HOWARD, Philip Henry (1801-1883), of 4 Duke Street, London of Corby Castle, Cumberland

Howard, the second English-born Catholic to sit in the post-emancipation Commons, was the eldest son of Henry Howard, owner of the Corby Castle estate in Cumberland and a kinsman of the dukes of Norfolk.The first was his kinsman Henry Howard, 13th duke of Norfolk, MP for Horsham, 1829-1832, and West Sussex, 1832-1841: HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 731-3; R.S. Ferguson, Cumberland and Westmoreland MPs from the Restoration to the Reform Bill of 1867 (1871), 385-6. Excluded from the universities on religious grounds, he was tutored privately and at Stonyhurst. Howard was elected to Parliament as Whig member for Carlisle at the 1830 general election, and quickly established himself as a vocal supporter of Irish Catholics and backed Grey’s ministry on Reform.HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 733-5. Throughout his two decades in the Commons, he remained an outspoken advocate for the rights of Roman Catholics, and a common theme in his interventions was that the tenor of public debate regarding Catholicism needed to be elevated.

Following a canvass in which his Catholicism and refusal to support the ballot met with a hostile reception, Howard was returned for Carlisle as a Liberal at the 1832 general election.Morning Post, 13 Dec. 1832. A steady attender, he generally supported Grey’s ministry, but voted against the Irish coercion bill.Parliamentary Test Book (1835), 85. Drawing on the fact that his family had ‘for centuries ... been debarred by a very few words in an oath from the honour of a seat’ in the Commons, he called for Catholic members to be completely relieved from the oath, 11 Mar. 1834.

Howard was re-elected unopposed at the 1835 and 1837 general elections. He divided for the Whig opposition’s amendment to the address, 26 Feb. 1835, and for Irish church appropriation, 2 Apr. 1835, and thereafter loyally supported Melbourne’s second administration on most major issues, including its reform of Irish tithes, 3 June 1836, 15 May 1838. He was particularly supportive of the ministry’s municipal reform bill, criticising the Lords’ opposition, 31 Aug., 7 Sept. 1835, and backed Lord John Russell’s opposition to extending the county franchise to £10 occupiers, declaring that ‘if there were no other reason for inducing him to stand by the noble lord on this occasion, he should find it in this, that he coveted not the ignominy of deserting his friends’, 4 June 1839. A proponent of the equalization of the sugar duties, 22 June 1836, but wary of the effects free trade would have on British corn growers, 20 Mar. 1838, he commended the government for ‘pursuing a middle course’ on the corn law issue, 14 May 1841. Unsurprisingly, he supported the Maynooth grant, arguing that ‘it scarcely became those who came into possession of splendid edifices ready built for them to grudge to the Roman Catholics who raised them, so paltry a sum’, 30 July 1838.

Following a fractious campaign in which he championed the record of Melbourne’s late ministry, Howard was returned at the head of the poll at the 1841 general election.Morning Chronicle, 2 July 1841; Northern Star, 3 July 1841. Although his attendance thereafter was unreliable, in debate he vociferously defended the civil and religious liberties of Catholics. Arguing that ‘the Roman Catholic members’ of Parliament ‘had been more liberal than the Protestants’, he pressed for the continuation of the Maynooth grant, 29 July 1842, called for a greater Catholic presence on the board of commissioners for Irish charitable donations, 1 Aug. 1844, and criticised a proposal to ensure that office holders in Irish colleges take a declaration of faith, stating that ‘he did not think the cause of religion would be a gainer by its adoption’, 7 July 1845. In a passionate speech, he described the Peel ministry’s arms (Ireland) bill as ‘a tyrannical enactment’, deploring the ‘animus’ of the government towards Ireland, 16 June 1843, but his attempt to confine the operation of the bill to ‘fire-arms’ came to nothing, 13 July 1843. Clearly, the general tenor of debate concerning Irish issues exasperated Howard, who, in one particularly charged contribution, lamented being surrounded by ‘gentlemen who had lately on the hustings at public meetings indulged in epithets towards their Catholic fellow subjects, calculated to embitter the feelings which existed between Catholics and Protestants’, 25 Feb. 1846.

During Peel’s ministry Howard generally followed Russell into the division lobby, voting against the reintroduction of income tax, 13 Apr. 1842, and for the redress of Irish grievances, 12 July 1843. An advocate of a fixed duty on grain, he pressed the government to offer preferential duties on corn imported from the colonies, 26 May 1843, 28 May 1845, and voted against repeal, 26 June 1844, 10 June 1845. He subsequently accepted Peel’s case for repeal, but urged agriculturalists to engage with the government to achieve modifications that would ensure the ‘shock consequent upon the change [was] less sudden and violent’, 27 Jan. 1846. He withdrew his planned motion to extend the period of protection to 1851 to ‘give colonies and Canada time to prepare for change’, believing that immediate repeal would ‘meet the wants of the Irish people’, 6 Mar 1846. He voted for repeal, 15 May 1846. Howard also modified his views on factory legislation. He initially opposed the ten hours factory bill, insisting that such changes should be brought in by general agreement amongst the manufacturers rather than by legislative enactment, 29 Jan. 1846, before stating that the ‘opinions ... of the working classes’ had convinced him to support the measure, 10 Feb. 1847.

Defeated at the Carlisle election of 1847, which was overturned on petition, Howard was returned in second place at the subsequent double-by election of March 1848. A poor attender in his final Parliament, he devoted his energies to opposing the Russell ministry’s ecclesiastical titles bill, which proposed to make it a criminal offence for anyone outside the established church to use a territorial episcopal title.Howard was present for only 27 out of 219 divisions in the 1849 session: Hampshire Telegraph, 20 Oct. 1849. His select committee service was also limited during Peel’s ministry. He is known to have sat on committees on the coalwhippers bill and the courts of law and equity: PP 1843 (532), xi. 25; PP 1845 (608), xii. 6. During his parliamentary career he is also known to have sat on select committees on the ventilation of the House of Commons and on the law of mortmain: PP 1835 (583), xviii. 38; PP 1852 (493), xiii. 40. In an impassioned defence of Catholic civil and religious liberties, Howard, who stated that he was ‘unwilling to appear to shrink from the defence of his faith in the hour of peril’, insisted that the Pope, in wishing to establish a hierarchy of bishops in Britain, had ‘neither usurped nor encroached upon the rights of the Crown’ and labelled the bill as the most ‘wanton and arrogant aggression and interference with the private rights of property’ he had witnessed since entering the House, 12 Feb. 1851. He subsequently protested against the ‘imputation that Roman Catholics of England ... claimed by the institution of the hierarchy any temporal authority’, 25 Mar. 1851, and in a masterful speech which detailed the history of the temporal power of the Pope in England, he launched a scathing attack on Russell, arguing that ‘it was not the friends of liberty, but the friends of intolerance, who wished the bill to pass’, 15 May 1851. However, despite numerous interventions to delay a vote on the bill, 19 May 1851, his protests came to nothing. Undeterred, he maintained his support for the Maynooth grant, and in one of his final recorded speeches, he claimed that those who signed the petitions against the grant did so ‘not from malice, but from ignorance; many who were occupied in daily toil had doubtless taken this step without adequate information’, 27 May 1852.

Following the dissolution in 1852, Howard, who believed that his outspoken criticism of the ecclesiastical titles bill had made his return impossible, made way for Sir James Graham.Ferguson, Cumberland and Westmoreland MPs, 274-5; C.S. Parker, Life and letters of Sir James Graham, 1792-1861 (1907), ii. 155-6. Thereafter he largely withdrew from public life, and spent the majority of his time on the Warwickshire estate of Foxcote, which his wife, who predeceased him, had inherited from her uncle Major Francis Canning.HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 733-5. Howard died at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight in January 1883. He left estate valued at £94 7s. 10d.England and Wales, National Probate Calendar, Index of wills and administration, 1861-1941, 10 Apr. 1883. He was succeeded by his eldest son Philip John Canning Howard (1835-1924).Morning Post, 3 Jan. 1883; The Times, 3 Jan. 1883. His family papers and correspondence are held at Cumbria Record Office.Cumbria RO (Carlisle), Howard of Corby Castle mss.