Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Robert Walpole built his career on a network of family relationships and the shared interest of the Whig squirearchy. It was the corrupt nature of his regime that forced him to resign in February 1742. . . . (Although the term was not used in his lifetime, historians refer to Walpole as the first prime minister, and he was the first to live at 10 Downing Street.) The twin pillars of his power were an unashamedly corrupt manipulation of ambition and greed-- encapsulated in his famous aphorism, "Every man has his price." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "Walpole rejoined the government in June 1720, just in time to save George from the fallout from ‘the most dramatic financial storm in eighteenth-century England’.32 This was the ‘South Sea Bubble’. . . . In an exceptionally penetrating passage in his great work The Financial Revolution in England, Peter Dickson identified Walpole’s essential contribution to the success of the reign of George I (and of the Hanoverians who followed him). Walpole saw that England’s victory in the wars of 1688–1713 stemmed from a de facto alliance between the landed and the monied interests. Through Parliament, the former voted the huge taxes and loans needed for military and naval success. Through the City of London, the latter provided the expertise necessary to sustain a war effort out of all proportion to the country’s relatively modest population. Each resented the other, but each needed the other. It was Walpole’s insight that he must allow all to feel that the government fundamentally represented their interest, however much they might criticize individual measures." [Blanning: George I, Kindle, p. 61, 65]