Prime Factors - Ranking UK Prime Ministers

2 - Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington

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2 - Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington

Episode Transcript

Abram: Welcome to Prime Factors. This week, Spencer Compton.

Parliament: Hip hip! Hurrah! Hip hip! Hurrah! Hip hip! Hurrah!

Abram: Hello and welcome back to Prime Factors. I'm Abram, and I'm here with my dad. We're reviewing all the British prime ministers from Robert Walpole to Rishi Sunak. This episode is number two, Spencer Compton. Really, it's our fourth episode but our second prime minister.

Joe: Yes, this is our first real episode. Well, the other episodes were also real, but they were pilots. We weren't sure if we would even make them available. This is the first one after we decided to keep going. Abram, do you want to tell everyone our good news?

Abram: You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and we even have a website at www.primefactorspodcast.com. Please like and subscribe or write comments or reviews. We're pretty small right now when we're recording, but we want to grow.

Joe: Okay, we are up on YouTube, but our YouTube videos are audio only. We're still deciding the best way to do that. We don't really want to video us talking, and we don't have enough budget to do that well. But we may do some illustrated podcasts. We'll see.

Abram: I want us to have pictures in the videos.

Joe: The other good news is we got an email and a virtual blessing from Graham at Rex Factor. It means a lot to us that they are supportive of our little podcast. I also got an email from Ben at Battle Royale, and I'm grateful for his comments too. He likes our logo, Abram.

Abram: That's good.

Joe: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Finally, I should say that we have no social networks. You cannot find us on X or Instagram or anywhere else. It was enough this week just to get the website up and the podcast available on all the apps. We may look to set up some socials next time, but we don't really have a plan for that right now. Are you ready, Abram?

Abram: I'm ready.

Joe: Great. Let's talk about Spencer Compton.

Part 1 — Ancestry

Joe: Now, before we can talk about Compton, I think we need to go back. We need to go way back in history. All the way back to King John, because it was during his reign that we have the first evidence of the Compton family living in Warwickshire, in the ancestral home that they still live in today.

Abram: Which means Robin Hood, if he was real, could have met them.

Joe: Robin Hood, if he was real, could have met them. Yeah. So there was a guy named Edmund Compton. He later built a Tudor manor home there in the 1480s, started during the reign of Edward IV, and that house is called Compton Wynyates. I am probably mispronouncing that because it has too many Ys and I don't know how to say that word, but it was finished under Henry VII. So, Abram, I would love to tell you that it's a good picture, but here is a picture of Compton Wynyates.

Abram: If you don't know, it's that our ink ran out when printing out the portrait, so now it's all orange with stripes of green on it.

Joe: Okay, so it's a bad picture, Abram, but it looks really cool. Yeah, it's not what we would call a castle, but you can't really tell on that picture because it's orange. But there was even a little dry moat. So it was pretty much a castle, just built during the early Tudor reign.

Joe: Now, Edmund, he died in 1493, leaving his eleven-year-old son William Compton to be made a ward of King Henry VII. So I struggle to find the little details going this far back, but it's understood that Edmund was close to the Tudor court. Maybe it was because of land or influence. Maybe there was a personal connection. It could even have been the opposite, right? So maybe the Comptons owed money to the Tudors and that after Edmund died, that they decided, hey, your kid is going to live here and work for me for a while. I don't know what, but however it was, young William was made a ward to the Tudor Henry VII.

Joe: At this time, Henry VII's second son, Henry, the Duke of York, was only two. And so William Compton was nine years older and he became a page to the young Henry. So that basically meant he helped to deliver messages or do little tasks. And we know that they kind of became friends, right, during this time. Maybe William even felt like a little bit of an older brother to the young Henry.

Joe: But in 1501, something bad happened. So Henry's brother Arthur, the Prince of Wales, died. Now, Arthur had been next in line to the throne, but now Henry was next in line. And William suddenly went from being the page to like a second son to being a good friend of the soon-to-be king. And who became king in 1509?

Abram: Henry VIII. Dun dun dun!

Joe: Henry VIII became king in 1509, and he appointed William as Groom of the Stool.

Abram: Which sounds like he married a seat, like a literal chair. But it's even funnier.

Joe: Yeah, it is funnier. He did not marry a chair, but the Groom of the Stool was like a personal bathroom attendant.

Abram: Remember the Knights of the Undies? This is even funnier.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Abram: This is so funny.

Joe: These British things are funny, but that's why we're doing a podcast, right? Anyway, in reality, he was a personal attendant to Henry. He helped him dress. He did help him use the bathroom. And the word "stool" apparently is an early name for toilet.

Joe: William, in addition to helping him use the bathroom, also fought with Henry. He was knighted in 1513 in a war called the War of the League of Cambrai. I've never heard of it, but apparently the French and Italians fought it and Henry VIII jumped in because he wanted territory in northern France. And it's not important. But the key thing here is that William continued to grow in influence. He became a key advisor to the king. He was put in charge of several castles. He was put in charge of Ireland from 1513 to 1516. And a ton of other things.

Joe: And he's very interesting, and I could keep talking about him, but I've talked enough about this. This is supposed to be a podcast about Spencer Compton, and the fact that I'm talking more about his ancestor probably tells you something about how this episode is going to go. He was perhaps the source of the Compton family's importance on the English national stage, and even through all that, he was never given a peerage.

Joe: And after William, the Compton family was never far from power. His grandson, Henry Compton, was the first member of the family in the House of Commons. He eventually became a baron. His son became an earl. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Joe: Well, fast forward to a different Spencer Compton, our Spencer's grandfather. He was a close friend of Charles I. He fought for the royalists during the English Civil War. He was killed in battle in 1643. So that meant that our Spencer's dad, whose name was James Compton, he was only 22 when his dad died and he became the Earl of Northampton. Like his father, he fought on the side of the royalists. When the royalists were defeated, he basically went back to his estates, kind of tried to stay out of trouble. He was arrested several times for trying to put Charles II on the throne, but he was never punished significantly.

Joe: While he was doing this, James also spent his time as a playwright, although we don't know how many of his plays were performed. They were only rediscovered in 1977 and performed for the first modern time in the 2010s. It's kind of nice to think of him as like a closet intellectual.

Joe: But by 1673, he was made a member of the Privy Council, an advisor to Charles II. And in 1674, we finally made it. Spencer Compton was born. He was probably named for a guy named Sir John Spencer, who was his great-great-grandfather, who had been a Lord Mayor of London. His father was an advisor to the king. He was born into a family of privilege that had been around for hundreds of years. They had their own castle. Abram, do we have a castle?

Abram: No.

Joe: No. Do we know anyone that has a castle?

Abram: No.

Joe: That's sad. He was born, he had a castle.

Abram: Of course. Was it orange?

Joe: It wasn't orange.

Abram: Did our printer think it was orange?

Joe: Our printer is pretty sure that it's orange, but it wasn't orange.

Part 1B — Silver Spoons

Joe: Now I want to introduce a new feature to our podcast.

Abram: Silver Spoons.

Joe: These aren't going to be part of the rating, but it's a funny way to acknowledge that political dynasties ruled the day, and who you are related to opened doors for you. So I built the point system. We're not going to go over all the points in detail, but basically being a baron's worth a point and a half. Being an MP is worth one. An Earl is two and a half. Being a bishop, serving in the Privy Council, all the normal stuff, like everything.

Abram: And being a prime minister is worth— maybe let's say four to make it like—

Joe: We don't have anyone yet that his relatives were prime minister. So we—

Abram: #PittTheYounger. #PittTheYounger. So prime minister is worth four.

Joe: Sure. Prime minister is worth four. And then what I do is I add up all of the points for their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and then up the father's line. So the father's father's father's father, up until the point where Wikipedia doesn't have a page for them.

Joe: So looking at Walpole, Walpole only would've received five points or five silver spoons because you might remember he had an evil Tory uncle, but his evil Tory uncle didn't become an evil Tory uncle that was an MP until after Walpole was born. So he didn't get any points for that. But his father and his grandfather were important, and I think both of them were MPs if I remember right.

Joe: Now, Spencer Compton, do you want to make a guess? As to how many silver spoons Spencer Compton was born with?

Abram: I'm guessing at least fifteen.

Joe: So close, but you're underestimating just how much privilege he was born into.

Abram: I'm guessing thirty.

Joe: Thirty-five spoons he had.

Abram: Silver spoons.

Joe: Thirty-five silver spoons.

Abram: That's a lot of spoons to give him. That would certainly be good if he keeps losing his utensils.

Joe: Yes, if he loses his utensils, or if he likes soup.

Abram: Yeah, or if he likes having a bunch of types of soup at once without mixing them using the spoons.

Joe: Yeah, I think so too. So Compton, he had an uncle who was a bishop, he had parents and grandparents and earls, and I mean, he just had a pretty big, pretty notable family. And I wonder if thirty-five is going to be actually even unusually high. I'm looking forward to seeing how these scores change as we look at our future prime ministers.

Part 2 — Young Spencer Compton

Joe: So Spencer Compton was born in 1673, but we don't know when. He wasn't the first son. His older brother George was nine at this point. He had a sister Mary that was four, and nobody even bothered writing down when he was born. That is how unimportant he was. He wasn't going to be the heir. He wasn't going to become the Earl of Northampton, like his father was. And in fact, we don't know a ton about Spencer's childhood.

Abram: This is probably going to be the prime minister that we know the least about.

Joe: I think it's true. Well, one of the things about Spencer Compton is that he is one of the few prime ministers that nobody has written a full-length biography of. I'm not just saying that because I couldn't find one, but I found a different historian commenting on the fact that nobody ever bothered writing a biography about him because he just wasn't seen as that important.

Abram: Later on, since we're a ranking podcast that does everything including disputed prime ministers, like one of the disputed prime ministers even has one of the cards we use that will come sort of important later on in this episode when we'll tell you why we're super angry at the cards people. But we're doing all the prime ministers. We don't care if no one cares about them. We're just gonna do them.

Joe: Well, I'm gonna do my best to make it as interesting as possible. And every time Abram falls asleep, I know that I've done bad.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: All right. He was born when his father was a member of Charles II's Privy Council, but that was also the year when James, the Duke of York, later James II, admitted that he was a Roman Catholic. Trouble began between the Stuarts and Parliament. We know that his sister Aletha, who I don't even think I mentioned, she died when Spencer was five. She was only seventeen.

Joe: So Spencer's dad James was a strong supporter and friend to Charles II. And when Parliament wanted to punish Charles during the Exclusion Crisis, he was removed from all of his posts. So essentially he was fired.

Joe: So you might also remember that that's kind of the schism that led to the Whigs and the Tories. So the Whigs were the party that wanted to keep James II from becoming king. While the Tories were loyal to the king and they were kind of okay with the Catholic monarch because God thought it was okay. And I don't really quite understand all of their logic.

Abram: Trust us, we will get a Tory eventually.

Joe: There's going to be a lot of Tories eventually.

Abram: Actually, no, like ten or something compared to like thirty Whigs, I think.

Joe: I look forward to finding out. So James was an early Tory, but he wouldn't live to see this out. He died in 1681 when Spencer was around seven. And so Spencer's older brother George, who was only seventeen, was the new Earl of Northampton.

Joe: We have no idea what Spencer Compton's feelings were during all this, but when he was thirteen, he was sent off to St. Paul's School in London. This is about the same time that his brother got married to a woman named Jane Fox, and they started their own family at Compton Wynyates.

Joe: So Spencer went to Trinity College in Oxford when he was fifteen. He studied law at the Middle Temple in London. Because he was a second son, he didn't really have the opportunity to inherit as much, but he still had plenty of money. And so he essentially was going to, I guess, the British equivalent of law school. He was going to become something called a barrister. And that's a type of lawyer that we don't have here. And I'm not going to be able to explain to you the difference because I've tried to figure it out my whole life. And the British system is just very weird to me.

Joe: Now, I had a source that claimed that Spencer didn't really complete his degree at college. They just gave it to him even though he wasn't doing very well.

Abram: Yeah, I assume that's just because literally everyone's biased against him except us.

Joe: Yeah, I think you're right. One of the things that I found while I'm researching this is that absolutely everyone talks down about Spencer Compton. So we're going to try to give him the benefit of the doubt. I don't know whether he finished his degree or not, but certainly there have been some historians that have said that maybe he didn't actually really finish.

Joe: So what happened in 1689?

Abram: Um, William and Mary.

Joe: Yep, the Glorious Revolution came, divided families, put William and Mary on the throne. So do you remember the Comptons were royalists, right? They supported Charles II. Yeah, but some of them switched sides and some of them didn't. So we have some of the Comptons essentially becoming Whigs, and some of the Comptons becoming Tories, and some of them are kind of on the fence.

Joe: Spencer's uncle is a guy by the name of Bishop Henry Compton.

Abram: You said he was Bishop. Does that mean his parents were idiots, or does that mean that—

Joe: No, no, his name was not Bishop. His name was Henry, but he was a bishop. Abram is referring to a funny thing from Totalus Rankium where there was a guy named Dr. Doctor because his parents named him Doctor, and he thought that the only job he should get at that point is doctor, because otherwise it was just going to confuse people.

Joe: So Bishop Henry helped to smuggle a young woman named Princess Anne out of London, and she would later become Queen Anne. So Spencer's brother George also had to decide, and he chose to ally himself at this point with William and Mary against James II. To thank him for this, George Compton carried the king's scepter and cross during the coronation ceremony, basically recognizing his important place and that he had switched sides.

Joe: But there's a lot of confusion on this point. So one source I read said that this is the point where Spencer and George got into a big fight between the two brothers, and that George was a Tory, and that Spencer got in such a big fight that he just became a Whig. I actually think that that story is completely wrong because at this point, as best I can tell, George was the one that had switched to being a Whig. Spencer was still a Tory, and he would stay a Tory for the next twelve years. So there's a lot of confusion. The biographies that I found, I think, aren't perfect.

Joe: But at this point, Tory Spencer was now against his brother, the Whig George Compton. Around this time, Spencer supposedly picked up drinking. This might not be true either. This might be propaganda, but later in life, a guy by the name of Lord Chesterfield is going to claim that Spencer Compton picked up a drinking habit while he was studying at Oxford and that he remained a drunk for the rest of his life. I mean, it might be true, but I don't know that I would put a lot of faith in what his enemies say. What do you think?

Abram: I don't think we should. We're trying to be at least as least biased as possible.

Joe: It's hard. Sometimes these sources are really biased. Trying to figure out what the truth is when you have biased sources can be really tough.

Joe: So in 1695, Spencer Compton decided that he was going to be a politician. On the advice of his uncle, Charles Sackville, the Earl of Dorset, he ran for a seat as a Tory in the House of Commons in East Grinstead. This had actually been Sackville's old seat before he was made an earl, but Spencer lost the election badly. Badly. There were four candidates, two seats, and guess what place Compton came in?

Abram: Fourth.

Joe: Fourth. He got eleven votes out of, I don't know, like forty. There weren't that many voters.

Abram: You made it sound bigger than it actually was.

Joe: So the winning candidate got sixteen votes. So him getting eleven doesn't sound so bad. But again, all the sources were like, and Spencer Compton came in last. But in fact, he lost not that bad.

Joe: So losing it didn't really discourage Spencer from politics. And fortunately for him, his brother had connections. His brother had married into the Fox family. Remember Jane Fox? Her sister was Elizabeth Fox.

Abram: Do they have anything to do with Guy Fawkes?

Joe: I'm not sure it's spelled the same way. I'll have to check. So Elizabeth Fox had become Elizabeth Cornwallis.

Abram: I hope there are no people related, or at least no Comptons, that are trying to blow up Parliament.

Joe: If he tried to—

Abram: This is one of the few things I know that isn't completely king-related about British history.

Joe: Yeah, well, I don't think any of the Comptons are looking to blow up Parliament.

Joe: Now, this is all too complicated, but there was basically a little family alliance between the Comptons and the Cornwallises through the Fox sisters. And the Cornwallis family basically helped Compton run for a seat in a town called Eye.

Abram: E-Y-E.

Joe: So thanks to the help of the Cornwallis family, Spencer Compton was finally an MP in the borough of Eye in southeastern England. Can you think of a town name more weird than Eye?

Abram: Belchertown.

Joe: Belchertown, Massachusetts. Okay, that is weirder than Eye. People aren't that good at naming towns. What can I say?

Joe: So thanks to this family connection, Spencer Compton won that election. But do you know where he was for that election?

Abram: Where?

Joe: On vacation. Or he would probably say holiday, I guess. But anyway, he was on vacation in Europe during the whole election.

Joe: But it is a little bit confusing. So the Cornwallis family were Whigs. He just won that seat as a Tory. There's definitely some weird stuff going on at this point with changing alliances. I don't fully get this, but he did have the seat, and clearly the Cornwallis family thought that he was enough of a Whig that he could have it.

Joe: But he didn't stay a Tory for long because he officially became a Whig in 1701. And he was a Whig in part because he met somebody. Who do you think he met?

Abram: Did he meet Walpole?

Joe: He met Walpole. So Robert Walpole also entered Parliament in 1701.

Abram: Yeah, I remember that.

Part 3 — Rise and Fall in Parliament

Joe: So it might have been coincidental that he changed to a Whig after he met Walpole. He might have changed to a Whig first. One source that I read said that, you know, he wasn't really that much of a stickler of this Whig thing or a Tory thing, but he thought that his career would go better if he was a Whig. We have no idea for sure.

Joe: So Walpole proved himself to be a really great speaker, as well as a, well, corrupt son of a gun, I guess. Maybe he was, he had his ways. But Compton instead proved himself to be an expert at parliamentary procedures, right? This might've been due to his background as a lawyer. He understood Parliament and very quickly found out ways to get work done.

Joe: He continued to just progress as a low-level member of Parliament. He ran again in 1701, 1702, 1705. He always won. But in 1705, he got his first real job in the Commons. This was in something called the Elections and Privileges Committee. That was for deciding disputed elections, which happened quite a lot at the time. And it was seen as an important role because he wanted to make sure that his candidate would always win.

Joe: In 1707, though, he was appointed by Queen Anne to be the Treasurer to Prince George of Denmark, who was Anne's husband. So this allowed him to, like, hang out with the royal family. Like, it was a big deal for him.

Joe: Do you remember what happened in 1709?

Abram: In 1709, there is a very cold winter.

Joe: Okay, I've learned something today. But in addition to the very cold winter in 1709, this is when Walpole was going after this guy named Dr. Sacheverell. Remember, he was a High Church Anglican. He had been issuing pamphlets, delivering sermons, attacking the Whigs, claiming that the English government was too soft on Protestants, kind of secretly probably being a Jacobite.

Joe: So Walpole, you might remember, gave some great speeches and was like trumpeted as a great leader in that trial. So much of a great leader that they threw him in the Tower of London after everything was over, 'cause they blamed him for stuff. Not just for that trial, but you know, other things too.

Joe: For Spencer, he really did really badly. He apparently gave speeches that nobody liked. He upset the Cornwallis family. And the Cornwallis family basically said, hey, you know what, we're not going to support you anymore. You went against Dr. Sacheverell too hard. We're Whigs, but no, that wasn't okay. So Spencer Compton was out of a job and out of Parliament.

Part 4 — Gap Years and The Return

Joe: I don't have a lot to say about what he did during the three years that he was out of Parliament. We know that he started living in Sussex for a house that he's eventually going to buy, but he didn't buy it yet. We know that he was picking up books to build a library. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it.

Joe: But in 1713, he ran again in East Grinstead, which is where he ran all that time ago. And in contrast to his last-place finish, we don't know how well he did. Do you know why we don't know how well he did?

Abram: Because there are barely any sources about it.

Joe: Well, yes, that too. But there were two seats in East Grinstead that election. There were two candidates in East Grinstead that election. They didn't even bother voting. It's like, eh, you win. No worries. So he might have come in first. He might have come in last. We don't know.

Abram: Last would have been second, right?

Joe: Well, last would have been second. I mean, somebody else should have run, clearly.

Joe: So, by the way, if you don't know, East Grinstead is a bit south of London near the Ashdown Forest. You and I were there a couple of years ago because that's not so far from all the Winnie-the-Pooh stuff that we went to see. There was a really lovely house. We had tea. It was my first English tea experience in real England. It was nice. We had scones, little sandwiches with the crust cut off. If you're a parent, you should go there. It's really good for kids.

Joe: Anyway, these are the final years of Queen Anne. The Tories were in power, right? We talked about all this with Walpole. Compton was in the opposition, yada yada yada yada.

Part 5 — King George I

Joe: What happened in 1715?

Abram: It was George I's first full year.

Joe: Yes. So Anne died, the Hanoverian succession happened, King George came to power, there was another election. So instead of running in East Grinstead again, because maybe there would have been more than two candidates running and he might have come in last again, Spencer Compton ran for the Sussex county seat.

Abram: Isn't that even bigger?

Joe: Yes. So all of the seats we've been talking about so far have been like little town seats. So this is the first time we've actually seen a county seat, and these were kind of more democratic than the others. So there was, I don't know, forty people in East Grinstead that could vote. Do you know how many people could vote in Sussex at the time?

Abram: Forty thousand?

Joe: Forty thousand? Well, no, four thousand. So a lot more people could vote, but they were all still the rich people. For the most part, but it meant that he had to win a lot more voters. And he came in second in that election. He won 32% of the vote, and that was enough to take a seat.

Abram: Good job, Compton.

Joe: Good job, Compton.

Abram: That's something good about him.

Joe: Yep. So unlike Walpole, who as soon as George I became king, Walpole seemed to become important. Compton did not. He didn't get any of the early offices that were offered. He wasn't added to the Privy Council. He was basically given one new job, and this was to be the Treasurer to George, the Prince of Wales. So George, the Prince of Wales, was thirty-five, Compton was forty-two, and they kind of became friends. Do you know who George, the Prince of Wales, will be?

Abram: George II.

Joe: He's going to be George II.

Abram: And as seen in Walpole's episode, if you listen to it, George II kept insisting that Compton should be prime minister. So there probably will be some tension over there.

Joe: I think we're going to get there in a couple minutes. I look forward to it.

Part 5B — Speaker of the House

Joe: So Compton continued to rise a little bit. He became the Speaker of the House of Commons. So this is going to be his job for the next twelve years, from 1715 to 1727. So let's talk about what that means. Walpole was never the Speaker of the House of Commons, so we didn't talk about it then.

Joe: So Compton essentially acted as the chair of Parliament. He presided over the debates. He made sure that everyone followed the rules. He made sure that everyone spoke on their turn. He was supposed to be unbiased. So even though he was a Whig and he would be a Whig in opposition with Walpole when that happened, he was still expected to follow the rules. At a time of high politicalization, having this role and being impartial was important. And finally, he would present bills passed by the House to the Lords or to the monarch.

Joe: So later someone's going to say that he was, quote, "very able in the chair, but not a great speaker." Compton had something else to say. So tell me if you think this is fair. So Compton himself said, and I quote, he "had neither the memory to retain, judgment to correct, nor skills to guide the debate."

Abram: That seems rather rude.

Joe: About himself. Like, I think he was just being modest. But I mean, for all of the historians that go around saying that he wasn't that exciting and he didn't do very much, like, and then he says that about himself.

Joe: So there was a time when the House was not settling down and allowing a member to speak. So that member complained to Speaker Compton, and Compton replied, quote, "You have the right to speak. But the House has a right to judge whether they will hear you."

Abram: It's like you can speak, but like the House can say you can't speak. So he's saying that you can, but you can't.

Joe: Well, he's saying I'm not going to make them not talk over you. You can talk as much as you want, but none of those guys are listening. So I don't think it was very helpful.

Joe: So Compton at this point, as I said, he became an expert at the rules. He used those rules to his advantage. They passed the bills they wanted to pass. He was probably a pretty good speaker because he was that for twelve years.

Part 5C — Sir Spencer Compton

Joe: Now, in 1717, you might remember that Walpole had a falling out with George. Basically, King George wanted the English military to help in Hanover. Walpole didn't, so he basically split off some of the Whigs. Compton went with Walpole but somehow still managed to convince the rest of the House to keep him as Speaker. So that was pretty cool.

Joe: That split only lasted for a couple of years. And you'll remember that Walpole sort of came right back into the government right before that whole South Sea Company crisis kicked off. So it's kind of funny looking at it now, because like Compton's just really good at always like being friends with the people in power. So when Walpole's in power, he was good friends with Walpole. When the Tories were in power, he managed to, you know, keep some of his jobs even when he wasn't part of their party. He's just pretty good at convincing people that they should let him work.

Abram: Yeah, we'll probably talk a bit more about that in the ranking, but let's just continue with the story.

Joe: Yeah. So the thing I'm trying to say is that everything was happening around him, but he isn't shaping the story the way Walpole or Stanhope or Sunderland or Oxford or Bolingbroke did. He's just sort of riding the story. Do you feel that way as well?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Anyway, so with Walpole's help, Compton eventually became Paymaster General. In 1725, he got a knighthood. A couple biographies I read said that this was Walpole buying him off, saying, if you support me, I will make you a knight. But I don't know. Again, a lot of these sources are biased. I think he was probably pretty good at his job. He probably deserved the knighthood for everything that he had done for the House of Commons. Maybe this was Walpole buying him off, but maybe this also was just him getting a reward that he deserved.

Joe: But he was about to be offered his biggest job yet.

Abram: What?

Part 6 — King George II and Not Being Prime Minister

Joe: In 1727, something happened.

Abram: George I went, eh.

Joe: George I went, eh. So we talked about this last time. Walpole had to meet George II to tell him the news that his father was dead and that he was now the king. When Walpole informed now King George II of the death, George told him, quote, "Go to Chiswick and take your directions from Sir Spencer Compton."

Joe: So Chiswick, by the way, is probably Chiswick House, in the Chiswick district of London. This was kind of like a headquarters for the Whigs at the time.

Joe: So the question is, why did George II want Compton? Well, at this point, he had been Treasurer to George II when he was Prince of Wales.

Abram: They were friends.

Joe: They were friends. He was good in the House of Commons as a Speaker. He seemed a pretty decent choice. Additionally, Walpole had kind of burned some bridges with George II, right? During that whole period of around 1717, when he came back, he upset George II by becoming closer to his father again. So regardless, George II wanted Compton to be his prime minister.

Abram: But wait, then why didn't Walpole's main episode end in 1727?

Joe: That's a good question, Abram. So last time we looked at this from Walpole's perspective, but this is kind of a big thing in Compton, so we're going to talk about it again.

Joe: So Walpole did go to Chiswick, he did speak with Compton, and he basically told Compton that he was prime minister. But one of Compton's first tasks was to prepare something called the King's Speech, an announcement that the king had to give to his Privy Council.

Joe: So what happened next depends on your point of view. Either Compton, realizing that Walpole was better at writing speeches than him, delegated the writing of the speech and asked Walpole to please help write this speech so that our new king can get the best speech possible. Or Spencer Compton was very scared of writing a speech and upsetting the king, so he'll just make Walpole do it. So I don't know, do you think, was he a good leader by asking Walpole to do something he was good at? Or was he afraid and wanted to run away from the job?

Abram: I don't know. I think it's slightly more likely it would be option A because we haven't seen like any evidence of B, but I'm really not sure.

Joe: Yeah, I don't know either.

Abram: But you agree with what I'm saying?

Joe: I do. And I don't know the answer. I don't know whether he was scared. I don't know whether he was just being a good manager.

Abram: Yeah, I think it's more likely A only because if it was B, we would have probably seen signs before.

Joe: Yeah. So Walpole took this opportunity as a way to stay in power. He wrote the speech and for all intents and purposes, it was a good speech.

Joe: Walpole had two other advantages. Number one, he was still good friends with Queen Caroline. So even though Compton had the better relationship with George II, Walpole had the better relationship with his wife, and that probably helped.

Joe: And then Walpole did something clever with money, and that is that when Compton and Walpole both met with the king regarding how much money they were gonna be given in the civil list. Do you remember the civil list?

Abram: No.

Joe: That's sort of the pay that Parliament gives to manage the royal household and stuff. So Walpole was offering twice as much money to the civil list for Queen Caroline's expenses than Compton was. And so naturally, Caroline convinced George II, perhaps, or maybe George II convinced himself. Finally, they decided that, okay, well, Walpole's going to stay the guy.

Abram: Yeah, but why are we doing an episode on Compton? Is he going to come back?

Joe: I'm getting there. I'm getting there. Good foreshadowing, Abram. Good foreshadowing.

Joe: So Compton basically acted as prime minister for three weeks. It was pretty clear at the end of three weeks that he really wasn't in control. And he was, I mean, some people say he was humiliated. He was just very embarrassed that Walpole had steamrolled over him like this. And none of the prime minister lists say that Compton was prime minister for three weeks. Right? He never became First Lord of the Treasury or any of that. But for three weeks, he held on to the fiction that he was in charge. But at the end of the three weeks, it was pretty clear Walpole had won.

Part 7 — Earl of Wilmington

Joe: So six months into George II's reign, Compton was given a promotion. He is now the Baron Wilmington.

Abram: Uh-huh. And that's why we're recording in Wilmington.

Joe: It is, but this was both a promotion and a demotion because as Baron, he would no longer be allowed to sit in the House of Commons. He could no longer be the Speaker of the House of Commons. He now had to sit in the House of Lords. So he basically lost his job while getting another job. And maybe it was good.

Joe: Most historians state that this was a strategic move by Walpole to get Compton out of the House of Commons and out of his hair, by ostensibly giving him a reward. Compton, of course, deserved the peerage, right? He had been a great and loyal servant of King George I and then George II. He had been Speaker for twelve years, right? He had gotten a knighthood. Of course, he deserved to be a baron. But a lot of the people around him thought that maybe this wasn't really a promotion.

Joe: So the Baron Hervey said, quote, "He seemed just as well satisfied to be bowing and grinning in the antechamber, possessed of a lucrative employment without credit, and dishonoured by a title which was the mark of his disgrace."

Joe: So he's saying that now he's a baron, but it's really his disgrace because he should have been prime minister.

Joe: A couple of years later, he was promoted again, this time the Viscount of Pevensey and the Earl of Wilmington. George II continued to support him. Compton was added to his cabinet as Lord Privy Seal in 1730. This was mostly ceremonial, but it was a way for George II to keep Spencer Compton close to him.

Abram: Also, Spencer Compton is one of the prime ministers that's almost entirely known as Wilmington or Earl of Wilmington. There are a few others like that, but he's probably the one that's most often referred to as that.

Joe: Yep.

Part 7B — Wilmington, MA

Joe: Speaking of Wilmington, where are we recording today?

Abram: We're recording in Wilmington.

Joe: We're recording from the Wilmington Library in Wilmington, Massachusetts.

Abram: Remember, we were in the Walpole Library before.

Joe: This is the moment in our story when Wilmington is founded. So let me tell you a little bit about it. Wilmington is roughly fifteen miles northwest of Boston, the wetlands at the start of the Ipswich River. There's a lake here somewhere. I didn't see it, but there's a lake here somewhere. The area was initially settled by either the Massachusetts or the Pawtucket peoples, but I really haven't been able to learn much about the native life here before colonization.

Joe: In 1628, the Massachusetts Bay Company came to New England, and this territory was originally made part of Charlestown. But the borders were hazy and no Europeans lived here, so they just made the borders as big as they wanted. In 1642, this area officially became the, quote, "boggy part of Woburn," because the town of Woburn was founded nearby and this was added to that town. But this specific area where Wilmington is wasn't settled at that point.

Joe: So let me tell you about one of the first settlers. Now, his name was Will Butter, and he was born in Scotland somewhere around 1630. We know that his family was Presbyterian, which is a Protestant offshoot of Christianity. They weren't particularly well-liked by either the Catholics or the other Protestants. You know, they weren't the right kind of Protestants.

Joe: You know about the English Civil War with the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, but this is when Parliament faced off against Charles I, who was trying to assert more of his own authority. The war started in 1642, Charles was captured in 1646, and then he was executed three years later. I'm leaving out a lot, but even with the death of Charles, there were ongoing battles, especially in Scotland and Wales, for people still loyal to the monarchy that now felt that Charles II was supposed to be their king.

Joe: So Oliver Cromwell marched his New Model Army to Scotland to take on a group called the Covenanters. They were Presbyterian soldiers that remained royalist and loyal to Charles II. On September 3rd, 1650, Cromwell's soldiers met these Covenanters at the Battle of Dunbar. William Butter was one of those soldiers, although probably not an important one.

Joe: So the Scottish forces were defeated and William Butter and others were forced into something called indentured servitude.

Abram: Which isn't good.

Joe: So what is that? It's like short-term slavery. So for nine years, his punishment was to work hard for somebody else. Unlike African slaves and the type of slavery that we hear about here, indentured servants would, if they survived, regain their freedom after a period of time, nine years in this case. Oftentimes the work was very hard and many people did not survive the nine years.

Joe: So he wasn't made a servant in England. He was made a servant in the New World, in Woburn. So for nine years, he worked for a family in Woburn. And at the end of the nine years, his family might have paid him something called freedom dues. They might not have. We don't really know.

Joe: And for other reasons we don't know, he didn't go home after those nine years were up. Maybe he didn't have the money. Maybe he had a family here. Maybe he loved Massachusetts because, you know, it's pretty nice. Or maybe there were still tensions between England and Scotland. I don't know. But he never went home. Instead, he went to the swampy part of Woburn, crossed the swamp, built a house, and that house is the first house in what would eventually become the town of Wilmington. He raised a family here. More families moved in.

Joe: It wasn't originally called Wilmington. It was originally called something called Goshen, but it was like a village of Woburn. But in 1730, the townspeople voted and it was incorporated as a town. Why it was named Wilmington, I don't know. But it was named Wilmington only four months after Spencer Compton became an Earl. And around that time, there were a lot of towns in Massachusetts that were named for prominent peers or members of Parliament. So Townshend is going to get his own town in two more years. So he gets Townsend, Mass. And others will be—

Abram: No pins on him, though.

Joe: No pins. And we're not going to their library.

Joe: So Wilmington, Delaware is probably the most famous place called Wilmington. But it wasn't really named for him. It was named Willington after a guy by the name of Thomas Willington, and then they just sort of renamed it Wilmington in honor, supposedly, of Compton. But I don't know, it already more or less had that name. He'd also get a town in North Carolina in 1740 and Vermont in 1751.

Joe: The population of Wilmington remained small, wasn't even more than a thousand before 1900. There were troops from Wilmington that fought in Concord during the American Revolution, and the town just kept moving on. In 1803, it was connected to Boston through the Middlesex Canal, and it was connected to the rest of the country by railroad in 1835. And that's where we are. And I think we probably better get back to Compton.

Abram: Yeah.

Part 8 — Family Life

Joe: So while Compton settles into being an Earl, let's step back, look at his family life. So Compton purchased a mansion in a place called Eastbourne, in East Sussex, in 1726, and then he built it and refined it over the coming decades.

Abram: 1726?

Joe: 1726.

Abram: That's before where we are now.

Joe: It is before where we are now, but you know, we're moving in history. So he named this house Compton Place. So let me give you a picture.

Abram: It's another orange picture. It's even more orange. It looks pretty cool. It looks taller but less castle-like.

Joe: When I think of his family, I like to think that maybe they were all joining him in that very orange place at Christmas, although honestly, I have no idea if they did that. For those of us that don't know English geography well, this is near the south coast of England, and pretty far from Compton Wynyates, which was northwest of London.

Joe: We know that he never married, and I wasn't able to find any real information on anyone that he might have wanted to marry. These days, you might say that he didn't marry a woman because maybe he liked men, but there's no evidence of that. A guy by the name of John Perceval, the 1st Earl of Egmont, wrote in his diary in 1738 that Compton did have kids, but he was just very good at hiding them.

Abram: Perceval? Is that a Perceval?

Joe: John Perceval.

Abram: Is it related to Spencer Perceval? Spencer Perceval is related to Spencer Compton. Also Spencer Perceval. He isn't directly mentioned here, but put a pin on him.

Joe: Yes. So there is a Perceval. He's probably related to Spencer, like, pretty closely.

Abram: I assume so. Put a pin on Spencer Perceval. Anyway, let's just continue.

Joe: So according to a historian named Dick Leonard, Compton at least had a daughter, and this daughter actually married a man named James Glen, who was future governor of the South Carolina colony. So we can connect the dots. We think that the daughter might have been someone named Elizabeth Wilson, and she was the granddaughter of someone named Sir William Wilson. But the name is too common, and it's just not able to connect the dots to figure out who Compton might have had a relationship with.

Joe: So Spencer's sister Mary had married somebody called Charles Sackville. We talked about him, and she died very young at twenty-two. Charles died in 1705, but Spencer Compton continued to have a relationship with his nephew, who was called Lionel Sackville, and he became the Duke of Dorset.

Joe: In fact, Spencer helped all three of Lionel's children become members of Parliament in 1734. So Charles Sackville got a seat at East Grinstead, just like Spencer Compton previously did. John Sackville in his old seat in Sussex, and George Sackville in a place called Hythe. And I have no idea how he managed to help him get into Hythe, but presumably he knew people. And this basically would be kind of like the Compton power base.

Joe: So remember how Walpole had like all of those relatives that would be in Parliament with him? Compton now has that too, but just, he doesn't have as many relatives.

Joe: So Spencer's brother George had also died at this point, leaving his son James as the 5th Earl of Compton. And although George had become a Whig, his son James was a Tory, and in fact was also in Parliament since 1710. So do you remember way back when, Harley, who I think became Oxford?

Abram: Yeah, Oxford, who was mentioned in Walpole Part 1, but unlike Bolingbroke, never really came back.

Joe: Yeah. So remember when he added a bunch of peers to the House of Lords to try to make it more Tory?

Abram: I don't remember Walpole Part 1 that well, so no. I think if it was the last episode, I would.

Joe: Oh, now I feel bad. So basically what Oxford did is to try to make the House of Lords more Tory. He appointed a whole bunch of new peers.

Abram: I remember this a little bit.

Joe: And one of the peers that he appointed was James Compton, who now became known as Baron Compton. We don't know what his relationship with his nephew is, but it's going to come back in a minute. So just, we'll go with that.

Part 9 — Compton's Revenge

Joe: So I've titled the next section Compton's Revenge. So I've read a couple of biographies of Compton, all short, and none of them mentioned this, but Wikipedia mentions this and it has a good reference. So it might be true or it might be a complete lie.

Joe: The book that the reference is from costs like $200 and wouldn't arrive for weeks. And so I didn't want to waste the $200 or make the episode wait a couple of weeks. So if this isn't true, well, that's not true.

Joe: But in 1730, Compton apparently tried to bring together a group of Whigs led by Pulteney, as well as something called the Hanoverian Tories. So I guess the moderate Tories that weren't Jacobites, and he tried to topple Walpole. He wasn't successful and it failed.

Joe: So it's possible that the reason he got an earldom was because Walpole basically bought him off for making this fail. But I don't know the timing. And unfortunately, the sources that I have don't say whether this happened before or after he was made an earl.

Joe: The next time that Compton went against Walpole was in 1733. There was something called the Excise Crisis. Remember, Walpole was trying to change all the taxes.

Abram: Yeah, I remember that.

Joe: Basically moving more taxes from the rich to the poor. And once again, there were opposition Whigs and moderate Tories, and they were against Walpole. So Compton was supporting the opposition. He threatened to resign if the bill went through, and he didn't resign. The bill went through, and then Walpole arranged for Compton to be made a Knight of the Garter.

Abram: Hahaha, Knight of Undies.

Joe: It's not undies. It's like a thing that connects socks that's under your clo— I don't know what a garter is. I guess I need to look it up.

Abram: I don't care. They're just undies. So that means he's now a Knight of the Undies.

Part 10 — Walpole's Fall & Wilmington's Rise

Joe: So as we discussed last time, the unrest, the discontent over taxes, the constant pressure by Bolingbroke and his newspaper.

Abram: Finally Bolingbroke gets mentioned.

Joe: He's not that important in Compton's episode, but Bolingbroke and his newspaper, the Patriot Whigs with Pulteney. They eventually broke Walpole. He was forced into that War of Jenkins' Ear that he didn't want to be in, and then he was blamed when the war didn't go well. That led to a confidence vote, or what they called a confidence vote, over Chiswick, which ended in Walpole's resignation. And after two decades in power, he was gone.

Joe: But with him gone, it was necessary to select the next prime minister. However, Walpole at this point was the only prime minister, and the role wasn't well defined. So selecting a new one, eh, wasn't quite sure how to do it.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Essentially, they decided that the decision would come down to George II, but it had to be somebody that could command a majority in Parliament. And at this point, Parliament had been split into several factions. We still had Whigs and Tories, of course, but the Tories were left out of the picture 'cause George wanted to build a government with just Whigs.

Joe: Pulteney and a guy by the name of Lord Carteret were essentially leading the Patriot Whigs, though they didn't agree on everything. Just as in previous occasions, the Prince of Wales, who at this point was the future George III, he had his favourites, which were led by somebody called John Campbell, the Duke of Argyll. And George II was trying to smooth things over with his son, but the Argyll faction was another major faction in Parliament.

Joe: And then there was the Walpole faction. And with Walpole out of the picture, this was led by Henry Pelham and Thomas Pelham-Holles.

Abram: Pin and pin. We already said it. No, two pins on Pelham. One pin on each of them.

Joe: Yes. They wanted a more direct continuation of Walpole's policies. So George II consulted with Pelham-Holles and consulted with others.

Joe: And you might be surprised about this, but who did they offer the job of prime minister to?

Abram: Compton?

Joe: No.

Abram: Help.

Joe: Pulteney. And you know what he said?

Abram: No. He said no, though he will sort of become prime minister.

Joe: Well, he's not going to say no the next time.

Abram: We are going to have an episode, but he won't become prime minister.

Joe: Let's just say he won't say no the next time, but he also won't be successful.

Joe: So Pulteney turned it down, but he did offer to help identify the right candidate. Lord Carteret wanted it. I think it's Carteret, it might be Carteret, but I think it's Carteret wanted it. But Pulteney didn't like him enough, even though they were technically working together, so he didn't get it.

Joe: And at the end of the day, the compromise was advanced: Wilmington, Spencer Compton as the candidate. George II liked him, they had a long relationship, he previously had him try to be prime minister, and Compton accepted the role and became prime minister officially on February 16th, 1742.

Joe: How do you think he's going to do as prime minister?

Abram: I really don't know.

Part 11 — Prime Minister

Joe: So it's difficult to summarize his time as prime minister. He had recently developed kidney stones, so he was in a lot of pain. He was having trouble working.

Joe: We know that one of his first actions was to try to resolve the Whig split, bringing back Argyll's faction into the government. And he did this by increasing the civil list again, giving more payments to the Prince of Wales. The Prince of Wales backed Compton, and the Duke of Argyll said, okay, we're friends again.

Joe: We also know that he had hoped to expand his government to include moderate Tories, those Hanoverian Tories, but George II wasn't having any of that still.

Joe: But for most of his time as prime minister, Lord Carteret was probably the real one in charge. He was the king's favourite at that point. He spoke fluent German. He would've gotten the job if Pulteney didn't push back on him getting it. And he was at this point the Secretary of State for the Northern Department. So Pelham-Holles was Southern, by the way.

Joe: Carteret's involvement was so encompassing that some people say that Compton was just, quote, the "nominal" prime minister during this period. So he wasn't really prime minister, even though we're doing an episode on him. He was officially prime minister, but you know, this other guy was really in charge. Carteret even visited one of the battles during the War of Austrian Succession. And that's something that Compton never did.

Joe: Another factor, the weakness of his government, was that no one in the Privy Council was in the House of Commons. Everyone at that point had been promoted to be a peer. Nowadays, of course, this doesn't happen because the prime minister's in the House of Commons. But this was Spencer Compton being prime minister from the Lords. Yeah, it'll be common for a while, but it eventually—

Abram: Yeah, the last one will be prime minister ending in 1902. So not recently as that happened in the time it is now.

Joe: So all during his time in office, the War of Jenkins' Ear, which became the War of Austrian Succession, Compton didn't have very much involvement in it personally. And basically, Carteret and Newcastle were dealing with it. Newcastle is Pelham-Holles. So I'm going to hold most of the discussion of the war until we get to Pelham-Holles's episode.

Joe: The one thing that Compton did manage to pass was something called the Place Act of 1742. This might be his biggest accomplishment and the biggest reaction to Walpole's corruption. This law made it illegal to give members of Parliament certain offices that could be used to bribe them. So this is something that Walpole liked to do, and he basically was trying to keep it, make Parliament less corrupt.

Joe: But Compton's health was in decline. And he died of kidney stones on July 2nd, 1743.

Abram: And also, it's unknown if he was 69 or 70. We're just gonna go with 70 because I do want him to have in one category an advantage over Walpole. He would either way, but this one he'd have slightly more of an advantage. So once we get to that, he's gonna get seven points.

Joe: So after his death, his house, but not his earldom, actually went to his Tory nephew. Some of his books and his valuables were auctioned off. One of the sources said that the Sackvilles expected to get his inheritance because they were really close to him and he had made them all MPs, but for whatever reason, he passed over them in favour of his Tory nephew. I don't understand why. Feels odd. Maybe deep down he just wanted to pass it on to a Compton.

Joe: So I'm going to end the biography portion of this episode with a poem. "See yon old, dull, important lord, who at the longed-for money board, sits first but does not lead. His younger brethren all things make, so that the treasury's like a snake, and the tail moves the head."

Joe: It's not that good of a rhyme, but I just think he is the old, dull, but important lord. And that's a good way to think of Compton. He's dull. He's important. He's dead now.

Joe: Okay, let's rank him.

Rating

Abram: Okay, rating. The first category is one to forty, how much accomplished. So you'll go first.

Joe: One to twenty, how much did he accomplish?

Abram: We're counting his political career because oftentimes prime ministers have big political careers but not big-time prime minister. His political career, he himself didn't do that much, right?

Joe: Well, he was Speaker of the House.

Abram: Yes, I'll give him, I think, two points for that.

Joe: And he had an anti-corruption bill that he passed, which I'll give—

Abram: Actually, I'm gonna give him three points for the original. I'm gonna give that one two points. And as prime minister, what did he do? Die. Did he do anything?

Joe: I mean, he passed the anti-corruption act, which we mentioned.

Abram: So he only gets five from me. From you, what does he—

Joe: He doesn't get a lot of points.

Abram: You can agree with five out of twenty.

Joe: I'm gonna give him three.

Abram: Okay, so that's eight. Minus one to twenty with my personality slash how much did he anger people? Didn't anger people. He just didn't do a lot.

Joe: I mean, most people just described him as boring.

Abram: Yeah, but that isn't angering people, so he gets, I think, zero for the angering part.

Joe: I mean, he had one illegitimate child.

Abram: That— I'll give him one for the anger part. Now for the personality part, there isn't really much known about his personality.

Joe: I mean, other than the fact that he was dull.

Abram: That would go more in our interesting part.

Joe: Oh yeah, because we could score him on how interesting he is. I honestly think that for the negative points here, I'm only going to give him one.

Abram: So that means minus two. The accomplished— this is the only score that only counts as prime minister and absolutely nothing.

Joe: Yeah, I don't think I— he didn't unaccomplish anything. So zero points for that.

Abram: Minus two once we do the minuses. Interesting. There are a few spots of interest, but none of them are that big, I think.

Joe: So for interesting, we're supposed to think of how good he would be in a movie or a book, right?

Abram: In a movie, he would not be that good. I'm not gonna give him zero due to him almost becoming prime minister and stuff like that, but I'm gonna give him two out of ten.

Joe: I think I'm gonna go two out of ten as well.

Abram: Which means he's not awful, but he's one of the worst ones because he only has like one real point of interest.

Joe: I really had to work hard to find anything to talk about with him.

Abram: Yeah, let's move to our painting. This one, it's a bit weird. Again, we do it— it's out of ten, but we both do it out of ten and divide it by two. This one looks like he's holding a note. It doesn't look as official. But on the same side, he looks a bit healthier, you could say, than Walpole.

Joe: I mean, he looks younger than Walpole, certainly.

Abram: Yeah. So I'm going to give him a four. And he's like going through a weird doorway, it looks like, which is just weird.

Joe: I mean, he's carrying a note. I don't know what that is. I'm going to go four also.

Abram: Which means he gets four for that.

Joe: So this is the part where we would normally look at his picture on our prime minister playing card.

Abram: Except he doesn't have a picture on our prime minister playing cards. How come Pulteney has a picture and he wasn't even a real prime minister? And more impressively, how does a cat have a picture?

Joe: Well, that's exactly right.

Abram: We're going to be reading the cat instead.

Joe: Instead of talking about Spencer Compton and his picture on this card, we're going to be looking at the picture of Larry, and we're also going to be reading it. The Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, otherwise known as the Number 10 cat. Quote, "From the time of Henry VIII onwards, cats have served cardinals, chancellors, and prime ministers as mousers. The cat with the longest term at Number 10 is Wilberforce, who served under Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, and Margaret Thatcher from 1973 to 1987." But the picture on the card is of Larry. Who is a very cat-looking cat.

Abram: That's all I'm going to say.

Joe: I don't think he gets any points for being a picture of a cat, though.

Abram: Yeah. Now for his time. His time?

Joe: One year. Yes. So Spencer Compton was officially prime minister from February 16, 1742, to July 2, 1743. So that is 1.37 years. But we round down. So we only give him one point.

Abram: And his total, that means, is twenty-two.

Joe: Because he was seventy years old, so he gets seven points for his age.

Abram: Which means he's not terrible. Honestly, I expected him to get a bit worse than that. But he did get pretty high in the lifespan points, and he got a little bit accomplished, and he really didn't have a lot of minus. Except everything else was sort of little, so he only got twenty-two and no decimals.

Joe: Okay, twenty-two points. So we now have to answer the question.

Abram: No and/or ice cream cone.

Joe: What do you think, Abram?

Abram: What do you think?

Joe: He's the most boring prime minister I've covered so far.

Abram: Except remember, he was sort of powerful. He didn't do it a lot, but he was still very powerful.

Joe: I know, but I got to be honest, this deck of cards gave a card to a cat before giving it to him. I don't think he can be considered known. Yeah, I think he's an ice cream cone.

Abram: Yeah, he's probably an ice cream cone.

Joe: So with that, congratulations, Spencer Compton. You're an ice cream cone. You do not win our prestigious award.

Abram: Yes. So it doesn't really do much in our podcast. We might do the things to determine the best later, but we might just use the scores.

Joe: We'll figure it out when we get there. We got a lot of prime ministers left.

Abram: Twenty-two, which is less than half of Walpole's.

Joe: Yes. So with that, I think we need to end this for the evening. Please don't forget to subscribe, like, comment, all of those things that you're supposed to do. With that, I'll say goodbye. Bye! See you next time.

Bibliography

Joe: Bibliography. The plan for this series is to primarily base each episode on one to two full-length biographies written per prime minister. For most of the prime ministers, this should be relatively straightforward, although a handful of them will not have full-length biographies written, or the full-length biographies will be very out of date. For example, with Robert Walpole's, there were contemporary biographies that were not tremendously useful for my efforts.

Joe: In Spencer Compton's case, there have been no full-length biographies written. So I've based the entirety of the research on three chapter-length biographies. Those are from *18th Century British Premiers* by Dick Leonard, published in 2011, *The Prime Ministers* by George Malcolm Thompson, published in 1981, and *British Prime Ministers* by Robert J. Parker, published in 2019.

Joe: These books aren't perfect, but with them I was able to flesh out a pretty broad picture of Spencer Compton, supplemented by research on individual topics. There are some great websites on the history of Parliament, including on the UK government sites, that had additional details that I was able to use.

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