Author: Hardinge, George
Biography:
HARDINGE, George (1743-1816: ODNB)
Much of the biographical information about Hardinge comes from the memoir attached to the posthumous Miscellaneous Works edited in three volumes by his friend the great publisher John Nichols in 1818. The eldest surviving son among twelve children of Jane (Pratt) and Nicholas Hardinge (q.v.), he was born at Canbury Manor on the family estate near Kingston, Surrey, on 22 Jun. 1743. He inherited Canbury on the death of his father in 1758. After attending Kingston grammar school and Eton he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he matriculated 1761 but did not take a degree; he was however awarded an MA in 1769 by royal mandate. Admitted to the Middle Temple in 1764, he was called to the bar in 1769. In the same year, he was elected a member of the Society of Antiquaries—a sign of his commitment to history and literature—and in 1788 became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was a respected barrister and government official (commissioner of bankruptcy 1771-82, solicitor-general to Queen Charlotte 1782 and her attorney-general from 1794 to his death) and sat in the House of Commons as MP for the rotten borough of Old Sarum, Wiltshire, from 1784 to 1802. In 1776 he married Lucy Long; it was not a happy marriage and eventually they separated. They had no children themselves but adopted George Nicholas Hardinge, his brother’s son. Between 1786 and 1816, Hardinge acted as chief justice of three Welsh counties and gained a reputation for learning and humanity in that role. In literature he was also industrious, from the satires and spoofs of his early years to the speeches and political pamphlets of his public life. Nichols gratefully acknowledged the anecdotes and biographies that Hardinge contributed to his Literary Anecdotes and Literary Illustrations which appeared first in GM; Chalmeriana (1800) likewise was an assemblage of short pieces submitted to the Morning Chronicle under the pseudonym “Mr. Owen, Junior, of Paper Buildings, Inner Temple.” According to Nichols, there were substantial unpublished ms remains, present whereabouts not known. For some time from the early 1770s Hardinge lived close to his friend Horace Walpole at Twickenham, but in 1815 his residence was Milbourne House, Esher, Surrey. He died of pleurisy at Presteigne in Radnorshire on 26 Apr. 1816 and was buried in the family vault at Kingston. He must have been a clubbable man: Nichols’s “Memoir” of 1818 describes him as “one whose pleasure seemed chiefly to arise from the communication of it to others.” (ODNB 30 Jan. 2022; ACAD; Miscellaneous Works [1818]) HJ