Dr Lushington’s brief parliamentary experience in this period was not a happy one. He came in for Yarmouth as a friend and colleague of Edward Harbord, whose father Lord Suffield was establishing an interest there and made the arrangement with Lushington’s father. They had ousted the ministerial candidates, but both men were inclined to support the Grenville administration, Lushington strongly so: William Windham described him in December 1806 as ‘very much a friend of mine’. Although his family were West India proprietors, he was one of the ‘staunch friends’ of abolition, and both spoke and voted against the slave trade, 23 Feb. 1807; but his speeches of 10 Aug. 1807 and 13 Apr. 1808 showed that he was not unsympathetic to the plight of the West Indian commercial interest.
This conduct irritated his patron, whose elder son William Assheton Harbord had complained to his father that Lushington’s conduct was ‘particularly observed’ and that he was currying favour with his constituents without regard to the Suffield interest.
If I had a wish to ask any favour from administration and was to hint that I had brought my younger son into Parliament at a great expense and he will support the measures of government, what would or might not be the answer: ‘I know you did, but you must recollect that the same influence and at the same expense you also introduced into Yarmouth and Parliament a decided oppositionist ...’ If I had any ambitious view in engaging in a contest for Yarmouth, those purposes you have defeated.
Suffield mss, Suffield to Lushington, 29 June and draft n.d. [1807], cited by Hayes.
Lushington had taken the line that he had given no pledge.
In the spring of 1808 Suffield’s ambitious views led to a bargain with administration involving the replacement of Lushington by a Member friendly to government. He resigned and was out of Parliament, though at first ‘too anxious to return’, until 1820. Francis Horner wrote of him, 26 Jan. 1809, as ‘my excellent friend Stephen, the denouncer of Sir Home Popham’, and added that he was ‘out of Parliament and working hard at Doctors’ Commons ... he has a very fair share of natural talents, though he has hitherto been idle after the manner of Oxford, but he is honest, intrepid, and good tempered. He is what an old Englishman would call a well conditioned man.’
Lushington, who joined Brooks’s Club on 22 Mar. 1808, continued to see his Whig political friends ‘occasionally’, gained some notoriety as counsel to Lady Byron in her proceedings against her husband, and before the session of January 1818 wrote to Lord Folkestone to advocate a motion against the suspension of habeas corpus. Brougham thought that he should be ‘quite invaluable’ as a speaker in Parliament and Lord Sefton described him after the election of 1818 as one of the men of talent whom the Whig borough patrons had ignored. He was an active supporter of county meetings after the Peterloo tragedy in 1819, thinking that ‘the Whigs ought to come forward with their whole strength’. When he was informed by George Tierney in January 1820 that a seat in Parliament could be found for him he replied:
Some three or four years since I had determined never again to engage in any parliamentary speculation however eligible: this resolution has in a degree been shaken when I have occasionally met with my political friends, and so I may have appeared inconsistent; but upon deliberation I deem it wisest to adhere to it, and to decline making any attempt to re-enter Parliament.
His reasons were ‘many and various’; but the chief were his 12 years’ absence and want of confidence, and the loss of ambition in that direction, especially when it involved ‘pecuniary sacrifice’.