The closest to a Bank Holiday theme – 2nd Earl Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson (groan!). Described as a ‘liberal tory’, he can perhaps best be described as the purveyor of the ‘carrot and stick’. In 1812, he succeeded the assassinated Spencer Perceval as PM (a similar end he later escaped) and oversaw emancipation and put-down in equal measure. With family connections to the East India Company, he fought for the abolition of slavery and revoked the death penalty for certain previously capital offences. Yet he reasserted the landowner classes and urged resistance to uprising and ‘radicalism’ among the masses, including a clampdown on the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 and the future right for protestors to gather in numbers. After a major U-turn, he later repealed laws banning trade union formation. Thus fulfilling the much later adage that ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time’, he survived an assassination plot of his own (the Cato Street Conspiracy) and is still regarded by many as one of Britain’s finest PMs. He remained in office until 1827 and died a year later, aged 58. He is buried at Hawkesbury Church in Gloucestershire.
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