Background
Frederick John Robinson was born in London on 30 October 1782, the second of the three sons of the second Baron Grantham, foreign secretary under Shelburne, and of Lady Mary Yorke.
politician prime minister statesman
Frederick John Robinson was born in London on 30 October 1782, the second of the three sons of the second Baron Grantham, foreign secretary under Shelburne, and of Lady Mary Yorke.
He was educated at Harrow and at St. John’s College, Cambridge. In 1802 he entered Lincoln’s Inn to train in the law, but was never called to the bar.
In 1803 he became private secretary to his cousin the Earl of Hardwicke, who was then lord lieutenant of Ireland. In 1806 he entered Parliament as Tory M.P. for the Irish borough of Carlow, and a year later he became M.P. for Ripon, a seat that he held for twenty years. He was appointed undersecretary for war and the colonies in April 1809, but resigned his post in September, together with his mentor Castlereagh. He was brought back into the Perceval administration of 1810 to 1812 and remained continuously in office until 1828.
He became a loyal supporter of Lord Liverpool, and from 1813 to 1817, acted as joint paymaster-general of the land forces. He accompanied Castlereagh to the continent for the Vienna peace negotiations.
In 1812, Liverpool appointed him vice-president of the Board of Trade, and in 1818, president. The latter post was the first of a large number of ministerial appointments that he filled in an active career that lasted until 1846.
Robinson was appointed chancellor of the exchequer in the government reshuffle that followed Casdereagh’s suicide.
Grief-stricken by the death of his 11-year-old daughter Henrietta after a painful illness, and increasingly anxious about his wife’s health, he contemplated quitting politics altogether in 1826. In April 1827 he was appointed secretary of war and the colonies, and leader of the House of Lords, in George Canning’s short-lived ministry. He proved less effective in the House of Lords than he had been in the House of Commons. Nevertheless, he was persuaded by George IV to succeed Canning as prime minister, following the latter’s sudden death in August 1827.
Goderich was not offered a post in the Duke of Wellington’s government, and he gradually drifted closer to the Whigs. After a grudging conversion to parliamentary reform, he joined Earl Grey’s Whig administration as secretary of war and the colonies, and was thus responsible for implementing the government’s policy of abolishing slavery in the colonies. He agreed, reluctantly, to exchange this post for that of Lord Privy Seal in 1833. He was compensated with the new tide of Earl of Ripon, but found himself an increasingly peripheral figure, and a year later left government altogether with Stanley, Graham, and Richmond, in opposition to Irish church reform. Their departures, mocked by the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell as the “Derby Dilly,” precipitated the fall of Grey’s government a few weeks later and added another humiliating sobriquet to the Earl of Ripon’s collection.
He returned to the Conservative Party later in 1834 and took office for the last time in Peel’s second administration as president of the Board of Trade (1841-1843) and president of the Board of Control (1843—1846). He supported Peel’s overhaul of customs duties, which paralleled his own in the early 1820s, and the revision of the sliding scale on corn. He resigned with Peel in 1846 and remained a Peelite after 1846, making his last speech in the Lords on Irish affairs in 1847. He died from influenza at Putney Heath, London, on 28 January 1859.
At Lord Liverpool’s request, he introduced, “with great reluctance,” the notorious Corn Law Bill of 1813, after which his home was besieged by angry mobs, and in the ensuing fracas two assailants were killed. He broke down in tears while reporting the incident to the House of Commons, earning the unflattering nickname of “Blubberer.”
During his period in this office, between 1823 and 1827, he became associated, along with William Huskisson at the Board of Trade, with policies designed to balance the national budget and increase freedom of trade through the lowering of customs duties and fiscal reform. Although no more able a financier than his predecessor, Nicholas Vansittart (Lord Bexley), who had left him a handsome legacy of nearly £5 million in excess revenue, he was a better communicator and a more popular figure in the House of Commons. With trade recovering, Robinson was able to budget for an even greater surplus of £7 million, which, after allowing for the £5 million earmarked for debt redemption, gave him £2 million for tax reductions, enabling him to slash the window tax by half. Budget surpluses in 1824 and 1825 allowed him to lower duties on a whole range of consumer goods and raw materials for industry, including iron, coal, wool, silk, hemp, coffee, wine, and rum. Despite the lowering of duties, rising consumption and a greater volume of trade kept the revenue buoyant and facilitated further fiscal reform, so that when the financial crisis of 1825 and the subsequent recession of 1826 brought the first phase of economic recovery to a halt, Robinson was still able to anticipate a small revenue surplus for 1827. During this period he acquired two further nicknames, Prosperity Robinson and Goody Goderich, from William Cobbett. Applied sarcastically by the radical journalist on account of the chancellor’s unwarranted optimism on the eve of the economic crisis of 1825, they have since been appropriated by historians to underline the success of his policies in generating economic improvement in the early 1820s. Robinson, a devout Christian and patron of the arts, also directed revenues from Austria’s partial repayment of a British war loan into grants to build new churches, restore Windsor Castle, and found the National Gallery. Robinson also was a cautious supporter of Roman Catholic emancipation.
As a Prime Minister Goderich was indecisive, unassertive, and incapable of holding together the lukewarm and fractious cabinet, which was deeply divided on domestic and foreign policy. The appointment of the ultra-Tory J. C. Herries as chancellor of the exchequer, under pressure from the king, alienated the Canningites and Whigs in Goderich’s administration and fueled continuing controversy around Roman Catholic emancipation, which divided the Whigs and Tories. These divisions were further exacerbated by new issues arising from the Eastern question, following the Anglo-French destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino Bay in October. When he resigned in January 1828 after less than five months in office, Goderich became the only prime minister ever to resign without having appeared in Parliament as the holder of that office. William Huskisson observed that Goderich had been reduced to “a most pitiful state.” However, it was Huskisson himself who first lost his nerve and resigned, after a bitter quarrel with Herries, in the belief that the government would simply collapse as soon as the new session of Parliament began. George IV, fearing a further lurch toward the Whigs, eased Goderich out of office in January 1828.
The personal ridicule to which he was subjected throughout his political career, and the ignominy of his failed premiership—dismissed by Disraeli in Endymion as a “transient and embarrassed phantom”—have ensured that he has been treated somewhat contemptuously by posterity. However, as Norman Gash has argued, the malicious epithets of “Goody Goderich” and “Blubberer” suggest “a more foolish man than he actually was.” On the whole, he was a capable administrator unable to withstand the strains of the highest office during the post-Liverpool era, when Tory Party unity was rapidly disintegrating.
In 1814 he married the daughter and heiress of the Earl of Buckinghamshire, Lady Sarah Hobart, a notorious hypochondriac who became neurotically obsessed with her husband’s safety.
