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This book throws fresh light on British and Irish politics at the start of the 18th 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 king''s "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 Based on extensive use of unpublished archives, including the numerous cache of letters to and from Coningsby; lawsuits; legal documents such as wills and marriage settlements; as well as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.>
About the author
Pat Rogers is Distinguished University Professor and DeBartolo Chair in the Humanities, University of South Florida, USA.
PAT ROGERS is DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida. He is the author of more than 200 articles, and his books include Grub Street (1972), The Augustan Vision (1974), Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (1985), The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature (1987), the Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (1992), Johnson (1993), Essays on Pope (1993), and Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia(1995). He is the former president of the Johnson Society of Lichfield, and of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
