Lord Liverpool won few encomiums during an extraordinarily long political career which spanned the wars against revolutionary France and the deeply troubled era at home which followed after 1815. He was seriously misjudged. After his death in 1828 his reputation continued to languish. It is high time that his formidable talents were properly recognised, particularly in the Conservative Party where nothing much is remembered about him, apart from his political longevity.
I am extremely grateful to Professor Jeremy Black, a prolific author with many books on this period, for reading and commenting on this essay. I have dealt rather sketchily with Liverpool’s economic policies, which have received considerable attention in recent years from historians of the period.The publications of Professor Boyd Hilton cover them fully.
This essay will be published in September in the annual Conservative History Journal, where many of Alistair Lexden’s previous history essays have appeared.
Lord Liverpool was recalled briefly by Mrs Thatcher in her speech at the Conservative Party Conference after her resounding election victory in 1987. “They tell me that makes it three wins in a row, just like Lord Liverpool, and he was prime minister for fifteen years. It’s rather encouraging.” Her audience cheered rapturously.
She did not of course match him, losing the premiership after eleven and a half years to the bitter regret of some Tories who would have liked her to have served for at least fifteen years, if not for ever.
It seems almost inconceivable that any prime minister in the future will come anywhere near Liverpool’s lengthy tenure, exceeded only by Walpole, the first prime miniater who remained for twenty years, and the Younger Pitt, a national hero who worked himself into an early grave after eighteen years . Liverpool will surely remain firmly ensconced in the record books as our third longest-serving prime minister, having held the highest political office from 1812 until 1827 when a serious stroke forced him to resign at the age of 56. He died the following year.
Yet his praises are never sung or his achievements honoured, even among Tories. When the Carlton Club was established in 1832 its managers installed copies of well-known portraits of past prime ministers who enjoyed the Conservative Party’s approval, even though not all had been within the Tory fold. These worthies included the 3rd Duke of Portland, a Whig grandee allied to Pitt, who rarely attended meetings of his cabinet as prime minister from 1807-9. But no room was found for the assiduous Liverpool, who never neglected his duties.
In the 1840s he fell victim to Disraeli’s habit of enhancing his own importance by denigrating many of his predecessors (not even excluding the great Duke of Wellington). Liverpool was dismissed memorably and rudely as “the arch-mediocrity”; the much-repeated incivility appears in the well-known novel, Coningsby (1844). Who among the party faithful could revere a prime minister, even a long-serving one, who had been ridiculed by their idolised Dizzy, worshipped for decades after his death with the assistance of his own personal cult founded and maintained by the Primrose League?
In 2024, the year of the National Gallery’s bicentenary, no one is likely to mention that it owes its very existence to Liverpool’s initiative. Large pictures , he said, could not be displayed adequately in private residences in London and ought not to be “ sent to great houses in the country where few can see them.” He instructed the Treasury to buy a much-admired collection of old masters on the death of its owner in 1823, along with the house in which they were hung. The nucleus of a famous institution was created. Liverpool appointed its first Keeper to ensure it was profesionally run, though the Gallery did not really come of age until Sir Robert Peel, an even greater lover of art than Liverpool, took its affairs in hand in the 1840s.
The Trustees of the National Gallery today repay their founder by giving prominence on their website not to his bold initiative, but to his support for the slave trade which occurred early in his career in the 1790s, but never became a major theme of his career. Anxious to ensure that no posssible misdemeanour is overlooked, they add: “ Liverpool or his father was a trustee of his uncle and aunt, owners of plantations and enslaved people” in Barbados. They do, however, graciously acquit him of owning any slaves himself. (Peel too is a source of worry to the Trustees who say they are investigating his possible links to the slave trade, a task that ought to be swiftly completed since Peel denounced all aspects of the evil activity throughout his career.)
Similarly,the crucial role that Liverpool played in the defeat of Napoleon is forgotten. Much doubt was expressed in the Commons about Wellington’s Peninsular campaign before victories started to come in steady succession after 1811. Complaints about its cost abounded. It was Liverpool’s skill which overcame them and ensured that the great commander had the resources he needed.
He is the only prime minister to be denied the nation’s applause in the aftermath of a victory to which he had made a signal contribution. No cheering crowds assembled in his honour after Waterloo as they had done in the previous century for the acclaimed Chatham and would do again in the next century for Lloyd George and Churchill.
Attention focused instead on Liverpool’s two famous foreign secretaries, Castlereagh and Canning, as if all the interest to be found in this period rested with them. Liverpool never seems to have resented the prominence that these two very different figures (whose quarrels led to duel on Putney Heath) achieved , but it was the prime minister who determined the framework within which foreign policy was conducted. He was always included in its detailed formulation too. Both Castlereagh and Canning received invaluable counsel from him in executing the decisions that enhanced British power after Waterloo.
With these achievements forgotten, political longevity became almost the only thing generally held to his credit . His opponents, on the other hand, had plenty to say to his disadvantage and what they said was remembered, passing more or less unamended into the history books used until our own day. Now scholarly biographies by Norman Gash (1984) and William Anthony Hay (2018) have redressed the balance among specialists in the period . Gash provides a beautifully etched portrait; Hay rather buries the misjudged premier in a mass of factual detail about his life and times, as does the latest biography, a bizarre, ramshackle work by Martin Hutchinson (2020) who tries, and fails, to show that Liverpool was our “ greatest prime minister”.
Entrenched misjudgements have not yet been banished by this new research. It still remains customary to condemn the domestic record of Liverpool’s long government for its right-wing callousness in the face of deep social and economic distress after the end of the Napoleonic wars, during which one in six of the population was mobilised, a higher proportion probably than in France.
All political reform, it came to be widely believed, was anathema to him; any deaths which occurred in the course of suppressing agitation in its favour were regrettable, but of little importance to him. The notorious incident in Manchester, known as Peterloo, when eleven agitators for political reform, mingling happily with revolutionaries in their midst, died and several hundred were injured in August 1819, has been frequently depicted as a wholly predictable result of Liverpool’s black, reactionary policies. The impression is sometimes given that he responded to events with all the obtuseness of the French Bourbon monarchs.
These were years in which the left abandoned all restraint in attacking those who disagreed with them. The poets Shelley and Byron were at the forefront of the unremitting denigration. When Castlereagh died in 1822, Byron leapt into foul verse: “Posterity will ne’er survey/ A nobler grave than this/ Here lie the bones of Castlereagh/ Stop, traveller, and piss”. There were no limits to the abuse that Liverpool and his ministers had to endure from those convinced of their own moral superiority. The ferocity of their horrible attacks blinded people to the truth.
It is unsurprising then that Mrs Thatcher said nothing in her 1987 Party Conference speech about what Liverpool did during his long period of office. (As I remember, she politely declined the little note I offered about his work.) Overwhelmingly,Liverpool has been held to symbolise all that was wrong about Britain in his time, a judgement laid down by the Whigs and Liberals who became dominant in politics shortly after his political retirement in 1827.
To such people Liverpool was intolerable. Instead of understanding (as they did in self-righteous fashion ) that political reform must carry all before it if their nation was to progress, Liverpool defended the constitutional order that had served the country well since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Instead of accepting at once (like all the best Liberals) that concessions should immediately be made to quell political and social unrest, Liverpool believed that order must first be restored before change could be contemplated. (This Liberal sentiment has had a long triumph: in Britain the counter-measures taken by those in authority are almost always judged more severely than the disaffected elements who provoke them, a habit from which the IRA has profited in our own day.)
Liverpool’s detractors virtually ignored the reforms which he did make when he judged the time to be right, admitting only that some significant progress in economic affairs was made during his last five years in power; but that was not allowed to count in his favour. Credit was vested in Canning, his second outstanding foreign secretary , whom Liberals were subsequently to claim as one of their own political standard-bearers, operating covertly within the Tory fold during the last phase of Liverpool’s government, which came to be described as a time of benign Liberal Toryism in contrast to the supposedly reactionary policies which had preceded it (in reality all the Liverpool years were guided by the same underlying principles).
Liberals also loved Canning because he supported Catholic emancipation—the conferring of voting and other rights on Roman Catholics—unlike Liverpool, who believed that the monarch’s hostility to this revision of the Protestant constitution of 1688 should be respected, a view reinforced by the practical difficulty of a winning a decisive government majority for change.
In short, Liverpool had the cardinal misfortune to offend against that powerful phenomenon, the spirit of a coming age brimming with confidence in its own very different values and assumptions . There are few harsher or more inequitable political fates. Liverpool’s Tory heirs did not demand that he should be judged properly against the standards of his own time or be given his due place in an unfolding Tory political tradition . Some even agreed with the unjust assessments of his opponents.
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Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, was destined for politics almost from the moment of his birth in 1770 . His father decreed it; he readily acquiesced. The Ist Earl was a tremendous toady at George III’s court, much favoured by the monarch. A notable financier endowed with great administrative gifts (which were inherited by his son),he made himself useful to several prime ministers, including the Younger Pitt who put him in charge of a new Board of Trade when it was created in 1784.
Along the way he accumulated a string of profitable offices, many of them sinecures, which, coupled with his financial skill, enabled him to enrich his family and take it from the lower reaches of the aristocracy, where it had resided for centuries under a succession of baronets, into the rareified world of its upper echelons, sealed by the Earldom conferred on him in 1796. His brother-in-law described him as “a common kind of man whom luck and perseverance have made.”
A martinet, he kept a tight rein on his heir throughout his formative years. Nothing could be allowed to imperil the greater glory which it was his duty to bring to the family. At Charterhouse (surprisingly not Eton) and Christ Church, Oxford, he was required to send long letters home, listing the books he had read and the academic tasks he had performed, together with his tutors’ comments on them. Novels were strictly prohibited. The standard curriculum of the time, dominated by the classics, was greatly extended at the insistence of the demanding father to the son’s ultimate profit. It was noted that “ commerce and finance were especially attended to ”during his education. They provided the basis for the mastery of economic policy which he displayed as prime minister.
One feature of his family background which seems remarkable now attracted little attention in his lifetime. He was one eighth Indian. His maternal grandfather, one of Robert Clive’s reckless band of adventurers, had married a Bengali woman. This heritage, which he shared with no else in public life, appears to have been unimportant to him. He took no particular interest in the affairs of the sub-continent. His Indian blood stirred no unkind comment. Racial prejudice was not rampant in Britain in his time.
A rather priggish young man who was “much ridiculed”, he never fell for temptation. At Oxford, he brushed aside a gay admirer who was besotted with this “delightful beauteous fair one.” A more detached contemporary said “his manners were effeminate and cold.” The effeminacy did not survive into full manhood, but he was always cold in his treatment of virtually everyone he met . His warmth was reserved entirely for his wife, the very serious daughter of one of the most unconventional men of the age, the Earl-Bishop of Derry, who spent his patrimony as Earl of Bristol as freely as he departed from orthodox Anglicanism in his Ulster diocese, giving his name to numerous hotels across Europe during extensive travels after abandoning his family. The high-minded, evangelical Louisa Hervey was a walking rebuke to his lapses (and to the notorious promiscuity of her two married sisters) as she went about her daily work of visiting the poor and the sick, the only prime minister’s wife to become an ardent philanthropist. She was confident of getting her reward in heaven.
The marriage was unclouded. They were rarely apart, untroubled, it seems, by the absence of children. No one else mattered much to them. They had houses in London and just outside the then small town of Kingston-on-Thames, and ample money for their modest needs. Their occasional dinner parties were notorious for their dullness. Liverpool became perhaps the most solitary of all prime ministers. One of his colleagues wrote that he had “fewer personal friends and less quality for conciliating men’s affections than perhaps any Minister that ever lived.” The immense void created by his wife’s death in 1821 could only be filled in one way. He married again rapidly ; his second wife was a close friend of the first.
His father made doubly sure that he became an MP at the first possible moment by getting him elected for two pocket boroughs, Appleby in Westmoreland and Rye in Sussex, in 1790 when he was twenty. It was as the latter’s representative( with its electorate of six) that he took his seat when he became entitled to do so the following year. From the outset he was Pitt’s faithful lieutenant, always ready to leap from his seat to deliver an effective speech in his leader’s defence. He reached a high standard in his maiden speech, addressing the Commons for over an hour “without a falter”, and rarely faltered thereafter.
Wellington regarded him as Pitt’s equal as a speaker. He was admired for his vigorous, forceful debating style which contrasted with the ponderous, florid rhetoric of so many contemporaries. As the war against France went badly in the 1790s, he was often on his feet, explaining how serious military reverses would eventually be overturned. Only one other rising star could do the work as well: George Canning, as brilliant as he was nakedly ambitious. The future Liverpool, a sorely tried Oxford contemporary of Canning whose teasing made him cry, was always the more relaible of the two. His career advanced more steadily. An acute contemporary observer of political affairs described him as “a far wiser statesman than Canning.”
Appointed a junior member of the Board of Control (for Indian affairs) in 1793 at the age of 23, he spent the whole of the rest of his long political career in office, apart from a break of a few months in 1806-7 when Pitt’s heirs were out of power. As Foreign Secretary in his early thirties, he made peace with France in 1802, and then, after going to the Lords in 1803, unmade it when Napoleon’s aggression reasserted itself. Two competent but unremarkable terms as Home Secretary before and after Pitt’s death (1804-6, 1807-9) were followed by his major contribution to ultimate victory over France as War Secretary.
Liverpool put the Peninsular War firmly at the centre of British strategy for the first time.There had been much talk of possible withdrawal. He put a stop to it. “I laid it down as a principle”, he wrote, “that if the war was to be continued in Portugal and Spain, we ought not to suffer any part of our efforts to be directed to other objects.” Wellington got over 20,000 more troops and a great deal of money to pay and equip both them and their Portugese allies. By 1811 he had some 90, 000 men drawn from the two nations under his command, with the conquest of Spain clearly in their sights.
When a cabinet reshuffle was under discussion, a colleague said: “Lord Liverpool was too good a War Secretary to be spared there”. Everything changed in May 1812 when the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated. The cabinet unanimously wanted Liverpool as his successor and, after prolonged time-wasting antics by the Prince Regent, later George IV, it duly got him a month later.
Liverpool received a typically deflating letter from Wellington: “You have undertaken a most gigantic task and I don’t know how you will get through it. However, there is nothing like trying.” On that far from reassuring note, a fifteen-year government began. Its survival and success owed much to a quality for which Liverpool was praised by a friend in 1812: “He is one of the best -tempered men living.” His cold heart perhaps assisted his equable temper, though as the long years in government took their toll that changed and he became notably fretful and irritable in dealing with colleagues.
So bad had things become by 1820 that even a strong supporter found it “a difficult and unpleasant task to act in public life with him.” By the end this lonely man, much given to tears, was a bag of nerves, consumed by anxieties. Nevertheless, he made the cabinet a much more formidable instrument of government than it had been before, binding its members together with a sense of common purpose in the face of George IV’s confused and unpredictable attempts to intervene in policy. Talent flourished. Of the next ten prime ministers, six had served in his administration.
But his coldness never changed. It did great harm to his historical reputation. There was no devoted friend or admirer to record his achievements with affection and regard. Liverpool’s solitude contributed to the misjudgements made by hostile Liberals which have been allowed to fester. The wife of one of his ministers scented the danger: that he would be left deserving “ a higher reputation as a statesman than I dare say History will grant to him.”
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After the end of the long French wars in 1815, Liverpool’s cardinal objective was to resume the work of enlarging the nation’s prosperity on which Pitt, his mentor and inspiration, had embarked in 1783 but had been forced to lay aside ten years later with the end of peace. Like Pitt, he stressed “ the general principle of free trade as the great foundation of national prosperity.”
Prosperity cannot co-exist with acute political instability. That is why Liverpool bore down firmly, though not ferociously, on the agitators—most for political reform, some for revolution on French lines—who fomented so much trouble in the first post-war years, a time of severe economic depression. Though it included a plot to murder the entire cabinet (uncovered by government agents), the acute discord is remembered chiefly because of unyielding left-wing determination to keep alive the memory of Peterloo in August 1819.
Liverpool and his ministers did not condone the eleven deaths and some 400 injuries that occurred when a crowd of between 60,000 and 100,000 panicked as soldiers went in to arrest their radical ring-leader, the local magistrates having judged that the meeting “bore the appearance of an insurrection.”
In private, Liverpool was highly critical of the magistrates’ decision; in public he had no alternative but to endorse it. As Wellington put it: “Unless the magistrates had been supported in this instance, other magistrates on future occasions would not act at all; and then what a state the country would be in!” Hardly less infamous in the view of the left were the supposedly draconian Six Acts, denounced over and again for giving the government the powers of a police state.
The reality was very different. The Acts “ made the law rather more effective, while never amounting to the straitjacket of repression that radical writers and politicians loved to denounce”, in the words of Professor Rory Muir, the acclaimed recent biographer of Wellington. At the time Liverpool himself was always took care to strike a moderate note, saying that “ the best friends of liberty were those who put down popular commotion, and secured the inhabitants of the country in the peaceable enjoyment of their rights.” (Peel, Liverpool’s disciple, drew the obvious conclusion: Britain needed a paid, civilian police force. The Met was created ten years later.)
Liverpool faced one last upsurge of popular discontent in 1820-1 in support of a most unlikely cause: the rights of the dissolute King George IV’s equally dissolute wife, Queen Caroline, whom the monarch was determined to divorce. The extraordinary sympathy she evoked led to riots which have been described as “arguablly the largest movement of the common people during the early nineteenth century.” Troops killed protesters at Hyde Park Corner. After Caroline’s sudden death in 1821, this bizarre issue faded as rapidly as it had arisen.
During the following years Liverpool spoke repeatedly of his now peaceful country’s growing wealth. He extolled its “unprecedented, unparalleled prosperity.” His political opponents did not deny it, while refusing to acknowledge its true author in order to make a hero of Canning. His colleagues knew better. When a new Chancellor of the Exchequer was appointed in 1823, another cabinet minister said “as to measures, Liverpool must of course give the orders, and he obey.”
His orders brought currency stability through a return to the gold standard (after a long arguments between financial experts, wealth creators and politicians) without the harmful effects that followed Churchill’s adoption of this course a century later.Though acute fiscal difficulties ensued, Liverpool cut public spending by about a third, much to the delight of the Commons which had an insatiable appetite for the reduction of taxation through which the state’s services were financed. Even so about half the huge debts amassed in wartime were paid off.
In 1824 Liverpool pointed out that direct taxation amounted to less than £4 million, a smaller proportion of the total national revenue than in any other country in Europe. Even so, indirect taxation fell sharply too. Clear prospects for the expansion of trade encouraged this ardent disciple of Adam Smith “ to make a frontal attack on the vast structure of prohibitive and protective duties which encased the British economy”, in the words of Professor Gash. Away went a swathe of tariffs on cotton, wool, silk and other commodities to be followed in the next year by duties on spirits and wine.
Trade duly expanded, and the government’s total revenues increased. Liverpool stressed “the great advantage resulting from unrestricted freedom of trade.” He added: “ Government and Parliament never meddle with these affairs at all but they do harm.”He yearned to reduce the high level of protection given to agriculture through the Corn Laws, but his Commons supporters with their landed estates would only allow modest change.
Expanding trade, he said in Bristol in 1825, brought prosperity to the country’s landed and manufacturing interests, which were both “ links in a great social chain, all connected and all dependent on each other for their mutual welfare.” In the view of Boyd Hilton, the leading economic historian of this period, he was the first prime minister “to adopt a coherent economic policy.” He was also one of the great, though rarely acknowledged, architects of the liberal, free trade Victorian state.
Liverpool’s era of prosperity killed interest in radical parliamentary reform in the 1820s. His Whig opponents under Lord Grey largely ignored it; the quest for a Reform Bill only got their full, excited attention when Wellington unexpectedly made it a central issue by denouncing it in 1830. Liverpool believed in what is now called incremental reform, gradual carefully considered change in stages.
He saw the case for disenfranchising rotten boroughs. The counties, he thought, should be the main beneficiaries. In 1821 he argued that “county elections are the least corrupt in the kingdom. The representatives of them, if not the ablest members in the House, are certainly those who have the greatest stake in the country and may be trusted for the most part in periods of difficualty and danger.” There was nothing inevitable about the victory of a big measure of parliamentary reform in 1832.
Deep respect for the constitution, insistence on law and order, victory in war, tireless promotion of free trade, low taxation and public spending: Mrs Thatcher would have applauded Liverpool as a fine Tory predecessor if she had known what he did during his career. He came from a strong Tory family. A fairly sympathetic contemporary observer said “ he was too much of a Tory in his principles, which had been bred in him ; but he was very mild in their application.” At the 1818 general election Liverpool was told that some famers in Sussex “ are no longer what they were ten years ago in their attachment to the old Tory interests and principles.” In the same year J.W.Croker, an influential political factotum, stated that “ Tories are placable people.” Impressed by Edmund Burke’s service to the Whigs, Liverpool himself said: “I wish the Tory cause had found as good an oracle. Dr Johnson is admirable as far as he goes.”
These comments ( a sample of those made at the time) rebut the often expressed view of some historians today that there were no professing Tories in Liverpool’s time, only people who were insulted by being called Tories by their opponents in the tradition of Walpole after the Hanoverian succession in 1714 when he very successfully got the country to believe that all Tories were Jacobites, traitors to the new regime. Yet, for all his open profession of Tory instincts, Liverpool never described himself as a Tory prime minister or as the head of the Tory Party. In Parliament he led a governing coalition which looked back to Pitt, a lifelong Whig, as its founder and continuing inspiration, and sought to carry forward his principles in a conservative vein.
Opponents certainly repeated the old Walpole trick in an attempt to discredit Pitt’s political heirs. By the 1820s, however, many of them had embraced the old title, which went back to the 1680s, in day to day politics without any feeling of being tainted by it. As Professor Peter Jupp put it in his careful survey of the evolution of political parties in this period, “ contemporary evidence attests to the re-emergence of a Tory party in the 1820s…It certainly was the case by the late 1820s that a two-party polarity dominated the conduct of the 300 or so most active MPs in the Commons.”
Liverpool presided over an important transition. Conscious himself of belonging to the Tory tradition, his work in government recreated a distinctive Tory political dispensation once again. In his time too, some inkling was provided about what would happen next. In 1818 a group of Tory activists in Gloucester established a Gloucester Conservative Association.
Conservatives interested in history should think seriously about the career of Lord Liverpool—and put up his picture in the Carlton Club.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Bew, Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny (Quercus,2011). Norman Gash, “The Earl of Liverpool” in The Prime Ministers, Vol.One, edited by Herbert Van Thal (George Allen & Unwin, 1974) and Lord Liverpool: The Life and Political Career of Robert Banks Jenkinson Second Earl of Liverpool 1770-1828 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984). William Anthony Hay, Lord Liverpool: A Political Life (The Boydell Press, 2018). Boyd Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815-1830 (Oxford University Press,1977); A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006); and “ The Political Arts of Lord Liverpool” in The Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol.38 (1988). Martin Hutchinson, Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister: Lord Liverpool (The Lutterworth Press, 2020). Peter Jupp, The Governing of Britain 1688-1848: The Executive, Parliament and the People ( Routledge,2006). Stephen M.Lee, George Canning and Liberal Toryism, 1801-1827 (Boydell Press,2008). Rory Muir, Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace, 1814-1852 (Yale University Press, 2015). R.G.Thorne (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1790-1820. 5 Vols. (Secker & Warburg, 1986).
