Commons 1790-1820

There is still no complete biography. Soon after Windham's death his friend Edmund Malone published a memoir (see Gent. Mag. (1810), i. 588) described by Lord Holland as 'a most miserable performance'. His executors delegated the task to George Ellis*, who died in 1815 without accomplishing it. Windham's agent and secretary, Thomas Amyot, published his speeches in 3 volumes in 1812 with a prefatory memoir. Some of his diaries (1784-1810) were published in 1866; probably incompletely, and are partly lost. His correspondence with Mrs Crewe was published at the same time in the Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Soc., vol. ix. The Windham Papers edited by S. Benjamin in 1913; not always reliably, but with a notable introduction by Lord Rosebery, drew on the mss collection acquired by the BL in 1909 (Add. 37842-37935), as did J. P. Gilson in his Corresp. of E. Burke and W. Windham (1910) and 'Lewis Melville' in his Life of William Cobbett (1913). R. W. Ketton-Cremer drew on his own Windham mss (now in the Norf. RO, except for Add. 50851 in the BL) for The Early Life and Diaries of William Windham (1930) and wrote an extended essay on Windham in his Felbrigg (1962).