Fetherstonhaugh was again returned for Portsmouth on the interest of Sir John Carter in 1790. A member of the Whig Club since 6 Dec. 1784 and a friend of the Prince of Wales, he led a life of fashionable and sporting dissipation and had to be pressed to attend Parliament.
The reassertion of the Admiralty interest at Portsmouth elbowed him out of his seat in 1796, when he wrote to one of his supporters:
The fact is that from the corruption of the times the House of Commons in its present degraded state is such a complete farce that I am quite disgusted with being one of the puppets; as long as there remained a dawn of hope that any good was to be done the prospect would have been too flattering to have retired from, and a sacrifice of time and other amusements have been not only a duty but a pleasure, but I am not sanguine enough to see a possibility of redress from the present complexion of things, and am indignant to the last degree at the insult offered to all people of common sense by that impudent display of love for the constitution in those who have left us only the shadow without the substance.
Fetherstonhaugh mss, draft letter [1796].
In October 1809 there were rumours of his absconding (or even shooting himself) ‘in consequence of discoveries having been made relative to certain practices which are punishable by death as well as with the loss of all society in this country’.