# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Nugent, Robert

​NUGENT, ROBERT, Earl Nugent (1702–1788), who afterwards assumed the surname of Craggs, politician and poet, born in 1702, was the son of Michael Nugent of Carlanstown, co. Westmeath, by his wife Mary, youngest daughter of Robert Barnewall, ninth baron Trimleston. His property at the outset produced about 1,500l. a year, but on his death he was considered one of the millionaires of the day, both in personalty and in real estate; and this accession in wealth was caused by his skill in marrying rich widows, a talent so marked that Horace Walpole invented the word ‘Nugentize’ to describe the adventurers who endeavoured to imitate his good fortune. Among the pamphlets in the British Museum is ‘The Unnatural Father, or the Persecuted Son, being a candid narrative of the … sufferings of Robert Nugent, jun., by the means and procurement of his own father’ (1755), and the writer, then a prisoner in the Fleet prison, alleged that he was a son of Nugent ‘by his first cousin, Miss Clare Nugent, daughter of a gentleman in Ireland of 2,500l. per annum,’ and that he was born in the parish of St. George, Hanover Square, in 1730. This was, no doubt, an illegitimate son, whose pertinacity in urging his claims on Nugent must often have caused trouble to the father. His first recognised marriage was to Emilia, second daughter of Peter, fourth earl of Fingal, whom he married on 14 July 1730 and lost in childbed on 16 Aug. 1731. The child, Lieut.-col. Edmund Nugent, whose two sons, Charles Edmund [q. v.] and George [q. v.], are noticed separately, survived his mother, but died many years before his father. His second marriage (23 March 1736–7) was to Anne, a daughter of James Craggs, the postmaster-general, and a sister of James Craggs, the secretary of state [q. v.], who divided with her two sisters the property both of her father and brother. Her first husband was John Newsham of Chadshunt in Warwickshire, by whom she had an only son, and her second marriage was to John Knight. Several letters addressed by Pope to her during the earlier period of her life are in Pope's ‘Works,’ ix. (Letters, vol. iv.) pp. 435–59 (1886). John Knight, her only son by her second husband, died in June 1727, and her husband thereupon bequeathed all his estates to her, and at his decease on 2 Oct. 1733 she became possessed of all his property. By his marriage to this fat and ugly dame (whose name he assumed in addition to his own) Nugent became the owner of the parish of Gosfield in Essex, of a seat in parliament for St. Mawes in Cornwall, and about 100,000l. besides; but she brought him neither happiness nor the children which he desired. He amused himself by forming an extensive park at Gosfield, and the taste shown in the setting of the woods and ornamental water is highly praised by Arthur Young. A visit which Horace Walpole made to this house in 1748 is described in his ‘Correspondence’ (ii. 118–20). His second wife died in 1756, aged 59, and was buried in Gosfield Church, where an inscription to Nugent himself was also subsequently placed. Nugent sat for his borough of St. Mawes from 1741 to 1754, and was re-elected at the general dissolution in that year, but preferred to sit for the city of Bristol, which had also returned him, and to secure the return of a relative for his Cornish borough. The voters of Bristol remained faithful to him until the dissolution of 1774, when even the arguments of Dean Tucker in ‘A Review of Lord Vis. Clare's Conduct as Representative of Bristol,’ which praised Nugent's zeal to advance the interests of the poor in legislation, his anxiety to serve the interests of his constituents in parliament, and his liberality in promoting from his own purse improvements in the city, could not effect his re-election. In 1774 he returned to St. Mawes, and for it he sat until he retired in June 1784, his interest in the borough being supreme then and afterwards, although his son did ​not obtain the post of governor of the castle of St. Mawes, which Nugent applied for to George Grenville in 1764 in a remarkable letter printed in the ‘Grenville Papers,’ ii. 452–4. As Nugent owned a borough in Cornwall, a county where the Prince of Wales, the unhappy son of George II, was ever scheming to advance his parliamentary influence, and as the prince lacked money, while the rollicking Irishman was wealthy, they soon became fast friends. Nugent was made controller of the prince's household in 1747, and was always nominated to high office in his royal master's imaginary administrations, in return for which favours the needy prince condescended to borrow from him large sums of money. These debts were never repaid, but they were liquidated by George III in ‘places, pensions, and peerages.’ On the prince's death he made his peace with the Pelham administration, and was created a lord of the treasury (6 April 1754). This office he retained until 1759, and he owed his continuance in his place in Pitt's administration of 1756 to the influence of Lord Grenville. From 1760 to 1765 he was one of the vice-treasurers for Ireland; from 1766 to 1768 he held the post of president of the board of trade, and from the latter year until 1782 he was again one of Ireland's vice-treasurers. This exhausts his lists of places, but he was raised to the Irish peerage as Viscount Clare and Baron Nugent in 1766, and promoted to the further dignity of Earl Nugent in the same peerage in 1776, being indebted for his places and his peerages to the king's remembrance of the money lent to the Prince of Wales, and to his unbroken support of every ministry in turn. Nugent's third wife (1757) was Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Drax of Charborough in Dorset, and relict of Augustus, fourth earl of Berkeley, with whom he secured, as he did with his second wife, a large fortune, and failed to obtain happiness in married life. She outlived him, but they had been separated for some years, and he disowned the second of the two daughters whom she bore after their marriage. His last act in politics was an attempt in 1784, unfortunately a failure, to bring about a union between Pitt and Fox, and in that year he retired from parliamentary life, where his wit and humour had made him a popular figure. He died at the house of General O'Donnel, Rutland Square, Dublin, 13 Oct. 1788, when the title and real estate of about 14,000l. per annum passed to the Marquess of Buckingham, who, on marrying (16 April 1775) Mary Elizabeth, his elder daughter, assumed by royal permission the surnames of Nugent and Temple, and obtained the privilege of signing Nugent before all titles whatsoever. The personal property (200,000l.) was bequeathed to two relatives. Nugent was brought up as a Roman catholic, turned protestant, and, last stage of all, died in the bosom of the church which he had abandoned and ridiculed. Popular doubt as to the religion which he professed gave the sting to Oswald's retort to him, ‘What species of christianity do you claim to belong to?’
Nugent was endowed with a vigorous constitution and athletic frame, a stentorian voice, and a wonderful flow of spirits. His speeches in parliament, delivered as they were in a rich Irish brogue, often hovered on the borders of farce, but his unflagging wit usually carried him happily through his difficulties. As for convictions in politics he had none; from the first he laid himself out for the highest bidder, and as his knowledge was inconsiderable and his opinions changed with expediency, he was open to the censure of Lord George Sackville, who dubbed him ‘the most uninformed man of his rank in England,’ adding that nobody could depend upon his attachment (Hist. MSS. Comm. 9th Rep. pt. iii. p. 19).
Nugent's ode to William Pulteney obtained great fame throughout the last century. It described the poet's passage from the creed of Roman catholicism to a purer faith, and the belief which dwelt in his mind afterwards. Two quotations from it, the opening lines and a portion of the seventh stanza, became almost proverbial in literature. The first runs—
Remote from liberty and truth, By fortune's crime, my early youth Drank error's poison'd springs;
and the second asserts—
Though Cato liv'd, though Tully spoke, Though Brutus dealt the godlike stroke, Yet perish'd fated Rome.
Horace Walpole called this ode a glorious poem, but Gray, in a more critical spirit, writes to the owner of Strawberry Hill: ‘Mr. Nugent sure did not write his own ode,’ and the latest editor of Gray's works adds that ‘Earl Nugent was suspected of paying Mallet to write his best ode, that addressed to Pulteney, his later and obviously unaided efforts being contemptible.’ Many poems by Nugent, and this piece among them, are in ‘Dodsley's Collection,’ ii. 166, &c., and in the ‘New Foundling Hospital for Wit,’ a catalogue of which is given in ‘Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors’ (Park's ed.) v. 288–91. The ode was published separately and anonymously in 1739, and was included in the same year in two anonymous editions of his ​‘Odes and Epistles,’ most of which lauded the talents and aims of the ‘patriots’ in opposition to Sir Robert Walpole. Nugent wrote in 1774 an anonymous poem, entitled ‘Faith,’ which has been described as a strange attempt to depose the Epicurean doctrine for that of the Trinity. A present to the queen, as a new-year's gift for 1775, of some ‘Irish stuff’ manufactured in his native land, and of a set of loyal verses, produced in return an anonymous poem, ‘The Genius of Ireland, a New Year's Gift to Lord Clare,’ and drew from the wits the jest that the queen had thanked him for both his ‘pieces of stuff.’ An anonymous tract, with the title of ‘An Inquiry into the Origin and Consequences of the Influence of the Crown over Parliament’ (1780), is sometimes attributed to Nugent, but with slight probability. An ‘Epistle to Robert Nugent, with a picture of Dr. Swift, by William Dunkin, D.D.,’ is reproduced in ‘Swift's Works’ (1883, ed. xv. 218–21), but his name is more intimately associated with another literary genius. On the publication of the ‘Traveller,’ the acquaintance of Goldsmith was eagerly sought by Nugent, and they lived ever after on terms of close friendship. Goldsmith visited him at Gosfield in 1771, and at his house of 11 North Parade, Bath, and embalmed for all time the name of the jovial Irish peer in the charming lines, ‘The Haunch of Venison, a poetical epistle to Lord Clare,’ as an acknowledgment for a present of venison from Gosfield Park. The character of Nugent is tersely summed up by Glover in the words ‘a jovial and voluptuous Irishman, who had left Popery for the Protestant religion, money, and widows’ (Memoirs, 1813, p. 47).
Two portraits were painted by Gainsborough; one is the property of the corporation of Bristol; the other, which formerly hung over the mantelpiece in the dining-room at Stowe, was, at the sale in 1848, purchased by Field-marshal Sir George Nugent [q. v.] for 106l., and now belongs to his son. The same gentleman owns a portrait by Gainsborough of Lieutenant-colonel Edmund Nugent.
[Gent. Mag. 1788, pt. ii. 938; Albemarle's Rockingham, i. 77–8; Horace Walpole's Letters (Cunningham), passim; Gray's Works (ed. 1884), ii. 220; Wright's Essex, ii. 1–12; Morant's Essex, ii. 382; Wraxall's Memoirs (1884 ed.), i. 88–96, iii. 305; Walpole's Last Ten Years of George II, vol. i. 381; Hist. MSS. Comm. 8th Rep. pp. 199–200; Peach's Houses of Bath, i. 27, 92, 151; Grosvenor Gallery, Gainsborough Exhib. Catalogue, 1885, pp. 22, 66, 92; Lord Chesterfield's Letters (Mahon), v. 448; Southey's Later Poets, iii. 290–5.]
W. P. C.