Family and Education

b. 29 Sept. 1728, o.s. of Charles Cadogan, M.P., 2nd Baron Cadogan, by Elizabeth, da. and coh. of Sir Hans Sloane, 1st Bt. educ. Magdalen, Oxf. 1746. m. (1) 30 May 1747 Frances (d. 25 May 1768), da. of Henry Bromley, 1st Baron Montfort, sis. of Thomas Bromley, 6s.; (2) 10 May 1777 Mary (div. 1796), da. of Charles Churchill, 3s. 3da. suc. fa. 24 Sept. 1776; inherited under the will of Hans Stanley his half of the Sloane estate at Chelsea 1780; cr. Earl Cadogan 27 Dec. 1800.

Offices Held

Treasurer to Prince Edward (subsequently Duke of York) 1756-67; surveyor of the King’s gardens, 1764-9; clerk of the venison warrant 1769-78; master of the mint 1769-84; Sloane trustee of the British Museum 1779- d.

Biography

Cadogan was returned for Cambridge in 1749 on the interest of Lord Montfort, supported by the Pelhams; in 1754 he made room for his brother-in-law, Thomas Bromley, and unsuccessfully contested Great Marlow; but he was again returned for Cambridge on Bromley’s succeeding to the peerage; and till 1774 his elections at Cambridge were uncontested. The appointment in the Duke of York’s ‘family’ in time created a new connexion, and as its senior member Cadogan naturally had to follow the Duke. In Bute’s list of December 1761, ‘Newcastle, Government’ was first placed against Cadogan; but next ‘Newcastle’ was crossed out. He appears in Fox’s list of Members in favour of the peace preliminaries; and writing to Bute, 30 Nov. 1762, Fox mentioned him among possible seconders of the Government motion.1 In the autumn of 1763 Jenkinson marked him as ‘pro’, and towards the end of the year when vacancies were expected at the Boards of Trade and the Admiralty, the Duke of York seems to have pressed Cadogan’s claims;2 but finally he was appointed, in April 1764, surveyor of the King’s gardens. In June 1765 some further ‘arrangement in his favour’ was discussed,3 but the Grenvilles left office before it materialized.

In February 1766 Cadogan took a hand in trying to bring about a meeting and reconciliation between Grenville, Bedford, and Bute with a view to defeating the Rockinghams and the repeal of the Stamp Act4 (their meeting, on 12 Feb. having proved of no avail, the Duke of York tried to obtain for Bedford an audience with the King for the same purpose5). No wonder then that Cadogan, on 22 Feb., voted against the repeal of the Stamp Act; and Rockingham, who in July 1765 had, mistakenly, classed him as ‘pro’, by November 1766 placed him among the ‘Swiss’, i.e. those prepared to serve any Administration. But after Cadogan had absented himself from the division on the land tax, Newcastle, in March 1767, counted him among the followers of ‘Bedford and Grenville’. Horace Walpole ascribes responsibility to the Duke of York for ‘Cadogan, his treasurer, attached to Grenville, and whose place of surveyor of Kensington garden had newly been increased to £1000 a year, absenting himself’.6 This passage, in the ‘foul’ copy of the Memoirs, was written by Walpole in the second half of 1769. In the clean copy,7 which he started after 1772 and continued to annotate till about 1785, he added the note:

I have said he was attached to Grenville; it was because he thought Grenville likely to come into power again; but when deserted by the Bedfords, Cadogan paid his court to Lord Gower; and when Lord North became minister, became so servile to him, that being out shooting in Norfolk during the Newmarket season, it was a joke with the persons who returned thence to examine the game going to London, and at every inn was a parcel directed by Cadogan to Lord North.

By the beginning of 1768 Cadogan was back in the Government camp, towards which he had always gravitated; but more important than the failure of the negotiations for a united Opposition in July 1767, and the Bedfords joining Administration, was the death of the Duke of York in September 1767, which set Cadogan free to follow his own inclinations—and a careful study of the various collections of Grenville and Bedford mss. shows that at no time was he really close to either. Henceforth he is never found voting against the Government.

In 1770, on Granby’s death, Montfort thought of putting up Cadogan’s eldest son, Captain Cadogan, for the county;8 and before the general election of 1774, Cadogan, expecting soon to succeed to his father’s peerage, would have liked to cede the seat at Cambridge to him, but in the end himself had to fight hard for it against a dangerous opposition encouraged by the ‘parsimony and niggardliness’ of the sitting Members.9 ‘In the autumn of 1775’, writes the Cambridge scholar, William Cole, ‘... his eldest son, my dear friend Captain Charles Cadogan being fallen ill of a malady of which there was no great prospect of his getting the better of [insanity], he declined all interest at Cambridge’.10

Cadogan died 3 Apr. 1807.

Ref Volumes: 1754-1790

Author: Sir Lewis Namier

Notes

• 1. Bute mss.
• 2. See letters from Ld. Halifax to Geo. Grenville, 8 and 10 Nov. 1763, Grenville mss (JM).
• 3. Same to same, 27 June 1765, ibid.
• 4. See memorandum by Geo. Grenville, paper by Cadogan, 13 Feb. 1766. Printed Grenville Pprs, iii. 360, n. 1; Add. 34713, f. 265.
• 5. See Fortescue, i, 272-3, and Namier, Add. Corr. 52-3.
• 6. Mems. Geo. III, ii. 300-1.
• 7. Both copies are in the possession of the Earl Waldegrave at Chewton House, Som.
• 8. See S. Jenyns to Ld. Hardwicke, 3 Nov. 1770, Add. 35631. ff. 93-94; and corresp. between Walpole and Cole, Corresp. H. Walpole (Yale ed.), i. 198-202.
• 9. Add. 5823, f. 100.
• 10. Ibid.