Sir Henry Cavendish, 2nd Baronet PC (29 September 1732 – 3 August 1804) was an Anglo-Irish politician noted for his extensive recording of parliamentary debates in the late 1760s and early 1770s.
He is chiefly remembered for the enormous amounts of notes he took of the debates in this session of Parliament using Gurney's system of shorthand.
The notes, which include speeches by Edmund Burke, George Grenville, Lord North and Charles James Fox, are now stored in the British Museum.
Cavendish's original notebooks have gone missing but they were all transcribed by a clerk and fifty longhand manuscripts are in the British Library.
[1] According to P. D. G. Thomas, "The fullness and accuracy of both diaries, in so far as that can be established by comparison with other sources, is remarkable...fewer than 100 omissions have been detected among the 12,000 speeches he noted at Westminster, and he seems to have captured much of the debating verbatim".
The third son, Augustus, who took the surname Bradshaw in order to inherit a legacy from his grandfather, was the defendant in a celebrated criminal conversation action brought by George Frederick Nugent, 7th Earl of Westmeath in 1796, and was required to pay £10000 damages.