‘Lord Ossulston is insignificant and diminutive in his appearance, and aims at thinking and judging for himself’: thus Lady Holland in 1799. ‘Little O’ joined Brooks’s Club on 3 May of that year. Before the election of 1802 he informed his kinsman Charles Grey of his aspirations to a county seat for Northumberland, when the moment was ripe. He proceeded to Paris, where he was not noticed by the Whig leader Fox, and returned in December 1802, ‘abusing everything at Paris like a pickpocket’. His father had meanwhile secured him a seat in Parliament as the Duke of Norfolk’s guest for Steyning.
Ossulston voted with Fox against the Nottingham election bill, 3 May 1803. On 27 Feb. 1804 he spoke ‘at some length’, but inaudibly, on the volunteer consolidation bill. The Duke of Northumberland had not taken his offer to raise volunteers seriously. The reporters believed he was favourable to the bill (their deafness to his speeches recurred frequently), but on 6 Mar. he secured an amendment. Moreover, he was in the opposition minorities of 7, 14 and 19 Mar., and in those of 10, 16, 23 and 25 Apr. 1804 which heralded Addington’s downfall; and was listed a Foxite in all three party lists that year. But his only contribution in debate was to lead the opposition to the extension of the franchise at Aylesbury, 13 Apr.; in doing so he disclaimed hostility to parliamentary reform, but (with the Cavendish interest in mind) to this mode of effecting it. He conceded defeat on 7 May by 154 votes to 126. He was then about to marry a French ward of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, but differences with his father led to a threat to settle on an estate in America and postponed the match for two years.
Ossulston presented Fox with ‘more trouble ... than the whole cabinet’ when he came to power in 1806. ‘Fox had openly expressed a wish that he might have offered him some place, and little O’s vanity made it into a promise.’ The Duchess of Devonshire interceded with Fox for him. The sequence of events was bewildering:
First he lost a lord of the Admiralty by being at Cambridge; next he was named for White Stick which he hates, and which was taken away for Lord William Russell; then came a vacancy in the Admiralty which he was really appointed to and the patent made out, and the Duke of Bedford claims it, for Lord William ...
So Russell got the Admiralty and Ossulston the Household place, ‘a mere cypher about the Court’. His ‘pride and hesitation’ vexed Fox, who urged that in due course he might become a lord of trade or of the India Board and informed the duchess, ‘I am ashamed of myself for going so far as to press him. I have my pride as well as others.’ Ossulston let his father decide for acceptance.
Ossulston needed a seat for the next Parliament; indeed he ‘must be ruined if he were out of Parliament’, as Lady Bessborough complained when she realized that the Duke of Devonshire would prefer Ossulston to her son Duncannon for Knaresborough—the duke also provided a dowry of £10,000 for Lady Ossulston.
Lady Harriet Cavendish, who found Ossulston mildly exasperating, reported that he forgot ‘even his politics’ in 1807 on the birth of a daughter and that he accepted with alacrity his father-in-law’s introduction of him to the exiled French Bourbon princes, ‘meaning his empressement to be a small satire upon the country for its backwardness in this respect’. But when he threw himself into opposition to the Portland ministry, she commented ‘his tirades against ministers are not amusing and leave him scarcely breath to splutter out "it’s a shame, it’s a blot upon the country" at the end of each of them’.
He soon associated himself with the more advanced Whigs.
Listed a ‘thick and thin’ adherent to the Whigs, he emerged, 27 Mar., 5 Apr. 1810, as a champion of Sir Francis Burdett in debtae and on 18 Apr. called for inquiry into the death of an ‘inoffending individual’ at the hands of the soldiery in the Burdettite disturbances in London. Lady Harriet reported:
Little O. was obliged to explain his politics to the mob, who were going to swallow him, I believe. He is so factious that if he was not so small and inarticulate he might some day or other get into mischeif. As it is, he is never heard and scarcely seen. So passe, passe petit bonhomme, very harmless and very ridiculous.
Letters of Countess Granville, i. 3.
He voted for sinecure and parliamentary reform, 17, 21 May 1810. He opposed the Regebcy restrictions silently and was one of the Prince’s Brighton Pavillion gang in 1811, when he was courted by the Freinds of Constitutional Reform and attended the London livery reform dinner, 3 May;
In the ensuing session he spoke in the House only twice: in defence of his father’s conduct as postmaster general, 28 Jan., and in an unsuccessful bid to promote a new theatre in London, 20 Mar.—in this he failed again on 28 Apr. 1813, altogether inaudible. Out of the House, he was overheard: on 12 May 1812, Fremantle informed Lord Grenville, ‘Lord Ossulston’s speech at the reform meeting with Mr Waithman in the chair, was of the most gross description’.
Ossulston’s re-election for Knaresborough in 1812 caused considerable embarrassment to the Whig leaders. The 6th Duke of Devonshire was pledged, by his father’s word, to return him again if he could find no seat elsewhere. Lord Grey had induced him to bide his time as to Northumberland and, in doing so, only increased the reluctance of the independent interest to adopt him, in view of his Burdettite proclivities.
Ossulston continued to act with the opposition dissidents in the Parliament of 1812. He supported Burdett’s and Creevey’s motions; opposed the East India Company trade monolpoly, 14 June, and Christian missions to India, 1 July 1813. He invariably voted for Catholic relief when present. He attempted, on his own account, to secure a guarantee of amnesty for Frenchmen of all political persuasions under the peace treaty, 21 Mar. 1814, but, as usual, no notice was taken of him in the House. He voted against the expulsion of Lord Cochrane, 5 July 1814. Beyond a brief observation, 24 Feb. 1815, he avoided the question of agricultural protection. He voted against the transfer of Genoa, 21 Feb. 1815, and against the deportation of Spanish Liberals from Gibralter, 1 Mar.; after a week’s sick leave, 28 Apr., he was lost to sight until 31 May when he paired the opposition on the Regent’s extraordinary expenditure. A month later he opposed the Duke of Cumberland’s establishment bill throughout. He had been ‘most dangerously ill’ and horrified by Whitbread’s suicide.
‘Lord Ossulston is come to town for the winter full of eagerness, not to say hopes’, reported Tierney, 4 Jan. 1817.
The Duke of Devonshire has given Ossulston notice to quit and in a very unworthy manner in my opinion—complaining of [Henry Grey] Bennet’s abuse of Castlereagh—and he wished to have Members who would vote with him in every tittle as he pleased!
Brougham mss, Brougham to Grey, Wed. [19 Mar. 1817].
In consequence, Grey promised to recommend Ossulston for the first vacancy that he could influence. This caused embarrassment because Brougham’s intention to vacate a seat of Lord Darlington’s in which he wanted Sir James Mackintosh to be his successor became known; but Grey stood by his promise—and failed in his recommendation.
After all, Lord Tankerville does no great thing in paying their debt’s, for he makes them pay the interest of the money he borrows, and their income is reduced to £600 a year, poor little people, and what is worse they must live always with him.
Chatsworth mss, Lady Morpeth to Devonshire, 29 May; Carlisle mss, Mrs Lamb to Lady Morpeth, 10 July [1817].
A visit of Ossulston’s to Berwick in March 1818 was intended to pave the way for his standing there, which faute de mieux he did, only to be defeated. Nothing came of last-minute hopes of a seat of Lord Darlington’s.
The amiable Lord Ossulston was maddened with rage, at finding that the Duke of Devonshire refused to bring him in; and forgetting all his former obligations, he revenged himself, by persuading Sir J[ohn] A[ubrey] to give any second vote to Cavendish.
Buckingham, Regency, ii. 263.
Ossulston also refused to support John Cam Hobhouse for the Westminster by-election later that year, consoling him with the reflection that he preferred him to Douglas Kinnaird.
Ossulston was the only other person thought of, and his situation prevented the possibility of his succeeding. I mean as to pecuniary affairs. Besides he is not formed by nature (or indeed art) to stand a contested election.
Grey mss, Lambton to Grey, 12 Feb., [1819].
He took it well and went to France. Earl Fitzwilliam would not consider Ossulston for a vacancy at Peterborough later that year, but he won his contest for Berwick in 1820.