Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain's First Prime Minister

The Great Man

The most comprehensive biography of Britain's first - and longest-serving - Prime Minister.

Edward Pearce is a magnificent historian, and his biography of Sir Robert Walpole, the first British Prime Minister, is superb.

It is hard to imagine how anyone could rival this author's unparalleled expertise on prime ministers and politics, which makes him a lucid guide through the arcane maze of 18th-century government.

Richly detailed, stylistically ornate and littered with eccentric asides.

This is serious history...consistently illuminated by Pearce's sharp prose.

Few political writers can collapse half a dozen ideas into a single, dense yet witty sentence with such elegance.

A witty narrative written by an author intrigued by his topic.

Admirable ... Any young fans of Downing Street history would be wiser to read this elegant and insightful account of the failures, frustrations and addictions of power by a seasoned political observer.

Edward Pearce, after a national newspaper career starting in 1977, still keeps his hand in with book reviews, obituaries and travel pieces. However, for several years now he has concentrated on writing history. The Lost Leaders (about three near-Prime Ministers) was followed by Lines of Most Resistance (about English Resistance to Irish Home Rule), Denis Healey (the authorised biography), Reform! (about the 1832 Act), and The Diaries of Charles Greville, both published in Pimlico. He lives in North Yorkshire.

The year 1721 has many splendours: great houses built by William Kent, fine pictures and the fruits of commerce. But there are also thirteen public hanging days a year, drunkenness is endemic, organised crime rampages through the streets. And politics are ferocious. Only a generation earlier, The Pretender failed to take the Crown; the new King is cursed as a damned foreigner; James's followers - the Jacobites - conspire and are persecuted; the South Sea Bubble collapses.Robert Walpole, once imprisoned for financial chicanery, assumes political control and becomes 'Prime Minister'. He personally detects a Jacobite plot, is dismissed in 1727 on the death of George I, recruits the new King's clever wife, Caroline, and bounces cheerfully back. Coarse, corrupt and cynical, Walpole dominates King, Parliament and Government until 1742. This is Mr Worldywiseman, keeping England out of war for twenty years and setting up a stable and growing economy. All politics of a kind we can recognise today begin with Robert Walpole. And here, in Edward Pearce's elegant book, he is brought vividly back to life.

Man of War

Pitt the Elder

Groundbreaking in its approach, this is the definitive biography of William Pitt the Elder - a brilliant, yet tragic, British statesman.

Dazzling in its ways, glittering with clever insights and provocative comparisons

Pearce shrewdly captured the problems involved in interpreting the career of a man who fell under the spell of his own speechifying

Pitt was the hero...He was, as Edward Pearce argues in this revisionist biography, the show business man of war

[Pearce] constantly, often illuminatingly and sometimes wittily, draws parallels between the English politics of Pitt's time and more recent events or personalities

This is an immensely readable book -  informative, scholarly, but never dry

Pearce enlivens the narrative with crisp characterisations of the figures on the stage

Edward Pearce is a political journalist and author. He has been a leader writer for the Daily Express, a Commons sketch writer and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph, a columnist for the Sunday Times and the Guardian, and sketch writer for the New Statesman. He also writes regularly for the Yorkshire Post, and was a panellist on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze. He has written over 13 books, from The Senate of Lilliput (1983) to his most recent, The Great Man (2007), a life of Sir Robert Walpole.

This remarkable book opens at the dawn of the British Empire - with the great sea battle at Quiberon Bay where French ships, intended for the 1759 invasion of Britain, are chased, caught and defeated by a fleet commanded by Admiral Sir Edward Hawke. In this momentous victory Britain effectively settled the outcome of the Seven Years' War and established itself as the world's dominant imperial power. 
 
At the heart of the conflict with France was William Pitt, the first Earl of Chatham and Britain's future Prime Minister. Weaving together military history and political biography Edward Pearce provides a portrait of the man 'with an eye like a diamond' - a man who had close ties with the slave trade and who preached war and British supremacy on a world stage. Alongside detailed descriptions of battles in Europe and North America we follow Pitt's career as a politician - one that was closely intertwined with General James Wolfe at Quebec; American independence; the slow mind of George III and the quick one of the rake and outsider John Wilkes. 
 
Edward Pearce scrutinises the real man at the heart of the historical events and mystique surrounding the legacy of Pitt the Elder, to present a rounded and masterful portrait of arguably the most powerful minister ever to guide Britain's foreign policy and of an age which marked a new epoch in history, when the balance of power in Europe and the world was set for almost two centuries.

The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act

Reform!

'An attractively vivid and racy account of events that otherwise might have run the risk of possessing a distinctly musty flavour.'  Anthony Howard, Sunday Times

An attractively vivid and racy account of events that otherwise might have run the risk of possessing a distinctly musty flavour

Edward Pearce, after 25 years of Commons sketching and political commentary in national newspapers, concentrates on history. After eight briefer, contemporary books, Reform! is the latest of four major studies, following The Lost Leaders (1997), Lines of Most Resistance (1999), and Denis Healy (2002), the widely acclaimed authorised biography.

There may be a civil war, starting in the Midlands. The Birmingham garrison have rough-sharpened their swords and barricades have gone up in the town. Wellington is trying to form a government without a majority. The Duke says 'The English people are usually quiet; if not, there are ways of making them.' These are the Days of May, High Summer of English Reform.  The new Whig government has staggered everyone with a reform bill more drastic than all expectations, one to wipe out rotten boroughs and enfranchise industrial towns. It has passed the Commons, been thrown out by the Lords, then, in an election, is massively endorsed. Now in May 1832, the Lords are again blocking it. Political unions formed to promote reform are denounced for Jacobinism and revolution.  One Tory, John Croker, hopes that 'the coming revolutionary regime' will let Princess Victoria 'live quietly as Miss Guelph'.  King William IV, influenced by the Court and Queen Adelaide, refuses to make new peers; stalemate may turn into street fighting. The struggle is recorded here. The players, painted vividly, speak in their own voices from 170-year-old Hansards: the radicals, Cobbett and Hunt; the Ultras, Wetherell and Eldon, resisting all reform; Lord Chancellor Brougham, drunk and brilliant in a great speech; Lord Alport, who manages the nightmare legislative struggle, tempted by suicide; a mad backbencher demanding a day of fasting and penitence.  Here too are the riots and the quiet politics of British constitutional reform.  The outcome - the 1832 Act - is the most important event in the last 300 years of parliamentary history.

Edward Pearce

'The arrival of this book is a good deed in a naughty world...Pearce is to be congratulated for bringing growly, sardonic Greville back into the hubbub he retired from.'

'Edward Pearce has released Greville from the prison of dusty research libraries, giving new life to a literary treasure.'

'Edward Pearce has done a good job of reducing 40-odd years of diary entries to a manageable size.'

'For insights into the comedy of politics I doubt The Diaries of Charles Greville can be matched. Half Samuel Pepys, half Alan Clark, this inventory of wasted time an assessment of colleagues can't be bettered...The magic ingredient in the Pearces' volume is the candour of the original author...rescued artfully from oblivion'.

Charles Greville (1794-1865) made his first occasional diary entries in 1814, but the diary only became a regular habit in the mid-1820s, continuing with occasional breaks, about which he is self-reproachful, through the reigns of George IV, William IV and Victoria. Finally, in 1860, after shaking his head over the worrying triumphs of Garibaldi, he closed it, once and for all. The grandson of a duke, Greville looked with a level and scornful eye upon royalty. George was 'the most worthless dog that ever lived'; William 'the silliest old gentleman in his own dominions, but what can be expected of a man with a head like a pineapple?' The diaries roused Queen Victoria - 'an odd woman' - from the lethargy of her widowhood.She spoke of Greville's 'indiscretion, indelicacy, ingratitude toward friends, betrayal of confidence and shameful disloyalty'. 
 
Greville's circle included Talleyrand, Wellington, Macaulay, Sydney Smith, Princess Lieven, Lord Grey, Melbourne, Guizot and Disraeli, as well as 'jockeys, bookmakers and blackguards'.As Clerk of the Privy Council, Greville works for a compromise on the Reform Bill.He witnesses Covent Garden theatre burning down.His closest friend, Lord De Ros, is caught cardsharping. Visiting Balmoral, he finds Albert and Victoria living 'not merely like small gentlefolks, but like very small gentlefolks'. When cholera comes, he writes laconically of 'Mrs Smith, young and beautiful, taken ill while dressing for Church and dead by nightfall.' Not a chatterbox, Charles Greville brilliantly assembles everyone else's chatter. This is the intelligent voice of another age, an uneasy aristocrat catching history on the turn and looking dubiously at the future.

Edward Pearce

Praise for The Diaries Of Charles Greville

'The arrival of this book is a good deed in a naughty world...Pearce is to be congratulated for bringing growly, sardonic Greville back into the hubbub he retired from.'

'Edward Pearce has released Greville from the prison of dusty research libraries, giving new life to a literary treasure.'

'A thoroughly good idea.'

'The arrival of this book is a good deed in a naughty world...Pearce is to be congratulated for bringing growly, sardonic Greville back into the hubbub he retired from.'

'Edward Pearce has released Greville from the prison of dusty research libraries, giving new life to a literary treasure.'

'A thoroughly good idea.'

'The arrival of this book is a good deed in a naughty world...Pearce is to be congratulated for bringing growly, sardonic Greville back into the hubbub he retired from.'

'Edward Pearce has released Greville from the prison of dusty research libraries, giving new life to a literary treasure.'

'A thoroughly good idea.'

Books by Edward Pearce

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