Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle

I hope our active Secretary will at last find out that dexterity with princes, to seem to promise all and intend nothing, will as little do as with private persons.

Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle upon Tyne and 1st Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyme KG PC FRS (21 July 1693 – 17 November 1768) was an English Whig statesman who served as Prime Minister of Great Britain, his official life extended throughout the Whig supremacy of the 18th century. He is commonly known as the Duke of Newcastle.

Quotes

• I cannot conclude without congratulating your excellency upon the success of our negociation at Vienna. The honour and credit which our royal master has so justly acquired by having singly given peace to all Europe, and the particular advantages which his majesty's own people will receive by it, are too great for his majesty's faithful subjects or servants not to take all opportunitys of expressing their gratitude and acknowledgments for it; and if your excellency can be so happy as to satisfy the court of France, the work will be complete indeed; and therefore I most heartily wish you success in it.
  • Letter to Lord Waldegrave on the Treaty of Vienna (26 March 1731), quoted in William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, Volume the Third (1798), p. 112

• I hope our active Secretary will at last find out that dexterity with princes, to seem to promise all and intend nothing, will as little do as with private persons.
  • Letter to Lord Hardwicke (6 October 1743), quoted in Philip C. Yorke, The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, Volume I (1913), p. 339

• I hope and believe you will receive, before you have this letter, an account of the signing the Definitive Treaty, and the accession of the court of Vienna; upon which near prospect, I most heartily congratulate you and my country. I feel the joy of an honest man upon it. I have the secret comfort of thinking that I have not only greatly, not to say almost singly, brought it about.
  • Letter to Henry Pelham on the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (9-20 October 1748), quoted in William Coxe, Memoirs of the Administration of The Right Honourable Henry Pelham, Collected from the Family Papers, and Other Authentic Documents, Vol. II (1829), p. 325

• You will not wonder that I have neither time nor spirits to write to you, having lost the best King, the best Master and the best Friend that ever subject had. God knows what consequences it may have.
  • Letter to Joseph Yorke after the death of George II (28 October 1760), quoted in Philip C. Yorke, The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, Vol. III (1913), p. 254

• With all his faults we shall want Mr Pitt, if such a complicated, such an extensive war is to be carried on. I know nobody who can plan or push the execution of any plan agreed upon in the manner Mr Pitt did.
  • Letter to Lord Hardwicke (15 November 1761), quoted in Philip C. Yorke, The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, Vol. III (1913), pp. 338-339

Quotes about the Duke of Newcastle

• His Majesty said he was sorry to lose him, and should always remember his services: that he feared the Duke's private fortune had suffered by his zeal for the House of Hanover: that his Majesty was desirous to make any amends in his power in any way that should be most agreeable: and added that it was a debt due to his Grace. The Duke answered that in office he had never considered the profit of employment: that out of office he could not bear the thought of being a burthen and charge on the Crown: that if his private fortune had suffered by his loyalty, it was his pleasure, his glory, and his pride: and that he desired no reward but his Majesty's approbation.
  • Lord Barrington to Andrew Mitchell (1 June 1762), quoted in Henry Ellis, Original Letters, Illustrative of English History; Including Numerous Royal Letters: From Autographs in the British Museum, and One or Two Other Collections, Second Series, Vol. IV (1827), pp. 445-446

• But my own greatest debt to the Duke was the discovery of Namier... I was delighted above all in his portrayal of the great Duke of Newcastle, for me the very quintessence of the anti-hero, a personage of delightfully unglorious proportions.
  • Richard Cobb, A Sense of Place (1975), p. 43

• It moves one to compassion to think of the poor old Duke himself. A man once possessed of £25,000 per annum of landed estate, with £10,000 in emoluments of government, now reduced to an estate of scarcely £6,000 per annum, and going into retirement (not to say sinking into contempt) with not so much as a feather in his cap.
  • Mr. Symmer to Sir Andrew Mitchell (31 December 1762), quoted in Henry Ellis, Original Letters, Illustrative of English History; Including Numerous Royal Letters: From Autographs in the British Museum, and One or Two Other Collections, Second Series, Vol. IV (1827), pp. 454-455

• The cause of his [William Pitt] quitting the Ministry was from a difference of opinion in a capital measure relative to Spain, as you know; the favourite united with the Minister of numbers [Newcastle], bore down the Minister of measures [Pitt], and by that means in effect removed him from the King's Council, and deprived him of the means of further serving the public.
  • Lord Temple to John Wilkes (16 October 1761), quoted in The Grenville Papers: Being The Correspondence of Richard Grenville Earl Temple, K.G., and The Right Hon. George Grenville, Their Friends and Contemporaries, Vol. I, ed. William James Smith (1852), pp. 404-405

• Lord Bute had the ill-natured arrogance to compliment him on his retirement: the Duke replied with a spirit that marked his lasting ambition, "Yes, yes, my Lord, I am an old man; but yesterday was my birth-day, and I recollected that Cardinal Fleury began to be prime minister of France just at my age."
  • Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, Vol. I (1845), p. 169