Britain's Greatest Prime Minister: Lord Liverpool

453 Pages·2020·5.641 MB·English

by  Martin Hutchinson

Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister
Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister
Lord Liverpool
Martin Hutchinson
Hardback ISBN: 978 0 7188 9563 1
Paperback ISBN: 978 0 7188 9564 8
PDF ISBN: 978 0 7188 4821 7
ePub ISBN: 978 0 7188 4822 4
The Lutterworth Press
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Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister
Lord Liverpool
Martin Hutchinson
L
Th e Lutterworth Press
The Lutterworth Press
P.O. Box 60
Cambridge
CB1 2NT
United Kingdom
www.lutterworth.com
[email protected]
Hardback ISBN: 978 0 7188 9563 1
Paperback ISBN: 978 0 7188 9564 8
PDF ISBN: 978 0 7188 4821 7
ePub ISBN: 978 0 7188 4822 4
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A record is available from the British Library
First published by The Lutterworth Press, 2020
Copyright © Martin Hutchinson, 2020
For more information, please visit
www.lordliverpool.com
Additional information on the following subjects, inter alia:
The life and career of Charles Jenkinson
Biographical notes on Liverpool and his colleagues
Discussion of Britain’s other 54 prime ministers, and their claims to greatness.
All rights reserved. No part of this edition may be reproduced,
stored electronically or in any retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
prior written permission from the Publisher
([email protected]).
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Note on Nomenclature vii
Note on Money xi
I. Introduction 1
II. Early Years until the Death of Pitt, 1770-1806 8
III. De Facto Primus inter Pares, 1806-11 72
IV. Year of Destiny, 1812 126
V. Years of Victory, 1813-15 150
VI. Penury and Progress, 1815-19 214
VII. Challenges, Recovery and Transition, 1820-23 279
VIII. Bubble, Reform, Death and Oblivion, 1824-28 337
IX. Conclusion 392
Appendix: Liverpool’s letter to the Bank of England 418
Bibliography 423
Index 430

List of Illustrations
Money exchange table xii
Mir Jafar and his son Miran delivering the Treaty of 1757 to William Watts 13
(platinotype by Henry Dixon and Son, c. 1890)
Charles Jenkinson, 1st Earl of Liverpool 17
(George Romney, 1786-8, National Portrait Gallery)
Portrait of Sir Banks Jenkinson 20
(George Romney, 1786-7, National Portrait Gallery)
The House of Commons 1793-94 34
(Karl Anton Hickel, 1793-1795, National Portrait Gallery)
Louisa, Countess of Liverpool 36
(George Romney, 1793, National Trust)
‘Massacre of Tranent’ memorial in Civic Square, Tranent, East Lothian 39
(Kim Traynor, own work)
The nursery, with Britannia reposing in peace 55
(James Gillray, London, 1802)
Armed-heroes 59
(James Gillray , engraving, 1803, British Cartoon Prints Collection)
Dudley Ryder 63
(John Samuel Agar, 1813, National Portrait Gallery)
Whitehall Yard 89
(Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 1811)
Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington 127
(mezzotint by W. Say, 1814, after T. Phillips. Credit: Wellcome Collection.
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0))
Henry Bathurst, 3rd Earl Bathurst 141
(William Salter, 1834, National Portrait Gallery)
Graf Clemens Metternich 164
(David Weiss, 1810, Porträtsammlung der Nationalbibliothek)
The British general Joseph Wanton Morrison 166
(Unknown author, 1821, Musée McCord Museum)
Things as they have been. Things as they now are, caricature 181
of Lord Cochrane (C. Dyer, publisher, 1815)
Portrait of Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh 187
(Thomas Lawrence, 1821)
Nicholas Vansittart, Lord Bexley 208
(Thomas Anthony Dean, 1838, Welsh Portrait Collection
at the National Library of Wales)
Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth 234
(John Singleton Copley, 1797-98, Saint Louis Art Museum)
Sir Robert Peel, 1st Baronet 251
(John Henry Robinson, mid 19th-century)
Portrait of George Canning (1770–1827) 278
(Richard Evans, 1825, National Portrait Gallery)
McConnel & Company mills, about 1820 284
(A Century of fine Cotton Spinning, 1790-1913.
McConnel & Co. Ltd., 1913, Ancoats, Manchester)
The Trial of Queen Caroline, 1820 292
(George Hayter, 1820, National Portrait Gallery)
Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool 338
(Thomas Lawrence, before 1827, National Portrait Gallery)
The Opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway in 1825 368
(J.R, Brown, originally published in The Graphic 13 Oct 1888)
Note on Nomenclature
One difficulty for historians of this period is that the names of many statesmen
changed several times during their lives as they were granted or inherited
peerages.
Liverpool’s father, Charles Jenkinson, is a case in point; he became Lord
Hawkesbury in 1786 and then in 1796 first Earl of Liverpool. (He was also
Sir Charles Jenkinson, seventh Baronet, from 1790.) Liverpool himself was
plain Robert Jenkinson until 1786, the Hon. Robert Jenkinson from 1786
until 1796, Lord Hawkesbury from 1796 until 1808 (he held this name as a
courtesy title between 1796 and 1803 and then in his own right after he was
called to the Lords in 1803) and then the second Earl of Liverpool (and 8th
Baronet) on his father’s death in 1808.
The problem exists for other statesmen also. Henry Addington was known
as ‘Addington’ during his prime ministership, 1801-04, but ‘Sidmouth’
(Viscount Sidmouth) as Liverpool’s Home Secretary, 1812-21. Robert Stewart
was ‘Stewart’ until 1796, his courtesy title was ‘Castlereagh’ (Viscount)
from 1796 to 1821, and ‘Londonderry’ after he inherited his father’s Irish
marquessate in 1821. Henry Dundas was ‘Dundas’ until 1802, first Viscount
Melville thereafter; his son Robert was ‘Dundas’ until 1811, then second
Viscount Melville on the death of his father.
The normal convention is to be pedantic, referring to each statesman
according to his title in the year you are discussing, so the familiar ‘Castlereagh’
becomes an unfamiliar ‘Londonderry’ in the last year of his life and (another
example) the familiar ‘Vansittart’ becomes ‘Bexley’ after 1823. (Addington and
Sidmouth are both familiar; I suspect most readers think they are different
people!)
I have followed this, except in the case of Liverpool and his father, who
sat in the same Cabinet together between 1801 and 1804, at which point
the whirligig of names becomes just plain confusing (and has confused many
well-regarded historians of the period, if you read their accounts carefully).