politician prime minister statesman
Robert Banks Jenkinson was born in London on 7 June 1770, the eldest son of Charles Jenkinson (1727—1808), a Tory politician who had served as secretary at war under Lord North and as president of the Board of Trade under William Pitt, the Younger. His father, the scion of a landed family of Oxfordshire, had become a leading adviser to George III, and in 1791 was raised to the peerage as the first Baron Hawkesbury; in 1796 he was created the Earl of Liverpool.
Robert was educated at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford. He witnessed the fall of the Bastille in Paris while he was touring France in July 1789 and retained a fear of mob violence throughout his political career. He entered the House of Commons at the age of 20, in 1790, as M.P. for Appleby. He later became M.P. for Rye. He was a strong supporter of the war with France after 1793.
Jenkinson served at the Board of Control for India between 1793 and 1796 and as master of the Royal Mint from 1796 until 1801, when he was appointed foreign secretary by Henry Addington. He was responsible for negotiating the short-lived Treaty of Amiens with Napoleonic France in 1802. He served as home secretary and leader of the House of Lords in Pitt’s second ministry, from 1804 until Pitt’s death in 1806, as well as in the Portland administration,' from 1807 until 1809. He also proved an efficient secretary for war and colonies under Spencer Perceval between 1809 and 1812, staunchly supporting Wellington’s Peninsular campaigns.
When Liverpool became prime minister in June 1812, following the assassination of Spencer Perceval, he was only in his mid-forties but already had a broader base of political experience than most who attained this office. Moreover, he remained in office until 1827, completing the longest tenure of any British prime minister in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As prime minister he not only presided over the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and the conclusion of the longest period of warfare in modern British history but also over an era of profound social and economic change. His term of office witnessed spectacular industrial and urban expansion and the most rapid period of population growth in Britain’s history.
By 1832 the party over which he had presided for so long had virtually disintegrated and had suffered a humiliating defeat in the general election of 1830. His success, which had occurred entirely within the context of the unreformed political system, may also be attributed to the weakness, during the period from 1812 to 1827, of the Whig opposition, as revealed in the general elections of 1818 and 1826.
Liverpool had few interests outside of politics. Self-effacing and serious-minded by nature, he also exhibited a consistency, a dependability, and an ability to compromise that won him the respect of more talented and temperamental ministers who served under him. His parliamentary speeches were well-researched although rarely inspiring, and his arguments were carefully reasoned. He proved a sensitive and effective chairman of cabinet meetings during a significant period in the evolution of cabinet government. He entrusted his cabinet colleagues with considerable responsibility in the management of their ministerial departments, and was in turn rewarded by their loyalty.
Liverpool’s failure to secure a majority in the House of Commons for a continuation of the wartime income tax after 1815 placed severe financial constraints on his government; but he strengthened the monetary system by restoring the gold standard in 1819, and prosperity returned in the 1820s. Liverpool responded firmly to the wave of radical discontent that erupted during the postwar recession: He suspended the Habeas Corpus Act in 1817, after which his ministry was satirized by the poet Shelley as “rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know”; and he introduced the Six Acts of 1819, whose repressive effects have been considerably exaggerated by subsequent critics. He was determined to maintain public order by supporting the local magistracy in the absence of a substantial professional police force, but he was privately critical of the conduct of the Manchester magistrates at the time of the so-called “Peterloo Massacre” in August 1819, when a crowd that had gathered to listen to speeches on parliamentary reform and on the repeal of the Corn Laws was beset by the local militia and soldiery. Moreover, Liverpool had no desire to strengthen the power of the central government. His administration foiled a Jacobin threat to assassinate the cabinet and dealt adroitly with the complexities of the Queen Caroline affair in 1820, although he incurred the wrath of George IV, who contemplated dismissing him on account of his sympathy for George’s estranged wife.
Liverpool’s ministry bowed to pressure from anxious farmers and landowners in imposing the unpopular Corn Laws in 1815. Although Liverpool regarded the Corn Laws as an interim measure to encourage the revival of agriculture, in the short term these laws, combined with a series of bad harvests, drove the average price of corn higher in the years preceding 1819 than it had been at any other period during the whole of the nineteenth century, resulting in widespread distress. Liverpool also showed attentiveness to commercial and manufacturing interests, praising Watt’s steam engine as “the greatest and most useful invention of modern times.” He endeavored, with limited success, to reduce unemployment in 1817. Liverpool’s fundamental commitment to the principles of free trade was revealed in a speech in 1820. In 1826, he ex-pressed a willingness to reduce corn duties; but before a sliding scale for import duties could be introduced, he suffered a paralytic stroke in February 1827 and resigned from office.
In 1941, historian W. R. Brock famously characterized the later period of Liverpool’s administration (1822—1827) as “an experiment in Liberal Toryism.” During this period his government introduced a series of celebrated domestic reforms designed to reduce the number of capital offenses and rationalize the system of criminal justice—reforms that many historians view as sharply contrasting with the repressive legislation of the period before 1820. However, some historians—notably J. E. Cookson and Norman Gash—have emphasized fundamental continuities in the policies of Liverpool’s administration before and after 1822. Gash and Eric Evans also have challenged predominantly negative interpretations of Liverpool’s premiership influenced by Disraeli’s unsympathetic assessment of Liverpool in 1844 as “the Arch-Mediocrity.” Liverpool’s qualities as an intelligent and able administrator in his tenure of three of the main offices of state are increas¬ingly recognized. As premier, Liverpool skillfully coordinated the disparate interests and abilities within his party and worked persistently toward broadening his ministry’s support in Parliament and in the country. His long, cohesive administration achieved success in times of war and of peace, laying the foundations for a return to prosperity in the 1820s by sound economic management, and for Peel’s later remodeling of the Conservative Party.
An Evangelical Protestant, Liverpool insisted that ecclesiastical appointments be made on the basis of merit rather than of patronage. He also strenuously promoted the international prohibition of the slave trade. He opposed, in principle, the granting of Catholic emancipation, but allowed members of his cabinet freedom to follow their own consciences on this potentially divisive issue, enabling protagonists on both sides of the argument—notably Addington (Sidmouth) and Viscount Castlereagh, and later George Canning—to serve under him. Although Liverpool was respected for his integrity, calmness, and good temper, his avoidance of the great issues of Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform created problems for his party after his death on 4 December 1828.
