Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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Many former prime ministers were privately wealthy and able to retire to

their country estates. Walpole amassed a large personal fortune in ofﬁce.

Bute (in the 18th century) and Rosebery (in the 19th) were among

the wealthiest men in the country and married fabulously rich heiresses.

When Rosebery died in 1929, he left £1.7 million – the equivalent of nearly

£60 million in today’s money. Eleven of the 18 former prime ministers

who have died since 1900 would be counted today as millionaires on

that basis, including Lloyd George and Churchill who both left public life

substantially wealthier than when they entered it (helped by lucrative

publishing deals and private benefactors).

Some prime ministers and former prime ministers have had money

troubles. Both Pitts – father (Chatham) and son – died with massive

debts that were paid off by public funds by Parliament. King George III

quietly lent money to Lord North (who ﬁnally inherited his estates

and fortune only two years before he died), and Queen Victoria loaned

money to Melbourne who was ﬁnancially rather disorganised and always

thought he was harder up than he really was. Neither Addington nor

Russell were well off and were helped-out by being granted royal ‘grace and

favour’ houses to live in. Disraeli’s ﬁnances were dangerously rackety for

much of his life but were in reasonable shape in his later years, with his lit-

erary earnings, some large bequests and help from a shadowy benefactor.

Asquith’s ﬁnancial position was so bad that some of his friends organised

an appeal for a fund to pay his debts and give him a private pension for the

last few years of his life; he left only £9,345 on his death in 1928. Attlee

lived modestly on his pension, the House of Lords attendance allowance

and whatever he could make from lectures and journalism. He left only

£7,295 in his will – the smallest sum left by any of the 20th century’s

former PMs.

Until Tony Blair Labour former-premiers like Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan

do not seem to have acquired lucrative directorships or business appoint-

ments as some Conservatives had. In the 1920s, however, Lloyd George

made large sums of money from international lectures in the same way as

contemporary ex-PMs like Thatcher, Major and Blair.

The latest development is for former prime ministers to set up found-

ations to provide a base and a platform for continuing involvement with

political and public issues. Thatcher was the ﬁrst to set up her own found-

ation to try to secure her legacy and propagate her ideas (but funds ran

out and it closed down in the UK in 2005). Blair set up a Sports Foundation

and an Inter-faith Foundation. By seeking to operate as an active and

roving ﬁgure on the world stage, Blair may also be carving out a new

role for a former British prime minister, though one with some obvious

contemporary international parallels (as Chapter 10 shows).

The former MP and journalist Matthew Parris asserted in 2007 that

‘no British prime minister in history has ever done anything seriously

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worthwhile or interesting after leaving Downing Street’. A Guardian editor-

ial in 2008 echoed his claim, saying that ‘No British prime minister has

ever found signiﬁcance in a new role. Their best times are always behind

them.’

Both were wrong. There may not be a clear or established role

for former British prime ministers, but – as this book will show – they have

done plenty of worthwhile, interesting and signiﬁcant things in the years

after they have left Number 10.

Introduction 13

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Walpole to Shelburne

Robert Walpole (resigned 11 February 1742)

Britain’s ﬁrst and longest-serving prime minister (having held the post

of First Lord of the Treasury for almost 21 years), Walpole left ofﬁce on

11 February 1742. He had already ceased to be an MP, having a few days

earlier accepted a peerage and been created Earl of Orford. He had also

obtained from the King a pension of £4,000 a year (worth over £450,000 a

year in today’s money), though Walpole chose not to apply for his ﬁrst

payment for two years, perhaps because it might have aroused controversy

in the immediate aftermath of his resignation. He continued to live in

Number 10 Downing Street for several more months before he moved out

to take up residence in a house in Arlington Street in St James’s as his new

London base. Sixty-ﬁve years old, he was to live for another three years as

‘the ex-minister’.

Walpole’s long hold on power had been weakening for four or ﬁve

years before his fall, as he had encountered political and personal setbacks

and blows. He had lost an important royal ally with the death of Queen

Caroline in 1737. The death in childbirth of his second wife (and former

mistress), Maria Skerret, in 1738 had left him devastated and depressed.

Internal tensions and divisions had been growing in the Cabinet and the

government, and Walpole’s hold over the House of Commons was slip-

ping. That against his wishes war had been declared with Spain, showed

how much his power was waning, and the ineffective conduct of that war

further sapped his popularity and inﬂuence. He was feeling his age and was

frequently ill with gout and the stone. It seems that he would have liked to

quit in 1740 but the King insisted he must remain in ofﬁce. Lack of agree-

ment on how to force him out or who should replace him kept him safe for

a while, but his enemies and rivals could not be held at bay indeﬁnitely.

The 1741 general election cut his parliamentary majority, and as disgrun-

tled ministers began to put out feelers and make overtures to the oppos-

ition, and as narrow margins and defeats in a series of early parliamentary

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votes showed that he had lost the conﬁdence of the House of Commons,

Walpole recognised that it was time to throw in the towel.

King George II had burst into tears at the audience when Walpole took

leave of him as prime minister. He had been so anxious to retain Walpole

that he had authorised an approach to the Prince of Wales, offering to pay

his debts and raise his allowance by £50,000 a year in exchange for support

and the parliamentary votes he could inﬂuence. The Prince had refused.

The ex-prime minister remained high in royal regard and conﬁdence. The

King made it clear he still wanted and valued Walpole’s advice, and contin-

ued privately to consult him, sometimes by letter and sometimes, it is

claimed, in quiet meetings set up in a ‘safe house’ between Walpole and

the King’s ‘conﬁdential page of the back stairs’. Jeremy Black judges that

Walpole’s inﬂuence over the King after his resignation was ‘considerable’.

Contemporaries saw him as a ‘Minister behind the curtain’. His inﬂuence

with the King was thrown in on the side of Pelham, his former protégé, in

his struggles and rivalry with Pulteney (Earl of Bath) and Carteret over the

next few years.

When the King offered ofﬁce to Pulteney, he made it a condition that

Walpole should be ‘screened from all future resentments’, something

Walpole’s old enemy rejected while assuring the monarch that he was not

a ‘man of blood’. Walpole feared prosecution after leaving ofﬁce and seems

to have had many of his papers burnt. For him it was no idle threat, for

earlier in his career he had had ﬁrst-hand experience of political vengeance,

spending some time in the Tower of London on corruption charges in

1712, and then in 1715 playing a leading role in the proceedings against

the former Tory ministers Oxford (who spent two years in the Tower) and

Bolingbroke (who ﬂed the country in fear of his life). His allies rallied

round to protect him, and in negotiations with the opposition about the

formation of a new government and the distribution of posts, the Pelhams

insisted that when Walpole left ofﬁce he ‘be attended with honour and

security’. Nevertheless a select committee was set up to investigate his

conduct of the administration over the previous ten years, though Henry

Pelham and Speaker Onslow were able to inﬂuence the selection of its

membership, keeping off some of the ex-prime minister’s most bitter

enemies and including some loyalists. It made little headway in investigat-

ing allegations of corruption, misuse of funds and interference in elections,

however, because key witnesses – including Walpole’s lieutenants and aides

in the staff of the Treasury – refused to answer questions or testify against

him (one was bought off with a peerage and another had a spell in jail

rather than spill the beans). The House of Lords then threw out an oppos-

ition bill to indemnify witnesses who would give evidence against Walpole.

The investigation soon ﬁzzled out and in December 1742 an attempt to set

up another committee to go after Walpole was easily defeated. Ministerial

obstruction, the continued strength of his supporters, behind-the-scenes

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deals, and the reluctance of some former enemies (like the Earl of Bath) to

go all out for his blood saved Walpole from prosecution and allowed him

to retire in peace.

The possibility of a return to ofﬁce cropped up occasionally. At the end

of 1742 some MPs were said to be sorry they had voted against him and

would be willing to see him back in. In January 1743, according to his son

Horace Walpole, there was talk of him being made a Duke and coming

back to head the ministry. But Horace believed ‘nothing could prevail on

him to return hither’. Walpole in fact had ‘no hope or expectation of

returning to power himself’, as Henry Pelham’s biographer notes, and he

saw Pelham as his heir apparent and natural successor.

Walpole remained involved in politics after his fall – ‘an important

ﬁgure, though necessarily in the background’, according to Jonathan Oates.

He kept in close touch with Henry Pelham and the Duke of Newcastle and

received political reports and conﬁdential information from them; during a

visit to Houghton Hall, Walpole’s country house, in 1743 Pelham read

ofﬁcial dispatches with the former prime minister. Walpole wanted to see

his political legacy and system maintained, the Whigs kept in power, the

Tories kept out and his enemies confounded. He advised Pelham on polit-

ical strategy and tactics, on parliamentary management and patronage, and

on where to look for factional support, with the aim of outsmarting the

former opposition Whigs, even though Pulteney (Bath) and Carteret had

come into the new government formed under the nominal leadership

of the Earl of Wilmington. In 1742 Pelham had refused to take either

of Walpole’s ofﬁces (as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the

Exchequer). But when Wilmington died, Walpole – wanting to keep the

key levers of power out of the Earl of Bath’s hands – successfully urged

Pelham to become First Lord of the Treasury (and advised the King to

appoint him). Pelham largely followed Walpole’s advice. Walpole did not

try to undermine Pelham (in the way that some later ex-prime ministers

turned against their successors), and his support, belief and trust in the

younger man helped him to gain and consolidate power.

Walpole’s more direct, public political role after his resignation was

more limited. His interventions and speeches in House of Lords debates

were few. In January 1744 he is credited with playing a major role in rally-

ing support and lobbying behind the scenes in both Houses to have the

continued payment of British subsidies for Hanoverian troops carried. The

following month he made an effective speech calling for support of the

Hanoverian dynasty and arguing that fears of a Jacobite/French invasion

scare needed to be taken seriously. Later that year, when the disputes over

foreign policy and the power struggle between the Pelhams and Carteret

came to the boil, Walpole (in his last political intervention) advised the

King to back the Pelhams and the Cabinet majority, and Carteret was

forced out.

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Walpole found the solitude of retirement dull and dreary. He had been in

parliament and in politics for 40 years, and in ministerial ofﬁce for most of

that time, experiencing, as Coxe noted, ‘a life of unremitting activity’ and

‘political exertion’. The splendid library at Houghton was no substitute:

‘I have led a life of business so long’, he said, ‘that I have lost my taste for

reading.’ When one of his sons was preparing to read something to him, he

ordered: ‘O! do not read history, for that I know must be false.’ There was

his large art collection of over 400 paintings to enjoy, however (later sold

by his debt-ridden heirs to Catherine the Great for the Hermitage in

St. Petersburg). But his health was not now good enough for him to pursue

the country pursuits of riding and hunting he had previously enjoyed. He

would travel round his estate in his carriage, looking over his land and

plantations. He wrote that ‘the oaks, the beeches, the chestnuts, seem

to contend which shall best please the lord of the manor. They cannot

deceive, they will not lie.’ His paintings, he sighed, ‘expect nothing in

return which I cannot give’. But no one was fooled by such talk. As Edward

Pearce puts it, ‘retreat [to Houghton in Norfolk] was for intervals between

politics and politics; as a ﬁxed condition it was intolerable’.

Walpole had left ofﬁce, as A.J.P. Taylor pointed out, ‘markedly wealthier

than when he had entered it’. Over the years he had used and abused his

government ofﬁces to amass (and spend) a large personal fortune. Starting

as a country gentleman with an estate worth about £2,000 a year, he

had become ‘one of the greatest magnates in the country’. He had built a

magniﬁcent palace at Houghton, and lived and entertained extravagantly.

‘He was very rich’, as Pearce puts it, ‘probably more in assets than cash’. He

died with debts of £40–50,000 (equivalent to around £4–5 million today),

but his estate was by then worth around £8,000 a year (perhaps £900,000

today); J.H. Plumb argued the debts were of ‘no great signiﬁcance in

relation to Walpole’s total estate’.

Not long after he left the premiership, Walpole’s health started to deteri-

orate. He was ill in 1743 and by 1744 was suffering more or less continuous

pain from kidney stones, with internal haemorrhaging and blood in his

urine. After a terrible, jolting carriage journey to London in November

1744 (called to town by the King, who wanted his advice), his condition

worsened. His doctors’ treatment made things worse, their medicines splin-

tering the stone(s), which then lacerated his bladder. He was in constant

pain in his last few weeks, sedated with large doses of opium, before dying

of kidney failure, aged 68, on 18 March 1745 at his house in London. He

was buried at Houghton.

Walpole would not be the last former prime minister to miss the excite-

ments and challenges of active political life and to complain about the

‘many tedious hours in my present retirement’.

But he had not been com-

pletely sidelined or ignored or banished to the outer darkness. He had

ﬁnished up in the House of Lords, not the Tower of London. It had not

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been a long post-premiership but Walpole had got out in one piece, as it

were, had secured a succession to his taste and a continuation of his pol-

icies and his regime, and had exercised an important inﬂuence over polit-

ical affairs. Not all his successors would be so inﬂuential in retirement.

However – the ﬁrst prime minister and the ﬁrst ex-prime minister – he had

helped to stabilise politics and the political system in a way that allowed

him and those who came after him to play a role and have a life after

Number 10.

Earl of Wilmington (died in ofﬁce 2 July 1743)

The ﬁrst of the seven British prime ministers to have died in ofﬁce and

so not have a post-premiership, Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington,

was two or three years older than Walpole (his exact date of birth is

not known, but usually recorded as 1673 or 1674) and so aged 68 or 69

when he became First Lord of the Treasury in 1742. He was really a stop-

gap, compromise ﬁgure and the titular head of a ministry dominated

by others (chieﬂy the Secretary of State, Carteret). Elderly and ill with

the stone (kidney stones) when he took ofﬁce, he served only one year and

136 days before suddenly dying, aged around 70, on 2 July 1743 at his

house in St James’s Square in London. It seems he would not have anyway

lasted much longer in that role, as plans had been laid to replace him as

First Lord with Henry Pelham at the start of the next parliamentary session.

He had never married (though he was said to have fathered several illegit-

imate children), and his large fortune passed to his nephew, the Earl of

Northampton. He was buried in Warwickshire. Following Wilmington’s

death, there was a gap of 56 days before Henry Pelham succeeded him on

27 August 1743 – the longest interval between administrations in the

history of the premiership. (The other three longest intervals also followed

cases where the prime minister died in ofﬁce: 28 days in 1812 [Perceval-

Liverpool], 23 days in 1827 [Canning-Goderich], and 19 days in 1806

[Pitt-Lord Grenville].)

Henry Pelham (died in ofﬁce 6 March 1754)

Pelham was one of the 18th century’s most successful, if unspectacular,

prime ministers: Walpole’s chosen heir, a capable and pragmatic admin-

istrator and parliamentary manager, and a skilful political balancer who

provided stable government and whose tenure of ten years and 191 days

in the premiership has been exceeded by only seven other holders of

the ofﬁce. He died at his London house, in Arlington Street, Piccadilly, on

6 March 1754, aged 59. Like many busy middle-aged politicians, Pelham

is commonly said to have eaten too much and exercised too little. He was

seriously ill in 1748 (a severe attack of shingles) and thereafter his health

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declined. In the summer of 1753 he fell ill with erysipelas, a skin disorder,

going to Scarborough to drink the waters, but in December he became

seriously ill again with the disease, making an apparent recovery and trans-

acting government business in January and February before suffering a

relapse. His death came as a great shock to the political world, his brother

and Cabinet colleague (and successor), the Duke of Newcastle, being so

overwhelmed and grief-stricken that he shut himself away for several days,

refusing to see anyone. Unusually for a politician in that era, Pelham dis-

played a ‘disinterested integrity’ and had not used his government ofﬁces

for personal enrichment. He is often described as having died ‘poor’, but

these things are relative: he had had an income of about £3,000 a year from

his estates and £11,000 from his ministerial ofﬁces. He left a personal estate

at death of about £15,000 but legacies and debts of £22,000, forced his

executors to sell land.

Duke of Devonshire (resigned 29 June 1757)

The fourth Duke of Devonshire was prime minister for less than eight

months (November 1756 to June 1757) and was only 37 years old when he

left that ofﬁce. He continued to serve in government for ﬁve more years

and under two successors before his political career ended. He died on

2 October 1764 at the age of 44, the youngest to die of Britain’s prime

ministers.

Head of one of the great Whig aristocratic families, Devonshire seems to

have been in politics largely out of a sense of duty (to his class, his King

and his country) rather than because of any driving sense of personal ambi-

tion for power and high ofﬁce. Amiable, honourable, straightforward, an

honest broker, commonsensical, un-self seeking, and somewhat above the

fray, he had been a stop-gap, nominal prime minister – and had seen

himself as such – holding the fort while stronger political personalities

(Pitt, Newcastle, Fox) manoeuvred and negotiated to form a more stable

administration. Everyone knew that William Pitt was the real centre of

power during Devonshire’s short-lived ministry. He was not unhappy

to leave the premiership, having said he had taken it on upon the basis

‘that he would retain the Treasury but till some new system should be

completed’.

A strong supporter of Henry Pelham and of the Duke of Newcastle,

Devonshire had been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland during Newcastle’s ﬁrst

government and had no difﬁculty in serving under Newcastle again when

he returned to ofﬁce in June 1757. He had no desire for ‘effective ofﬁce’

say the editors of The Devonshire Diary, and the post he accepted was

that of Lord Chamberlain.

One of the most senior and important Royal

Household and Court ﬁgures, the Lord Chamberlain is today (and since

the 1920s) a non-political appointment, but up until 1782 the post was of

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Cabinet rank. Two other prime ministers – the Duke of Newcastle and the

Duke of Portland – also held the post of Lord Chamberlain, but in both

cases it was as their ﬁrst step on the ministerial ladder; Devonshire is the

only person to have ﬁlled the post after being prime minister.

He had a seat in the Cabinet, and some involvement and inﬂuence in

decision-making, but was not a central ﬁgure, being described by Schweizer

as ‘an onlooker rather than a principal actor in the political arena’ and by

Howat as ‘a political supernumerary’. His political inﬂuence, Howat says,

‘lay in his family standing and in his relations with Newcastle, which

remained close for the rest of his life’.

With the accession of George III in October 1760 and the rise of Bute, the

new king’s favourite, who became a Secretary of State in March 1761,

Newcastle’s days were numbered. Devonshire persuaded him not to resign,

and acted as an intermediary when his relations with Pitt became rocky.

But in May 1762 Newcastle did quit and Bute became prime minister.

Devonshire stayed on as Lord Chamberlain but, to show his support for his

old patron Newcastle, refused to attend Cabinet and Privy Council meet-

ings, an impossible situation that could not long continue. He refused a

summons by the King to a Cabinet Council to discuss peace terms with

Spain in October 1762, after which the King’s coach overtook Devonshire’s

on the way to London. The suspicious monarch thought that the Duke was

on his way to cabal against him and to resign ofﬁce. He was then dismissed

from his post as Lord Chamberlain. Shortly afterwards in a bitter snub

the King personally struck out Devonshire’s name from the list of Privy

Councillors – he remains the only prime minister ever to have been dis-

missed from the Privy Council. Later, in a further show of royal displeasure,

he was dismissed from his position as Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire, an

ofﬁce that had been in his family for the previous half a century without

interruption.

Devonshire’s last appearance on the political stage came when he took

part in the opposition to the Cider Tax, the controversy around which led

to Bute’s resignation in April 1763. By then he was in poor and deteriorat-

ing health, having been ill with fever in 1761 and again the following year,

and suffering from palsy. In 1764 he had a stroke and went to Spa, in

Germany, to recuperate but died there.

Duke of Newcastle (resigned 26 May 1762)

Newcastle had an extraordinarily long political career, spanning half a

century, nearly all of which – bar ﬁve or six years – he spent in ministerial

ofﬁce. He had his ﬁrst post (in 1717) in his early twenties, was a key ﬁgure

in the Cabinets of Walpole and Henry Pelham (his brother), served twice as

First Lord of the Treasury (1754–56 and 1757–62), and ﬁnished as Lord

Privy Seal under Rockingham (1765–66) while in his early seventies. Only

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in January 1768, in the last year of his life, did he ﬁnally announce his

retirement from politics.

Although he is usually listed as having two terms as prime minister,

in his second stint as First Lord of the Treasury Newcastle was not really a

prime minister in the sense of commanding the government, for he shared

power in a coalition with William Pitt who, as Secretary of State, was the

ministry’s driving force, directing the nation’s war effort during the Seven

Years War, while Newcastle dealt with patronage matters, parliamentary

management and public ﬁnances. With the accession of George III in 1760

– who did not like or trust Newcastle – his power was even more curtailed

by Bute’s rise to power as the royal favourite. Newcastle’s old friend and

colleague, Lord Hardwicke, had advised the Duke that the death of George

II would be a good time to retire, but politics was the stuff of life to

Newcastle and he could and would not quit. Pitt resigned in October 1761

and power and inﬂuence drained away from Newcastle, who was increas-

ingly isolated in the Cabinet and was in effect levered out of ofﬁce by Bute,

who replaced him as prime minister. The old Duke wept as he handed over

the seals of ofﬁce at his ﬁnal audience with the young King and refused the

offer of a pension – although, given his ﬁnancial circumstances, the money

would have been useful.

Newcastle was almost 69 years old when he resigned in 1762 and he

went on to live another six and a half years. He spent the next three years

(1762–65) in opposition, which proved a frustrating and dispiriting experi-

ence as well as a fairly novel one for him – and Hardwicke warned him that

opposition was a ‘new trade to learn at a late hour’.

Bute tried to lure him

back into ofﬁce within a few months of his resignation, but Newcastle

refused to be captured and neutralised in that way by a ministry he wanted

to see ousted.

He made some blunders, as when in the autumn of 1762 he called upon

those of his supporters still holding ofﬁce to resign and saw an embarrass-

ingly small number heed him, many choosing to hang on to their posts

and abandon their former loyalties. Worse followed when the government

retaliated by carrying out a big purge of Pelhamites from ofﬁce, throwing

Newcastle’s party into disarray, and further humiliated the Duke by strip-

ping him of his lord lieutenancies and other honoriﬁc ofﬁces. Although

allies would be needed to regain power, the understanding Newcastle and

Pitt came to in 1763 (Pitt planned to offer Newcastle a Cabinet position

without ofﬁcial responsibilities had he formed a government that year)

broke down in 1764. The deaths of some of Newcastle’s friends – Hardwicke

and the Duke of Devonshire – were blows, and he began to feel ever

more lonely as a survivor of the Whig ‘Old Corps’. He was in no sense

‘leader of the opposition’ – but was a leading ﬁgure in the opposition

to Bute and then to Grenville’s government, often hosting important meet-

ings at his grand houses in London (Newcastle House) or in the country

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