This early intimacy probably brought Lord Chesterfield into the close friendship which afterwards subsisted between him and Lady Suffolk, to whom many of his letters are addressed.

His first public capacity was a diplomatic appointment:  he afterwards attained to the rank of an ambassador, whose duty it is, according to a witticism of Sir Henry Wotton’s ’to lie abroad for the good of his country;’ and no man was in this respect more competent to fulfil these requirements than Chesterfield.  Hating both wine and tobacco, he had smoked and drunk at Cambridge, ‘to be in the fashion;’ he gamed at the Hague, on the same principle; and, unhappily, gaming became a habit and a passion.  Yet never did he indulge it when acting, afterwards, in a ministerial capacity.  Neither when Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or as Under-secretary of State, did he allow a gaming-table in his house.  On the very night that he resigned office he went to White’s.

The Hague was then a charming residence:  among others who, from political motives, were living there, were John Duke of Marlborough and Queen Sarah, both of whom paid Chesterfield marked attention.  Naturally industrious, with a ready insight into character—­a perfect master in that art which bids us keep one’s thoughts close, and our countenances open, Chesterfield was admirably fitted for diplomacy.  A master of modern languages and of history, he soon began to like business.  When in England, he had been accused of having ’a need of a certain proportion of talk in a day:’  ‘that,’ he wrote to Lady Suffolk, ’is now changed into a need of such a proportion of writing in a day.’

In 1728 he was promoted:  being sent as ambassador to the Hague, where he was popular, and where he believed his stay would be beneficial both to soul and body, there being ’fewer temptations, and fewer opportunities to sin,’ as he wrote to Lady Suffolk, ‘than in England.’  Here his days passed, he asserted, in doing the king’s business, very ill—­and his own still worse:—­sitting down daily to dinner with fourteen or fifteen people; whilst at five the pleasures of the evening began with a lounge on the Voorhoot, a public walk planted by Charles V.:—­then, either a very bad French play, or a ‘reprise quadrille,’ with three ladies, the youngest of them fifty, and the chance of losing, perhaps, three florins (besides one’s time)—­lasted till ten o’clock; at which time ’His Excellency’ went home, ’reflecting with satisfaction on the innocent amusements of a well-spent day, that left nothing behind them,’ and retired to bed at eleven, ‘with the testimony of a good conscience.’