Philip Stanhope, styled Lord Stanhope, inherited his father’s title and estate on the latter’s death on 28 Jan. 1714. Although eligible to sit in the House of Lords during the last two parliamentary sessions of the reign of Anne, he did not attend any of the sittings of 1714, nor any of those during the reign of her successor George I. As early as March 1703 he withdrew himself from public life, explaining to his brother-in-law Thomas Coke‡ that ‘my ill state of health and the unfortunate deafness that attends it ... must destroy all thoughts I can have of meddling with public business’.
In his youth a political career in the upper echelons of the aristocracy stretched out before Lord Stanhope. He made an advantageous political match in 1692 when he married Lady Elizabeth Savile, the daughter of his father’s old friend, Halifax. A private act of Parliament which allowed the underage Stanhope to make a jointure and settlement for his prospective bride received the royal assent on 24 Feb. 1692 and the marriage licence was hurried through the same day. Lady Elizabeth brought a dowry of £20,000 with her, but the marriage was not a success and by November 1693 Lord Stanhope was complaining of his wife’s behaviour to his father-in-law.
By 1698 Stanhope was renting the unoccupied Bishop’s Palace in the precincts of Lichfield Cathedral and actively supported the Tory candidates in the elections of December 1700-May 1702 for that borough. He also exercised his father’s interest in Derbyshire to help his brother-in-law Thomas Coke in the election of January 1701, which Coke unexpectedly lost. He then tried to assist Coke to find an alternative seat, although he attempted to dissuade his father from pushing first Coke and then their cousin Colonel James Stanhope†, later Earl Stanhope, to stand for a Lichfield seat, arguing from his own experience that the interest of the borough’s sitting member was too strong.
His letters on the elections of 1701-2 largely confirm a comment recorded by Michael Maty, biographer of Lord Stanhope’s celebrated son Philip Dormer Stanhope†, 4th earl of Chesterfield, that in his youth Stanhope was of ‘strong parts’ and that he was ‘a high Tory, if not a Jacobite’.
By the time Stanhope became the 3rd earl of Chesterfield his wife had predeceased him by five years, leaving him four sons and two daughters. All four sons sat in Parliament, and his heir, Philip Dormer Stanhope, remains one of the most famous statesmen and writers of the eighteenth century. Lord Stanhope, as Philip Dormer Stanhope was styled from 1714 until his accession to the earldom, was largely raised by his grandmother, the dowager marchioness of Halifax. In later letters he denied that affection between parents and children was natural and insisted that it must be developed through kindness and consideration – suggesting that he had received little of either from his ailing father. The 3rd earl’s will of 30 Jan. 1725 bequeathing all his personal estate to his heir was terse and lacking in emotion. For his part Lord Stanhope showed little sign of grief at his father’s lingering illness and eventual death on 2 Feb. 1726.