Abstract
The man usually credited with having been Britain’s second Prime Minister is a somewhat shadowy figure. No full-length biography of him has ever appeared, and most accounts of his career have largely depended on passing — and usually acerbic — references in the memoirs of such contemporaries as Horace Walpole, Lord Hervey, Lord Chesterfield and Mr Speaker Onslow. The almost unanimous conclusion has been that he was not really up to the job, and that he owed his preferment almost entirely to the inflated view which King George II held of his abilities.
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Works consulted
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© 2011 Dick Leonard
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Leonard, D. (2011). Spencer Compton, First Earl of Wilmington — ‘George II’s Favourite Nonentity’. In: Eighteenth-Century British Premiers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304635_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304635_3
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