FREDERICK NORTH, end earl of Guilford, but better known by his courtesy title of Lord North (1732-92), prime minister of England during the important years of the American War, was born on April 13, 1732, and was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. At 22 years of age, he was elected M.P. for Banbury, of which town his father was high steward; and he sat for the same town in parliament for nearly 4o years. In the duke of Newcastle made him a lord of the treasury, and he held this office under Lord Bute and George Grenville till 1765. On the fall of the first Rockingham ministry in 1766 he was sworn of the privy council, and made paymaster-general by the duke of Grafton. In December 1767, on the death of the brilliant Charles Townshend, he was made chancellor of the exchequer. North succeeded Grafton as premier in March 177o, and con tinued in office for 12 of the most eventful years in English his tory. George III. had at last overthrown the ascendancy of the great Whig families, and found in North a pliant instrument. The path of the minister in parliament was a hard one; he had to defend measures which he had not designed, and of which he had not approved, and this too in a House of Commons in which all the oratorical ability of Burke and Fox was against him, and when he had only the purchased help of Thurlow and Wedder burne to aid him. The most important events of his ministry were those of the American War of Independence. He cannot be accused of causing it, but one of his first acts was the retention of the tea-duty, and he introduced the Boston Port bill in When war had broken out he earnestly counselled peace, and it was only the earnest solicitations of the king not to leave his sovereign again at the mercy of the Whigs that induced him to defend a war which from 1779 he knew to be both hopeless and impolitic. In March 1782, he insisted on resigning after the news of Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown. He had been rewarded for his assistance to the king by honours for himself and sinecures for his relatives, but in April 1783 North formed a famous coalition with C. J. Fox (q.v.), and became secretary of state with him under the nominal premiership of the duke of Port land. The coalition ministry went out of office on Fox's India bill in December 1783, and North, who was losing his sight, gave up politics. He succeeded to his father's earldom in I 7 90, and died on Aug. 5, 1792.
For the Lord Keeper Guilford see the Lives by the Hon. R. North, edited by A. Jessopp (189o) ; and E. Foss, The Judges of England, vol. vii. (1848-64) . For the prime minister, Lord North, see Corre spondence of George III. with Lord North, edited by W. B. Donne (1867) ; Horace Walpole, Journal of the Reign of George III. , and Memoirs of the Reign of George III., edited by G. F. R. Barker (1894) ; Lord Brougham, Historical Sketches of Statesmen, vol. i. (1839) ; Earl Stanhope, History of England (1858) ; Sir T. E. May, Constitutional History of England (1863-65) ; and W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the 18th century (1878-9o) .