Lyttelton served as a volunteer in the war of the Austrian succession, acting as aide-de-camp to Lord Stair at Dettingen and attending the Duke of Cumberland at Fontenoy. Failing to get the advancement he expected, he wrote home in July 1745: ‘I am so discontented that if I could possibly live without the army I would not continue in it longer than this campaign’.
I have lived long enough in the world to think the bloom of youth an unnecessary ingredient in an agreeable woman ... As to her circumstances, they are such as give me a fortune in the present beyond the utmost of my ambition, and secure me an independency hereafter to put an honest man above the frowns of a minister; whilst on the other hand the weight of her fortune and the interest of her brother and son, the Dukes of Bedford and Bridgwater, must contribute greatly to my advancement in the army if I choose to continue in it.
In 1746, seeing the Duke of Cumberland’s favourites ‘being put over his head,’ he threatened to resign;
At the general election of 1747 Lyttelton was returned for Brackley, which he controlled through his step-son, the young Duke of Bridgwater, still a schoolboy at Eton, living in the holidays with his mother. On 4 Mar. 1749 Horace Walpole wrote to Mann:
a great storm ... was stirred up by Colonel Lyttelton, who, having been ill-treated by the Duke, has been dealing with the Prince. He discovered to the House some innovations in the mutiny bill, of which, though he could not make much, the Opposition have, and fought the bill for a whole fortnight; during the course of which the world has got much light into many very arbitrary proceedings of the commander-in-chief.
He renewed his vendetta against Cumberland in January 1751, on a government motion condemning a treasonable leaflet, in which the commander-in-chief was accused of planning to establish military government. Supporting a previous speaker, who had maintained that some of the charges made in the leaflet were not ungrounded, Lyttelton, ‘with a greater command of absurdity’,
told a long story of Colonel George Townshend’s having been refused leave to stay in Norfolk, though he was cultivating the Whig interest, and an alarming history of the Duke’s having placed two sentinels to guard the ruins of Haddocks Bagnio and the Rummer tavern at Charing Cross, which had been burnt down.
Walpole, Mems. Geo. II, i. 10-11.
On the Prince of Wales’s death two months later Horace Walpole wrote (to Mann 1 Apr. 1751),
Dick Lyttelton, one of the patriot officers, had collected depositions on oath against the Duke for his behaviour in Scotland, but I suppose he will now throw the papers into Hamlet’s grave.
Lyttelton now became involved in a bitter quarrel with his brother-in-law, the Duke of Bedford, over the custody of the young Duke of Bridgwater. On 13 Apr. 1751 he wrote to Bedford complaining that the young Duke’s ‘good disposition has been perverted ... and estranged from us’ and that there had been ‘caballing’ and ‘wicked practices to set him against his mother’.
improperly used or treated at your house, I would as his next relation apply to Mr. Egerton, his guardian, to interpose the authority the late Duke of Bridgwater gave him and me to apply to the court of Chancery.
The upshot was that the custody of the young Duke was transferred from his mother to his uncle, who thereby gained control of the borough of Brackley.
He died 1 Oct. 1770.