2 - Apprenticeship and Public Life

Summary

JENKINSON's EARLY POLITICAL education continued through his studies at Christ Church. As that period closed, he began an apprenticeship in public life that continued through the 1790s. Travel took him to Continental Europe as the French Revolution unfolded. Seeing its violent upheaval at first hand had a lasting impact. Entering parliament gave Jenkinson the chance to apply his training in rhetoric and take a place among his father's political colleagues. Debate tested his mettle among established men by engaging questions that shaped his intellectual development. Jenkinson's first years in public life went beyond the standard cursus honorum among the English elite. Responsibilities as a promising junior MP on Pitt's side prepared him for higher office while lending a confidence apparent in his growing self-assertion. Jenkinson also gained experience beyond politics at Westminster as he returned to Europe and then commanded volunteer soldiers on policing duties in Scotland. Lessons from those experiences guided his later career.

A four-month visit to Paris from July through October 1789 marked the next step in Jenkinson's education. Confident of its cultural superiority and the tone it set, old regime France was the “middle kingdom” of Europe. Fluent command of French brought access to ruling circles across the Continent and opened a cosmopolitan world of ideas and the arts. Hawkesbury had encouraged his son to use his French to read history and criticism at Charterhouse. The grand tour gave young men something to do that encouraged cultivation between ending their formal education and settling into adult responsibilities. A rite of passage meant to shape an individual resolutely British but knowledgeable in classical antiquity, modern taste, and other European nations, it cultivated a disposition to see the world through the prism of classical ideas acquired by study that reinforced earlier stages of elite education. Despite the common preoccupation with sex, gambling, and drink – which Jenkinson avoided on both his ventures abroad – travel facilitated the acquisition of social graces and an education beyond what reading alone could provide.