Robert Banks Jenkinson (7 June 1770 – 4 December 1828), 2nd Earl of Liverpool. The Prime Minister who led Britain from 1812 to 1827, taking in the phases of the Napoleonic Wars when the tide turned and Napoleon was defeated. Prior to this, he had served as Foreign Secretary under William Pitt The Younger and Henry Addington. He was first appointed as PM the day after his 42nd birthday.
Lord Liverpool was conservative and reactionary in his personal politics, though he was a skilled politician who held the disparate conservative and liberal wings of the Tory Party together through his long tenure. Initially opposed to the abolition of the slave trade, he later changed his position and advocated all European countries abolish it at the Congress of Vienna in 1814.
His government's more hands-off approach to the war in Europe can be partially credited with victory, and more so with the post-war settlement at the Congress. However, when he is remembered in Britain it is chiefly with distaste for his very authoritarian domestic policy, going so far as to suspend habeas corpus and unlawful gatherings at times in the face of Radical and Luddite activity. This went so far as to make him and his cabinet the targets for (unsuccessful) assassination in the 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy. His policies were intensified after the enormously scandalous Peterloo Massacre of 1819, when cavalry charged a peaceful crowd protesting for parliamentary reform. The reaction against Liverpool is arguably one of the major causes of the Chartist movement.
Early in his ministry, the UK and the US fought their second (and last) war, the War of 1812, but no one remembers this. Except Canadians.
Lord Liverpool was also one-eighth Indian (his great-grandmother being from India), therefore making him a dubious candidate for Britain's first ethnic minority PM, as he held office fifty years before Benjamin Disraeli. For 200 years he was the only Prime Minister to marry while in office, until Boris Johnson did the same in 2021.
No subsequent Prime Minister has exceeded the fifteen straight years in office served by Lord Liverpool. The next-longest term was the combined three stints, totaling thirteen years, of Lord Salisbury (1885–86, 1886–92, and 1895–1902), and the next-longest unbroken term was the eleven years served by Margaret Thatcher (1979–90). Also, only three PMs since Liverpool have been appointed as such before their 44th birthday: Tony Blair in 1997, David Cameron in 2010 and Rishi Sunak in 2022.
In fiction:
- Lord Liverpool appears as both Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
