The Mitred Earl: An Eighteenth-Century Eccentric (Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry)

Brian Fothergill, The Mitred Earl: An Eighteenth-Century Eccentric. London: Century, 1988.

Paperback, 21.5 x 13.5 cm, card wraps, 254 pages, plates.

Text a little browned, light stain and cockle in some margins.

The Mitred Earl: An Eighteenth-Century Eccentric by Brian Fothergill is a vivid and entertaining biography of Frederick Hervey, the flamboyant Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, one of the most colorful and controversial figures of the eighteenth century. Blending meticulous historical research with a sharp eye for eccentric detail, Fothergill reconstructs the extraordinary life of a churchman-aristocrat whose restless energy carried him across the worlds of politics, religion, art, travel, and scandal. Hervey emerges as a dazzling contradiction: an Anglican bishop who championed Catholic emancipation, a cultivated patron of architecture and the arts whose lavish tastes bordered on excess, and a worldly adventurer whose irreverent wit and theatrical behavior shocked contemporaries from London to Rome. The book follows his political intrigues in Ireland and revolutionary Europe, his friendships with figures such as Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin, his grand building projects at Ickworth and Downhill, and his notorious social escapades, all while painting a rich portrait of eighteenth-century aristocratic society in an age of upheaval and enlightenment. Fothergills prose captures both the humor and tragedy of a man who seemed too extravagant for the office he held yet too intellectually alive to fit comfortably within the conventions of his time, making this biography not only a study of an unforgettable eccentric but also a lively exploration of power, privilege, religion, and personality in Georgian Britain and Ireland.