Talk:Robert Harley (1579–1656)

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Untitled[edit]

persons by each other obtain

Sir Robert Harley (1579–1656) < and > Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661-1724).

adapt of Article wished; [WIP] Netherlands

Disambiguation[edit]

I have deleted the following text which refers not to the subject but to his descendant (I think) Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661-1724). This leaves the articel as a stub.

British statesman who headed the Tory ministry from 1710 to 1714. Although by birth and education he was a Whig and a Dissenter, he gradually over the years changed his politics, becoming the leader of the Tory and Anglican party.

Harley came from a Presbyterian family; he was first elected to Parliament in 1688. Within several years he became, with Paul Foley, leader of a coalition of Whigs and moderate Tories opposed to the government of King William III. Convinced (wrongly) that the Peace of Rijswijk (1697) would usher in an era of pacific relations, he called for a smaller army than that favoured by William, and he further angered his sovereign by attacking royal largesse and insisting on a reduced budget.

Harley was speaker of the House of Commons from 1701 to 1705 and secretary of state from 1704 to 1708. During this period Harley, along with John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin, dominated the government of Queen Anne (reigned 1702–14) and directed the war against the French (War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–14).

Although Harley became Queen Anne's favourite, his anti-Whig attitudes brought him into conflict with his two colleagues, who in February 1708 forced him to resign. He then allied with the Tories, while the Whigs occupied all major government offices. Because of the growing closeness of his cousin and ally, Lady Abigail Masham, to the queen, Harley remained influential. In 1710 public dissatisfaction with the Whig-directed war and with the handling of the Sacheverell affair (see Sacheverell, Henry) enabled Anne to dismiss Godolphin and install Harley as chancellor of the Exchequer at the head of a Tory ministry. Although he secured a great majority at the general election, his new ministry was more radically Tory than Harley wished. He now reached the peak of his career; and, after surviving a murderous assault by the Marquis de Guiscard, a French spy who had been arrested and was being interrogated at a privy council meeting, Harley was created Earl of Oxford and made lord treasurer and Knight of the Garter in 1711.

By funding the most pressing portion of the national debt in the South Sea Company stock (1711) and by securing a reasonable peace at Utrecht (1713), Oxford dealt with two crucial issues, but he was now threatened by the intrigues of his protégé and colleague, Henry Saint John, Viscount Bolingbroke. Avid for power, Bolingbroke, like Godolphin earlier, could argue the need for an alliance with a party; and the Schism Act (1714) abolishing the Dissenting academies, in one of which Oxford himself had been educated, was his pledge to the high Tories. The struggle between them became the more desperate, because both had rankled George, the Hanoverian heir to the throne, for making peace at Utrecht, and both had engaged in questionable, if not treasonable, correspondence with the Stuart claimant to the throne, the Roman Catholic James Edward, the Old Pretender. Oxford, now preoccupied with nepotism, was in physical and mental decline, but Anne stubbornly kept him in office until July 27, 1714, five days before her death.

Permanently exiled from power by the Hanoverian succession, Oxford was imprisoned in 1715. An impeachment of him collapsed in 1717 because of differences between the two houses of Parliament and among the Whigs themselves, but Oxford played no further part of importance in parliamentary politics or Jacobite conspiracy.

Peterkingiron 17:29, 3 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have not sought to merge that text with the present article on Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer because the present one looks much fuller and may in fact be a later version of that text. I have however spent a good deal of time correcting links. The few that remain linked to this page are either linked to a user's page or where I cannot resolve the issue. I have also copied here and edited some text that I found in a linked article on Hereford. However this article remains a stub. Peterkingiron 18:54, 3 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ambiguous Sentence and "Lord Herbert"[edit]

"On 30 September 1642, Parliamentarians led by Harley and Henry Grey, 1st Earl of Stamford, occupied the city without opposition. In December they withdrew to Gloucester because of the presence in the area of a Royalist army under Lord Herbert." There is no indication as what the city they occupied was (Brampton Brian being a village not city). Also I question the accuracy of linking "Lord Herbert" to "Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury" as the latter, as far as I know of him, held no command in the Civil War and tried to be neutral, pleading ill health. It would be a revelation to me if he were; do your sources confirm it? He did have a son, who succeeded as 2nd Lord Herbert in 1648, who was a Royalist officer who mostly saw active service in Wales.Cloptonson (talk) 19:53, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have amended this. The only likely city is Hereford. Lord Herbert is almost certainly the man who later succeeded as 2nd Marquis of Worcester. See Raglan Castle for another reference to him. I guess someone who did not understand courtesy titles looked for an appropriate Lord Herbert to link to. I need to look for a reference for this. Peterkingiron (talk) 22:39, 9 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]