Maberly is best known for his career as a civil servant and administration of the Post Office, where his opposition to the introduction of the penny post put him at odds with popular campaigners for reform, not least Rowland Hill (1795-1879), with whom he remained locked in a bitter and public dispute for almost twenty years.
Eldest son of the pugnacious entrepreneur and ‘troublesome’ radical MP John Maberly, who in 1832 fled abroad following the collapse of his Scottish banking empire owing £200,000, Maberly suffered from inevitable comparison with his formidable father during their thirteen years together in the unreformed Commons.
At the 1832 general election Maberly, who had evidently made no trouble about making way for Lord Holland’s illegitimate son as surveyor-general and being moved to a clerkship, 30 Nov. 1832, offered for the newly created borough of Chatham with treasury support.
A regular attender, Maberly continued to support ministers in the lobbies, casting no known wayward votes. He steadily opposed most radical initiatives, including motions for the ballot, 25 Apr. 1833, and shorter parliaments, 23 July 1833, 15 May 1834, and was in the majorities against the abolition of military flogging, 2 Apr. 1833, and naval impressment, 4 Mar. 1834. That month, in his only known spoken contributions of this period, he defended his department’s estimates from the attacks of his father’s former associate Joseph Hume and other retrenching radicals. Announcing that he ‘had been able to effect reductions even beyond the most sanguine expectations’, 21 Mar., he contended that Hume had ‘mixed up the charges for the various departments in such a manner that he found it extremely difficult to reduce them ... into intelligibility and order’. Using his military expertise to justify each cost, he added that the expenses were now less than ’in the golden time of the honourable Member, namely 1792’.
In June 1834 Maberly, who had lost considerable sums to his father and was remembered as being ‘fond of money’, secured a customs post, which made him ineligible to sit in the Commons.
The colonel, a big, heavily-built man, would sit in a big chair, with a handkerchief over his knees and two or three private letters before him. Into a closely neighbouring seat the clerk would drop, placing his array of official documents on the table. Greetings exchanged ... the clerk would commence reading aloud one of his documents. The colonel, still half engaged with his private correspondence, would hear enough to make him keep up a running commentary of disparaging grunts: “Pooh! Stuff! Upon my soul!” etc. Then the clerk, having come to the end of the manuscript, would stop, waiting for orders, and there would ensue a dead silence, broken by the colonel, who having finished his private letters, would look up and say, “Well my good fellow, well?”. “That’s all, sir”. “And quite enough too, go on to the next!” “But what shall I say to this applicant sir?” “Say to him? Tell him to go and be d[amne]d, my good fellow!”, and on our own reading of these instructions we had very frequently to act.
Yates, Memoirs, 64-5.
Maberly’s fashionable and indiscreet wife, who published a string of historical romances from 1840, brought him place but also embarrassment, especially when she embarked on a platonic but nevertheless ‘ridiculous and unbecoming liaison’ with Duncannon (by now 4th earl of Bessborough) during his dotage. Her ‘ostentatious effrontery’ following Bessborough’s appointment as Irish viceroy in 1846 produced ‘universal ridicule and disgust’, not least because ‘she meddled with everything’, and his death the following year was considered ‘fortunate’ by the Whig diarist Greville.
Maberly, who retired from the civil service with a pension of over £1,700 per year, died ‘one of the last survivors’ of the unreformed Commons in February 1885.