Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford 1717-97
English writer

Born in London, the son of Sir Robert Walpole, he was educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge, then undertook the Grand Tour, with the poet Thomas Gray. Returning to England in 1741, he became MP for Callington, Cornwall, and interested himself in cases like the John Byng trial of 1757. He exchanged his Cornish seat in 1754 for the family borough of Castle Rising, which he vacated in 1757 for the other family borough of King's Lynn. In 1747 he purchased, near Twickenham, the former coachman's cottage which he gradually 'gothicized' (1753-76) into the stuccoed and battlemented pseudo-castle of Strawberry Hill, which helped to reverse the fashion for classical and Italianate design. He also established a private press on which some of his own works as well as Lucan's Pharsalia, and Gray's Progress of Poesy and The Bard, were printed. He wrote essays and verse, and is at his best in such satires as the Letter from Xo Ho to his friend Lien Chi at Pekin (1757). His Castle of Otranto (1764) set the fashion for supernatural romance. However, his literary reputation rests chiefly upon his letters, which deal, in the most vivacious way, with party politics, foreign affairs, art, literature and gossip. His firsthand accounts in them of such events as the Jacobite trials after the 1745 Rising and the Gordon Riots are invaluable.

Bibliography: A Dobson, Horace Walpole, a memoir (1893)