Conclusion: Weathering the Storm

Summary

DRAMATIC EVENTS OVER the years after Liverpool's stroke eclipsed his public reputation. The political crisis ending with the 1832 Reform Act marked a watershed that set the terms on which he would be remembered. Conflicts over issues that had made Liverpool essential for holding a revived Tory party together ironically pushed him into the background even before he died. The split gave Whigs an opening they had lacked since 1783 as personal differences and policy disputes upset the parliamentary base of Liverpool's administration. Repealing the Test and Corporation Acts and then passing Catholic Emancipation also began a constitutional revolution that swept away the balanced constitution Liverpool had upheld through his long career. Instead, “parliamentary government” transferred powers over executive government formerly held by the Crown to ministers as members of a cabinet answerable to parliament, primarily the Commons. The shift made Liverpool seem a figure of a bygone age with scant relevance to politics from the 1830s. What had been pressing controversies – Walter Bagehot took Catholic Emancipation as an obvious case from 1856 – were no longer even political questions. Doubts about them seemed absurd to younger generations. Harriet Martineau revealingly described parliament in 1816 as closer to its predecessor a hundred years before than to her own readers in the 1840s. Liverpool became a relic of that much earlier world.

The way Liverpool quickly faded from view raises questions about both his legacy and the larger narrative that framed nineteenth-century British history. Brougham noted in retrospect that blame never fell directly upon Liverpool: “while others were the objects of alternate excretion and scorn, he was generally respected, never assailed.” A prime minister spared criticism marked a “singular spectacle” that Brougham attributed to Liverpool's mediocrity. Praise, like blame, fell to those seen as responsible while Liverpool merely oversaw their actions. “Respectable mediocrity,” Brougham dismissively observed, “offends nobody.” Spencer Walpole, who wrote a popular history of the decades after Waterloo, deemed Liverpool “respectable in everything,” but “eminent in nothing.”