Sir Robert Walpole. The creator of parties, of cabinet government, and of the office of Prime Minister - these nursery and schoolroom myths vanish before the harsh reality: his vast appetite for detail, made him for twenty years the colossus of English political life. By his own superhuman endeavors he held in check the aggressive appetites of English merchants who saw in war an opportunity for commercial plunder, men who afterwards found their voice and inspiration in Chatham, to whom they raised the Guildhall monument, with its proud boast that he was the first minister to make trade flourish by war. But Walpole, hard-headed, obstinate, secure in power, would have none of it. He was too conscious of the great burden of debt, created by the long wars of William and Anne, which pressed like peine forte et dure on the owners of land.