Baring, a wealthy and influential Hampshire landowner of 9,000 acres, had no direct involvement in the family financial business after 1809. Unlike his younger brother Alexander, he ‘never entered much into political affairs’, but he was an energetic county magistrate, with a particular interest in prison administration.
His only known votes in the 1820 session were against the Liverpool ministry on the civil list, 3, 5, 8 May. He was given three weeks’ leave on account of a family illness, 29 June 1820. His only recorded vote on the Queen Caroline affair was for the opposition censure motion, 6 Feb. 1821. He was in their minority on the repression of liberalism in Naples, 21 Feb. He divided for Catholic relief, 28 Feb.1821, 1 Mar., 21 Apr., 10 May 1825. After three months apparent absence from the House he was present to vote for the forgery punishment mitigation bill, 23 May 1821. He divided to exclude arrears from the grant to the duke of Clarence, 8 June 1821. He voted for more extensive tax reductions, 11, 21 Feb., to condemn Sir Robert Wilson’s* dismissal from the army, 13 Feb., in Hume’s minority on naval pay, 22 Feb., and for gradual reduction of the salt duties, 28 Feb. 1822. He divided for admiralty reductions, 1 Mar., abolition of one of the joint-postmasterships, 13 Mar., 2 May, and inquiries into the board of control, 14 Mar., the government of the Ionian Islands, 14 May, and diplomatic expenditure, 15 May. He was in a minority of 33 for postponing the public works grant, 29 Mar., but only paired for Russell’s parliamentary reform motion, 25 Apr. His last recorded vote that session was as one of Hume’s minority of 35 for use of the sinking fund to pay the deadweight pensions, 24 May, when he presented the Wycombe residents’ petition for relaxation of the penal code.
Chairing the Hampshire reform meeting, 1 Mar. 1823, he declined to censure the sheriff for initially vetoing it, but asked, ‘Did not the veriest reptile turn when trod upon; and were the people of England, when overwhelmed and oppressed, not to complain of their oppression?’ He explained that ‘his idea of reform went to the entire eradication of corruption’, on which he blamed the ‘alarming amount of the national debt’ and the ‘lamentable’ 1797 cash restriction, but condemned ‘specious and plausible’ radical schemes as ‘pregnant with infinite though latent mischief’.
Baring voted against the Irish unlawful societies bill, 15 Feb., and to hear defence by counsel on behalf of the Catholic Association, 18 Feb. 1825. He supported inquiry into turnpike trusts, which he said put £1,500,000 a year into the hands of ‘irresponsible persons’, 17 Feb., when he was named to the select committee.
His return for Wycombe at the 1826 general election was unopposed, but some of the unfranchised residents abused him for his supposed criticism on the Hampshire bench of the high level of allowances for the poor; his hat was hit by a stone and his hasty departure from the borough impeded.
Baring voted for the amendment to the address, 4 Feb., to reduce taxes, 15 Feb., and for various economies in public expenditure, 1, 9, 12, 22, 26, 29 Mar. 1830, when he argued that there was no need to fund a private chapel at Pembroke dockyard. He divided for the enfranchisement of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, 23 Feb., and for investigation of the Newark petition accusing the duke of Newcastle of electoral interference, 1 Mar. He welcomed Peel’s proposal to abolish the fees payable to clerks of the peace, 17 Feb., and was appointed to the select committee, 23 Feb. He was in the minority of 26 for preventing Members from voting on bills in which they had a personal interest, 26 Feb. He presented a Wycombe petition for mitigation of the penal code, 23 Mar. He voted for Jewish emancipation, 5 Apr., 17 May. He was unhappy with Slaney’s poor bill and unsuccessfully divided the House (9-91) against its clause stipulating parish care for children whose parents could not provide for them, 26 Apr. He voted to reduce the salary of the assistant treasury secretary, 10 May, for repeal of the Irish coal duties, 13 May, reform of the Barbados pensions fund, 21 May, inquiry into the civil government of Canada, 25 May, and to reduce the grant for South American missions, 7 June. He argued that transportation or solitary confinement would more effectually curb forgery than execution, 13 May, and voted in that sense, 24 May, 7 June. Supporting a London bakers’ petition against enforced Sunday working, 25 May, he said that ‘the custom of Sabbath breaking is a rapidly increasing evil’. He divided for reform of the divorce laws, 3 June 1830.
After his quiet return for Wycombe at the 1830 general election Baring was involved in the abortive bid to bring in Lord Porchester* for Hampshire in place of the Tory Fleming. Announcing Porchester’s refusal to stand, he declared that it was essential to have Members who would support reform and ‘an unsparing and uncompromising economy of the public purse’.
I have apprehended about twenty of the worst and most active of our mob ... Those I have been most kind to and who were the best provided for have taken the lead. The motive which has operated upon the minds of my people has not been distress but a revolutionary spirit. The language they have used has been, ‘We are going to have another constitution; the heads have been in power long enough, and now it is our turn’; and to the farmers they said, ‘When we are in possession you shall have the land at ten shillings the acre’.
Wellington mss WP4/2/2/8, 20; Baring Jnls. i. 77-78; Foster, 71.
He complained of the refusal of solicitors’ access to prisoners in some London prisons, 10 Feb. 1831. At the Hampshire county meeting to petition in favour of the Grey ministry’s reform bill, 17 Mar., he said, as ‘a most zealous friend to the great cause’, that it would give the people ‘their just rights’, but he acknowledged his brother Alexander’s embarrassing turncoat hostility to the measure.
Baring voted for the second reading of the reintroduced reform bill, 6 July, and throughout the night against the opposition’s adjournment motions, 12 July 1831. Tom Macaulay* reported that he ‘sent for his razor’, being ‘resolved to spend the whole day in the House rather than give way’.
He voted for the second reading of the revised reform bill, 17 Dec. 1831, supported it steadily in committee, defended the proposal to give the Isle of Wight a county Member, 1 Feb., and divided for the third reading, 22 Mar. 1832. He was prepared to vote for a general fast day, 26 Jan., was named to the select committee on Sabbath observance, 2 July, and presented a Winchester petition on the subject, 13 July. He voted with government on relations with Portugal, 9 Feb., against inquiry into military punishments, 16 Feb., and for their temporizing amendment on slavery abolition, 24 May. On 8 May he supported Hume’s motion for investigation of church pluralities, but accused him of unfairly blaming the clergy for the increase in crime; he attributed this to the Sale of Beer Act, which had ‘diffused much immorality through the country’. He divided for the address calling on the king to appoint only ministers who would carry reform unimpaired, 10 May. He informed the promoters of a Wycombe reform meeting, 24 May, that his duties as a member of the Irish tithes select committee (15 Dec. 1831) prevented his attendance, but that his enthusiasm for reform was ‘unabated’.
Baring initially offered for the new Northern district of Hampshire, but thought better of it and brought his Commons career to an end in September 1832. According to Thomas Creevey*, Lord Grey said ‘he should have liked very much’ to have recommended him for a peerage as the head of his family and to give ‘an additional mortification’ to the renegade Alexander, but that ‘his having sons to succeed him put that quite out of the question’.