Great expectations were entertained of Viscount Milton as sole heir of Earl Fitzwilliam, the Yorkshire Whig grandee. At his birth, his father was reported ‘almost out of his senses with joy, and can see, think and talk of nothing but his child’ and on 2 Sept. 1789 the white hope of the Yorkshire Whigs was held up before 40,000 guests by the Prince of Wales on his visit to Wentworth Woodhouse. Milton never quite fulfilled such auguries: at Eton he was ‘rather too gentle and meek’ and his health was a frequent source of anxiety. Nevertheless he was put through his paces for a public career. His debut was the introduction of Henry Grattan to the electors of his father’s borough of Malton in April 1805. With the doubling of the voters’ fees to mark the occasion, he was well received and himself became the Member at the ensuing election, though under age. He had meanwhile survived an alarming fever and staidly married his cousin Mary Dundas.
While Member for Malton, Milton had made his maiden speech in favour of the abolition of the slave trade, 23 Feb. 1807, describing the cause as a bequest of Fox ‘whom he was proud to call his friend’. Lord Howick assured his father, 26 Feb., that the speech was ‘sensible and animated, and his delivery very good’. But soon after, still a minor, he was a defaulter in attendance, taking leave until the end of the session. Fresh from his triumph in Yorkshire, where his speeches were also well received, he opposed the address, 26 June 1807, protesting against the ‘profligate and corrupt exercise of the prerogative’, the restoration of Lord Melville and the new government’s appeal not to the ‘sense’, but rather to the ‘nonsense’ of the country, as witnessed by their enlistment of the cry of ‘No Popery’ at the recent election. He was thought at this time to show ‘a spirit, and vigour of thinking much wanted in the House of Commons’.
With the approval of his political mentors, Milton discouraged petitions for peace from Yorkshire in the autumn of 1807, yet he felt obliged to regret, ‘at no great length’, as first opposition speaker on the address, 21 Jan. 1808, that Russia’s offer of mediation had been rejected and that ministers, far from showing a disposition to contemplate peace, in the face of manufacturing distress, had embarked on the aggressive Copenhagen expedition. He voted for the motions against this on 3 and 8 Feb. He could not, however, concur with Whitbread’s third censure resolution of 29 Feb. calling for ministers’ removal in view of their rejection of Russian and Austrian offers to mediate, which he admitted was reprehensible. On the motion of Lord Folkestone, one of the young lions of opposition with whom he consorted, he concurred in the censure of Wellesley’s conduct in India, 15 Mar. 1808. On 5 May he justified the support of Maynooth College against his colleague Wilberforce and on 25 May supported the Catholic petition, as well as voting for Newport’s motion of 30 May to admit Catholics to the Bank of Ireland. He was a critic of ministers over the claims of John Palmer, 16 May; of the local militia bill, which he tried in vain to have postponed, 18 May, but successfully amended on 30 May; and of Rose’s bill to fix a minimum wage for cotton weavers, which he argued would only lead to unemployment. The curates residence bill met with his disapproval, 8 June, because it gave too much power to the bishops. He failed to thwart its extension to Ireland.
Urged by his father to maintain active opposition in the session of 1809, Milton was one of those Whigs who endorsed Ponsonby’s leadership on 18 Jan. On 24 Jan. he objected to the remodelling of the finance committee, on 25 Jan. and 14 Feb. opposed the militia enlisting bill and on 24 Feb. justified an inquiry into the Peninsular campaign after voting for Petty’s motion on the subject on 21 Feb. On the conduct of the Duke of York, 15 Mar., he opined that an address should not be necessary to urge the King to relieve him of the army command, as a review of the evidence showed that he could not be entirely exonerated from irregularities in patronage. For this he was one of the Whigs thanked by the electors of Westminster, though he did not stir up Yorkshire on the subject and was absent owing to bereavement on 17 Mar. He supported the charge of corruption against Castlereagh, 25 Apr., and on 11 May proposed an amendment to Madocks’s charges against Perceval and Castlereagh, preferring that they should be heard by a select committee rather than at the bar of the House. This amendment was negatived without a division, but he voted for Madocks’s motion, being favourable to the correction of abuses, though he had written to Folkestone beforehand, on the subject of reform, that it should be scouted completely. He promised Folkestone to attend his motion for a committee on abuses on 17 Apr., but his name is not in the minority in favour of it. On 12 June he voted for the amendment proposed by Folkestone to Curwen’s reform bill, acknowledged to be a moderate measure; he had supported it in its pristine form, 26 May, 6, 7, 9 June. That autumn he approved Lord Grey’s refusal to parley with Perceval’s administration. Tierney evidently chose to regard him as an intractable Foxite, doubtless on account of his association with the young lions, sons of Whig grandees, who were sometimes labelled the Insurgents. He did not, however, sympathize with Burdett and the radicals and Grey informed his father, 13 Jan. 1810, that he hoped Milton would set a good example to other young Whigs in rallying to Ponsonby’s leadership in the ensuing session.
After voting against the address, 23 Jan., Milton missed the division of 26 Jan. owing to the death of his brother-in-law. He moved the amendment to the thanks to Wellington, 1 Feb., and opposed the annuity for him, 16 Feb., ‘granted rather for the purpose of shedding a lustre on the present administration’. He opposed the subsidy to Portugal, as a critic of the Peninsular war, 9 Mar. He gave silent votes critical of Lord Chatham’s apologia, 23 Feb. and 5 Mar., and for the censure of the Scheldt expedition on 30 Mar., being listed a ‘thick and thin’ adherent by the Whigs. On 5 Apr. he was against Burdett’s committal to the Tower, but remarked on the 10th that if Burdett’s letter was an aggravation of his former offence, the House must act against him. He opposed the release of Burdett’s crony Gale Jones, 16 Apr., and on 11 May differed markedly from his friend Folkestone in maintaining the privilege of the House against Burdett’s summoning the Speaker to plead in another court; if plead he must, the Speaker must uphold the privileges of the House at their highest possible point. He saw no necessity for going to the courts of law for confirmation of parliamentary privilege, 18 May. On 6 June he favoured the reception of a petition in favour of Burdett, thinking it dangerous to refuse, but two days later he voted for Williams Wynn’s affirmations of the House’s privileges against Burdett. He opposed Brand’s motion for parliamentary reform, 21 May: ‘he enjoyed the British constitution, and was perfectly content with it’. On the other hand, he supported the campaign against sinecures, 17 Apr., 4, 17 and 30 May, citing Burke as his mentor, though without much confidence that a pension system would prove an economical substitute. On 1 June he advocated more churches in populous towns to combat the spread of dissent. Of his tribute to his father’s Member for Higham Ferrers, William Windham, 7 June, when he moved for a new writ, he remarked ‘it would have been better if the performance of that duty had devolved upon some more competent person’. Canning took it as a hint to improve on Milton’s performance.
Milton opposed further adjournment on the King’s illness, 29 Nov. 1810, thinking it time the lacuna was filled. He was of the committee to examine the royal physicians, 13 Dec. He spoke and voted against the Regency proposals, particularly on the concessions to the Queen in the Household, 1 Jan. 1811, and against the language used in two of the clauses, 17, 18 Jan. He voted silently for the admission of Catholics to the army staff, 11 Mar., and for Grattan’s Catholic relief motion on 31 May. His own motion of 6 June, protesting at the reinstatement of the Duke of York as commander-in-chief of the army, misfired. It was not helped by his attempt to draw a parallel with Lord Melville’s case, but the fact was that the opposition were divided on the subject. He evaded an opportunity given him by Perceval to drop it, only to be defeated by 296 votes to 47, a minority of Whigs, radicals and ‘Saints’ supporting him, while his leader Ponsonby and other Whigs joined government, and others thought it more prudent to stay away for fear of offending the Regent and their constituents. The Duke of Richmond commented: ‘I should think it would have been wiser of Lord Fitzwilliam who wants the Ribbon and to be prime minister to have prevented his son from taking so marked a part’. In fact, it was supposed that Milton would decline office for himself in a Whig ministry if the Regent invited its formation.
Milton then lay low. After voting silently for Morpeth’s motion on Ireland, 4 Feb., and Turton’s on the state of the nation, 27 Feb. 1812, he intervened in support of Brougham’s motion against the orders in council, 3 Mar., merely to report that like Lord Granville Leveson Gower he was prevented from submitting a county petition from the distressed manufacturers because the Regent held no levées. He presented one to the House on 14 Apr. He voted for Williams Wynn’s motion of that day against the appointment of Col. McMahon. He spoke late at night in favour of Grattan’s motion for a Catholic relief committee, 23 Apr., giving Perceval credit for honest prejudice, but denouncing some of his colleagues as shufflers on the question. While he continued to vote for the abolition of sinecures 4 May, he did not support Creevey’s motion of 7 May and he steadily opposed parliamentary reform, 8 May, alleging that the present House found room for all interests and deriding the notion of an ancient and pure constitution conjured up by Burdett: the bill of rights itself was the product of an unreformed Parliament. He could not support a public monument to Perceval, 19 May, and on 21 May he came to the rescue of Stuart Wortley’s motion for a stronger administration, which lacked a seconder, praising the opposition leaders for refusing to parley with the rump of Perceval’s. He accompanied Stuart Wortley in carrying the address to the Regent and on 5 June opposed the adjournment of the House. When Stuart Wortley renewed his plea on 11 June, Milton proposed an amendment indicative of opposition intransigence towards the ministerial rump, but more moderate in language than Folkestone’s. It was rejected by 289 votes to 164.
Although he put in a word against government’s evasiveness in the debate on the orders in council on 16 June 1812, Milton evidently did not satisfy his West Riding constituents that he was alert to their distress: two days later he was stoned at Sheffield, where his father had to disperse an angry mob. At the ensuing general election, when he again professed to stand alone, he would have preferred Stuart Wortley, whose friends were cordial towards him, to Lascelles, who came in as his colleague.
It was not apparent that Milton’s speechifying gained him credit: Charles Williams Wynn wrote to Lord Grenville, when the question arose as to who should move a censure on the Speaker for his prorogation speech, 2 Aug. 1813, ‘Lord Milton would perhaps be the best person if he was not rather unpopular in the House’. He took little part in the session of 1813-14, at least until 16 May, when he objected to the inclusion of counties in the election expense bill. On 6 June he supported Wilberforce’s plea for an international agreement to abolish the slave trade and on 16 June approved the poor settlement bill. His next session was more active, as he took up the question of the disembodying of the militia, complaining of government reluctance to implement it, 9 Nov. 1814, and supporting Romilly’s motions on the subject, 28 Nov. 1814 and 28 Feb. 1815 (when he was teller). On 21 Feb. and 27 Apr. 1815 he voted against the transfer of Genoa and on 1 Mar. against the betrayal of the Spanish Liberals. On 2 Mar. he obtained a promise for relief from window tax for factories and cloth halls and voted for a committee on the Bank. Next day he came out in favour of agricultural protection, having previously presented a petition from Leeds against it. On the other hand he remained an eager advocate of government retrenchment and opposed the renewal of the property tax, 13 Mar., 19 Apr.; but his motion to authorize the committee to amend the bill was defeated by 134 votes to 37 on 1 May. He was opposed to a precipitate renewal of war with Buonaparte, and in May continued to criticize the retention of the militia and spoke up for the Westminster peace petition, but on 25 May, with several other opposition spokesmen, found the resumption of hostilities justified and voted for it. The day before he had attempted to secure a censure on the president of the Board of Control for voting £20,000 to Lord Melville for his services to the East India Company, a motion that was lost by 86 votes to 30. On 31 May, on the failure of his friend Althorp’s motion on the application of the Regent’s grant to the payment of his debts, he moved, ostensibly to catch Stuart Wortley’s vote, a modification of it, but it was negatived without a division.
Although, unlike his father, who approved the peace settlement, Milton was critical of it, he was ‘strenuous’ against any opposition amendment to the address at the Whig pre-sessional meeting in Ponsonby’s absence, 31 Jan. 1816, wishing to see a uniform lead given on the subject; nor did he share some of the Whigs’ sympathies for Buonaparte’s generals condemned to death. Accordingly, on 1 Feb., he refused to vote for the amendment, but made it clear that he thought the military pretensions now assumed by Britain in Europe were incompatible with retrenchment and presumably involved a breach of promise in requiring the continuance of the property tax. On 14 Feb. he called for a reduction of the navy estimates and next day moved for statistics of peacetime establishments over the last century. When the peace treaties were debated on 19 Feb., he came into the open and explained his opposition to the new peace, after having approved the former one, basing it on the premise that occupied France, with Wellington imposed on her as ‘King’, would never forgive Britain, which had not done enough to secure itself in the Netherlands against French revenge: a cession of territory by France would have served the purpose better than the expensive and constitutionally dangerous assumption of a grand military role by Britain. Milton’s amendment to this effect was lost by 240 votes to 77. Tierney reported afterwards that opposition’s differences of opinion over the treaties were smoothed over: ‘Lord Milton contributed a great deal towards this, and I rather flattered myself that I contributed something to keeping him in good humour’.
Milton’s speech against the peace settlement was a prelude to his most active phase in Parliament. In the next few weeks he was a leading opponent of the renewal of the property tax and on 4 Mar. clashed with his colleague Lascelles in defence of a petition against it from Leeds, while on 18 Mar. he challenged a petition from Sheffield presented by Lascelles. On 8 Mar. he opposed the army estimates at length. His resentment at the upsurge of militarism found an outlet in criticism of the Military Club, 4 Mar., and in his motion of 4 Apr. against the ‘unconstitutional interference of the military’, after he was held up by the Guards in Pall Mall on a levée day: it was defeated by 48 votes to 31. On 26 Apr. he risked the displeasure of his West Riding clothier constituents by deprecating their hostility (expressed in a petition) to the export of raw wool and on 29 Apr. opposed an additional duty on imported wool; on 24 May he generalized this into a plea for free trade, differing from his colleague Lascelles. He opposed the Bank restriction bill, 3 May, and, in defence of Althorp’s motion for a committee on public offices, called for further government economies, 7 May. He discredited an outmoded Huddersfield petition for parliamentary reform, 8 May, opposed the leather tax, 9 May, with reference to his experience on the committee of 1813, and on 13 May again protested against the ‘unconstitutional interference of the military’ in obstructing Lord Essex in Pall Mall. His motion was lost by 112 votes to 54. On 17 May he unsuccessfully opposed the additional duties on hard soap, to please the West Riding soap makers. He opposed the aliens bill as a blow to Spanish liberalism, 20, 28 May, and on 31 May attempted to defeat the clause rendering the alien wife of a British national liable to deportation. He found the purchase of the Elgin marbles untimely, 7 June. By the end of this session Milton had sufficiently established himself as a spearhead of opposition to be named as a potential leader of it.
Before the session of 1817, his father was ‘rather against’ an amendment to the address, but Milton doubted if ministry deserved to get off so lightly. Lord Grey commented, ‘He is himself quite right’. He voted against the address. On 12 Feb. he presented a petition from Dewsbury for retrenchment and reform and, in doing so, commended Lord Camden’s abandonment of his sinecure. On 17 Feb. his motion against the payment of wartime salaries to the Admiralty secretariat during the Algerine war was defeated by 169 votes to 114. As a member of the secret committee on disaffection, he was conspicuous in the debate on the suspension of habeas corpus, 26 Feb., coming out strongly against suspension, though he did not deny the existence of sedition and the need to curb it and was not in the minority on the third reading, 28 Feb. In this view, as he admitted publicly, he differed from his father.
On Ponsonby’s death in July 1817, Milton was named as one of the contenders for the opposition leadership, particularly as a candidate acceptable to the moderate Whigs: but it was doubted whether he would do. Nor did he wish to undertake the burden of ‘leading a certain set of gentlemen who were quite determined not to be led’, as Frankland Lewis put it, and his intimates advised him not to be tempted. Only Lady Spencer went so far as to urge Milton that ‘the whole community with one voice and with one mind proclaim you’, and she met with a polite demur. Milton’s father had decided in favour of Tierney.
Milton remained at Ryde, for health reasons, during the election campaign of 1818, agreeing to send no substitute to canvass Yorkshire. His outspoken views on the wool trade had stirred up opposition in the West Riding and there the cry of inadequate attention to county business was heard against him, but the trustees of the Cloth Hall at Leeds were dulcified by his friends and in the event there was no competiton. Stuart Wortley, who replaced Lascelles as his colleague, was more congenial to him. Althorp reported of Milton on 29 July, ‘he looks very weak and seems languid; he is constantly yawning’; he predicted a winter journey to a warmer climate. In the New Year Milton duly arrived at Naples, having set out in September.
Following the Peterloo incident in the autumn of 1819, Milton was involved in organizing a protest meeting in Yorkshire to call for an inquiry, 14 Oct. Despite a moderate speech by him, it led to his father’s being deprived of his lieutenancy. His colleague Stuart Wortley had been unable to subscribe to Fitzwilliam’s views and in the debate on the address, 23 Nov., Milton felt obliged to justify his proceedings, which had placed him ‘at the top of popularity’ in Yorkshire, according to his friend Althorp. Supporting Althorp’s motion of 30 Nov., he explained that what was at stake in the Manchester incident was the constitution: the growth of despotism abroad warned Britain to look to her liberties. On 2 Dec. and subsequently he opposed the seditious meetings prevention bill, suggesting a local, rather than a general, measure: the proposed bill left the people no rights, only permits. He likewise thought the seizure of arms bill ‘totally uncalled for’, 10 Dec. On the other hand, he was relieved when Lord John Russell withdrew his proposals for parliamentary reform, 14 Dec. 1819; it was the one subject on which he could still be counted not to concur with the ‘young inflammables’. In this he bowed to his father’s views: the enfranchisement of Leeds in place of Grampound was a source of anxiety to the family electoral interest, which he was increasingly managing.
With the years Milton acquired a reputation for obstinacy and impracticability, though he was won over to parliamentary reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws and never wavered in his support of Catholic relief. Other features prejudiced men against him: Sydney Smith found him ‘one of the most ungainly looking young men I ever saw’ in 1812, and in 1834 Creevey described him and his family as ‘the ugliest and most dismal race I ever beheld’. Henry Fox thought Milton ‘sensible, but his manner is disagreeable, and he seems to think everybody must be acquainted with all his actions however minute’. He was conscientious: Lady Spencer was sure that in Parliament he was ‘the most constant attender and would hang himself if he was out of the House’. From another quarter we learn that ‘his mind appeared to be plodding about business, his head much occupied with political or parliamentary concerns. His manner is shy in a greater degree than would be supposed, and his appearance and carriage has something puritanical in it.’