In the same year as he inherited his father’s estate and shouldered his debts, Brand became heir to a peerage in his mother’s right. He inclined to his father’s politics, joining the Whig Club on 6 and consorting with Whig society, though he did not join Brooks’s Club until 9 Mar. 1815. He was a favourite of the Melbournes at Brocket and commended to Lord Holland, at the age of 23, as ‘gentle in his manners, shy and not happy’. Called to the bar, he attended the western circuit for two years, ‘rather as an amateur than as looking to professional employment’.
Brand was the unsuccessful candidate in the Hertfordshire by-election of 1805. His opponent was William Baker, a former Whig whom his father had challenged as a renegade at a county meeting in 1792; but Brand’s own stance was compromised by his electoral alliance with Lord Salisbury, then a disgruntled courtier, whose wife wished Brand to marry their daughter Lady Georgina Cecil. Nicolson Calvert’s wife described him at that time as ‘a very pleasing gentleman-like man’, but added ‘I am much afraid he has not much religion, from some expressions he dropped when we talked of the question of Catholic emancipation’.
On 9 Apr. 1807 Brand made a spectacular parliamentary debut. He had done nothing while his friends remained in power, except sit on an election committee, assist in the preparation of a Poor Law bill and get leave to attend assizes. Now, giving notice of it on 26 Mar., he was entrusted with the Whig protest in the Commons against the pledge to the King made by the incoming Portland administration. There were misgivings, owing to Brand’s ‘character for violence and democracy’: Lady Bessborough reported that
Mr Brand’s motion is to be revised and corrected by the chefs till it is softened down to the taste of the weakest palates and Sheridan says its whole strength will lie in Mr Brand’s arms which he usually waves about with great vehemence.
Despite rumours that the matter would be taken out of his hands, it was Brand who moved that it was
contrary to the first duties of confidential servants of the crown to restrain themselves by any pledge expressed or implied, from offering to the King any advice which the course of circumstances may render necessary for the welfare and security of any part of his Majesty’s extensive empire.
In deploring the shipwreck of the Grenville ministry on the issue of Catholic relief, Brand did not meet Lord Temple’s wish that he would ‘temper his language in such a manner as will ensure the support of Wilberforce, Bankes, etc, etc, upon whose opinions at this moment much depends’. The motion was defeated by 258 votes to 226, a result ‘equally unexpected by all parties’, for as Romilly, for the Whigs, noted in his journal, ‘we supposed ourselves the majority’.
At the dissolution of 1807 Brand obtained an opening for Hertfordshire, as anticipated, by Plumer’s retirement: he faced no contest while he held it. He at once emerged as a sniper for opposition, making a general attack on the Portland ministry, 30 June. He was a critic of the Irish insurrection bill 24, 27 July 1807, and on this and the question of droits of Admiralty, 11 Feb. 1808, showed his affinity with the Whig ‘Mountain’; like them he had reservations about the party leadership.
On 21 May 1810, denying that he meant to steal Burdett’s thunder, Brand introduced a motion for parliamentary reform which he had contemplated since the failure of the inquiry into the Walcheren expedition. On 14 May he had defended John Cartwright’s petition in favour of reform. His gesture was the outcome of over two years’ lobbying by Cartwright.
Brand promised to revive the question of reform in the session of 1811. At its outset, although he objected to the Regency bill, 21 Jan. 1811, he ‘fairly cheered’ Perceval’s performance during the debates on it and was particularly hostile to any Whig junction with Canning to smooth their return to power. He had no illusions as to that likelihood.
In the next session Brand was a spokesman for economy. (He had already opposed the foreign ministers pensions bill, 1 Apr. 1811.) He attacked the royal household bill, 18, 27 Jan. 1812, and on 21 Jan. seconded Brougham’s motion for the parliamentary audit of the droits of Admiralty. On 4 May he voted for the sinecure reform bill. Two days later he waived his motion on parliamentary reform in favour of Creevey’s motion against the tellers of the Exchequer, which he amended unsuccessfully, 7 May. Next day he moved for reform, calling as before for the enfranchisement of copyholders in the counties and triennial Parliaments, but also for the abolition of nomination boroughs and curtailment of bribery. This was rejected by 215 votes to 88, after a debate in which conservative Whigs and ministerialists united against him. He voted for a stronger administration, 21 May 1812.
Soon after his re-election in 1812, Brand’s mother had a serious illness and he was placed in the painful position of preferring William Hale, his protégé, as his successor to the Hon. William Lamb, the Whig grandees’ favourite.
Brand, who sat on the select committee on the corn trade, was one of the foremost Whig supporters of the protection of the agricultural interest during the debates on the Corn Laws, 15 June 1813, 16, 23 May 1814, as well as of the English corn distillers against their Irish competitors, 25 May, 24 June 1814. On 1 Aug. 1814 appeared his pamphlet in defence of protectionism.
Brand returned to the subject of parliamentary reform, 18 June 1816, when he presented two petitions from Aberdeen in favour of it. He deplored the apathy of the House and on 29 Jan. 1817 he blamed extremists for it. On 31 Jan. he defended the Cornwall petition for reform. He denied that his proposals were ‘chimerical’, 17 Feb. He defended another petition, 10 Mar., and on 20 May seconded Burdett’s reform motion in a studiously moderate speech which failed to soothe alarmists. He had been thwarted by 210 votes to 117 on 7 Feb. when he amended the government motion for a finance committee in the interests of retrenchment. He opposed the suspension of habeas corpus, 26 Feb., 5 June 1817, and complained of its effects, 29 Jan., 9 Mar. 1818. He opposed the ducal marriage grants, 13, 15 Apr. 1818. By then he had turned his attention to reform of the Game Laws, which he denounced as oppressive if not vicious, 6 May 1818. On 9 Mar. 1819 he elaborated on this in a motion for their amendment, having a week before voted for criminal law reform. His motion was carried, but the bill was afterwards lost at the committee stage. He voted for Burdett’s reform motion of 1 July 1819. He was on the Poor Law committees of 1817, 1818 and 1819.
Brand had ‘scruples and doubts’ about Tierney’s leadership of the Whigs, though he signed the requisition to him in 1818 and voted for his censure motion, 18 May 1819. When he succeeded to the peerage in October 1819, he was disappointing the Whig leaders by his unwillingness to promote a county meeting in condemnation of the Peterloo tragedy.