(The contents of letters which appeared on
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The Carlow Borough
Members Of Parliament
 Frederick John Robinson, 1st Earl of Ripon.
(1782-1859)
From
London 30.3.1835 to Lady Agar, Georgina House,
Cheltenham.
PC, FRS,
Governor of the Charter House, Recorder of
Lincoln. A lord of the Treasury 1812, Chancellor
of the Exchequer 1823, Secretary of State for
the Colonial Department 1827 and 1830, Prime
Minister 1827-8, Lord Privy Seal 1833-4. Created
Viscount Goderich 1827. Seats: Studley Royal,
near Ripon, Yorks. & Nocton Hall, Lincoln.
MP for
Carlow Borough, Ireland 1806-7 & for Ripon,
Yorkshire 1807-27.
He held
the privilege of free franking at this time as
an English peer.
Robinson, Frederick
John, first Viscount Goderich and first earl of
Ripon (1782–1859), prime minister, was born on 1
November 1782 at Newby Hall, Yorkshire, the
second of three children of Thomas Robinson,
second Baron Grantham (1738–1786), diplomatist
and MP, and his wife, Lady Mary Jemima Grey
Yorke (1756–1830), daughter and coheir of Philip
Yorke, the second earl of Hardwicke. As his
father died when he was only three he was
brought up by his mother, principally at
Grantham House in Putney, which she inherited
from her husband together with the income from a
£100,000 trust fund. Later, in 1797, she
inherited a half-share in her mother's
properties.
Robinson's education was of an entirely
conventional kind for one born into two
substantial landed families: a preparatory
school at Sunbury-on-Thames, followed by Harrow
School (1796–9), St John's College, Cambridge
(1799–1802), where he graduated MA, and
Lincoln's Inn (1802–9). The evidence indicates
that he was a diligent and accomplished
student—he won the Sir William Browne medal for
the best Latin ode at Cambridge in 1801—but his
own memory of Cambridge suggests that he
regarded meeting ‘distinguished men’ as being
just as important as scholarship. He was never
called to the bar.
Pittite politician
It was almost
inevitable that Robinson would gravitate towards
politics. Being a younger son of no independent
means and little enthusiasm for the law, he had
few other ways of obtaining an income. In
addition, his mother's family—the
Yorkes—regained a powerful political position
when the third earl of Hardwicke became lord
lieutenant of Ireland in 1801 as a member of
Addington's government. Hardwicke was therefore
responsible for his entry into politics by
making him his private secretary at Dublin
Castle (1804–6) and for negotiating his return
to parliament as member for the borough of
Carlow at the 1806 general election. As the
patron of Carlow offered terms of £3000 for the
duration of the parliament or £2000 down and
£500 for every session in excess of three, it is
to be hoped that Robinson chose the latter
option, for it proved to be a single-session
parliament. If he did not, it was the first of a
series of misfortunes.
In the unsettled and factious state of
parliamentary politics between his election in
1806 and the formation of Lord Liverpool's
administration in the summer of 1812, Robinson's
career was advanced by a combination of his
Pittite views, some well-received speeches, and
the patronage of Lord Castlereagh. In the case
of his politics, he demonstrated a similar
outlook to Pitt on constitutional issues by
upholding the right of the king to veto Catholic
relief in March 1807 (even though he was later
to approve qualified concessions) and by not
favouring extremes in the reduction of the
influence of the executive. In addition he was a
steadfast supporter of the war with France and,
more controversially, the Peninsular campaign.
In 1810 he wrote the bulk of a pamphlet, Sketch
of the Campaign in Portugal, supporting
Wellington's endeavours, and he approved the
latter's case for a state annuity.
Although Robinson was never a frequent speaker,
a number of his initial interventions attracted
favourable notice. In this respect his bearing
was no doubt an advantage, marked as it was by
blond hair, blue eyes, and, to judge by
Lawrence's portrait (c.1823), an
expressive countenance. Perceval thought he
‘distinguished himself very much’ (Later
Correspondence of George III, 4.565) in his
maiden speech on 15 April 1807 approving the
king's dismissal of the Grenville government,
and considered his moving of the address on 19
January 1809 ‘very able’ (ibid., 5.169). Three
years later, on 27 April 1812, Robert Ward
regarded an intervention in defence of the
government as ‘the best young man's speech I
ever heard in the Parliament’ and one that gave
him the appearance ‘of an old and able debater’
(E. Phipps, Memoirs of the Political and
Literary Life of Robert Plumer Ward, 2 vols.,
1850, 1.438). The last remark is perceptive, for
throughout his career his speeches were marked
by an ability to outline the complexities of an
issue but a reluctance to drive home one
particular line of argument.
With regard to patrons Robinson was initially
deferential to those among his immediate family.
In the case of his seat in parliament, he had no
ties of significance. At the 1807 general
election he exchanged Carlow for a seat at
Ripon, which he held for the next twenty years
without political strings on the interest of his
kinswoman, Miss Lawrence. However the views of
the Yorkes, and to a lesser extent his mother
and elder brother, Lord Grantham, were a
different matter. In April 1807 he declined a
post in the duke of Portland's government
because of Lord Hardwicke's opposition and his
mother's gloomy prognostications for its future,
and acted as secretary to a special mission to
Vienna (July–September 1807) only out of
friendship with its chief, Lord Pembroke. Two
years later, in January 1809, he apologized to
Hardwicke for moving the address, and in June
1810 agreed to serve as a member of the
Admiralty board in Perceval's government only
out of deference to the wishes of Hardwicke's
brother, Charles Yorke.
By this time, however,
Robinson was already widening the circle of his
political friends. On Wednesday evenings during
the parliamentary session he dined at the Alfred
Club in the company of a number of *Pittites,
most of whom had been born, like himself, in the
1780s and had entered parliament in the first
decade of the century. They included some of
those who were Robinson's colleagues in junior,
and later senior, office, such as Peel, Croker,
Palmerston, and Goulburn. More importantly, in
May 1809 he became a protégé of one of the four
contestants for Pitt's mantle, Lord Castlereagh.
It was Castlereagh who appointed him his
under-secretary in the War Office in that month
and who was subsequently to become his patron.
He resigned with Castlereagh in the autumn of
that year and, in deference to him, declined an
office in Perceval's newly formed government.
Furthermore, although Charles Yorke was able to
persuade him into office under Perceval in the
following June, it was Castlereagh's appointment
to the cabinet under Lord Liverpool in the
summer of 1812 that secured Robinson's
allegiance to the new government and his
reward—the vice-presidency of the Board of Trade
with a privy councillorship and a seat at the
Treasury (which he exchanged for one of the
joint paymaster-generalships in 1813). Robinson
must therefore have impressed Castlereagh with
his efficiency as an administrator, for although
his father had held the trade post he was
certainly not known for any particular aptitude
in economic matters.
* 'Pittite' or 'Friends of Mr Pitt'
Board of Trade and
exchequer, 1813–1827
It was under Lord
Liverpool that Robinson rose from the ranks of
the junior Pittites to become one of the senior
Tories, as that party came to be called. To some
extent this was due to the same combination of
factors as before: his skills as a debater and
an administrator, both of which improved in this
period, and the influence of his patrons. In
January 1818, for example, his promotion to the
cabinet as president of the Board of Trade
(which was accompanied by the treasurership of
the navy) was said to be the result, on the one
hand, of ‘his standing in the House of Commons’
and ‘his character and talents’ as ‘a most
amiable and gentlemanlike man’, and, on the
other, of the influence of Castlereagh (Jones,
65). In the last respect the ties between the
two men had grown closer as a result of
Robinson's being Castlereagh's secretary at the
congress of Châtillon in the first half of 1814
and by his marriage (on 1 September 1814) to
Lady Sarah Albinia Louisa (1793–1867), a
daughter and heir of
Robert Hobart, the
wealthy fourth earl of Buckinghamshire,
and a kinswoman of Castlereagh. Moreover, his
further promotion, as chancellor of the
exchequer in January 1823, was said to be the
result partly of his acceptability to his
predecessor, Vansittart, who had been a
confidant of Castlereagh, and partly of the
appeal that his ‘amiable and gentlemanlike’
manner had with the powerful independent country
gentlemen in the Commons. There were some,
however, who felt that Robinson was
insufficiently active as a debater.
Robinson's elevation was also due to his
contribution to one of the hallmarks of Lord
Liverpool's government—the measures to relax
constraints on trade. Ironically the first
occasion on which he attracted widespread public
attention was when he was engaged in an opposite
cause—the justification in 1815 of the Corn Law
Amendment Bill prohibiting the import of foreign
grain when the price was below 80s. a
quarter. It was a bill that he had helped to
shape and one that he was obliged to present in
his official capacity, especially as
Castlereagh, the leader of the house, was
abroad. However, it was not a bill for which he
had a strong enthusiasm. As he said in his
opening speech (17 February), the house was
faced with ‘a choice of difficulties’ and not an
opportunity to discuss ‘first principles’, such
as ‘restriction or non-restriction’. It was a
pragmatic issue in which the objective was to
maximize the advantage ‘to all parties’ (Hansard
1, 29, 1815, 798–808). The famous measure was
nevertheless widely regarded as a sop to the
landed classes and led to nightly attacks on
Robinson's London house; during one such attack,
furniture and pictures were destroyed, and, in
the course of another, two people were killed.
In relating the last incident to the house,
Robinson was moved to tears—a propensity under
stress which was to earn him the first of
several nicknames, in this case the Blubberer.
However, the corn law was untypical of the
policies with which he was chiefly associated.
When president of the Board of Trade these
included the progressive reduction of duties on
a large number of articles as well as steps to
liberalize trade with other countries by
bilateral agreements, most notably with the USA.
Indeed five acts of 1822, two of which were
introduced by Robinson and three by his
vice-president, Thomas Wallace, are generally
regarded as marking the end of the venerable
system of protection known as the navigation
laws. Later, when he was chancellor of the
exchequer, budget surpluses enabled him to
reduce assessed taxes and to abolish or reduce
duties further. They also gave him the
opportunity to make grants to house the Royal
Library in the British Museum and to purchase
the Angerstein collection for the National
Gallery. These achievements, together with his
support for Catholic relief and the abolition of
slavery, led to his being regarded as one of the
most liberal members of the government and to
two more nicknames—‘Prosperity Robinson’ and
‘Goody’.
Yet Robinson's precise role in the early stages
of what subsequently became known as the
free-trade movement has been the subject of
debate. In 1826 and 1827 he claimed publicly to
be the person most responsible for the
government's measures in favour of freer trade,
and his biographer W. D. Jones supports him in
preference to the claims of any other
individual, such as Wallace, Huskisson, or
Liverpool. However, the author of the most
detailed study of the subject, A. J. Boyd
Hilton, argues that the government's economic
policies were the result of collective decision
making by the trade and Treasury ministers, and
that Robinson was one of a team of three or four
leading contributors in which Huskisson, his
senior in years but junior in office, was the
most influential. Further, the same author has
established that the policies themselves were
not fashioned by a commitment to the kind of
free-trade theory that became orthodox economic
thinking in the 1840s and 1850s. Instead they
emerged in response to the pursuit of two
traditional objectives: the ensuring of food
supplies and the establishment of economic and
monetary stability. Robinson may have been more
committed to free-trade theory than his
colleagues, and was certainly ready, when
challenged, to claim responsibility for the
measures themselves, but the evidence suggests
that he was one of a team and that the policies
to which he contributed were essentially
pragmatic.
The final year of Robinson's chancellorship was
by far the least successful. A run on the banks
in the last months of 1825 led to a commercial
crisis. The government responded in 1826 with a
bill to restrict the issue of paper money below
the value of £5, but Robinson consented to a
weakening of its terms in the face of strong
opposition in the Commons. According to Charles
Greville, the diarist, the sudden change of tack
convinced many that Robinson was unequal to the
crisis and that this was partly due to
Huskisson's being ‘the real author’ of his
measures. Moreover he refused to concede in his
1826 speeches that the crisis was as serious as
his critics alleged. In opening his fourth and
last budget statement (13 March 1826) he adopted
the same optimistic tone that had been a feature
of such statements in former years. Taxation, he
claimed, had been reduced by £8 million since
1823, during which time government revenue had
remained static and consumption had grown. The
country was prosperous, he stated, and that
prosperity was not going to be undermined by
‘untoward circumstances’ (Hansard 2, 14, 1826,
1305–34). However, the severity of the crisis
was such that others were not convinced, and as
1826 drew to a close Robinson himself began to
feel the strain. In December he asked Liverpool
for a peerage and a less onerous post.
Peerage and
leadership in the Lords
Liverpool's
resignation through ill health in February 1827
and Canning's appointment as his successor in
April shattered the tory–whig divide that had
dominated parliamentary politics since 1812.
Among the tories Canning's personality and his
liberalism, particularly on the Catholic
question, led the anti-Catholic ministers to
refuse to serve under him. The tories therefore
separated into four main groups: Canning's
personal party, which was nearly fifty strong in
Lords and Commons; liberals and moderates, like
Robinson, who were prepared to accept his
leadership; anti-Catholic ministers, such as
Wellington and Peel, who refused to do so and
resigned; and ultra-tories, who were mustering
to resist concessions to Catholics or any other
liberal causes. Canning was therefore obliged to
turn to the whigs in order to form a government.
A section of the whig party led by Lord
Lansdowne agreed to take office, but this had
the effect of separating it from the main body,
which preferred to judge the government on its
measures. The proliferation of parties was such
that the king was obliged to play a significant
role in the negotiations leading to the
formation of Canning's government, and to some
this raised the spectre of the resurgence of
another party—that of the crown.
It was against this background that Robinson
eventually became prime minister. In the
tortuous negotiations leading to Canning's
appointment to the post in April, Robinson had
been considered, but rejected, as a compromise
head. However, although he was not one of
Canning's intimate friends, his liberalism and
experience made him an essential member of the
new government. He therefore accepted the less
onerous post of colonial secretary, but agreed
to take the lead in the Lords as the newly
created (28 April) Viscount Goderich.
If Goderich had hopes of a quieter berth, he was
quickly disappointed. The Lords certainly met
less frequently than the Commons, but the
bitterness engendered by Canning's prime
ministership was equally strong in both houses.
Moreover there were some powerful speakers in
the Lords who found the amiable Goderich a
tempting target. Thus, when the session resumed
on 2 May the rebarbative Lord Ellenborough
opened the campaign by calling into question
Goderich's contribution to the previous
government's economic policies. Two days later
Lord Londonderry made a personal attack on him
for combining with the whigs and therefore
abandoning the policies of his former patron
(and Lord Londonderry's half-brother), Lord
Castlereagh. On the 10th he was confronted by
such withering attacks on Canning by Lord Grey
and the duke of Newcastle that he found himself
inviting them to propose a no-confidence motion.
Following another personal attack by
Ellenborough on 17 May he experienced the
ignominy of the government's Corn Bill being
twice defeated on motions of the duke of
Wellington. Although the loss was retrieved
partially by the passage of a modified bill,
there was a widespread feeling that Goderich had
lost control of the house.
Prime minister,
1827.
If Goderich's first
experience of political leadership was
humiliating, the second was disastrous. On 8
August Canning died, and the king immediately
turned to Goderich to be the head of the
government, subject to a reorganized cabinet's
agreeing to the same terms as its
predecessor—namely that it should continue to be
a coalition of moderate tories and whigs which
would be dismissed were it to propose measures
of parliamentary reform and Catholic relief. On
the following day Goderich and his colleagues
agreed to the king's wishes; Goderich formally
took office on 31 August 1827.
That George IV turned to Goderich is not
surprising. He had been the government's leader
in the Lords and therefore Canning's nominal
second in command. In addition, with the
exception of Lord Bexley, he was the most
experienced of the senior ministers and still
only forty-four. Furthermore, he had certain
political advantages. As a former protégé of
Castlereagh he still had some credit with the
ultra-tories. On the other hand he had
subsequently espoused liberal policies without
becoming a member of Canning's party. He was
therefore an independent liberal tory, and as
such was well placed to preside over the
continuation of the coalition government.
Finally, it is likely that his amiability was
seen as an advantage given the personal
rivalries that now soured politics.
The disadvantages of Goderich's position were
nevertheless severe. In the early nineteenth
century, prime ministers needed the support of
the crown and a disciplined party in order to be
able to impose themselves on their colleagues:
the former in order to attach the large number
of independent MPs to the government, and the
latter in order to outvote the opposition on
routine measures. In Goderich's case, however,
neither requirement was available in the right
measure. Thus, as the initial exchanges with the
king indicated, George IV regarded himself as
the active guardian of the government and was
soon advising him on how the vacancies in the
cabinet should be filled. This reduced
Goderich's standing with both the Canningites
and the coalition whigs, who resented the king's
assertiveness, particularly as they believed he
was unduly influenced by unaccountable advisers
such as his private secretary, Sir William
Knighton. As for the support of a party,
Goderich had been chosen not only because he was
not a party leader but because his government
was actually supported (in theory at least) by
three different factions of the two former
parties.
Goderich was also troubled by personal problems.
Although his wife's prospects as an heiress
(which were realized in 1816) may have been a
factor that initially attracted him to her, they
became devoted partners. However, she suffered
from hypochondria and depression, illnesses
exacerbated by the deaths of their first child
in infancy and their second, when only eleven,
in October 1826. On 24 October his wife gave
birth for a third time, but within a few weeks
she was afflicted with what seems to have been
severe post-natal depression. By the end of the
year her condition was regarded as sufficiently
serious to merit the attention of four doctors
(though she went on to outlive her husband).
Goderich initially overcame his political
difficulties. The most serious was the question
of who should be Canning's successor as
chancellor of the exchequer. The king was
anxious for the post to be given to one of
Canning's oldest friends, William Sturges
Bourne, but the latter declined to move from a
minor office. Goderich then offered it to
Huskisson and the coalition whig George Tierney,
but they also refused. He therefore turned to J.
C. Herries, the financial secretary of the
Treasury under Liverpool but an anti-Catholic
politician rumoured to be a confidant of
Knighton and to have connections with the
Rothschilds that were likely to create ill
feeling in other quarters of the City of London.
Goderich knew that the offer would be approved
by the king but was unprepared for the hostility
that it engendered within the government.
Ominously, it was the king's insistence in
Herries's favour that secured his appointment,
Goderich's role being little more than a
mollifier of his outraged colleagues.
The problem of the exchequer surmounted,
Goderich and his colleagues began to prepare for
the resumption of parliament in the following
January. In the case of party politics Goderich
regarded what he called the ‘odious distinctions
of Whig and Tory’ as redundant and seems to have
hoped that all types of liberals would merge
into a new political force. As for policies,
there is some evidence that the Treasury
ministers decided to propose a property tax to
compensate for continued cuts in indirect
taxes—an initiative which, if it had been taken,
would have secured Goderich's reputation, for it
was not until 1842 that a measure of similar
intent—the income tax—was implemented, and then,
famously, by Peel. In addition, some
conciliatory measures short of Catholic relief
were planned for Ireland. However, as the
resumption of parliament drew nearer, hopes for
a new party and plans for new policies were
overtaken by manoeuvres to ensure the
government's survival in the division lobbies.
The problem as Goderich perceived it by November
was the prospect of a powerful opposition being
formed by anti-coalition whigs and secessionist
tories led by lords Grey and Bathurst. He and
other members of the cabinet concluded that a
liberal coalition government could not survive
against a combined whig and tory opposition
without drawing off in advance some of the
latter's potential strength. He therefore wrote
to the king on 11 December proposing the
accession to the cabinet of the tory Lord
Wellesley and the whig Lord Holland, but
unbeknown to his colleagues added a postscript
stating that his own health and, more
importantly, that of his wife, were so poor that
he felt unfit for the duties of his post. The
king, who was anxious to resist Lord Holland's
inclusion, chose to construe this as a
resignation and immediately set about finding an
alternative prime minister, his eye falling on
Lord Harrowby. As might be expected his
colleagues were shocked by this development,
especially as there were those who saw a
personal advantage in having an amiable chairman
as prime minister. They therefore persuaded
Goderich to remain at his post and then
persuaded the king to keep him there.
Resignation from
the premiership
Thus began the
series of tragicomic events that brought the
government to an end. The first followed shortly
after Goderich was reconfirmed in office when
details of the episode were leaked to the press.
As a consequence Huskisson indicated that he
wished to resign. The following day, 20 December
1827, two of the more conservative members of
the cabinet, Herries and Bexley, said that they
would resign if Lord Holland was ever to become
a cabinet member. The dénouement occurred over
the chairmanship of a Commons select committee
on national finances, the setting up of which
had been promised by Canning. Huskisson stated
that he wished the chair to be filled by one of
the leading whigs, Lord Althorp, and that he
would certainly resign if it were not. Herries,
on the other hand, said that the chair was in
his gift as chancellor, and at the end of
December tendered his resignation on the issue.
Depressed by his wife's poor health and unable
to control his obstinate colleagues, Goderich
concluded that his government was about to break
up. On 8 January 1828 he reported the situation
to the king who, having listened, decided that
the ministry was at an end. The final ignominy
took the form of the king's asking Goderich, who
had not formally resigned on this occasion, to
take the necessary steps to arrange for his own
replacement—a request that according to one
account led Goderich to cry and the king to pass
him a handkerchief. His ministry had lasted just
five months and, uniquely, had never been tested
in parliament.
Colonial secretary
and president of the Board of Trade and of the
India board
Despite the
ignominy and distress of his prime minister-ship,
Goderich remained a front-bench politician for a
further twenty years. A quick recovery from the
strain of being prime minister and a not
unjustified sense of the value of his experience
played some part in his longevity. Described no
more than six days after his dismissal as ‘quite
another man’ who ‘sleeps at nights now, and
laughs and talks as usual’ (J. Planta to W.
Huskisson, n.d. [13 Jan 1828], BL, Add. MS
38754, fol. 97), he was ready to hold office
under Wellington, his successor as prime
minister, and made a tentative bid later in 1828
to become leader of the Canningites. Moreover in
April 1833 he accepted the honorific post of
lord privy seal in Lord Grey's government with
great reluctance, believing that he deserved
something of consequence, such as the Home
Office. He was not at all mollified by receiving
a step in the peerage as the earl of Ripon (13
April 1833), having expressed a preference for
the first vacancy in the Garter.
The major reason for his longevity as a
front-bencher, however, was that Goderich was an
experienced, 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 balanced and
sustainable ministries. Thus, having supported
the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and
the Catholic Relief Bill, he was appointed
colonial secretary by Grey in November 1830
(holding the office until March 1833) and became
a convert to parliamentary reform. On 27 May
1834 he resigned from Grey's coalition in
protest against a perceived threat to the
establishment of the Church of Ireland, and over
the next two years was an ally of Stanley before
drifting towards the Conservative Party, which
he joined in December 1836. In 1840 he
criticized Lord Melbourne's government for not
doing enough to reduce expenditure and to
advance free trade, and received his reward by
being appointed president of the Board of Trade
when Peel's government was formed in 1841.
Nearly two years later, in May 1843, when he was
still only sixty, he took up his last post, as
president of the India board.
In the succession of offices that he held after
1830 Ripon continued to pursue liberal causes
and to meet with misfortune. As Grey's colonial
secretary he fought hard to abolish slavery, but
had his own plan overturned in favour of that of
his successor, Stanley, who received all the
credit. He even found himself moving Stanley's
resolutions in the Lords (25 June 1833), a duty
which may have contributed to his breaking down
twice in the course of his speech. Later, as
Peel's president of the Board of Trade (working
somewhat uneasily with the young W. E. Gladstone
as vice-president), he made a contribution to
the commercial policies inaugurated in 1842 for
which the administration is famous: the first
major relaxation of the corn laws since 1828;
the Customs Bill founded on the principle of
abolishing prohibitory duties, in which he
played a major role; and the renewal of the
income tax, the policy he had apparently
favoured since 1827. On the other hand, his
pursuit of trade treaties with a number of
European states, including France, proved
nugatory. Yet although he achieved nothing of
consequence in his last post as secretary for
India, his official career ended on an
appropriate note: having been obliged to sponsor
the unpalatable corn law in 1815, it was he who
was able to move, successfully, for its
abolition by the Lords in May 1846. A month
later he resigned with the rest of his
colleagues and, having given his last speech in
the Lords in May 1847, he died peacefully at
Grantham House in Putney on 28 January 1859. He
was buried at Nocton Hall in Lincolnshire, a
house that his wife had inherited in 1816. He
was succeeded by his only surviving son, born
during his brief premiership, George Frederick
Samuel Robinson, first marquess of Ripon.
Reputation and
assessment
For a century after
his death assessments of Ripon were based
principally on his premiership, the experience
of which exposed the weaknesses of his
personality and his indecisiveness. Recent
research, however, has led to a more favourable
judgement. In the case of his premiership it is
accepted that the office did not then carry with
it the means to control colleagues which later
incumbents possessed, and that 1827 was a year
of exceptional confusion and fractiousness in
party politics. Even Wellington, his successor,
who was strong in those qualities in which Ripon
was weak, found it extremely difficult to
establish a stable ministry from among the
discordant elements that then dominated
politics. Ripon attempted to act as a congenial
chairman and, more positively, hoped to forward
a realignment of politics, but he was unable to
overcome the obstinacy of his colleagues and the
differences between them.
Ripon's contribution in the other twenty-six
years of his ministerial career has also been
placed in perspective. He was one of a number of
politicians who entered parliament in the first
decade of the nineteenth century who inherited
the dominating ideal of the younger Pitt: namely
that a politician's primary duty was to serve
the crown by diligent application to essentially
pragmatic administration. It was in this
capacity (as opposed to that of the partisan)
that he attached himself to a series of mentors:
Hardwicke, Charles Yorke, Castlereagh,
Liverpool, Canning, Grey, Stanley, and Peel.
The
services he rendered were of two kinds. On the
one hand he was an effective administrator whose
study of the facts led him in most cases to see
the merit of liberal reform. This enabled him to
make important contributions over many years to
the progressive reduction of taxes on trade and,
to a lesser extent, to a number of other causes,
most notably the abolition of slavery and more
harmonious relations with the USA. On the other
he was an amiable and gentlemanly colleague who
could see both sides of a question and was ready
to explain them in parliament. In the first half
of the .nineteenth century there were those in
cabinets as well as parliaments who valued such
qualities. [ODNB P. J. Jupp]
Sources W.
D. Jones, ‘Prosperity’ Robinson (1967) ·
HoP, Commons, 1790–1820, 5.26–8 · J.
Derry, ‘Viscount Goderich’, The Prime
Ministers, ed. H. Van Thal, 2 vols.
(1974–5), 1.313–20 · G. I. T. Machin, The
Catholic question in English politics, 1820 to
1830 (1964) · B. Hilton, Corn, cash,
commerce: the economic policies of the tory
governments, 1815–1830 (1977) · The later
correspondence of George III, ed. A.
Aspinall, 5 vols. (1962–70) · GEC,
Peerage
Source: eBay Inc. Mar 2008
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