Coningham has been neglected as an early English socialist, his credentials having been overshadowed by his privileged background, furious rows with the National Gallery, and episodes of erratic behaviour, which culminated in his eventual ostracism for standing against the rising star of the advanced Liberals Henry Fawcett at Brighton in 1868. Described with uncanny foresight by George Eliot in 1851 as ‘a disciple (not yet run mad) of Robert Owen’s’, who was also ‘a gentleman’ and ‘rather aristocratic’, Coningham was the eldest son of an Ulster clergyman with family connections to the West India trade, and the daughter of a Bengal army officer.
Around this date he fell under the spell of his influential cousin John Sterling, the celebrated author and associate of Thomas Carlyle, with whom he also became friends. His correspondence with Sterling exploring ‘the received doctrines on Christianity’, a selection of which he later published, appears to have profoundly shaped his political outlook and interest in social problems.
Between 1843 and 1846 Coningham undertook a series of trips across Europe buying Italian old masters, many of them in Rome and often for a ‘small price’. By 1847, aged just 32, he had assembled what is now recognised as one of the finest collections in nineteenth-century England, most of it purchased ‘on his own initiative, without advice from dealers or other connoisseurs’.
By now he had made his first attempt to enter Parliament. A resident of Brighton’s fashionable Kemptown since the early 1840s, where he lived with his wife, two children, and a dozen servants, in 1847 he had accepted an invitation from the newly established Brighton Liberal Association to come forward as a second Liberal candidate at the general election, and secured the backing of the local Society of Friends (Quakers). On the hustings he eulogised Richard Cobden, cited his support for the secret ballot, triennial parliaments, and the abolition of the rate-paying clauses of the Reform Act, and promised to uphold the interests of workers. After a violent contest he was defeated in third place, amidst allegations that the Liberal and Tory sitting Members had worked in coalition against him.
Adopting a more strident tone at a meeting of the newly established Amalgamated Society of Engineers at Manchester in February 1852, which he chaired, he defended the railway engineers’ ‘right to combine’ against their ‘tyrannical employers’ in protest at overtime and the ‘most noxious and pernicious system of piecework’, adding that ‘the working classes not only paid an enormous proportion of the taxes of this country, but they had to suffer from the monopolies of the aristocracy’. That month he also presided at meetings of the striking railway engineers on the London, Brighton and South Coast railway, of which he subsequently became a director.
Coningham’s eventual return for Brighton at the 1857 general election owed much to his support for Palmerston over the Chinese war. In 1854 he had backed Palmerston’s ‘liberal notions of foreign policy’ in a series of outspoken letters to the press, insisting that the latter’s dismissal by Lord John Russell in 1851 had been ‘a preconcerted coup d’etat’ masterminded by Prince Albert and the Coburg family, whom he accused of ‘unconstitutional interference in the foreign affairs of the country’ for their own ‘Teutonic’ ends, and of suppressing a pamphlet on the affair.
A frequent attender and a regular presence in the lobbies, Coningham initially rallied behind Palmerston, before breaking with him over the conspiracy to murder bill in February 1858. He voted steadily for most radical causes, including the ballot, triennial parliaments, extension of the franchise, and the abolition of church rates, and has been identified among a handful of ‘radical independents’ who regularly divided against the Liberal majority in 1861, most notably on issues of defence.
Coningham’s other contributions included suggestions for saving army expenditure, especially that relating to the manufacture of small arms, a subject on which he had previously undertaken ‘a series of careful experiments’ relating to the conversion of muskets into rifles.
Re-elected for Brighton with a comfortable majority at the ensuing general election, he was present at the meeting of Liberal MPs at Willis’s rooms, 6 June 1859, when he spoke briefly against adopting a hostile policy towards France.
The sun gets hotter, and debates follow suit. Coningham and Osborne have been fighting over Crawley’s case. O. interrupted C. on a supposed point of order. C. doubted whether O. was sober. O. doubted whether C. was sane ... The two combatants damaged themselves and the House.
Hansard, 3 July 1863, vol. 172 cc. 230-40; Trelawny Diaries, 262;
Deeply suspicious of the government’s attitude towards the Confederacy, and their motives in considering to recognise its independence, one of Coningham’s last known speeches, to an inattentive House, was to refute the existence of any sympathy among the British working classes for the Southern States, even in the cotton manufacturing districts, 10 July 1863.
In January 1864 it was reported that Coningham would retire for reasons of ill-health and on 6 Feb. 1864 he vacated his seat, taking the stewardship of Northstead. Satirizing the ‘main points of Mr. Coningham’s political biography’, the Tory Standard listed his ‘strong opinion about a picture of Apollo and Marsyas’, ‘general antipathy to Sir Charles Eastlake’, and discontent ‘with everything, the British constitution included’.
Coningham died after a ‘long illness’ in December 1884, leaving his estate, proved under £6,000, to his wife and only surviving child William John Capper Coningham, an Indian army officer (1843-99).