It was in 1790 that Curwen assumed the name to which his marriage to his cousin had been a passport, bringing him an established estate with collieries worth over £5,000 p.a. and, in local politics, the championship of the independent and anti-Lowther party which drew its weight from the interests of the Dukes of Portland and Norfolk in Cumberland. The latter sponsored his return for Carlisle, where he was defeated in 1790 but, as in the preceding Parliament, seated on petition.
Curwen, who joined the Whig Club on 6 Nov. 1786, had vacillated from Pitt to Fox during the Regency crisis—nor was he ever, by his own later confession ‘what is called a good party man’—but he was one of those opinionated stalwarts, like Thomas William Coke I and Charles Callis Western, whose independence found readiest expression in alignment with the opposition. Thus on 12 Apr. 1791 he voted with the latter for Grey’s Oczakov resolutions. The same month he was listed a supporter of repeal of the Test Act in Scotland. He was a founder member of the Friends of the People, but seceded with five other Whig members in June 1792 in protest against the admission of the Jacobins Cartwright and Cooper.
Curwen’s acquiescence in the war, qualified as it was, soon atrophied. He voted for Maitland’s motion for an inquiry into its conduct, 10 Apr. 1794, for Sheridan’s motion to limit émigré enlistment, 16 Apr., and on 29 Apr. came out against the Prussian subsidy, in so far as it involved Britain in allied interference in the internal affairs of France, a change of policy which he could not condone and would henceforward oppose. He was teller for the call of the House. He also opposed the suspension of habeas corpus, 17 May 1794. On 30 May he supported Fox’s, on 30 Dec. Wilberforce’s, on 26 Jan. and 6 Feb. 1795 Grey’s and on 27 May 1795 Wilberforce’s motions against the war, while on 5 Jan. 1795 he voted, on 22 Jan. presented a controversial and dubious Carlisle petition against and next day both spoke and voted against the suspension of habeas corpus, with its ‘detestable system of spyism’, which exacerbated the popular ‘disbelief of public virtue’. He did not think that the rich, or the crown, had sufficiently contributed to the war effort, 19 Feb. 1795, and, while he supported public payment of the Prince of Wales’s debts, 14 May, he thought that the Prince and ‘those who govern’ generally should learn from events in France ‘to be cautious of their conduct, and not abuse the power they are entrusted with’. On 15 June he was teller for the amendment on the subject. On 10 June he voted against the Austrian loan. After voting for Fox’s amendment to the address in favour of peace, 29 Oct. 1795, he voted against or was teller against the legislation on sedition, 10, 25 Nov. 1795, leaving the House with Fox at the committee stage, and on 15 Feb. 1796 voted for peace negotiations. On 10 Mar. he voted for an inquiry into the nation’s wartime financial burden. Meanwhile he had found an outlet for himself in an ineffectual bid to reform and virtually abolish the Game Laws, 16 Feb., 4 Mar. 1796. He was by now reckoned as ‘standing pretty forward in the second class of speakers’ for opposition.
Curwen’s hostility to the government remained unabated in the Parliament of 1796. At its outset, opposing the increase of the military, he claimed there was no proven necessity for it: ‘I do not think there are any disaffected men in the country: and if any enemies exist, I must look for the traitors near the throne’. Likewise, on 31 Oct., he accused ministers of acting on ‘the system of confidence’, without spelling out their case for preparing against invasion and without reference to ‘the middling and lower classes of the people’, who knew ‘the real situation of the country’. If the war must now continue, he would not obstruct it, but peace must bring ‘great and radical reforms’ to compensate for it. On 8 Dec. he was teller for Fox’s motion hostile to the Austrian subsidy. On 28 Feb. 1797 he characterized Pitt’s Bank inquiry as ‘another rash endeavour ... to delude the country’ and on 1 Mar., while conceding that the country had no choice but to support the minister in this crisis, he supported Fox’s motion to inquire into the stoppage of cash payments by the Bank. On 17 Mar. he successfully moved for a call of the House, with defaulters to be taken into custody, on the report of the finance committee. He stood behind Fox in debate on the state of Ireland, 23 Mar., the Bank restriction, 24 Mar., and the imperial loan, 1 May 1797, and on 5 May criticized the crown for not providing from the privy purse for the princess royal’s dowry. He felt obliged to concur in the censure on the delay in seamen’s pay that had provoked mutiny, 10 May, and on 19 May he supported the opposition motion for the dismissal of ministers who had failed either to avert war or achieve peace, involving the country in ‘a war of kings against the people’. It was a total change of system, not men that was required: in Ireland, for instance, Catholic relief and parliamentary reform were necessary. On 26 May Curwen voted for Grey’s motion in favour of parliamentary reform. In his preceding speech he had stated that he believed Members should listen to and obey the instructions of their constituents. On 26 June he harangued his Carlisle constituents at a meeting convened to move for the dismissal of ministers and, after urging the need for parliamentary reform as a prerequisite for national confidence and vigour, announced his secession from Parliament in accordance with Fox’s example.
Curwen was present to oppose Pitt’s triple tax assessment, 24 Nov. 1797, noting that ministers’ tolerance of innovations in the field of taxation far exceeded that shown in such matters as reform. At the same time he complained that the war could no longer be justified as one either of necessity or indemnity: Britain’s Dutch ally had been ‘plundered’ by her and opportunities for peace rejected by a refusal to make any sacrifices. On 8 Dec. he denounced the tax proposals as a crippling burden. Subsequently, Curwen’s agony abated. On 8 May 1798, while reserving his notion of the incapacity of ministers and of the necessity of reform for ‘the proper time’, he conceded that ‘the infamous conduct of the French’ must first be ‘baffled and confounded’; and on 25 May he supported Pitt’s naval manning bill for security reasons ‘and to expedite peace’. In after years he admitted that his reforming zeal in the 1790s had not been matched by popular demand, but he never ceased to deplore Pitt’s record in wartime.
There is no evidence that Curwen attended the House in 1799 and 1800 but, like other Foxite Whigs, he returned in March 1801 and voted for Grey’s motion on the state of the nation, 25 Mar., and opposed the renewed suspension of civil liberties, 14, 20 Apr. A further minority vote of 22 Apr. was in retrospective criticism of Pitt’s ministry. He bore no animus against the Addington administration: on the contrary, he subsequently praised it for a combination of economy and vigour and for a manifest bid ‘to rule in the hearts of the people’, in which he thought it succeeded. His only known minority vote after April 1801 was characteristically in support of the motion of thanks for the removal of Pitt from office, 7 May 1802. A week later he spoke briefly in support of the peace treaty. He secured his unopposed return for Carlisle soon afterwards for the first time. On 4 Mar. 1803 he spoke and was teller against inquiry into the Prince of Wales’s debts. He was a protagonist of non-commissioned as against field officers for the volunteer service in the debates of 10 and 12 Dec. 1803, and in March 1804 gave his views on the regulation of the volunteers. Sheridan at this time counted Curwen as one of his supporters in a ‘remonstrance’ against the coalition of Fox with Pitt against Addington, and he told Fox as much, 21 Mar. 1804, speaking apparently for the Duke of Norfolk too:
Curwen did not appear in the minority lists against Pitt’s second ministry until the division on war with Spain, 12 Feb. 1805, but there is no doubt that he was hostile to it. On 8 Apr. and 12 June 1805 he was in the majorities against Melville and on 10 May he defended St. Vincent’s character at the Admiralty against Jeffery’s motion. As a Manxman by descent, he was an uncompromising opponent of the Duke of Atholl’s pretensions in the Isle of Man and the public money spent on them, May-June 1805.
Curwen was not a conspicuous attender in support of the Whigs in power in 1806. On 9 May he ‘very reluctantly’ opposed the iron duty bill, the indirect effects of which must be so mischievous that he proposed in its place a tax on all horses, though he had opposed the tax on agricultural horses last session. He was disappointed in his hope to come in for the county that year, failing to frustrate Lord Morpeth’s pretensions by a stratagem. On 28 Dec. he informed Viscount Howick that his wife’s health had prevented his attendance, but he hoped to resume it.
Curwen appeared in the minority on the address, 26 June 1807, though he warned ‘his honourable friends below him’ four days later that ‘he was not one of those who would defend any man through thick and thin’. He was, however, ‘at least thus far independent, that he had never accepted a favour from any minister, nor ever would’. This was apropos of the abolition of sinecures, which he further supported, on a selective basis, 7 July, as ‘a friend to the democratic part of the constitution’ against corruption and the excessive power of the crown. On 5 June he had written despondently to Grey:
From the transactions of the last two months I despair of ever seeing the corrupt influence of the crown reduced. The people whose interest should lead them to give their assistance in curtailing it are more disposed to increase the power of the crown and the King’s favour will support these ministers or worse if they can be found.
When Curwen next made his presence known in the House, 11 May 1808, he opposed the appointment of Dr Duigenan to the Irish privy council. He complained: ‘if the people had energy, the ministers had none. There was a secret influence in the cabinet of this country, which Mr Pitt would have spurned.’ Eight days later, in leading the unsuccessful opposition to Col. Stanley’s poor settlement bill, which made him unpopular at Carlisle, he proposed the encouragement of Friendly Societies as the solution to the problem of the poor rates. On 27 Feb. 1809 he gave a conditional support to the corn distillery prohibition bill, with reference to the prevailing scarcity of grain in the north of England.
Curwen had great hopes that the misconduct of army patronage by the Duke of York and his mistress would stir up public opinion against corruption and he favoured the duke’s removal, as a prelude to a general reform of abuses which would render Jacobinism superfluous, 8 Mar. 1809. On 27 Mar., favouring the ministerial bill to remodel the local militia, he claimed that ‘the people would not grudge the money necessary for placing the country in a state of the fullest security, if real abuses were reformed’. On 25 Apr. 1809 he voted for the motion deploring ministerial corruption. All this served as a preface to his parliamentary reform bill, which without consulting anybody except Coke of Norfolk, he introduced on 4 May 1809, and which was limited, as its title stated, to ‘better securing the independence and purity of Parliament, by preventing the procuring or obtaining seats in Parliament by corrupt practices, and likewise more effectually to prevent bribery’. It proposed an oath for candidates and electors against bribery (a measure suggested long before by Blackstone); prosecution of vendors of seats; and extension of the bribery law to any candidate or his agent who gave, and any elector who accepted, a bribe for his vote at any time before, during or after an election. While Curwen’s main aim was to restore the tarnished reputation of the House in popular esteem, he also claimed that it would strengthen the landed interest against the encroachments of the monied, mercantile interest in rural constituencies and thereby produce a House ‘more pacifically disposed’, since the merchants had a vested interest in war.
Curwen’s reform bill was backed by the Whig leader Ponsonby but, as Charles Williams Wynn observed, it was snagged by the widening gap between the ‘moderate’ and ‘violent’ parts of the opposition, the moderates supporting Curwen’s proposals and the extremists Madocks’s line of bringing charges of corruption against Perceval and Castlereagh.
Curwen’s Act made political leaders cautious: Lord Liverpool, who had favoured it from the start, claimed during the general election of 1812:
Mr Curwen’s bill has put an end to all money transactions between government and the supposed proprietors of boroughs. Our friends, therefore, who look for the assistance of government must be ready to start for open boroughs, where the general influence of government, combined with a reasonable expense on their own part, may afford them a fair chance of success.
He instructed Peel the Irish secretary, ‘with respect to all official persons, it has been thought necessary, that they should be elected for places, to which no imputation can attach under Curwen’s Act’. On the other side, Earl Grey would not himself indulge in any negotiation for the purchase of seats for Whigs, with Curwen’s Act hanging over his head. But borough mongers continued to ply their trade with impunity and, as Brougham remarked, the sale of seats in defiance of Curwen’s Act was akin to usury, ‘which people are apt to think discreditable, though there is but one opinion as to the usury laws’. Curwen admitted its failure as early as 1810, when he was willing to bring forward a new bill, if assured of support, and was in 1821 prepared to admit that the Act was ‘totally inefficacious, and had not been acted upon in any one case’.
Curwen eschewed ‘party feelings’ when, after missing the opening of the session, he opposed the Portuguese subsidy, 9 Mar. 1810, seeing no prospect of success in the Peninsula. On 7 June previous he had accused ministers of niggardliness in their aid to Austria: now he doubted if they could be trusted with subsidization of allies. He was a member of the finance committee proposed by Henry Bankes. He deplored the ‘disgrace of Walcheren’ and voted with opposition on the conduct of that expedition on 5 and 30 Mar. 1810.
Curwen was a champion of the agricultural interest against the West India sugar planters and against the manufacturers on whom government had misguidedly lavished commercial credit in March 1811. On 25 Mar. he supported Charles Williams Wynn’s election bribery bill, premised though it was on the failure of his own reform Act: refusing to rally to extra-parliamentary agitation for constitutional reform, he wished to put an ‘extinguisher’ on extremists by supporting every ‘temperate and just’ measure on the subject. Although he was absent from the division on the state of Ireland, 4 Feb. 1812, he indicated on 13 Feb. that he favoured inquiry, in a speech otherwise devoted to condemnation of the effects of the orders in council on Anglo-American relations. He also condemned ministers for the framework bill, 18 Feb., and for the employment of foreign troops, 23 Feb. He voted against Col. McMahon’s sinecure office, 24 Feb., as also against McMahon’s appointment as private secretary to the Regent, 14 Apr. Ministers turned a deaf ear to his prophecies of grain scarcity and to his threats of moving for inquiry into the current high price of it, 10 Apr. He paired in favour of Catholic relief, 24 Apr. 1812.
Curwen surprisingly ceded defeat at Carlisle in the election of 1812. His local unpopularity was assigned to his seduction of the daughter of Bishop Watson of Llandaff at Workington, which by one account ‘certainly lost him his seat in Parliament’.
It soon became clear that he had missed the sound of his voice at Westminster: he spoke twice as frequently as before and attended and voted far more steadily with opposition. On 20 Mar. 1816 he presented a petition from Cumberland for the relief of agricultural distress and, in committee on it on 28 Mar., opined that ‘trade and agriculture are so united in their interests that the ruin of one must involve the destruction of the other’. He called for bounties on corn exports, storage of grain against scarcity, tithe and Poor Law reform, remission of taxes on salt and husbandry horses, increased currency circulation and loans to agriculturalists. On 4 Apr. he called for the abolition of the wartime malt duties forthwith and on 9 May supported the repeal of the leather tax. As a corollary to all this, he called for government retrenchment, 3 Apr., and advocated it constantly thereafter. On 24 Apr., finding that government had no proposal to offer for the reform of the Poor Laws, he undertook to supply one. He moved for information calculated to expose the harm done by the tithe system, 8 May, supported a committee on it, 22 May, and advocated the reform of the Game Laws, 20 May 1816 and again on 12 Feb. 1817, though no subsequent proposal satisfied him. On 28 May 1816 he brought in his proposal for Poor Law reform instigated, he stated, by pressure from his constituents, who were overwhelmed by the influx of Scots and Irish in the north west of England: he advocated ‘a total change of system’ based on the propagation of the benevolent insurance society that he had himself patronized in Workington. It involved a national benefit society with 14,000 committees. On 21 Feb. 1817 he successfully moved for a committee to inquire into the subject.
In airing his views in favour of retrenchment and reform in the debate on the address, 29 Jan. 1817, Curwen deplored the readiness of ministers to ignore the patient distress of ‘the working classes’, whom he had always ‘loved and admired’, in contrast to the unseemly antics of the metropolitan mob. He was a friend of petitions to the House and particularly supported that of 26 Feb. against the suspension of habeas corpus, for which he saw no necessity, claiming next day in committee that, as in 1795, it was a bid to frustrate parliamentary reform which ‘all honest men, from one end of the country to the other’ wished for. He promised opposition ‘at every stage’ and likewise opposed the seditious meetings bill, in which he unsuccessfully objected to the clause prohibiting public meetings within a mile of Westminster, 28 Mar. On 20 May he supported Burdett’s motion for parliamentary reform and he objected to the secret committee on sedition, 5 June, and the use of spies by government, 16 June. He advocated the repeal of the salt duties, 25 Apr. 1817, and before the end of the session, assisted by his friend Baron Wood, he attempted to introduce a tithe exemption bill, which he renewed on 19 Feb. 1818. It was lost on 16 Mar.
Curwen again appealed for retrenchment in the debate on the address, 28 Jan. 1818, and the same day asked government to take Poor Law reform under their wing, as he despaired of carrying it otherwise—they refused and the committee on it was revived on 4 Feb., but Curwen disliked Sturges Bourne’s ensuing Poor Law amendment bill, which he criticized at length by reference to his own ideas on 9 Feb. and 17 May 1819. On 14 Apr. 1818 he opposed the free export of wool which would involve ‘taking the bread from thousands’. He opposed the marriage grants to the royal dukes for reasons of economy and likewise the purchase of such cultural luxuries as Dr Burney’s library, April 1818. He almost invariably opposed Sir Robert Peel’s attempts to regulate child labour in the cotton factories.
Curwen, who in 1820 obtained the county seat he had long been ambitious for and had offered to contest in 1818, remained an independent critic of the government. While he achieved some minor successes in securing the repeal of unpopular taxes, his larger schemes came to nothing. His provincial bluntness had always prevented his acceptance by the aristocratic Whigs, who were doubtless startled at his venturing into the House in the guise of a Cumbrian labourer to deplore agricultural distress; although he had affinities with other country Whigs, ‘his eyes ... steadily fixed upon ministers, and his ears turned towards the people’, he did not act in concert with them. Only Perceval’s insecure administration in 1809 felt obliged to come to terms with his proposals, and his reform bill of that year, though it retained his name, was muzzled by the minister. He had no ability to relate his notions for legislation to practical administration. When he took up Poor Law reform in 1817, John Rickman, one of the clerks of the House commented:
Curwen will be the ruin of any Poor Law improvement. Such an ignorant long-tongued man to be chairman of a committee and who will work in it under his name and banner? Yet many members are very eager and very well informed: but Curwen must ruin all...
H. Lonsdale, Curwen (1867), 58; J. Wilson, Biog. Index (1808), 123; O. Williams, Life and Letters of John Rickman (1912), 192.
Curwen died 11 Dec. 1828. His obituary gave him credit for having imparted through his ‘soiling system’ ‘an impulse to agricultural exertions all over the kingdom’.