Foster, who had sat undisturbed for Louth since the Union, had long aspired to a United Kingdom peerage as the last Speaker of the Irish Commons. After his unopposed return on his family interest at the 1820 general election Lord Camden advised him to apply again, explaining that as he had previously ‘requested an audience of the prince regent, in which you laid before him your old claim and your anxious wishes, you would naturally repeat that request now that he is king’.
to express his humble hope that ... he may receive ... that accustomed and permanent mark of the approbation of the crown, which so many of his predecessors in the chair have received by an hereditary seat in the Upper House ... its having been the usual practice of the sovereigns of Great Britain to create new peerages on their accession ... Mr. Foster is now very near his eightieth year and hopes that this circumstance may excuse his anxiety.
Ibid.; Add. 38284, f. 76.
Assuring Foster that ‘the mode of application has not been detrimental’, 7 May 1820, Camden urged him to come to England to press his claims further.
Foster was named to the select committees on agricultural distress, 31 May 1820, 19 Mar. 1821. He called for repeal of the Union duties and the ‘total removal of all obstacles to the commercial intercourse between England and Ireland’, 8 June 1820. He spoke in support of a grant to prevent a run on the Irish banks, saying the ‘necessity of an immediate remedy was obvious for the fact that eight banks had failed in the south-west of Ireland’, 16 June. He condemned a move to prevent Irish masters in chancery from sitting in Parliament as an ‘attempt to defeat the wishes, and to interfere with the franchises of the people of Dublin’, who had returned Thomas Ellis, 30 June. That day he argued that ‘it would be ingratitude to take away the bounties on linen from Ireland’. On 6 July he denied what had been had ‘imputed to him’ by William Smith, Whig Member for Norwich, insisting that he ‘never could have been guilty of the absurdity of asserting’ that the English Parliament ‘could not legislate for the whole of the empire’ and warning of the danger of ‘setting the manufactures of one part of the country against those of another part, as if they had separate interests’. He seconded a motion for a grant to repair Banff and Peterhead harbours, 12 July 1820.
Foster was described as ‘the best gentleman-manager of nursery grounds, plantations, and woods’ by the agricultural writer and Member for Cumberland, John Curwen. He ‘entirely built’ the ‘remarkably neat village’ of Collon, and ‘in spite of the sterility of the soil’, its ‘elevated situation’ and ‘its uninterrupted exposure to the winds of the sea’, his plantations there grew ‘very luxuriantly’.