WALPOLE, HORATIO or HORACE (1717-1797), English politician and man of letters, 4th earl of Orford—a title to which he only succeeded at the end of his life—was born in London, on Sept. 24, 1717. He was the youngest of the five children of the 1st earl of Orford (Sir Robert Walpole) by Catherine Shorter, but by some scandal-mongers, Carr, Lord Hervey, has been called his father. No such suspicion ever entered into the mind of Horace Walpole, who remained deeply attached to the memory of his parents throughout his life. He was educated at Eton, where he formed what was known as the "Quadruple Alliance" with Thomas Gray, Richard West and Thomas Ashton, and be came very intimate with Henry Seymour Conway, George Augus tus Selwyn and the two Montagus, and at King's College, Cam bridge. Two years (1739-1741) were spent in Gray's company in the recognized grand tour of France and Italy. They stopped a few weeks in Paris, and three months at Reims. At Florence Walpole stayed for a year with Horace Mann, British envoy to the court of Tuscany. He continued to correspond with Mann till 1786, and as they never met again, their friendship, unlike most of Walpole's attachments, remained unbroken. After a short visit to Rome (March–June 1740), and after a further sojourn at Florence, Walpole and Gray quarrelled, and parted at Reggio.
Walpole came back to England on Sept. 12, He had been returned to parliament in May 1741 for the Cornish borough of Callington. He represented three constituencies in succession, Callington the family borough of Castle Rising from 1754 to 1757, and King's Lynn, for which his father had long sat, from 1757 until 1768. In that year he retired, probably be cause his success in political life had not equalled his expectations, but he continued until the end of his days to follow and to chronicle the acts and the speeches of both houses of parliament. Through his father's influence he had obtained three lucrative sinecures in the exchequer, and for many years (1745-1784) he enjoyed a share, estimated at about £1,500 a year, of a second family perquisite, the collectorship of customs. He acquired in
1747 the lease and in the next year purchased the reversion of the villa of Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, on the banks of the Thames. Six years later he began a series of alterations in the Gothic style, not completed for nearly a quarter of a century later, under which the original cottage became transformed into a building without parallel in Europe. On the 25th of June 1757 he established a printing-press there, which he called "Officina Arbuteana," where many of the first editions of his own works were printed. Other works printed here were Richard Bentley's designs for Gray's poems (1753), and reprints of the Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Memoirs of Grammont, Hentzner's Journey into England, and Lord Whitworth's Account of Russia. The rooms were crowded with curiosities of every description, and the house and its contents were shown, by tickets to the public. Walpole paid several visits to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Madame du Deffand (q.v.) in 1765, and they corresponded until her death in 1780. His nephew, the reckless 3rd earl, died on Dec. 5, 1791, and Horace succeeded to the peerage, but he never took his place in the House of Lords. All his life long he was a victim of the gout, but he lived to extreme old age, and died unmarried, in Berkeley Square, London, on March 2, 1797. All Walpole's printed books and manuscripts were left to Robert Berry and his two daughters, Mary and Agnes, and Mary Berry edited the five volumes of Walpole's works which were published in 1798. Their friendship had been very dear to the declining days of Walpole, who, it has even been said, wished to marry Mary Berry. The collections of Strawberry Hill, which he had spent nearly fifty years in amassing, were sold in 1842. They are described in a catalogue and in the Gentleman's Maga zine.