Sloane Stanley’s relationship with his father went from bad to worse during his early manhood. Money was at the bottom of their squabbles, which were exacerbated by the gulf in years and temperament between them. There were hints of trouble to come during Sloane Stanley’s education in Scotland and Germany, when he ran up debts and was accused of gambling. His father envisaged a career in the diplomatic service for him, but he was set on joining the army. Hans Sloane, who had bought a 1,500-acre estate with his future in mind, and assured him that ‘there will be few things you will not have a right to command’, gave way and, after an initial setback, secured him a commission in the Prince of Wales’s Hussars. Yet in little more than a year Sloane Stanley, complaining both of the expense and of ‘the caprices of a most whimsical commanding officer, whose whole endeavour seems [to be] to run me into debt and to make me miserable’, was begging to be released. Though slightly mollified by promotion to lieutenant as the prince’s gift, he continued to moan, and incurred his father’s displeasure by revealing new debts. The conclusion of peace gave him the chance to extricate himself from the army.
He subsequently rebelled against the regime of academic study and foreign travel which his father sought to impose on him, preferring the field sports to which he was addicted. His outburst of resentment at being treated like ‘a common gamekeeper’ and his mounting debts so enraged his father that his uncle William Dickinson had to intervene as a peacemaker in November 1802. He was ordered to London for a showdown and advised to go abroad, in which case his father was prepared to increase his allowance from £700 to £1,000. There was another major row in the spring of 1805, when Sloane Stanley tried to get his hands on some of the substantial trust funds which his maternal grandfather had left between himself and his younger brother Stephen. (The latter, a clergyman, had also tested their father’s patience by marrying an unstable widow at the age of 18.) Hans Sloane, who had been given the final say in the distribution of this money, which was subject to good behaviour, would not hear of it, though he accepted William’s later apology and offered to settle his debts if he made a clean breast of them. At the end of that year Sloane Stanley entreated his father to resume negotiations with Lord Carlisle, who had refused his earlier offer of marriage to his daughter, and to overcome Carlisle’s objections by making a partial entail of his estates on any son of such a union. Hans Sloane, sceptical of William’s ‘easily discarding the parade of expense and bustle of large societies’, for all his promises to mend his ways, refused to go cap in hand to Carlisle, and threatened to impose the strictest entail on his son’s inheritance if he continued to misbehave. In the end, however, he relented, and sanctioned a settlement guaranteeing his daughter-in-law a widow’s jointure of £1,200 a year, to be charged on certain estates which were entailed on the eldest son of the marriage.
Thereafter relations between father and son seem to have improved. Sloane Stanley, who made no mark as a Member of the 1807 Parliament, continued to devote most of his time to hunting and the turf. His brother, whose sinecure living of Gidney was the price extracted by his father for surrendering his seat in Parliament to suit the Grenville ministry, died in 1812. In his declining years Hans Sloane revelled in ‘a scrambling life’ divided between Paultons and his London house in Upper Harley Street, which was noted for its vile food and slovenly servants.
At the 1830 general election he was put up for Stockbridge by the 2nd Earl Grosvenor. His sister Maria’s waggish husband Joseph Jekyll† noted that he ‘canvassed and kissed the voters’ wives with a bottle of wine in his pocket, which, being poured plentifully into the female stomach, had a great effect in winning the female heart’.
Although he was never again in Parliament Sloane Stanley, a personal friend of Sir Robert Peel*, was an active and zealous supporter of the Conservative interest in the southern division of Hampshire. Palmerston, smarting after his defeat there in 1835, found it hard to forgive his ‘particular friend’ for ‘his offensive attack upon my personal character as a public man on the day of nomination’. He turned down Sloane Stanley’s subsequent offer of a written public explanation, ‘begged him to leave bad alone’, and reflected that ‘the only thing that can be said in his excuse is that he is a regular ass’.