Prime Factors - Ranking UK Prime Ministers

6.1 - John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (Part 1)

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6.1 - John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (Part 1)

Episode Transcript

Abram: Welcome to Prime Factors. This week, John Stuart, 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'm here with my dad. We're reviewing all the British Prime Ministers from Robert Walpole to Keir Starmer. This is episode 6.1, John Stuart, Part One.

Joe: Yeah, I know we said we were only going to do one part for John Stuart, but I was wrong. He's a fascinating guy and it's a good chance to see what life was like for a Scottish noble after the Acts of Union. So we're going to split it into two parts. The second might be a bit shorter, and that's okay.

Joe: We're recording at home, and we'll probably also record Part Two at home. The only place I can find that is currently named after John Stuart is only open in the summer and requires us to book a seaplane. And, uh, Abram, I love you very much, and this podcast is awesome, but I'm not booking a seaplane in British Columbia in order to visit an island in Canada.

Abram: Canada will be involved in the upcoming episode.

Joe: Yes. So part of the deal that I'm making with Abram, because we're missing out this week on British Columbia, is we are going to go try to visit Grenville for his episode.

Abram: And that's in Canada. The deal is that if we do two parts, we'll go to Grenville because I didn't want to do two parts. But if I got to go to Grenville, then I was happy.

Joe: Yeah, it's okay. We're going to go to Grenville. If I can afford the airfare. I'm looking forward to it. We'll figure it out.

Abram: Don't forget that you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and at www.primefactorspodcast.com. No spaces. Also on Facebook and BlueSky. If you enjoy listening, please like, subscribe, comment, and review. By comment, we don't mean comment one star.

Joe: No, no, we want—

Abram: We want at least 4.5 stars.

Joe: Yeah, we're aiming high. So Abram, you know, we have more than 75 followers on BlueSky already, which I don't know if that's a lot, but it makes me feel really good. And we have absolutely— not a single person followed us on Facebook. And that's okay. I don't like Facebook that much either, but I am liking BlueSky quite a bit.

Joe: So if you follow us at Prime Factors Pod on BlueSky, you can see our messages and our pictures. And it's the cool thing that all the cool people are doing right now. So follow us there.

Joe: We're still planning a special episode with our other Prime Minister reviewing friends, Prime Time, as soon as we can get our schedules aligned. They gave us an amazing shout-out in their most recent episode.

Abram: Their version of John Stuart, Part One!

Joe: Yes, and we're gonna play their promo at the end. But they did say something a little bit disturbing.

Prime Time: They're American, and they have a lot of really cool information about the sort of development of colonies and that kind of thing. I'm not convinced that they can tell their viscounts from their marquesses.

Abram: What an insult!

Joe: I'm appalled, Abram.

Abram: Me too!

Joe: Well, okay.

Abram: Maybe that is true.

Joe: Maybe it's true, yeah. So it is true that our British friends probably know about more British stuff than we do.

Abram: How are they our friends if I haven't even met them?

Joe: We'll work on that. But in honor of this grave insult, we're going to be interrupting our narrative today to play a game, a quiz game, Abram, where I'm gonna ask you questions about viscounts and marquesses, which I sourced off of ChatGPT, and we're gonna see how he does.

Abram: Don't expect too much. I haven't memorized these.

Joe: So without any further delay, let's get on to...

Picture This

Joe: We set our scene on a wet and miserable September morning in 1747. John Stuart, the Earl of Bute, steps gingerly out of a carriage and into a muddy meadow wrecked by the stomping of hoof and wheels. His boots sink deep into the soft mud as he turns to his friend climbing out just beside him, holding an umbrella. His friend hardly seems to notice the rain and the mud.

Joe: "Well, here we are! Nothing like the Egham Races, even in a bit of rain, eh?"

Joe: "A bit of rain? This mud is practically trying to swallow me whole."

Joe: So Abram, I have some pictures here for you. They are at the Egham Races.

Abram: And some of them are orange.

Joe: This is the picture. That is the racetrack. And here are some paintings that were done of these races.

Abram: So basically a bunch of people had horses and the horses happened to be in midair at the time. A bunch of people watching them. Wait, Dad, look. Do you see these trees in this picture? Yeah, they're the same trees as in this picture.

Joe: Yeah, it's almost as if like two painters took two paintings of the same place and they both had too much orange paint. Yeah, well, I think it's pretty much always muddy there, but let's continue.

Joe: Lord Bute shakes his boots—

Abram: Yeah, he shakes himself. Oh no, what happened? What's that mean?

Joe: Bute and boot, they're hard to say. Lord Bute shakes his boots fruitlessly as his friend slips a few coins into the hands of a young attendant, perhaps no older than twelve. The boy slips into the carriage and leads the horses away to a nearby field to be parked and fed for the afternoon. Further across the field, a line of hackney cabs sit waiting for their return fares to London.

Joe: As the two men squelch their way across the muddy field, let's take a look at them. Lord Bute is 34, but there is no gray yet around his temples. He is, despite his worn but elegant clothing, a handsome man. He brushes the rain off his long coat, hoping that no one sees the elbows wearing through or the poor polish on his now muddy boots.

Joe: In contrast, his friend is well-presented, dressed to impress even on this rainy day. John sighed at the embarrassment that his friend, the proud owner of an apothecary, or pharmacy, in London, should be so much better dressed than he, an earl— or an earl at least of a faraway Scottish island.

Joe: It's only a short walk to the racing grounds as more and more attendees of all stripes, rich and poor, find enjoyment in the day despite the rain. Vendors cry out their wares as the sweet smell of meat pies and pastries fill the air. Horses trot in the distance with little separation between the muddy track and the muddy field adjacent.

Joe: A trumpet sounds in the distance, announcing the start of a qualifying heat as some in the crowd file towards a nearby embankment for a better view.

Joe: Finding their own vantage point, Bute and his friend set down a blanket from his bag and place it in the wet grass. It is quickly soaked and the pair resolve to stand and shiver in the chill September air. But the rain is quickly forgotten as they watch magnificent horses loop the track.

Joe: A man holding an umbrella approaches cautiously and taps Lord Bute on the shoulder.

Joe: "Excuse me, sir. Are you John Stuart, the Earl of Bute?"

Joe: "I am. What's this about?"

Joe: "His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, requests your presence."

Joe: "The Prince of Wales? Here? What could he possibly want with me?"

Joe: "If you'd kindly follow me, my lord."

Joe: "Sorry, friend. I'll be back shortly."

Joe: Bute's friend, a meat pie in one hand, waves him off as the horses pass their positions once again. The footman leads Bute across the field to a cordoned-off area near the finish line. A pair of guards at the entrance sees the footman and nods them through. Inside a large tent, Prince Frederick sits at a table with two other well-dressed nobles. A chandelier of oil lamps casts a warm glow despite the dreary weather outside.

Abram: Ah, the Earl of Butt— I mean, Bute, sorry. John Stuart, correct? Marvelous surname, just full of royal prestige. Just the man we needed.

Joe: Bute bows deeply, water dripping from his coat. He tries to compose himself, suddenly conscious of every tear in his pants and every muddy scuff on his shoes.

Abram: We were taking a break from the races and had in mind to play whist, but realized that we were one short. My footman has been scouring the grounds for anyone noble enough to join us, and well, here you are. Sit, sit.

Joe: The prince gestures to a fourth seat at the table. Bute hesitates, glancing at the others. But realizes that he has little choice.

Abram: Let me introduce my companions. This is Charles Calvert, the Baron Baltimore, and Lord William Manners. Lord Manners is quite the connoisseur of horses, aren't you, William?

Joe: "Indeed, Your Highness. While I don't race my own these days, many of today's finest steeds are sired by my stallions."

Joe: The group chuckles politely. The prince gestures to the cards. Bute sits and wiggles uncomfortably, his soaked clothing sticking to his body as the Prince deals. He's familiar with whist— how could he not be?— and plays initially nervously, missing a trump and stumbling over his words. He's self-consciously aware every time a hint of his own Scottish accent peeks through his careful English speech.

Joe: And yet John soon finds himself relaxing and enjoying the game. Between the Prince's casual attitude and perhaps a bit of the ale that is continually poured, he soon finds himself laughing like they were all old friends, slapping Lord Manners on the back after a particularly good hand and making small talk with the Prince about royal gossip. He never expected in a million years to have such a chance with the future King of England.

Abram: Well played, my lord. Perhaps we've underestimated you. Calvert, take note. We may have found a new partner to outmatch you.

Abram: A footman enters, bowing low.

Joe: "Your Highness, my lords, a message has arrived for Lord Bute."

Joe: He turns to Bute.

Joe: "Your companion wishes to inform you that he's leaving. The weather has chilled him to the bone, and he intends to return home. He asks if you would join him for the ride."

Joe: Bute begins to rise, but the Prince waves him back down.

Abram: Nonsense! Send the good man on his way, with my personal thanks, of course. Lord Bute shall ride with me this evening to Cliveden House. I won't hear of cutting this fine day short.

Joe: That evening, as the Prince's elaborately decorated carriage pulls away from the racecourse, Bute sits opposite his royal host. The conversation flows easily, punctuated by laughter. As the carriage rumbles down the road, Bute gazes out at the rain-soaked landscape, wondering at the strange twist of fate that had him spending the evening with the Prince at his own residence. Little does he know, his life is about to change forever.

Abram: Dun dun dun!

Joe: Good addition there, Abram. And you snuck in a butt. I mean, I knew you were going to sneak it in there somewhere.

Abram: Do you like how I did it at the beginning?

Joe: Yes.

Ancestry

Joe: Our subject this episode is John Stuart, the 3rd Earl of Bute, and usually considered the sixth Prime Minister, not counting Bath and Waldegrave. He's also our first Scottish Prime Minister. And as you can tell from his name, he's related to the Stuart dynasty that ruled Scotland and then England after Queen Elizabeth.

Joe: So this seems as good a time as any, not only to talk about his ancestry, but also the history of Scotland up to this point. So how could a Scottish noble have become a prime minister? Abram, do you know a lot about Scottish history?

Abram: James, James, James, James, James, Mary Queen of Scots, James.

Joe: Okay, that's a lot about Scottish history. Can you— do you know anyone before the Jameses?

Abram: If you don't want me to say the King of Scotland in the Pixar movie, then no. I do know, but I'm not telling you.

Joe: You do know, but you're not telling me. Okay, so during the Roman period, the people of what is now Scotland were called the Caledonians by the empire, but they were really a collection of Celtic and Brythonic and Gaelic tribes. They're primarily known for building hill forts, and they scuffled with the Romans on many occasions.

Abram: But weren't the Romans scared of Scotland?

Joe: They were scared of Scotland because they built—

Abram: And yet they weren't scared to build a wall inside of Scotland, yet they were scared to fight Scotland.

Joe: Hey, the Scottish, the Picts, or the tribes in Scotland were very scary, and they built two walls. Hadrian's Wall in 122 and the Antonine Wall in 142.

Abram: But the Antonine Wall lasted like ten years.

Joe: Yeah, the Antonine Wall didn't last very long, but they never held the land really, and the tribes of the north were never subdued like their cousins further south.

Joe: After the Western Roman Empire fell, Scotland was controlled by a group of tribes called the Picts. They gradually formed their own kingdoms similar to the Anglo-Saxon ones, the major kingdoms being Dal Riata, Pictland, and Strathclyde. I believe that each of them actually had a different ethnic group, and I apologize to everyone that knows the history of Scotland better than I do.

Joe: In 843, one of the most important Scottish leaders, Kenneth MacAlpine from Dal Riata, conquered and unified the Picts and the Scotti into the Kingdom of Alba, which is what eventually became the Kingdom of Scotland.

Abram: Is that related to, like, Albion? I bet you it is.

Joe: Yeah, I'm sure. So let's just skip over much of the story. The next big event in our tale is 1072. Just six years after conquering Britain, William the Conqueror attacked north, and he forced Scottish King Malcolm III to submit, declaring that Scotland was going to be a client kingdom of England. That went about as well as you expect, and there'll be many, many wars, but that's a big moment.

Joe: But let's get back to this John Stuart guy we're supposed to be talking about. His distant ancestor, a guy named Walter Fitz Alan, arrived in Scotland from Brittany in about 1136. He becomes an advisor to King David I, and he rises so quickly and becomes such an important trusted ally to King David that he is made the High Steward of Scotland in 1157.

Joe: And this would be hereditary. All of his eldest-born sons would also be the High Stewards, and they're even going to take Steward as their last name.

Joe: And just to be clear, like, these names drift a little bit. So he is the High Steward, S-T-E-W-A-R-D, but that last name is eventually gonna become Stewart, S-T-E-W-A-R-T, and then eventually Stuart, S-T-U-A-R-T. But it's all based on this guy.

Abram: So wait, the Stewart— are two spellings, or there's Stewart and Stuart?

Joe: Yeah, they're practically the same. One is spelled a little Frenchy, and the other is more Englishy.

Abram: So one of them is like Stewart, the other is Stuart. Stew, stew. Yep.

Joe: I was looking for a good metaphor for these Stewards and what they did, and I have one for you. I think that they're like Jafar was to the Sultan in Aladdin, or how Zazu is to Mufasa in The Lion King.

Abram: So they're either a bird or a genie, basically.

Joe: Basically. I think that you're taking the wrong point of that metaphor, but I think you really get the idea.

Joe: So England. Terrible people, those English. We should never do a podcast about them. They invaded Scotland in 1296 because Scotland didn't want to accept that England was dominating them. They were fought off under the leadership of a guy named William Wallace and later Robert the Bruce. Now, William Wallace, you've heard of, maybe?

Abram: Yeah, I have. Horrible Histories. Horrible Histories.

Joe: What do you know about William Wallace? Do you remember?

Abram: Scottish rebel. Yep, that's it.

Joe: "You can take my life, but you cannot take my freedom." Yeah, that's all I know either.

Joe: So Robert the Bruce is like the other super famous Scottish king, and the House of Bruce ends up taking the Scottish throne. But by this point, the Stuarts are even more prominent in Scottish affairs. Robert the Bruce's daughter marries the 6th High Steward's son, and so their son becomes the 7th High Steward. His name is Robert Stuart, blah blah blah blah blah.

Joe: But the important thing is that Robert the Stuart served under King David II, but King David II ended up spending a lot of his time being captured in England, and then he ended up not having any kids. And so when King David II died, Robert the Stuart said, you know, I'm next in line and I've kind of been running the show for a while. I'm now in charge. I'm King Robert II.

Joe: So the Stuarts, the helpers of Scotland, had just become the kings of Scotland.

Joe: Now we're here to talk about John Stuart, and John Stuart is descended from one of King Robert II's sons called Sir John Stewart, and he is the progenitor of something called the Clan Stuart of Bute. He's going to be made the Sheriff of Bute.

Joe: So, you know, if you're the son of a king, even if you're an illegitimate son like he was, if you're the son of a king, you're going to get some prizes. And so he basically got put in charge of the island of Bute, and his ancestors are going to continue to be from there for a long time.

Joe: But as you know, the Scottish Stuarts are going to marry into the Tudors. Henry VII's daughter Margaret marries James IV of Scotland. So that's James, James, James, James, right?

Joe: So that when Henry VIII died, and then his children died. Edward the—

Abram: Eighth.

Joe: No. When Henry VIII died, who were Henry VIII's children? Edward the—

Abram: Eighth.

Joe: Oh, you're doing it again. Edward VI.

Abram: Henry VIII. Fine.

Joe: Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. See, whenever you pretend like you don't know something, it's really because you're just being clever at me. Did you forget that that joke existed?

Joe: In any event, all three of them died without heirs, and so they followed the line of succession.

Abram: Of course they died without air. You don't breathe when you're dead. Yep.

Joe: So they went to the next in line, down Henry VII's daughters into the Scottish monarchs, and then magically James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England, and the Scottish had conquered England. The end. No, not the end. Not the end.

Joe: We're going to get back to John soon. So even though England and Scotland had one king, they were still two kingdoms. We saw something similar to this when we talked about Ireland, but even more so. Scotland had their own parliament in Edinburgh, their own separate nobles, their own separate laws, but they still had one king.

Abram: Is it like how the Netherlands and England weren't the same kingdom in 1698? And surrounding years.

Joe: Well, 1698 was William the Duke of Orange, right?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: So, but he was a duke, not a king. But yeah, the idea is the same. Like, his territory was— they weren't one kingdom, they were two different places under the same king. That is a really good example.

Joe: So in 1627, King Charles I needed money, and a way the kings get money was they could sell some of the lower peerages. And at the same time, Scotland was looking at all these other countries that were starting to set up colonies, like Virginia and Plymouth, and they said, we should have colonies too. So they decided to start something— I think you know what this is— called Nova Scotia.

Abram: Nova Scotia. Did they settle Halifax yet?

Joe: They didn't settle Halifax yet. So they wanted to settle Nova Scotia, but they needed money to settle Nova Scotia. So King Charles I sold land and titles in the new colony of Nova Scotia to any nobles that wanted to help settle there, not personally necessarily, but just to settle.

Joe: So one of John Stuart's ancestors, he paid 3,000 Scottish merks, which I think is about $65,000 in today's money.

Abram: You're forgetting that we have like the same amount of listeners in England than in Massachusetts right now, so you should also do it in pounds.

Joe: Oh yes, we have many more viewers in the UK, so I should start translating these things to pounds. I'll keep that in mind for next time.

Abram: How's that? Yeah, because we, uh, by next episode we will have more English listeners than listeners in Massachusetts, but not listeners in the US.

Joe: But we'll go with it. So the point is he paid 3,000 Scottish merks, about $65,000 today, to help pay for the new colony. This ancestor was given 25 square miles of Nova Scotia that he could either colonize himself or he could pay others to do so.

Joe: But bad news, Nova Scotia is going to get taken over by the French in 1632. I don't even know where these 25 square miles would have been, probably on the northwest coast near what is now called Port Royal. And we could talk about Nova Scotia history for a while, but I think it's neat that he became Baronet Stuart of Bute in Nova Scotia.

Abram: He was in Nova Scotia or what?

Joe: No, he never went there. None of them went there. Lots of people paid for this. They never went there. But he got to be a Baronet of Nova Scotia, even though Britain lost Nova Scotia in 1632 and wouldn't really get it back permanently until 1710.

Joe: So he bought a title that came with land. The land immediately got conquered by the French, but he could still be a baronet, and that is the most important thing.

Joe: And actually, the Peerage of Nova Scotia still exists. I looked on the Canadian government website and they talk about this very briefly, and it says that the Peerage of Nova Scotia is not a Canadian thing, it's a British thing, go away. They don't add the "go away" part, but there are actually still people in England— or Britain somewhere— descended from the people that bought baronetcies in Nova Scotia, in a colony that failed in the 1600s.

Joe: But it is interesting. I'm not aware of any other case in American history where American colonization was paid for by selling titles. I could be wrong. I'm not aware of any. Let's keep going.

Joe: Two generations later, we finally get to John Stuart's immediate family. His grandfather, James Stuart, was born in 1661. He's going to be called the 3rd Baronet Bute. He rose in the ranks and he was eventually added to the Scottish Privy Council.

Joe: And as the decision was being made to merge Scotland and England into one country, he was on a special commission that would help decide how to merge the two countries together. And because of his help on that commission, he was made the 1st Earl of Bute in the Scottish peerage system.

Joe: He had a son, 1698, James Stuart, another James Stuart. This is John Stuart's father. So he was only 11 when England and Scotland merged, so he didn't have anything to do with it. But you know, I bet you an 11-year-old would be pretty proud of his dad helping to merge two countries.

Joe: But in the merger of Scotland and England, Scotland was always the junior partner. And one of the ways we see this is the way that their leaders in Parliament worked. So prior to the Union, Scotland had about 60 MPs, or the equivalent of MPs, but they were only given 45 seats in the House of Commons. That's not so bad.

Joe: But Scotland had 160 peers, 160 lords, and England said, there's no way we're allowing 160 lords from Scotland to sit in our House of Lords.

Abram: How many lords are from England?

Joe: I think there's only about the same number. So if all the Scottish lords would have sat in the House of Lords, Scotland would have been able to dominate English politics, and you can't have that. So instead of giving them 160 seats, they gave them 16. So the 160 Scottish peers have to have an election among themselves to decide which 16 of them get to actually be in.

Abram: I think they should have done like 80 or so. I think like 70 would have been the right amount.

Joe: And that would have been fair, but England was not worried about being fair.

Abram: They just didn't want to make the Scottish try to break away from them immediately.

Joe: They wanted to have some control over Scotland, and this is a way that they could do it.

Joe: In 1711, John Stuart's dad married into one of the most powerful political families in Scotland, the Campbell family, by marrying a daughter of the Duke of Argyll. And John Stuart's uncles— John Stuart that we're going to talk about today— will be two of the most powerful men in Scotland, and they're basically going to get a lot of the credit for holding the country together.

Joe: And it wasn't long after they were married that James Stuart had a son, John Stuart, and we can start our story. But before we start, Abram, we have our first trivia challenge.

Marquesses and Viscounts, Round One

Joe: So I would like you to put this list in the order of precedence. The lowest to the highest, if you can. Marquess, Viscount, Duke, Earl, and Baron.

Abram: I know Baron is the lowest. Baron is the lowest, good. Guessing Earl is next, and then Viscount, then Marquess, then Duke.

Joe: So close. You got four of five. It is Baron, then Viscount, then Earl, then Marquess, then Duke. But that is really impressive.

Joe: So I did some looking up. I don't have good numbers for the 18th century. The reason that we haven't heard of marquesses and viscounts very much is because there's relatively few of them.

Joe: So the numbers that I pulled— and I do not know that these are accurate— said that there were 28 dukes, because they're very powerful at this time, and there's not that many. 32 marquesses, 210 earls, 66 viscounts, and 172 barons. But some of these may have been courtesy titles. Like, I don't feel great about these numbers at all, so I don't want anyone to quote me.

Joe: But the important thing to glean from this is that the marquesses and viscounts are much fewer, and the dukes are fewest of all. And I don't know if they were adding Scotland and England. Really, I don't feel great about these numbers, but the scale I think is about right, which is a lot more earls and barons, a lot fewer viscounts and marquesses, and fewer still dukes.

Joe: But the dukes are always the people that we talk about because it's like the Duke of Newcastle. You know, and the Duke of Argyll, the people that show up all the time because they're super powerful.

Abram: Just aren't powerful enough to be powerful.

Silver Spoons

Joe: On May 25th, 1713, John Stuart was born to James Stuart, the 2nd Earl of Bute, and Lady Anne Campbell. He was born in a place called Parliament Close near St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh.

Joe: One of the biographies that I read started off his biography with a joke, saying that being born in Scotland was his, quote, "first and most unforgivable mistake." It's a joke. But I mean, at the time, being born in Scotland was considered to be somehow lesser to the English. It's like, if only I had not been born in Scotland.

Abram: If only I hadn't been born where I was born, my life would have been better. Maybe so.

Joe: But even being born in Parliament Close was a sign because this is where the old Scottish Parliament had met. But by 1713, the building had been empty for six years, with all the power having moved away to England.

Joe: So working out his Silver Spoons is actually pretty tough because most of his family's offices were Scottish.

Abram: But didn't we say that like 1.5 points would go to Scottish or something?

Joe: Yeah, so you and I decided completely arbitrarily that we are going to subtract 25% off of the Scottish scores. So a Scottish earl is worth 25% less than an English earl. This is wrong on so many levels. Please, Scottish people, don't hate us. But I really don't know how wrong it is.

Abram: So at least they don't hate us in Wales anymore.

Joe: That's true. The good news is that John Stuart is descended from a king, but it is far enough ago that it doesn't really impact his score. At the time that he was born, his grandfather and uncles were the three most powerful men in Scotland. Although I think his grandfather had just died.

Joe: The biography that I read stated that the Duke of Argyll practically ruled Scotland for most of George I's reign. So considering that, doing all the calculations, yada yada yada, I find his score to be 27.9 Silver Spoons. So he's right up there with William Cavendish and Spencer Compton. So he's very aristocratic. He has a lot of blue blood, but Scottish blue blood in his background.

Abram: Which means blue blood that speaks with a Scottish accent.

Joe: Yeah, I'm not even going to try. I would insult so many people if I tried to, like, pull a Sean Connery or something.

Abram: What's that?

Joe: Sean Connery? Oh my goodness. Sean Connery is a very famous Scottish actor, most famous for playing James Bond, being the first actor to play James Bond in the movies.

Abram: James Bond? Who's that?

Joe: Do you actually not know?

Abram: Yes, I don't.

Joe: James Bond is a super famous British movie character.

Abram: And why'd they choose someone Scottish?

Joe: There's a valid question for you, and something that a James Bond podcast could probably answer.

Abram: They didn't even like Scotland for a lot of their history.

Joe: I mean, honestly, who could not pick Sean Connery for something? We'll find you a picture of Sean Connery. But James Bond is the famous spy. You've probably heard his catchphrases, you know, "Shaken, not stirred," and "Bond, James Bond," and stuff like that. Have you ever seen any of that?

Abram: No.

Joe: All right, well, I think we've learned that the culture has moved away from this.

Joe: Anyway, there's not too much that we can say about John's early life. So there's a Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, and his family fought on the side of the Hanoverians. That further ingrained them into English society, and Robert Walpole pretty much granted his Uncle Argyll control over most of the Scottish patronage networks, and that helped them to keep Scotland on the side of the English.

Joe: Over the next couple of years, the family did well. He had seven siblings, but we don't even have birth years for all of them. And to raise their growing family, their dad built a manor house called Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute, which was still the family's ancestral land.

Joe: So of course, he is the Earl of Bute and his family's land is the Isle of Bute. So in England, you know, the Duke of Newcastle has nothing to do with Newcastle, but in Scotland, at least some of the time, there seems to be more of a connection. So the Earl of Bute really did live on Bute, which is an island in sort of the southwest of Scotland.

Abram: Is it near Argyll?

Joe: I'm not sure because I don't know my Scottish geography very well. Abram is pulling up a map of Scotland so that he can see where Bute and Argyll are.

Abram: Okay, so Argyll is not the name of an island as far as I can tell. It's the name of an area. It might be a name of an island too, but it looks to be a name of an area. So basically Argyll is like anywhere in this part and Bute is the little island over here.

Joe: Okay, so which part of Scotland is Argyll?

Abram: Basically, if you go near Glasgow on like that belt area, and like, do you know how there's a part of Scotland that kind of like sticks south on the weird peninsula near Glasgow? It's that.

Joe: All right. Thank you for looking that up for me, Abram.

Joe: So the good times were not to last. On January 28th, 1723, when John was just ten, his father died. That made him officially the 3rd Earl of Bute. But a decision had to be made quickly. He and his brothers and sisters were going to be raised by their uncles, the Duke of Argyll and the Earl of Ilay.

Young Life

Joe: Life with his uncles was different. For a start, his uncles immediately pulled strings to enroll him at Eton, pushing for him to integrate into English society. So while it wasn't unprecedented for Scots to attend Eton, their influence certainly helped.

Joe: Now, remember, this is like that super prestigious boarding school. He is there at the same time as William Pitt and George Grenville. So imagine that they're all in the same middle school as you, and you might run into them every now and then, particularly since you live there. But I wasn't able to find any stories of them at Eton where they met or do anything.

Abram: During school holidays. They don't steal things.

Joe: No. Who was that? I forget who that was. Oh, what's it again? One of the prime ministers. We had a story where he and his rival were schoolyard buddies. I don't remember which one now.

Joe: So during the school holidays, he would stay with his Campbell cousins, his uncle's and aunt's kids, at Uncle Argyll's home in England, probably at Sudbrook House in Petersham, just southwest of London.

Abram: Petersham? Probably a different one, because the one near here is near Pelham.

Joe: Like every town name in New England, it probably originated there.

Joe: They had a close relationship with Catherine Douglas, the Duchess of Queensbury, and she lived down the road. And while the Douglases and the Campbells had a long rivalry in Scottish politics, the families got together, at least in this period, to put on plays and sketches and skits around the holidays.

Joe: We don't know whether John participated in those, but John, as we're going to discover, loved acting and he has a flair for the flamboyance. So I would not be surprised if he was involved in those little plays.

Joe: After finishing at Eton, John was sent abroad for his education, first at the University of Groningen and then at the University of Leiden. Do you know where those are?

Abram: One of them's in the Netherlands, right?

Joe: They're both in the Netherlands. Good job. He studied civil law, which was about governance and administration. Like he wanted to be a noble or a politician.

Abram: So wait, travel abroad does not mean travel that far in his opinion. It just means travel across the sea, a.k.a. like very short distance. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to travel abroad. We're going to Pennsylvania. Yay!

Joe: Here's the thing. He completed his studies at 21, but he didn't go on a world tour or a grand tour.

Abram: He didn't go on a grand tour of the world. Sorry, Europe.

Joe: So the reason was, maybe the reason why he only went as far as the Netherlands is because he's actually very poor. Even though he's living on his uncle's money, he is personally very poor. And so he couldn't afford a lot. The Bute family estates did not have a lot of income. So he had connections but no cash.

Joe: So after he gets back, sometime around 1734, he met and fell in love with an English woman named Mary Wortley Montagu. She is a free-spirited daughter of a very free-spirited woman, also named Lady Mary. And the relationship was a scandal on both sides of the family.

Abram: What's that mean?

Joe: Well, a scandal, you know, it's— the relatives are like, what? He's going to marry an English woman? We're Scottish. We don't marry English women. So he would actually be the first member of his family that I know of, or at least his direct line, to marry an English woman.

Joe: But for Mary, the problems were bigger, right? Her dad, Edward Wortley Montagu, he was a former ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He was super important at court, and he basically said, no, you can't marry. He is too poor for you. Like, he is not a good match. Marry a rich guy. Don't marry him. Her mother was more understanding of a love match, but she warned Mary that it would be very hard to live poor.

Joe: Now, we don't have time to talk about her, but Lady Mary is one of the most interesting women I've come across. She was a writer and a poet. She wrote books about the family's travels to the Ottoman Empire. She was a supporter of vaccination. She was one of the people responsible for introducing the smallpox vaccine because she observed the practice while she was in the Ottoman Empire.

Joe: Anyway, her views didn't matter because in August 1736, Mary and John decided that they didn't care at all what their parents thought, and they got married in secret. She at just 18 and he at 23.

Joe: What happened next is a little bit unclear. We know they didn't have any kids until 1741, and one of the biographies I read said that she was still living with her dad, or was back living with her dad, or was living with her dad in any event, in 1739.

Abram: What year are we in when they got married?

Joe: They got married in 1736. So did they delay moving in with each other because he was too poor? Did the parents fight back? We don't know.

Joe: We also know that Lady Mary, so his wife's mother, she left her husband in 1739 to travel to Italy, supposedly to be with another man. So we don't know, but from Italy, Mary's mother wrote to her telling her how happy she was that her daughter had found a love match. So I guess her mother forgave her eventually.

Joe: So I'm going to mention this now because there's not going to be a good time later, but Mary's older brother, who is going to be the heir to this family, is going to be even more free-spirited. He's going to convert to Islam. He is going to move to Turkey. And supposedly, although I'm not sure this is actually true, he's going to take multiple wives.

Joe: So he's going to be such a scandal to the family that he's going to be disinherited. And then when the family finally dies, 20 years after this, they're going to leave all their money to Mary and John. So he's going to get all their money later. But at the time that this story takes place, they're not dead yet. And I'm just letting you know.

Joe: In the meantime, John Stuart had a wife now, but he had no money. With the help of his Uncle Ilay, he was given a job of Lord of Police for Scotland in 1737. But as best I can tell, he never actually went there to do the job. He just collected a paycheck.

Joe: That same year, also with his uncle's help, he was elected one of those representative peers. Remember I told you the 16 that had to cover the 160? Well, he got elected as one of the 16, so he was allowed to sit in the English House of Lords. But he rarely attended and didn't bother doing much. But he supported his uncles when they needed votes, and that's pretty much it.

Joe: He must have been doing something right, because in 1738, King George granted him the Order of the Thistle. You know how in Britain we have the Bath and the Garter?

Abram: He taking a bath in the Knight of Undies.

Joe: Well, this is the Scottish version of the Knight of Undies. This is the Knight of the Thistle, or the Order of the Thistle. A thistle is like a spiky flower.

Joe: In any event, it is very difficult to see what John Stuart had done up to this point to deserve this. I think the only thing he had done was to be born at this point. But hey, let's give him an Order of the Thistle. Why not? You're one of the most 16 important people in Scotland. I think they only gave them to 16. I could be getting the number wrong.

Joe: But what he was doing at the time was spending time with his true loves: botany, mathematics, and acting, right? So if you can imagine this poor noble collecting plants and animals on the banks of the River Thames, going home and doing math problems and trying to solve difficult math situations and acting in local amateur theater, he knew how to have fun. Let's just put it that way.

Joe: So his political career, if you can even call it that, reached a difficult point in 1739 when his two uncles disagreed. Now, you might remember this was around the time of the War of Jenkins' Ear. Do you remember the War of Jenkins' Ear?

Joe: Uncle Argyll wanted war. Uncle Ilay sided with Robert Walpole, who was trying to avoid a conflict. As you might remember, Walpole ends up winning this time, even though he's gonna be pushed into the war very soon.

Joe: So Bute sides with his Uncle Argyll, ends up really upsetting Walpole, or at least ends up being on the wrong side of Walpole. He doesn't get reelected in 1741, and he ends up just essentially retiring from politics because he's just done, and he moves back home to his ancestral home in Bute.

Joe: We know at least that by that point, Mary went to Scotland, because as soon as he moves back to Bute, he starts having kids. So maybe now that he's not so busy doing politics and getting the Order of the Thistle, he had time to settle down with his wife. We don't really know.

Joe: But John seemed to really enjoy the simple life for a time. He indulged his botany in the more rustic setting of Scotland. But things are going to get bad there very soon, and he's going to have to return to England.

Marquesses and Viscounts, Round Two

Joe: So, Abram, it's time for your next trivia question. This is a multiple choice question. What is the main duty of a viscount historically? Is it A, protecting the borderlands, B, acting as a deputy or assistant to an earl, C, leading the king's armies, or D, hosting royal banquets?

Abram: I'm guessing B.

Joe: It is B.

Abram: Isn't A like a marquess's job or something?

Joe: Maybe. Yes. Yes, it is. That is a marquess's job. Good job.

Abram: So I kind of got double points.

Joe: Well, you might have answered an upcoming question. Good job, Abram.

A Chance Meeting With a Prince

Joe: In 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, led a Jacobite rebellion in an attempt to reclaim the British throne. We've talked about this how many times? But unlike the other times we've talked about it, Lord Bute was actually in Scotland. And while the rebellion gained significant support in the Highlands, loyalty where he was in the Lowlands was much more divided.

Abram: Where's the Lowlands? Is that like southern Scotland?

Joe: Southern Scotland. So John Stuart remained aligned with the Hanoverian government. But given his English connections, given his wife was English, this might have been a really uncomfortable time for him to be hanging out in Scotland.

Joe: So as tensions rose, he moved his family back to London, settling in a modest, actually pretty much middle-class home that he rented in Twickenham, which is in Middlesex. So it's about $30,000 a year in modern money, or about $2,000 to $2,500 a month, which isn't actually that much for a nice place in London.

Joe: Twickenham was famous at that time for its intellectuals and artistic people, including poets like Alexander Pope, and that would have given him a quiet life while remaining close to London.

Joe: But he is not having like a giant manor house. He has what amounts to a nice apartment that has enough room for all of his kids. He is not rich.

Joe: And by 1746, he was even worse off because of falling stocks. At that point, he had to give up having a carriage. He could no longer afford his own car. Instead, he had to take taxis or hackney carriages around London when he traveled. He struggled to keep up appearances as an earl.

Joe: It was in this condition that our intro story happened. In September 1747, he bummed a ride off a friend to the—

Abram: Who's the friend?

Joe: The friend is a guy who owned an apothecary. He is not named in any of the stories, and I could not figure out who he was, if indeed it really happened.

Joe: He bummed a ride off a friend to the Egham Races. It was a rainy day, and while the races were running, Prince Frederick, who was there, had retired to a tent to play cards with his friends. But there weren't enough nobles to play cards, so his servants searched the race for anybody there who was of noble blood. They found John Stuart, and they invited him to cards.

Joe: The Prince and the Earl became friends, and by the time the game was over, John's friend had already left, and the Prince basically invited him to stay over at his house that night because he had lost his ride home. But this was the beginning of a beautiful and very, very politically important friendship.

Joe: But that said, some of the details might just be wrong. I have a different biography that tells the exact same story, but they weren't at the Egham Races. They were at a cricket match in Cliveden. So where was he? Did this really happen? I don't know.

Joe: But sometime around this point, he met the Prince, and over the next months he became a really good friend to the Prince. He was invited there on multiple occasions.

Joe: One of the interests that they shared was in theater. Prince Frederick liked to teach his children through theatricals, and they'd even hired an actor called James Quinn to be one of Prince George's tutors, right? So he was going to tutor Prince George on public speaking, and they would do little plays and skits as part of their learning.

Joe: So John Stuart, as we said, loved the theater, and he might have been involved in some of these lessons.

Joe: Now that he's back in London, he started acting in amateur plays, and we know that two of those plays that he acted in around this time— the first was something called The Revenge by Edward Young, and he played the lead, Don Alonzo.

Joe: In 1748, he also played the co-lead in a play called The Orphan by Thomas Otway. This was at the Duchess of Queensbury's house. They had run the play three times, but Prince Frederick was unable to attend, so he requested that they do it again so that he could come and bring his family. And they got to watch their friend John Stuart be the lead actor in a play.

Joe: And I looked these up, and these are pretty tough plays. Like, this isn't easy stuff, a lot of lines. In both cases, he had to memorize the most lines of any character in each of those plays, so I'm pretty impressed.

Joe: His theatrical life might have led him to his first unofficial job for the Prince because he was involved in organizing the Prince's balls and dances at Leicester House. Remember, Leicester House is the name of his house when he's a prince, and it'll be the name of the political faction when he's dead.

Joe: This only seemed to deepen the friendship between Lord Bute and the Prince's family. He was getting to know the royal children, and at this point Prince George was just nine and was probably getting used to seeing John Stuart around.

Joe: In 1750, this unofficial job became an official one when he was appointed as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber for Frederick. So a Gentleman of the Bedchamber is a guy who helps him get dressed in the morning and stuff like that. There's usually a couple of them, so he didn't really have to help the Prince get dressed every day, but he was one of them.

Joe: By this point, I don't know how much of it was honorary, but it did mean that he was officially a close confidant. He officially had a job in the Prince's household, and everything was going great.

Joe: But then something bad happened.

Abram: What?

Joe: On March 31st, 1751, Prince Frederick died unexpectedly. As best I could tell, John Stuart was in Scotland at the time, but he was devastated by the news of his patron's death. And his death changed everything, not only because he lost a close friend, but also it drove him back to politics, as we'll see.

Joe: He was so affected by this that John Stuart's third son, which we think was born shortly after the Prince died, was named Frederick Stuart in his honor.

Marquesses and Viscounts, Round Three

Joe: Our next trivia question, let me bring it up. As I said, I looked up all of these questions on ChatGPT and it gave me a whole bunch of questions to ask you. So true or false: marquesses were originally responsible for defending the border regions of the kingdom.

Abram: True.

Joe: True, yes. You answered that one already. "Marquess" comes from the word "mark" or "marches," and the marches were the border regions. And you can find places called—

Abram: Is Denmark named after them?

Joe: Mm-hmm. Denmark has that word in it. You are correct.

Leicester House

Joe: One of the surprising things to me is how quickly John Stuart goes from being this happy-go-lucky, artsy guy who likes to collect bugs on the bank of the River Thames to political mastermind. And I think that some of this might be due to biased sources.

Abram: Are they biased supporting him or against him?

Joe: Well, against him, because just— spoilers for the second part— he's going to be prime minister, but then he's going to be utterly reviled. People hate him. They're going to blame him for the Treaty of Paris. One of the subject headings of the next episode is "The Scottish Boogeyman," and he's basically going to be not that popular. Let's just put it that way.

Joe: So I want you to have a grain of salt here. But almost immediately after Prince Frederick died, John Stuart ends up taking on a leadership role in Leicester House, right? Leicester House being Frederick's house.

Abram: Except no longer Frederick's house.

Joe: No longer Frederick's house.

Abram: Frederick's house.

Joe: Sure. Now Princess Augusta and her kids' house.

Joe: So Princess Augusta is immediately going to be worried. She and her husband were against King George II for a long time, and she's worried about the independence of her son, Prince George. Right. So they're turning to whoever they can and they turn to John Stuart.

Abram: What about the kids?

Joe: Oh, I don't remember all of their names. George and Edward are the oldest two, basically because there were so many characters and I was doing a parody of Mary Poppins where they only had two kids, so I just made do, okay? Otherwise we would have had too many characters.

Joe: But barely more than a month after her husband's death, John Stuart vowed to Princess Augusta to, quote, "support her and preserve the independence of the Prince whenever he shall come to the crown." And she responded by saying that she would, quote, "always countenance those the King employed and would never oppose the King's measures."

Joe: More privately, she seemed to be expressing, you know, help me keep some separation between Prince George, the future king, and the current King George II.

Joe: This led to a series of meetings held on May 5th and 6th, 1751, between John Stuart and key figures in the opposition. The first of these was between himself, William Pitt, Princess Augusta, and some guy named Sir George Lee. On the second day, he met with Pitt again and Andrew Stone, who was at the time Prince George's tutor and, I believe, personal secretary.

Joe: So even at the very beginning, he was seen as like a leader. William Pitt personally asked John Stuart, the Earl of Bute, to promise him that Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, would be removed from office as soon as George III came to the throne.

Joe: Keep in mind, this was before Newcastle was Prime Minister. Henry Pelham is Prime Minister. So he was so upset that he was Secretary of State that he was like, remove this Secretary of State. I don't like him. To his credit, Bute seems to have not agreed.

Joe: Over the following years, Bute became Princess Augusta's lead advisor, and he cultivated relationships across the opposition. William Pitt was going to support him sometimes, hate him sometimes. George Grenville, support him sometimes, hate him sometimes.

Abram: Should we put a pin in him?

Joe: I think it's too late.

Abram: Okay, sorry, the pins didn't arrive on time.

Joe: His Leicester House faction was consistent only in that it opposed the current government, but he struggled to have a consistent message or even consistent leaders. Nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of the Prince just in case the King were to die, but he struggled to keep people with him for very long.

Joe: At some point during this, John Stuart was officially hired as a tutor to Prince George. Different sources place the start of his tutoring at 1751, or after Waldegrave was made governor in 1752, or even later. One said 1755.

Abram: How many sources did you use for him?

Joe: Three main sources and several smaller sources. And so I think some of the confusion stemmed because tutor is kind of an unofficial role, and, you know, it didn't have to be appointed by the king. And maybe he was tutoring him before he was a tutor. I'm not really sure.

Joe: And some of his tutoring must have rubbed off on young Prince Edward.

Abram: Hi, I'm Prince Edward. I love the Tories.

Joe: Okay, that didn't really happen. Back to our story.

Joe: But it was clear that he also wanted to have a good relationship not only with Princess Augusta but the future king.

Joe: However, the election of 1754 was a major test of his abilities to galvanize the opposition around Leicester House. If that was a test, though, he failed it. His faction wasn't really successful in arguing what they were for, only what they were against. And the Duke of Newcastle successfully won that election very well. And it showed that the Prince's future faction didn't have as much control as they hoped they would.

Joe: As the years went on, Princess Augusta gradually shifted from trying to be a completely neutral actor to begin to more directly support John Stuart and Prince George.

Joe: So in 1753, for example, George II either tried to arrange a marriage or proposed a marriage between the 15-year-old Prince George and Princess Sophie Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. And this would have been an alliance between English and German families, but Princess Augusta pushed back on this. The Prince was too young, but if he were to be distracted by being married or engaged, maybe he would be less into his mom.

Joe: Continuing along, as he became older, he became more active in politics. In 1755, the 17-year-old Prince George pushed back on subsidies to Hanover in the tensions that led up to the Seven Years' War.

Joe: And King George II was so angry about this that he sent a message that they must, quote, "remove from the Princess all persons who have endeavored to create misunderstandings in the royal family." And in case you weren't sure who he meant, he continued, "by which His Majesty means particularly my Lord Bute."

Joe: So King George is saying, get that Bute guy out of there, he is tearing my family apart.

Joe: You know, I'm going to bring this up now because it's the right time. One of my sources said that in this time period, the 1750s, it was pronounced "Lord Boot." And so we've been making fun of him pretending that it sounds like "butt." Well, maybe you have been doing it, but really they were making fun of him because it sounded like "boot." So, my Lord Boot.

Abram: So he basically has one of his shoes in charge.

Joe: Pretty much. But at this point, it was pretty much too late. John Stuart was the Prince's best friend. In fact, in 1755, the Prince called him, quote, "his safeguard, his friend, and his comforter."

Joe: And actually, the friendship seemed to help the Prince. One of the biographies that I read reported that the King's grammar and spelling improved under Bute's tutelage, that he took to reading more, began attending plays and operas. Some of that might have just been the Prince getting older. Some of it could have been other tutors, or like the plays.

Abram: Definitely. It was probably Stuart. At least the plays was almost definitely Stuart.

Joe: Yeah, the point is the future king was improving.

Abram: Yeah, John Stuart's story's been really good so far.

Joe: I'm glad you're enjoying it.

Abram: I think that it would make a cool story.

Joe: I'm looking forward to getting to rating him because we have a rating point for that.

Joe: So John Stuart proposed that he could calm the situation with King George simply by leaving, but Prince George would have none of it. And so Prince George wrote to him, quote: "It is very true that the ministers have done everything they can to provoke me, that they have called me a harmless boy and have not even designed to give me an answer when I so earnestly wish to see my Friend"— Friend in capital letters— "about me."

Joe: "I know few things I ought to be more thankful for to the great power above than for having pleased Him to send you," Lord Bute, "to help and advise me in these difficult times. I do hope you will from this instant banish all thought of leaving me."

Joe: And in separate letters, Princess Augusta pretty much said the same thing. The young Prince loves him. He is like the father figure that he didn't have because Frederick died. He was very close to his mother. It was all— they were very tight.

Abram: So is John Stuart kind of like tutoring him at this time?

Joe: He was tutoring him. He was kind of his mother's advisor, but he was a friend of the family. He had been a friend of the family since those days doing plays with his dad. So he has been around a long time.

Joe: So Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, was afraid of giving John Stuart an official role in the household, but I don't really know why. It's not like he could be even more dangerous than he already was.

Joe: So at Thomas Pelham-Holles's request, Uncle Argyll met with John Stuart and basically said—

Abram: The uncle guys are still alive?

Joe: The uncle guys are still alive.

Abram: How old are they, like 75? They're pretty old, actually.

Joe: This Uncle Argyll might be Uncle Ilay because the other Uncle Argyll died, and then Uncle Ilay became the next Argyll. So I'm not sure which Argyll this is, but the point is— was the Argyll older than Ilay? Yes, he was the older brother, so he was the Duke, and the younger brother got to be an Earl. So when the older brother died, the younger brother got to be Duke.

Joe: So the point is that Uncle Argyll met with John Stuart, basically said, we'll give you any job you want in the government, just leave Leicester House. And John Stuart refused.

Joe: But he did promise that if he were made the Groom of the Stole to Prince George— Groom of the Stole? I'll explain that— that he would try to mend the relationship between the Prince and the King.

Joe: And so finally, in September 1756, King George II gave in and appointed, at Prince George's request, John Stuart to be his Groom of the Stole, and officially the future king's closest advisor.

Abram: Why are we calling it Groom of the Stole then?

Joe: So in Henry VIII's time, it was Groom of the Stool, the stool being his toilet. By the Hanoverians, at some point during George I or George II, the role was officially changed from Groom of the Stool, i.e., the toilet, to a more polite word, the Groom of the Stole, which is a type of cloth that is put over somebody when they are— I don't know, there's a stole when they're crowned. There's probably a stole other times too.

Joe: So it seems to be by the time of the 1700s, they were sort of embarrassed to be the Groom of the Toilet. So they found a word that was very close to it and they continued the role but with a more polite name. At least that's the understanding that I have. And in this case, it seems very much it was called Groom of the Stole.

Joe: But I think it's time for some more trivia, Abram.

Marquesses and Viscounts, Round Four

Joe: Here's our next multiple choice question, Abram. What does "viscount" mean in Latin? Does it mean A, deputy of the count, B, guardian of the people, C, ruler of the valley, or D, friend of the king?

Abram: I'm guessing A.

Joe: It is A, deputy of the count. Good job, Abram.

Abram: It literally has "count" in the name. It does. You should pick harder ones for the other ones.

Joe: I will pick harder questions next time. So this is an invitation to all of our friends on BlueSky. Send us a message with some trivia questions that you think I should ask Abram, and I will maybe ask them in the next episode. Does that sound good?

Abram: But don't do it in specific categories because we're gonna have a roll-the-wheel thing, so we'll have two different categories. I'll do it about— in the next episode to try to give like broad ones of any of them, not just like two types.

Joe: Well, we'll see what questions we get and then we'll figure it out.

Abram: Okay, and then we'll see the two best, and if they're even, we'll do the wheel.

Joe: Sure.

Groom of the Stole

Joe: In that final capitulation that allowed John Stuart to become the Groom of the Stole, Newcastle won nothing. I mean, he was really aiming to have negotiated something, but in the crazy game of whatever political chess they were playing, Thomas Pelham-Holles hoped that by helping him get that, Leicester House would help him stay in power, but they did not, and he did not.

Joe: Because only a month after he was appointed, Newcastle was out and William Cavendish came in as Prime Minister. Of course, we remember that there were many reasons why Thomas Pelham-Holles left for the first time, but it certainly didn't help that John Stuart didn't really throw his support behind him.

Joe: In fact, John Stuart actually threw a lot of his support behind William Cavendish because he was one of the people behind the scenes that was pushing for William Pitt— who you might remember was one of the friends in that early meeting back when Prince Frederick died— to push William Pitt back into power. And this is one of the periods where he and William Pitt actually liked each other.

Abram: You forgot to mention that John Stuart's a Tory, right?

Joe: He is a Tory, but you know, it hasn't really been pertinent. He's just a friend of the future king. Like, his party seems almost irrelevant, and he is a friend of William Pitt. So even though he's a Tory and we call him a Tory, he's still friends with Pitt, let's put it that way.

Joe: Anyway, William Pitt's gonna start chafing against Bute again almost immediately, but putting him in charge of the war certainly helped the country, helped William Cavendish, and it set the Seven Years' War back on the right foot.

Joe: One of these days, when we eventually get to William Pitt, I hope to understand him a little better because right now he just ping-pongs his way around. Getting a job, upsetting the King. Getting the job, upsetting Lord Bute. I don't understand Pitt, and I think we'll need to have an episode on him, or two.

Abram: Oh, we'll have an episode or two.

Joe: We will. For me to really understand his motivations, because right now, I just see him ping-ponging along from one leader to another, upsetting everyone while still doing a good job. It is a very weird thing.

Joe: So, another fun point. This now is when Waldegrave gets appointed governor to the Prince of Wales. So when Bute was promoted to the Groom of the Stole, it was Waldegrave that delivered the message from the King that said he got the promotion. I'm sure, knowing how much Waldegrave liked Bute, he enjoyed that very much.

Abram: He didn't enjoy it at all.

Joe: Oh, Waldegrave actually attempted to resign pretty soon after and was forced to stay by George II against his better judgment.

Joe: In the months that followed his appointment, Prince George and John Stuart developed a plan. Here's what I will do when I become king. And the first decision that they planned to make together was that Bute, John Stuart, would be made the First Lord of the Treasury immediately after King George becomes king.

Joe: Now, we don't know this firsthand, but a letter from 1758 from Prince George said that they made this agreement two years ago. So clearly that agreement must have been made in '56. So even from this early point, they have a plan that as soon as I'm in charge, John Stuart, you are my number one.

Joe: And it's kind of amazing, if you ask me, to think that he was this poor guy who couldn't afford a carriage to the races, and now the future king basically says, you're going to be my prime minister. He has such an amazing rise in power, I can't even imagine it.

Joe: Anyway, this is about also the time when the rumors about John Stuart having an affair with Princess Augusta started up. Remember, Waldegrave may have been the one spreading these rumors. People were very suspicious because he was a Scottish outsider. They were suspicious because he gained power so quickly.

Joe: But he did have a couple of reasons why they thought that. And one of the reasons was that in 1756, Princess Augusta and Prince George were living separately for a while. Prince George was living in Leicester House while Princess Augusta, with all the younger kids, was living in Carlton House nearby. It was like a ten-minute walk, like from here to the really great Indian place down the street.

Joe: Now, Bute was caught trying to visit Carlton House in secret by entering via a side entrance rather than being announced at the front gate. And he seemed to be doing this because he was trying to be sneaky. He didn't want people to know that he was still talking to Princess Augusta. But him being sneaky just caused people to think, wait, is he sneaking in there to have a secret relationship?

Joe: Was he? Well, most historians think not. Frankly, I think he just parked his carriage at Leicester House and made the ten-minute walk down to Carlton House and popped in the side entrance because he didn't want to make a big deal of it. But people noticed that he was coming in the side entrance.

Joe: Quite frankly, if he would have just walked in the front door, maybe no one would have cared, or maybe they would have thought he was doing that anyway because they were looking for anything they could say that was bad about this guy.

Joe: So none of the books that I read said that current historians think they were actually having a relationship, either because there isn't proof or because Bute was still happily with his wife or whatever.

Abram: Did he like his wife?

Joe: He did. They had 11 kids, but I have barely mentioned her because she mostly stayed out of politics and she was so busy having kids she didn't have a lot of life. And I think that is unfortunate, but that is regretfully a lot of the inherent sexism of the age.

Joe: Anyway, Prince George soon turned 18, but in the law at the time, 18 did not make him fully an adult. There were laws that said that he would only be fully an adult at 21, and so until he turned 21, King George II still had control of his affairs.

Joe: I do not know if that applied to everyone in England. I do not know if that applied only to the crown prince. I'm not sure, but at least for him, the rule was 21. And even though he was 18, John Stuart continued to tutor him, but now tutoring him in more university-level instruction, right?

Abram: He's no longer teaching him, like, elementary, middle school, that part.

Joe: Correct, right? The Prince can't go to a university, like, he can't go to Cambridge or something like a normal person can.

Abram: No Descendants vibes?

Joe: Yep. So he started university-level instruction. What I do know is that he worked with someone called Sir William Blackstone, who is gonna become famous for a book called Commentaries on the Laws of England, which is going to be super famous in about ten years. And he worked with this William Blackstone guy to give him material on the law of England so he could learn about the law of England.

Joe: And there is also a story that John Stuart and Prince George may have traveled in secret to visit Scotland sometime in 1756 or 1757. But even the biography that I read that in says that, eh, it would have been really tough for the future king to travel incognito all the way to Scotland and not have anyone notice, so it probably didn't happen.

Joe: So John Stuart's political authority continued to grow. In 1757, when Pitt wanted to raise a regiment of Scottish troops, he went to Bute to ask him, hey, who should I appoint as officers? So he's now kind of very much in control.

Joe: As you'll probably remember, William Pitt was pushed out in April 1757 because he went against George II again, right? The history of Pitt: does really good, really annoys somebody, gets kicked out, repeat.

Joe: But at this point, he managed to upset George II partially because of the Byng affair. And so as soon as Pitt was gone, William Cavendish pushed out all of the Leicester House-aligned ministers. So basically William Cavendish decided that all of the people in his government that were aligned with John Stuart had to be pushed out.

Joe: So I don't remember— I think Grenville was one, but of course, you know, it wasn't that long before William Cavendish was out. Thomas Pelham-Holles came back, he's Prime Minister again, and this time, guess what? He comes back with Pitt because Pitt is now friends again with everybody. And yay, he's brought back into government.

Joe: And of course, that time he's going to have a really successful time with Newcastle until he annoys George III, but we'll get to that later.

Joe: So there's a good quote from the Earl of Hardwicke, who was Thomas Pelham-Holles's friend, about this. It says, quote, "I have always been of the opinion that jealousies and distrust would always arise between Lord Bute and Mr. Secretary William Pitt." So he was kind of right. It never worked.

Joe: Anyway, Prince George is starting to get impatient with the situation. He starts pushing back on stuff. He's now over 18. He wants to be his own man. George II is still trying to control him.

Joe: In fact, at one point in that December, he wrote a letter that said to Bute, "the King, oh, he's beginning to gain strength. And, you know, he's likely to last until summer." In other words, Prince George is like actively like, please die soon, please die soon, please die soon.

Joe: But he can't say that because if you say you want the king to die, that's treason. And I think even for a crown prince, that's not a good idea.

Abram: I think he'd literally get killed if he said that.

Joe: I don't know, I don't think so.

Abram: I think he'd be like locked up for a while.

Joe: Yeah. So another way that he was being independent— right, so by law King George II was in charge of appointing the staff in the Prince's household, and some people were leaving and some people were dying, but Prince George refused to allow George II to fill it.

Joe: George II said, "Just tell me who you want and I'll appoint them." And Prince George said, "No, I'm going to appoint them in my own right. I'm not even going to tell you who I want or you'll appoint them." So, you know, just completely playing a game.

Joe: And that game lasted for like two years until the day he turned 21. The Prince said, okay, I'm hiring all the people I want and you can't stop me.

Joe: So he finally turns 21 on June 4th, 1760. On October 25th, 1760, what happened?

Abram: Did George II die?

Joe: George II finally died. At long last, Prince George was now King George III. His first official act after hearing about his grandfather's death was to return home and to summon his friend John Stuart, the Earl of Bute.

Joe: And that is where we are going to leave it this time. Next episode, we're going to trace the rise and fall of John Stuart during the reign of King George III.

Abram: Did George III support him the whole time?

Joe: Yes. And we'll find out more what happened. But before we get to that, we got one more round of—

Marquesses and Viscounts, Round Five

Joe: Okay, Abram, here's another multiple choice question. The title of marquess is less common in England than other peerage titles. Why? Is it A, it was considered too French? B, it was expensive to grant? C, kings preferred to make people dukes? Or D, it could only be given to women?

Abram: I'm guessing A.

Joe: A, it was considered too French. That is correct.

Promo

Joe: In their most recent episode, Prime Time gave us an absolutely amazing and fantastic recommendation despite insulting our ability to know about marquesses and viscounts. But as you heard, Abram got pretty much all the questions right.

Abram: Did I get all of them right?

Joe: You missed one part of the first question. And that's it. Otherwise, you got them all right. But we appreciate them. We like them. So they played our promo. So we are gonna play—

Abram: So I calculate I got 96%, I'm pretty sure. Which is equivalent to an A. Good job.

Joe: So let's listen to their promo.

Prime Time: How many medieval weapons are there in the Houses of Parliament? Which Downing Street cat has caused the biggest diplomatic incident? And why are so many MPs whipped regularly, and not just in their private lives? I'm John. I'm Rob. And I'm Kess. And we're here to tell you all about the unhinged world of British politics. We're ranking all the prime ministers from Robert Walpole to the modern day. We'll be telling the story of each prime minister's life, legacy, and premiership. Extra cash, a dukedom, even a garter. No matter what they walked away with, we'll be casting judgment and deciding whether they are a right-on or a write-off. We are Prime Time Prime Ministers, and remember, never flinch, never weary, never despair, and find us wherever podcasts are found.

Joe: They have a great promo. They're a great podcast. Please give them a listen, and we appreciate them very much.

Joe: So with that, we are done for this episode of Prime Factors. We'll be back soon for the conclusion to our story of John Stuart, the Earl of Bute. Say goodbye, Abram.

Abram: Bye!

Bibliography

Joe: As usual, I had some difficulty with my sources, with inconsistent information this episode, particularly around some dates and events. I put things together as best I could for our narrative. Any mistakes are my own, but for all the people complain about AI hallucinating and inventing historical events that didn't really exist, I'm not convinced that some historians didn't do much the same.

Joe: My primary sources for this episode are George III and Lord Bute: The Leicester House Years by James Lee McKelvey, published in 1975. This was the most recent biography that I found and focused entirely on Bute's life prior to George III becoming king. As such, it was perfect for this episode.

Joe: Next was John Stuart, the Earl of Bute by J.A. Lovat-Frasier, published in 1912, and A Prime Minister and His Son, edited by Mrs. E. Stuart Wortley, published in 1925. That book is mostly primary sources with letters and materials written during the relevant time period, but with context and surrounding narration by Wortley. The "and his son" part refers to the second part of the book, a biography of one of his sons, Sir Charles Stuart, who served in the American Revolution. I'm pretty sure I didn't even mention him. This is a fascinating read and I enjoyed a lot of it, but not our period.

Joe: And finally, I took a little bit from Lord Chesterfield's Characters by Philip Dormer Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield, published in 1778. This is a cute biographical dictionary of the political figures of his day, and I read it from a 1912 edition. I didn't use very much, but it did provide color on what people at the time thought of Lord Bute.

Joe: Finally, our editor is Samuel Cunningham. You can find him at samc_productions on Fiverr. He continues to do great work.

Joe: And now for something, well, a little bit different. Action!

Elliot: Hi, I'm Prince Edward. I love the Tories. I love stories about the Tories. Like and subscribe to Prime Factors. This is Elliot. My cousin is Abram. It's his podcast.

Elliot: It's raining waffles. Waffles, so get your syrup and your butter. I love the waffles. Oh, I went a little off topic there. Back to talking about the Tories. I like to hear stories about the Tories.

Elliot: It's raining waffles, so get your syrup. The butter is great. I love you so much. The waffles. Waffles are coming out of the sky. It's raining waffles. I love waffles. Get your butter and your syrup. Get your fruit and your whipped cream. Maybe some chocolate chips. They're very closely related to pancakes. Now it's raining pancakes.

Joe: Prince Edward, weren't you telling us about the Tories?

Elliot: Um, no, I was talking about waffles. I love waffles. I love waffles. I love waffles. It's the end now. Cut!

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