biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1737–94)
|
| biography:
| Historian, born in Putney, Surrey, SE England, UK. He studied at Oxford, became a Catholic at 16, and was sent to Lausanne, where he boarded with a Calvinist pastor who wooed him back to Protestantism. After a visit to Rome in 1764 he began to plan for his major work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (5 vols, 1776–88). Left money by his father, he settled in London for the task (1772), in 1774 entering parliament, and becoming commissioner of trade and plantations. After completing his History, he spent much of the rest of his life with Lord Sheffield, who published his Miscellaneous Works (1796). |
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