William Coventry - Assessment

Assessment

Writing Coventry's biography in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Philip Chesney Yorke stated that "though Sir William Coventry never filled that place in the national administration to which his merit and exceptional ability clearly entitled him, his public life together with his correspondence are sufficient to distinguish him from amongst his contemporaries as a statesman of the first rank. Lord Halifax obviously derived from his honoured mentor those principles of government which, by means of his own brilliant intellectual gifts, originality and imaginative insight, gained further force and influence. Halifax owed to him his interest in the navy and his grasp of the necessity to a country of a powerful maritime force. He drew his antagonism to France, his religious tolerance, wider religious views but firm Protestantism doubtless from the same source. Sir William was the original Trimmer".

Writing to his nephew Thomas Thynne, 1st Viscount Weymouth, while denying the authorship of The Character of a Trimmer, he says, "I have not been ashamed to own myself to be a trimmer... one who would sit upright and not overturn the boat by swaying too much to either side." He shared the Trimmers' dislike of party, urging Halifax in the exclusion contest not to be thrust by the opposition of his enemies into another party, but that he keep upon a national bottom which at length will prevail. His prudence is expressed in his perpetual unwillingness to do things which I cannot undo. A singular independence of spirit, a breadth of mind which refused to be contracted by party formulas, a sanity which was proof against the contagion of national delirium, were equally characteristic of uncle and nephew. Sir William Coventry's conceptions of statesmanship, under the guiding hand of his nephew, largely inspired the future revolution settlement, and continued to be an essential condition of English political growth and progress.