Robert Walpole

English prime minister

• Born: August 26, 1676
• Birthplace: Houghton Hall, Norfolk, England
• Died: March 18, 1745
• Place of death: London, England

As prime minister, Walpole gave his country the longest period of peace and political stability in the eighteenth century. He also raised the status of the House of Commons to that of principal partner in government.

Early Life

Robert Walpole was the third son of Colonel Robert and Mary Burwell Walpole. Both his grandfather and his father were active Whigs, and both held seats in Parliament, his grandfather from King’s Lynn, his father from Castle Riding. As a younger son, Walpole was intended for the Church and so was sent to Eton, in 1690, and then to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1696. As it would later in his career, death now played a role in advancing Walpole’s fortunes. One of his two older brothers, Burwell, had died in the Battle of Beachy Head (June 30, 1690). In 1698, his other brother, Edward, also died; as a result, Walpole was summoned home from college to help his father manage the family estate.

On July 30, 1700, Walpole married Catherine Shorter, who brought with her a rich dowry of some œ20,000 and even richer tastes. Although Walpole would indulge her extravagances until her death in 1737, the couple grew estranged after a few years, and shortly after Catherine’s death, Walpole married Maria Skerrett, his mistress of some fifteen years.

Life’s Work

When his father died on November 18, 1700, Walpole succeeded to his seat in Parliament. In his first session, he demonstrated that he had inherited his father’s views as well, supporting religious toleration and the Hanoverian succession and befriending the Whig leaders. In the 1702 elections, he helped secure seats for the son of the duke of Devonshire and for Sir Thomas Littleton, a client of the duke of Somerset; his reward was a place on the Council of Admiralty (1705-1708).

An ardent supporter of the war against France, Walpole was named secretary at war in 1708, and in 1710 he became treasurer of the navy. In these posts, he demonstrated a capacity for hard work—he would be at his office at 6:00 a.m.—and a mastery of detail that made him valuable even to his political opponents. Indicative of his abilities was Robert Harley’s attempt to keep him in office after the Whig debacle of 1710. The nation had tired of war, which it had been waging almost constantly since 1688. Hence, the Tory promise of peace was welcome, and that party won overwhelmingly in the parliamentary elections of 1710. Many Whigs immediately lost their posts, but Harley, the Tory leader, retained Walpole, hoping that he would support the new ministry. Walpole refused, however, to abandon his party, and in January, 1711, he was dismissed.

The Tory assault on the previous administration included charges of misappropriation of œ35 million. Walpole used his detailed financial knowledge to demolish these accusations by issuing two pamphlets: A State of the Five and Thirty Millions (1711) and The Debts of the Nation Stated and Considered in Four Papers (1712). In an attempt to silence him, the ministry accused him of corruption. Holding an overwhelming majority, the Tories expelled him from Parliament (in January of 1712) and ordered him confined to the Tower of London for several months; Walpole was not allowed to resume his seat from King’s Lynn until 1713.

If the Tories believed that such treatment would silence Walpole, they were disappointed. In The Present State of Fairyland in Several Letters from Esquire Hush (1713), Walpole attacked the ministry’s policy toward France, and A Short History of Parliament (1713) effectively responded to Jonathan Swift’s claims, in The Conduct of the Allies (1711), that concluding a separate peace with France did not betray Great Britain’s war partners, Holland and Austria.

The death of Queen Anne in 1714 and the succession of George I altered the political situation. Henry St. John, First Viscount Bolingbroke, long one of Walpole’s opponents, wrote to Bishop Francis Atterbury, “I see plainly that the Tory Party is gone.” Indeed it was; not until the end of the century would it return to power. The Whigs now imitated their opponents’ purge, and Walpole returned to office as paymaster-general and chancellor of the exchequer (1715). These posts offered many opportunities for self-enrichment, and Walpole did not hesitate to seize them. While the appointments were intended as rewards for service to the party, they also show again the confidence that the nation’s leaders placed in Walpole’s financial abilities.

This faith was further demonstrated in 1717. Although the Whigs firmly controlled Parliament, the party itself was divided between the supporters of Charles Townshend and Walpole on one side and those led by James Stanhope and Charles Spencer, third earl of Sunderland, on the other. This latter faction was the stronger of the two, so in 1717, Townshend lost his post as lord lieutenant of Ireland. As in 1710, Walpole could have retained his office; indeed, the king pleaded with him to do so. Instead, though, Walpole chose loyalty to his brother-in-law, Townshend, and joined the opposition.

The ministry, like the Tories before, found Walpole a formidable foe. In financial matters, he was supreme: Sunderland and Stanhope adapted his plan to reduce the large national debt caused by decades of war, and Parliament accepted his figures rather than the ministry’s in a vote on how much money to allot for retired army officers. He also successfully led the fight against the ministry’s Peerage Bill, which sought to fix the number of members in the House of Lords at 216. The effect of the bill would have been to prevent the creation of additional members, a tactic both Whigs and Tories had used previously when the upper branch had sought to block legislation desired by the ministry. Without the power to pack the House of Lords, any future ministry would be dependent on that body, leaving the House of Commons powerless to reflect the will of the electorate. Under Walpole’s direction, in 1719 the opposition defeated the measure by almost one hundred votes.

By 1720, Stanhope and Sunderland understood that they needed Walpole’s cooperation, and since Walpole refused to join the ministry without Townshend, both Walpole and Townshend received offices. Walpole returned as paymaster-general, Townshend as president of the council. Walpole’s return came none too soon, for financial ruin shortly threatened the nation, and only Walpole could avert the disaster looming before the country—and the Whig ministry.

The South Sea Company had been chartered in 1711 to assume part of the national debt. Walpole had opposed its establishment, chiefly because his own interests lay with the Bank of England, which wanted to handle the debt by itself. In 1720, the South Sea Company offered to assume the entire debt; again, Walpole objected but failed to carry the ministry or Parliament with him. Yet some observers shared Walpole’s reservations. Edward Harley, for example, called the company “a machine of paper credit supported by imagination.”

For a brief period, it appeared that such a machine might nevertheless function. Beginning at œ100 a share, the price rose quickly; by June 24, 1720, the stock was selling for œ1,050, about ten times the original value, and this boom stimulated a similar rise in other companies as well. Even Walpole was changing his mind and attempting to capitalize on the company’s prosperity, and rumor later claimed that he had made much money trading in South Sea stock. In fact, as John Harold Plumb, Walpole’s most careful biographer, has demonstrated, Walpole actually lost money on his investment and would have lost even more had his agent, Robert Jacombe, not been more prudent than his master. By the end of September, the bubble had burst: The stock was selling at œ190.

Whereas Walpole had initially opposed the South Sea scheme and had subsequently remained largely aloof from it, Sunderland and Stanhope were deeply involved. Had Walpole chosen, he might have ended their control of Parliament during the 1720-1721 session, but whether he could govern without them was questionable. Instead of risking political chaos and possible Tory control of the government, Walpole used his skills as a parliamentarian and financier to restore confidence in the economy and to defend the present ministry. For his role in protecting Sunderland and Stanhope, Walpole was labeled the “screen-master general” by his enemies, but his friends named him first lord of the treasury and first lord of the Admiralty (April 3, 1721), while Townshend became secretary of state.

Despite this show of gratitude, Sunderland still distrusted Walpole, and what his fate would have been once the furor over the South Sea incident had abated is unclear. Again, however, death favored Walpole. Stanhope died in February, 1721; then, in the midst of the 1722 election, so did Sunderland. On April 20, 1722, King George I named Walpole his chief minister, a post Walpole would retain for the next twenty years.

In appointing Walpole first lord of the Admiralty and Townshend secretary of state, Sunderland had given to each what interested him most. Walpole’s primary concern was domestic policy, Townshend’s, foreign affairs. This division continued through the early years of Walpole’s administration, as Walpole concentrated on reducing the national debt by raising revenues and also lowering taxes on land. A key to the success of this plan was the excise tax. In 1724, Walpole exempted tea, chocolate, and coconuts from import duties. These goods were now placed in bonded warehouses. If they were reexported, they paid no duty, but if they were sold within Great Britain, they paid an excise. Even though the excise tax was lower than the old import fee, revenues rose because smuggling and other forms of evading taxes were now more difficult. Viewing the rising merchant class as his base of support and therefore seeking to promote commerce, Walpole exempted British manufactured goods from export duties and encouraged the American colonies to expand their trade beyond the mother country, for he saw in their prosperity greater markets for English products. Had the ministers of George III been equally perceptive, the American Revolution might have been averted.

Taxes could not remain low and trade expand, however, unless England remained at peace, and Walpole’s desire to avoid war eventually brought him into conflict with his brother-in-law, Townshend, who finally resigned as secretary of state in 1730, to be replaced by the dull but pliant William Stanhope. Walpole’s aversion to war went beyond economics, though; when he successfully kept Great Britain from intervening in the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735) despite treaty obligations to support Austria, he boasted to Queen Caroline that even though fifty thousand men had died in the fighting, not one of them was English.

Initially, Walpole’s policy of prosperity at home and peace abroad made opposition futile. In the years 1727-1729, his political foes could muster barely one hundred votes in a House of Commons with more than five hundred members. Slowly, however, this number grew, and in 1733, Walpole narrowly escaped the most serious threat his ministry would face until 1742.

In 1732, Walpole had reduced the land tax to its lowest level of the century, one shilling on the pound, and he removed the tax on salt as damaging to the poor because they could least afford it. To compensate for the resulting loss of revenue, he proposed extending the excise scheme to tobacco and wine. Again, taxes on these goods would decrease but revenues would rise, since it would be harder to avoid paying the levy.

Merchants reacted angrily, for the law required that they demonstrate that their goods had passed through the bonded warehouses, and they naturally preferred a high tax that they could easily evade to a low one that they had to pay. Moreover, the idea of an excise tax bred irrational fears of absolutism. Samuel Johnson summarized the British attitude when he defined “excise” as “a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.” Despite the strong opposition, Walpole probably could have forced the measure through Parliament; instead, he withdrew it, returned the land tax to two shillings, and reimposed the tax on salt.

Shaken by the excise crisis, Walpole was brought down by his pacifism. For almost twenty years, he had kept Great Britain at peace through his clever diplomatic maneuvering, creating alliances with France and Spain when policy required, shifting to Great Britain’s more traditional Protestant allies, Holland and Austria, when circumstances warranted, and simply ignoring treaty obligations or hostile actions when he believed the national interest demanded such measures. On October 19, 1739, however, Great Britain, provoked by Spanish interference with the British merchant marine, declared war over Walpole’s objections. Believing as he did in abiding by the wishes of a majority of his cabinet, he did what he could to support the war effort, but he revealed his feelings at the outset of the conflict when he observed, “They now ring the bells; they will soon wring their hands.”

Walpole’s majorities in the House of Commons had progressively shrunk since his total domination in the 1720’s. After the 1734 elections, it had fallen to about seventy-five; in 1737 his opposition to doubling the prince of Wales’s allowance from œ50,000 a year to œ100,000 succeeded by only thirty votes—and would have failed if the Tories had not abstained on the grounds that Parliament had no jurisdiction in the matter. The 1741 elections reduced Walpole’s margin even further. He was accused of not pursuing the war with sufficient vigor; those Whigs out of place wanted positions, of which there were never enough to go around; the prince of Wales, in typical Hanoverian fashion, quarreled with his father and so was using his influence to unseat his father’s minister.

When the new Parliament convened in December, 1741, Walpole’s candidate for the chairman of the Committee of Privileges and Elections lost by four votes; in January, 1742, the government’s candidate for Chippenham was rejected by one vote in the House of Commons. Lacking majority support, Walpole resigned, even though the king, in tears, implored him to remain. Instead, he accepted a peerage as earl of Orford and so moved to the House of Lords, where he remained active in politics until his death on March 18, 1745.

Significance

Robert Walpole claimed that he was no reformer, and, as was evident in his withdrawal of the excise scheme in 1733 and his consistent efforts to avoid war, he preferred conciliation to confrontation. Yet he inadvertently changed the way the British government operated. Even after the Glorious Revolution had diminished royal power, the monarch still chose his or her ministers, and support of the Crown was essential for office. Walpole shifted the balance of governmental power to the House of Commons.

George II disliked Walpole, and when he first assumed the throne, in 1727, tried to dismiss him. He quickly learned that Walpole’s parliamentary support was too great. Conversely, both George I and George II liked Lord John Carteret, but he never attained a post, because he lacked parliamentary backing. The House of Lords, too, lost influence under Walpole. He continued to use this chamber to kill measures that he opposed but that enjoyed popular support, but he refused a peerage during his ministry, choosing to lead the nation from the Commons. A peerage for him did not mark the pinnacle of power but the loss of it. When he and his longtime rival William Pulteney met in the House of Lords as newly created earls, Walpole remarked, “You and I, my lord, are now two as insignificant men as any in England.” The truth of this statement owed much to Walpole’s elevating the House of Commons to its commanding role in government.

Walpole also attempted to impose a measure of party, or at least factional, discipline. He refused to retain office without his party in 1710, supported the Sunderland-Stanhope ministry in 1720-1721, and, until his break with Townshend in 1730, repeatedly chose opposition to preferment without his political ally.

To achieve unity, Walpole relied more heavily than his predecessors on the powers of the chief minister. He increased to 185 the number of Parliament members who held lucrative government posts, he spent lavishly to buy votes of both electors and members of the House of Commons, and he ruthlessly punished those who opposed him. After the failure of the excise scheme, for example, Walpole stripped eight peers of their posts because they had objected to the bill. In his first fifteen years in office, he allowed only one Tory to become a bishop, and that person succeeded only because he had the support of Queen Caroline.

Such blatant use of power and money, which included self-enrichment, scandalized many of Walpole’s contemporaries. In the 1730’s, Samuel Johnson expressed the longing for a purer time, “Ere masquerades debauch’d, excise oppress’d,/ Or English honour grew a standing jest.” Later, Johnson saw matters more clearly, declaring that Walpole “was the best minister this country ever had, as if we would have let him he would have kept the country in perpetual peace.”

A brilliant financier who gave his country low taxes and prosperity, a shrewd negotiator who brought peace to Great Britain in a troubled century, a skillful parliamentarian who shifted the balance of power in British government, Walpole richly deserves Johnson’s—and history’s—praise.

Bibliography

Black, Jeremy. British Foreign Policy in the Age of Walpole. Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1985. Treats Walpole’s foreign policies and the domestic considerations that determined them. Particular chapters are devoted to such specific concerns as trade, religion, and the threat of the Stuart pretenders.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Robert Walpole and the Nature of Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Explains how Walpole’s politics and policies transformed England into a world power with a vast colonial empire.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Walpole in Power: Britain’s First Prime Minister. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 2001. Detailed exploration of Walpole’s political career. Black describes how Walpole’s ability to work with people, Parliament, and the king made him a model for all future prime ministers.

Dickinson, Harry Thomas. Walpole and the Whig Supremacy. Mystic, Conn.: Lawrence Verry, 1973. A political analysis rather than a biography. Sections treat political management, financial and commercial policy, and foreign affairs.

Goldgar, Bertrand A. Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722-1742. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976. Walpole has the distinction of inspiring some of the most biting satires of the eighteenth century. All the best writers—Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, James Thomson, and Henry Fielding—opposed him. Goldgar effectively traces the deepening gloom of their works and less convincingly argues that these writers were motivated by greed rather than principle.

Langford, Paul. The Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1975. Examines the Excise Crisis of 1733 to determine why Walpole’s plan was so controversial. Also uses the crisis as a key to understanding the nature of popular and aristocratic politics in early Hanoverian England.

Plumb, John Harold. Sir Robert Walpole. London: Cresset Press, 1956. The standard biography, tracing Walpole’s career through 1734. Provides a detailed analysis of Walpole’s personal and political life and of the events that helped shape him as well as his policies.

Speck, W. A. Stability and Strife: England, 1714-1760. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. Primarily a study of English politics under the first two Georges, tracing the fortunes of the Whigs and Tories. Chapters 9 and 10 offer a good summary of Walpole’s administration.

Williams, Basil. The Whig Supremacy, 1714-1760. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. A survey of England in the early eighteenth century. Explains the political, social, and cultural world in which Walpole lived.

Woodfine, Philip. Britannia’s Glories: The Walpole Ministry and the 1739 War with Spain. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1998. Focuses on the war that occurred during the final years of Walpole’s ministry, assessing the war’s impact on England and Spain and describing the war within the context of Walpole’s foreign policy.