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Person record

Robert Walpole

First Lord of the Treasury from 1721 to 1742, and by convention the first British prime minister, an office he denied holding.

Unverifieddraft

The essay's example of an office that emerged rather than being designed. The title began as an insult and Walpole denied it in the Commons in 1741; the office ran the country for a century and a half before any official document acknowledged it, and the brass plate on the door still says First Lord of the Treasury.

Quoted from Coxe's Memoirs.

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Source: knowledge/people/robert-walpole.md

Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25