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

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Middlesex elections to make a populist appeal, with radical rhetoric, on the

issues of the people, liberty, reform and the constitution. He was belliger-

ent in the face of a possible war with Spain over the Falklands, perhaps

hoping for a chance to play the part of the great war minister again. But

he was an isolated ﬁgure with few followers (Shelburne being a notable

admirer and supporter), and relations with the major opposition group, the

Rockingham party, were not easy, with rifts and divisions on some key

issues. His arrogance and sense of his own heroic superiority always made

him a difﬁcult man with whom to cooperate. By the beginning of 1772 he

could see that the game was up and concluded that not ‘the smallest good’

could result from attendance in parliament.

The developing crisis in America brought him back into the political fray,

with Chatham calling in 1775 for the withdrawal of British troops from

Boston and introducing a bill ‘for Settling the Troubles in America’, which

was rejected in parliament. Chatham’s policy was to conciliate the American

colonists by accepting their right not to be taxed without consent, but at

the same time to reafﬁrm that the colonies were subordinate to the British

crown and parliament. This attempt to bridge differences and head off con-

ﬂict was by that stage unacceptable on both sides of the Atlantic, unrealistic

and unworkable. In 1777 he returned to ‘thunder and lighten’ on the war,

criticising the government and attacking the conduct of the war. It was not

possible or desirable to subdue the Americans by force, he argued: ‘If you

conquer them, what then?’ On the other hand he was adamantly against

American independence (something on which the opposition was divided).

As Britain’s position in America worsened, many wondered if Chatham

might be recalled, though the notion that a sick old man might have been

able to turn the situation around was a fantasy. In March 1778 a wobbling

and unsteady North wanted the King to send for him to strengthen the

ministry. However, the King’s hostility to ‘that perﬁdious man’ – saying

that he ‘would rather lose the Crown’ than submit to him – and his refusal

to accept Chatham’s demand to dominate in the manner of a ‘Dictator’

meant that negotiations broke down. A few months later, Chatham was

dead. By then his years of greatness and of achievement lay long in the

past, his peak being the second half of the 1750s. For much of the period

after 1761 his role was more that of ‘a spoiler’, as Jeremy Black put it, and

after his incapacitation in early 1767 and ﬁnal retirement it was largely an

unhappy story of decline and failure.

Duke of Grafton (resigned 28 January 1770)

Grafton was only 34 years old when he resigned as prime minister, making

him the youngest ex-prime minister in British history, and he lived for ano-

ther 41 years before dying, aged 75, in 1811 – the longest post-premiership

to date. It had been a short premiership (one year and 106 days), starting in

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October 1768, though for a year or so previously Chatham’s illness and

incapacitation had made Grafton acting prime minister. He was not a suc-

cessful prime minister or a strong leader. As his uneasy coalition splintered,

the government ran into difﬁculties and he came under violent press attacks,

it was possible to see his heart was not in it and he wanted to get out.

Already in the summer of 1769, when he was on the losing side and over-

ruled in a Cabinet battle over taxation of the American colonies, he had

resolved (he later wrote in his autobiography) ‘to withdraw myself from

my ofﬁce, which was become very uncomfortable and irksome to me,

on the ﬁrst favourable opportunity that offered’.

Strong opposition

attacks in parliament and Cabinet divisions and resignations in January

1770 proved too much and Grafton threw in the towel, being succeeded by

his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord North.

‘Though he spent most of his life in politics’, wrote Peter Durrant, ‘he

was not a career politician’. That Grafton had been reluctant to become

First Lord of the Treasury under Chatham in 1766 and came close to resign-

ing the following year did not suggest a strong sense of political ambition

or a craving for power. He did not ﬁght to cling to ofﬁce. As Durrant says,

‘He much preferred the life of a country gentleman, and he was invariably

happier in the country than in London. There he could indulge in pursuits

that really interested him: farming, hunting, racing … and … collecting

and talking about books. His friends were drawn from men who shared

these interests, rarely from the political world. And he greatly preferred to

enjoy their company in the relaxed atmosphere of Euston Hall, his Suffolk

home, than to immerse himself in the tensions and perplexities of public

life.’

Outside Westminster politics his public positions included Lord Lieutenant

of Suffolk 1769–90, Chancellor of Cambridge University from 1768 until

his death, and (from 1793) trustee of the British Museum. He was inter-

ested in agricultural questions and developed the family estates in Suf-

folk. He had what have been described as ‘deep religious feelings’

during the last 25–30 years of his life, associating with liberal church-

men and becoming a Unitarian. He published two theological works,

Hints Submitted to the Serious Attention of the Clergy, Nobility and Gentry,

by a Layman (1789) and The Serious Reﬂections of a Rational Christian

from 1788 to 1797 (1797). In 1804 he started writing his autobiography,

worked up from journals, letters and memoranda made at the time of

the events recorded. The manuscript was kept in his family until edited

and published in 1898.

Grafton’s private life up to 1769 was rather scandalous: he was separated

from his wife and lived openly with his mistress. But in that year his

marriage was dissolved by Act of Parliament (he and Eden are the only

two divorced premiers), he ended his relationship with his mistress, and

remarried. With his second wife he enjoyed over 40 years of contented

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married life and had 13 children – all born after he left the premiership (to

add to the three children from his ﬁrst marriage). At least ﬁve of his

children appear to have predeceased him, and in his autobiography he

admitted to having been hit hard by the deaths of two of his daughters in

1803 and 1804.

Grafton remained politically active after 1770. He was a Whig but he sup-

ported North’s Tory administration, ‘speaking vigorously in its defence in

debates in the Lords’. He was soon itching to be back in ofﬁce and angled

for the post of First Lord of the Admiralty when it became vacant early in

1771. But he had to wait until June 1771 when he became Lord Privy Seal,

though he stipulated he did not want a seat in the Cabinet. He hoped he

might be able to moderate policy towards the American colonies but found

he could exert little inﬂuence, and in November 1775 resigned. A rather

independent ﬁgure, who did not have a political group around him, he was

nevertheless considered a ﬁgure worth catching, whose support could be

valuable. Both North in 1779 and Pitt in 1783–84 offered him Cabinet

posts, but he turned them down. He was in opposition against North from

1775 to 1782 and returned to ofﬁce as Lord Privy Seal for a second time

under Rockingham and Shelburne in 1782–83. It does not seem to have

been a happy or constructive period in his career. Anson says Grafton

‘did not help to smooth the difﬁculties of the Ministry. He had come

to adopt the attitude, so unsatisfactory in a colleague, of the critic who

ﬁnds fault with everything, and yet suggests nothing at all, or nothing

to the point.’ Fox called him ‘troublesome in the extreme’. Grafton

himself reﬂected that ‘a Lord Privy Seal, who is not known and under-

stood to be conﬁdentially trusted and consulted by the principal minister,

cuts but a silly ﬁgure at a Cabinet’. ‘I was vain enough to think’, he com-

mented about his relations with Shelburne, ‘that my experience in the

place he holds would have enabled me to have given often useful opin-

ions.’ But as the differences between them widened and Grafton found

he was not consulted, he saw the King in February 1783 to inform him

he was going to resign his ofﬁce. The government afterwards soon broke

up. After 1783 he never again held government ofﬁce and, while main-

taining his interest in politics, his stance gradually became that of

‘a bystander’, as Anson put it, and his contributions to debate became

rare. He broadly supported Pitt until, disagreeing with his foreign policy,

he moved over to opposition in the 1790s, becoming an opponent of

the government’s repressive measures at home, and advocating peace with

France.

Grafton died in relative obscurity. His local Suffolk newspaper, The Ipswich

Journal, in its note of his passing, listed various public ofﬁces he had held

and described him as ‘a steady friend to religious toleration’, but omitted to

mention that he had brieﬂy been 40 years previously prime minister of

Britain.

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Lord North (resigned 20 March 1782)

‘No man ever showed more calmness, cheerfulness and serenity’, recalled

an MP who dined with Lord North, in what has been described as ‘a happy

family atmosphere’, on the day he resigned the premiership in 1782. North

left ofﬁce with dignity and in good spirits, and with relief rather than with

regret. He had been prime minister for 12 years but had been begging the

King many times over the previous years to let him resign, and had been

refused. A capable administrator, a skilled parliamentarian, adept in the use

of charm and humour, and with excellent relations with King George III,

North was a good peacetime prime minister. But he was not up to the

demands of wartime leadership, and as Britain went down to defeat in the

American War of Independence, so North’s position became more embat-

tled, and his nerve and will to carry on more fragile. As his parliamentary

support weakened, he narrowly scraped through successive no-conﬁdence

motions in March 1782, but he could see the ‘torrent [was] too strong to be

resisted’ and ﬁnally persuaded a reluctant King – who accused him of deser-

tion – to accept the inevitable and let him resign before he was defeated in

the Commons.

It did not, however, seem like the ﬁnal curtain for North. He was still an

inﬂuential and able ﬁgure, backed by a group of over 100 MPs in the House

of Commons, and just turning 50 years old. To contemporaries a return to

ofﬁce and even another North premiership must have seemed likely at

some point. Neither of his two immediate successors – Rockingham, who

died, and then the unpopular Shelburne – lasted long in Number 10. The

combination of the emergence and dominance of the young William Pitt,

the damage to North’s reputation caused by his apparently opportunistic

alliance with Charles James Fox, and the collapse of North’s health within

a few years ﬁnished his career.

There was some talk of impeaching North, and Shelburne proposed at

the new Cabinet he be brought to a ‘Publick Trial’. Impeachment proceed-

ings later brought against Warren Hastings (1787) and Lord Melville (1806)

suggested this process was not an obsolete or archaic threat. One MP who

was a bitter enemy moved for his impeachment in the Commons, but the

motion was not seriously debated. A contemporary writer claimed North

feared the loss of his head and was driven into alliance with Fox to escape

the risk of a state trial, but this view is fanciful. North’s correspondence

does not indicate he seriously thought impeachment was likely. Many of

North’s opponents liked him personally and he was still popular with the

public, which would not have stood for it. Talk of impeachment, suggests

Alan Valentine, was for political ends – a way to throw mud and put the

ex-prime minister and his supporters on the defensive.

The release from the chains of ofﬁce seems to have done North a lot

of good. He was said to be ‘very good company’ and his friend Edward

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Gibbon, the historian, noted in September 1782 he was ‘not so fat and

more cheerful than ever’. When the ex-prime minister reached Manchester

on tour of the north of England, the crowds were so pleased to see him that

they unfastened the horses and pulled his carriage through the streets

themselves. George III seemed to overcome his annoyance at North’s resig-

nation, arranging a pension of £4,000 a year (approximately £300,000

today), and may have offered him a peerage (North’s title was a courtesy

one, as son of an Earl). However, they soon fell out again over repayment

of the £30,000 North had borrowed from bankers to help pay for the 1780

general election. After North left ofﬁce, the King would initially accept

responsibility for only £13,000 of the debt, insisting the rest was North’s.

But there was no way he could (or felt he should) meet that liability and

only in 1784 did the King grudgingly pick up the tab. The dispute soured

their once-close relationship.

A little over a year after resigning as prime minister, North in April 1783

was back in government in controversial circumstances, as Home Secretary

in alliance with Fox under the nominal leadership of the Duke of Portland.

The partnership between the two former political foes was denounced as ‘a

cynical sacriﬁce of principles to sheer political expediency’, motivated by

greed for ofﬁce. However, the parliamentary arithmetic after Fox had

broken with Shelburne pointed to the need for some sort of coalition or

combination, and the new partners came together in opposition to the

American peace-terms negotiated by Shelburne. North said his primary aim

was to see a stable administration in ofﬁce, claimed to ‘hate the thought of

resuming the Seals’ and ‘wish[ed] never more to be in the Cabinet’, insist-

ing he ‘renounce[d] all hopes of regaining my former political situation’. At

some level, however, the lure of ofﬁce and power remained strong. North’s

family opposed the alliance with Fox, and North himself was later said to

have wished he had taken their advice and he regretted it. George III had

tried in vain to persuade North to break with Fox, and was determined to

be rid of the government forced on him at the ﬁrst opportunity – he

abruptly dismissed it eight months later in December 1783.

North was Home Secretary in the coalition government with his eldest

son George (an MP since 1778) as his junior minister. A plan for North to

go to the House of Lords was thwarted when the resentful King refused to

create new peers on the government’s recommendation. North has been

rightly described as a ‘sleeping partner’, playing ‘second ﬁddle’ and taking a

‘back seat’ in the government, in which Fox was the dominant ﬁgure and

driving force, although he took the lead in rejecting a call for parliamen-

tary reform, on which subject the government had a decisive Commons

victory.

The Fox-North coalition badly damaged North’s reputation. The enmity

of William Pitt – who regarded him as the man responsible for the American

war and for allowing the King an unconstitutional inﬂuence, and who saw

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him as a dangerous rival to his own ambitions, the only alternative PM

in the Commons – was a further barrier to a return to power. Pitt’s refusal to

serve in the same Cabinet with North had blocked any chance of a Shelburne-

North combination in 1783. Pittite attacks on North were intense over the

next few years, Pitt conducting what Thomas describes as a ‘vendetta’ against

the former prime minister. After Pitt’s triumph in the 1784 election – in

which North’s personal following was reduced from 112 MPs to 69 – North’s

political position quickly weakened. For a year or so he remained active in

debate and in opposition to the government. But from the mid-1780s rapidly-

deteriorating health, and a realisation there was no political future for him,

led him to withdraw more into private and family life. He tended to appear in

the Commons only for subjects that particularly interested him (such as

speaking out against parliamentary reform and in defence of the established

church). His supporters drifted away and by 1788 his personal parliamentary

group was estimated as down to 20 MPs or even fewer.

By the late 1780s North was ‘sick, blind and old beyond his years’. His

eyesight had never been good and by 1787 he was virtually blind. His

general health deteriorated also. Sometimes he became depressed but on

the whole bore his afﬂictions and enforced political retirement with for-

titude and good humour, helped and supported by his close and affection-

ate family. North’s genuine happiness in family life, and his abstention

from the sort of drinking, gambling, womanising and ﬁnancial avarice that

marked so many of the 18th century political and aristocratic elite, were

notable.

His last speech in the Commons was in 1789 and he made a

few speeches in the House of Lords (critical of Pitt’s foreign policy) after

he succeeded his father and became the second Earl of Guilford in 1790. He

had not lost his old debating force and eloquence.

North had chronic money worries for most of his life, often being dogged

by debt, and in 1777 the King had given him £16,000 (something like

£1.3 million today) to pay off debts. In 1771 the King had appointed Lady

North Ranger of Bushy Park; this sinecure gave the family use of a country

home near to London, and in 1778 he made North Lord Warden of the

Cinque Ports. The salary attached to this position was a welcome addition to

North’s ﬁnances. North’s father was always mean and tight-ﬁsted towards

him, and only when he died – at the age of 86 – did North ﬁnally come into

secure wealth and estates worth over £10,000 a year (about £800,000 a year in

today’s money). He did not have long to enjoy them. In 1792 symptoms of

dropsy appeared (modern medicine would probably link this to congestive

heart failure or kidney disease), and he died, aged 60, on 5 August 1792.

Marquess of Rockingham (died in ofﬁce 1 July 1782)

Rockingham was prime minister twice (1765–66 and 1782) but for a total

of barely 16 months and his performance and achievements in that role

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cannot be highly rated. In his ﬁrst stint in ofﬁce he was young (35), inexpe-

rienced, and poor in debate. Second time around, he was ill when he took

ofﬁce, frequently absent from the Lords and rarely spoke there. A little over

three months (96 days) after he became prime minister for the second time,

he died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home in Wimbledon. His real

importance as a political ﬁgure comes from the nearly two decades he

spent – largely in opposition – leading the largest single group of Whigs,

though the Rockingham ‘party’ split after his death, which was followed by

the short-lived governments of Shelburne and then the Fox-North coalition

(under Portland) before the 20-years Tory dominance of Pitt the Younger.

An immensely rich and landed grandee (with an annual income rising to

about £40,000 – equivalent to over £4 million today), Rockingham often

seemed ill at ease in national politics, and more at home in his Yorkshire

power base, managing his estates, indulging his passion for horse-racing

and gambling, and collecting art (he was an important patron of George

Stubbs, one of the greatest painters of horses). He suffered from ill health

for most of his life, with long-term problems with his urinogenitary system

(perhaps damaging his kidneys), for which the medics and quacks of the

day could do little, though contemporaries attributed his death to inﬂuenza

(probably pneumonia on a modern reading of the evidence). He was only

52 when he died (just three other PMs dying younger) and is buried in York

Minster, the only prime minister to be buried in Yorkshire.

Earl of Shelburne (resigned 26 March 1783)

Shelburne was described by a 20th century successor in the premiership

as a ‘superb failure’.

It is a good description of someone who, for all his

intellectual talents and far-sighted views, spent only three and a half years

in ministerial ofﬁce in his long political career, including fewer than nine

months as prime minister (1782–83). Shelburne resigned after the House of

Commons rejected the unpopular peace terms he had negotiated with

the United States, his government had started to break up (with ministerial

resignations), and he had begun to lose the King’s conﬁdence and support.

He was only 45 years old when he left ofﬁce, and though he lived another

22 years and was often active in the House of Lords, Shelburne’s political

career was effectively over and he never held ofﬁce again.

In a parliamentary and Cabinet system politics demands the ability

to work with other people in a team, which Shelburne was unable to do.

‘He was touchy and interfering as a subordinate, uncooperative as an equal

and secretive when in command’, sums up Charles Stuart. Mistrust, sus-

picion and resentment ﬂowed both ways, and there was much friction and

many disputes within his ministry. Few of Shelburne’s colleagues were

sorry to see him forced out or were willing to work with him again. Being

unpopular and detested by other politicians, and unable to win and keep

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their conﬁdence, were key factors keeping him in the wilderness after 1783.

King George III actively disliked him and his radical ideas too, and formed

a major obstacle to any comeback. Faults of character, manner and behav-

iour had given Shelburne a reputation in the political world for intrigue,

inconsistency, arrogance, insincerity, deceit, treachery and even corrup-

tion. He was a man few were sorry to see frozen out.

But it was not just

personal unpopularity that brought about Shelburne’s fall and isolation. He

had only a small group of followers himself and lacked the support and

backing of a party within parliament, and particularly in the House of

Commons, unlike his rivals.

Such were the suspicions entertained of Shelburne that when after

his fall from power he took himself off to Spa to take the waters, the new

Fox-North government had the former prime minister’s mail opened under

the suspicion he was somehow, in opposition to Fox’s policy, conspiring to

promote an Anglo-French alliance.

Shelburne had made the 23 years old William Pitt Chancellor of the

Exchequer, and after the dismissal of Portland and the Fox-North coalition

in December 1783, and when Pitt became prime minister, the door was

implacably clanged shut on any lingering possibility of a return to ofﬁce.

Shelburne later complained of a ‘breach of faith’ by Pitt and Lord Thurlow

(who had been his Lord Chancellor, a key ﬁgure in the plots and manoeu-

vres that had brought down the Fox-North government, and was then

rewarded with the Lord Chancellorship under Pitt). John Norris argued that

Pitt’s new ministry might have been strengthened if Shelburne had been

appointed a secretary of state and put in charge of foreign affairs or India.

By the beginning of 1784, he suggests, Shelburne had perhaps even recon-

ciled himself to serving under Pitt. But Pitt – showing, as Hague puts it, ‘the

cool ruthlessness which characterises those politicians who are capable of

seizing power and keeping it’ – had no intention of consulting or including

his former patron and leader. He had not enjoyed working with him, knew

his reputation and unpopularity made him a liability, and was determined

to show he was in the driving seat. Lord Sydney, Pitt’s Home Secretary,

explained to one of Shelburne’s supporters that the former prime minister

would be impossible as a Cabinet colleague: it would almost be as bad as

bringing back the hated ﬁgure of Lord Bute.

In October 1784 Pitt wrote to him with an offer of a step up in the

peerage and a marquessate, saying ambiguously he wanted his government

to ‘receive the most public marks of your Lordship’s approbation’. The

ofﬁce of Lord Privy Seal was vacant and there were rumours Shelburne

might be offered it. Shelburne wrote to one of his supporters, Issac Barré,

that he was inclined to support Pitt, would not enter into any ‘cabal’

against him or with any part of the Opposition, and – as for the premier-

ship – said ‘I detest the situation for myself.’ But, he explained, he would

not take ofﬁce unless the King speciﬁcally desired it and unless he could

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ﬁrst negotiate with Pitt about policy. As Norris suggests, it seems probable

that Shelburne hoped at least to be brought in from the cold and consulted

in the role of an elder statesman – ‘in some conﬁdential line without

ofﬁce’. But Pitt was determined to exclude him and Shelburne became the

Marquess of Lansdowne with the reality of power as far away as ever. A year

later in 1785 he was reported to be ‘not in the most satisfactory temper

with the ministers’, saying in 1786 he found the ministry’s attitude towards

him ‘unaccountable’. He had by then virtually no personal followers left,

and admitted in that year that he was ‘growing very insigniﬁcant, very fast

in the political world’.

Lansdowne had plenty of non-political satisfactions. Immense wealth

came from the large family estates in Ireland and England, giving an esti-

mated income of about £50,000 a year (equivalent to at least £2 million

today). At Lansdowne House in Berkeley Square, London, and Bowood, his

large country house in Wiltshire, Lansdowne had long patronised and sur-

rounded himself with some of the most prominent intellectuals, scientists

and dissenters of the day (including Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham and

Richard Price, and many visiting thinkers from the Continent). After his

fall he often preferred to avoid parliament and London, and to preside over

his intellectual salon at Bowood. Many reformist ideas about administrative

and electoral reform, Ireland, and foreign policy were aired and developed in

his circle, and Shelburne/Lansdowne was open to new thinking. But against

the background of the French Revolution his ‘advanced’ and ‘radical’

ideas often seemed dangerous. Edmund Burke attacked Lansdowne’s circle

at Bowood in Reﬂections on the Revolution in France as a set of ‘literary cab-

allers, and intriguing philosophers … political theologians and theological

politicians’.

In his family and private circle Shelburne comes across as pleasant,

amiable, unselﬁsh and charming – the exact opposite of his political per-

sonality and reputation. His ﬁrst wife had died in 1771 and he had mar-

ried again in 1779, but his second wife died in 1789. Norris writes that

‘Shelburne felt her death … perhaps more than he had done that of his ﬁrst

wife. It left him alone in the world in his later middle age, when he was in

the political wilderness without the distraction of public affairs.’

Lansdowne continued to speak in the House of Lords, but John Cannon

describes him as speaking more ‘as a commentator, or even a lecturer,

rather than a leading politician’. He became increasingly ‘distanced from

the main body of political opinion. By the 1790s his sense of grievance

and resentment toward Pitt was strong, and he was in active and persistent

opposition. In 1791 he was praising the French National Assembly for

declaring that the right of making peace and war belonged to the nation,

not to the Crown. In 1793 he protested against war with France. He kept

pressing for parliamentary reform. Pitt was necessarily pragmatic and cau-

tious, and kept his distance from the man who ﬁrst brought him to ofﬁce.’

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Newspapers viliﬁed him as a friend of the Jacobins as he argued for peace

with France and protested against the suspension of habeas corpus and the

moves against domestic radicals, and he admitted himself that ‘the tide of

popularity was against him’.

In 1801 a recurrence of the illness of King George III raised the possibility

of a Regency, putting the Prince of Wales into power and opening the way

for a new ministry. Lansdowne agreed to serve alongside Fox as a secretary

of state under Lord Moira. But within a month the King recovered his

health and sanity, and the chance of a comeback slipped away. Lansdowne

lived to see his youngest son (Lord Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, later the Third

Marquess) take the ﬁrst steps in a distinguished political career, becoming

an MP in 1802; he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, aged 26, in 1806

and had a long Cabinet career in Whig politics, serving under seven differ-

ent PMs in all and refusing the premiership himself. Later still, the Fifth

Marquess served as Viceroy of India and as Foreign Secretary under Salisbury

and Balfour, 1900–05.

In May 1803 Shelburne made his last speech in the Lords, arguing against a

resumption of the war with France. Then illness compelled him to give up

parliament and he died at his house in London, aged 68, on 7 May 1805.

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