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Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland

Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland (23 April 1675-19 April 1722) was First Lord of the Treasury (Chief Minister) of Great Britain from 21 March 1718 to 3 April 1721, succeeding James Stanhope, 1st Earl Stanhope and preceding Robert Walpole.

Biography[]

Charles Spencer was born in 1675, the second son of Robert Spencer, 2nd Earl of Sunderland and Anne Digby, daughter of George Digby, 2nd Earl of Bristol. He was educated at Utrecht before becoming the Whig MP for Tiverton in 1695, and he married the daughter of Henry Cavendish, 2nd Duke of Newcastle in 1695. In 1700, he remarried to Anne Churchill, the daughter of John Churchill and Sarah Churchill. He succeeded to his father's peerage in 1702 before serving as one of the commissionersfor the union between England and Scotland. While he was tinged with republican ideas and made himself obnoxious to Queen Anne by opposing the grant to her husband Prince George of Denmark, his father-in-law engineered his appointment as Secretary of State for the Southern Department in 1706. From 1708 to 1710, he was one of the five Whigs collectively called the Junto, dominating the government amid the War of the Spanish Succession. He was dismissed by Queen Anne in 1710, but he cultivated a friendship with King George I of Great Britain. Lord Sunderland was disappointed when the newly-crowned King George made him Lord Lieutenant of Ireland on his accession in 1714, but he went on to join as Lord Privy Seal in 1715 and then Secretary of State for the Northern Department in 1717. Sunderland served as prime minister from 1718 to 1721, supporting a bill to limit the number of members of the House of Lords; the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, which he had helped launch in 1720, ruined his political career. He also served as Groom of the Stool to the King until his death in 1722.

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