A Unique Prime Minister

Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, was prime minister for almost fifteen years, during which Britain won the Napoleonic Wars and endured the most dynamic and difficult phase of the Industrial Revolution. Yet he has enjoyed only four significant biographies in 190 years, a tribute to the strength of his political opponents in the historical profession. Now William Anthony Hay has produced a fifth, and for the first time the character of this extraordinary man is revealed to modern eyes.

Hay begins by examining in detail the career of Liverpool’s father Charles Jenkinson (Lord Hawkesbury from 1786, 1st Earl of Liverpool from 1796) which previous biographers have not done. This adds greatly to our understanding of Liverpool’s own career, since the two men were close and there was a considerable intellectual transfer from father to son. Charles Jenkinson, who has enjoyed no biographies of his own, was at the top of British politics for forty years, beginning by designing the Stamp Act of 1765, then playing a major role helping King George III prop up Lord North’s feeble government in the last years of the American War. Then in 1786, having helped to engineer Pitt’s ascension to power, he joined Pitt as President of the Board of Trade, a post in which he served for eighteen years, ending together with his son Liverpool in Addington’s ten-man cabinet.

In that role Charles Jenkinson was active in promoting the new Australian settlements, seeing as he did a major future British trade in the Pacific; in 1789 the Hawkesbury River was named after him (he was at that stage Baron Hawkesbury). The family association with Australia was continued in 1810, when the New South Wales town of Liverpool was named by Governor Macquarie after Jenkinson’s son, the future prime minister, then Secretary of State for War and Colonies.

Jenkinson was a “Church and King” Tory with a philosophy derived ultimately from Edward, Earl of Clarendon, that was distinctly different from that of Edmund Burke’s Whigs (they were politically opposed for almost all Burke’s career). He was also, by the end of his career, remarkably economically sophisticated not only by the standards of his time, but among politicians of all periods—his treatise Coins of the Realm was the standard work for a century after his death. Hay shows how his knowledge and his beliefs were passed on to his dutiful, intelligent son.

Hay has done extensive research among Liverpool’s correspondence, which has never been published—a lacuna disgraceful to the historical profession, given Liverpool’s importance. This is especially helpful in describing the peripatetic but loving and stimulating upbringing Liverpool enjoyed, with a doting but very busy father, no mother, and other relatives dotted around southern England. Liverpool was a clever boy but with limited social skills and a nervous temperament, weaknesses which self-training and a good marriage quelled, so that in mid-career, from say 1808 to 1820, he had an admirable temperament for leadership: equable, un-egotistical and calm.

Hay’s work with Liverpool’s correspondence continues to illuminate his account of Liverpool’s time at Oxford and his early parliamentary career. In particular, Hay highlights Liverpool’s relationship with George Canning—a true and lifelong friendship on both sides, but with a jealousy on Canning’s part that was alien to Liverpool’s benignant nature. Liverpool sponsored Canning’s parliamentary career, introducing him through his father to Pitt, then Prime Minister, for whom Canning was a personal favourite. Much later, as Prime Minister in 1822, Liverpool was to override the opposition of King George IV and most of his colleagues to make Canning Foreign Secretary.

Liverpool himself had a couple of comfortable years as Master of the Mint, then was promoted right up the tree to Foreign Secretary by Addington after Pitt’s ministry fell in 1801. Later in the decade he served as Home Secretary on Pitt’s return, becoming close to George III, who offered him the top job in 1806, after Pitt’s death. Liverpool refused, not because he felt unable to handle the job, but because the Pittite contingent could not command a Commons majority in the 1806 session, now that Sidmouth (the former Addington) had temporarily joined with Grenville and the Whigs.

Liverpool took over the management of Britain’s war effort as War Secretary in October 1809, when Perceval succeeded Portland, and was from at least that date (arguably from 1807) primus inter pares among ministers. He established a good working relationship with Wellington, commanding British forces in the Peninsula, and (which Hay misses) devised a military strategy of moderate pressure over a prolonged period that, he believed, would cause Napoleon’s economically unstable empire to implode. Maintained for five years, that strategy achieved success.

Here we come to Hay’s only fault as a historian, which he shares with all Liverpool’s previous biographers, including Norman Gash in 1985; he is much less conversant than Liverpool himself with economic matters. Liverpool’s war-winning strategy of 1809 to 1815 was based on economic factors, recognising the primitive nature of Napoleon’s economic management, and the need for him to loot new conquests to sustain the French war effort.

When peace came, Liverpool and his underrated Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Vansittart dealt successfully with the heaviest public debt load ever brought down without inflation. (Britain’s 1945 debt load was about equal, in terms of national output, but was brought down through inflationary means.) Then in 1819, Liverpool managed the transition to return Britain to the Gold Standard, achieving rapid economic growth rather than the deflationary slump his distant successors incurred after 1925.

He then transformed Britain’s economic policy, realising that Britain’s new industrial economy required a new policy of trade liberalisation, which he outlined in a speech in May 1820 and pursued thereafter, bringing a period of unprecedentedly rapid economic growth. Finally, Liverpool dealt with the first true trade-cycle market crash in 1825-26, reforming Britain’s banking system successfully through measures he designed and implemented within six months of the crash—a feat that escaped his distant successors in 2008.

Hay’s coverage of these economic matters is sketchy. He discusses peacetime budgeting generally, without highlighting how great a problem the debt was for this generation of policy-makers. In general, Hay covers the political but not the technical aspects of economic policy, and he misses the significance of Liverpool’s banking reforms, for example. Still, he calls the book “A political life” so perhaps this is fair enough.

Liverpool had become Prime Minister on Perceval’s assassination in 1812 and kept the job until he suffered a stroke in February 1827. In foreign affairs, he devised the policy of imposing favourable terms on France in the peace treaty and taking only modest colonial gains from Britain’s war efforts. Thereby he and Castlereagh produced a more lasting peace at the Congress of Vienna than their vindictive successors at Versailles achieved in 1919. Hay recognises that Liverpool, not Castlereagh, was the strategic boss of British foreign policy even at the time of the Congress of Vienna, giving guidance where necessary. Later, foreign policy thinking changed and Britain drew back from the Congress system of alliances; Hay recognises that Liverpool, Castlereagh and Canning all contributed to this change.

With his first Home Secretary, Sidmouth, Liverpool navigated the period of distress and unrest that came with the economic downturn following the peace. Sidmouth had a very efficient system of informers, who were for example able to control and nullify the threat from the Cato Street Conspiracy, an attempt to wipe out the cabinet in 1820. There was only one blot on their record: the “Peterloo massacre” of 1819 in which eleven dissidents were killed; that was a case where the local magistrates panicked. After the economy turned up after 1820, security became more relaxed and Liverpool’s government in its latter years carried a major program of liberalising reform through its new Home Secretary Robert Peel. Hay understands the post-war security difficulties and does not overplay the switch to “reformism” as other historians have done.

Hay opens the book nicely with the Bristol banquet held to honour Canning and Liverpool in January 1825, during which Liverpool modestly disclaimed credit for his administration’s success and attributed it to “the talents of my excellent and able colleagues”. Liverpool’s modesty was admirable, but that does not excuse 200 years of historians taking it literally and concentrating more on the colleagues, particularly Wellington, Castlereagh and Canning, than on Liverpool himself. Gash’s 1985 biography went some way to rescue Liverpool from the obloquy and obscurity into which previous historians had condemned him; Hay’s biography goes further in this direction and is thus very much to be welcomed. Liverpool is truly a figure of world historical significance.

Martin Hutchinson is the author of a nearly-completed new biography of Liverpool, “Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister”, to published in 2019-20.

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Lord Liverpool: A Political Life
by William Anthony Hay
Boydell Press, 2018, 365 pages, $100
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