On January 17, 1712, after a furious and partisan Parliamentary debate, the British Secretary of War in a whig ministry (Robert Walpole) was committed to the Tower and expelled from the House of Commons. The majorities in favour of the measures were narrow and a motion to overturn the expulsion was defeated by only 12 votes. The merchant whigs favoured the war with France because victory over such a world rival would benefit British trade, the tories were against it because their crypto-Jacobite squires were paying for it. Walpole stood accused of corruption in the matter of forage contracts. He said he had declared that he was reserving a part of the forage contract for the army in Scotland for his friend Robert Mann. The contractors paid Mann five hundred guineas, twice, not to accept the contract. Walpole denied that he himself had himself benefited and indeed there was no evidence whatsoever - either at the time or since - to prove that he had, or that he took bribes or percentages from the deals. In a pre-democratic/post-democratic mirror reverse image of our own time, Britain’s future Prime Minster was imprisoned for corruption even though he wasn’t found guilty whereas the incumbent President of the United States (in Walpole’s time a British colony) hasn’t been imprisoned even though he was.
“The punishment was out of all relation to the crime” wrote JH Plumb in his classic 1956 biography of Walpole (though noting the Secretary of War’s wealth had increased immeasurably during his office) and Swift at the time opined that Walpole’s prosecution was really “a leading card to maul the Duke of Marlborough” ie a part of a general attack on the war against France and its inconveniently glorious Commander in Chief. “I heartily despise what I shall one day revenge,” declared a beaten but unbowed Walpole. His incarceration in the Tower lasted six months and his disgrace and exclusion from the Commons for two years. The electors of Lynn in the by-election occasioned by his expulsion returned him unopposed, an act as potent as it was unconstitutional. On 18 March 1714 he returned to the House and made one of the most forceful and eloquent speeches of his career, attacking the ministry’s craven appeasement of France and of plotting for a ‘popish successor’ and made another full of zest and wit on 16 April which drew thunderous applause. With the passing of Queen Anne, Marlborough’s restoration to Commander in Chief and the arrival in England of a Hanoverian (King George I, securing a protestant, anti-Jacobite and whig succession, he could look forward (Plumb suggests) to “the profits of office and the prospect of revenge.” He wasn’t out of the woods yet, as it happened, - in some ways, even as Britian’s first and still longest-serving prime minister, he never would be - but the old survivor was back with a vengeance and, by 1721 the former Secretary of War and Lynn career MP (40 years) would be presiding over ‘The Age of Walpole” and - ironically, given his former ministry - a long and profitable period of peace and national expansion.
“The Ballad of Sir Robert Walpole” was originally written to mark the bicentenary of Walpole’s return to Parliament in 1714 and published in “Doin’ Different”, a collection of new folk ballads about (mainly) Norfolk notables the following year. The book was the literary part of a project in which Norfolk-based musicians set our words and the ensuing collaborations toured East Anglian venues and festivals. The composer of the Walpole tune (and 5 others in the book) was Warwick Jones who plays it with us on this performance - Warwick has 4 composer and/or performer credits on the 2024 album of the project “Done Different.” This one in all its major-minor comic glory is an absolute treat to sing. Walpole was larger than life in every way, seeming to belong naturally to the Hogarth cartoons in which his era is preserved and extravagantly embodied in Houghton Hall, Norfolk, the immense and palatial neoclassical stately home – a “Neptune and Britannia Rampant Counting House as Castle” - he built in the West Norfolk woods. We have tried to convey something of Walpole’s formidable largeness of life and Hogarthian cartoon spirit, the latter most especially in the choruses (which in the film the feminine side of our duo sings live to a bucolic audience of horned cattle in the January grounds of Houghton Hall.)
