Lord Liverpool 1770-1828
Lord Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, was Prime Minister from 1812 to 1827. If this seems a lengthy period by modern standards as one of his biographers Norman Gash has noted, before the Great Reform Act of 1832 being removed from Office by a General Election was not one of the central things a Prime Minister had to worry about. Rather maintaining the confidence of the monarch was more important.
Liverpool’s action in attempting to frustrate the efforts of the early working class movement to organise were considerable. He frustrated the direct action of the Luddites with the use of the gallows. In 1819 he presided over the Peterloo Massacre and then introduced the Six Acts to block efforts towards political democracy. Finally in 1825 he produced the Combination Acts to effectively make trade union organisation illegal.
EP Thompson has several references to Liverpool in the Making of the English Working Class.
He noted that:
Cobbett had taught the weavers of upland Lancashire to look for Satan not in the ale-houses of a rival village but in ‘the Thing’ and Old Corruption. It was such a swift identification of Apollyon with Lord Liverpool and Oliver the Spy that led the weavers to Peterloo
Thompson goes on to comment that Liverpool refused to get involved in attempts to stop the execution of the French General Ney in the Waterloo period even though under the protocols applying at the time this was quite likely to have been possible
‘One can never feel that the King is secure upon his throne till he has dared to spill traitors blood’ Lord Liverpool himself had written when refusing to intercede for the life of Marshal Ney
Finally and perhaps most damning Thompson records Liverpool’s backing for the Magistrates at Peterloo
Lord Liverpool declared that the action of the Manchester magistrates was ‘substantially right’ although it was not altogether ‘prudent’. There remained no alternative but to support them
In the 200th anniversary year of Peterloo there is a very good case for seeing Lord Liverpool as the worst Prime Minister ever.
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