Wraxall, SIR NATHANAEL WILLIAM

Wraxall, SIR NATHANAEL WILLIAM, was born at Bristol 8th April 1751, at eighteen entered the East India Company Civil Service, but returned to England in 1772, and thereafter for nearly seven years travelled over Europe—even to Lapland, employed part of the time, however, in a confidential mission from Queen Caroline Matilda of Denmark to her brother George III. He published his Cursory Remarks made in a Tour in 1775, his Memoirs of the Valois Kings in 1777, entered parliament in 1780 as a follower of Lord North, but went over to Pitt, and was made a baronet in 1813. His next books were the History of France from Henry III. to Louis XIV. (3 vols. 1795), Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, and Vienna (2 vols. 1799), and the famous Historical Memoirs of my own Time, from 1772 to 1784 (2 vols. 1815). For a libel in the last on Count Woronzov, Russian envoy to England, Wraxall was fined £500 and sentenced to six months imprisonment, half of which he endured. Violent attacks on his veracity were also made by the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and the British Critic, but Wraxall printed Answers, on the whole, with success. He died at Dover, on the way to Naples, November 7, 1831. His Memoirs, continued from 1784 to 1790, was published in 1836 (3 vols.). There is an excellent edition of the whole work by Mr H. B. Wheatley (5 vols. 1884).