politician prime minister statesman
Frederick North was born on 13 April 1732 in London. His father, Francis, who lived to within two years of North’s own death, had been for a short time governor to Prince George, later George III, who was six years younger than N. As children the two had been so alike that Prince Frederick jokingly remarked to Francis North that “one of their wives had played her husband false.” The North family were well placed in provincial landed society.
North did not inherit the earldom until 1790, and thus was able throughout his career to sit in the House of Commons—a tradition that the Commons had come to accept, even demand, as normal practice for the First Lord of the Treasury. The long ministries of Walpole and Pelham had so accustomed the lower house to ministerial leadership from within the Commons that it became difficult for later prime ministers, such as the Duke of Newcastle or Grafton, to steer their governments from the upper house.
North entered Parliament for the family seat of Banbury in 1754, but did not make his first speech until two and a half years later. In 1759 he entered his first administrative post, that of junior Lord of the Treasury, under his distant relative Newcasde. He remained in that office under Bute in 1762 and Grenville in 1763. In November 1763 he was chosen as the Cornmons manager of the case against John Wilkes, despite his reluctance, as he had “personally rather received civilities from Wilkes.” After a long and violent day of debate, notable for repeated attacks on the ministry’s constitutional position by Pitt, North succeeded in passing his motion that the author of North Briton issue number 45 should not be protected by parliamentary privilege. North left office when Rockingham formed a ministry in 1765-1766; but he was recognized as an able and useful organizer, and was made paymaster of the forces when Chatham took office in the summer of 1766. Soon he was being considered for the dual role of chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. He initially refused this post in March 1767 but was compelled by circumstances to accept it.
When Charles Townshend died in October 1767, North became chancellor, and in January 1768 he became leader of the Commons. The latter role required him to be constantly in the chamber, where he rapidly acquired a habit of resting his weak eyes, giving an impression of sleep—which evidently was sometimes all too accurate. “Is there a minister who ever slept so much in Parliament?” complained Isaac Barré in 1770. “He has taken his doze and his nap, while notes have been taken for him.” As leader, North was responsible for dealing with the further developments of the Wilkes affair, and in the spring of 1769 he was the driving force behind the decision that Wilkes was ineligible to stand for election. This decision effectively meant that the Middlesex freeholders who voted for him had wasted their votes, and the one-sixth of the votes given to the ministerial candidate Colonel Luttrell were the only valid ones. Many members of the Commons feared that the precedents were unclear and that this new decision would open the way to executive control of Parliament. North himself took the opposite stance, defending the right of Parliament to decide upon elections against the clamor of the people: “Let not Parliament fall into contempt. Let not liberty be established upon the ruin of law.” Just as this short-run ministerial victory failed to prevent a long-running agitation for liberty outside Parliament, so did Norths next intervention, in the American dispute over taxation.
In January 1770, North became First Lord of the Treasury, succeeding his cousin Grafton. One of the earliest decisions taken by Parliament under the new ministry was the resolution to retain the tea duty. For the next three years, however, the fateful consequences were not apparent, and North enjoyed a period of profit and respect. His wife was given the profitable royal post of Ranger of Bushy Park, and he himself was made a Knight of the Garter, a singular honor for a commoner, and elected chancellor of Oxford University.
It was a period also of hard work, not only at the Treasury but in the Commons, which could not open until he attended in person, which he did each day at about 3 P.M.
He became Prime Minister in 1770, however North’s period in power did not last long after the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781, even though the government and naval strategies were finally beginning to bear fruit. In mid-March 1782 North narrowly faced down two parliamentary motions of no confidence, and soon after, he was finally allowed by the king to resign. The next phase of his career would have been hard to predict, as within a year he was organizing a parliamentary opposition to Shelburne with Charles James Fox, the man who had been the loudest and most brilliant critic of North’s coercive policies and of the ministers’ role as the corrupt agents of royal despotism. North still had a substantial following in the Commons, and he and Fox were able to defeat Shelburne over the peace proposals, which tactically meant that George III had no option but to bring in the Duke of Portland to head a ministry in which the main actors would be Fox and North as secretaries of state. The king disliked Fox and felt betrayed by North, but after weeks of delay he finally called them into office in April 1783. The Fox-North coalition was brought down, appropriately enough, by Fox’s insistence on passing his India Bill, designed to bring much-needed reform to the East India Company. Like North’s earlier attempt, this one backfired because it triggered reactions, not easy to predict, to the invasion of chartered rights and liberties such as those enjoyed, however corruptly, by the company. George III used his personal influence to defeat the bill, and in December 1783 he dismissed Fox and North with a bluntness and a speed that betrayed his anger at their having “stormed the closet” and gained power for all.
North’s followers steadily fell away over the next few years, despite his undiminished skill as a debater. His sight, always very poor, deteriorated sharply in 1787, and by the following year he was all but blind and was rarely present in Commons. Nonetheless, when he was present—for example, when he was called upon in 1788-1789 to lead the opposition argument over the Regency Bill—he could still command the floor. North had never been physically attractive and blithely described himself as one of the ugliest men in England, even before the gross obesity of his later years. Horace Walpole harshly described him in Parliament, with his prominent but near-sighted eyes rolling: “a wide mouth, thick lips and an inflated visage gave him the air of a blind trumpeter.” He was, nonetheless, a commanding speaker capable of sharp and witty interventions that typically gained the attention and approval of the members of the House. In his last years he bore his blindness and deteriorating health with humor. He died of dropsy on 5 August 1792.
He formed a plan to defuse American anger by rescinding all of Townshend’s duties save the one on tea—the only one that produced worthwhile revenues. The tea duty was retained to establish the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.
He had to convey to the House the views of the king and the ministry, carry through in detail all financial business, and lead all significant debates. Thomas has calculated that in the 1768-1774 Parliament North made over 900 speeches, more than twice as many as any other member except the speaker. Toward the end of that Parliament, North went to the rescue of the indebted and desperate East India Company with a Regulating Act that contained some well-judged features. A financial loan was extended to the company, and administrative and legal reorganization were supplemented by the privilege of shipping tea directly into North America without paying the English duty. To the English this arrangement must have seemed unexceptionable, as it would give the Americans cheaper tea, even as it was unlikely to undercut the price of the extensively smuggled product. North was inflexibly determined, however, to retain the principle of parliamentary sovereignty embodied in the duty itself.
The response of the Boston trading community was unexpected and shocking: on 16 December 1773 a large party of Americans in Mohawk disguises sacked East India Company ships in Boston harbor and tipped into the sea about 200 chests full of tea. With sizeable support in Parliament, North decided on a swift and uncompromising response to what he mistakenly thought was localized extremism. In March 1774 Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, which quickly fanned the flames of American resentment by their autocratic interference with the administration of politics and justice in Massachusetts. Nothing could have united the protests of the colonists more quickly, as it proved, than the “Intolerable Acts”: North had begun the American Revolution.
Like most of his English political contemporaries, North was slow to realize the force of the American decision for independence, but was quick, and sincere, in offering to accommodate the colonies’ grievances. In 1775—too late—he offered the colonists control of their own taxation, provided that British parliamentary sovereignty was preserved. Soon North was immersed in the prosecution of a war that was going badly and that by 1778 was threatening to bring on a major war with France; but despite his repeated offers of resignation, the king insisted that he stay on as premier.
North’s personal finances were in a poor condition too, partly due to the costs of electoral management, which his income and estate could not support. In September 1777, George III generously paid his debts to the sum of £20,000, but North was calculated to be ip debt by nearly as much again when he resigned in 1782. By 1779 serious unrest had broken out also in Ireland, over unfair restrictions on Irish trade, which led some members of his own administration to resign. In December 1779 North substantially freed Irish trade, and in April 1780 he blunted the edge of Dunning’s famous resolution against royal “secret influence,” though he could not prevent its being passed by the Commons. Allegations of the growing influence of the Crown through corruption were echoed in charges levied personally against North, who had been the king’s leading minister for ten years. His unpopularity was manifest in the Gordon riots of June 1780, when a mob attacked his house on Downing Street, which was saved only by the arrival of the military. Satirical prints depicted him as a second Walpole, an all-powerful “prime minister”—a charge to which he was very sensitive. North insisted that no such office as prime minister existed under the constitution, and he frequendy remarked that his was a “government by departments,” with each minister being answerable to the king for his own department. Such statements indicate his recognition of his own inability to coordinate and control the individual ministries.
His ministry was marred also by the anti-Catholic Gordon riots and by accusations of corruption and tyranny in the press. Easygoing and amiable but driven by a sense of duty to remain in office, North must often have wished to be back amid the rolling farm landscape and honey-colored stone of his village at Wroxton, near Banbury, dominated by the family seat of Wroxton Abbey.
In May 1756, North, then 22, married 16-year-old Anne Speke, whose father, one of the wealthiest landowners in Somerset, had died three years earlier, leaving her an income of £4,000 a year. The marriage was a successful union of two easy-tempered people, and the couple raised three daughters and four sons.
