James Stanhope, 1st Earl Stanhope was a British Army officer, politician, diplomat and peer who effectively served as Chief Minister between 1717 and 1721. He was also the last Chancellor of the Exchequer to sit in the House of Lords.
Stanhope fought to put the Allied candidate Archduke Charles of Austria on the Spanish throne
1718 portrait by Johan van Diest.
Chevening, the Seat of the Rt. Honble. James Stanhope Earl Stanhope, Visct Stanhope of Mahone & Baron of Elvaston, Principal Secretary of State, and one of his Majesties most Honble. Privy Councel. An engraving of Stanhope's Chevening by Johannes Kip (Amsterdam 1652/53-1722) after Thomas Badeslade (d.1742), published by John Harris in his History of Kent, London, 1719.
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.
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)