Robert Harley, 1st earl of Oxford

Robert Harley, 1st earl of Oxford (born December 5, 1661, London, England—died May 21, 1724, London) was a British statesman who headed the Tory ministry from 1710 to 1714. Although by birth and education he was a Whig and a Dissenter, he gradually over the years changed his politics, becoming the leader of the Tory and Anglican party.

Harley came from a Puritan-Parliamentarian family. As a Whig in the 1680s, he distrusted the pretensions of all governments. He entered Parliament in 1689 and was a strong supporter of the parliamentary transfer of power from James II to William III. But the willingness of some so-called “Junto” Whigs to develop new, strong executive powers in defense of that settlement cut against Harley’s reflex of distrust, and he became, with Paul Foley, leader of a coalition of Whigs and moderate Tories opposed to the government of King William III. Convinced (wrongly) that the Peace of Rijswijk (1697) would usher in an era of pacific relations, he called for a smaller army than that favoured by William, and he further angered his sovereign by attacking royal largesse and insisting on a reduced budget.

Harley was speaker of the House of Commons from 1701 to 1705 and secretary of state from 1704 to 1708. During this period Harley, along with John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, and Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin, dominated the government of Queen Anne (reigned 1702–14) and directed the war against the French (War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–14).

Although Harley became Queen Anne’s favourite, his anti-Junto attitudes brought him into conflict with his two colleagues, who in February 1708 forced him to resign. He then allied with the Tories, while the Whigs occupied all major government offices. Because of the growing closeness of his cousin and ally, Lady Abigail Masham, to the queen, Harley remained influential. In 1710 public dissatisfaction with the Whig-directed war and with the handling of the Sacheverell affair (see Sacheverell, Henry) enabled Anne to dismiss Godolphin and install Harley as chancellor of the Exchequer at the head of a Tory ministry. Although he secured a great majority at the general election, his new ministry was more radically Tory than Harley wished. He now reached the peak of his career; and, after surviving a murderous assault by the marquis de Guiscard, a French spy who had been arrested and was being interrogated at a privy council meeting, Harley was created earl of Oxford and made lord treasurer and Knight of the Garter in 1711.

By funding the most pressing portion of the national debt in the South Sea Company stock (1711) and by securing a reasonable peace at Utrecht (1713), Oxford dealt with two crucial issues, but he was now threatened by the intrigues of his protégé and colleague, Henry Saint John, Viscount Bolingbroke. Avid for power, Bolingbroke, like Godolphin earlier, could argue the need for an alliance with a party; and the Schism Act (1714) abolishing the Dissenting academies, in one of which Oxford himself had been educated, was his pledge to the high Tories. The struggle between them became the more desperate, because both had rankled George, the Hanoverian heir to the throne, for making peace at Utrecht, and both had engaged in questionable, if not treasonable, correspondence with the Stuart claimant to the throne, the Roman Catholic James Edward, the Old Pretender. Oxford, now preoccupied with nepotism, was in physical and mental decline, but Anne stubbornly kept him in office until July 27, 1714, five days before her death.

Permanently exiled from power by the Hanoverian succession, Oxford was imprisoned in 1715. An impeachment of him collapsed in 1717 because of differences between the two houses of Parliament and among the Whigs themselves, but Oxford played no further part of importance in parliamentary politics or Jacobite conspiracy.