Cavendish, clerk of the pipe in the exchequer, and his wife, Alice Smith of Padbrook Hall. He was probably born at his father’s manor of Cavendish, in Suffolk. Later the family resided in London, in the parish of St Alban’s, Wood Street, where Thomas Cavendish died in 1524. Shortly after this event George married Margery Kemp, of Spains Hall, an heiress, and the niece of Sir Thomas More. About 1527 he entered the service of Cardinal Wolsey as gentleman-usher, and for the next three years he was divided from his wife, children and estates, in the closest personal attendance on the great man. Cavendish was wholly devoted to Wolsey’s interests, and also he saw in this appointment an opportunity to gratify his master-passion, a craving “to see and be acquainted with strangers, in especial with men in honour and authority.” He was faithful to his master in disgrace, and showed the courage of the “loyal servitor.” It is plain that he enjoyed Wolsey’s closest confidence to the end, for after the cardinal’s death George Cavendish was called before the privy council and closely examined as to Wolsey’s latest acts and words. He gave his evidence so clearly and with so much natural dignity, that he won the applause of the hostile council, and the praise of being “a just and diligent servant.” He was not allowed to suffer in pocket by his fidelity to his master, but retired, as it would seem, a wealthy man to his estate of Glemsford, in West Suffolk, in 1530. He was only thirty years of age, but his appetite for being acquainted with strange acts and persons was apparently sated, for we do not hear of his engaging in any more adventures. It is not to be doubted that Cavendish had taken down notes of Wolsey’s conversation and movements, for many years passed before his biography was composed. At length, in 1557, he wrote it out in its final form. It was not, however, possible to publish it in the author’s lifetime, but it was widely circulated in MS. Evidently one of these MSS. fell into Shakespeare’s hands, for that poet made use of it in his King Henry VIII., although it is excessive to say, as Singer has done, that Shakespeare “merely put Cavendish’s language into verse.” The book was first printed in 1641, in a garbled text, and under the title of The Negotiations of Thomas Wolsey. The genuine text, from contemporary MSS., was given to the world in 1810, and more fully in 1815. Until that time it was believed that the book was the composition of George Cavendish’s younger brother William, the founder of Chatsworth, who also was attached to Wolsey. Joseph Hunter proved this to be impossible, and definitely asserted the claim of George. The latter is believed to have died at Glemsford in or about 1562. The intrinsic value of Cavendish’s Life of Cardinal Wolsey has long been perceived, for it is the sole authentic record of a multitude of events highly important in a particularly interesting section of the history of England. Its importance as a product of biographical literature was first emphasized by Bishop Creighton, who insisted over and over again on the claim of Cavendish to be recognized as the earliest of the great English biographers and an individual writer of particular charm and originality. He writes with simplicity and with a certain vivid picturesqueness, rarely yielding to the rhetorical impulses which governed the ordinary prose of his age. (E. G.)
CAVENDISH, HENRY (1731–1810), English chemist and physicist, elder son of Lord Charles Cavendish, brother of the 3rd duke of Devonshire, and Lady Anne Grey, daughter of the duke of Kent, was born at Nice in October 1731. He was sent to school at Hackney in 1742, and in 1749 entered Peterhouse, Cambridge, which he left in 1753, without taking a degree. Until he was about forty he seems to have enjoyed a very moderate allowance from his father, but in the latter part of his life he was left a fortune which made him one of the richest men of his time. He lived principally at Clapham Common, but he had also a town-house in Bloomsbury, while his library was in a house in Dean Street, Soho; and there he used to attend on appointed days to lend the books to men who were properly vouched for. So methodical was he that he never took down a volume for his own use without entering it in the loan-book. He was a regular attendant at the meetings of the Royal Society, of which he became a fellow in 1760, and he dined every Thursday with the club composed of its members. Otherwise he had little intercourse with society; indeed, his chief object in life seems to have been to avoid the attention of his fellows. With his relatives he had little intercourse, and even Lord George Cavendish, whom he made his principal heir, he saw only for a few minutes once a year. His dinner was ordered daily by a note placed on the hall-table, and his women servants were instructed to keep out of his sight on pain of dismissal. In person he was tall and rather thin; his dress was old-fashioned and singularly uniform, and was inclined to be shabby about the times when the precisely arranged visits of his tailor were due. He had a slight hesitation in his speech, and his air of timidity and reserve was almost ludicrous. He was never married. He died at Clapham on the 24th of February 1810, leaving funded property worth £700,000, and a landed estate of £8000 a year, together with canal and other property, and £50,000 at his bankers.
Cavendish’s scientific work is distinguished for the wideness of its range and for its extraordinary exactness and accuracy. The papers he himself published form an incomplete record of his researches, for many of the results he obtained only became generally known years after his death; yet in spite of the absence of anything approaching self-advertisement he acquired a very high reputation within his own country and abroad, recognized by the Institute of France in 1803 when it chose him as one of its eight foreign associates. Arsenic formed the subject of his first recorded investigation, on which he was engaged at least as early as 1764, and in 1766 he began those communications to the Royal Society on the chemistry of gases, which are among his chief titles to fame. The first (Phil. Trans., 1766) consists of “Three papers containing experiments on Factitious Airs,” dealing mostly with “inflammable air” (hydrogen), which he was the first to recognize as a distinct substance, and “fixed air” (carbon dioxide). He determined the specific gravity of these gases with reference to common air, investigated the extent to which they are absorbed by various liquids, and noted that common air containing one part in nine by volume of fixed air is no longer able to support combustion, and that the air produced by fermentation and putrefaction has properties identical with those of fixed air obtained from marble. In the following year he published a paper on the analysis of one of the London pump-waters (from Rathbone Place, Oxford Street), which is closely connected with the memoirs just mentioned, since it shows that the calcareous matter in that water is held in solution by the “fixed air” present and can be precipitated by lime. Electrical studies seem next to have engaged his attention, and in 1771 and 1772 he read to the Royal Society his “Attempt to explain some of the principal phenomena of electricity by an elastic fluid,” which was followed in 1775 by an “Attempt to imitate the effects of the Torpedo (a fish allied to the ray)” (Phil. Trans., 1776). But these two memoirs contain only a part of the electrical researches he carried out between 1771 and 1781, and many more were found after his death in a number of sealed packets of papers. The contents of these for a long time remained unknown, but ultimately by permission of the duke of Devonshire, to whom they belonged, they were edited by James Clerk Maxwell and published in 1879 by the Cambridge University Press as the Electrical Researches of the Hon. Henry Cavendish. About 1777 or 1778 he resumed his pneumatic inquiries, though he published nothing on the subject till 1783. In that year he described a new eudiometer to the Royal Society and detailed observations he had made to determine whether or not the atmosphere is constant in composition; after testing the air on nearly 60 different days in 1781 he could find in the proportion of oxygen no difference of which he could be sure, nor could he detect any sensible variation at different places. Two papers on “Experiments with Airs,” printed in the Phil. Trans. for 1784 and 1785, contain his great discoveries of the compound nature of water and the composition of nitric acid. Starting from an experiment, narrated by Priestley, in which John Warltire fired a mixture of common air and hydrogen by electricity, with the result that there was a diminution of volume and a deposition of moisture,
