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Canning served under the new prime minister the Earl of Liverpool as British Ambassador to Portugal (1814–1816), President of the Board of Control (1816–1821) and foreign secretary and Leader of the House of Commons (1822–1827). King George IV disliked Canning and there were efforts to frustrate his foreign policies.
- Overview
- Early life and career
- Rise to leadership
- Legacy
George Canning, (born April 11, 1770, London, Eng.—died Aug. 8, 1827, Chiswick, near London), British statesman known for his liberal policies as foreign secretary (1807–09, 1822–27) and as prime minister for four months during 1827.
Canning’s father, the eldest son of an Irish landowner, was disinherited for his marriage to a beautiful but penniless girl and died in 1771, leaving his wife and year-old son entirely destitute. The widow became an actress and the mistress of an actor, and in 1783 she married another actor. From this unsatisfactory environment, George Canning was taken away by a wealthy uncle, Stratford Canning, who raised him with his own children, one of whom was the future diplomat Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe.
Canning was educated at Eton College and at Christ Church, Oxford. After graduating (1791), he soon decided on a political career and, in July 1792, came under the influence of the prime minister, William Pitt, who undertook to find him a seat in Parliament. He was elected for the privately controlled borough of Newtown, Isle of Wight, in July 1793 and quickly became recognized as one of the rising men on the government side of the House. Pitt further procured for him the undersecretaryship of state for foreign affairs in 1796.
In 1799 he left the foreign office and was appointed a commissioner of the Board of Control for the government of India. In May 1800 he was promoted to the office of joint paymaster of the forces and was made a privy councillor. A few weeks later he married an heiress, Joan Scott. With her he had four children, including Charles John, later Earl Canning and a governor-general of India.
When Pitt resigned in 1801, Canning too left office. On the formation of Pitt’s last ministry in May 1804, Canning became treasurer of the navy, but his unpopularity (his biting wit made him many enemies) kept him out of the cabinet. Much to his disgust, his colleagues resigned after Pitt’s death (January 1806) because of the insecurity of their parliamentary position. When, however, in March 1807 the king called upon “the friends of Mr. Pitt” again to form a government, Canning became foreign secretary.
Actions in the Napoleonic Wars that occurred during Canning’s first tenure of the foreign secretaryship included the seizure of the Danish fleet (his own brilliant planning) and the unfortunate expedition to Walcheren Island off the Schelde River, in the Netherlands. The Peninsular War, involving British, Spanish, and French resistance to Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula, was also begun. Holding Viscount Castlereagh, the war secretary, responsible for the disasters that overtook British arms at Corunna in Spain and at Flushing (Vlissingen) in Holland, Canning in 1809 insisted on his dismissal. They quarreled and fought a duel on September 21, in which Canning was wounded in the thigh. Both had already resigned, Canning because of the nonfulfillment by the duke of Portland, William Bentinck, the dying prime minister, of his promise that Castlereagh should be removed from the War Department. Canning offered to form a government, but the king called upon his rival, Spencer Perceval, and Canning remained out of office until 1816.
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Lord Liverpool, who succeeded to the prime ministry in 1812 on Perceval’s assassination, tried hard to induce Canning to take office, but Canning refused to allow his old rival Castlereagh (who generously offered to surrender the foreign secretaryship to him and to take the inferior office of chancellor of the Exchequer) to retain the leadership of the House of Commons. So Canning lost the chance of being the peacemaker of Europe in 1815.
Two years later he entered the cabinet as president of the Board of Control. Canning, disapproving of the government’s efforts to deprive George IV’s queen, Caroline, of her title and position, resigned in December 1820. In the hope of improving his financial position and believing that advancement at home was blocked by the king’s hostility to him, he accepted the governor-generalship of Bengal in March 1822, with the additional prospect of a peerage on his return, but, before his ship was ready to sail, Castlereagh committed suicide (August 12), and George IV reluctantly acquiesced in Canning’s succession to the “whole inheritance”—the foreign secretaryship and the leadership of the House of Commons.
He was now the most important member of the government. Afraid of becoming too deeply involved in continental politics and disliking the great despotic sovereigns who were eager to suppress liberal movements everywhere, he cut England adrift in 1823 from the so-called Holy Alliance engineered by the emperor Alexander I of Russia to preserve the European status quo. He prevented France from intervening on the side of Ferdinand VII when that monarch sought to subdue revolts in Spain’s colonies in South America. Canning then recognized the independence of the rebellious Spanish-American colonies and so, in his famous phrase, “called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.” He also sent an army to Portugal to meet the threat of attack by Spain, gave diplomatic support to the Greeks in their struggle with the Turks for freedom, and ensured the eventual creation of an independent Greek state.
The hatred and malignity with which Canning was assailed by the Tory aristocracy in 1827 showed what prejudice still existed against a prime minister born outside the governing class. Contemporaries said that Canning’s ministry was the most popular with the middle classes that had ever been known. As member for Liverpool (1812–22), he came to recog...
George Canning was an enthusiastic follower of Pitt the Younger, resigning from his post as Paymaster General in 1801 when Pitt resigned as Prime Minister. Popular, witty and intelligent, he...
May 29, 2017 · He was prime minister for just 119 days before his death in office in 1827, killed by a severe bout of pneumonia, not by the gunshot wound inflicted by a Cabinet colleague.
On 30 March 1799, Canning left the Foreign Office and became one of the Commissioners of the Board of Control for India; he was made a Privy Counsellor on 28 May 1800.
He later became the country’s shortest-serving prime minister. A skilful propagandist, Canning promoted the scathing caricatures of Napoleon that appeared in Britain at the time. In 1809 George Canning fought a duel with the war secretary, Lord Castlereagh, which severely damaged his career.
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Canning resigned from office once more in 1820, in opposition to the treatment of Queen Caroline, estranged wife of the new King George IV. Canning and Caroline were personal friends. Another return. In 1822, Castlereagh, now Marquess of Londonderry, committed suicide. Canning succeeded him as both Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of ...
