Robert Walpole

Robert Walpole was born on August 26, 1676, at Houghton in Norfolk, the son of Robert Walpole, a Whig member of Parliament, and Mary Burwell. The family belonged to the county gentry and had held land at Houghton for generations. As a younger son among many children (several of his siblings died young), the boy was initially destined for a career in the church rather than in politics ^[1].

He was educated at Eton College, where he studied as a King's Scholar, and went on to King's College, Cambridge, in 1696. The deaths of his two elder brothers changed the direction of his life: he left Cambridge without taking a degree in 1698 to help manage the family estates, and on his father's death in 1700 he inherited Houghton and the political interest that went with it ^[2].

That inheritance came with a seat in Parliament. In January 1701 Walpole was returned for Castle Rising, a small Norfolk borough his family controlled, and the following year he transferred to the larger constituency of King's Lynn, which he represented for most of his career. Anyone asking who was Robert Walpole at this stage would have found an energetic country gentleman with a loud voice, a taste for hunting, and a quick grasp of finance ^[1].

Walpole rose quickly within the Whig party during the reign of Queen Anne. He proved an effective debater and administrator, serving as Secretary at War from 1708 and briefly as Treasurer of the Navy, posts that gave him close knowledge of wartime finance during the War of the Spanish Succession ^[3].

His rise was interrupted when the Tories swept to power in 1710. In 1712 his political enemies had him expelled from the Commons and imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of corruption connected with forage contracts, an episode Whigs treated as partisan persecution. Far from destroying him, the imprisonment made him a party hero, and he returned to Parliament at the next opportunity ^[2].

The accession of George I in 1714 restored the Whigs, and Walpole with them. He served as Paymaster General and then as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1715, before resigning in 1717 during a split within the Whig leadership. For three years he led an opposition faction with his brother-in-law Charles Townshend, demonstrating in the process how dangerous he could be from the back benches ^[3].

The financial catastrophe of 1720 gave Walpole his opening. The South Sea Company had taken over a large portion of the national debt, and frenzied speculation drove its share price to absurd heights before the inevitable collapse ruined thousands of investors and implicated ministers and courtiers in scandal ^[4].

Walpole, restored to office shortly before the crash, took charge of the cleanup. He devised a scheme to restore public credit, partly by transferring South Sea stock to the Bank of England and the East India Company, and he shielded the king and several ministers from the full force of parliamentary inquiry. Critics called him the Screen for protecting the guilty, but the settlement steadied the markets and left him indispensable ^[4].

In April 1721 he became First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Leader of the House of Commons. Historians conventionally date the office of prime minister from this appointment, although Walpole himself rejected the title, which was then a term of abuse implying overmighty ambition. He held power for twenty years and 314 days, still the longest tenure of any British prime minister ^[5].

Any account of Robert Walpole achievements begins with peace and low taxes. His guiding policy was to avoid continental wars, encourage trade, and keep the land tax down, a combination that pleased both merchants and country gentlemen. He reduced duties on exports and on imported raw materials, and he used the Sinking Fund to manage the national debt, though he also raided it when convenient ^[3].

Walpole perfected the management of Parliament through patronage. Offices, pensions, and honours flowed to loyal supporters, and he cultivated the Commons with daily attention rather than governing from the Lords, refusing an earldom for himself until his retirement. This command of the lower house, combined with the confidence of both George I and George II, defined what the premiership would become: a minister who governed because he could deliver Parliament to the Crown and the Crown's business to Parliament ^[5].

He survived serious storms. The excise crisis of 1733, when his plan to extend excise duties to wine and tobacco provoked a national outcry, forced a rare retreat: he withdrew the bill rather than lose control of the Commons. Queen Caroline's support helped secure his position with George II, and after her death in 1737 his hold weakened. War fever over Spanish depredations on British shipping finally overwhelmed his pacific system, and the War of Jenkins' Ear began in 1739 against his judgment ^[1].

Walpole married Catherine Shorter in 1700, and the couple had five surviving children, including Horace Walpole, the celebrated letter writer and author of The Castle of Otranto. The marriage grew distant, and after Catherine's death in 1737 Walpole married his long-standing mistress Maria Skerrett in 1738; she died within months of the wedding ^[2].

His fortune, drawn from office as well as land, went into building on a princely scale. Between 1722 and 1735 he rebuilt Houghton Hall in Norfolk as a Palladian mansion, with interiors by William Kent, and filled it with old master paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Poussin, Rembrandt, and others. The collection ranked among the finest in private hands in Europe ^[6].

The pictures did not stay in England. In 1779 his grandson, burdened by debt, sold the bulk of the Houghton collection to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, and the paintings became a founding component of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, where many remain today. The sale was lamented at the time as a national loss and helped fuel later arguments for a British national gallery ^[6].

The war with Spain went badly, and Walpole's parliamentary majority eroded through the election of 1741. Opposition Whigs, Tories, and followers of the Prince of Wales combined against him, and after losing key divisions in the Commons he resigned in February 1742, ending the longest ministry in British history ^[5].

George II, who had come to rely on him completely, created him Earl of Orford and granted his illegitimate daughter Maria the rank of an earl's daughter. A parliamentary committee investigated his conduct in office, hunting for evidence of corruption in the use of secret service money, but the inquiry collapsed when witnesses refused to testify without indemnity ^[1].

Walpole spent his final years between London and Houghton, still advising the king privately and helping to steer his successors through the early stages of the War of the Austrian Succession. Suffering from kidney stones, he endured painful treatments in his last months and died at his house in St James's, London, on March 18, 1745, at the age of 68. He was buried in the parish church at Houghton ^[2].

Walpole's most durable creation was the office he never officially held. By combining leadership of the Treasury, management of the Commons, and the personal confidence of the monarch, he established the working model of the British prime minister, and every account of the office's history starts with him. In 1735 George II gave him 10 Downing Street, which Walpole accepted for future First Lords of the Treasury rather than for himself, fixing the address that remains the prime minister's official residence ^[7].

His reputation has always been contested, and Robert Walpole facts can be marshalled for either verdict. Contemporaries attacked him as a corrupter of Parliament, and writers such as Swift, Pope, and Gay satirized him mercilessly; Gay's The Beggar's Opera invited audiences to see the great minister in the highwayman Macheath. Defenders point instead to two decades of peace, stability after the turbulence of the Stuart century, falling debt charges, and quiet consolidation of the Hanoverian succession ^[3].

Modern historians, led by J. H. Plumb's detailed studies, treat him as a supreme political manager whose methods were those of his age and whose achievements in stabilizing British government were real. Any Robert Walpole biography must weigh the patronage and the profiteering against the peace and the parliamentary craft. Houghton Hall survives as his monument in stone, and in 2013 many of the pictures sold to Catherine the Great returned there on loan from the Hermitage for a landmark exhibition ^[6].