A New Ministry Off to the Races

At the History of Parliament blog, the Georgian Lords welcomed Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri of the University of Aberdeen to discuss the equestrian genesis of the Marquess of Rockingham’s ministry:

By the spring of 1765, George III was determined to be rid of his overbearing minister, George Grenville, who had been in office since April 1763. The task of taking the pulse of the political nation, fell to the king’s uncle, William Augustus, duke of Cumberland. . . .

Cumberland had toured the great country houses in the summer of 1764, including Chatsworth, Wentworth Woodhouse and Woburn, discovering that the Whigs remained unenthusiastic about a return to power without [William] Pitt. The stalemate seemed unbreakable. Yet the solution would not be found in the names listed in the London Gazette, but in the pages of the Newmarket Calendar.

By the 1750s and 1760s horse racing had become a central ritual of aristocratic and political life. Already favoured by Charles II in the seventeenth century, by the 1740s Newmarket was the undisputed capital of the turf. The Racing Calendar, first published in 1727 by John Cheny, recorded results and pedigrees, turning the turf into a semi-official world of statistics and reputations. Ascot, founded in 1711 by Queen Anne, had by the 1760s become a highlight of the London season, attracting large crowds and royal patronage. (Morton, 56–61) Both courses were more than sporting venues: they were theatres of status, where political alliances were cultivated over wagers, where a minister could be sounded out between heats, and where a successful stable enhanced a nobleman’s standing. As one contemporary put it, ‘the turf is the true parliament of our nobility’. . . .

By 1765, Rockingham was already a figure of considerable weight within the Whig aristocracy, though not yet tested as a statesman. Born into immense wealth and heir to Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, he inherited his title in December 1750. In politics he aligned with the ‘Old Corps’ Whigs grouped around Newcastle, and from 1752 served as a gentleman of the Bedchamber to George II and George III, before resigning in 1762 in protest over Newcastle’s dismissal. . . . Like Cumberland, Rockingham was a passionate breeder and owner of racehorses, and he became known as ‘the Racing Marquess’. (Albemarle, i. 165)

Cumberland was equally at home on the turf, and in June 1765 he held court at Ascot, where the outlines of a new administration were hammered out. As well as Rockingham, the new ministry was to include Augustus Henry Fitzroy, 3rd duke of Grafton, a great-grandson of Charles II. Not yet 30, Grafton brought youth and royal blood; Rockingham brought wealth, influence, and respectability. Their conversations at Ascot and Newmarket were, as Albemarle noted, ‘held not in the closet, but at the races’. (i. 199) . . . Pamphleteers and satirists delighted in the horse racing connexion: ‘From Jockeys to Ministers’, they jibed…

The new ministry took office on 13 July 1765. The Duke of Cumberland hosted its meetings at his London home and country estate. But at the end of October he died, only forty-four years old. Rockingham, Grafton, Newcastle, and their colleagues rode on, but their coalition held together for only slightly more than one year.

During that time, Rockingham repealed the Stamp Act for North America. For the protesting colonists, that restored their loyalty to the British constitution. It did not, however, solve what London saw as the government’s revenue problem.

(The equestrian portrait of the Duke of Cumberland above was made in China, probably in the 1750s, for the British market. It is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.)