Between school and university he was placed as a rating (at his father's insistence) in the Royal Navy until a mutiny in 1797 led to him fleeing his ship, HMS Pomone.

[2] During the Napoleonic Wars, he was a cornet in the Surrey Yeomanry in 1803[2] and later served as a volunteer in the Austrian Army at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805.

Charles Jenkinson, as he was then, was elected Member of Parliament for Sandwich in 1807, a seat he held until 1812,[5] and then sat for Bridgnorth from 1812 to 1818,[6] and for East Grinstead from 1818 to 1828.

In 1841 he was invested a member of the Privy Council[8] and appointed Lord Steward of the Household in the government of Sir Robert Peel,[9] a post he held until 1846.

In 1828, he inherited the Jenkinson baronetcy, the barony of Hawkesbury and the earldom of Liverpool at the death of his older half-brother, the former prime minister.