[1] In his beginning writing, he was influenced by Edmund Spenser; his first dramatic effort was modeled after William Mason's Elfrida and called Caractacus.

He had begun to read for his fellowship at Trinity when the Earl of Halifax who had been made President of the Board of Trade in the Duke of Newcastle's government offered him the post of private secretary.

When in 1762 Halifax became Northern Secretary, Cumberland applied for the post of under-secretary, but could only obtain the less prestigious clerkship of reports at the Board of Trade under Lord Hillsborough.

When Lord George Germain in 1775 acceded to office, Cumberland was appointed secretary to the Board of Trade and Plantations, a post he held till Edmund Burke's reforms abolished it in 1782.

In 1780, he was sent on a confidential mission to Spain to negotiate a separate peace treaty during the American War of Independence in an effort to weaken the anti-British coalition.

Although he was well received by King Charles III of Spain and his minister, the Count of Floridablanca, the question of which nation would hold sway over Gibraltar prevented resolution.

He was the author of a version of 50 of the Psalms of David; of a tract on the evidences of Christianity; and of other religious pieces in prose and verse, the former including "as many sermons as would make a large volume, some of which have been delivered from the pulpits."

He weaves his plays out of "homely stuff, right British drugget," and eschews "the vile Gallic stage"; he borrowed from the style of sentimental fiction of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne.

His favourite theme is virtue in distress or danger, but assured of its reward in the fifth act; his most constant characters are men of feeling and young ladies who are either prudes or coquettes.

Cumberland's comic talents lay in the invention of characters taken from the "outskirts of the empire," and intended to vindicate the good elements of the Scots, Irish and colonials from English prejudice.

His first play was a tragedy, The Banishment of Cicero, published in 1761 after David Garrick rejected it; this was followed in 1765 by a musical drama, The Summer's Tale, subsequently compressed into an afterpiece Amelia (1768).

Its hero, who probably owes much to the suggestion of Garrick, is a young scapegrace fresh from the tropics, "with rum and sugar enough belonging to him to make all the water in the Thames into punch,"—a libertine with generous instincts, which prevail in the end.