Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I want to start
today by asking you to picture a specific kind
of person. We all know them. Okay. They're the
ones who are just absolutely obsessed with the
aesthetic of the past. Maybe a little too much.
They love old castles. They love gloomy weather.
Ah, I know who you're talking about. Right. They
probably have a very curated Instagram feed full
of... you know, dark academia vibes. And they're
constantly documenting every little irony of
their daily life. It sounds like half the people
on social media right now. Exactly. But the person
we are unpacking today isn't a modern influencer.
He was doing all of this in the middle of the
18th century. We are talking about Horace Walpole.
Horace Walpole, yeah. Honestly, the more I looked
into the stack of research for this episode,
the more it felt like he was a time traveler.
He basically invented the Gothic. So if you like
haunted houses or vampires or just moody lighting,
you have him to thank. You really do. But he
was also the son of the most powerful prime minister
in British history. It's a jarring contrast,
isn't it? On one hand, you have this incredibly
delicate, artistic innovator who coins words
like serendipity and builds these like fairytale
castles. And on the other hand, his last name
is Walpole. In the 1700s, that name was synonymous
with raw, hard nosed political power. That's
a great way to put it. It's like finding out
that the person who invented goth culture was
also, I don't know, the son of a pragmatic cigar
chomping president. It just doesn't seem to fit.
That is the perfect setup. And we have a massive
stack of sources today, biographies, political
histories, architectural critiques, and of course,
his own letters. A lot of letters. And there
are a lot of letters. 48 volumes of them in the
Yale edition. It's a monumental record of a life.
So our mission today is to figure out who this
guy actually was. Was he a genius, a dilettante,
a gossip? Or was he, as some sources suggest,
the patient zero? for the anxieties of the modern
world? A fascinating question. Let's start at
the beginning. 1717. He's born into the Walpole
family. But to understand Horace, we really have
to understand the dad, Sir Robert Walpole. You
cannot overstate Sir Robert Walpole's shadow.
I mean, he is generally considered the first
prime minister of Great Britain, though the title
wasn't official in the same way back then. Right.
He held power for over 20 years. He was a Whig.
But more importantly, he was just... A force
of nature. Okay, when you say force of nature,
what does that look like in the 18th century?
It looks like a tank. Sir Robert was a coarse,
heavyset, robust man. He was famous for his drinking,
his hunting, and his ability to manage the House
of Commons through a mix of, well, bribery, bullying,
and sheer personality. The ultimate insider.
The ultimate insider. He made the system work
by sheer will. He was masculine in that very
traditional, aggressive, country squire sort
of way. Okay, so you have this tank of a father.
And then comes Horace. He's the youngest son.
And looking at the descriptions of him as a child.
He doesn't seem to fit the mold. Doesn't fit,
is putting it mildly. Horace was born on September
24th, 1717. But the timing is the first red flag
that historians, you know, they really pick up
on. He was born 11 years after his mother's previous
child. 11 years. Yeah. That's a lifetime in terms
of family dynamics, especially back then. It
is. It effectively meant he was raised almost
as an only child in some respects, or at least
a distinct generation from his siblings. But
the whispers began almost immediately. Oh. You
see, his mother. Catherine Shorter, was a fascinating
woman, cultured, intelligent. But by 1717, her
marriage to the prime minister was, well, let's
call it polite estrangement. They were living
separate lives. Effectively. Sir Robert had his
mistresses and Catherine had her own social circle.
And this is where the gossip gets very specific.
There was a rumor that Dog Horace his entire
life, one that he never publicly acknowledged,
but, you know, likely knew about. The rumor was
that Sir Robert Walpole was not his biological
father. the suspect? A man named Carr, Lord Hervey.
He was an aristocrat, the elder brother of the
more famous John Hervey. And the reason this
rumor stuck wasn't just because of the timeline.
It was physical. Because Horace didn't look like
a Walpole. Not even a little bit. The Walpoles
were, as we said, robust, heavy, earthy people.
Horace was frail. He was slender. He had a pale
complexion and these bright, darting eyes. He
had a nervous energy that was completely alien
to his father's temperament, but according to
the gossips of the time, he looked exactly like
a Hervey. And the Herveys had a reputation, didn't
they? I remember seeing a quote in the research
from Lady Mary Wortley Montague. She was a writer
who, she did not pull any punches. Oh, Lady Mary
was lethal. She wrote a line that became famous
in London society. She said that mankind is divided
into three species, men, women, and Herveys.
That is brutal. What does she even mean by that?
She was implying that the Hervey family was so
eccentric, so effeminate, perhaps so, you know,
fluid in their gender presentation or just so
culturally distinct that they didn't fit into
the normal categories of male and female. They
were their own thing. They were something else.
Intelligent, witty, perhaps a bit hysterical
and physically delicate. And here's Horace, the
son of the most masculine man in England, and
everyone is whispering that he actually belongs
to this... Third species. Exactly. Now, we have
to be careful. There's no DNA test. We'll never
know for sure. But in history, the truth often
matters less than the perception. Right. It's
about the psychological impact. Think about the
psychological weight of that. You're living in
the prime minister's house. You're enjoying the
prime minister's wealth. But you look in the
mirror and you see a stranger. You see a Hervey.
It creates immediate imposter syndrome. It creates
an outsider status within the ultimate insider
family. Lady Louisa Stewart, who wrote a memoir
much later, noted that Horace was unlike a Walpole
in figure and in mind. And that would explain
his relationship with his mother. Absolutely.
Horace himself practically worshipped his mother.
The sources describe his attachment to her as
the most powerful emotion of his entire life.
That makes sense. If he feels alienated from
the father figure, he clings to the mother. It
was an intense, intense devotion. And when she
died in 1737, when Horace was just 20 years old,
he was shattered. He wrote about it in a way
that suggests he never really got over it. It
left him alone in a world of wolves, the political
wolves his father commanded. So he's a sensitive
kid. He's smart. He's a bit of a loner in his
own home. He goes to school, Eaton, and then
King's College, Cambridge. And this is where
we see him trying to find his own tribe. He doesn't
join the rugby team, so to speak. No, he does
something very characteristic. He forms a clique,
but not just the social clique, an intellectual
alliance. At Eaton, he creates the Triumvirate.
With Charles Littleton and George Montague. Okay.
But the really important one happens a bit later,
the Quadruple Alliance. It sounds like a geopolitical
treaty. The Quadruple Alliance. Who was in it?
It was Horace Walpole, Thomas Ashton, Richard
West, and a young man named Thomas Gray. Thomas
Gray, the poet. The very same. The man who would
go on to write Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,
one of the most famous poems in the English language.
But at this point, they're just students. And
the dynamic of this group is... Fascinating.
They were united by a sense of superiority, frankly.
They were the sensitive, literary, witty boys
who looked down on the rough -and -tumble hardies
of the school. It's the classic theater kid defense
mechanism. You might be better at sports, but
we read Virgil and have inside jokes. Precisely.
They gave themselves nicknames from antiquity.
They wrote long, flowery letters to each other.
For Walpole, this was the family he chose. It
was based on sympathy of soul, not blood. But
there was a class dynamic there, too, which I'm
guessing is important for what happens next.
Crucial. Right, because Walpole is the prime
minister's son. He's wildly rich. Gray is not.
Gray is the son of a scrivener. He's middle class.
He's at Eaton and Cambridge on scholarships.
He is brilliant, perhaps more brilliant than
Walpole, but he doesn't have the safety net.
So Walpole's the patron and Gray is the talent.
In a way, yeah. That inequality was always simmering
beneath the surface. Which brings us to the ultimate
post -grad trip, the Grand Tour. The rite of
passage. In 1739, Horace leaves Cambridge without
a degree, which he could afford to do, and decides
to tour the continent. And he invites Thomas
Gray to come with him. Walpole pays for everything.
On paper, this sounds like the dream. You or
your best friend? Unlimited budget traveling
through France and Italy. It should have been
the dream. And for a while it was. They land
in Calais. They go to Paris. They're seeing the
world. But imagine the reality of travel in 1739.
It's exhausting. You're in a carriage for days.
And you were stuck with the same person 247.
Exactly. And they have very different ideas of
fun. Right. That was my next question. Starkly
different. Walpole is 22. He's the son of the
most powerful man in Europe. essentially he wants
to go to the masquerade balls he wants to play
cards with duchesses until 4 a .m he wants to
be seen he wants to live the life he's embracing
the fashionable life absolutely and gray gray
is a scholar he's serious melancholic and introverted
he wants to go to the ruins he wants to transcribe
latin inscriptions he wants to study the architecture
so he's there for work almost He is, and he doesn't
fit in at the high society parties, and he probably
resents that Walpole fits in so easily. It's
a slow motion car crash. Yeah. You have the party
boy and the nerd trapped in a carriage crossing
the Alps. And don't forget the power dynamic.
Walpole is paying. Every time Gray wants to do
something, he effectively has to ask permission,
or at least defer to the man holding the purse
strings. That breeds resentment. So where does
it finally blow up? Reggio, Italy. May 1741.
We don't know the exact words that were exchanged,
but it was a furious argument. Some sources suggest
Walpole might have opened one of Gray's letters
to check if Gray was gossiping about him. Oof.
That is a massive breach of trust. A huge one.
Whatever the spark, the powder keg exploded.
They split up. Gray went on to Venice alone,
probably humiliated and terrifyingly short on
funds. And Walpole. Walpole stayed behind, fell
ill with Quincy, which is a severe throat abscess,
and nearly died. It's a tragic end to the friendship.
But this is one of the moments where I actually
started to like Walpole because he doesn't spin
this to make himself look good later on. No,
he doesn't. And that's really telling. Years
later, after they had reconciled somewhat, Walpole
took full responsibility. He wrote a letter where
he essentially flayed himself. What did he say?
He said, I was too young. Too fond of my own
diversions. Intoxicated by indulgence, vanity,
and the insolence of my situation. The insolence
of my situation? That is such a perceptive phrase.
He realized that being the prime minister's son
had made him a jerk. He did. He admitted that
he treated Gray, who was his superior in intellect,
as an inferior in rank. He wrote, I treated him
insolently. He loved me and I did not think he
did. Wow. It is a moment of profound maturity.
He realized that his privilege had blinded him
to his friend's humanity. So he comes back to
England in late 1741. He's alone. He's recovering
from illness. His best friendship is in tatters.
And to top it all off, he returns to a political
crisis. He lands right as his father's empire
is crumbling. Sir Robert Walpole had been in
power for decades, but by 1742, he was forced
to resign. The great man fell. So Horace enters
adulthood just as the source of his family's
power vanishes. But he doesn't, you know, get
a job at a coffee shop. He goes into the family
business. He enters Parliament. In 1741, he was
elected as a member of Parliament for Collington
in Cornwall. Now, when we say elected, we need
to clarify what that means in the 18th century.
Did he campaign? Did he kiss babies? Not even
close. He never set foot in Collington. He likely
couldn't even find it on a map without help.
This was a rotten borough. Explain that concept
for us. Imagine a district that has, say, 10
voters. And all 10 of those voters live on land
owned by your family or they work for your family.
So their vote isn't exactly a free choice. It's
no choice at all. If they don't vote for you,
they lose their homes. That's a rotten borough.
It was a seat in parliament that could be bought
and sold like furniture. The Walpole family controlled
several of them. Collington, Castle Rising, Kingsland.
So he sat in parliament for years without even
visiting the places he represented. For nearly
30 years, yes. Essentially as a placeholder for
his family's influence. So he's an MP. But he
also had these other titles. I saw them in the
notes. Usher of the Exchequer. Clerk of the Estreets.
What are these? These are what were known as
sinecures. This is a crucial concept to understand
the Georgian era. A sinecure is an office that
carries a salary but requires absolutely no work.
That sounds like a scam. To modern ears, it is
corruption, pure and simple. But in the 18th
century, it was how the government patronage
system worked. If you were a placement, you were
loyal to the government, and in exchange, you
got a title and an income. So as usher of the
exchequer. He didn't actually have to usher anyone
anywhere. He just collected the checks. How much
money are we talking about? By 1745, his various
sinecures were bringing in about 3 ,400 pounds
a year. Give us a frame of reference. What is
3 ,400 pounds worth back then? It's a massive
fortune. A skilled laborer might earn 30 pounds
or 40 pounds a year. A gentleman could live very
comfortably on 500 pounds. So he's pulling in
nearly seven times a comfortable gentleman's
income for doing nothing. For doing officially
nothing, yes. It feels hypocritical. Because
later on, we see him writing about liberty and
virtue. It is a paradox. But there's a scholar,
W .H. Smith, who makes a really interesting argument
about this. He suggests that while Walpole took
the money, he actually did perform a service
for the nation. He just didn't do it in the Exchequer.
How so? Smith argues that Walpole used that financial
independence to become the chronicler of his
age. Because he didn't have to work a real job,
he had the time to write thousands of detailed
letters. He had the time to preserve the history
of the 18th century. So, in a weird way, the
taxpayers of 1750 paid for the history books
we read in 2024. That's the argument. A generous
one, but it holds some water. That's a generous
reading, but I like it. It frames him as a state
-sponsored historian, just without the official
mandate. But let's talk about his actual politics.
Because for a guy living off the government,
he had some weirdly radical stuff in his bedroom.
Ah, yes. Major Charta. Tell us about Major Charta.
So on one side of his bed, he had the Magna Carta,
the Great Charter of Liberties. On the other
side, he hung a framed copy of the execution
warrant of King Charles III. The document that
authorized the beheading of a king. Yes, and
he called it Major Charter, the Greater Charter.
That is edgy. That is 18th century punk rock.
He's basically saying the only thing better than
limiting the king's power is cutting his head
off. It was a shocking thing for an aristocrat
to display. He called himself a quiet Republican.
But we have to nuance this. He wasn't a Republican
in the modern American sense, nor was he, you
know, a Jacobin revolutionary. He was an old
wig. What's the distinction there? He hated absolute
power. He believed that the king should be a
figurehead. He used a fantastic image from Shakespeare's
Macbeth to explain it. Oh, this I want to hear.
He said he approved of a king only if he was
like Banquo's ghost filling the empty chair of
state. Just a spooky image to keep the seat warm
so nobody else sits in it. Exactly. He wanted
the shadow of a king to prevent a dictator like
Cromwell from taking over. But he wanted that
king to have zero actual ability to govern. He
was terrified of prerogative power. So he hangs
the death warrant on his wall as a reminder.
We cut off one head. We can do it again if you
get too bossy. That's the message. It's so theatrical.
It is, which is the perfect transition to his
biggest project, the theater he built for himself
to live in, Strawberry Hill. Now we are getting
to the heart of the Walpole legacy. In 1747,
he got a small, nondescript house in Twickenham,
just outside London, overlooking the River Thames.
And most people in his position would have built
a nice, symmetrical, classical villa. You know,
white columns, Roman statues, very rational.
That was the style, Palladianism. It was all
about order, reason, and logic. The enlightenment
in architectural form. Walpole looked at that
and said, boring. Give me gloom. Give me the
Middle Ages. He decided to remodel the house
in the Gothic style. Now, you have to understand,
in the mid -18th century, Gothic was a dirty
word. It meant barbaric. Right. It was associated
with the Dark Ages, with superstition, with bad
taste. Completely. It would be like a billionaire
today deciding to build their mansion to look
like a, I don't know, a brutalist Soviet... bunker
mixed with a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon. That
is a surprisingly accurate analogy. He started
adding battlements, towers, arched windows, and
stained glass. But it wasn't an accurate historical
recreation. It was a pastiche. It was a fantasy.
Describe the vibe inside. If I walked into Strawberry
Hill in 1760, what am I seeing? You're entering
a world of deliberate atmosphere. He coined a
word for it. Gloom. Gloom. Like gleam and warmth.
Exactly. He wanted the gloom of an ancient cathedral
but the comfort of a modern home. You'd walk
into the hall and it's painted to look like stone
but it's actually wood and plaster. It's dark.
There are suits of armor. Then you go into the
library and the bookshelves are modeled after
the doors of old St. Paul's Cathedral. The ceilings
are covered in intricate fan vaulting but it's
made of papier -mâché. paper mache you're kidding
no it was stage scenery he wasn't building a
fortress he was building a set he filled it with
curiosities wolsey's hat star charts historical
relics it was a museum of his own mind and his
friends made fun of her right relentlessly they
called it a gingerbread castle they called him
the abbot of strawberry they thought it was a
toy house a folly but they were wrong because
this toy house changed the world it did it sparked
the gothic revival decades later when the victorians
started building everything in gothic style the
houses of parliament universities churches they
were all echoing strawberry hill walpole made
the irrational cool again he proved that architecture
could be emotional not just rational and he didn't
just build the set he wrote the script he set
up a printing press inside the house The Strawberry
Hill Press. This was another act of independence.
By owning the press, he controlled the means
of production. He could print his friends' poetry.
He printed Gray's Odes. And he could print his
own work without answering to a publisher. And
one night, he has a dream. A nightmare, really.
And he wakes up and writes a story that changes
literature forever. The Castle of Otranto. Published
in 1764. And yes, this is widely considered the
first gothic novel. I read the plot summary of
this book, and I have to be honest, it sounds
absolutely bonkers. It is fever dream logic.
It's meant to be. Walk us through the opening
scene. Okay. So you have the villain, Prince
Manfred. He's a tyrant. He's arranging a marriage
for his sickly son, Conrad, to a beautiful princess,
Isabella. The wedding is about to start. Everyone
is waiting. Suddenly, a servant runs in, screaming.
Okay, I'm with you. Manfred goes out to the courtyard.
And what does he find? Tell me. He finds his
son, Conrad, crushed to death. But not by a falling
rock or a weapon. He has been crushed flat by
a gigantic black feathered helmet. Like a suit
of armor helmet. Yes. But the size of a house.
It fell from the sky. That is hilarious. It's
surreal. It is surreal. And that's just the start.
The portrait of his grandfather steps out of
the frame and walks around. A giant foot appears
in a gallery. A statue bleeds from the nose.
A nosebleed statue. Yes, it creates a new genre.
Walpole was mixing the ancient romance, which
allowed for magic and miracles, with the modern
novel, which focused on realistic psychology.
He wanted the characters to react realistically
to impossible events. But he was scared to put
his name on it at first. He was terrified. He
was a member of parliament. He was nearly 50
years old. If he published a book about giant
helmets and bleeding statues, he thought he would
be laughed out of London, so he pulled a hoax.
The classic translation trick. Right. The first
edition claimed to be a translation of an Italian
manuscript from 1529 written by a priest named
Onufrio Meralto, found in the library of an ancient
Catholic family. Onufrio Meralto. Amaralto is
clearly an anagram or some kind of play on Horace
Walpole. It's a distinct alter ego. But the book
was a sensation. People were terrified. They
were thrilled. The poet Thomas Gray, his old
friend, wrote to him saying that at Cambridge,
it makes some of us cry a little and all in general
afraid to go to bed at nights. So once it was
a hit, Walpole came clean. He did. In the second
edition, he dropped the mask. He admitted it
was him. And in doing so, he legitimized the
genre of horror. He said effectively, It is okay
to be scared. It is okay to enjoy the irrational.
So without the Castle of Otranto, you don't get
Frankenstein. You don't get Edgar Allan Poe.
You don't get Stephen King. You really don't.
He's the Wellspring. It's amazing. He's the grandfather
of the horror movie. Yeah. But while he's inventing
genres, he's also keeping up that massive correspondence.
We touched on the letters earlier, but I want
to dive into the content. Because he wasn't just
writing, hope you are well. He was reporting.
He considered himself a journalist for posterity.
He wrote with specific themes for a specific
people. To Horace Mann, the British envoy in
Florence, he wrote about politics and the royal
court. To George Montague, he wrote about society
gossip. To others, he wrote about antiquities.
He tailored the content. And in one of those
letters to Horace Mann in 1754, he drops a word
that enters the dictionary, serendipity. This
is one of my favorite etymologies. He was explaining
a Persian fairy tale he had read as a boy called
The Three Princes of Serendip. Serendip was an
old name for Sri Lanka. What was the deal with
the princes? Walpole explained that these princes
were always making discoveries by accidents and
sagacity of things they were not in quest of.
By accidents and sagacity. That's the crucial
part, right? It's not just luck. It is. We often
use serendipity today to mean just happy luck.
But Walpole meant something deeper. He meant
the ability to recognize the value of something
you weren't looking for. So Fleming discovering
penicillin is serendipity. Perfect example. He
wasn't looking for mold, but he had the sagacity,
the wisdom to realize the mold was important.
It's a scientific mindset. It's openness to the
unexpected. Exactly. It captures the transition
from a world of rigid dogma to a world of observation.
He also had this philosophy about life that he
repeated in his letters. This world is a comedy
to those that think, a tragedy to those that
feel. It's his most famous maxim, and it really
serves as a shield. Walpole was a man who felt
things very deeply. Remember his mother, remember
the breakup with Gray, but he found that feeling
was painful. So he tried to retreat into thinking.
He tried to view the world as a detached, ironic
comedy. It's a defense mechanism. If I laugh
at the absurdity of politics, it won't hurt me.
Precisely. He became the spectator. The man in
the box seat eating popcorn while the world burned.
Let's talk about the man in the box seat. We've
hinted at his personality, the effeminacy, the
Hervey rumors. But as an adult, how did he present
himself? He was a singular figure. In an age
of heavy drinking and heavy eating, Walpole was
an esthete. He didn't hunt. He didn't gamble,
which was huge for an aristocrat. He disliked
pastry. Disliked pastry. That's suspicious. He
preferred chicken and pheasant. And he drank
iced water. So he's the first hydra homie. Sorry,
I mean, he's a hydration enthusiast in an era
of wine and gin. He was. And people thought it
was bizarre he would treat his water with almost
religious ceremony. And then there was his walk.
The novelist Letitia Matilda Hawkins left us
a vivid description. Wow. She said he always
entered a room with his knees bent and on tiptoe,
as if he were afraid of stepping on a wet floor.
Knees bent, tiptoe. That is so specific. It's
almost like a cartoon character. It suggests
a physical delicacy or perhaps a performative
elegance. He wore lavender suits. He had a collection
of waistcoats embroidered with silver. And in
his later years, he was always accompanied by
a fat and favorite little dog named Taunton,
which he had inherited from a famous French salonier,
Madame du Defant. A lavender suit tiptoeing into
the room. holding a fat little dog. He's a style
icon. But he never married. No, he was a natural
celibate, according to his biographer, W .S.
Lewis. He had intense emotional intimacies, but
they were almost always safe. What do you mean
by safe? He loved older women, like Madame du
Dauphin, who was blind and decades his senior.
He loved women who were arguably lesbians or
uninterested in men, like Mary Berry and Anne
Seymour Dahmer. It seems like he wanted the connection
without the physical expectation. Or he wanted
the soul connection he talked about at Eaton.
He was queer in the broad sense of the word.
He sat at a distinct angle to the normative world.
And his enemies used it. How so? They called
him a hermaphrodite horse. That is a confusing
insult. It's nasty. It's meant to be. It attacks
his gender, his productivity, his nature. But
Walpole just kept... tiptoeing, writing his letters
and building his castle. But then the comedy
stops. We get to 1789, the French Revolution.
This is the final act. And it is the tragic one.
You have to remember, Walpole considered himself
a liberal. He had a portrait of George Washington.
He supported the American colonies. He cheered
for liberty. So you'd think you would be thrilled
when the French stormed the Bastille. You would
think. But he wasn't. He was horrified. Why the
switch? What changed? Because for Walpole, liberty
meant ordered liberty. It meant the Magna Carta.
It meant gentlemen debating in parliament. It
did not mean the mob in the streets. When he
saw the violence in France, the beheadings, the
chaos, he recoiled. He called them savages, didn't
he? Savages, barbarians, monsters. He wrote that
they had destroyed God as well as their king.
But what really broke him, it seems, was the
treatment of the women, specifically Marie Antoinette.
The queen. He had met her. He had seen her at
Versailles. And when Edmund Burke, the famous
conservative philosopher, wrote his Reflections
on the Revolution in France, Walpole read it
and wept. Burke described the queen as an aerial
being, all brightness and grace. And that image
just stuck with him. He latched onto that. It's
fascinating. The man who hung the death warrant
of a king in his bedroom is now crying over the
fall of a queen. It shows the limits of his comedy.
When the violence became real, when it wasn't
just a historical abstraction like Charles I,
but real blood flowing in Paris, he couldn't
laugh anymore. He couldn't. He wrote to Lady
Ossory in 1793 after Louis VI was executed, saying
he was stunned. He called the revolutionaries
monsters who professed assassination and practiced
massacres. The world became a tragedy because
he couldn't stop himself from feeling. Exactly.
His intellectual shield shattered. And his final
years were physically painful, too, I read. Couch.
The aristocratic disease. He had chalk stones
in his fingers. It was agonizing for him to even
hold a pen, yet he kept writing. He was compelled
to. And then the final irony, the outsider becomes
the head of the family. In 1791, his nephew,
the third Earl of Orford, died. The nephew was,
he was mad, tragically. So the title fell to
Horace. At age 74, the hervy outsider, the gossip,
the goth, becomes the fourth Earl of Orford.
Did he enjoy it? He hated it. He called it the
most empty of all titles. He was an old man.
He had no heirs. He knew the line was ending
with him. That's incredibly sad, in a way. He
signed his letters the uncle of the late Earl
of Orford for a while, mocking the absurdity
of it all. And when he died in 1797, the title
went extinct. It did. The Walpole dynasty, which
had dominated the century, flickered out with
him. So we've covered the life. The rumors, the
castle, the giant helmet, the letters. If we
have to sum up Horace Walpole, if we have to
answer the so what, where do we land? I think
Horace Walpole is the bridge. He stands with
one foot in the Enlightenment, the world of his
father, of reason, of science, of thinking. Okay.
And he puts his other foot into the Romantic
era, the world of emotion, of the irrational,
of feeling. He's the missing link between Newton
and Dracula. That is a fantastic way to put it.
He showed us that you can be rational and irrational
at the same time. He taught us that history isn't
just about treaties and battles. It's about the
texture of life. It's about gossip. It's about
what people are afraid of in the dark. He democratized
history by making it personal. Yes. He proved
that a letter about a bad dinner party is just
as historically significant as a letter about
a war because it tells us who we were. I want
to leave everyone with one final thought to mull
over. We talked about his famous quote. The world
is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to
those that feel. Walpole spent 80 years trying
to be the thinker. He built a fortress of irony
and wit to protect himself. But looking at his
life, his obsession with his mother, his heartbreak
over Grey, his horror at the revolution, I wonder
if he was ever really a thinker at all. You think
he was a feeler in disguise? I think he was a
feeler who was terrified of his own feelings.
And maybe that's why he invented the Gothic.
Because in a haunted house, you're allowed to
scream. You're allowed to be terrified. It was
the one place where he could let the mask slip.
That is a very provocative thought. Maybe Strawberry
Hill wasn't a fortress. It was a release valve.
Something to think about next time you're watching
a horror movie or scrolling through Zillow looking
for castles. Thanks for listening to The Deep
Dive.