HUGHES, Edward (d.1734), of Hertingfordbury, Herts.

Hughes’s family seems to have been well-established in Hertfordshire, where he himself was J.P.Hertford County Recs., Sessions Rolls 1699-1850, pp. 65, 70. Marrying into an influential and wealthy local family he was returned for Saltash on the Admiralty interest in 1722, and again in 1727, though Richard Edgcumbe reported to Newcastle that ‘at Saltash they don’t relish Mr. Hughes, but make no difficulty of choosing a better man’.14 Aug. 1727, SP Dom. Cal. Geo. II. He voted with the Administration except in the divisions on the excise bill and on the repeal of the Septennial Act, from which he was absent, speaking for them in the debate of 12 Feb. 1730 on Dunkirk, and on 18 Feb. supporting the petition from the African Company for a subsidy towards the maintenance of its forts and settlements. A member of the gaols committee in 1728-9, he told the 1st Lord Egmont in February 1730 that:

there was great occasion to revise the committee, to keep the judges in order, who had behaved strangely, and used us so contemptuously ... Mr. Hughes added he could tell me something that would make me stare, and reached even to the judges. I did not encourage him to impart it to me, knowing his warmth against the judges, and great freeness in these affairs ... However, I commended his zeal, and that deservedly, for he seemed a very honest and conscientious man.

He was referring to a charge against the lord chief justice of the common pleas, which was found by the committee on investigation to be groundless. In 1732, when a bill enabling the Charitable Corporation to raise new capital was before Parliament, Egmont learned that Hughes had complained to the directors of the corporation of being ‘ill used by them’, in having ‘no shares given him for being for the bill’.HMC Egmont Diary, i. 42, 45, 46, 51, 243; O. C. Williams, Clerical Organization of the House of Commons, 325 seq.

He died in debt 26 Jan. 1734, his widow renouncing the executorship of his will to his principal creditor.PCC 35 Ockham.