The Great Man: Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain's First Prime Minister [Hardcover]

Edward Pearce (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0224071815 | ISBN-13: 978-0224071819 | Publication Date: February 27, 2007

The year 1721 has many splendors, but there are also 13 public hanging days a year, drunkenness is endemic, and organized crime rampages through the streets. Only a generation earlier James II, suspected of conspiring to enforce Roman Catholicism and subordinate England to France, was driven out by the Whigs. In 1715 his son, the Pretender, failed to take the Crown by armed force. The new King, George I, an intelligent, moderate man, is cursed everywhere as a damned foreigner. James's followers, the Jacobites, conspire and are persecuted. In 1720, the South Sea Bubble, an attempt to finance state debt by runaway speculation, collapses. Ruined people mass in Westminster. The South Sea directors, says an MP, should be thrown into the sea. The Pretender could take over any day. Robert Walpole, once imprisoned for financial chicanery, assumes political control. When the rage subsides he becomes chief minister—or, a new title, "Prime Minister." He personally detects a Jacobite plot. Digging in, he buys parliamentary seats wholesale with secret service money. In a runaway theatrical success, "The Beggar's Opera", Walpole is compared with the criminal mastermind Jonathan Wild. But he will dominate King, Parliament, and Government until 1742. Dismissed in 1727 on the death of George I, he recruits the new King's clever wife, Caroline, and bounces cheerfully back. Coarse, corrupt, and cynical, Walpole sits on the Treasury Bench munching little Norfolk apples sent from the estate he is enlarging with political profit. This is Mr. Worldlywiseman, keeping England out of war for 20 years and setting up a stable and growing economy. All politics of a kind we can recognize begin with Robert Walpole. And here, in Edward Pearce's elegant book, he is brought vividly back to life.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Edward Pearce, after a national newspaper career starting in 1977, still keeps his hand in with book reviews, obituaries and travel pieces. his early books include Contemporary Political Comment and Satire, The Senate of Lilliput, Hummingbirds and Hyenas, Looking Down on Mrs Thatcher, The Shooting Gallery, The Quiet Rise of John Major, Election Rides and Machiavelli's Children. However, for several years now he has concentrated on writing history. The Lost Leaders (about three near-Prime Ministers) was followed by Lines of Most Resistance (about English Resistance to Irish Home Rule), Denis Heaney (the authorised biography), Reform! (about the 1832 Act), and The Diaries of Charles Greville, both published in Pimlico. He lives in North Yorkshire.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Random House UK (February 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0224071815
• ISBN-13: 978-0224071819
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,158,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars England would like to forget him, April 29, 2011

By 

Harry Eagar (Maui) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Great Man: Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain's First Prime Minister (Hardcover)

Imagine if there were no complete biography of George Washington. That's the situation with Sir Robert Walpole, the first and longest-serving prime minister of England. And "The Great Man" isn't either. Edward Pearce would not disagree.

True, it covers Walpole from birth to death, but in a brisk, gossipy way. That is not to say that it is unserious, but it is not the fully-noted scholarly autobiography that the Regius Professor of History J.H. Plumb started and abandoned after two volumes.

In a coda, Pearce wonders why England, certainly well-supplied with historians and publishers, shies away from examining Walpole. The simple answer, that England is embarrassed, is not offered.

But no better answer is offered.

The 18th century was full of cant about the liberties of Englishmen, but they had little liberty, the Scotch and Welsh less, and the Irish were practically slaves. In English colonies overseas, there were outright slaves. The legal dictum that the air of England maketh a man free did not extend to the level of becoming a principle.

Walpole seems not to have had a single principle, except that he should lead the ministry of a Protestant king. It is not even obvious that he was loyal to the Guelph family, though he had to work with them.

He may perhaps have had a second principle, loathing for the Catholic Stuarts. He certainly spoke as if he did, but Pearce leaves open the possibility that this was mere waving of a bloody shirt, cynical and effective long after any real threat to the Protestant Succession was over.

Walpole is well known for two maxims, let sleeping dogs lie and every man has his price.

He nearly proved the latter. As head of a Whig ministry for a generation, he easily abandoned every Whig principle -- such as religious toleration -- in exchange for votes. No one in his party stood for conscience, and since the Tories were constitutionally against it, there was no conscience spoken for by anybody.

Pearce, a newspaperman, is memorably snide about all this. The gossipy Lord Hervey is labeled the "under-Queen," and many another character of the time, some of them rather complex personalities, is categorized as briefly. The writing style is engaging, though an American will miss a lot of references to late 20th century British popular culture.

What lifts this biography above the level of summer reading is Pearce's underlying seriousness, never quite hidden by the joking. For example, he devotes considerable attention to the Black Act (crediting E.P. Thompson for exposing its meaning in "Whigs and Hunters," which I agree was one of the more shocking historical studies of the last half century), which added about 50 hanging offenses to the already bulging list. He comments that none of the supposed despotisms on the other side of the Channel had anything like such a law.

It was, in fact, like the Nuremberg Laws, only motivated by class rather than race, and Walpole combined the tolerance of a Hitler, the probity of a Nixon and the breadth of a G.W. Bush.

And yet, and yet, although Walpole had, at best, contempt for poor folks, he did not like to slaughter them without a better purpose. He hated war, preferring peace and trade. His policy saved tens of thousands of poor men from being immolated in glory.

It would not, or at least it did not occur to Pearce in 2007 to make the comparison, but recent events suggest to us that the corrupt dictator that most resembled Walpole in our time was Hosni Mubarak.

Both men fell from power in a spasm of phony democracy.

2 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointing, June 5, 2008

By 

A Webb - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Man: Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain's First Prime Minister (Hardcover)

The author's style is so casual and "chatty" that the overall work lacks a feeling of authority. It's clearly well-researched so the presentational failings are keenly felt.