Edward Pearce - The great man: Sir Robert Walpole - scoundrel, genius, and Britains first Prime Minister

ABOUT THE BOOK

The year 1721 has many splendours: great houses built by William Kent, fine pictures and the fruits of commerce. But there are also thirteen public hanging days a year, drunkenness is endemic, organised crime rampages through the streets. And politics are ferocious. Only a generation earlier, The Pretender failed to take the Crown; the new King is cursed as a damned foreigner; Jamess followers the Jacobites conspire and are persecuted; the South Sea Bubble collapses. Robert Walpole, once imprisoned for financial chicanery, assumes political control and becomes Prime Minister. He personally detects a Jacobite plot, is dismissed in 1727 on the death of George I, recruits the new Kings clever wife, Caroline, and bounces cheerfully back. Coarse, corrupt and cynical, Walpole dominates King, Parliament and Government until 1742. This is Mr Worldywiseman, keeping England out of war for twenty years and setting up a stable and growing economy. All politics of a kind we can recognise today begin with Robert Walpole. And here, in Edward Pearces elegant book, he is brought vividly back to life.

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. 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 Healey (the authorised biography), Reform! (about the 1832 Act) and an edition of The Diaries of Charles Greville. He lives in North Yorkshire.

Printed and Published Books

Battestin, Martin with Ruth Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (Routledge, 1989)

Bennett, G. V., The Tory Crisis in Church and State: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Clarendon Press, 1975)

Black, Jeremy, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Duckworth, 1986)

The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Croom Helm, 1987)

Robert Walpole and the Nature of Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Macmillan, 1990)

Browning, Reed, The Duke of Newcastle (Yale University Press, 1975)

Burnet, Gilbert, History of His Own Times (Oxford University Press, 1833)

Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (George Bell, 1968)

Campbell Ross, Ian, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Cannon, John, ed., The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (Edward Arnold, 1981)

Carswell, John, The South Sea Bubble (Alan Sutton, 1993)

Colley, Linda, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 171460 (Cambridge University Press, 1982)

Britons: Forging the Nation 17071837 (Pimlico, 2003)

Colman, George, Dramatick Works, vol. II (T. Becket, 1777)

Connely, Willard, Sir Richard Steele (Jonathan Cape, 1934)

Connolly, S.J. ed., The Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford University Press, 2003)

Coxe, William, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, vols I and II (Cadell and Davies, 1798); vols III and IV (separate ordering) (Longman Hurst et al., 1816)

Dabydeen, David, Hogarth, Walpole and Commercial Britain (Hansib, 1987)

Dickinson, H. T., Bolingbroke (Constable, 1970)

Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (Hodder & Stoughton, 1973)

The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (St Martins Press, 1995)

Fielding, Henry, The History of the Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great (Everyman, 1932)

Foord, Archibald S., His Majestys Opposition 17141830 (Oxford University Press, 1964)

Freeman, William, The Incredible De Foe (Herbert Jenkins, 1950)

Fritz, Paul S., The English Ministers and Jacobitism Between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (University of Toronto Press, 1975)

Gerrard, Christine, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole (Clarendon Press, 1994)

Goldgar, Bertrand A., Walpole and the Wits (University of Nebraska Press, 1976)

Goubert, Pierre, The Course of French History (Routledge, 1988)

Graham, Walter, ed., The Letters of Joseph Addison (Clarendon Press, 1941)

Hamilton, Elizabeth, The Backstairs Dragon: A Life of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford (Hamish Hamilton, 1969)

Harris, Michael, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study of the Origins of the Modern English Press (Fairleigh Dickinson, 1987)

Hatton, Ragnhild, George I Elector and King (Thames & Hudson, 1978)

Hervey, John, Lord, Memoirs of the Reign of George II, vol. I (John Murray, 1848); vol. II, separate edition (Bickers, 1884)

Hill, B. W., The Growth of Parliamentary Parties 16891742 (George Allen & Unwin, 1976)

Sir Robert Walpole (Hamish Hamilton, 1989)

Holmes, Geoffrey, British Politics in the Age of Anne (Macmillan, 1967)

The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (Eyre Methuen, 1973)

The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain 16601722 (Longman, 1993)

and Speck, W. A. The Divided Society (Edward Arnold, 1967)

and Szechi, Daniel, The Age of Oligarchy 172283 (Longman, 1993)

Hoppit, Julian, A Land of Liberty?: England 16891727 (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Horn, David Bayne, Great Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century (Clarendon Press, 1967)

Hume, Robert D., Henry Fielding and the London Theatre 17281738 (Clarendon Press, 1988)

Hutton, Ronald, Charles II (Clarendon Press, 1989)

Kemp, Betty, Sir Robert Walpole (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976)

Kenyon, J. P., Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 16891720 (Cambridge University Press, 1977)

Kramnick, Isaac, Bolingbroke and His Circle (Harvard University Press, 1968)

Langford, Paul, The Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford University Press, 1975)

A Polite and Commercial People: England 17271783 (Guild Publishing/Oxford University Press, 1998)

Laprade, W. T., Public Opinion and Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Macmillan, 1936)

Lewis, Jeremy, Tobias Smollett (Jonathan Cape, 2003)

Macaulay, Lord, The History of England (Penguin, 1980)

Mack, Maynard, Alexander Pope: A Life (Yale University Press/Norton, 1985)

McLynn, Frank, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 1991)

Mitchison, Rosalind, Essays in Eighteenth-Century History: from the English History Review (Longman, 1966)

Nokes, David, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (Oxford University Press, 1985)

OGorman, Frank, Voters, Patrons and Partners (Clarendon Press, 1989)

The Long Eighteenth Century (Edward Arnold, 1997)

Olland, Richard, Pepys: A Biography (Oxford, 1974)

Owen, John B., The Rise of the Pelhams (Methuen, 1957)

Pares, Richard, War and Trade in the West Indies 17391763 (Oxford University Press, 1936)

Plumb, J. H., The Growth of Political Stability in England (Macmillan, 1957)

Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman, vol. I (Cresset, 1956); vol. II (Cresset, 1960)

Pope, Alexander, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davies (Oxford University Press, 1966, 1978)

Porrit, Edward and Annie, The Unreformed House of Commons, vol. I (Cambridge University Press, 1903)

Realey, Charles, The Early Opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, 172027