A ‘yellow-faced little man’, Spooner, with his colleague Charles Newdegate, was one of the leaders of the ultra-Protestant ‘quasi-religious party’ in the 1850s and was best known as the ‘able and indefatigable but unsuccessful opponent of the grant to the College of Maynooth’.
In 1791, Spooner’s father Isaac, a ‘stern Tory magistrate’ with interests in land and industry, had established a bank in Birmingham with Matthias Attwood, and their sons, Richard and Thomas, joined the firm after completing their schooling, in the former’s case at Rugby.
Like Attwood, Spooner was concerned about the government’s plan to resume cash payments (making paper notes convertible into gold), but unlike his friend does not seem to have published any pamphlets or letters on the issue. However, through his conversations with Attwood, Spooner undoubtedly contributed to the development of the ‘Birmingham school’ and for the rest of his life remained faithful to its tenets.
The lack of parliamentary support for currency reform led Spooner to contest a number of constituencies in the 1820s, although he was also motivated by personal ambition.
Attwood thought Spooner had been ‘seduced by a knot of Tories’, whilst later Liberal critics implied that repeated electoral defeats had ‘led him to reconsider his principles’.
In 1835, the Banker’s Circular remarked that ‘few people are so well informed on all subjects relating to Banks, Currency, and Agriculture, as Mr. Spooner’.
After declining to stand in 1837, Spooner was again defeated at Birmingham at the 1841 general election after offering ‘unvaried, unchanging, and unchangeable opposition’ to the Whig government, although, like them, he favoured a low fixed duty on corn.
In the House, Spooner joined his Radical colleague George Frederick Muntz in criticising the new poor law, supporting currency reform, advocating a progressive property tax, and opposing the 1845 Maynooth college bill.
In partnership with Newdegate, Spooner was one of the parliamentary leaders of ultra-Protestantism, using the National Club as a base from which to plot resistance to an 1848 bill to establish diplomatic relations with Rome.
After being re-elected in second place at the 1852 general election, Spooner resumed his campaign, but his motion for repeal of the 1845 Maynooth College Act was defeated 162-192, 23 Feb. 1853.
Considering the Crimean War ‘just and necessary’, Spooner nevertheless doubted that it could be carried on under the 1844 Bank Charter Act.
Unchallenged at the 1857 and 1859 general elections, Spooner’s anti-Maynooth campaign suffered from declining momentum in the late 1850s, with his annual motions now regarded as ‘one of the standing jokes of the House of Commons’ and ‘ridiculous & impractical’.
The old man is evidently breaking up. He could scarcely read his papers – even with the aid of an enormous pair of coloured spectacles.
Trelawny diaries, 38 (29 Apr. 1858).
Although his hostility to the endowment remained undiminished, Spooner’s almost complete blindness forced him to relinquish the leadership of the anti-Maynooth campaign to George Hampden Whalley, MP for Peterborough, in 1861, and he retired from public life after the 1862 session, although he remained an MP until his death in November 1864.
Regardless of his political and religious views, Spooner had been a diligent constituency MP, and even after his removal to North Warwickshire, ‘for all purposes of Ministerial or Parliamentary business Birmingham enjoyed all the advantages of a third Member’.
In the Birmingham town hall, on the county hustings, and in the House of Commons, he was always the same – frank, out-spoken, courageous, manly and invariably good-humoured.
Ibid.
His personal estate, sworn under £5,000, passed to his two sons Richard (d. 1867), an Indian civil servant, and Isaac, vicar of Edgbaston, neither of whom played any part in their father’s old bank, which collapsed in 1865.