COWPER, George Nassau Clavering, Visct. Fordwich (1738-89).

Cowper, sent abroad for his education, was by October 1757 ‘weary of Lausanne and wanting to ramble’.1Spencer Cowper, Dean of Durham, to Earl Cowper, 23 Oct. 1757, Letters of Spencer Cowper, ed. Hughes. A year later he went on a tour,2Ibid. arrived at Venice 21 June 1759,3Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Bute, 24 June 1759. and eventually at Florence, where he remained. Elected to Parliament in absentia he never took his seat. ‘We have Lord Fordwich’, wrote Horace Mann to Horace Walpole, 14 June 1760, ‘losing his whole time by acting the cicisbeo to the Marchesa [Corsi], and entertaining all her dependants.’ On the eve of the general election of 1761, 13 Feb., Dean Cowper wrote to Lord Cowper: ‘I don’t think but Lord Fordwich in spite of his perverse negligence is still safe in, Brassey’s interest being so closely connected with yours ...’ He was not even declared a candidate. On 17 Oct. 1761 Mann wrote to Walpole:

Lord Fordwich, who disobliged his father and lost his seat in Parliament by only not fixing the time of his departure, seems resolved to return to England soon.

He did not—even the earnest entreaties of his dying father failed to get him back from Florence. Still, his absence abroad did not stop him from applying in 1765 for the Order of the Bath, and the lord lieutenancy of Kent;4See letters from the Duke of Grafton to Cowper, 30 Aug. and 20 Nov. 1765, Herts. RO. Cowper mss. and in 1768 for the Garter or the Thistle.5See ibid. letters from Bute, 27 May, and from Grafton, 12 Dec. 1768. In 1780, having tried through the Grand Duke of Tuscany to influence the King of Spain in favour of a general peace, he asked George III once more for the Garter to ‘alleviate the mortification I am under ... in having failed in my enterprise’; and offered the King Raphael’s self-portrait and his ‘Madonna and Child’ (sold in 1928 for £175,000) for £2,500.6Fortescue, v. 50. In August 1782 he applied to be created a duke;7Cowper to Shelburne, 5 Aug. 1782, Lansdowne mss. and having at last returned to England in 1786, ‘a very great stranger ... in his native land and to it’,8Frances Boscawen to Mrs. Delany, 27 May 1786, Autobiog. and Corresp. vi. 356. he asked to be made British minister at Florence; went back without it; and died at Florence 22 Dec. 1789; but was buried at Hertingfordbury in Hertfordshire.