to render valuable service to Walpole from his influence over the queen. Through him the minister governed Queen Caroline and indirectly George II. Hervey was vice-chamberlain in the royal household and a member of the privy council. In 1733 he was called to the House of Lords by writ in virtue of his father's barony. In spite of repeated requests he received no further preferment until after 1740, when he became lord privy seal. After the fall of Sir Robert Walpole he was dismissed (July 1742) from his office. An excellent political pamphlet, _Miscellaneous Thoughts on the present Posture of Foreign and Domestic Affairs_, shows that he still retained his mental vigour, but he was liable to epilepsy, and his weak appearance and rigid diet were a constant source of ridicule to his enemies. He died on the 5th of August 1743. He predeceased his father, but three of his sons became successively earls of Bristol. Hervey wrote detailed and brutally frank memoirs of the court of George II. from 1727 to 1737. He gave a most unflattering account of the king, and of Frederick, prince of Wales, and their family squabbles. For the queen and her daughter, Princess Caroline, he had a genuine respect and attachment, and the princess's affection for him was commonly said to be the reason for the close retirement in which she lived after his death. The MS. of Hervey's memoirs was preserved by the family, but his son, Augustus John, 3rd earl of Bristol, left strict injunctions that they should not be published until after the death of George III. In 1848 they were published under the editorship of J. W. Croker, but the MS. had been subjected to a certain amount of mutilation before it came into his hands. Croker also softened in some cases the plainspokenness of the original. Hervey's bitter account of court life and intrigues resembles in many points the memoirs of Horace Walpole, and the two books corroborate one another in many statements that might otherwise have been received with suspicion.