Osborne’s inherited stake in Cambridgeshire consisted of a substantial house built within the ramparts of the Iron Age fort at Wandlebury, four miles south-east of Cambridge, together with some surrounding land.
Osborne voted against government on the civil list, 5, 8 May, the appointment of an additional baron of exchequer in Scotland, 15 May, the aliens bill, 1 June, and economies in revenue collection, 4 July 1820. He voted against Wilberforce’s compromise resolution on the Queen Caroline affair, 22 June. On 21 Aug. he condemned the bill of pains and penalties and, in protest against the ‘mock’ trial, which would ‘convert that House into a judicial tribunal’, moved an address for the prorogation of Parliament; he withdrew it when Tierney, the Whig leader, raised practical objections.
Much as I dislike personally intruding myself on the attention of the ... Commons, yet I feel so strongly on this subject that I should certainly concur in the propriety [of] so doing, provided no person more eligible or no other mode of proceeding more expedient should be pointed at.
Hants RO, Tierney mss 55.
In the event, he merely questioned Lord Castlereagh on ministers’ intentions regarding the royal divorce and voted in the minority of 12 for Hobhouse’s call for a prorogation. He was the prime mover behind a requisition for a Cambridgeshire county meeting to appeal to the king to dismiss ministers for failing to relieve distress and sanctioning proceedings against the queen. He secured the prestigious Whig signatures of the duke of Bedford, Lord Tavistock*, Lord Dacre and Lord Fitzwilliam, to whom he explained, 27 Dec. 1820:
My object was and is to address the king to remove his ministers ... but in order to obtain respectable signatures both of residents and non-residents and likewise to obtain their attendance ... I thought it better to throw out more than one inducement ... The dismissal of the ministers is the old constitutional remedy for general distress, which we all admit to prevail, but such is the difference of opinion on some of the leading political subjects that now occupy the public mind, that I thought myself justified in endeavouring to awake the feeling of each interest in order to bring them to coincide in one general resolution.
As it happened, illness prevented Osborne from attending the meeting, 16 Jan. 1821, when Dacre stood in for him; but he was voted thanks for his parliamentary conduct.
Osborne was in the opposition minorities on the treatment of Alderman Waithman* and for reduction of the salt duties, 28 Feb. 1822; he pleaded attendance for the latter as his excuse for not appearing at the county meeting on agricultural distress that day.
Osborne apparently went abroad again later in the year, and he was presumably with his wife at The Hague in March 1824, when Lady Granville described her as follows:
She knows everybody, every custom, every shop, every royalty, and every drug. She seems excellent and amiable, bearing wretched health with exemplary patience; but ... she is tiresome, in a fever about trifles, and talking incessantly about nothing. With great confusion in her own ideas, and always taking hold of mine by the wrong end.
Lady Granville subsequently warmed to her as a ‘very good, friendly and amiable’ woman, whose ‘worried, fidgety, bewildered manner’ gave a bad first impression.
Although rumours of an opposition, aimed chiefly at Manners, were rife as the 1826 general election approached, Osborne took few active steps to prepare for a contest. Yet when sounded by Lord Hardwicke, the lord lieutenant, who was considering a bid to reassert his electoral interest in the county, as to whether he would step down if a serious third candidate started or was nominated, he replied that, despite appearances to the contrary, he had every intention of standing his ground and contesting the issue, though on ‘a system as little expensive as possible’.
On neither issue did Osborne deliver. Although he presented the county petition against alteration of the corn laws, 26 Feb., he was not in the minority against the corn bill, 2 Apr. 1827.
He voted for repeal of the Tests, 26 Feb. 1828, and presented petitions for it that day and 5 Mar. He was unwell during April,
With the state of the king’s health promising a general election, the 1830 session was Osborne’s most active of this or the previous Parliament. His was the first signature on the requisition of 2 Jan. for a county meeting to consider agricultural distress and petition for repeal of the beer and malt taxes and alteration of the licensing system. At the meeting, 22 Jan., he reproved Maberly, the eccentric vicar of Kingston, for his rant against Catholics and fundholders, argued that ‘the distresses of the country were owing to excessive taxation and, observing that ‘the great portion of his income was derived from the public funds’, called for retrenchment to preserve the public credit. A motion that he and Manners be ‘instructed’ to support the petition and promote its object was carried.
When he offered again for Cambridgeshire at the subsequent general election, Osborn claimed, somewhat implausibly, to have ‘advocated the peculiar interests of this agricultural county with success’; and on the hustings he bragged that he had exerted himself last session to secure repeal of the beer tax and a change in the licensing system. He declared himself to be ‘a friend to reform’, reiterated his support for the corn laws and welcomed the emancipation of Dissenters and Catholics. He shrugged off Wells’s jibes at his brother’s household office and, in response to his direct question, pledged himself to support repeal of the malt tax, though he doubted if the state of his health would allow him to take the initiative.
Every now and then, when the populace pleased, the procession stopped, and the chairs were tossed up as far as the bearers could reach, amid loud huzzas. I recollect the look of discomfort at such times on Lord F. Osborne’s face, as he sat in his peculiar, stiff, stately manner, dressed in a green coat and top boots.
Rutland mss (History of Parliament Aspinall transcripts), Manners to Rutland, 25 July; Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 14, 21 Aug.; The Times, 14 Aug. 1830; G. Pryme, Autobiog. Recollections, 188.
Osborne did not attend the Wisbech celebration dinner, 8 Oct. 1830: according to his spokesman, he stayed away because he did not wish to become involved in any ‘personal triumph’ over Manners, whom he respected as an individual.
Osborne presented a number of anti-slavery petitions, 3, 4, 10, 16 Nov., and Wisbech petitions for repeal of the coal duties, 15, 22 Nov. 1830. He voted to scrap the Irish Subletting Act, 11 Nov., and against government on the civil list, 15 Nov. On 6 Dec. 1830 he was given three weeks’ leave to attend to his magisterial duties in Cambridgeshire, where the ‘Swing’ disturbances were troublesome. He warned Warburton that he would resist his anatomy bill if he reintroduced it, 9 Feb. 1831. Later that day he presented the petition of the inhabitants of Shelford, his neighbours, calling for tax reductions, abolition of the game laws, select vestries and tithes, reform of Parliament and election by ballot. As he had told the petitioners beforehand, it was ‘the first petition I have ever presented ... to which I have not been prepared to give my cordial support’. In a discussion on tithes, 16 Feb., he called for ‘a fair commutation’.
Unlike Adeane, who had reservations about details of the bill, Osborne had no difficulty in presenting himself as its unconditional supporter at the 1831 general election. When Manners came forward as a moderate reformer and farmers’ friend, Osborne dismissed him on both counts, arguing that the bill as it stood would strengthen rather than harm the landed interest. Manners’s bid collapsed, and Osborne and Adeane were unopposed; but Osborne was too ill to attend the formal proceedings. In his address of thanks he forecast that the bill would
strengthen the king upon his throne ... [and] enable the aristocracy to shine with pure and uncontaminated lustre, and, limited to its constitutional duties, again to become a rampart round the throne, and a guardian of the people’s rights; obliterating I trust from our memories and even our language the odious epithet of boroughmongers.
Ibid. 30 Apr., 7, 14 May 1831.
He voted for the second reading of the reintroduced reform bill, 6 July, and was a steady supporter of its details in committee. Unlike Adeane, he voted with ministers against the enfranchisement of £50 tenants-at-will, 18 Aug. He voted against the issue of a writ for Dublin, 8 Aug., and with government on the controversy over the last election there, 23 Aug. When he repeated his objections to the ‘farce’ of divorce bills, 11, 19 July, Whittle Harvey advised him to address the king to draw the attention of the commission on the ecclesiastical courts to the problem. On 17 Aug. Osborne, reporting that he had found that it was not possible to proceed in this way, said that ‘I almost begin to despair of being able to effect any good on this subject’. As a basis for others to work on, he suggested that divorce bills ought to be made public measures, started in the Commons and referred to select committees. On the presentation of a Gloucestershire petition for repeal of the corn laws, 22 July, he argued that ‘unless protection be afforded to the agriculturalist, corn cannot be grown in this country’. He presented a Cambridgeshire petition against distillation from molasses, 2 Aug., and saw the Eau Brink drainage bill through its third reading, 17 Aug. He voted for the passage of the reform bill, 21 Sept. About a week later he let it be publicly known that he intended to immediately retire from the Commons, claiming that his health was unequal to the duties of a county Member. He had already tipped off his friend, neighbour and fellow-reformer Richard Townley, who won the ensuing by-election against Hardwicke’s nephew.
He had already been talked of as a candidate for the peerage, though when he retired he denied that this was on the cards.
