Described by Lord John Manners as ‘a most honest, excellent, mulish prig of a bigot’, Newdegate made his name as a protectionist in the 1840s, but was better known as a prominent ultra-Protestant, who had an increasingly distant relationship with the Conservative party leadership.
At a young age Newdegate had succeeded to the estates of his father and great-uncle in Middlesex and Warwickshire respectively. Newdegate was largely brought up by his mother, who, Disraeli later claimed, ‘spoilt him. She wanted to make a Pitt of him ... but she ... took the wrong way to do it, kept him at home and crammed him’.
He made his first mark in the 1844 session with a series of attacks on Sir Robert Peel’s bank charter bill.
The following year, Newdegate again distinguished himself by his hostility to the Maynooth college bill, contending that what its opponents objected to was ‘nothing more nor less than the Roman Catholic doctrine’.
As whips from 1847, Newdegate and Charles Beresford owed their primary allegiance to Lord Stanley, the protectionist chief in the Lords. Not only were they unwilling to compromise their staunch anti-Catholicism, but, as Manners noted, 13 Dec. 1847, they actively ‘worked for a Religious cry, and determined to merge, perhaps, … Protection in Protestantism’.
I have been warned repeatedly not to trust Disraeli, while I see nothing in his public conduct to justify the want of confidence so many seem to feel. This I conclude is attributable to some circumstances of his earlier life, with which I am not familiar, but have little doubt you are. I can scarcely help believing there must be some foundation for so general an opinion as I have alluded to, and it makes me very uneasy.
Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Disraeli, iii. 120-1.
Much to Disraeli’s relief, Newdegate resigned as whip in March 1850.
They are all incompetent, except Newdegate, & he wd. have the worst chance of all … It is his own fault for tying himself up with such a Socrates [Spooner], for he has many excellent qualities for public life, & is a spirited fellow; but between his mother & Birmingham, the Alcibiades of Warwickshire has been spoiled.
Disraeli to Lord Derby, 1 Sept. 1852, qu. in Disraeli letters, vi. 133. Alcibiades was an Athenian general and politician during the Peloponnesian War.
Between 1849 and 1852, Newdegate published regular critiques of the board of trade’s statistics, which he believed obscured the trade imbalances caused by free trade, especially the export of gold.
Newdegate’s defence of the Protestant constitution rested on a belief in the supremacy of English law and allegiance to the sovereign and was as much political as religious. Thus Newdegate’s real complaint about ‘Papal aggression’ was that politicians and the public had focused on the Pope’s claims to spiritual authority. Much more significant, he argued, 20 Mar. 1851, was that cardinal Wiseman had been sent as a cardinal legate to extend the Papacy’s temporal power.
A regular attender, Newdegate often spoke up to seventy times a session, and, influenced by Spooner, developed a ‘solemn, pompous & bigoted’ style.
How he has improved! Recollecting his reception on many occasions some 20 years ago, I shd. scarcely have believed he could ever have obtained the ear of the House. But time and perseverance, with honesty of purpose & courage, effect much in Parliament as elsewhere.
Ibid., 309 (3 Mar. 1865).
His solemn voice meant that his speeches had a serious air, but one Irish MP wondered whether, ‘notwithstanding the extreme gravity of the hon. Member’s demeanour’, Newdegate actually believed the ‘ridiculous’ conspiracy theories he alleged about Jesuits and convents.
By the early 1860s Newdegate had taken his ‘place below the gangway as an independent member’, and preferred to describe himself as ‘a Tory of the Pittite school’ or an ‘old Whig’ in his public speeches.
Newdegate’s detachment from the party leadership was also reflected in the distinctive position he held on a number of other policies. For anti-Catholic reasons, Newdegate supported Palmerston’s encouragement of Italian nationalism, which he believed would weaken the Pope’s temporal power in the peninsula.
In 1861 Newdegate noted that ‘it was a growing practice for the House to expect the government of the day to introduce almost all legislation of importance’.
Not that Newdegate was opposed to parliamentary reform, and throughout the debates of the late 1850s and 1860s he took a distinctive stance on the issue. As his constituency included Birmingham and Coventry, which he believed gave him an ‘independent power’, unlike most Conservatives, Newdegate opposed the attempt to strip urban freeholders of their county votes in 1859, although he supported the rest of Derby’s reform bill.
Despite his contribution on a wide range of subjects, the defence of Protestantism and the established church remained Newdegate’s central concern in the 1860s, and he was a regular, and sometimes eccentric presence in religious debates. During a convoluted speech by William Gladstone, Trelawny noted that:
Newdegate’s face of ineffable contempt … was a subject of some amusement. He kept tossing his head aside with a jerk, assuming the contortions of a man taking physic, & accompanying his movements with an ironical ‘hear hear’ in tones like those of an old raven. Yet, he is a good & genuine man, anxious to do his duty. All honour to him!
Trelawny diaries, 228 (4 Mar. 1863).
In 1864 and 1865 Newdegate sought to rally anti-Catholics by unsuccessfully proposing an investigation of convents and monasteries.
Newdegate’s campaign against convents, the subject of a 1982 study by Walter Arnstein, continued into the 1870s, and in the following decade he sought to prevent the admission of the atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh.