Sir Henry Cavendish, 2nd Baronet

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Sir Henry Cavendish, 2nd Baronet

Early life

Cavendish was the son of Sir Henry Cavendish, 1st Baronet, and his wife Anne (née Pyne), daughter of Henry Pyne and Anne Edgcumbe, and granddaughter of Sir Richard Pyne, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland and his wife Catherine Wandesford, a granddaughter of the leading Anglo-Irish statesman Christopher Wandesford. This branch of the Cavendish family descended from Henry Cavendish, illegitimate son of Henry Cavendish of Tutbury Prior, eldest son of Sir William Cavendish and Bess of Hardwick and elder brother of William Cavendish, 1st Earl of Devonshire (the ancestor of the Dukes of Devonshire). The Pyne family were substantial landowners in County Cork, and owned the celebrated Ballyvolane House, and Mogeely Castle, Mogeely.

Member of Parliament

He sat in the

Cavendish's original notebooks have gone missing but they were all transcribed by a clerk and fifty longhand manuscripts are in the British Library.^[1] They have 15,700 pages with nearly 3,000,000 words. There are gaps in these volumes, where the clerk could not decipher Cavendish's hand. Cavendish only managed to fill in the gaps for twelve volumes out of fifty.^[1] Selections from these volumes were published in two volumes in 1839 and 1841. The debates on American affairs were published by R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas in the twentieth century.^[1]

Cavendish also kept a record of the Irish House of Commons between 1776 and 1789 (currently in the Library of Congress). These amount to thirty-seven longhand volumes (containing more than 2,000,000 words) and forty-five of originally fifty-four shorthand journals.^[1]

According to P. D. G. Thomas, "The fullness and accuracy of both diaries, in so far as that can be established by comparison with other sources, is remarkable...fewer than 100 omissions have been detected among the 12,000 speeches he noted at Westminster, and he seems to have captured much of the debating verbatim".^[1]

Personal life

Cavendish married

References

• Kidd, Charles, Williamson, David (editors). Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage (1990 edition). New York: St Martin's Press, 1990, ^{[page needed]}
• Peter D. G. Thomas. "Cavendish, Sir Henry, second baronet (1732–1804)".
  doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/4936. (Subscription or UK public library membership
  required.)
• Leigh Rayment's list of baronets