William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne
William Petty Fitzmaurice, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne,, was an Anglo-Irish Whig statesman who was the first home secretary in 1782 and then prime minister in 1782-83 during the final months of the American War of Independence. He succeeded in securing peace with America and this feat remains his most notable legacy.
Portrait by Jean-Laurent Mosnier, 1791
Shelburne served with distinction during the Seven Years' War participating in engagements such as the Battle of Minden in 1759.
A portrait of Lord Shelburne by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Shelburne, Charles James Fox and Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford by James Gillray (1783)
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)
