Robert Walpole

Robert Walpole (1676-1745), British statesman, commonly regarded as Britain's first prime minister (1721-1742).

Walpole was born on August 26, 1676, in Norfolk, England, and educated at the University of Cambridge. He entered Parliament in 1701 and became known as a spokesman for Whig policy. In 1708 he was appointed secretary at war, and in 1710 he became treasurer of the navy, a position he lost when the Whig government was defeated in an election the same year. In 1712 he was found guilty of corruption by a vindictive Tory Parliament, and was briefly imprisoned.

On the accession of the first Hanoverian king of England, George I, in 1714, Walpole, who had been a supporter of the German-born monarch, was restored to the cabinet, becoming first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the Exchequer in October 1715. Because of a conflict among the king's advisers, Walpole resigned in 1717, but he continued to exercise considerable influence as an opponent of government policy. He returned to the cabinet in 1720, a year of financial crisis caused by heavy speculation in the stock of the South Sea Company, a corporation founded in 1711 for the purpose of assuming the national debt (see South Sea Bubble). Members of the government were accused of manipulating the value of the stock, but Walpole was never proven to have abetted the scheme. He skillfully protected the court and the Whig leadership from political disaster.

From 1721 to 1742 Walpole served as leader of the House of Commons, first lord of the treasury, and chancellor of the Exchequer, and he consolidated Whig power through a system of royal patronage. He secured large legislative majorities because his policies of continued peace and low taxation reflected the desires of Parliament, and he displayed an unsurpassed ability to unite the members on political issues. Because of his extensive political power and influence on the domestic and foreign policies of Great Britain during this period, Walpole is considered to have been the nation's first prime minister, although the title itself did not come into common use until much later in the century and became official only in 1905.

Opposition eventually developed within Walpole's own party, and a trade dispute with Spain was used by his critics to force him to declare war in 1739. Although he won the election of 1741, a number of Whig politicians opposed his conduct of the war with Spain, and he resigned in February 1742. Walpole was created earl of Orford in the same year, and he remained politically active until his death, on March 18, 1745, in London.