James , Earl Stanhope, who had become Secretary of State on George I's accession, was the mainspring of the Whig administration. He had in the past combined no small skill as a soldier with profound sagacity as a statesman, and until his death in 1721 he was George I's closest adviser, to the prejudice even of Bernstorff and the Hanoverians. His life is treated in the Dictionary of National Biography, but no monograph, based on the original papers at Chevening, seems yet to have been published