His grandfather, George Stanhope (d. 1644), was canon and precentor of York from 1631, and was rector of Wheldrake, Yorkshire, and chaplain to James I and Charles I; he was dispossessed during the Commonwealth.

[3] He graduated in 1681 and obtained his Master of Arts in 1685 and entered into Holy Orders, however he remained three years longer at Cambridge.

As a man of peace, in friendship with Robert Nelson on one side, and with Edward Tenison and Gilbert Burnet on the other,[5] Stanhope was proposed by the moderate party as prolocutor in 1705, but was defeated by the high churchman, Dr. William Binckes.

In 1711, Stanhope was among the founding group that would organise the building of fifty new churches to replace those lost in the Great Fire of London,[6] and was re-appointed in 1715 after the accession of George I.

Early in 1717 the lower house of Convocation also censured a sermon by Bishop Benjamin Hoadly which had been preached before the king and published by royal command.

On the occasion of one of these prorogations Stanhope broke up the meeting (14 February 1718) in order to prevent Tenison from reading a protestation in favour of Hoadly.

[10] He died at Bath on 18 March 1728, and was buried in St. Mary's church, Lewisham, where a monument with a long inscription was erected to his memory.

According to Daniel Lysons (1796): His monument, the inscription on which has been already given, deserved a better fate than to be thrown aside in the vault, where it now lies, when the church was rebuilt.

After Olivia's death in 1707, Stanhope married in 1709 Ann Parker, half-sister of Sir Charles Wager; she survived him by two years.

Stanhope followed the same paraphrastic system in a translation of Thomas à Kempis's Imitatio Christi, which appeared in 1698 under the title The Christian's Pattern, or a Treatise of the Imitation of Christ, 2 pts.

'The pithy style of the original is lost in flowing sentences that pleased the reader in Queen Anne's reign.'

Its defect is the neglect of the organic relation of collect, epistle, and gospel ; but it contains much that is solid, sensible, and practical in clear and easy language, quite free from controversial bitterness.