My prime ministerial bucket list is finally empty. Well, sort of.
With two apparently unvisitable graves still nagging away at me, last month I headed to Bristol, which I used as a launchpad to see the 2nd Earl of Liverpool at the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Hawkesbury.
This was one of my most logistically challenging trips, and therefore also one of the most enjoyable. Not only did I have to spend a night in Bristol (no great ordeal) but from there I had to get a train to a small station called Yate, from which the church was a 40-minute bicycle ride on mercifully flat and deserted Gloucestershire roads.
It was sunny, so I didn't mind. Despite having checked in advance that the church would be open (it normally isn't), I still had a sense of relief on seeing an open door when I arrived. It was a fine old church, dating from the Saxon period. Apart from some gardeners, I was the only person there.
A church guide listed Robert Banks Jenkinson, the 2nd Earl of Liverpool, as the 'most distinguished member' of the Jenkinson family to lie at rest in St Mary's. He's buried under the chancel floor, above which is a memorial plaque. Two heraldic banners bearing the Liverpool arms and encircled by his Garter Ribbon also survive in the church.
As far as I could figure out, the Earls of Liverpool had very little to do with Merseyside. 'This eminent minister entered the public service early in life,' declared the plaque. Indeed, slightly too early. In 1790, Jenkinson was elected to represent Rye in the House of Commons but being only 20 was not old enough to take up his seat. In the interim, he toured the continent. Parliament was clearly a more indulgent place in the late 18th century.
When his father became the 1st Earl of Liverpool in 1796, Jenkinson took the courtesy title of Lord Hawkesbury but remained in the Commons. Only after becoming Foreign Secretary (in his early 30s) was he, as the memorial plaque records, 'summoned to the House of Lords, as Baron Hawkesbury' in 1803. Thereafter he became Home Secretary and when William Pitt the Younger died in 1806, Hawkesbury was asked to form a government. He refused, judging that he did not command the 'confidence' of parliament.
Six years later Hawkesbury got another chance, this time in tragic circumstances. As his memorial plaque continues, on the 'assassination of Mr Percival, in 1812, he was appointed Prime Minister, which office he held for a long and glorious period without interruption, until 1827'. Fifteen years in the top job wasn't bad, only beaten by Pitt the Younger and Sir Robert Walpole. But while certainly long, not all of it was glorious.
Liverpool's longevity as premier was all the more remarkable given that few expected him to survive in office for very long, not least because of the circumstances in which he'd been asked to form a government. Victory in the Napoleonic Wars strengthened him politically, but just two years later high unemployment, a bad harvest and rising prices led to riots. Liverpool's government reacted by suspending habeas corpus for two years and restricting the import of foreign wheat.
Following the Peterloo Massacre, in which soldiers killed and wounded dozens of those demonstrating in favour of parliamentary reform, Lord Liverpool's 'Six Acts' limited the right to hold 'radical' meetings. Only when domestic politics stabilised in the 1820s did his government's policy become more liberal. As the economy improved, trading restrictions were removed and anti-trade union laws repealed.
The memorial plaque glossed over all this, leaping ahead rather graphically to the 'paralytic seizure' which deprived the nation of Lord Liverpool's services in 1827. He died 'without issue' in December 1828. The Earldom passed to his half brother and then became extinct, although the Jenkinson baronetcy endures via a cousin.
Once I'd seen all I wanted to, I rewarded myself with a sandwich in the wonderfully named Chipping Sodbury and then caught a delayed train back to the aptly named Bristol Temple Meads (its public areas resemble a gothic cathedral).
So that's that. A bucket list which began (almost accidentally) 13 years ago with a photograph of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's grave near Stirling concluded with another snap of his predecessor from a century earlier in southern Gloucestershire. Emptying that bucket has taken me to the far north of Scotland, the Anglo-Scottish border, northern Wales and even the Scilly Isles. I now know England much better than I did a decade ago.
It's also been lots of fun, but still the two unvisited Prime Ministers – the 1st Earl Russell and the 1st Earl of Wilmington – irritate my sense of completism. It's possible to see the first upon making a sizeable charitable donation, which I think would be a step too far. As for the second, I've written to the Marquis of Northampton (a kinsman of the Wilmingtons), just to be sure.
David Torrance is a writer and historian
