Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle
Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle upon Tyne and 1st Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyme, was an English Whig statesman who served as Prime Minister of Great Britain, his official life extended throughout the Whig supremacy of the 18th century. He is commonly known as the Duke of Newcastle.
Portrait by William Hoare, c. 1750
Newcastle House which he inherited from his uncle in 1711, and used as his primary London residence, often throwing lavish parties there.
From 1720 Newcastle allied himself with Robert Walpole. They would be political partners for the next 20 years, and Newcastle would remain a loyalist until Walpole's fall in 1742.
Newcastle (left) and Henry Clinton, 7th Earl of Lincoln as painted by Godfrey Kneller, c. 1721.
Whigs (British political party)
The Whigs were a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs merged into the Liberal Party with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. Many Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Conservative Party in 1912.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, painted more than once during his chancellorship in 1672 by John Greenhill
Equestrian portrait of William III by Jan Wyck, commemorating the landing at Brixham, Torbay, 5 November 1688
A c. 1705 portrait of John Somers, 1st Baron Somers by Godfrey Kneller.
In A Block for the Wigs (1783), caricaturist James Gillray caricatured Charles James Fox's return to power in a coalition with Frederick North, Lord North (George III is the blockhead in the centre)