Politician, close friend and executor of Edward Gibbon (1737–1794; DNB). He was an MP for Coventry, 1780–1784, and Bristol, 1790–1802. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Sheffield in 1802, and obtained an earldom in 1816. Southey corresponded with him in 1817–1818, when Sheffield offered Southey sight of the papers of his son-in-law, General Sir Henry Clinton (1771–1829; DNB), to help with his History of the Peninsular War (1823–1832).