Macmillan was born on 10 February 1894. According to Wikipedia he was created Earl of Stockton (and Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden) on 24 February 1984. He was the last former Prime Minister to be granted an hereditary peerage.
Macmillan served as the Member of Parliament for Stockton–on–Tees from 1924 to 1929, and from 1931 to 1945. Having lost his seat in the landslide Labour victory of June 1945, he returned to Parliament five months later as the winner of a by–election in the more traditionally Conservative seat of Bromley. He succeeded Anthony Eden as Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister in 1957, and served until 1963 when he resigned in the wake of the Profumo scandal and was succeeded by Sir Alec Douglas–Home.
He initially refused a peerage, and retired from politics in 1964 – a month before the general election that would result in a Labour government under Harold Wilson.
In 1984, with the return of hereditary peerages under Thatcher, Macmillan requested, and was granted, the earldom that had been customarily bestowed on departing prime ministers. In his maiden speech in the House of Lords he criticised Thatcher's handling of the coal miners' strike and her characterisation of striking miners as 'the enemy within'. He received an unprecedented standing ovation for his oration, which included the words: "It breaks my heart to see – and I cannot interfere – what is happening in our country today. This terrible strike, by the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's and Hitler's armies and never gave in. It is pointless and we cannot afford that kind of thing. Then there is the growing division of comparative prosperity in the south and an ailing north and Midlands. We used to have battles and rows but they were quarrels. Now there is a new kind of wicked hatred that has been brought in by different types of people."
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