“Extremely reluctant to take on the premiership”

The History of Parliament project shared Dr. Robin Eagles’s assessment of Lord North’s work as prime minister.

Here’s a sample:

North had been just 37 years old when he became Prime Minister. The circumstances were unpropitious, and like the (even more youthful) Younger Pitt in his first few weeks in office, he faced a turbulent situation in Parliament as he settled into the role. His appointment had come following a period of crisis in government with the king at one point reported to have laid his hand on his sword insisting ‘I will have recourse to this sooner than yield to a dissolution’. [John Brooke, George III, p.158]

Unsurprisingly, North had been extremely reluctant to take on the premiership. Despite this, some senior politicians were cautiously optimistic about him. Lord Holland noted in a letter to a friend:

I believe you hear, as I do, a very good account of Lord North of whom, without knowing him, I have a very high opinion; but whether good omens will be follow’d by good events or no, you will not wonder that I don’t guess…
Campbell Correspondence, ed. Davies, p.316

One advantage was that, unlike Pitt, North was able to draw on a lengthy political apprenticeship. He had been returned to the Commons in his early twenties in 1754, and had become a predictably fast friend of the king, continuing the family tradition of loyal dependability. He accepted his first post in government in 1759 and from 1767 had served as chancellor of the exchequer. All of this ought, on the face of it, to have made him well prepared for the task ahead.

All of North’s good qualities – and there were plenty of them – were insufficient for a crisis of the proportions that was about to assail his administration from America. Some were out of North’s control; others stemmed from policies to which he had contributed in previous administrations.

Perhaps the biggest problem was that no one ever seemed entirely sure quite what government policy towards the colonies was supposed to be, though there should have been little doubt given the king’s own very clear determination to keep America as a British possession. North’s own response left everyone mildly confused. On one occasion, he was asked what the government plan was, only for him to reply that no one had come up with one.

To be fair, Lord North never sought the premiership. He simply couldn’t refuse the sovereign’s insistence that he take the job until the defeat at Yorktown made that ministry untenable. At that point, even the king was drafting abdication letters. The result was a change or clarification in the British constitution. While getting along well with the king remained a plus for a prime minister, it was henceforth to be the responsibility of the monarch to support ministry policy more than the dictate it.