Page 21 - History 2020

flattered. His ministry seemed perpetually on the point of breaking up; but he always

averted it. He weathered many storms, until 1742.

His fall ushered in a new age: the rise of the British Empire, the loss of America, and
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. War was the backcloth to this post-
Walpole world. Plumb sums up: “Time has not served him well. His use of patronage
and corruption, his worldliness and cynicism, are remembered in our text books; but
his capacity, his wisdom, his aspirations are frequently neglected. Even more
neglected is another aspect of his personality. None of our British prime ministers can

compare with Sir Robert Walpole in appreciation of the fine arts. He personally
supervised the building of Houghton, the design of the superb furniture by Kent, and
the magnificent collection of pictures afterwards sold to Catherine of Russia. To
questions of taste, he brought the same confident certainty of judgment that made
him a political master.”

Summing up, Walpole still divides opinion. Few perhaps are as extreme as biographer

(not of Walpole) Frank McLynn: “Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, was the most
despicable creature ever to have occupied the position of Prime Minister in this
country and that, given the moral turpitude of many of the recent incumbents at
No.10, is saying something. He famously stated that every man has his price and, in a
career of stupefying venality, set out to prove it. His attitude to money bordered on
the pathological. He was the avatar of corruption. It took the genius of Swift even to
suggest an approximation to his depravity. Almost singlehandedly Walpole turned the
Whig party into a byword for sleaze. So obsessed was he by money that he even

objected to ecclesiastical preferment of talented parsons. His line was that you should
only advance someone's career who you could use or manipulate.” [He was] “a
monster of despotism and depravity, a waste of space human being.”

A more balanced view comes in the most recent biography, by Edward Pearce (“The
Great Man: Sir Robert Walpole” 2007); he particularly commends a remark he made

to George II’s wife, Queen Caroline, in 1734: "Madam, there are 50,000 men slain this
year in Europe, and not one an Englishman."*

*It is perhaps not surprising that Walpole’s policy of peace does not impress Mr McLynn; his
approval of the Tory policy of aggressive imperial expansion is suggested by the title of his book on
the subject, “1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World”. Eight of his books are about
wars.

How did the Constitution change after Walpole?
When Walpole fell from power in 1742, it was widely expected that parliament
would dismantle his system of patronage by passing an Act forbidding MPs from