"Sir Spencer Compton was at this time Speaker of the House of Commons, Treasurer to the Prince, and Paymaster to the army, he was a plodding, heavy fellow, with great application, but no talents, and vast complaisance for a Court without any address; he was always more concerned for the manner and form in which a thing was to be done than about the propriety or expediency of the thing itself; and as he was calculated to execute rather than to project, for a subaltern rather than a commander, so he was much fitter for a clerk to a minister than for a minister to a Prince; whatever was resolved upon, he would often know how properly to perform, but seldom how to advise what was proper to be resolved upon. His only pleasures were money and eating; his only knowledge forms and precedents; and his only insinuation bows and smiles."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandUniversity of Oxford alumniWhig (British political party) politicians
Original Language: English
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Lord Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second from His Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline, Vol. I, ed. John Wilson Croker (1848), pp. 32-33
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Spencer_Compton%2C_1st_Earl_of_Wilmington
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Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington
1673 – 1743
Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington KG PC (c. 1674 – 2 July 1743) was a British Whig statesman who served continuously in government from 1715 until his death in 1743. He sat in the English and British House of Commons between 1698 and 1728, and was then raised to the peerage and sat in the House of Lords. He served as the prime minister of Great Britain from 1742 until his death in 1743.
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