The Stanhope essay prize was an undergraduate history essay prize created at Balliol College, Oxford by Philip Henry Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope in 1855.
Notable Stanhope Prize winners:
John Richard Magrath, 1860
Francis Jeune, 1863, 1st Baron St Helier
Thomas Pitt Taswell-Langmead, 1866
Thomas Buchanan, 1868, Liberal politician
Arthur Francis Leach, 1872
Richard Lodge, 1875
Charles Harding Firth, 1877, British historian
Arthur Elam Haigh, 1878
Holden Hutton, 1881
William Carr, 1884, biographer
Owen Morgan Edwards, 1886
George Arnold Wood, 1889, English Australian historian
John Buchan, 1897, British novelist
Robert Rait, 1899
Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, 1902, New College, Oxford, British classical scholar and historian
Archibald Main, 1903
George Stuart Gordon, 1905
Vivian Hunter Galbraith, 1911, English historian
Michael Sadleir, 1912
Aldous Huxley, 1916, English writer
Bruce McFarlane, 1924
Bernard Miller, 1925, British businessman
Maurice Ashley, editor of The Listener.
Derek Pattinson, 1951, Secretary-General of the General Synod of the Church of England
In Max Beerbohm's satirical tragedy of undergraduate life at Oxford, Zuleika Dobson (1911), the hero Duke of Dorset, was awarded, amongst others, the Stanhope:
At Eton he had been called "Peacock", and this nick-name had followed him up to Oxford. It was not wholly apposite, however. For, whereas the peacock is a fool even among birds, the Duke had already taken (besides a particularly brilliant First in Mods) the Stanhope, the Newdigate, the Lothian, and the Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse.
