Mitford, WILLIAM, was born in London, 10th February 1744, entered Queen's College, Oxford, but left without a degree. In 1761 he succeeded to the family estate of Exbury near the New Forest, and in 1769 became a captain in the South Hampshire Militia, of which Gibbon was then major. By Gibbon's advice and encouragement he was induced to undertake his History of Greece (5 vols. 1784-1818). It is a pugnacious, opinionative, one-sided, and even fanatical production. The author is an intense hater of democracy, and can see in Philip of Macedon nothing but a great statesman, in Demosthenes nothing but a noisy demagogue. Yet his zeal, which so often led him astray, also urged him, for the very purpose of substantiating his views, to search more minutely and critically than his predecessors into certain portions of Greek history, and the result was that Mitford's work held the highest place in the opinion of scholars until the appearance of Thirlwall and Grote. He sat in parliament from 1783 to 1818, and died at Exbury, 8th February 1827.
See the Memoir prefixed to the 7th edition of his History (1838), by his brother John Freeman Mitford (1748-1830), who was Lord-chancellor of Ireland from 1802 to 1806, and was raised to the peerage as Lord Redesdale.