training System are available from Vivien Marshall, Secretary to EEMTEB, Leicester House, 8 Leicester Street, London WC2H 7BN, who would also welcome comments. Other sectors were involved in the discussions to ensure that the proposals were valid not only in the engineering industry, but nationally.

The Misfortunes of Lord Bute: A Case-Study in Eighteenth-Century Political Argument and Public Opinion

Few politicians can have been as maligned, insulted and manhandled as John Stuart, third earl of Bute. Before 1760, cosseted within the confines of the Prince of Wales's court at Leicester House, this former Scottish representative peer was of little public note although he had acted as the lifeline between Pitt and the reversionary interest between 1755 and 1758. In London society he was known for his intellectual pretensions (he was a very competent botanist), his haughty airs, and a shapely figure which was displayed to such good effect in the theatrical productions held under the auspices of the Princess Dowager. It was only after 1760, when it became abundantly clear that the youthful George — if not his mother - was infatuated with Bute, that the royal favourite was exposed to the bleak winds of political hostility,. Admittedly there were rumours before George's accession about the subsequently notorious liaison between Bute and the Princess Dowager, rumours that Sir John Pringle told Boswell emanated from the intrigues of Bute's rivals at Leicester House. But these were a mere foretaste of what was to come: after 1760, whether Bute was serving the king (1761–3) or out of office, he was attacked by the mob, threatened with assassination, vilified in pamphlets, prints, newspapers, songs, plays, and handbills, and effectively rejected as a potential ally by all the leading politicians of the day except for the none too politically respectable Henry Fox. The bulk of this criticism was levelled in the 1760s, but even after 1770 the so-called ‘Northern Machiavel’ was under withering if increasingly sporadic fire, and as late as the 1780s vestigial elements of the old hostility remained.

III Leicester House Politics, 1750–60, from the Papers of John, Second Earl of Egmont

‘Leicester house’, those politicians associated with the Prince of Wales' court in Leicester Square Fields, played an important part in the development of the concept of ‘Opposition’ during the eighteenth century, and particularly between 1717 and 1760. There were several periods when this faction was particularly active, and these activities have acquired peculiar importance for many historians in view of the supposed intentions of George III of putting into effect precepts urged either at his own court as Prince of Wales or at that of his father, Frederick. As a result, considerable attention has been paid to the activities of Leicester House, and particularly to Frederick and his colleagues. Although Frederick was active, politically, between 1737 and 1751, it was after 1746 that he was virtually head of the Opposition, and it is in this period that he becomes most interesting, perhaps because it is for these years that there exists a body of documents illustrating his activities in such detail that it is possible to ascertain the nature of his plans. None of Frederick's own papers survive, and the documents in the Royal Archives at Windsor are derived from the records of his earlier associates. His principal associate after 1749 was John Perceval, second Earl of Egmont, whose father's diaries were published by the Historical Manuscripts Commission some forty years ago. Egmont was a Lord of the Bedchamber to the Prince and was the last in a series of favourites intended as future Prime Ministers, so that the papers drawn up in consultation between the two undoubtedly represent the intentions and plans of the Prince in these years and especially in the spring of 1750, to which period many can be dated from internal evidence.

Spenser, Shakespeare, Honor, and Worship

In his letter to Harvey from Leicester House on October 5, 1579, Spenser said he hoped to be employed by a ‘Lorde’, evidently the Earl of Leicester, and intended to devote his time ‘to his Honours service’; and he further reported that ‘gentle M. Sidney, I thanke his good Worship’, had asked for news of Harvey. In a second letter ten days later he said he would follow Harvey's advice to publish various of his writings but was in doubt about their dedication. One work, evidently the Shepheardes Calender, seemed to him ‘too base for his excellent Lordship’. He noted that Gosson had been scorned for dedicating his Schoole of Abuse to Master Sidney, from which he concluded: ‘Suche follie is it, not to regarde aforehand the inclination and qualitie of him, to whome wee dedicate oure Bookes.

Communication: The Political Patronage of Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales

An association between the prince of Wales and various opposition leaders is a recurrent feature of eighteenth-century politics. A politically active prince found little difficulty in securing a following among the politicians of the day; the glittering prospects of the ‘reversionary’ interest1 were an obvious lure, and an obvious basis for such a connexion. But this is not a complete explanation. The prince had also a considerable degree of patronage at his disposal, and could add a more immediate and concrete reality to promises for the future. A study of this patronage, its extent and its disposal, and more particularly the way in which it was exercised by Frederick, ‘Poor Fred’, throws much light on the connexion between the prince and his political friends, and contributes to an understanding of the place of Leicester House in the politics of the early eighteenth century.

I.—Essex House, formerly Leicester House and Exeter Inn

The London Inn of the bishops of Exeter in the fourteenth century occupied the greater part of the space between the Temple and the bishop of Bath's Inn. The whole site was probably at one time the property of the Knights of the Temple, to whom Henry II in 1173 granted the church of St. Clement Danes. In the thirteenth century the advowson of St. Clement's together with certain messuages opposite to the church had passed into the possession of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre at Warwick. When or how this took place I have not discovered. But these messuages, like the Temple, were held of the Honour of Leicester, and when in 1280 the Inn of the Canons opposite St. Clement's Church was granted to William de Breuse, bishop of Llandaff, for life, the grant was made with the assent of Edmund, earl of Lancaster, to whom that Honour belonged. In 1323 Walter de Stapledon, bishop of Exeter, was anxious to provide a London Inn for his see, and for that purpose desired to acquire the property of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre in St. Clement Danes. With a view thereto he purchased from Walter de Cantelupe land at Snitterfield in Warwickshire with the advowson of the church there. In the following year he obtained the king's permission to exchange this property for five messuages and the advow-son of St. Clement Danes together with some land at Hornsey. The exchange was confirmed by two fines levied in Michaelmas Term 1325. From another source it appears that the Canons had held four messuages together with the reversion to a fifth which had been demised for life to William de Bereford. Bereford, who was Chief Justice of the Common Bench, died in 1326, and Stapledon then became fully possessed of the property. The messuages were stated in 1324 to be held of the king as of the Honour of Leicester, having come into the king's hands through the forfeiture of Thomas ot Lancaster in 1322; it was not known of whom the advowson was held.

Leicester house, leicester fields

Journal Article Leicester house, leicester fields Get access Qui Tam Qui Tam Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s5-II, Issue 37, 12 September 1874, Page 205, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s5-II.37.205c Published: 12 September 1874