Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool — Keeping the Show on the Road

Abstract

The third longest-serving British Prime Minister was the second Earl of Liverpool, who took over the leadership of Spencer Perceval’s government, following his assassination in 1812, and remained in office until April 1827. He was, effectively, the product of a one-parent family, his mother dying one month after his birth and his father not remarrying until he was 12 years old. Robert Banks Jenkinson was born in London on 7 June 1770. His father, Charles Jenkinson, was descended from a long line of baronets going back to the reign of Charles II, but whose fortune dated back to Anthony Jenkinson, a sea captain and merchant venturer in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who had finished up as her ambassador to the Tsar of Russia and the Shah of Persia. Charles Jenkinson was a successful politician, who had become the leader of ‘the King’s friends’ in the House of Commons, and a minister under both Lord North and the Younger Pitt. In 1769, at the age of 41, he made a financially beneficial marriage to the 18-year-old Amelia Watts, the partly Indian daughter of William Watts, a former governor of Fort William in Bengal, who had made a considerable fortune as one of the more rapacious associates of Robert Clive. She was to die, from the delayed effects of childbirth, at the age of 19, on 7 July 1770. Robert was brought up in his father’s household, but spent his holidays near Winchester, either in the house of his grandmother Amarantha Cornwall, or his Aunt Elizabeth, whose husband, Charles Wolfram Cornwall, was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1780–9.