Prime Ministers of Britain

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Prime Ministers of Britain

PRIME MINISTERS OF BRITAIN. "Prime minister" was the popular term used in Britain to designate the leader of the group or faction wielding the powers of government. According to the theory of balanced (or mixed) government, the king ruled the nation through his ministers who sat in Parliament, especially in the House of Commons, because it was that house alone that could originate the all-important measures having to do with money and taxes. The king had a great deal of leeway to select a prime minister and government, and generally sought someone whose policies he could endorse and whose personality he found compatible. Once satisfied he had found the right person, the king would ask him to form a government to manage the affairs of state, that is, to prepare a slate of men who would fill the offices of state because of their talents, their political connections, or a combination of both. The prime minister usually filled one of the senior offices of state, as there was no position called "prime minister" until the twentieth century.

The first statesman in British history who properly deserved to be called prime minister was Robert Walpole, first earl of Orford, who held sway between 1721 and 1742 during the reigns of George I and George II. Walpole was succeeded by the elderly Spencer Compton, the earl of Wilmington, who died on 2 July 1743. Wilmington was followed by Henry Pelham, a skilled parliamentary manager, who died on 6 March 1754. On Pelham's death, George II called on Pelham's brother, Thomas Pelham-Holles, the duke of Newcastle, whose strength was the management of patronage, to form a government. Newcastle, however, proved to be a poor manager of the war that broke out in North America in 1754 and extended to Europe in 1756. After installing a caretaker ministry led by William Cavendish, the fourth duke of Devonshire (October 1756 to April 1757), the king was forced to ask William Pitt the elder, later the earl of Chatham, to join in a coalition with Newcastle from 1757 to 1761. Pitt was a charismatic speaker in the House of Commons and a talented organizer of strategies and armies, but he was anathema to the king because of a lifetime spent opposing subsidy treaties for Hanover. When Pitt and Newcastle fell from power, the new king, George III, appointed his close friend and mentor, John Stuart, the third earl of Bute, as his principal minister, but the Scotsman was forced to resign on 8 April 1763 because he lacked support in Parliament. Rather than reappoint Newcastle and Pitt, the king turned to George Grenville, supposedly Bute's puppet but a force in the House of Commons in his own right. Best remembered for his advocacy of plans to tax and better control the American colonies, Grenville was dismissed on 10 July 1765 because the king found him "insolent in attitude and tedious in behaviour" (Beckett and Thomas).

The king next turned to Charles Watson-Wentworth, the second marquess of Rockingham, a younger member of the Newcastle-Pitt faction. An inexperienced administrator and poor parliamentary manager, he was more moderate than the king on American regulation and was dismissed on 30 July 1766. With nowhere else to turn, the king asked Chatham (Pitt) to form another ministry. But Chatham was physically frail, now a member of the House of Lords, and made haughty by his wartime success. Progressively retiring from business, he resigned in October 1768. Augustus Henry FitzRoy, the third duke of Grafton, who had been effective head of Chatham's ministry for over a year, became the next prime minister, but parliamentary politics and the deteriorating American situation led to his resignation on 30 January 1770. Frederick, Lord North, a true Commons man, had already agreed to become first lord of the Treasury (28 January).

For the next twelve years, with the king's firm friendship and support, North led the government with great skill as the American crisis turned into the American rebellion. Worn out by bad news from America and constant sniping from parliamentary opponents of the American war, he decided to resign on 20 March 1782, although his policies were still firmly supported by George III, who accused North of desertion when he resigned. Rockingham returned as prime minister, without the full confidence of the king; he died on 1 July 1782, before he could see the culmination of the negotiations he had set in train to end the war. William Petty, the second earl of Shelburne, continued many of Rockingham's initiatives, including peace with the United States (preliminaries were signed on 30 November), but he was personally unpopular and unskilled in Parliament. He resigned on 22 February 1783 but stayed on until a coalition ministry under William Cavendish-Bentinck, the third duke of Portland, took office on 2 April 1783. The king had already come to detest the coalition by the time Charles James Fox introduced the India bill on 18 November. Seeing the bill as an attack on the prerogatives of the monarchy, the king took the unconstitutional step of comporting privately with Chatham's son, William Pitt the Younger, the rising star in Parliament, to take over the government. The coalition collapsed in December 1783, after the peace treaty ending the War of American Independence had been signed, and Pitt assumed office, inaugurating a period of relative calm that would be broken only by the next great war, against Revolutionary France.

The history of the prime ministership in this period highlights the reality that British politics was governed by the twin needs to manage Parliament, where intensely local and personal political relationships regularly overrode considerations of imperial policy, and to work with George III, Farmer George, the quintessential Englishman who could and did play an active role in shaping politics according to his notions of the place of the monarch in mixed government. A system of governance that had grown out of the interplay of forces in an island kingdom had yet to develop the means to govern an empire.