Prime Factors - Ranking UK Prime Ministers

3.1 - Henry Pelham (Part 1)

Link:

3.1 - Henry Pelham (Part 1)

Episode Transcript

Abram: Welcome to Prime Factors. This week, Henry Pelham, part one.

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

Abram: Hello and welcome back to Prime Factors. I'm Abram and I am here with my dad. We're reviewing all the British prime ministers from Robert Walpole to Rishi Sunak. This is episode 3.1, Henry Pelham, part one. Three prime ministers.

Joe: Three? Wow, we still have 54 or so more to go and we haven't started this one yet. So three is good.

Abram: Don't forget that you can find us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and www.primefactorspodcast.com. If you enjoy listening, please like, subscribe, comment, and review. Helps us get our podcast known — we don't want to be an ice cream cone.

Joe: It's exciting so far. Well, we don't have a ton of listeners yet, but now we have people from the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Chile and Brazil for some reason. Chile and Brazil. No Wales yet. England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, but no Wales. Why don't they like us in Wales?

Abram: Can we go to Wales?

Joe: That would be great. We still don't have any social networks, but I did post a link on an old Facebook group of mine and we got more than 300 likes on Spencer Compton. We didn't get 300 listeners yet on Spencer Compton, but clearly people like the idea of a ranking podcast about prime ministers, even if they don't listen.

Joe: Facebook doesn't seem to want me to post about this for some reason. They keep flagging me as being about UK politics and not liking that I'm an American talking about UK politics. They think I'm interfering with the election or something. I'm not really sure. But if anyone actually thinks that us talking about Walpole, Compton, or Pelham will change their vote in the next UK election, I think we have a bridge to sell them.

Abram: I still want to go to Wales.

Joe: We also got two five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts, so thank you for those.

Abram: Yay!

Joe: We are recording today at the Pelham Library in beautiful Pelham, Massachusetts. And I mean beautiful because we're out like in Western Mass. It's mountainous. There's lots of trees. It's very green. This is just a lovely library. Quite far from the, like, Boston-adjacent towns of Walpole and Wilmington. It's really neat out here. Are you ready?

Abram: I'm ready.

Joe: Okay, let's talk about Henry Pelham.

Picture This

Joe: We're totally not stealing this from Totalis Rankium, but this was too good to pass up this week. It's foreshadowing. So we're going to tell a little story.

Joe: Picture this. It's summer in Herrenhausen Palace. A beautiful and ornate setting fit for a king. Just out the window are the magnificent Herrenhausen Gardens, filled with vibrant colors and intricate designs. But the situation in the room is far from colorful or joyful. The desk is covered with papers, troop reports, and maps. This is a war room.

Joe: Now I want you to picture King George II behind a grand mahogany desk. His usual white wig sits on a wig stand nearby. Revealing his natural hair color, slightly disheveled from a long and stressful day. The king's face is stern, etched with lines of responsibility and fatigue. The scent of ink and old parchment fills the air, mingling with the faint, distant sounds of military drills outside. Dim light from an oil lamp casts long shadows across the room, dancing over the maps and documents scattered on the desk.

Joe: George II, dressed in a military uniform, adorned with medals. He looks every bit the soldier and the sovereign. His stern expression betrays the weight of the troubles resting on his shoulders.

Joe: Sitting nearby is Lord Carteret. Unlike the king, his wig is firmly in place, but he fidgets uncomfortably, shifting from foot to foot. From time to time, he makes apologies in fluent German, but his voice is strained. Carteret wrings his hands, glancing nervously at the door. As if hoping for escape, he adjusts his wig repeatedly, a telltale sign of his discomfort. "Mein König," he stammers, "es tut mir leid."

Joe: In front of George on the desk are two letters. He's been putting off reading them for a month, but he can't delay any longer. One letter is from Henry Pelham; the other is from William Pulteney.

Abram: Dun dun dun!

Joe: George II reads them over again, his expression growing more intense with each line. He pauses, then looks up at Carteret and asks him several pointed questions in German. You don't understand the language, but Carteret's increasingly nervous demeanor speaks volumes.

Joe: Finally, George makes his decision. Carteret turns pale as the king begins to write his reply. The room is thick with tension. Welcome to Henry Pelham.

Ancestry

Joe: Abram, you know this, but not everyone else does. Henry Pelham and his older brother Thomas Pelham-Holles, who's also called the Duke of Newcastle — now they're both going to be prime ministers, one after the other. We'll do a quick interlude episode between the two about William Pulteney, the Earl of Bath, because he's going to be prime minister for like three days, and he's not even really counted because it — we'll get there, you'll see.

Joe: But we'll essentially have two members of the same family one after the other. Their lives will be very different, so we won't be repeating too much, but there is going to be a little bit of overlap. One of the ways in which there'll be overlap is right now, which is when we talk about their ancestry.

Joe: So remember that the Comptons were an influential family in Warwickshire. The Pelham family has been influential in Sussex, in southeast England, and they've been influential there for centuries.

Joe: Henry's great-great-great-grandfather — that's a lot of greats — Nicholas Pelham. He had married a first cousin of Anne Boleyn during the reign of Henry VIII. I'm sure that seemed like a good idea at the time, but maybe it wasn't. It must have worked out because he was elected to Parliament during Edward VI's reign, but he fell out of favor during Mary I, and he even served time in prison. He's a neat guy, but we're going to fast forward.

Joe: His next generation, Henry Pelham's great-great-grandfather was Thomas Pelham. He was made a baronet. We haven't talked about baronets yet, but this is like the lowest rank of nobility. So you know how there's barons and earls and dukes? So below baron is something called a baronet. It's like a little baron. They get to be called "Sir." The title gets to be passed down from father to son, but unlike a baron, they don't get to sit in the House of Lords. So it's like the highest of the low ranks, or maybe the lowest of the high ranks. But anyway, Thomas Pelham, Henry Pelham's great-great-grandfather, was now the Baronet of Laughton in Sussex.

Joe: Fast forward generation by generation, that baronet title was passed down, and most of the Pelham kids, especially in Henry and Thomas's line, they ended up joining Parliament.

Joe: Henry's father — so we're going a number of generations forward — his name is Thomas Pelham. Like so many of his ancestors, he was a member of Parliament. He first entered Parliament in 1678 in East Grinstead. He later served in Lewes. He married a woman named Elizabeth Jones. They had two daughters together, but then she died. He then remarried someone named Grace Holles, and that Grace is going to be both Thomas and Henry's mother.

Silver Spoons

Joe: So since Henry's about to be born, let's look at how many silver spoons they were born with. So just a reminder, silver spoons is essentially a score that we are giving based on how many family connections each of these future prime ministers have. So we are awarding points for aunts and uncles, fathers, mothers, grandparents, and up the father's line for things like whether they were members of Parliament or ambassadors or dukes or earls. And there's a whole complicated scoring system, but we'll put it up on the website as soon as we get that part of the website figured out.

Joe: What matters for us is how many points he would've gotten at birth. So remember how Walpole had an evil Tory uncle, but Walpole didn't get any points for his evil Tory uncle because he didn't become an MP until after Walpole. So Walpole didn't benefit from him. He benefited from Walpole. So we're only gonna go with the points up until their birth.

Joe: Walpole only got 5 points because he wasn't in a very well-connected family — more connected than our family, but you know, as British politicians go, Walpole did great by sort of climbing up the ladder by himself. Spencer Compton, who was really old money, he scored 35 points.

Joe: So Henry Pelham is going to make it about halfway between the two. By my scoring system, he has 19.5 points. Six generations of his forefathers were members of Parliament. Almost all of them were baronets. He has two prominent uncles, one of which is John Holles. John Holles is the Duke of Newcastle, which is where his brother Thomas Pelham-Holles is both going to get his last name and his duke title from. We'll talk about that in a bit. Thomas is going to reap more of those rewards than Henry, but they're both going to do okay. So 19.5 points. He's pretty well connected, but not as connected as Spencer Compton.

Henry's Youth

Joe: So Henry was born September 25th, 1694. When he was born, his grandfather, the Baronet John Pelham, he was still in Parliament, as was his father Thomas. So he was born, father and grandfather were serving in Parliament together.

Joe: At this point, his older half-sister Elizabeth was 13. Remember that she was from Thomas's original wife. And that this sister, we've mentioned her before, she's the sister that eventually is going to marry Charles Townshend in a few years. She'll be the bridge between the Townshend family, the Walpole family, the Pelham family, and the Holles family. So like that whole Walpole-Townshend monstrosity that we talked about in Walpole's episode, she is really the bridge between all four of those families coming together.

Joe: He had another sister, Grace, who was 9. His older brother Thomas was 2, and four more sisters are going to be born later.

Joe: Henry initially went to school at the Westminster School in London, and as far as I can tell, he was staying in London at the time due to his father and grandfather's role as an MP. But unfortunately, his mother died in 1700 when he was just 5. I don't know how this shaped him and his family. Henry's father never remarried. But the transition may have been difficult. I have no idea, but five and seven, it just pains me to think about.

Joe: Three years later, Henry's grandfather died, so that made his dad into the new baronet. And Baronet Thomas Pelham continued his Parliament career. He was a prominent Whig. I don't know everything that he did, but he was recognized by the crown, and Queen Anne said, you know, baronet isn't quite good enough for your family. I think that you should be a baron. And so in 1706, the Pelham family became a baron family and not a baronet family. So that's pretty exciting for him.

Joe: At 15, in the year 1709, Henry Pelham left to attend King's College in Cambridge. During this time, he and his brother were both being privately tutored by some guy named Richard Newton.

Abram: That sounds rich.

Joe: It does sound rich. Now, I looked this up. It's no relation to Isaac Newton. Okay, Abram is looking shocked. However, Richard Newton was eventually given a job running Hart Hall in Oxford University, and so Henry — but weirdly not his brother, so just Henry — went to join Richard Newton, his tutor, at Oxford. However, even though he was attending Oxford, his tutor basically ran one of the schools at Oxford. He never actually graduated. He never matriculated a degree. So I don't know the story there. I don't know why he left, but there's some good questions.

Joe: In 1711, John Holles, their uncle, the Duke of Newcastle died.

Abram: So much death.

Joe: There's a lot of death.

Abram: Poor Pelham and poor Pelham-Holles.

Joe: Yeah, there's a lot of death. So John Holles dying isn't going to mean a lot for our story this week, but he divided his inheritance between two people. Do you want to guess who those two people are? No. No?

Joe: Well, Edward Harley and Thomas Pelham. Now, Edward Harley is the son of Robert Harley, who we also know as the Earl of Oxford.

Abram: Which we also know as just Oxford.

Joe: As Oxford, right. So once again, all these families are just really connected in weird ways that are almost inexplicable. In any event, so he divided his inheritance between Edward Harley and Thomas Pelham, and one of the rules for Thomas Pelham getting the inheritance was that he would have to change his name from Thomas Pelham to Thomas Pelham-Holles. And when offered a lot of money and just like, oh, change your name — he said, yes, I'm changing my name, no problem.

Joe: You were commenting a second ago about how there's a lot of death, huh? Yeah. So the next year, Henry and Thomas's father died.

Joe: Abram is just making faces at all the death. So as usual, Thomas was the elder son, so he received most of the inheritance and titles. So Thomas is now the Baron Pelham. And Thomas is now sitting in the House of Lords. Thomas got the title, the seat, almost all the property. Henry got an inheritance of about 5,000 pounds, which in modern money is like a million dollars. And that feels like a lot of money, but it's like the tiniest sliver of what Thomas just received, right?

Joe: So Thomas has all the money from his uncle. All the money from his dad. In fact, Thomas is now one of the wealthiest men in Sussex. Henry, he got a million bucks. Great. He's not one of the wealthiest men in Sussex.

Joe: I don't know how this made their relationship, as we'll see in a little bit, like the relationship between Henry and his brother is always going to be complicated. And Thomas just got every opportunity that he possibly could have gotten at a young age; he was in Parliament in the House of Lords when he was 21 years old.

Abram: Whoa.

Joe: Whereas Henry, he has all of his relatives dying and he doesn't get a fraction of the money. So it's tough.

Joe: So Henry's brother did agree to give Henry some money. So he gave him a stipend of about 1,000 pounds per year, which is like $200,000. So, I mean, he was definitely not poor. In fact, he was pretty well off. But again, richest person in Sussex giving little handouts to his younger brother.

Abram: That's a bit suspicious.

Joe: I don't know if it's suspicious. It just feels a little selfish.

Abram: Yeah, but I guess it may have been normal at the time.

Joe: So yeah, it might have been normal.

The Jacobite Rebellion of 1715

Joe: So in 1715, Henry Pelham is now 21 years old. King George is just recently on the throne after the death of Queen Anne. But, you know, not everyone in Britain was happy with the Hanoverian succession. We talked about this already in Walpole Part 1, but it's going to be very personal for Henry, so I want to dig a little deeper. So after George became king, do you remember we talked that there was unrest that grew, first starting in Scotland?

Abram: Wasn't there the person at like Queen Anne's funeral who had to be stopped from saying that the new king was James III and VIII?

Joe: Yes. Well, that's exactly it. There's Jacobites everywhere, and they really were upset that King George I had come into power because that was their biggest opportunity to get James back on the throne. If they could have managed that succession, then they could have gotten James back on the throne. So everyone that was a Jacobite at that time was really upset.

Joe: And there was a lot of them in Scotland. I mean, keep in mind that Scotland is always under the thumb of England at this point. For example, Scottish peers could not sit in the House of Lords.

Abram: That will be a bit bigger once we get to Stuart's episode.

Joe: Wow, you've been reading ahead!

Abram: I've not been reading ahead, I've been watching videos ahead.

Joe: Okay, well, that works out.

Abram: You are correct. So he probably won't appear in this episode. I'm not sure if he will, but anyways, just put a pin on him.

Joe: Yes, you're absolutely correct that that's gonna be a big deal in Stuart's episode. So, Scotland, you'll also remember, was the home of the Stuart dynasty, right? So, the Stuarts were not only a future prime minister here, but of course, they were one of the royal houses, and they had been pushed out by William and Mary.

Joe: So, in Scotland especially, when George became king, it was a clear sign that the Stuarts were not coming back. So we had a national pride angle, a religious angle, an overall fighting against oppression angle. What can they do but fight, right?

Joe: So there was a leader who came up in Scotland, John Erskine. He was the Earl of Mar. So you might just call him Mar. On September 6th, 1715, the Earl of Mar declared war against England from Scotland. And he raised a flag of James III and VIII.

Abram: Oh, I'm guessing George won't like that.

Joe: No, George is not going to like that. So, Mar's first actions, he's going to try to bring Scotland to his cause. He quickly grew an army, first 6,000 troops and then 12,000 troops. Within a month, he had pretty much control over all of Scotland north of the Firth of Forth. Do you know where the Firth of Forth is?

Abram: I think it's like in sort of the southern middle of Scotland.

Joe: Yeah, that's that big indentation of water just to the north of Edinburgh.

Abram: That has a very confusing name.

Joe: Yeah, it's probably Scottish. So at this point, he was acting alone, right? He's just like, I want James to be the king, I'm going to rise up, and here's 12,000 people that want to rise up with me. But on October the 22nd, 1715, James officially recognized Mar's rebellion, and he made plans to come to Scotland in order to fight with him. Now, it's going to take him a while to get there, so — well, you probably remember how it ended up, but we'll just keep going.

Joe: So while this was happening, England was not waiting. The Duke of Argyll, we talked about him in Spencer Compton's episode, although that was 30 years later, right? So this is I think the same duke actually, but the Duke of Argyll was commissioned, granted an army, start fighting back against the insurrectionists.

Joe: So we're gonna skip ahead. The rebellion continued. The Jacobites would conquer territory in Scotland. The English would go and try to recapture some of the cities. There was a place called Stirling Castle in Scotland, which was a holdout that the Scottish rebels just couldn't take. The Scottish rebels, the Jacobites, also tried to conquer Edinburgh and they weren't able to do it, but it was a pretty big war.

Joe: It wasn't just in Scotland though. So in England, maybe less organized, but pockets of rebellion also started up. The Jacobite Tories were also against the Hanoverian succession. And remember, Queen Anne was very pro-Tory, so they saw like George's snub of the Tories as being part of their problem.

Joe: And that November, a group of English Jacobites combined with a group of Scottish Jacobites. They marched on the town of Preston on November 9th, 1715, and they defeated a small militia there and seized the town. The following day, in the market square of Preston, the insurrectionists, the Jacobite leaders, put up a flag and proclaimed King James III and VIII in the Preston market square.

Joe: The Jacobites, under a guy named Thomas Forster, they knew that the English were coming soon.

Abram: The English are coming, the English are coming. Close enough to the British, but still.

Joe: Were they English or British at this point? I get confused. I forget what exactly that is.

Abram: In the American Revolution, they are British, but it's the English here because the Scottish are sort of rebelling.

Joe: So yeah, you're right, you're right. So they knew that the English were coming soon, so they barricaded the streets. They essentially blocked them with wood or furniture, whatever they could manage. So they turned part of the town into a fortress. The Jacobites also had control over a nearby bridge, but they made an early decision that they weren't going to try to hold the bridge. They were just going to try to defend the town.

Joe: So I have here, Abram, for you a map. We'll put this map up on our website. So this is a map of Preston. Now there's not much to say, but let me just narrate what we have here. So Preston is a town. It's not a big town that is sort of surrounded on three sides pretty much by the River Ribble. And there is a bridge conveniently called the Ribble Bridge just to the south of town. To the north of the town is moorland. But so it's like open territory. So if you take a look at this, they had originally had troops stationed there at the bridge, but they pulled all of the troops back to go into the town.

Joe: So remember, we are supposed to be talking about Henry Pelham. So during the uprising, Henry Pelham and his brother, they saw the Jacobites rising up against King George. So the Pelham brothers together, they raised troops for the war, probably as many as 50 to 100 horsemen. So Henry Pelham went even further than his brother, and he volunteered to serve, probably with those troops, in a regiment of dragoons under a person named James Dormer.

Abram: What are dragoons?

Joe: That's a great question.

Abram: They're not dragons, I assume.

Joe: No, they're not dragons.

Abram: That would be funny.

Joe: In war at this time, like, you usually had the infantry, which were the people fighting on foot, and you had the cavalry, which are the people that are fighting on horseback, right? Now, the word cavalry is kind of close to the word chivalry. They're both coming from the same French word. So you can kind of imagine the cavalry as what knights would have ended up being a couple hundred years later. Do you see? Dragoons are in the middle. They are people that fight on horses sometimes, and that sometimes they get off their horses and fight on foot. So they're kind of flexible troops that can be used either as cavalry or infantry.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: I don't know why you would do that.

Abram: And I've heard in India or something, there are elephantry.

Joe: Elephantry? Yeah, maybe there are.

Abram: I don't know. Yeah. Which are elephants. Anyways, let's continue.

Joe: So Henry was made a captain in this regiment, and so he probably commanded close to 50 or 100 men. Conveniently, probably the same 50 or 100 men that he brought with him, but details on this are a little scarce. I wasn't able to figure out exactly who he was captaining, or indeed even his exact actions during the battle. So it is entirely possible that he just sort of sat back and let other people fight for him, but we don't know.

Abram: That's not interesting.

Joe: No. So Pelham's regiment was ordered to march to Preston to retake it from the Jacobites. But they weren't the only ones. So five regiments of dragoons, one of infantry, and one of cavalry, all led by different people, were sent to converge on this town that had been taken over by the Jacobites.

Joe: So what he would have found when they arrived, and they arrived on November 12th, was a death trap. The streets were barricaded. The Jacobite troops were firing at the English from the barricades and the houses. And anytime that any of the troops got near, they were essentially pushed back. In the first day of fighting, the English were unable to overrun the barricades, and they took heavy losses. Like, 300 of the English troops died compared to maybe 16 of the Jacobite troops on that first day.

Joe: The English, never wanting to give up, sort of pulled back to the edge of town, and they awaited some reinforcements, which they knew would come. They didn't just wait, however. They also tried to set fire to the town.

Joe: Abram's giving us a shocked look. Yes. So the English just set fire to a town in England. So apparently the Jacobites tried to set fire in return to some farmhouses that the English were staying in. But the point was, it's just messy.

Joe: Night fell and the Jacobites continued to fire on the English from the safety of the town. But they also started to realize that they couldn't win this, right? They were pretty much boxed in.

Joe: So if you take a look on this map, so the English had basically taken — see where this says Preston Moor here in the north? Yeah. All of the horses were pretty much lined up on the north side of the town.

Abram: I can imagine that. I'm just a bunch of horses, like horse, other horse, other horse, other horse, other horse, other horse, just standing there.

Joe: I don't know if it was exactly like that, but we'll go with it. And that the English had managed to capture the bridge because they didn't defend it. So some of the Jacobites started leaving overnight, and as best I can tell, the English let them leave. The fewer troops that there were in the town, the easier it would be for the English troops to take it back over again.

Joe: So you can only imagine what Pelham must have been thinking in this situation, right? He's a mounted dragoon. He's fighting a street-by-street, like, urban battle. This was before they had urban battles, really. Anytime they come near, they're being shot at, not by an army that's arranged in front of them, but by people shooting out windows and between holes and barricades. That had to have been terrifying for someone who kind of grew up in a very prominent family.

Joe: So the following day, more English troops arrived and they successfully encircled the town. None of the Jacobites could escape at this point, and we would say that the town was pretty much besieged. Have you heard that word before?

Abram: No.

Joe: It's basically when a town is so surrounded by troops that you can't get supplies in and out, you can't get any reinforcements, people can't leave. Basically, they lock down the town on all sides.

Joe: So on the Jacobite sides, now remember that they were originally some English troops and some Scottish troops. So the Scottish troops wanted to keep fighting, fight to the death, but the English troops said, nope, we're good, we'll surrender. But by that morning, the Scottish troops realized that if the English troops surrendered, they didn't stand a chance. So both sides surrendered together.

Joe: You might remember when we talked in Compton's episode about the Scottish troops, I mean, it was 100 years earlier, how they were forced into indentured servitude in Massachusetts, and that led to the founding of Wilmington. Well, the same thing happened here. About 1,500 Jacobites were captured and some of them were sent to indentured servitude. They'd be pardoned in 1717.

Joe: So how did Henry feel when the battle was over? We have no idea. Only a couple of Jacobites were actually killed over the entire fighting. As I said, at least 300 English troops were killed. We know that Pelham stayed with Dormer's regiment until the end of the rebellion, but he wasn't involved in any further major actions that are recorded.

Joe: On December 22nd, James VIII finally arrived in Scotland to lead his rebellion, but at that point it was too late. The Earl of Mar had lost too much territory in Scotland. He had actually started burning Scottish villages in order to try to keep the English from having provisions. And by February 4th, James realized that the situation was lost and he sailed back to France, taking the Earl of Mar with him. The rebellion, it just dissolved.

Joe: So I don't even know how important this battle was to Henry Pelham. The longest biography that I read didn't even mention his time here across 300 pages. I find references to —

Abram: Was that the one that it was like 80% prime minister, 19% Parliament, 1% not prime minister or Parliament?

Joe: Yeah, I mean, that biography was very much like a look at his political career and not anything else, so it naturally wouldn't have listed this or wouldn't have spent much time on it. But it is interesting that of the biographies that I read, none of them really spent a lot of time here.

Joe: But I really can't imagine — that being a 21-year-old, being shot at, seeing 300 of your countrymen killed right in front of you, I mean, that had to have been impactful for him. He's going to develop some very significant anti-Jacobite feelings later, and by the time he's prime minister, he is going to have some problems with a resurgence of Jacobites. So I can't imagine that this event didn't really shape some of his future politics.

Joe: So Henry's just finished fighting a battle. The rebellion is over.

Abram: What reward do you think he got?

Joe: Absolutely nothing. Correct. What reward do you think his brother got?

Abram: Everything.

Joe: Everything. His brother, for his courageous service and for providing the horsemen for the war, his brother was made the Duke of Newcastle. So he got his uncle's original title. But remember that when his uncle died, that title went extinct because Thomas was inheriting his property, but he wasn't like his heir to the title. So Thomas became the Baron Pelham when his dad died. But here, a couple years later, in his service to his country, Thomas Pelham-Holles becomes the Duke of Newcastle. Henry Pelham, who actually got shot at, gets absolutely nothing.

Abram: So unfair.

Joe: His life isn't fair.

MP for Seaford

Joe: So soon after the 1715 to 1716 rebellion was quelled, Pelham, he took a vacation. He went on a several-month tour of Europe, the continent, since you've rightly pointed out that Great Britain is in Europe. He just wanted to vacation, see the world. He went on what they call a grand tour.

Abram: But wait, if he wants to see the world, he shouldn't even be going to, like, Asia or North America. Not just the continent where he lives.

Joe: He's European. All those places are backwards. Why would he go to any of them?

Abram: Because that's what "see the world" means.

Joe: Okay, fine. He went on a grand tour around Europe, and that was very common for wealthy people at the time before embarking on their career. Spencer Compton, you might remember, did the same thing.

Joe: But in 1717, a seat opened up in the Cinque Port of Seaford on the south coast of England. Now, this is a C-I-N-Q, Cinque, not S-I-N-K, sink. His brother had property and connections there, and, you know, this would allow him to influence the selection of the replacement for the seat. And his brother, so Thomas, naturally wanted his brother Henry to have a seat in Parliament, probably so he could help his older brother.

Joe: So just to explain, so what is a Cinque Port? A Cinque Port was another type of parliamentary constituency. We've talked about borough and county seats, but Cinque Ports are special towns on the coast, usually on the south of England, that were at one time given special permissions and rights and taxes and other things so they could build ships for the English Navy. And in return for doing that, they would be more self-governing. But by this point, they're just towns that have their own seats in the House of Commons that are disproportionate to the number of people that really live there, right? It's just an opportunity to have another type of rotten borough.

Joe: So in February that year, Henry Pelham, he was either won that seat or he was given that seat depending on your point of view. He appears to have been the only candidate, so he came in first. Congratulations, Henry. And he joined the House of Commons as one of Newcastle's allies. I don't even think he returned immediately. So that election was in February, and Paris is where he was in October of 1717 when he decided to come back.

Joe: So why did Henry get this seat? Well, we'll talk about this in his episode, but Newcastle was trying to firm up his base of power. So, you know, he was obviously a very young member of the House of Lords. He was super rich, and he was basically making all of these connections, kind of building his power base. So Henry is just a pawn in Thomas Pelham-Holles' game.

Abram: So what, is Thomas Pelham-Holles like a queen and Henry Pelham's just a pawn?

Joe: At this point, I think Henry Pelham's a pawn and Thomas is the queen. Yeah, that makes sense.

Abram: But that naturally restricts him because now he has to go straight on to his goals.

Joe: This is a good chess metaphor. I like it. So Henry and Thomas's sister Frances married the Earl of Lincoln. And this also allowed Thomas Pelham-Holles to make an alliance with a different political family. We'll talk about that in his episode.

Joe: So October 1717, Henry returned home and went to see his brother. So Thomas at this point was the Lord Chamberlain for George I, and Pelham had an audience with the king. It might have been his first audience, I'm not sure. And he met the future King George II as well. And the whole place was abuzz. Like, he got there at a great day because Prince George's son, who confusingly is also called Prince George, was just born. And Pelham wrote a letter to a friend about just how joyous Prince George, the future George II, looked about his new son. But who's his son? I think his name is George — Prince George William, but he's going to die a couple months later, so —

Abram: There's a lot of death back then.

Joe: Yeah. So Thomas Pelham-Holles in the House of Lords. Henry Pelham becomes a supporter of Sunderland and Stanhope. Remember those guys? Well, remember, Walpole hasn't really come into power yet. Walpole is going to become really big in a little bit.

Abram: Sunderland is right near Pelham, which is where we're recording.

Joe: That's true.

Abram: There is also another place related to Pelham-Holles nearby.

Joe: Yes. There's a lot of towns in this area that all have names from this era of Parliament. It is what makes us going to each of these towns so relatively easy.

Joe: So in 1720, Henry Pelham got his first real job through Parliament, which was, quote, the Treasurer of the Chamber for the Prince of Wales. So this actually confused the heck out of me because Compton at this point was the Treasurer for the Prince of Wales. So apparently the Treasurer of the Chamber is an under-treasurer under the treasurer. So I think he worked for Compton is what this all comes down to. But Pelham's job wasn't as important, but it is likely that Pelham would've been working with Compton during this time as they both managed different aspects of Prince George's finances.

Joe: And as we discussed in Walpole's episode as well, this is about the time when the South Sea Bubble hit. Remember, everybody lost some money. The Pelhams lost about 2,000 pounds each, which was a lot of money, but a tiny fraction.

Abram: Which means that now they're slightly weaker, I guess. Well, maybe for Pelham, that probably just means that like two or three of his pawns, of his fellow pawns, got taken.

Joe: Yeah, I think that's true. But also, Thomas Pelham-Holles is really, really rich.

Abram: Which means, yeah, which means that maybe one pawn got taken for him.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. I mean, Thomas is so rich, I doubt he would have noticed. I don't know how impactful this would have been to Henry, but the point is that the Pelham brothers both sort of changed. And as the bubble sort of happened, they started supporting Walpole and Walpole and Townshend's new government, right?

Joe: So now, maybe because Walpole saw Pelham's job that he was doing for the Treasurer for the Chamber — we don't know, maybe it was a push from his brother Newcastle — but Walpole added Henry Pelham to the Treasury Board. And so this is an even more important job. So Henry Pelham is beginning to sort of rise up the cursus honorum, as it were. See, I made a Roman joke. Do you want a high five? There, we high-fived.

Abram: Basically, he's rising up, he's getting higher and higher jobs, and that'll lead him to getting higher jobs later, which means that it'll lead him to becoming a queen.

Joe: I think our chess metaphor is beginning to break down, but yes, he eventually becomes prime minister, so I think it's gonna work out for him.

Joe: So during all this time, Pelham had little difficulty or even competition. He won offices again in the rapid-fire elections of 1720, 1721. But because Henry Pelham's clout was increasing, Newcastle supported him to run for the much more prestigious Sussex seat. So instead of being at this Seaford seat, he was going to be getting a county seat. This is the same seat that Spencer Compton also ran for and won. So Spencer Compton and Henry Pelham will be the two members of Parliament for Sussex. So it's just another kind of interesting coincidence between the two of them. And hey, there were only two candidates, so you didn't even need to vote.

Lord Carteret

Joe: So as Pelham is settling into being a member of Parliament, I want to pause for a second. I'm gonna do two pauses in a row, so just live with me here. I need to introduce the villain of this piece, Lord Carteret.

Abram: He was a minor villain in Walpole Part Two, right? Yeah. I think we thought that he was going to be a big villain, but then only for the beginning he was a villain, and he wasn't really that much of a villain even when he was the main villain.

Joe: I mean, he's been a guy that's kind of been in the background a lot, especially through Walpole. Like, he and Walpole did not get along. They were very much at odds. And then, of course, he had a bigger role in Compton's episode, but I never really kind of brought him forward. I never really focused on him. And I'm gonna kind of catch you up on some of the stuff that I skipped over a little bit.

Joe: Now, keep in mind that Lord Carteret would not consider himself a villain. If anything, he'll be one of the good guys when we get to Pulteney's episode.

Abram: Yeah, which will be the next episode after Pelham Part Two.

Joe: Right. But the trick is that there's always gonna be this weird three-way tension between Walpole and Carteret and Newcastle, right? So those are, like, the three power brokers. And Henry Pelham is, as you pointed out, just a pawn at this point. He might be a bishop at this point, but the power brokers here are Walpole, Newcastle, and Carteret.

Abram: Not Henry Pelham. Yeah. As we mentioned, they're currently like rooks and queens. I think Walpole is a queen and Carteret and Newcastle are rooks.

Joe: If I'm going to take this chess metaphor, I'm going to say Walpole is a queen because he's prime minister. Carteret is a rook because he is worth 5 points. And I think Newcastle's a rook, and I think maybe Henry Pelham is a bishop.

Abram: Uh-huh. And what about Spencer Compton?

Joe: Has he even started yet? Spencer Compton's a bishop, I think, because he's — at this point, he's Speaker of the House of Commons, I think. So he's important, but he's not that important yet.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Now, back to the actual episode. So Lord Carteret, his real name is John Carteret, and he's from a longstanding noble family originally from the Channel Islands. So do you remember all about the Channel Islands, right? Jersey and Guernsey.

Abram: Jersey and Guernsey. What else do you know about them? That they should be part of France.

Joe: Geographically speaking, yes.

Abram: That New Jersey was probably named after Jersey.

Joe: Yeah, I think that's probably —

Abram: Jersey is like ten times more people than Guernsey. That's about all I know.

Joe: That's more than most people, so we're going to go with that. So as I said, Lord Carteret is John Carteret. He is from the Channel Islands, and you're right, the Channel Islands are practically France. He's from a very old Norman family. That is why his name sounds French. I'm not going to calculate his silver spoons for you, but let's just say I think he got a lot of them.

Joe: Now, his father died when he was five, so then he became the Baron Carteret, but his family still has a lot of power in the Channel Islands. So he was a — I'm gonna mispronounce this, but he was the Seigneur of Sark, which is a lower-ranked noble title in the Norman system still used in the Channel Islands. And in this case, that is a territory on Guernsey. And he was also the Bailiff of Jersey. So he was like officially the chief judge of the island, although I've read that he was officially the bailiff but he didn't go to Jersey very often, so presumably they found someone else to do —

Abram: Was he mostly on Guernsey or something?

Joe: He was mostly in London because he was a British politician that just happened to have these very important jobs in the Channel Islands. Yeah.

Joe: Now, for all that Walpole — remember, he was super focused on England and Britain first, on domestic stuff — Carteret was international. He spoke a bunch of languages, including German, which is gonna be very important. And he had been ambassador to Sweden back in 1719. In England, he was a close ally of Sunderland and Stanhope, and he was at this point the Secretary of State for the Southern Department.

Joe: So Carteret's relationship with Walpole was never good, and his relationship with Newcastle was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. But in the 1720s, right, Walpole had finally become prime minister. I mean, he had invented the idea of prime minister pretty much. And Walpole finally found a way to get Carteret out of his hair.

Joe: And he did this by arranging for the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to resign, sort of forcing him out of the job, and then promoting — and I'm using quotes here — "promoting" Carteret to be the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Now, I'm sure he'd be good at it, actually. His strength in foreign affairs probably would make him excellent for that job, but it also meant that he was out of London, had to live in Ireland, and really couldn't be involved in the day-to-day politics of the House of Lords. So Walpole succeeded in getting rid of him.

Joe: Instead, Walpole appointed Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, to Carteret's old job, right? So Newcastle at this point is going to be the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, and that is going to be a job that he holds a long way through. So through the rest of Walpole, through Compton, and into the beginning of Pelham's administration.

Joe: Through this, Henry was able to ride his brother's coattails. So his brother has just been promoted to Secretary of State, so Henry is now Secretary at War. That's an administrative position. You — Walpole had it once. Walpole was briefly Secretary at War. But it's just a sign that Pelham's role continues to get slightly bigger and bigger each year.

Abram: Which means now he's a knight, I assume. I think he's a knight because knights are like just slightly stronger than bishops. So I think he's a knight.

Joe: Yeah, we could say he's a knight. Yeah, he likes to jump the little diagonals. Yeah.

MP for Sussex

Joe: So one of the funny things is I do these — is of course I read a couple of biographies of each person, and in the same way that Compton's biographies — I mean universally just belittled him every chance they could get. Like when his own biography said that he was a bad speaker, right? It's a bad sign. Pelham's biographies remind us over and over and over again that he only had his important roles up to this point, his seats, his job, because of his brother. He is Newcastle's buddy that is going to help keep Newcastle in power, not as his own person.

Joe: But this is where we start to see that beginning to change. So there's gonna be a kind of shift that changes their relationship because Pelham is gonna become very close to Walpole. So Pelham is gonna become essentially Walpole's right-hand man, Walpole's protégé, and he's gonna spend a lot of time at Walpole's house. He's gonna be plotting and supporting Walpole on legislation. He's gonna be learning government finance from Walpole. He's gonna learn how to run elections, and he's gonna learn how to deal with factional politics.

Joe: So Newcastle and his brother will continue to remain close, but as Henry is beginning to side more with Walpole, Newcastle is gonna become a little uncomfortable about this. So you can see this sort of three-way thing. And if anything, Pelham, Henry Pelham, starts to sort of try to mediate between Thomas Pelham-Holles and Walpole. He's kind of like a man in the middle.

Joe: So this is also where, and I think we'll talk about this more in Pulteney's episode, that Pelham and Pulteney started to get into a bit of a conflict. This is not the only time that they will get into conflict, but Pulteney was campaigning against corruption in the Civil List, right? He was trying to advance bills that were against Walpole. Pelham argued against him in Parliament and even managed to arrange for Pulteney to lose his job. And that job instead was given to one of the Newcastle relatives. So again, it's Thomas Pelham-Holles using what's going on to get another one of his relatives in a job.

Joe: But Walpole found an interesting path to getting Henry to be more independent from his brother. Do you want to guess what it is?

Abram: Giving him a bigger job? No. Giving him a worse job? No.

Joe: Doing nothing? Walpole helped find him a wife.

Abram: Oh, okay.

Joe: There's a shocked face here again. So one of the ways in which Walpole would help Henry Pelham was by finding him a wife. And it's going to take a couple of years, but they were looking for a wife that had a lot of money and that could bring through a dowry, which is like a marriage payment that was common back then, that would basically bring a lot of money.

Joe: And in 1726, with some of Walpole's help, and probably some of Newcastle's help as well, Henry Pelham married the daughter of the Duke of Rutland. Her name was Catherine Manners.

Abram: Uh-huh. I'm guessing that either she wants everyone to use their manners, or if she's not using her manners, Pelham's like, "Catherine, manners!" It can't —

Joe: It's funny. That is funny. Oh, look, I have it in my script. "Is Abram going to make a joke about whether she has good manners?" Yes. Yes, he did.

Joe: But she brought with her 30,000 pounds, or about six million dollars in today's money. And he was able to use that money to buy a property in Lincolnshire. And now finally, Pelham and his wife are independently wealthy because she had a lot of money and her family had a lot of money. And they, you know, now he does too.

Joe: All right, although it was set up for politics, Henry and Catherine seemed to get along with each other and eventually seemed to truly love each other, and they're going to end up having six daughters and two sons.

King George II

Joe: Now, at this point, it's 1727. King George I died, King George II came to power. You know, this was a major thing for both Walpole and Compton's episode, but Pelham was lower on the totem pole. It really didn't affect him in any big way. Besides, he was too busy taking care of his first child, Catherine Pelham.

Joe: Now, I do want to stop here and mention that it is very difficult for me to talk about his personal life and his children. The biographies do not go into this with him in any detail, and quite honestly, they don't agree. You know, he's living in the 1700s, not the 700s, and there shouldn't be so much disagreement about how many kids he has and stuff.

Joe: So a couple of the sources say he only had the four daughters. Some sources say he had eight children total, six daughters and two sons. And other sources say that four of them died in infancy. Okay. The — I think the most likely answer — the most recent biography says that he did have two sons, but they died at three and ten.

Abram: So much death, so much sad.

Joe: I don't even know how to talk about it, but there's a little bit of confusion with his family. Just know that he's having kids. They're — some of them are dying.

Abram: It's very sad. This reminds me of Franklin Pierce.

Joe: So continuing our story, Townshend, remember, he resigned in 1730, making Walpole the real prime minister. And Pelham, Henry Pelham, he got another promotion. So he's now Paymaster of the Forces. And so this will give him better pay and everything else. So Henry is increasingly becoming independently wealthy, and so increasingly now able to act independently of his brother.

Joe: At about this time, Carteret managed to end his job in Ireland, and he returned to London, back in the House of Lords, back being a thorn in Walpole's side.

Joe: The following year, 1731, during a debate in the House of Commons, another debate, William Pulteney and Henry Pelham argued over funding for the army. Walpole wanted, and therefore Pelham wanted, large funding for the military, but Pulteney was arguing for less, right? The backdrop here is, you know, we got these European wars, and Walpole was concerned that if we had a big army that we'd get involved in some of these wars. The point is they had a disagreement. The details barely matter, but it was so heated that Pulteney just stormed out.

Joe: Now, some of the sources are a little bit unclear, but either Pulteney thought or Pelham thought that the other had just challenged him to a duel. So Pulteney went outside so they could fight a duel.

Joe: Now let's see, so Pulteney is probably what, a, uh, a bishop at this point?

Abram: Bishops are weaker than knights by very slightly. Is Pulteney stronger at this point?

Joe: So yeah, I'm wondering if Pulteney is stronger at this point.

Abram: I think Pulteney might be — I'm like, probably he's a rook. Sure.

Joe: So the details barely matter, but it was so heated that Pulteney stormed out of the chamber. Either he thought or Pelham thought that they were being challenged to a duel, so he went outside to be prepared to fight this duel. Henry Pelham tried to follow him out the door, but he was stopped. His friends in Parliament refused to let him out.

Joe: The Speaker of the House of Commons, who was Spencer Compton, he used the Sergeant-at-Arms to bring Pulteney, force him back into the chamber, and they basically made the two talk it out and explain themselves. In the end, Compton smoothed the situation, the two men calmed down, and heck, I think Compton did something after all. Maybe we should have given him another point.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: But this isn't the only time that Henry Pelham would find violence in the House of Commons. So two years later, do you remember the excise crisis?

Abram: Was that the tax thing?

Joe: That's the tax thing where Walpole wanted to change the tax code to be taxing the poor and the middle class more and the rich less.

Abram: That isn't good.

Joe: No, but you know, Walpole, he knew who was buttering his bread, let's put it that way. So Pelham was involved in a couple of interesting events during that crisis, but I don't know what happened first.

Joe: So first we have the only recorded time where Pelham voted against Walpole. So there was — it's not even very important, but there was some interest rate that Walpole wanted 4% and he wanted 3%. It's entirely meaningless. But that is the only time that he ever voted against Walpole in his parliamentary career, at least according to the biographies that I read. So you might think, oh, maybe he's turning against Walpole. I don't think so.

Joe: Now, more importantly, during one of these drawn-out sessions, Walpole had left the House of Commons walking towards a nearby coffee shop. I guess they had coffee shops back then, only to discover that a, quote, well-dressed mob attacking him. They grabbed his cloak. They seemingly tried to strangle Walpole with his cloak.

Joe: Now, Pelham leapt to Walpole's aid. He drew a sword. Why was he carrying a sword? I have no idea. Did they all carry swords at this point? It's never been brought up before, but he had a sword on him for some reason. He pulled out his sword and he backed Walpole into a nearby hallway, and he guarded him, threatening everyone that would attack Walpole, saying, quote, "Now, gentlemen, who will be the first to fall?"

Joe: I mean, that's pretty heroic, don't you think?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Now, the situation eventually calmed down. Walpole continued, you know, this excise crisis as well as many of the other unpopular things that Walpole was doing. These are going to be things that eventually lead to him being thrown out of office.

Joe: Now, even as Walpole grew further and further out of favor, Pelham remained a strong supporter, even when his brother Newcastle was starting to use Walpole's problems as ways to boost his own power. We'll talk about that more when we get into Thomas Pelham-Holles's episode.

Joe: But during this time, Pelham frequently worked as a mediator between Newcastle and Walpole, asking his brother to temper his letters or correspond through intermediaries to keep the tension low. Pelham even worked with his brother and Hardwicke — we'll talk about Hardwicke more in Newcastle's episode. There is a Hardwicke nearby, isn't there?

Abram: There's a Hardwick nearby. There's a Harwich in Cape Cod, right? No, Harwich in Cape Cod.

Joe: And I think it's just a different spelling, but it's actually named for the same guy. So Pelham worked with his brother and Hardwicke to rewrite letters to Walpole to soften them.

Joe: So here's just an example letter just telling you. So quote, "Dear brother, this morning we read over your dispatches together, and Sir Robert" — Robert Walpole — "I can assure you, not only in the conclusions but as he went along, approved every paragraph. I did not tell him that I had your original draft, nor did he insinuate that you had any assistance in forming it. I'm glad that you took the Lord Chancellor's alterations, for though they don't make any great difference in the substance of what you wrote, it makes your orders influenced in a manner more agreeable to the present system."

Joe: Yet another fancy — it's very fancy, but he's basically saying, thank you, I took your comments and I said what I wanted to say in a nicer way.

Joe: So Pelham seems very torn during this period between Walpole and his brother, but over and over again, Henry Pelham focuses on keeping the Whigs together. He doesn't want a Newcastle faction and a Walpole faction. He wants to keep the Whigs together.

Joe: While he was struggling to keep the Whig government together, he also had a great tragedy at home. Both of his sons, ages three and ten, died within weeks of each other in 1739, of some throat disease. His daughter Mary was born around the same time, but that could hardly have helped with the grief.

Prime Minister Compton

Joe: And as we already discussed, Walpole was unable to hold these factions together long. He was increasingly unpopular, especially with the war in Spain over Jenkins' Ear. And Walpole resigned in February 1742. Compton became prime minister shortly after.

Joe: So as Compton became prime minister, Pelham refused to accept any offices from him. He said that he would not profit from Walpole's downfall. So as Compton formed his government, which we now know to be short-lived, he didn't want to gain anything by it.

Joe: At this point, the Walpole faction was completely out of power. Compton brought in Lord Carteret and others. Carteret became a Secretary of State and took over much of the war in Spain. So he essentially acted as a lot of the power behind the throne — not literally behind the throne because Compton is a prime minister, but as we already mentioned in Compton's episode, a lot of people think that Carteret was essentially acting as prime minister, particularly as Compton spent much of his time being very ill.

Pelham, Massachusetts

Joe: Now we are going to break for just a minute from this because I want to talk about where we are.

Abram: It's the town section.

Joe: Yes. So on January 15th, 1743, Pelham, Massachusetts was officially incorporated. And notice he's not even prime minister yet. So he is getting this town named after him just because of his great work in Parliament. Also probably because he's related to his brother, but that's the usual problem, right?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: And actually, if you read a couple of the, like, Wikipedia pages and stuff on Pelham, Massachusetts, they all say it was named after him as prime minister, but that's because — he's going to be prime minister in 1743. Most people don't bother paying attention to the fact that the town was incorporated in January, but he didn't become prime minister till August. So, you know, it's an easy mistake to make.

Joe: Now, Pelham, Massachusetts is very different and quite a lot farther out than either Walpole or Wilmington, right? So both of those were very much suburban towns on the outskirts of Boston, very much early Massachusetts Bay sort of territory. We're here in western Massachusetts, in the Connecticut Valley. We're on the far side of the Quabbin Reservoir. But at that point, the Quabbin didn't even exist yet. In fact, about a third of the town's territory is now underwater in the Quabbin.

Joe: So this town was settled later than some of the others. So 1739 by Scottish immigrants who called the area New Lisburne. Now Lisburne is a, I think it's a peninsula in Scotland or a region in Scotland. And this was a tough time for many in Scotland due to the persecution after the Jacobite Rebellion in 1715. A lot of people moved out of Scotland seeking a better life with less persecution. The English didn't like the Scottish for being Scottish. The Anglicans didn't like that a lot of the Scottish people were Presbyterians. Massachusetts was a common place for those people to settle.

Joe: But if you look at the list of town names in Massachusetts, you're not going to find many that are from Scotland. But not too far from here, there was a town that was founded that was called New Glasgow, for example. But when the Massachusetts colonial legislature incorporated that town, they called it Blandford.

Abram: Such a bland name.

Joe: Such a bland name. New Lisburne similarly couldn't stick. So this is just a way in which the Massachusetts legislature was sort of papering over the fact that they were discriminating against the Scottish people too by not recognizing their town names.

Joe: So New Lisburne was incorporated as a town on January 15th, 1743, as Pelham. I don't know why Pelham was chosen. I can't find any connection that those settlers had to the Pelham family, either Henry or his brother Thomas. We do know that Hardwicke got a town nearby at around the same time, so maybe Newcastle was just having people name towns after his friends. Not really clear. Doesn't matter. Henry Pelham got a town.

Joe: So the town was small at the beginning. It only had 371 people by 1760.

Abram: And even now it doesn't have a lot of people.

Joe: Do you know how many people it has now?

Abram: Like just slightly over 1,000 or slightly less than 1,000.

Joe: 1,280. Yeah. As we drove here, we passed like the town hall.

Abram: Nearby, there are maybe five or so houses.

Joe: Yeah, it's very rural here.

Abram: It's very beautiful. Like, from the town hall, you could only see like five houses.

Joe: Yes, it is very, very different than further east. So this is open country, mountains, forests, a lot of reservoir.

Joe: This town is best known for being the home of Daniel Shays, who led Shays's Rebellion. In fact, we're here in the history room of the Pelham Library, and there is a big display over there to Daniel Shays. This was a short-lived uprising against the very young American government in 1787 by poor farmers that were bankrupted by the Revolutionary debts. There used to be a tavern in town — I didn't check to see if there's a historical marker — called Conkey's Tavern where the rebels planned and where they ended up marching from here to attack the armory in Springfield.

Abram: What happened to the tavern?

Joe: I don't know, I have to look it up. Unfortunately, the Articles of Confederation made the federal powers of the United States at that time very weak, and the national government wasn't able to respond to the revolt. In the end, the Massachusetts State Militia had to be the one to put it down. And at least some historians claim that this was one of the reasons for why our later Constitution had a stronger federal authority.

Joe: In 1788, the town was expanded. It annexed parts of Belchertown.

Abram: Belchertown. Belchertown. That's so funny. So that's the only town near here besides Springfield and Amherst, which are near here but not that near here, that actually has a reasonable amount of people of 15,000.

Joe: You are very good with your population figures.

Abram: I'm a bit surprised that there's that many because I think a lot of people would be discouraged from going there due to its name.

Joe: I don't know, maybe they enjoyed belching. But in 1822, part of the town was separated and became —

Abram: Forming Prescott.

Joe: Which no longer exists. Correct.

Joe: So in 1848, the process began on one of the defining changes that would affect Pelham. At the time, the Massachusetts government was strategizing ways to improve the supply of fresh water to the growing metropolis of Boston. These actions wouldn't bear fruit for several decades. The Wachusett Reservoir, which was further east, was completed in 1908. But as Boston and nearby towns continued to grow, the government estimated that they'd only have enough water for another decade or so.

Joe: In 1922, they identified that the Swift River — that's a river that flows through Pelham — as their next best source of fresh water. Construction on infrastructure to transport the water, what would become the Quabbin Aqueduct, started in 1926. Construction on the Winsor Dam, which would form the basis of the reservoir, began in 1935.

Joe: Connecticut sued to try to stop this whole project, complaining that the new dams and the new reservoir would block the water that would eventually flow into the Connecticut River, but they ultimately lost.

Joe: So essentially what the government is doing here is that they have identified that they need to build a very big reservoir in western Massachusetts, and the Swift River, which runs through Pelham, is going to be a major source of this new reservoir. But where the reservoir would be was not unoccupied. Four towns were in the valley that would soon find itself at the bottom of a lake.

Abram: They were Enfield, Prescott, Dana, or whatever its name is, and one other. Greenwich.

Joe: Wow. Really?

Abram: I think Greenwich is the only one that they needed to completely get rid of.

Joe: Well, I think a lot of the others, like, had little bits that were outside, right?

Abram: Yeah, like one of them was like 60% outside, which I felt like was weird.

Joe: Yes. Well, Pelham, as I said, 30% of the town is now underwater.

Abram: Uh-huh. Which means it isn't really part of the town.

Joe: Correct. So by August 14th, 1939, the project was completed. The dam was locked off and water began to fill the reservoir, flooding all those towns, the roads, the railroads, everything that was in that valley was gradually flooded. It took seven years for the reservoir to be filled, and that's where we are today. The town is still beautiful, it's still pretty small, and it is a pain in the butt to get to because the reservoir is on the entire east side and we have to drive all the way around the reservoir to get here.

Abram: So yeah, at least it still exists.

Joe: Yes. All right, so that was the town of Pelham. Isn't that such a cool story?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Yeah. And for those of you that don't know the geography, like, if you look at a map of Massachusetts, there's that big inland lake, like, just, you know, in the western part of the state. That's the Quabbin Reservoir, that giant lake.

Abram: And there's like this little river-looking part on one of the sides. Just imagine Pelham being on the side away from where Boston is on that little, like, stretch.

Joe: Yes, it is. Pelham is like on the western shore of the Quabbin Reservoir. I think it's a cool story.

Abram: I think it's a cool little town.

Joe: Okay, should we move on?

Abram: Yes.

The War of Austrian Succession

Joe: We should move on because we're not here to talk about Pelham. We're here to talk about Henry Pelham. So in order to get back to Henry Pelham, we have to actually talk about something else again, which — you remember at the beginning of the Walpole episode, we had something called the War of the Spanish Succession.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Right. So there's a lot of these. Like, so the British fought the War of Spanish Succession. Walpole managed to keep England out of the War of the Polish Succession. But now we have a new one, the War of Austrian Succession.

Joe: And the important thing to think about for each of these is that the major powers of Europe are sort of trying to maintain a balance, right? So Great Britain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, they're all trying to maintain a balance. And every time something happens that might take it out of balance —

Abram: But the thing is, there's always something happening right now because it seems like whenever they're in the middle of the war or there's a new war, they just can't get enough war.

Joe: You know, for all that I thought that the First World War and the Napoleonic Wars and stuff were all special, like, now I'm realizing that, like, there's just this tremendous history of European powers looking for reasons to go to war with each other. But the weird thing about these is because they were about the balance of power, sometimes Britain would side with France and sometimes Britain would fight France. It's crazy.

Joe: But in 1740, Emperor Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Empire — so he had like a mini empire in the empire. I don't fully grasp the whole feudalism way in which those two things overlapped, but he died without a male heir. But he did have a daughter, and his daughter —

Abram: So he died by running out of air and choking to death or something.

Joe: This is a podcast with a 10-year-old. These kind of jokes happen.

Joe: So he had intended for his daughter Maria Theresa to be the new ruler of his Habsburg possessions. I don't think she could have automatically been the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire stuff because I think there's a whole election process, and some of the territories followed Salic law, which is sort of the French system that says that women can't be rulers. So the whole thing was really overly complicated. But Maria Theresa wanted to maintain control because she was the appointed successor of her father, Charles VI.

Joe: Now remember that George II was an Elector of Hanover, and Hanover was in the Holy Roman Empire. Actually, it has a different name in the Holy Roman Empire. We always call it Hanover, but it does have a slightly different name in the empire. I looked it up. I don't remember what it is now, so we'll cover it some other day if it's important.

Joe: But George II, he wanted to throw the might of Britain into the conflict to ensure that she took the throne. For reasons that I don't entirely get, her possessions, those Habsburg possessions, will often be sort of simplified in the history books as Austria, which is why we call it the War of Austrian Succession. But she actually controlled more and different territories than modern Austria. And I'm sure somebody can explain it to me, but just like the British people in the 1740s, I don't care a lot about this war.

Joe: And indeed, that was like a big problem that George II had, which is that he was trying to wage a war that the British population, for the most part, really didn't care about. This was a war about him as an Elector of Hanover. Not about him as a king of England.

Joe: So on one side we had Britain and it turns out the Netherlands and Maria Theresa's Austrian army. And against them would eventually be a whole bunch of kingdoms. But the King of Prussia, that's Frederick II of Prussia, he tried to take advantage of Charles VI's death. He invaded a place called Silesia. He was successful. Maria Theresa fought back.

Joe: So essentially the belligerents end up being Prussia, and then Bavaria is going to join, because the Elector of Bavaria is going to proclaim himself a king. And in fact, he's going to proclaim himself Charles VII of the Holy Roman Empire. Then he's going to be beaten back. And like, this is all really complicated, and I'm not going to try to explain it that well because, as I said, in Britain they're mostly like, why are we involved in this? This is a war very far from us involving territories that we don't care about.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: But in 1743, George II decided that he needed to get involved personally. So in May of 1743, he appointed a regency council of 19, quote, Lords Justice, that they would oversee Britain because he was heading off to Hanover to try to help Maria Theresa fight this war.

Abram: He's going off to Germany again. Why do they love Germany so much? He's from Germany. Doesn't he care that Germany is not all funny rules?

Joe: Well, I mean, this is the problem with the Hanoverian kings, right? They always have one foot in Germany and one foot in England.

Abram: Except they can't have that literally.

Joe: Correct. Because they aren't big enough. They are not big enough.

Joe: So he appointed a council of 19 Lords Justice to oversee Britain while he was away. At this point, Queen Caroline had died. Yes, I know it's sad, but had she been alive, then she would certainly have acted as a regent. So instead, he made 19 lords into a regent, collectively into a regency council.

Joe: So Henry Pelham was one of the 19, as was Hardwicke, Newcastle's friend, Carteret, the Duke of Argyll, who we spoke about before, Pulteney, and others. In fact, one new name is added to this list. I'm going to ask you to put a pin in it.

Abram: William Cavendish.

Joe: Put a pin in him. That's, I think, the first time he's shown up in anything that I've talked about so far.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: So, Carteret, who is still like the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, he is gonna end up going with George II. So he doesn't stay behind and rule England with these 19 Lords Justice. He actually ends up going with George to Germany in order to assist in some way in this war.

Joe: And all of this leads up to something called the Battle of Dettingen in Bavaria. We skipped over most of this, but the British allied army, which they had a name for themselves, the Pragmatic Army — that's such a weird name. So the British allied army was running out of supplies. They had to fight against 23,000 French troops to get to a supply depot at Hanau, and the French had blocked off the road at the town of Dettingen. And they were forced to fight. After a horrendous battle, the British and other forces barely managed to win.

Abram: And didn't George II actually fight in that battle? I believe he did. And that's the last time an English king, British king technically, has ever fought in a battle.

Joe: I think that is a good trivia fact. So not only did he fight in that battle, but Lord Carteret was there as well. And I don't know if this is true, but the story that I read said that while King George was out there fighting, Carteret was in a nice comfortable tent eating snacks watching the battle. I don't know if that's true.

Abram: It's like playing the fiddle while watching Rome burn.

Joe: It's kind of like playing the fiddle while watching Rome burn.

Abram: It's actually a lot like that.

Joe: Do you know what I mean? Well, what I'm actually remembering is that, remember, during some of the battles of the Civil War, people would come out and like bring a picnic to watch the battle? Do you remember learning about that?

Abram: Yeah, people do weird things.

Joe: So although they had won the battle, the British forces were just totally depleted. They didn't chase the French, they didn't defeat the French, they just decided to rest and recover.

Joe: And at this point like the war hadn't been going that well. The war was becoming more and more unpopular at home. Lord Carteret was increasingly becoming unpopular. George II, who wasn't even in England at the time, was becoming unpopular. Like, the British people are asking, why are we there? This is a Hanoverian problem. This is not a British problem. Why does England care about Maria Theresa? George II cared, maybe, because he was Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, but not Britain. Carteret wasn't home. He couldn't manage the perceptions.

Joe: And in all this mess, less than a month later, Spencer Compton died.

Abram: Oh yes, so much death.

Joe: Like this podcast says —

Abram: Death, death, death, death, death, death.

Joe: That's basically this episode. There's a lot of death here, especially in this episode.

Joe: So Spencer Compton died. And to go back to our little introduction, right, both Pulteney, who was also at this time the Earl of Bath —

Abram: I guess he's taking a bath all the time.

Joe: Perhaps. Pulteney and Pelham both submitted letters.

Abram: Probably Pulteney's was a wet letter considering he was in the bath at the time.

Joe: That could be. So both Pulteney and Pelham submitted letters through Carteret in Germany for the approval of the king. Now, the king actually ignored the letters for, I think, a month.

Abram: Yeah, as said in the introduction. As we said in the introduction.

Joe: And wasn't Carteret there? Yes, and we're about to get that. So Carteret, he supported Pulteney, and obviously Newcastle supported his brother, but Newcastle wasn't there. And Carteret, he was with the king. He could talk to the king in German. Like, really, Pulteney had the better hand here. Like, his advocate was standing there.

Joe: But the king had to weigh out how to manage the situation best. So they had the problem with the army. They had won the battle, but they weren't really winning. The people at home were unhappy that British troops were fighting in this war. A major general actually resigned, Lord Stair, after this. So the king had to make this decision. And in the end, the king felt that Pelham was gonna be able to make a better government. And that he already had an okay relationship with Pelham. For whatever reason, the king decided that this was the right choice.

Joe: So I'm going to read you Carteret's letter to Pelham. Quote, "I laid both your letters before His Majesty, which he read with great attention, and then gave me the letter which you wrote to His Majesty, which I read and returned to him. I told His Majesty that you had acted very fairly and kindly by me, and for which I thought myself much obliged to you — in assuring Lord Bath, that I had constantly declared, that if he liked that post I must be for his succeeding to it, but that I had found him unwilling to accept it till now; that both of your letters contained the whole matter, and therefore I would not trouble his Majesty farther, than by giving my opinion that in the present circumstances of affairs, it would be easier for his service to place Lord Bath there, for he made that one motion, whereas if you were placed there at present, I could not foresee how many motions must be made, and that I thought Lord Wilmington's death had happened at a very unlucky time."

Joe: "You see, I state the affair very truly and naturally to you, and what could anybody in my circumstance do otherwise? If I had not stood by my Lord Bath, who can ever value my friendship? And you must have despised me. However, as the affair is decided in your favor by His Majesty, I wish you the joy of it, and I will endeavor to support you as much as I can, having a most cordial affection for your brother and you."

Abram: Finally, a letter that doesn't sound completely fancy. It's fancy, but not as fancy as the others.

Joe: Yes, but he's basically saying, I wanted the other guy to win. But now that you've won, I support you 100%.

Abram: That's a bit suspicious.

Joe: It is a little suspicious. I'm being stared at.

Joe: So on August 23rd, Henry Pelham received the news via a letter. He was the third prime minister. Good job, Henry Pelham. Lord Carteret was going to remain as the Secretary of State, and he'll still have a lot of sway with the king, but we'll have to get to that next time.

Joe: Abram, did you enjoy this part?

Abram: Yep.

Joe: Isn't this like an awesome prime minister?

Abram: I like — I love him. Walpole was just corrupt and corrupt.

Joe: And Compton just had a lot of power, but he did nothing with it.

Abram: This guy actually has a lot of power and he isn't corrupt and he uses it.

Joe: Yeah, I think it's — and he's sort of the younger brother.

Abram: He's not the oldest brother who inherited everything.

Joe: He's an underdog.

Abram: You want him to be successful.

Joe: He's finally a queen.

Abram: He is indeed that. And Thomas Pelham-Holles, I guess, has been demoted into a rook.

Joe: I think so too. Well, guess what? Thomas Pelham-Holles is going to get his time too. But before we get to that, we'll have another episode about Henry Pelham. Then we'll have an episode about William Pulteney.

Abram: And then we'll have the episodes about Thomas Pelham-Holles.

Joe: So if you like what we're doing here, please give us a like, give us a review, share us with your friends, share us with your enemies, share us with people you barely know. Write reviews. We're very excited to see every download from every new country, so please think of us. But until next time, thank you for listening and goodbye for now.

Bibliography

Joe: So as usual, I'm trying to work from two full-length biographies plus my collection of chapter-length ones. They don't always agree on the details, so I apologize if I get something wrong. For this episode, my two key biographies are "Memoirs of the Administration of the Right Honourable Henry Pelham" by William Coxe, published in 1829, and "A Whig in Power: The Political Career of Henry Pelham" by John W. Wilkes, published in 1964. I was unable to find a full-length biography that was more recent than those. However, I am still working from George Malcolm Thompson and Dick Leonard's chapter-length biographies written in 1980 and 2011, respectively.

Join the Discussion: We want to hear your ranking! Find us on BlueSky at @primefactorspod.bsky.social

Support the Show: If you enjoyed our show, please leave us a rating or review on your podcast app. It helps others find us and makes Abram very excited.