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Abbot was considered by contemporaries to be an upstart: he believed himself to be descended from Sir Maurice Abbot, MP for London, a brother of Archbishop Abbot. His father, an ‘uncommonly learned’ clergyman, who kept a school at Abingdon, died when he was three, and his mother, by her...
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Cavendish, a founder member of the Whig Club, was not expected to return to public affairs after his disgust at being defeated in 1784. He might have stood for York again and he had no objection to his name being used; on 18 Nov. 1787, however, he informed his friend Earl Fitzwilliam, ‘If I can I...
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Jenkinson ‘seemed born to be a statesman’: he was carefully educated for the role by his father, who aspired to it himself and who as Pitt’s president of the Board of Trade readily assumed that character, which seemed to be confirmed by his admission to the cabinet in 1791. At Oxford...
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Peel in later life recalled his father’s jocular admonition, ‘Bob, you dog, if you are not prime minister some day, I’ll disinherit you’. As a schoolboy he was shown the House of Commons by Pitt, whom his father held up to him as a model statesman, and before going up to Oxford in 1805 he...
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An impecunious younger son, Wellesley, described while at Eton as ‘not at all a book boy, and rather dull’, was destined for a military career, in which he progressed under the aegis of his eldest brother Lord Mornington. On coming of age, and while aide-de-camp to the lord lieutenant, he was...
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