A Post-War Prime Minister
Lord Liverpool and Liberal Toryism, 1820-7. By W. R. Brock. (Cambridge University Press: 8s. 6d.)
ROBERT BANKS JENKINSON, second Earl of Liverpool, has been under- rated by Whig historians because he was a Tory, and by historians in general because he was overshadowed, from first to last, by contemporaries of greater ability. Nevertheless, although he was honest, tactful and, in economic questions, not unenlightened, and in spite of his power of soothing the grands amours-propres of ambitious politicians, he was not, and is not, a figure to catch the imagination. Such a man offers particularly difficult problems to a biographer who is aiming at something more than cheap and slick irony.
Mr. Brock solves these problems in a most satisfactory way by setting Liverpool in his proper context, in the years after Waterloo, as a Tory Prime Minister in a post-war age, and at a time of rapid change in the character of his own party. This method of treatment, again, is not easy. It requires an understanding of the working of Government and of the party system in the early nineteenth century. English party politics between the accession of George III and the death of Palmerston do not present easy paths to generalisation. The material is stubbornly intractable ; much of it lies hidden away in chance sentences in private papers and correspondence, and the interpretation of these documents is full of pitfalls.
In his preface Mr. Brock writes that the circumstances of the time have not allowed him to revise his work (originally a Cambridge prize essay) to his satisfaction, and that his final proofs were read in a barrack-room. Certain sections of the book—perhaps the last chapter—might have gained by further revision, and one or two statements about the " road to political power " in the early nineteenth century, may need some qualification ; but the book was well worth publishing, needs no apology, and should interest the general reader as much as the expert. In an odd way Mr. Brock's study, like all good books, has a moral, or, at all events, sets one thinking about the post-war age which we hope to see. One may have little patience with the Sidmouths (and even less with the Grenvilles) of the decade after Waterloo, and one can never forget the great misery of the English poor in town and country ; but if the Prime Minister in the years following a great war had not been a solid, careful man, more anxious to reconcile conflicts and to work existing institutions than to give his name to vast new schemes, it is not at all certain that the great political changes of the succeeding decades would have been carried through without destructive revolution. However, these are large questions, and a reviewer today can but wish dr. Brock a safe return to learned studies, and remind him of Gibbon's charming phrase about the value of military experience to a historian.
E. L. WOODWARD.
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