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

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minister without portfolio from January 1805, but playing only a limited

role.

In his sixties and in poor and worsening health, he had been thinking

of retirement for some time, and Pitt’s death in January 1806 and the dis-

solution of his government would have provided a good moment ﬁnally

to bow out. In that year he endured an emergency operation to remove

kidney stones, stoically going under the surgeon’s knife without anaes-

thetic. But a sense of duty to the King and the agreement of the leading

Pittites to unite under his nominal leadership prevented him from quitting

the scene.

His second government was starting to fall apart with Cabinet tensions,

plots and inﬁghting (two ministers, Canning and Castlereagh, even fought

a duel) when Portland was suddenly stricken by an apoplectic seizure on

11 August 1809; he made a partial recovery after this stroke but his retire-

ment was now inevitable and he tendered his resignation on 6 September,

formally staying in ofﬁce until his successor, Spencer Perceval, took over on

4 October. Portland had agreed to remain in the Cabinet, without port-

folio, but only 26 days later, on 30 October 1809, he died at Bulstrode, his

country house, at the age of 71, after undergoing an operation to remove a

large kidney stone. He had a private burial at St Marylebone Church in

London. He had never been as rich as other grandees and often had serious

ﬁnancial problems, leaving debts of over £500,000 at his death (equivalent

to around £20 million today).

Spencer Perceval (assassinated 11 May 1812)

Spencer Perceval is the only British prime minister to have been assass-

inated: shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons on 11 May 1812.

He was 49 years old and had been prime minister for just two years and

221 days. His assassin, John Bellingham, was a deranged bankrupt merchant

consumed by a grudge against the British government, which he felt had

not helped him or compensated him after he had been imprisoned in

Russia. Bellingham, who was hanged a week after the murder, claimed at

his trial that he had not been speciﬁcally planning to shoot Perceval but

would have shot Lord Granville Leveson Gower, the former ambassador to

St Petersburg, if he had the chance.

Perceval had been seen in 1809 as a compromise ﬁgure and perhaps a

stopgap prime minister, a steady plodder, known for his strong conservative/

reactionary views, fervent evangelicalism and personal integrity. Like his

patron William Pitt he died virtually penniless and stood out for his refusal

to enrich himself from the public purse. His government had faced daunt-

ing challenges and problems, above all the war with Napoleon, and it had

not been expected to last long. But its fortunes had improved, and Perceval

himself had grown in ofﬁce, had been determined and resilient, had come

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to exercise a ﬁrm control over the Commons and the Cabinet, was polit-

ically secure, and was cut down at the height of his powers when he could

have reasonably expected several more years in government.

The assassination panicked the authorities and was greeted by mob

disturbances in London and by bonﬁres and celebrating crowds in econ-

omically hard-pressed towns in the Midlands. It was thought the govern-

ment might collapse, but after a period of uncertainty Lord Liverpool emerged

as the new prime minister and Tory rule continued for 15 more years.

Perceval’s family refused the offer of a public funeral in Westminster

Abbey and he was buried in the family vault at Charlton, Kent. Parlia-

ment provided for his large family: his widow, Jane Perceval, was voted

a pension of £2,000 a year (she later remarried and lived until 1844)

and a grant of £50,000 was made for the support of the 12 Perceval

children.

Lord Liverpool (left ofﬁce 9 April 1827)

Liverpool spent 15 years as prime minister (1812–27), the third longest-

serving prime minister, behind Pitt the Younger and Walpole. He had

assumed that ofﬁce one day after his 42nd birthday and there has not been

a younger prime minister since. The long years in government – encom-

passing the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, post-war economic prob-

lems and unrest, and the more prosperous and stable 1820s – had been

turbulent and stressful and had taken their toll on Liverpool. An effective

administrator and an emollient political manager, he was always highly-

strung, anxious, irritable and temperamental, and was suffering from increas-

ingly poor health in the second half of his premiership (thrombophlebitis

in his legs and a developing heart condition). Norman Gash argued ‘after

ﬁfteen years his administration was more popular in the country, more

ﬁrmly entrenched in the good opinion of Parliament and the Crown, than

at any previous time. It came to an end not because it lost the favour of the

King or of the legislature but because the Prime Minister’s health made

it impossible for him to serve any longer.’

‘Like Pitt, Fox, and Canning’,

noted Sir Charles Petrie, ‘he was to die at an age when a later generation of

politicians considered themselves still in the prime of life.’

On a number of occasions it had looked as if Liverpool might have quit

ofﬁce: after the death of his ﬁrst wife in 1821, worried by his health

in 1824, and when a Catholic emancipation measure was nearly carried in

1825. At the end of 1826 he told his Chancellor of the Exchequer that

he was thinking of resigning before it was too late for him to enjoy the

pleasures of retirement, though that mood did not seem to last long. An

unsociable man, with hardly any interests outside politics, Liverpool would

not have known what to do with himself once off the ministerial treadmill.

‘Ld. Liverpool could not exist out of ofﬁce’, one of his ministers had said;

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‘he has no habits of any but ofﬁcial employment’, said another, ‘and

I cannot imagine him being happy in retirement’.

Ministers were very conscious it would be difﬁcult to replace him. Factional,

policy and ideological tensions were building up in the last years of the

government (along liberal Tory versus ‘ultra’ lines), complicated by per-

sonal rivalries and jealousies. The prime minister felt the end of his min-

istry was not far off, likely to be triggered by divisions over Catholic

emancipation. A ‘blow up’ was on the cards once the unifying ﬁgure of

Liverpool left the scene.

That came suddenly on 17 February 1827 when

he suffered a massive stroke and was for a while paralysed down one side

and incapable of speech. There was no immediate resignation but the polit-

ical world (where, it was noted, ‘there was not only no grief, but not even

a decent pensiveness’ about Liverpool the man

) was consumed by specu-

lation and by manoeuvring for the succession. It was soon obvious there

was no hope of a recovery and Liverpool formally left ofﬁce on 9 April

1827 (unable to tender any advice as to who should succeed him).

He lingered for 20 more months, a wreck of a man, suffering another

stroke in July 1827, ‘a mental and physical shadow forgotten by the world’

and unable to play any part in politics, before dying at the age of 58 after a

third stroke on 4 December 1828. By then Canning, his immediate succes-

sor, had died, Goderich’s government had ignominiously collapsed, and

Wellington was struggling with Tory divisions. There was to be no strong,

stable and successful Tory government after Liverpool’s departure from

ofﬁce until 1841.

Circumstances meant that Liverpool had no chance of playing an elder

statesman role, helping out his Tory successors in the late-1820s, but it

is likely that the party splits and the problems they faced would have

been too much for them anyway. Almost as soon as he was off the stage

Liverpool seemed a ﬁgure from the past, to belong to an old and disappear-

ing political world. Disraeli later (wrongly) wrote him off as a reactionary

and mediocre ﬁgure. But those who served with him knew what they had

lost. Five future prime ministers served under Liverpool, and the ideas and

approach of Peel, his ‘greatest pupil’, and the work of Peel’s government in

the 1840s, were greatly inﬂuenced and shaped by his experiences under

Liverpool.

George Canning (died in ofﬁce 8 August 1827)

Canning died in ofﬁce, aged 57, in 1827 after only four months (119 days)

as prime minister, making him the shortest-serving prime minister in

British history. A brilliant, ambitious, controversial and divisive ﬁgure,

his career had had a snakes-and-ladders quality and he might well have

reached Number 10 much earlier but for the mistrust he aroused. His

historical reputation rests more on his achievements as one of the great

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Foreign Secretaries rather than for his ill-starred and abruptly truncated

premiership (April–August 1827).

Canning took on the premiership already bowed down by stress, over-

work and serious illness. His health had been progressively deteriorating

through the 1820s, with disabling attacks of gout, bowel and chest pains,

and fevers. He caught a severe chill at a royal funeral in January 1827 from

which he never fully recovered and many observers during his premiership

were struck by how ill he looked, as if he was on his last legs. By the

summer he was worse and at his last meeting with the King, on 30 July,

Canning said he did not know what was wrong with him but he was ill all

over. He died from what his doctors said was inﬂammation of the liver and

lungs, at Chiswick, on 8 August, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

It is a matter of speculation what might have happened had Canning

lived longer. His government had been an uneasy and shaky-looking coali-

tion of liberal Tories and moderate Whigs, formed after Liverpool’s stroke

and resignation. The Tory party had split, and half the old Cabinet and

many other ministers had walked out and refused to serve under Canning

because of his commitment to Catholic emancipation. He faced strong

opposition from the main body of Whigs under Grey. The big issue of par-

liamentary reform, which Canning opposed, loomed ahead. Goderich, his

successor, could not ﬁll Canning’s shoes and within a few months of his

death the coalition fell apart and the Tories came back in for a few more

years under Wellington. In the years ahead the Canningites broke up and

ended up in different places on the political spectrum – some with the

Whigs, others back with the Tories.

Canning’s widow was made a Viscountess in her own right in 1828, and

an annual pension of £3,000 was granted to his family. His youngest son,

to whom the peerage passed, later had a political career, serving in minor

ministerial posts and ﬁnally becoming governor-general of India (1856–62).

Lord Goderich (resigned 8 January 1828)

Frederick Robinson, Viscount Goderich, found himself an ex-prime min-

ister at the age of just 45, ignominiously and humiliatingly bundled out of

ofﬁce on 8 January 1828 after only 130 days, his government, uniquely,

never even facing parliament in that time. Goderich was an experienced

minister, an amiable and popular parliamentarian, a ﬂexible and moderate

liberal-conservative, and a seemingly acceptable compromise ﬁgure after

Canning’s death. But he was undermined by the absence of consistent

royal support and a stable base of party support, and by Cabinet feuding

and inﬁghting, all of which cruelly exposed his limitations. He lacked the

strength of personality and the toughness to impose himself on events

and to lead a government. In the end he was effectively dismissed by the

King and, breaking down in tears at his ﬁnal audience, had to borrow the

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monarch’s handkerchief. He quickly rebuilt his career, however, continuing to

be active in frontbench politics for 20 more years and holding ministerial

ofﬁce for over eight years after his disastrous stint in Number 10.

On top of his political problems Goderich’s grip on power had been

weakened by personal problems. That his wife, whom he had married in

1816, was an heiress might have been one of her attractions to a man who,

as a peer’s younger son, lacked any substantial resources of his own

(though he was to inherit £50,000 when his mother died in 1830). They

became a devoted couple, though Lady Sarah Goderich was to prove, it has

been argued, ‘a very serious handicap’ to him. She has been described

as being ‘demanding, neurotic and hypochondrial’. She certainly seems

to have suffered mental illness and depression and at times to have been, as

one of Goderich’s colleagues put it, ‘all but crazy’. The deaths of the poor

woman’s ﬁrst two children (an 11-year old daughter dying in 1826, only

ten months before Goderich became PM) and then severe post-natal

depression following on the birth of a son who was born in Downing Street

in October 1827 (who grew up to have a long and distinguished political

career of his own as a Liberal Cabinet minister), doubtless explains much.

It was all too much for him and, exhausted, stressed and depressed by

his political and personal tribulations, Lord Goderich left ofﬁce a broken

man.

Escape from Number 10 seems, within a short while, to have restored the

health and spirits of both Lord and Lady Goderich. Within a week of his

departure from ofﬁce, Goderich was being described as ‘quite another

man’, one who ‘sleeps at night now, and laughs and talks as usual’. By May

1828 he was reported as looking ‘happier and fatter than when Prime

Minister’. Although she had some relapses over the next couple of years,

Lady Sarah seems to have soon started leading ‘a much more normal and

useful life’, according to Goderich’s biographer. She once again took a

strong interest in her husband’s career and became ‘determined that he

should not be completely elbowed out of political life’. In her mid-thirties

when Goderich was premier and, in her delusions, convinced she was

dying, she eventually outlived her husband by eight years, dying aged 74 in

1867.

Goderich marked time for a couple of years. He had spent 15 years as

a government minister before becoming prime minister and would have

been willing to accept ministerial ofﬁce in the Duke of Wellington’s gov-

ernment (1828–30), but his High Tory successor did not offer him a post.

He spoke regularly in the Lords and thought he could establish himself as

leader of the Canningites after Huskisson and others had resigned from

Wellington’s Cabinet, but they had taken his measure and would not

accept him as their leader.

But Goderich was by no means politically ﬁnished. He was to hold four

ministerial positions at different times between 1830 and 1846 – Secretary

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of State for War and Colonies (1830–33), Lord Privy Seal (1833–34),

President of the Board of Trade (1841–43) and President of the Board of

Control for India (1843–46) – serving in the Cabinets of a Whig prime min-

ister (Grey) and a Conservative (Peel). Peter Jupp argued ‘the major reason

for his longevity as a front-bencher … was that Goderich was an experi-

enced, but comparatively young, member of the House of Lords, whose

moderate liberalism held the centre ground in politics. This made him a

useful colleague to both whigs and tories in their attempts to create bal-

anced and sustainable ministries.’ He was regarded, says his biographer

W.D. Jones, as ‘a useful and experienced statesman and politician’, seen by

a contemporary politician, Palmerston, as not up to the topmost job but all

the same a congenial personality: ‘an excellent fellow’, ‘an able head of a

department’ and ‘a most agreeable colleague’. Goderich, as Dick Leonard

puts it, ‘was valued as a Cabinet colleague as somebody who was conscien-

tious, reliable and easy to deal with’. One of the great political survivors,

he was over his long career ‘successively, though seldom unequivocally,

a Pittite, a Tory, a Canningite, a Whig, a Stanleyite, a Conservative, and a

Peelite’. The ﬂuidity of the party system helped him, but ‘though party

labels held no charm for [him]’, says his biographer, ‘no one was a more

loyal member of a Cabinet’, ready to compromise his views and take on dif-

ferent jobs. A more cutting verdict was the comment of Lord Crewe that

Goderich’s ‘political convictions were limited to those announced by the

diverse governments of which he was a member’.

He supported Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and in July 1830, admit-

ting he was ‘not a theoretical reformer’, he came out in support of ‘gradual

and practical’ franchise reform, an announcement well-timed to build

bridges with the Whigs who came into power that November. Goderich

seems to have had a sense of his status and of what was due to him as a

former prime minister, declining Grey’s offers of the Board of Trade and

the Mastership of the Mint, and holding out for appointment as a Secretary

of State, taking the Colonial Ofﬁce. He did not ‘lead a section of Parlia-

ment, nor did he command many votes in either House’, but the Whigs

had been so long out of ofﬁce that Goderich’s ‘business-like habits’ and

‘knowledge of ofﬁcial life’ were attractive assets. Michael Fry argues, how-

ever, that Goderich was ‘little trusted in this unfamiliar company’. Although

he wanted a major ‘ofﬁce of business’ like the Home Ofﬁce, a reluctant and

protesting Goderich was forced by Grey in March 1833 to give up the

Colonial Ofﬁce and become Lord Privy Seal. As a consolation prize he was

given a step-up in the peerage and became the Earl of Ripon, but was not

molliﬁed as he had wanted to become a Knight of the Garter when the

next vacancy occurred in that exclusive Order.

One of the reasons he was unhappy about being reshufﬂed out of the

Colonial Ofﬁce was he had been working hard there to develop a plan

to abolish slavery in the British empire and – sensitive about his public

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character after the debacle of his premiership – feared accusations of polit-

ical cowardice, indecisiveness and weakness, of seeming to run away from

difﬁcult issues. Freeing the slaves greatly boosted the political reputation

and credit of his successor, Stanley, and Ripon (as we shall now call him)

broke down twice when introducing the Emancipation Bill in the Lords

in June 1833.

Over the next year there was a parting of the ways as Ripon grew dis-

enchanted with Grey’s repeated slights and rebuffs. In January 1834 he

refused to attend Cabinet meetings in protest at Grey’s failure to give him a

better post, having been passed over for the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland

and the Board of Trade. The prime minister’s promise of a more ‘efﬁcient

ofﬁce’ in the future assuaged him for a while but Ripon was moving away

from the Whigs and in May 1834 he resigned from the government, along

with Stanley and two other ministers, in opposition to Irish Church reform.

For the next two years he was an ally of Stanley in the small clique of the

so-called ‘Derby Dilly’, out of ofﬁce and behaving, says Jones, ‘like an inde-

pendent statesman with a strong bent towards moderate Conservatism’,

and by the end of 1836 was back within the Conservative Party fold.

The 1830s were a period of domestic happiness and tranquillity for

Ripon. His wife was now largely recovered from her illnesses, real and

imaginary. In 1834 a ﬁre destroyed Nocton Hall, their country house

in Lincolnshire, but they had it rebuilt. Their political and social life in

London centred on their houses in Carlton Gardens and Putney Heath.

Had Peel succeeded in forming a government in 1839, Ripon would

have been in the Cabinet. In 1840–41 he was active in the House of Lords,

criticising the Melbourne government’s economic policies. When the Con-

servatives ﬁnally returned to ofﬁce in 1841, he became President of

the Board of Trade – a post he had previously held 20 years before.

The young and ambitious William Gladstone was his junior minister (the

Vice-President), and their relations were somewhat uneasy. Peel had told

Gladstone that Ripon was a ‘master of the craft’ on economic affairs, but

Gladstone liked later to say that in three or four weeks he knew enough to

know that his ministerial superior ‘knew nothing’ about economics. Ripon

(now entering his sixties) should not be written off, though he operated

largely at the policy-making level, according to Jones, and left routine work

and details to others. He played a role in and made a contribution to

the important commercial policies of the government in 1841–42 – the

revision of the Corn Laws, the reintroduction of income tax, the Customs

Bill and tariff revisions, and the pursuit of trade treaties – handling the

relevant legislation in the Lords. By 1843, however, Ripon’s ill health was

such that Gladstone was in effective command of the department.

In May 1843 Ripon was moved to his ﬁnal post, President of the Board

of Control, in charge of Indian affairs. Lack of experience, interest in and

knowledge of India meant he made little mark in his three years in this

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post. He continued to be the chief government spokesman in the Lords

on economic affairs, taking charge there of the legislation to abolish the

Corn Laws in 1846.

By 1846 Ripon (aged 64) was a ‘tired, prematurely aged, and sick old

man’. The defeat of Peel’s government in June of that year ended his min-

isterial career. He made his last speech in the Lords a year later, in May

1847. Lady Ripon fell seriously ill in 1848 and the anxious Ripon did not

even appear in the Lords’ voting lobbies that year. But when she recovered

in 1849, he returned to the political fray for a while as an active Peelite.

By 1851 he had faded from the political scene. He apparently considered

himself a supporter of the Peelite-Whig coalition formed by Lord Aberdeen

in 1852 rather than of Derby’s Conservatives, but he now played no sig-

niﬁcant part in politics. His son’s political career started in 1852, with his

election as a Liberal MP; he went on to serve in every Liberal government

between 1861 and 1908, to become the ﬁrst Marquess of Ripon, and to be

awarded the Order of the Garter his father had coveted. Although a former

prime minister who enjoyed good relations with other party and parlia-

mentary leaders, the Earl of Ripon was not looked to as an elder statesman

by the Palace, or trusted by Victoria and Albert, as an adviser during the

various ministerial crises of the 1850s.

Ripon’s health was poor for the last few years of his life. His son noted in

1855 that ‘my father is being greatly injured by a variety of doctors pulling

different ways’. There were signs of senility and of failing mental powers.

He died, aged 76, on 28 January 1859 at his house in Putney, having fallen

ill with a pulmonary disorder and then contracting what was described as

‘inﬂuenza’. He was buried at Nocton Hall in Lincolnshire. He had been a

hopeless premier – Huskisson once told Gladstone that Goderich ‘would

not do’ as prime minister because ‘he had not “devil” enough’.

He was a

solid, hard-working, pragmatic and competent minister and administrator.

He was someone who was not shipwrecked by his failures in Number 10,

and while there were no great achievements in his political ‘afterlife’, he

still found a useful role to play as an ex-prime minister.

Duke of Wellington (resigned 16 November 1830)

Wellington was famously indifferent to public opinion, which may have

been just as well given the swings in his popularity after he left the pre-

miership in 1830. For a few years, during the reform crisis of 1831–32, he

was a ‘bogy to the mob’, rampaging crowds twice smashing the windows of

Apsley House, his London home, which Wellington was sure they intended

to destroy, and on one occasion the mob had to be seen off by blunder-

buss-ﬁring servants. A large and threatening crowd followed him around

the city, hooting, throwing stones and trying to pull him off his horse. The

Duke always maintained his cool and imperturbable pose but when there

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were rumours he was in danger of assassination he took to carrying a brace

of pistols beside him in his carriage, with an armed servant on the box. On

a journey through Kent a volunteer escort riding alongside him carrying

pistols and horsewhips provided security. Yet within a year or two this tide

of unpopularity seems to have passed and the Duke’s unique status as a

national icon was restored. It was not so much ‘popularity’ as ‘reverence’,

noted one contemporary. His public appearances were now greeted enthu-

siastically: crowds would cheer and wave handkerchiefs to salute the great

man; hats would be doffed as he passed by ‘as if he had been a king’. The

Duke normally purported not to notice the acclaim but, if a crowd outside

his house began to cheer him, he liked sometimes ironically to raise his hat

and gesture towards the iron shutters he had had ﬁxed to his windows. At

his death in 1852 one and a half million people lined the route to pay their

respects at what has been called ‘probably the most ornate and spectacular

funeral ever seen in England’.

When he left ofﬁce, aged 61, on 16 November 1830, Wellington had

been prime minister for just two years and ten months (since January

1828). The victor of Waterloo was a great soldier but did not have the per-

sonality or political skills to be a success in Number 10, though his govern-

ment carried Catholic Emancipation. Tired, frustrated and disillusioned,

regretting having become prime minister in the ﬁrst place, he had said he

was anxious to quit ofﬁce a year before he did so, and at one point had to

be talked out of throwing in the towel by resigning and making way for

Robert Peel. With unhappy, divided and resentful Tories behind him the

end came after he made a deﬁant and provocative anti-parliamentary

reform speech that played into the Whig opposition’s hands and was fol-

lowed by defeat on a vote on the civil list that showed the government had

lost control of the Commons.

Although a few months afterwards he was blaming Peel for persuading

him to resign and claiming he regretted having done so, Wellington was

probably not sorry to be released from his difﬁculties. He seemed to enjoy

his freedom and the pleasures of reading, riding, country life and the com-

pany of friends. Time did not hang upon his hands and he was reported

to be ‘enjoying his idleness’. A week after leaving ofﬁce he went to

Hampshire, where he was Lord-Lieutenant, to put some backbone into

the local gentry and magistrates, organise the militia, and lead the rapid

putting-down of the ‘Captain Swing’ disturbances, rioting and unrest in the

county. He was less comfortable or sure about what to do, however, in the

unfamiliar role of an opposition politician. He would not retire into private

life, but said he would remain by position and by duty a public man ‘so

long as life and intellect last’. He saw himself as a servant of crown and

country and, while it was important to try to keep the party together, he

would not lead what he saw as ‘factious opposition’ to the King’s ministers.

He would censure and oppose when necessary, but equally would support

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and assist the government’s measures if he thought it right to do so.

This stance often left the more partisan Tory ‘Ultras’, many of whom felt

he had betrayed them over Catholic Emancipation, restlessly chafﬁng at

the bit, and led Wellington himself to undertake some abrupt political

somersaults.

Only ﬁve months after he had lost ofﬁce Wellington’s wife, Kitty, died

in April 1831. Although they had lately been closer than ever before, the

marriage had not been happy or successful. Wellington had long had a

reputation as a ladies’ man and was supposed to have had many affairs. He

was devastated by the death in 1834 of Mrs Harriet Arbuthnot, who had

been a particularly intimate friend and companion (and, many thought,

his mistress). (The Duke helped her widower, Charles Arbuthnot, through a

nervous breakdown and then gave him a home in his own house for the

rest of his life, where he became a friend, adviser and aide.) A number of

young women tried hard to become the second Duchess of Wellington but,

while the Duke enjoyed his ﬂirtations, none succeeded. One competitor,

who pursued him for seven years, was Mary Anne Jervis, over 40 years

younger than him, and called ‘the Syren’ because of her beautiful singing

voice. Then there was the curious relationship with Miss Anna Maria

Jenkins, an intense religious evangelist and do-gooder, to whom he wrote

hundreds of letters over a 17-year period – his inability or unwillingness to

shake her off indicating something of the old man’s loneliness and his par-

tiality for the company of young, attractive women. Lady Georgiana Fane

took compromising letters from the Duke to her lawyers, who advised that

she had grounds to sue for breach of promise (no case was brought). In

1847 the 32-year old banking-heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts proposed

marriage to the 77-year old Duke, an offer he declined on the grounds that

she should not throw herself away on a man old enough to be her grand-

father; they remained close and affectionate friends until he died. The

British public saw only the public image of the legendary and aloof soldier-

statesman, and these strange and colourful adventures were not widely

known at the time.

Asked what was the best test of a great general, Wellington once answered:

‘To know when to retreat and to dare to do it.’ That was a good description

of his political stance too in the years after his premiership for, while

he may have often seemed to be an ‘ultra-tory resister’, he was essen-

tially a pragmatic conservative-traditionalist rather than a die-hard or die-

in-the-last-ditch reactionary. His language about the Whigs’ parliamentary

reform bill was vehement and alarmist: it was ‘an evil’ that would mean

the overthrow of the whole constitution and the established order, it would

lead to revolution, ‘terror’, even ‘civil war’, ‘the people are rotten to the

core … [and] are gone mad’. But faced with political pressure for reform,

resolute ministers and the King’s support for a reform measure, Wellington

made a political retreat from resisting the bill to the utmost to accepting

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10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston