Under George II Conway belonged to the old corps of Whigs, and in 1754 he was returned as a Government candidate on Lord Falmouth’s interest at St. Mawes. From 1754 to 1765 his most important political connexions were with the Duke of Cumberland and the 4th Duke of Devonshire. He had been appointed aide-de-camp to Cumberland in 1745 and had served under him at Fontenoy and Culloden. Cumberland wrote about him to Devonshire on 23 May 1757:
The pleasure you express on the part Conway took in Parliament is so like the constant proofs of friendship you have always given ... Harry knows the high opinion I have always had of him, and that his only fault is hiding his talents from too much modesty and a little indolence which with his good sense I am sure he can get the better of, and I hope he has already gained greatly upon it.
When Devonshire (then Lord Hartington) was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1755 he refused to go (according to Horace Walpole)
In 1757 Conway was made groom of the bedchamber (a post he had long desired), and appointed one of the commanders of the expedition to Rochfort. He was ambitious of military distinction, but the failure of the expedition brought him into disfavour with George II; nor was Cumberland, who had resigned his post of captain-general, in a position to help him. In 1758 he asked leave to accompany the expedition to St. Malo but was refused. It was not until 1761, when he went to serve under Granby in Germany, that he again held military command. His reputation in the army was that of a brave soldier and an efficient staff officer, but he was neither a strategist nor a leader of men.
His closest friends were Horace Walpole and the Duke of Grafton. He sat for Thetford and Bury St. Edmunds on Grafton’s interest, and was intimately associated with his private affairs: Grafton, by his will dated 12 June 1761, appointed Conway one of the guardians of his son;
When Conway returned to England in March 1763 he found Walpole and Grafton in opposition. On 15 and 23 Nov. he voted against Grenville’s ministry over Wilkes: the King proposed to dismiss him instantly, but was restrained by Grenville, who undertook to find out whether Conway considered himself in opposition or had voted against Government ‘merely from opinion’. Conway denied that he intended to join the Opposition but would not give a pledge to support Government. On 6 and 18 Feb. 1764 he spoke and voted against them on general warrants, and when Parliament was prorogued in April was dismissed from his regiment and his place in the bedchamber.
‘He neither complained’, wrote Walpole, ‘nor tried to instil a sense of his injuries into a single friend, though he wished they should take his part, and resent for him.’ He acquired a martyr’s reputation with the Opposition, and his dismissal was used as a stick with which to beat Grenville. In the negotiations for a new Administration in July 1765 he was considered for chancellor of the Exchequer, an office for which he knew himself to be unfit and which he was unwilling to take; but eventually, as Cumberland’s choice, became secretary of state and leader of the House of Commons. As secretary of state he was hard-working and conscientious, but inclined to think in terms of routine administration rather than of policy. He was temperamentally unsuited to lead the Commons: ‘could not be induced to traffic with Members’, ‘allowed too much to his scruples’, and ‘thought nothing a virtue but his own moderation’.
After Cumberland’s death Conway formed with Rockingham and Grafton the junto of the Administration, in so far as any fixed lines can be discerned in it. But he did not believe that it could stand as it was, and together with Grafton wished to place Pitt at its head. In April 1766, when Rockingham made it clear that he would not stand down for Pitt, Conway considered resigning with Grafton. When Pitt came to power in July, Conway agreed to serve under him, though Pitt’s projected northern alliance reversed Conway’s pro-Austrian foreign policy. He hoped to act as mediator between Pitt and the Rockinghams, and they saw him as a guarantee of their influence in the new Administration. The dismissal of Lord Edgcumbe in December 1766 ended these hopes and occasioned the breach between Chatham and the Rockinghams: Conway tried to intervene on their behalf and talked of resignation, but, under pressure from Walpole and out of loyalty to Grafton, remained. He broke off relations with Chatham and gave the Rockinghams hope that he would soon resign.
During the session of 1767 he was in disagreement with his Cabinet colleagues on the fundamentals of their policy: he opposed Townshend’s American plan, refused to introduce it in the Commons, and twice voted against it, 13 and 15 May; and he opposed Chatham’s policy with respect to the East India Company and voted against the bill to restrain their dividends, 26 May. Yet Grafton, unable to replace him, begged him to remain in office: minister malgré lui, he was the main bulwark against an apparently united Opposition. Indeed, had he been ambitious or unscrupulous, he could have supplanted Grafton as effective minister; while the Rockinghams hoped for and expected his resignation as the prelude to Chatham’s downfall. He feared the reproaches of Grafton if he resigned, and of Rockingham if he did not; ‘dreaded its being said that he remained in place with all denominations of men’;
Yet he delayed his resignation and persuaded the King to open negotiations with Rockingham, believing that the Rockinghams would be prepared to enter the Administration. After Rockingham had insisted that the negotiations should be extended to the Bedfords and Grenvilles, Conway, offended at the inclusion of Grenville and now conscious that his prime political allegiance was to the King, agreed to stay in office. On the failure of the negotiations for a ‘comprehensive Administration’ Conway made a last effort to satisfy Rockingham and pressed him to accept office ‘on his own bottom’; Rockingham’s refusal freed Conway from his obligations to the party, but his failure to resign estranged him from them. ‘Conway’, wrote Burke on 18 Aug. 1767, ‘is gone fairly to the Devil.’
He remained unsettled and dissatisfied, searching for an excuse to shed his distasteful responsibilities as leader of the Commons and vaunt the purity and disinterestedness of his motives to the world. It was suggested that he might become secretary of state for America;
Henceforth he adopted a detached attitude towards Government measures, and tried to avoid giving his opinion or accepting responsibility. Although not present at the Cabinet meeting which decided to expel Wilkes, 20 Apr. 1768, he did not contest their decision in principle, but held that expulsion should be deferred till next session. When the matter was reconsidered in January 1769, Conway was against expulsion, but went down to Parliament, wrote Hertford to the King on 27 Jan.,
without any prejudice upon his mind favourable to Mr. Wilkes and desirous of being convinced that the measure is right and that he may be able to support it with his opinion.
However he did not vote on the expulsion motion of 3 Feb., but said, 17 Mar., on the motion to declare Wilkes’ third election void:
Originally, while it was a question of Mr. Wilkes’s expulsion alone, I was one of those who took no part in it. I was not a friend of Mr. Wilkes: I considered his expulsion a very undesirable thing; but I did not care to be an advocate for him. As long as it was a question of Mr. Wilkes, I did not concern myself in it; but now it is become the case of the people at large ... I say, that those who think to set up the liberty of the people against the liberty of Parliament, will find themselves mistaken.
He voted for the seating of Luttrell on 15 Apr. and 8 May 1769.
At the Cabinet meeting of 1 May 1769 Conway was in the minority who advocated the repeal of all the Townshend duties. When it was proposed in the Commons, 5 Mar. 1770, to repeal the duty on tea, he said: ‘I did not know, till the day before yesterday, what determination the Administration had come to with regard to this matter.’
From 1770 to 1775 he gave Government critical and unreliable support. He had objected to details in the royal marriage bill before its introduction, on second reading declared that he was ‘a friend to the principle of the bill and to the minutest wish of the Crown’,
Conway was on the continent when Parliament was dissolved in September 1774. ‘I had imagined’, he wrote to Robert Murray Keith on 19 Nov., ‘the Duke of Grafton, as he had said nothing to the contrary, purposed bringing me in as before.’
Conway took a leading part against the American war, condemning it as ‘cruel, unnecessary, and unnatural’,
Conway became commander-in-chief in the Rockingham Administration with a seat in the Cabinet. Grafton, Camden, and Conway, survivors from the Chatham Administration who had not resigned with Chatham, formed a group committed to neither Rockingham nor Shelburne. With them Conway remained in office under Shelburne, and defended his conduct against Fox in the Commons on 9 July 1782, using the clichés of twenty years earlier:
On 28 Mar. 1784 the King wrote to Pitt:
Having heard this day that the Duke of Grafton has met with the repulse of his candidate General Conway at St. Edmundsbury and that the Duke to prevent the introduction of a stranger has been obliged to put up in his stead Captain George Fitzroy, I think it may be agreeable to Mr. Pitt to know of a certain friend instead of a determined enemy.
Conway had sat in Parliament for over forty years; had worked at different times with different parties; yet at no time had he been a party man.
He died 9 July 1795.