Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool

Statesman and Prime Minister.

National Gallery Trustee (1824–1828).

Robert Banks Jenkinson (generally known as Lord Liverpool in the context of the National Gallery) was the son of Charles Jenkinson, 1st Earl of Liverpool and Amelia Watts, daughter of William Watts, a senior East India Company official. As the serving Prime Minister in 1824, he was among the first group of trustees to the Gallery.

In 1790 he won the parliamentary seat of Rye, and probably entered parliament in 1792. On the death of his father in 1808 he became Lord Liverpool. From 1812–27 he was Prime Minister. In 1795 he married Lady Louisa Hervey, daughter of the 4th Earl of Bristol, and on her death he remarried, in 1822, Lady Mary Chester.

In the 1790s, as a member of parliament, Liverpool opposed the abolition of the slave-trade. According to the History of Parliament ‘Jenkinson differed from his associates in opposing the abolition of the slave trade pro tem., 2 April 1792, when he failed to carry two propositions to encourage the proliferation of slaves …. On 26 February [1793] he advocated indefinite postponement of the abolition of the slave trade (modifying this on 25 February 1794 to the duration of war) …. He now opposed the abolition of the slave trade as Jacobinical, 18 February, 26 April 1796, voting against it on 15 March …. On 6 April [1797] he supported Ellis’s motion to encourage the regulation of the slave trade by colonial assemblies’. (R. Thorne, ‘JENKINSON, Hon. Robert Banks (1770-1828), of Coombe Wood, nr. Kingston, Surr.’, in History of Parliament Trust (ed.), The History of Parliament: British Political, Social & Local History [online], London, 1964 -, 1790-1820 <https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/jenkinson-hon-robert-banks-1770-1828> accessed 30 July 2021.) He was also in opposition to Lord Greville, Prime Minister in 1806–7, when the slave-trade was abolished.

Liverpool, or his father the 1st Earl, was trustee for the estate of his uncle and aunt, owners of plantations and enslaved people, George Poyntz Ricketts (UCL Department of History, ‘George Poyntz Ricketts I’, in UCL Department of History (ed.), Legacies of British Slave-ownership [online], London 2020, <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146647767> accessed 30 July 2021) and his wife Sophia. George Poyntz Ricketts was Governor of Barbados from 1794–1800, appointed on the recommendation of the father, Charles Jenkinson, the 1st Earl.

Eric Williams cited a pamphlet produced in 1792 by a Committee of sugar-refiners, stating that the1st Earl of Liverpool was a slave-owner but the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery has found no evidence to confirm this and suggests that the pamphlet may have been mistaken (Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill 1944, 94-5).

There is no evidence, either, that the 2nd Earl of Liverpool owned enslaved people.

However, Liverpool did oppose the abolition of the slave-trade as an MP in the 1790s and he was also in opposition to the Grenville ministry in 1806–7 when the slave-trade was abolished.

No known connections with abolition.

Donor: Lord Liverpool presented in 1830 John Singleton Copley’s The Collapse of the Earl of Chatham in the House of Lords, 7 July 1778, which is now at Tate (N00100), and on loan to National Portrait Gallery (L146).

N. Gash, 'Jenkinson, Robert Banks, second earl of Liverpool', in C. Matthew et al. (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford 1992-, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14740
Checked and found — Item on publisher's website

R. G. Thorne, 'JENKINSON, Hon. Robert Banks (1770-1828), of Coombe Wood, nr. Kingston, Surr.', in History of Parliament Trust (ed.), The History of Parliament: British Political, Social & Local History, London 1964-, 1790-1820, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/jenkinson-hon-robert-banks-1770-1828
Checked and found — Item on publisher's website

J. Turner et al. (eds), Grove Art Online, Oxford 1998-, https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/
Checked and not found — Item on publisher's website

UCL Department of History (ed.), Legacies of British Slave-ownership, London 2020, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
Checked and not found — Item on publisher's website