Frederick North Biography

Dromo's Den

NORTH, Frederick, Lord, second Earl of Guilford (1732-92). An English statesman. He was a son of Francis, seventh Baron North, third Baron Guilford, and first Earl of Guilford. He was born April 13, 1732. After a course at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, and a period of continental travel, North was at the age of 22 sent to the House of Commons as member from Banbury, a borough of which his father was high steward. From 1759 until the fall of the Rockingham ministry in 1765 he held the position of a Junior Lord of the Treasury. In December, 1766, after a short tenure of the office of paymaster, he was admitted as a member of the Privy Council. His ability won for him, in March, 1767, an offer of the chancellorship of the Exchequer. His attitude on the Townshend tea tax, however, was one of the immediate causes of the American war. 1t was North's own boast that as a member of the Commons he had "voted against all popular and in favor of all unpopular measures." In 1770 he succeeded the Duke of Grafton as Prime Minister. He was called by Horace Walpole the ostensible minister, for the real minister was King George III. It has since been proved that North as early as 1776 believed that the unyielding policy he was pursuing with regard to the American Colonies would end in ruin to the King and a great loss to the country; yet in the face of the powerful opposition of Fox and Burke he allowed his own convictions to be overborne by the obstinacy of King George's ultra-Tory purpose. In 1778 he was forced to a renunciation of the right to tax the Colonies; but the concession came too late, and in 1782, finding it impossible to carry on the war any longer, he resigned. With North's retirement came to an end George III's scheme of governing the country by his own will and of ruling the House of Commons. Soon, however, Fox entered into a coalition with North, against whom he had for so many years inveighed. North and Fox took office under the Duke of Portland in 1783, but the coalition lasted only a few months. He succeeded his father as Earl of Guilford in 1790. During the last five years of his life North was totally blind. He bore his afflictions with great cheerfulness. He died Aug. 5, 1792. Consult: W. B. Donne, Correspondence of George III with Lord North (London, 1867); G. 0. Trevelyan, The American Revolution (New York, 1905); Reginald Lucas, Lord North (London, 1913).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XVII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 213-214.