Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (22 September 1694 – 24 March 1773) was a British statesman and man of letters.
A Whig, Lord Stanhope, as he was known until his father's death in 1726, was born in London, and educated at Cambridge and then went on the Grand Tour of the continent. The death of Anne and the accession of George I opened up a career for him and brought him back to England. His relative James Stanhope, the king's favorite minister, procured for him the place of gentleman of the bedchamber to the Prince of Wales.
In 1715 he entered the House of Commons as Lord Stanhope of Shelford and member for St Germans, and when the impeachment of the Duke of Ormonde came before the House, he used the occasion (5 August 1715) to put to proof his old rhetorical studies.
In 1726 his father died, and Lord Stanhope became Earl of Chesterfield. He took his seat in the House of Lords, and his oratory, which had been ineffective in the Commons, was suddenly appreciated. In 1728 Chesterfield was sent to the Hague as ambassador. His tact and temper, his dexterity and discrimination, enabled him to do good service, and he was rewarded with Robert Walpole's friendship, the Order of the Garter, and the position of Lord Steward. In 1732 there was born to him, by a certain Mlle du Bouchet, the son, Philip Stanhope, for whose advice and instruction at Westminster School were afterwards written the famous Letters to his Son. He negotiated the second Treaty of Vienna in 1731, and in the next year, his health and fortune damaged, he resigned as ambassador and returned to Britain. Vincent la Chapelle, his cook, accepted a post at the court of William IV of Orange.
In the mid-1750s Chesterfield offered a cogent critique of the Stamp Act passed by Grenville's parliament. He wrote (in a letter to his friend Lord Newcastle) about the "absurdity" of the act. It could not be properly enforced, and even if it was effective, the tax would bring in no more than 80,000 pounds per year while the cost in reduced trade from the American colonies would be at least a million pounds a year (as it happened the loss was nearly two million a year).
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