Yarmouth, who had joined Brooks’s in 1795 and from 1797 had sat for three constituencies on the family interest, followed his father Lord Hertford in his support for Pitt’s and subsequent Tory administrations. His principal allegiance was to the prince of Wales, who took his mother as a mistress in about 1807, appointed his father lord chamberlain when he became regent in 1812 and showered him and other relations with lucrative sinecures. However, by the mid-1810s Yarmouth’s once considerable ascendancy over the prince had waned and, having already separated from his wife, he increasingly indulged his appetites for gambling, women and residence abroad.
He retired from the representation of county Antrim at the dissolution in 1818, pleading ill health and personal reasons, which apparently had to do with his father’s reluctance to see him continue in Parliament as ‘his own master’.
In November 1820 Yarmouth, who expected the bill against Queen Caroline to be defeated in the Lords, wrote to Croker that
I am sorry but do not wonder at your anxiety to see whatever sport there may be. To me there could be none, those with whom I would cheerfully have gone into opposition totis viribus have treated me unkindly and refused me the little favour I asked; and on the other hand the pleasure I might personally feel at their removal would be damped and destroyed by seeing you and Lord Lowther* and [John] Beckett* and some other friends dislodged from what amuses and is agreeable to you. So I am as well in a turnip field as anywhere.
Ibid. ff. 209, 210, 215.
Despite being lukewarm towards ministers, he voted against censuring their treatment of the queen, 6 Feb. 1821. He paired against Catholic relief, 28 Feb. He divided against repeal of the additional malt duty, 21 Mar., 3 Apr., disqualifying civil officers of the ordnance from voting in parliamentary elections, 12 Apr., and the forgery punishment mitigation bill, 23 May. He voted against reduction of the barracks grant, 28, 31 May, and for the arrears payment to the duke of Clarence, 8, 18 June 1821.
In July 1821 he received the Knight Grand Cross of St. Anne of Russia. That month his father was forced into resigning from the household, where Lady Conyngham had succeeded Lady Hertford, the ‘Sultana’, as maîtresse-en-titre. Resentful of his fall from grace, Hertford renewed his application for a dukedom, which was refused by George IV, and insult was added to injury when early the following year the marquess of Buckingham was made a duke on coalescing with government with the remnant of the Grenvillite faction. As Yarmouth remarked in December 1821, ‘so the Pitt party begin their first honour by breaking Pitt’s promise to promote Lord Hertford if ever he promoted Lord Buckingham, but the latter has been an enemy, the former a firm friend’.
According to Countess Lieven, Yarmouth was ‘waiting with indecent impatience the death of his father, but it should be said in his defence that the poor old man has become quite childish’.
whenever you see Liverpool or Peel, if either talk to you, I think mystery always bad among intimates and therefore you had better say we talked it over last night and that I said I could fear no personal objection on His Majesty’s part possessing as I do the king’s letters since 1784 to 1819 ... Since the last date the king may have ceased to like frequenting Manchester House or our society but my poor father never failed a day on the queen’s trial when he could be carried down and I after being out of Parliament got a seat to vote on her question as the king knows. I say nothing of this king’s more peculiarly associating with Lord Hertford, but in your researches look whether any old household servants ever retired, without a change of sovereign or ministers, from long service without some step of rank or splendid mark of favour bestowed on him or his.
Add. 60286, f. 261.
Londonderry’s garter was soon presented to him, and Creevey commented that Hertford owed it ‘to his having purchased four seats in Parliament since his father’s death, and to his avowed intention of dealing still more largely in the same commodity’.
By his intimates, who included Croker and the strait-laced Peel, Hertford was well respected, and George Agar Ellis* commented on 29 Nov. 1822 that ‘his faults make chiefly against himself - his qualities are many, though the world with its usual good nature dwells always upon the former and drops the latter’.
He directed our attention to the convenience of opening the door, himself, to any fine lady who would honour him with a visit incognita, after his servants should have prepared a most delicious supper and retired to rest. He told us many curious anecdotes of the advantage he derived from his character for discretion: ‘I never tell of any woman. No power on earth should induce me to name a single female, worthy to be called a woman, by whom I have been favoured. In the first place, because I am not tired of variety, and wish to succeed again: in the second, I think it dishonourable’.
Harriette Wilson Mems. (1929), 275-6.
He died, having enjoyed a final debauch despite feeling unwell, in March 1842, when he was said to be worth over £2,000,000. By his extraordinary will, dated 25 Feb. 1823 with 29 codicils, he made (and unmade) numerous bequests, including one of over £20,000 and his wine cellar to Croker, and left several annuities to his lady friends, including a ‘Mrs. Spencer’. A fraud case brought against Nicholas Suisse, a former servant and legatee, soon brought Hertford’s private life into public notoriety. The bulk of the estates descended to his elder son, Richard Seymour Conway, 4th marquess of Hertford.
no man ever lived more despised nor died less regretted. His life and his death were equally disgusting and revolting to every good and moral feeling. As Lord Yarmouth he was known as a sharp, cunning, luxurious, avaricious man of the world, with some talent ... He was a bon vivant, and when young and gay his parties were agreeable, and he contributed his share to their hilarity. But after he became Lord Hertford and the possessor of an enormous property he was puffed up with a vulgar pride, very unlike the real scion of a noble race ... After a great deal of coarse and vulgar gallantry, generally purchased at a high rate, he formed a connection with Lady Strachan [wife of Admiral Sir Richard Strachan], which thenceforward determined all the habits of his life ... There has been, as far as I know, no example of undisguised debauchery exhibited to the world like that of Lord Hertford, and his age and infirmities rendered it at once the more remarkable and the more shocking. Between 60 and 70 years old, broken with infirmities and almost unintelligible from a paralysis of the tongue, he has been in the habit of travelling about with a company of prostitutes, who formed his principal society.
Greville Mems. v. 19-20.
As well as other literary depictions, he appeared as Lord Monmouth in Benjamin Disraeli’s† Coningsby (1844) and as the marquess of Steyne in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-8).