Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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(Claremont in Surrey), while a younger generation of politicians was coming

forward.

Newcastle wanted to get back into ofﬁce but sought an inﬂuential elder-

statesman position and did not want to be First Lord again. He was too

old, the ﬁnancial responsibilities would be too much for him, and he had

not been a very good prime minister when he had the job – indecisive and

not good at decision-taking. His strengths and interests lay in borough-

mongering, electioneering, and the management and manipulation of

patronage. He loved being busy, the ‘buzz’ of politics and intrigue, being

on the inside of things. Although a notorious and fussy hypochondriac,

he was, as his biographer Reed Browning says, usually healthy (though he

had a recurring intestinal problem) and able to enjoy outdoor activity until

the last year of his life, when he was crippled by serious illness. He had the

vitality of a much younger man: ‘repose offered no attraction to an active

man who had never cultivated the arts of leisure and solitude’.

When a Whig ministry was formed in July 1765 under Lord Rockingham,

Newcastle (aged 72) returned to ofﬁce. Most of his Cabinet colleagues were

now several decades younger than him and he had been a power in the

land and a Secretary of State before the new prime minister (aged just 35)

had even been born. Newcastle became Lord Privy Seal, the post carrying

no ofﬁcial duties, but he was given special responsibility for ecclesiastical

affairs and patronage, dealing directly with the King on church appoint-

ments. He was restored to his position as Lord Lieutenant of Nottingham

and Steward of Sherwood Forest. He had hoped to be able to exercise a

behind-the-scenes inﬂuence over ‘our young ministers’ but, to his dismay,

quickly found himself ‘isolated from his … colleagues, his counsel unsought

and his sensibilities unrespected’. ‘He tried his hand at meddling in the

departments of others’, but his advice was spurned and he was ‘rebuked’

when he was not ignored. ‘Mingling with his colleagues became distaste-

ful’, says Browning, ‘and by November [1765], though still summoned to

all cabinet meetings, Newcastle attended only if foreign affairs, his ﬁeld of

special interest and competence, were to be discussed.’ In January 1766 he

offered to resign if his departure would clear the way for Pitt to join and

strengthen the ministry – privately hoping he would not have to deliver on

the promise – but Pitt refused to come in. In February and March 1766

he had one last triumph, playing a leading role in pushing the ministry’s

repeal of the Stamp Act through the House of Lords and also helping per-

suade a doubtful George III that the policy of conciliation of the American

colonies in the interests of trying to revive British trade was right. On the

fall of the Rockingham government Newcastle left ofﬁce for the last time

on 30 July 1766, again refusing the offer of a pension (of £4,000 – worth

over £350,000 a year today).

‘Seventy-three and ambition are ridiculous comrades’, wrote Horace Walpole

but even now Newcastle would not retire from politics and public life, though

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he knew he would not hold ofﬁce again. He spoke frequently in the Lords,

attacking the Chatham (Pitt) government. But his personal following largely

fell away as his followers (looking to their own futures) shifted to support

other leading ﬁgures and factions, back the government, or themselves

retired, and his electoral inﬂuence faded (he could help return only seven

MPs in the general election of 1768). Rockingham and other Whig leaders

did not seek or follow his advice, and he seemed even more isolated, a

ﬁgure from the past, looking at politics in an out-of-date way and failing to

see new, emerging problems. He pressed the idea of an alliance with the

Bedford faction on a reluctant and wary Rockingham (hosting key talks and

negotiations and trying to play the part of a mediator) but it did not come

off and in 1767 Bedford chose to swing behind the government.

Newcastle’s marriage as well as his political career had started in 1717 and

he was – unfashionably for the era – entirely faithful to his wife, Henrietta.

It was a childless marriage but close and happy. The Duchess suffered from

poor health and by the mid-1760s she was ‘a disabled old woman’, often

off at Bath, taking the waters, attended by a posse of quacks and doctors.

The Duke lavished considerable attention (and money and other forms of

help) on his wider family and relatives, not all of whom reciprocated this

affection – his heir and nephew, Lord Lincoln, became estranged and

clearly felt that his uncle was managing to live far too long. Newcastle had

inherited a fortune but squandered it by inept and reckless ﬁnancial man-

agement, lavish entertainment, a proﬂigate lifestyle, and heavy political

(electioneering) spending. But in a corrupt age he was strikingly honest

and graft-free and refused to enrich himself at the public’s expense. When

he inherited them, his estates were bringing in £32,000 a year (perhaps

£3.5 million today), but by the 1760s his income was down to about a

quarter of that ﬁgure. He had to sell land to fund staggeringly large debts

and when he died left debts of over £300,000 (£27 million pounds or more

in today’s money).

Age and ill health ﬁnally caught up with the Duke. He remained a polit-

ical obsessive to the end but his last appearance at a political meeting

was apparently in July 1767. In late 1767 he was seriously ill and seems

to have suffered a stroke from which he did not fully recover, with his

ability to walk and write limited and his memory impaired. He continued

his incessant correspondence with friends and other politicians, ﬁring off

‘letters of complaint and advice’ to his party leaders, who kept in touch

and visited him – but not for serious political purposes. Newcastle’s bio-

grapher says that being irrevocably out of politics made Newcastle’s last

year his unhappiest. He returned to his London house in the autumn of

1768, planning to be based there (close to the political action even if

only as an observer) through the winter. But he collapsed with what

was described as ‘a stroke of palsy’ and died shortly after, aged 75, on

17 November 1768.

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Earl of Bute (resigned 8 April 1763)

There are strong grounds for considering the Earl of Bute to be probably the

most unpopular prime minister and then former prime minister in British

history. Both during his brief ten-month premiership in 1762–63 and after-

wards in his political retirement, he was subject to a torrent of vicious,

spiteful and even obscene abuse, persecution and viliﬁcation from the press,

cartoonists, the public and his political enemies. He was perhaps the most

hated and reviled man in the country. He was denounced from the pulpit,

threatened with assassination, hung and burned in efﬁgy, and attacked by

the mob. His town house in London was frequently the target for attack,

and in 1768 (ﬁve years after he had resigned) rioters smashed the win-

dows of his wife’s room as she lay in bed. In the same year, as Bute set sail

from Dover to convalesce on the continent, he was threatened by a stone-

throwing mob. He was sometimes compelled to travel in disguise or incog-

nito. In the 1780s – 20 years after leaving ofﬁce – the ex-prime minister was

still receiving poison-pen letters and anonymous hate mail. It was not just

intense public hostility that forced him into political exile but also that

virtually all the other leading politicians came to regard him as politically

beyond the pale and persona non grata, rejecting him as an ally and blocking

any idea of his return to ofﬁce and inﬂuence.

Not that that he wanted a political come-back or to return to ofﬁce. Bute

was not suited for the stresses and strains of politics and the demands of

ministerial life. Shy, aloof and withdrawn – though more competent

than his enemies allowed – Bute was not in politics by nature, choice or

ambition but only out of duty to his friend the King. Almost as soon as he

became prime minister in May 1762 he began to talk about quitting ofﬁce.

He was too thin-skinned and too sensitive, unable to sleep, and his health

was shattered – by the end of his premiership he seemed physically

exhausted and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. After he left ofﬁce,

he spent a great deal of time between 1768 and 1771 abroad, in Italy and

France, trying to keep out of politics and recover from illness. Even long

into retirement, in 1778, a recurrence of press attacks – which he could

never be persuaded not to read or to ignore – could make him upset and

agitated, and trigger a serious bout of ill health.

Bute had a long time in which to contemplate his political misfortunes for

he was, as Peter Brown has pointed out, ‘the ﬁrst prime minister to survive his

resignation by a generation’. He was six weeks short of his ﬁftieth birthday

when he resigned as prime minister, and he lived for almost another 29 years,

dying at the age of 78 in 1792. ‘Every one of Bute’s predecessors, with the

exception of the Duke of Devonshire, had either died in harness or been old

men on retirement.’

Devonshire had died in early middle age after only

seven years of retirement. Bute lived long enough to see eight men succeed

him in the premiership, with three of them pre-deceasing him.

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Bute’s tremendous unpopularity was partly because of the way his Scot-

tishness was used against him and partly because of cack-handed policies

such as the strongly-opposed cider tax. What the political elite of the

day and his rivals for ofﬁce really disliked and distrusted about him was

his status as a royal favourite, which posed a major threat to the ruling

Whig oligarchy. His role as friend and mentor to the young George III lay

behind his meteoric rise to power. Suspicions of his continuing royal access

and ‘secret inﬂuence’ behind the scenes, as a power behind the throne,

a meddler and an intriguer, carried over after he had resigned as prime

minister.

For a few years George III seems to have kept his conﬁdence in Bute and

to have trusted and liked his favourite more than he did his next two prime

ministers, Grenville (1763–65) and Rockingham (1765–66). Relieved at

being out of ofﬁce, Bute wanted to retire completely from politics but prob-

ably hoped to keep in with the King and still have some general inﬂuence.

Several of Bute’s friends and protégés were ministers in Grenville’s gov-

ernment, he had great inﬂuence and patronage in Scotland (through his

brother, James Stuart Mackenzie, Lord Privy Seal in Scotland), and he

initially remained Keeper of the Privy Purse, a key post in the Royal House-

hold. The King continued to seek Bute’s advice, writing to his ‘Dear Friend’

asking for his views. Bute’s successors resented the real and imagined

machinations of the ‘minister behind the curtain’, and felt Bute’s covert

interference and inﬂuence were undermining them. They blamed and

scapegoated him for their problems. But it did not help Bute that not long

after recommending Grenville as his successor he was engaged in putting

out feelers to Pitt to see if he would replace Grenville and form a new

administration. Both Grenville and then Rockingham had to insist that

the King give commitments not to consult Bute on public business, and

Bute was pushed into the wilderness. He resigned his post as Privy Purse

in September 1763, was at one point virtually banished from London

for a while (more or less compelled to decamp to his country house

in Bedfordshire), and in 1765 Mackenzie was dismissed by Grenville from

his key Scottish post (though he was restored to it a year later).

As King George III grew in experience and conﬁdence, he looked less to

his old tutor and adviser. In June 1766 Bute claimed not to have seen the

King for a year and to be ‘ignorant to the last degree of what is going

forward, the papers are my only intelligence’.

In March 1766 he had

spoken and voted against repeal of the Stamp Act – the ﬁrst time he had

differed from the King on a political issue. When Pitt formed a govern-

ment in July 1766 (ﬁnding places for some of Bute’s former adherents

but leaving Bute himself out in the cold), Bute took offence and thought

he had been slighted. A letter of complaint he wrote to the King only

made things worse. It was obvious the old days of his royal friendship and

inﬂuential access were over. Any chance of a political role for Bute (except

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as a whipping-boy for his enemies) was now terminated. He never saw the

King again except in public and had no political communications with

him. Years later, in 1778, tentative negotiations to lure him out of retire-

ment and into an alliance with Chatham got nowhere: Bute was reluctant,

Chatham died, and there was uproar when the exchanges were made

public.

Bute kept a seat in the House of Lords, as a Scottish representative peer

until 1780 when he stood down on grounds of age (he was then 67). Three

of his sons sat as MPs in parliament, the eldest of them being created a

baron in 1776, the father and son therefore having the unusual distinction

of both being in the Lords at the same time. Even more unusual, Bute’s

wife was also a peeress in her own right (as Baronness Mountstuart of

Wortley).

One Bute biographer called her chapter on his retired life ‘The consol-

ations of botany’, but there were also the consolations of money. Bute was

not particularly wealthy in his own right but had married a rich heiress

(and it seems to have been a happy marriage) who inherited estates and a

personal fortune of over one million pounds (probably over £90 million

today), generating an income of £17,000 a year (£1.5 million in today’s

money). As one of the richest men in the country, with grand country

houses (including one, Highcliffe, he built in the 1770s near Christchurch,

Hampshire, on a site overlooking the sea, which became his favourite

residence), he has been described as living a life of ‘melancholy grandeur’

in his long retirement.

As he got older, he became more absorbed in his

private pursuits and increasingly withdrew from society. He was a noted

patron of science, literature and the arts and was an active and enlightened

patron of Scottish universities and colleges. In 1786 he donated his private

scientiﬁc library of 1,300 books to Marischal College, Aberdeen (where he

was Chancellor), and later gave money and telescopes to develop its observ-

atory. He had a magniﬁcent library at his house Luton Hoo, unfortunately

gutted by ﬁre in 1771 and collected scientiﬁc instruments. His real, life-

long, passion was for botany. He had helped to create Kew Gardens (and

remained its honorary director until 1772) and helped establish the Royal

Botanical Garden at Edinburgh. He built up a great collection of plants

and specimens and was a serious scholar of natural history. He produced

and published (at a cost of £10,000) for limited private circulation, a nine-

volume study, Botanical Tables Containing the Families of British Plants (1785),

with 654 hand-coloured plates. Another book, A Tabular Distribution of British

Plants, is often attributed to him.

Botany may have helped kill Bute for in November 1790, while reaching

for a plant he fell 28 feet down cliffs at Highcliffe and injured his ankle. It

was slow to heal and there were complications. The fall is believed to have

contributed to his death, in London, on 10 March 1792, at the age of 78,

though it was reported he had died of a ‘disorder in his bladder’.

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George Grenville (dismissed from ofﬁce 10 July 1765)

Grenville had been prime minister for two years and 85 days when he was

dismissed on 10 July 1765 by George III and replaced by the Marquess of

Rockingham. He was 52 years old, an able and self-conﬁdent ‘man of busi-

ness’, a capable parliamentarian, on top of the details of administration,

ﬁnance and legislation (‘public business … was his luxury and amusement’,

one contemporary noted, ‘an Act of Parliament was in itself entertaining to

him’), and had been for a quarter of a century at that stage a professional

politician whose life, says his modern biographer, ‘was devoted to politics,

everything else came secondary’.

He lived for a further ﬁve years after

leaving the premiership and was active in opposition politics but never

again held ministerial ofﬁce.

Grenville’s fall was sudden and he had nowhere to live when he left

Number 10. After what has been described as ‘a slightly frantic search’ he

bought a London town house in Bolton Street, Piccadilly (in the rush to

leave he left behind in Downing Street his turtle which subsequently died).

As a younger son Grenville had not been independently wealthy or proper-

tied when he went into politics, but various legacies, ofﬁcial salaries, land

purchases (including 35,000 acres in Florida) and shrewd stock market

deals and investments meant he became, says John Beckett, ‘a wealthy man

in his own right’. He was ‘active in both the land and money markets’

after 1765. According to Lawson, when he became prime minister in 1763

he had made ‘unprecedented demands’ of the King, ﬁrst for a pension of

£3,000 a year for himself when out of ofﬁce (equivalent to nearly £300,000

a year today), and second for the reversion of a tellership of the exchequer

for his ten-year old son – a sinecure bringing in a large fee income of

several thousand pounds each year (the Grenvilles did not have to wait

long, acquiring the post in 1764). The King agreed but commented on

Grenville’s ‘avarice’. Grenville so carefully built up and managed his

ﬁnances that he left £154,000 in trust for his children when he died (nearly

£15 million in today’s money).

Outside politics, when parliament was not sitting, Grenville usually escaped

to enjoy family life in the country at Wooton House in Buckinghamshire.

He had a close and happy marriage (his wife Elizabeth dying in December

1769), with seven surviving children ranging in age from 12 to 4 at the time

he left ofﬁce. His three sons all went into politics, the youngest, William,

born in 1759, later himself becoming prime minister.

Grenville’s premiership had been abruptly terminated largely because

of his poor relations with and estrangement from King George III, and the

King’s dislike and mistrust of his former prime minister was a big obstacle

in the way of any return to power. Grenville’s suspicions about the behind-

the-scenes inﬂuence of the King’s favourite, Lord Bute, had poisoned relations

with his monarch who was alienated and wearied by what he experienced

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as the high-handed, even offensive, verbose, boring and tedious style of a

PM he had not really wanted in the ﬁrst place. The King had indeed been

canvassing others and plotting to remove Grenville for some time before he

ﬁnally forced him out. Such was the King’s personal detestation and hatred

of Grenville that he is supposed to have declared he would rather see the

devil in his closet than his former prime minister. The suggestion is ‘he

would do all in his power to keep … Grenville from taking ofﬁce again’.

However, Lawson rejects the idea of a royal veto wrecking Grenville’s polit-

ical prospects after 1765, arguing it is an assumption made by later histor-

ians and not one held by 18th century contemporaries. Beckett and Thomas

argue that ‘royal antipathy’ meant a return to ofﬁce was never likely. But

Grenville himself did not admit to such a veto in his private papers. He

continued to play the political game energetically, and at different times a

return to ofﬁce seemed possible, and contemporary politicians and political

observers thought he might go back into government and perhaps even

become prime minister again. Grafton in 1767 appears to have believed

that the King would have put up with Grenville back ‘in a great ofﬁce’ if he

(Grafton) could thereby strengthen the ministry and remain in ofﬁce. To

Grenville himself, and to political rivals and allies, his exclusion from ofﬁce

and power did not at the time necessarily seem permanent. As Lawson puts

it, Grenville in the late 1770s ‘did not attend Westminster for the sake of

appearances or simply to relax in the role of elder statesman’. The ex-prime

minister was ‘a politician still interested in occupying the highest ofﬁces

of state’.

The backing and loyal support of a personal following or a sort of

personal party group was something Grenville had after, rather than before,

he was prime minister. Perhaps someone who was respected rather than

liked, Grenville had no seats at his disposal and little electoral inﬂuence to

help his followers, but actively directed strategy and parliamentary tactics.

It is estimated that over 70 MPs swung behind him when he left ofﬁce and

went into opposition. But his support steadily fell away or was chipped

away following parliamentary setbacks, and as the prospects of a return to

ofﬁce faded (the selection of Chatham rather than Grenville to succeed

Rockingham in 1766 was a major blow in that respect). His support

had perhaps been halved even before 19 of his MPs were defeated in the

1768 general election, though nine new recruits were gained, giving him a

following of 31 MPs in the new parliament.

Being in opposition was something Grenville had little experience

of, most of his career having been spent in government ofﬁce. One MP at

the time considered he did ‘not possess in any eminent degree opposition

talents’. However, his biographer Philip Lawson argues that opposition

‘proved no hardship’ to him, saying he had a real standing at Westminster,

an unrivalled knowledge of procedure, a stature in debate and could turn in

effective performances in the House. ‘Grenville’s position remained strong

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in the years 1765–70 for the simple reason that he was an effective leader

in the Commons at a time when ministries were built around leading ﬁgures

in the Lords.’

He did make blunders, losing heavily when he fought

unsuccessfully against the repeal of his ministry’s Stamp Tax (which had

provoked violent protests in the American colonies), and suffering a dam-

aging reverse when he tried to argue on legalistic constitutional grounds

against an order forbidding the export of grain (in 1766), which most MPs

accepted was a practical necessity to head off bread shortages and rioting.

There were successes, such as the opposition victory on a vote to reduce the

land tax in 1767.

Opposition divisions and disunity – sometimes exploited by the govern-

ment in a divide-and-rule manner – were a major problem. The Rockingham

group was larger than Grenville’s (and there was a third, Bedford, group),

and though they really needed to work together to make headway and

regain ofﬁce, co-operation was often difﬁcult, both on policy and personal

grounds. There was much mutual mistrust and resentment, Grenville did

not rate Rockingham as prime-ministerial material and would not agree

to serve under him. In turn Rockingham let it be known at one point that

he would not be part of a ministry including Grenville. There were, how-

ever, signs of a closer working relationship between the two ex-prime min-

isters in 1769–70 over the Wilkes case (Grenville opposed the expulsion of

Wilkes from the Commons as unconstitutional, and lost some of his own

supporters as a result), which energised the forces of the opposition and

contributed to the fall of the Grafton ministry.

Grenville had a signiﬁcant personal success in 1770, pushing through

against government opposition but with the support of independent MPs

a bill to reform the way the Commons handled disputed election cases

(removing the process from the full House and establishing a select com-

mittee of MPs chosen by lot to hear cases). It was testimony to Grenville’s

reputation, standing and prestige in the Commons.

Still a fully committed, busy and active politician and leader, with every-

thing to play for, Grenville then fell ill in the summer of 1770 and died

(apparently of a blood disorder) at his house in London aged just 58 on

13 November. His ‘party’ soon broke up, some joining North’s government,

others staying in opposition or drifting out of active politics. As an ex-prime

minister Grenville had been a force to be reckoned with, and at the time of

his death he showed no sign of quitting politics or fading away into quiet

retirement. To the end he remained a ﬁrst-rate and front-rank political ﬁgure.

William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham (resigned 14 October

1768)

Few former prime ministers have had so dramatic an exit as the Earl of

Chatham, collapsing in the House of Lords on 7 April 1778 in a ‘sudden ﬁt’

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as, ill and worn out, he made his last speech there – rather rambling, con-

fusing and incoherent – denouncing the mismanagement of the war with

America and the idea of acknowledging American independence. The scene

was immortalised in a famous painting by the American artist, John Single-

ton Copley. Chatham lingered for a month at his house at Hayes Place,

Bromley, in Kent, before dying, aged 69, on 11 May 1778. He received a

public funeral, his body lying in state at Westminster (drawing huge crowds)

before his burial in Westminster Abbey (he was the ﬁrst of eight prime min-

isters to be buried there). Yet such was the controversy and strong opinions

Chatham had aroused during his life and career, that the House of Lords

voted against attending the funeral (though Rockingham and other oppos-

ition peers did go), and (showing the King’s aversion to him) there was

Court pressure exerted to inﬂuence MPs and peers against going – the Speaker

did not attend and only one member of the government and around 20 MPs

were at the funeral.

Chatham had left ofﬁce nine and a half years earlier, his resignation as

prime minister being accepted on 14 October 1768. But for 18 months pre-

viously he had been prime minister in name only as, incapacitated by ill-

health and suffering a complete mental breakdown, he had withdrawn

from politics. There was talk of ‘dejection of spirits almost approaching to

insane melancholy’ and his wife was given power of attorney to act on his

behalf. His government had been in serious trouble even before his col-

lapse, with little sense of coherence, unity or direction, and a damaging mix-

ture of egoism, autocratic leadership and poor political management from

Chatham himself. The King had been reluctant to lose him and accepted his

resignation only with the greatest reluctance. Grafton, who had been in effec-

tive charge of the government in Chatham’s absence, now became prime

minister in name as well as in form. So embittered and disenchanted was

the King by his sense of Chatham letting him down and deserting him, that

he would never again contemplate offering him ofﬁce.

Although there were periods of intense political activity in Chatham’s

post-premiership – particularly in 1770–71 and again in 1775 – when he

displayed ‘his old brilliant style’ and energy, the years after 1768 have been

described overall as ‘tragic’: ‘twilight years of frustration and failure,

marked by growing political isolation, mental illness and physical decay’.

When not ‘debilitated by illness’, says Marie Peters, he was marooned in

‘fruitless opposition’.

Free from ofﬁce Chatham had recovered enough to appear at Court and

meet the King in July 1769 and resume political and parliamentary life later

that year. But his life-long chronic health problems continued: what was

usually described as ‘gout’ (covering a whole variety of ailments and prob-

lems in his limbs, stomach and bowels, and head), and serious – perhaps

hereditary – mental-health problems (manic-depressive or bipolar disorder,

according to modern diagnoses). He could sometimes put his physical

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inﬁrmities to political use, making dramatic Commons interventions while

swathed in bandages and hobbling on crutches. But his mental problems

would leave him a ‘shattered recluse’ for extended periods, as in 1767–68

and for two years in his retirement, 1775–77, when he came near to death.

Although there were occasional rumours and suggestions that Chatham

might return to ofﬁce after 1768, it must be doubted he would ever have

been physically and mentally robust enough for a prolonged and successful

stint back in government.

For a couple of years, 1772–74, Chatham withdrew from politics not

because of illness but simply out of political frustration and disillusionment

(North’s government being securely established, the various opposition

groups going in different directions, and his small personal following atro-

phying). He spent most of his time in this period on family and private

pursuits, busy ‘farming, hunting, and planting’, living mainly at the Burton

Pynsent estate in Somerset he had inherited from a benefactor. There can

be little doubt about his happy marriage to his wife Hester (made a peeress

in her own right in 1761), whose devoted care helped him through his

illnesses and who was also a political aide. In the early 1770s he seems

to have enjoyed playing the ‘old doting daddy’ to his ﬁve children (then

teenagers), all educated at home, his favourite, William (who became PM

himself ﬁve years after his father’s death), being carefully coached as

an orator and debater. Chatham presented himself in these years as ‘rich in

rural peace, [with] ne’er thought of pomp or gold’, even writing a poem in

which he described himself as with ‘Ambition cured, and an unpassion’d

mind;/A statesman without power, and without gall,/Hating no courtiers,

happier than them all;/Bow’d to no yoke, nor crouching for applause.’

The family ﬁnances were, however, usually in a hopeless state, Chatham

having extravagant tastes, liking to spend freely on building works, gardens

and farming, living constantly beyond his means and piling up debts.

An income of perhaps £7,000 a year in the 1770s (including a pension of

£3,000 a year that had been granted to him when he left ofﬁce in 1761)

was not large enough, and the family had frequently to be rescued and

bailed out by loans from friends and relatives. At his death parliament

voted £20,000 (roughly £1.7 million today) to clear his debts.

It has been suggested that Chatham felt at home in and was suited to the

opposition role he had to play after 1768, where he could try to parade and

protect his reputation as the great patriot, a man of independence and

integrity above faction, taking a sporadically active and critical role in par-

liament on big issues and an aggressive and uncooperative stance in nego-

tiations. Marie Peters, however, insists that 1770–71 marked his ‘last great

bid for power’ and that he seriously wanted ofﬁce in that period. He felt

betrayed by Grafton, and his attacks helped to weaken and bring down that

ministry. But the King turned to Lord North, not to the opposition. He

seized on and tried to exploit the controversies around Wilkes and the

Walpole to Shelburne 31

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10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston