24 Facts About William Mitford

William Mitford was an English historian, landowner, and politician.

William Mitford's best known work is The History of Greece, published in ten volumes between 1784 and 1810.

William Mitford's mother, Philadelphia Reveley, heiress to a powerful Northumberland landowner and, at the same time granddaughter of the president of the Bank of England, was to swell the family fortune, but perhaps more importantly, she was a first cousin of Hugh Percy, Duke of Northumberland, patron of the "rotten borough" in which he and his brother were elected to Parliament at the end of Whig supremacy.

When his father died, William Mitford was the sole heir to the family fortune.

Cheam School, an aristocratic boarding school in Hampshire not far from his home in Exbury, was where William Mitford discovered his love of history.

William Mitford was educated under the picturesque writer William Gilpin.

William Mitford was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel in 1779 and, although he never saw combat he was a senior member of the regiment in home defence during the American War of Independence, the Gordon Riots and the French Revolutionary War.

The style of William Mitford is natural and lucid, but without the rich colour of Gibbon.

William Mitford affected some oddities both of language and of orthography, for which he was censured and which he endeavoured to revise.

William Mitford retired to Exbury for the rest of his life, and made the study of the Greek language his hobby and occupation.

William Mitford was encouraged by French scholars whom he met in Paris, Avignon and Nice to give himself systematically to the study of Greek history.

William Mitford's work was published by Thomas Cadell from 1784 until the beginning of the 20th century with a significant continuity.

William Mitford starts as a historian with an acceptable knowledge of classical literary sources.

William Mitford tries in the text to present himself as a reliable and objective enunciator, but he does not succeed.

William Mitford's work is not accepted in academic circles and is openly criticised by the liberal groups of the time, even more strongly after the author's death.

The literary characteristics of William Mitford's work are typical of the period.

William Mitford was for many years a member of the Court of Verderers of the New Forest, a county magistrate and a colonel in the Hampshire Militia.

William Mitford was an impassioned anti-Jacobin from the 1790s, and his partiality for a monarchy led him to be unjust to Athenian democracy.

John William Mitford then goes on to make a comparison between ancient Greece and Britain from the time of the Saxons and the Norman invasions up to the time he writes the short biography, where he refers very little to his brother's life or even to his work itself.

Much of the contemporary political baggage of The History of Greece is, therefore, raised by the political views expressed by his brother, John William Mitford, who seems to use the popularity of the work to make a clear and intentional interpretation of it.

William Mitford was for the Tory party, then, an intellectual reserve rather than a political cadre, who by the posthumous edition in which his memoir is written was losing the influence he had had until then.

William Mitford's parents were James Molloy and his wife Anne Pye of Faringdon House.

William Mitford's younger brother John was a lawyer and politician who became Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Chancellor of Ireland.

William Mitford was distantly related to the novelist Mary Russell Mitford.