Arthur Onslow - Legacy and Honors

Legacy and Honors

• Onslow was awarded the Freedom of the City of London.
• He was voted a trustee of the British Museum.
• Onslow County, North Carolina, was named in his honour.

He died at his home in London in 1768 and was buried at Thames Ditton, but his body and that of his wife were later removed to the Onslow burial place in Merrow Church, Surrey.

Horace Walpole at one point said of him that he was "too pompous to be loved, though too ridiculous to be hated", but subsequently wrote in more considered fashion:

"No man had ever supported with more firmness the privileges of the House, nor sustained the dignity of his office with more authority. His knowledge of the constitution equalled his attachment to it. To the Crown he behaved with all the decorum of respect, without sacrificing his freedom of speech. Against the encroachments of the house of peers he was an inflexible champion. His disinterested virtue supported him through all his pretensions; and though to conciliate popular favour he affected an impartiality that by turns led him to the borders of insincerity and contradiction; and though he was often so minutely attached to forms, that it made him troublesome in affairs of higher moment, it will be difficult to find a subject, whom gravity will so well become, whose knowledge will be so useful and so accurate, and whose fidelity to his trust will prove so unshaken."