1st Baron Hawkesbury (1786-1808), 1st Earl of Liverpool (1796-1808)
English statesman
Born 1729 Died 1808
Charles Jenkinson, eldest son of Colonel Charles Jenkinson (d. 1750) and grandson of Sir Robert Jenkinson, Baronet, of Walcot, Oxfordshire, was born at Winchester on the 16th of May 1729. The family was descended from Anthony Jenkinson (d. 1611), sea-captain, merchant and traveller, the first Englishman to penetrate into Central Asia. Charles was educated at Charterhouse school and University College, Oxford, where he graduated M.A. in 1752.
In 1761 he entered parliament as member for Cockermouth and was made under-secretary of state by Lord Bute; he won the favour of George III, and when Bute retired Jenkinson became the leader of the king's friends in the House of Commons. In 1763 George Grenville appointed him joint secretary to the treasury; in 1766, after a short retirement, he became a lord of the admiralty and then a lord of the treasury in the Grafton administration; and from 1778 until the close of Lord North's ministry in 1782 he was secretary-at-war. From 1786 to 1801 he was president of the board of trade and chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, and he was popularly regarded as enjoying the confidence of the king to a special degree. In 1772 Jenkinson became a privy councillor and vice-treasurer of Ireland, and in 1775 he purchased the lucrative sinecure of clerk of the pells in Ireland and became master of the mint. In 1786 he was created Baron Hawkesbury and ten years later Earl of Liverpool. He died in London on the 17th of December 1808.
Liverpool was twice married: firstly to Amelia (d. 1770), daughter of, William Watts, governor of Fort William, Bengal, and secondly to Catherine, daughter of Sir Cecil Bisshoff, Baronet, and widow of Sir Charles Cope, Baronet. He had a son by each marriage.
He wrote several political works but except his Treatise on the Coins of the Realm (1805) these are without striking merits. They are, Dissertation on the establishment of a national and constitutional force in England independent of a standing army (1756); Discourse on the conduct of the government of Great Britain respecting neutral nations (1758, new ed 1837); and Collection of Treaties between Great Britain and other Powers 1648-1783 (1785). His Coins of the Realm was reprinted by the Bank of England in 1880.
Extracted from the entry for LIVERPOOL, EARLS OF in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the text of which lies within the public domain.