LUTTRELL, Henry Lawes, 2nd earl of Carhampton [I] (1737-1821), of Painshill, Surr.

Carhampton, one of a wild, cynical and unscrupulous Irish family, was a parliamentary relic of the days of Wilkes, his Commons career far outlasting those of his brothers. CP, iii. 23-25; HP Commons, 1754-90, iii. 65-71. His army duties kept him mainly in Ireland, where he also held various non-professional appointments, at least until the late 1790s, when he sold Luttrellstown, county Dublin, to Luke White*. Hist. Irish Parl. v. 141-3. Having been out of the House for over 23 years, he was brought in for Ludgershall in 1817 on the interest of Sir James Graham* of Kirkstall, Yorkshire, and, aged 82, he was again returned by him at the general election of 1820. Goaded by the Liverpool administration’s rejection of his high-handed demands for a United Kingdom peerage, which he claimed as a belated reward for his support of the Union, he was generally in opposition, although he had approved of government’s stern response to radical agitation in 1819. Lonsdale mss, Long to Lonsdale, 24 Feb. 1820; HP Commons, 1790-1820, iv. 476-8. He seems to have sided, nominally at least, with opposition on the Queen Caroline affair at the start of the 1821 session. Charles Williams Wynn* noted, 14 Feb., that ‘on a preceding night’ Carhampton and White, who is known to have paired with the Whigs in the divisions on 26 Jan. and 6 Feb., ‘paired off and went comfortably to bed, without finding out that they were on the same side’. Buckingham, Mems. Geo. IV, i. 122. No other trace of parliamentary activity has been found before his death in April 1821. His illegitimate son, Henry Luttrell (1768-1851), who had briefly sat for Clonmines in the last Irish Parliament, became an habitué of Holland House and enjoyed a high reputation as a wit and conversationalist. The peerage passed to Carhampton’s brother John (c.1745-1829), Member for Stockbridge, 1774-5 and 1780-5, and latterly a commissioner of excise, on whose death it became extinct. The Jamaican plantation was devised to a nephew, subject to the 3rd earl’s life interest, but the rest of his real and personal estate, which was sworn under £60,000, went to his wife (d. 1831). Gent. Mag. (1821), i. 468, 648; PROB 11/1643/262; IR26/856/446; DNB; Oxford DNB.