This book throws fresh light on British and Irish politics at the start of the eighteenth century. It tells for the first time the story of a powerful and eccentric peer, Thomas Coningsby, who played a key role in Ireland as the kings saviour at the Battle of the Boyne and as one of the top administrators of the Protestant ascendancy. It describes his tumultuous career in local and national politics in England, along with his hectic familial and private life, marked by his combative behaviour towards neighbours and tenants in Herefordshire, where he feuded with the Harley clan and the Duke of Chandos. The book describes his bitter quarrels with political rivals and shows how these were enlisted by the greatest poet of the age, Alexander Pope, to form a devastating critique of the Whig revenge against their discredited rivals. Based on extensive use of unpublished archives, including the numerous cache of letters to and from Coningsby; lawsuits; legal documents such as wills and marriage settlements; as well as newspapers, pamphlets and printed sources.
Author Biography
Pat Rogers is Distinguished University Professor and DeBartolo Chair in the Humanities, University of South Florida, USA. The author or editor of over forty books Rogers has held teaching posts at the universities of Cambridge, London, Wales, and Bristol, and been a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and a visiting fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. Currently a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the School for Advanced Study, University of London, he is former President of the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and currently a Vice-President of the Johnson Society of London. His recent works include Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne (OUP, 2005) and in 2006 he produced the first full scholarly version of Pride and Prejudice for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen as well as editing The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, and serving as associate editor of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
