FRANCIS, SIR PHILIP English politician and pamphleteer, the supposed author of the Letters of Junius, and the chief antagonist of Warren Hastings, was born in Dublin on Oct. 22, 1740. He was educated at a Dublin free school, pri vately, and at St. Paul's school, London. In 1756, immediately on his leaving school, he was appointed to a junior clerkship in the secretary of State's office by Henry Fox (afterwards Lord Holland), and this post he retained under the succeeding admin istration. In 1758 he was employed as secretary to Gen. Bligh in the expedition against Cherbourg; and in the same capacity he accompanied the earl of Kinnoul on his special embassy to the court of Portugal in 1760.
In 1762 he was appointed to a principal clerkship in the War Office, where he formed an intimate friendship with Christopher D'Oyly, the secretary of State's deputy, whose dismissal from office in 1772 was hotly resented by "Junius" ; and in the same year he married Miss Macrabie, the daughter of a retired London merchant. In 1763 the great constitutional questions arising out of the arrest of Wilkes began to be sharply canvassed. It was natural that Francis, who from a very early age had been in the habit of writing occasionally to the newspapers, should be eager to take an active part in the discussion, though his position as a Government official made it necessary that his intervention should be carefully disguised. He is known to have written to the Public Ledger and Public Advertiser, as an advocate of the popular cause, on many occasions about and after the year 1763. His chief title to fame as a writer, however, is his supposed author ship of the Letters of Junius, of which the first appeared in Jan. 1769, and the series was continued till Jan. 21, 1772 (see JuNxvs) .
In March 1772 Francis finally left the War Office, and in the following July started a continental tour which lasted until Dec. 1772. In June 1773 Lord North appointed him a member of the newly constituted supreme council of Bengal at a salary of . 1 o,000 per annum. Along with his colleagues Monson and Clavering he reached Calcutta in Oct. 1774, and a long struggle with Warren Hastings, the governor-general, immediately began. These three formed a majority of the council in opposition to the governor-general's policy, accusing him of corruption, mainly on the evidence of Nuncomar. The death of Monson (1776) and of Clavering (1777) made Hastings again supreme in the coun cil, and a dispute with Francis, led in Aug. 1780 to a minute being delivered to the council board by Hastings, in which he stated that "he judged of the public conduct of Mr. Francis by his experience of his private, which he had found to be void of truth and honour." A duel was the consequence, in which Francis received a dangerous wound (see HASTINGS, WARREN) . His re covery was rapid and complete and he left for England where, on his arrival in Oct. 1781, he was received with little favour.
In 1784 Francis was returned by the borough of Yarmouth,. Isle of Wight ; and on the return of Hastings in 1785, did all in his power to bring forward and support the charges which ulti mately led to the impeachment resolutions of 1787. He sympa thized warmly with the French revolutionary doctrines, in 1793 supported Grey's motion for a return to the old constitutional system of representation, and was one of the founders of the "Society of the Friends of the People." The acquittal of Hast ings in April 1795 disappointed Francis of the governor-general ship, and in 1798 he had to submit to the additional mortification of a defeat in the general election. He was once more successful, however, in 1802, when he sat for Appleby, but was not offered the governor-generalship on the `Whig success in 1806, though he accepted a K.C.B. He was not re-elected for Appleby in 18a7 and the remainder of his life was spent in comparative privacy.
Among the later productions of his pen were, besides the Plan of a Reform in the Election of the House of Commons, pam phlets entitled Proceedings in the House of Commons on the Slave Trade (1796), Reflections on the Abundance of Paper in Circu lation and the Scarcity of Specie (181o), Historical Questions Exhibited (1818), and a Letter to Earl Grey on the Policy of Great Britain and the Allies towards Norway (1814) . His first wife, by whom he had six children, died in 1806, and in 1814 he married his second wife, Emma Watkins, who long survived him, and who left voluminous manuscripts relating to his bi ography. Francis died on Dec. 23, 1818.