THE OBSERVER ( Magazine ) - ' The Triumph of the British ' c.1971 series edited by Colin Cross ROBERT WALPOLE - by Keith Sainsbury senior lecturer in Politics. Reading University

ROBERT WALPOLE, a Norfolk squire, was the first politician to hold an office akin to that of a modern Prime Minister. He first entered Parliament at the beginning of Queen Anne's reign. A countryman, born In 1676,Walpole was the fifth of 19 children . He came from a line of farmers and landowner's, who had cultivated their East Anglian estates at Houghton for the beat pert of three centuries. They had supplied their quota of lawyers, ecclesiastics and Members of Parliament, but had not hitherto made a noticeable mark on history. Robert Walpole might well have remained obscure, if his two elder brothers had not died within a few months of each other, both in their twenties. Soon after, his father also died comparatively young, and at 26 Walpole inherited the family estates. Then, he became an M.P.

He had already allied himself with the rising commercial class by his marriage to Catherine Shorter, daughter of a London timber merchant. The marriage brought him additional wealth but not much happiness. His wife was vain, trivial, empty headed and only moderately faithful. Divorce in the eighteenth century was hard to come by. With characteristic realism, Walpole accepted the situation. He allowed his wife to go her own way, took a mistress, Maria Skerritt, who seam to have had all the agreeable qualities his wife lacked; and threw himself into the great game of politics.At the beginning of the beginning of the eighteenth century, politics meant above all influence

Influence first of all with the monarch, for, as Walpole himself wrote, ' No Minister of State can serve in this nation whose credit with the prince is... lost or declining Influence secondly with the great landowning aristocrats the Dukes of Newcastle, Shrewsbury, Norfolk, Rutland; the Earls of Sunderland, Carlisle, Portland, and many others. These possessed vast power. They sat in the House of Lords , and exerted a powerful influence on its decisions; and through their patronage they controlled the election and hence the votes of many M. P's.

Influence was also needed with the 'independent Members of the House of Commons the minor country gentlemen, who made up more than a quarter of the House. Mostly they represented county constituencies, whose electorates were more numerous and therefore less easy to bribe or manipulate than those of the boroughs. where often no more than 50 or 100 electors needed to be bought. They were often, in the terminology of the day, 'High Tories- wedded to the High Anglican Church, and bitterly opposed to the more tolerant attitude towards Nonconformist dissenters which Walpole, and Whigs like him, generally espoused.

Toleration appealed to Walpole's cynical agnosticism: and from a practical point of view he saw the importance of gaining for the Hanoverian dynasty the support of wealthy Nonconformist merchants. The country gentlemen favoured a return to the persecuting ways of the seventeenth century in religious matters. Many of them , hankered after a restoration of the exiled Stuarts; even those who accepted the Hanoverians did so with little enthusiasm.

Walpole had the qualities necessary to weld these different forms of influence, and create a governing machine out of them. Robust and corpulent he was quick to impose his personality on the parliamentary scene. A few years in the Commons were sufficient to demonstrate his powers of Argument and invective, his mastery of facts and logic, his incisive power of presentation. He first entered the Government in 1705 and demonstrated that his talents as administrator and manipulator were equal to his debating skills.

At this time, the monarch largely dictated who held office - Whigs such as Walpole, or Tories such as Harley and St. John. In the last years of Anne's reign the Tories were dominant and Walpole was excluded from power. In the crisis of the succession, however, as the old Queen lay dying . Harley succumbed to the battle, St. John to a failure of nerve. George I arrived from Hanover and the Whigs returned to power Whigs returned to power

Walpole was reward was the Treasury: he chose it, he said, because he wanted to get rich. In a period when Ministers could invest public money for their own profit and let out public contracts for a consideration. this may well have been a motive. Certainly he lived on a grand scale for the rest of his life. His country home at Houghton was rebuilt as a palatial mansion. In his town houses at Chelsea and Richmond, he entertained lavishly.

Walpole could claim that in return he provided the nation with an efficient administration; and, after the storms and turbulence of the previous century, with a quarter of a century of relative tranquility and growing prosperity based on expanding trade and external peace. On the whole the nation had a good bargain. If Walpole's e friends and relatives were much in evidence under what was genially known as the 'Robino-cracy', they were quite as competent as other people's friends and relatives, often mare so. There was a more compelling reason than personal gain for Walpole to prefer the Treasury post, leaving the more glamorous field of foreign affairs and the Secretaryships of State to political rivals - the Treasury controlled Government patronage. The judicious distribution of pensions, titles and Government jobs was the means whereby a parliamentary majority was maintained.

As Walpole himself observed, 'every man had his price ' Electors could be bribed, great lords could be won over by office, titles, or jobs for friends and relatives; Members of Parliament likewise; and the King's favour could be bought by the guarantee of a generous Civil List on his accession and a manageable House of commons thereafter. Walpole's command of the Treasury, and his parliamentary and administratrative talents, enabled him to gasp all these levers of power.

For a brief period after the Hanoverian Succession he had to contend with the intrigues of his fellow Ministers Stanhope and Sunderland, who were able to exclude him for a short time from Office. But in 1720, a great financial scandal - the South Sea Bubble -s wept them, both away. From then, until his retirement in 1742, Walpole's power was virtually unchangeable, Political rivals we out-argued or out-manoeuvred; awkward or intriguing colleagues were ousted When George I died in 1727, the confidence of his son, George II, was won even more - quickly than the father's had been.

Walpole's contribution to his countrymen's welfare during these 20 years was not spectacular; but it was fully appreciated. He avoided the Continental alliance which in the past had again and again embroiled the country in wars.. With peace assured he was able to concentrate on putting the national finances on a sound footing by a steady reduction of interest rates. This relieved the taxpayer and also stimulated trade - a process further assisted by the lowering of custom duties.

The watchwords of his policies were caution and ' Quieta non movere ' - 'let sleeping dogs lie'. No glittering military success was worth the expenditure of British blood and money; and no spectacular political reform was worth the price of domestic upheaval. Walpole allowed political discrimination against dissenters to fall into disuse, but did not stir up a hornets ' nest by trying to abolish it at one blow. It was not until the end of his career that he began to lose his grip. In 1739 he allowed a wave of spurious popular patriotism fomented by his opponents, to push him into an unnecessary war with Spain - the 'war of Jenkins' Ear'-he mismanaged it, and was discredited. He resigned and retired to Houghton, where in 1745 he died.

Walpole has often been credited with the creation of Cabinet government in the modern sense, and the establishment of the office of Prime Minister. This is an over simplification . The two developments had already begun when Walpole took power, and were to continue after his departure. They followed from the deliberate reduction of royal power and the increase of parliamentary power which were inherent in the 'Revolution Settlement of 1689. After this period the monarch could not govern without Parliament or in defiance of its wishes.

Parliament however, could still be persuaded, managed, bribed or manipulated, but this required a skilled parliamentary 'manager. None of the eighteenth-century sovereign possessed the required talents, and if they lad, would not have been well placed to exert them. They came to depend on the services of men like Walpole. and, later in the century, practitioners such as Lord North and William Pitt the Younger.

This strengthened the position of the leading Minister. As the power of the monarch declined, that of the 'Prime Minister' began to increase. The process was accelerated by the importation of a foreign dynasty. George I did not speak English well; and neither he nor his successor understood the intricacies of British affairs, or were particularly interested in them. They ceased to attend Cabinet meetings, preferring to hear private reports from the Chief Minister, or occasionally from other Ministers.

Walpole became the link not only between monarch and Parliament. but also between monarch and Cabinet: and as long as he could retain the confidence of the sovereign and preserve his parliamentary majority, his pre-eminence over other Ministers was unassailable. He made himself Chief or Prime Minister to a greater extent than any of his predecessors. He was also able, so long as he remained leader, to weld the nascent Cabinet, which had only just emerged from the larger and more cumbersome Privy Council, into a more cohesive and united body, owing collective allegiance to his leadership. Thus he laid the foundations of the modem doctrine of collective responsibility.

He was also a great House of Commons man', in the sense that Gladstone and Winston Churchill were great House of Commons men. In the somewhat uneasy dualism of the parliamentary & constitutional monarchy as it emerged from the conflicts of the seventeenth century, he tilted the balance of the system towards Parliament, and within Parliament towards the House of Commons.

It was in the Commons that he chose to spend his political career, refusing a peerage until his retirement, when he is said to have remarked to his old opponent William Pultney, ennobled at the same time: 'My Lord, we are now as important men as any in England'. His attitude naturally served to increase the prestige of the Lower House; and he further increased it by arguing on more than one occasion in favour of Ministerial 'accountability'. He considered that his responsibility was to the Commons as much as to the Crown.

Some historians have argued that Walpole was not Prime Minister 'in the modern sense. But in the sense of having undisputed leadership and preeminence, mastery of his Cabinet ad of the House of Commons command over the whole range of business, Walpole was as much Prime Minister as Peel or Gladstone - or Wilson or Heath. True, he had to devote more attention to placating his sovereign than today's Prime Ministers: and he had to make patronage' and favours do the work that party discipline now does. But when George II's Queen, Caroline of Ansbach, lay dying, she did not commend Walpole to his sovereign: she commended her husband's interests to Walpole. That was symbolic of the change he had wrought in the status of his office.