Lord Liverpool: A Political Life

by William Anthony Hay

Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, was Britain's longest serving prime minister since William Pitt the Younger. Liverpool's tenure in office (1807-1827) oversaw a series of seismic events including the War of 1812 with the United States, the endgame of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, the Corn Laws, the Peterloo Massacre, and the emerging issue of Catholic Emancipation. However, Liverpool's overall status within British political history has been overshadowed by contemporaries such as Castlereagh and Canning, and his reputation and achievements were downplayed by the Reform period that followed. This new political biography explores Liverpool's career and puts his efforts at resisting change into context, bringing this period of transformation into sharp focus. It shows Liverpool as a defender of the eighteenth-century British constitution, documenting his efforts at adapting institutions to the challenges of war and then the very different post-1815 world. Shaped by eighteenth-century assumptions, Liverpool nonetheless laid the foundations for the nineteenth-century Britain that emerged from the Reform era. This book uses his career and outlook as a way of exploring the crucial transition from the Georgian to the Victorian era.

Genres: Biography, History

296 pages, Hardcover

First published April 20, 2018

Reviews

[Anthony]

A Missed Opportunity

Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool was prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1812 until 1827. He led the country during final years of the Napoleonic Wars and during its finest hour, the victory at Waterloo in 1815. Like so many of his contemporaries, he was an apprentice of William Pitt the Younger, he was a friend of Viscount Castlereagh, George Canning and worked well with the Duke of Wellington amongst other titans of British history. Within this he was at the forefront of British politics for 20 years. However, he is practically unknown in British and world history. I do not use this lightly, most have never heard of him. As such he is in desperate need of a revisit. William Anthony Hay has attempted this during this recent biography. Unfortunately this has fallen way off the mark.

Even though Lord Liverpool: A Political Life is relatively small, under 300 pages, it took me a long time to wade through this confused text. Hay’s style of writing does not flow and I found myself constantly having to re-read sentences to try and understand what Hay is trying to say. I came away with little understanding of the man privately or politically. This is a political history book, however I expect to learn some of his personality. All I took away was that he was a statesman, steady and reliable, but not a genius like Pitt. What is significant is that he held together a fractious cabinet in testing times for the United Kingdom. He brought stability and continuity after years of ministries coming and going, in the previous eleven years before he became prime minister there were five governments, with the PM coming and going for various reasons. After the Napoleonic Wars, there was economic downturn and depression, rioting and famine. 1816 was known as the ‘Year without a Summer’ due to the volcano eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The unrest of riots and protests such as Peterloo in Manchester in 1819 is testament to the unstable age which needed a level head to guide the country through. The flamboyant and detestable Prince Regent, later George IV wasn’t going to do it. Liverpool had to. He also introduced a new brand of ‘liberal Toryism’ which is also a significant lasting legacy.

Lord Liverpool: A Political Life should have been an exciting read for the man at the apex of British society during one of the most fascinating periods of history in my opinion. However, it left a feeling that another biography is needed. I agree with some of the other reviews here, ‘Who is this aimed at?’ This is clearly a scholarly book, but what is the book trying to do? Just provide a source of basic facts about Liverpool? Or is it that Benjamin Disraeli’s assessment, of Liverpool as ‘the arch-mediocrity who presided, rather than ruled over his Cabinet of Mediocrities’, so true that Liverpool is far too boring to bring to life in any other way? It has been said that no one much writes about King William III and Queen Mary II as they were too normal, maybe Liverpool is the same. I disagree, a better writer could provide a better book and we are still waiting for it!

[Chris]

A bit of a slog. The author's style was at times ponderous and I had to re-read sentences in order to understand what he meant. I was surprised that he was obviously writing in American for an American audience - who in America would ever have heard of a British Prime Minister at the beginning of the nineteenth century?! I did find it difficult to pin Liverpool down - he didn't really emerge from the words as subjects of biographies should. At the end I really didn't find myself much the wiser about his character, other than at times he could get weepy but this seemed to be not uncommon for the period. Hay was keen to dispel the generally accepted idea that Liverpool was reactionary, but he didn't quite convince me.