Abraham Stanyan

Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, National Portrait Gallery, London

Abraham Stanyan (c. 1669–1732) was an English politician and diplomat. He was the older brother of the historian and politician Temple Stanyan.

After becoming a student in the Middle Temple, he served as secretary to Sir William Trumbull as Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and later to the Earl of Manchester as Ambassador to the Venice in 1697–1698 and then in France in 1699–1700. He became a Clerk of the Privy Council, briefly between these appointments. After a period out of employment, he appointed as envoy to Switzerland from 1705–1714, Commissioner of the Admiralty, Ambassador to Austria from 1716 to 1717. He was appointed Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in October 1717. He arrived at Adrianople on 24 April 1718. He held these last two posts in a period when England held the role of mediator between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, and having worked in the capitals of both powers Stanyan was an influential part of those negotiations. He was recalled on 16 May 1729 but did not leave Turkey until 18 July 1730.

On his return to England from Switzerland, he became member of parliament for Buckingham. He was a member of the Kit Kat Club.

Works

• L'account of Switzerland, London, printed for Jacob Tonson, 1714.

References

• The National Portrait Gallery
• The English Embassy at Constantinople, 1660–1762, A.C. Wood, The English Historical Review, Vol. 40, No. 160 (Oct., 1925), pp. 533–561
• Philip Woodfine and Claire Gapper, ‘Stanyan, Abraham (c.1669–1732)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008) , accessed 18 November 2008.