The irrepressible Creevey, ‘that old mischief brewer’, whose ‘lively perception of the ridiculous’ entertained his friends but sometimes betrayed him into malevolence, was, as Greville put it in 1829, ‘a living proof that a man may be perfectly happy and exceedingly poor, or rather without riches’.
Creevey divided against the aliens bill, 1 June 1820. That day, supporting a motion for inquiry into the Welsh judicature, he ‘hacked coarsely but cruelly with a butcher’s knife’, as the Whig Sir James Mackintosh* put it, the chief justice of Chester, Warren, Member for Dorchester, contending that his convenient recantation of his former radical views ‘furnished a strong argument ... to show that the judges should not be allowed to have seats’.
He had encouraged Brougham, whom he rightly distrusted, to bring the queen to England, and he became one of her ‘furious partizans’.
Creevey, who on 20 Jan. 1821 made his peace with Lady Holland, at her husband’s request, declined to attend the opposition’s eve of session meeting, but pressed on Brougham ‘the absolute necessity’ of immediately confronting ministers over the ‘outrage offered to the ... Commons by the last prorogation’. He was disgusted when the leaders, guided by the ‘inveterate folly’ of Tierney, decided to do nothing on this and to move ‘a censure upon ministers’, which he saw would only play into their hands. He privately considered the speech from the throne, 23 Jan., as ‘all muggery’, but, a precedent having been found for the summary prorogation, he confined himself in the House to arguing that by taking temporary charge of the board of control after Canning’s resignation, Bragge Bathurst had vacated his seat, and to voting silently against government on the liturgy question. He deemed the administration’s success on this, by 310-209, 26 Jan., ‘a ruinous blow to the character’ of the House, but felt that ministers were not ‘out of the wood yet’ and continued to hope that ‘this blackguard foolish war with the queen will eventually ruin the ministers and produce some great changes in the House of Commons’. On 2 Feb. he ‘discharged my duty to my native town’ by supporting the Liverpool petition (presented by Lord Sefton, of whom Creevey passed himself off as a bastard half-brother) demanding justice for the queen and complaining of corporation interference in elections there. He believed that he ‘never did anything so well’; but the son of the Liverpudlian ministerialist John Gladstone, who answered him, thought that ‘Creevey seems to make a great noise in the House, but without any effect’.
Creevey made his greatest impact in the Commons this session by leading, with Grey Bennet, Thomas Davies, Joseph Hume and a few others, an obstructive campaign against the estimates, to the disapproval of the opposition front bench, which he called ‘Rotten Row’.
to the convulsion of Sefton and my other ten bottle-holders with laughing. It was considered a most successful exposure of the honourable House, the big Whigs of course are horrified at the radical nature of the proceedings, but the great mass are quite enchanted, and only mortified they were not there ... Bennet tells me Lord Grey told him he quite approved of what I did, which pleases me much. Old Cole is furious with me.
Ibid. 11-12; The Times, 7 Feb. 1821.
On 9 Feb. he attacked corruption, the 72 Members who held places or pensions and the so-called ‘independent Members’ whose ‘families were quartered upon the country, and lived upon the taxes’. He divided the House against renewal of the sugar duties and, despite the accidental absence of Sefton and others, was ‘quite content’ with his minority of 48 (against 81). When unsuccessfully opposing the second reading of the malt duties bill, 14 Feb., he made what Grey Bennet called a ‘droll speech’ in which he mocked Sir George Warrender*, ‘a sinecure and sham lord of the admiralty’, who had threatened to serve him out for obstructing the supplies, as a former ‘tip-top patriot’. Warrender demanded a written apology, but the quarrel was settled without recourse to violence.
Creevey had ‘an infernal lump in my throat’ over the death of the queen and was inclined privately to accuse Brougham of exploiting her case for his own selfish ends. He voted for the amendment to the address, 5 Feb., against the suspension of habeas corpus in Ireland, 7, 8 Feb., and for more extensive tax reductions, 11, 21 Feb. 1822. He considered the division on the 11th, when ministers mustered only 212 votes to 108, ‘a most extraordinary one’. He divided in protest at Sir Robert Wilson’s* dismissal from the army, 13 Feb., and for inquiry into the Scottish burghs, 20 Feb., and continued to vote steadily for economies and tax cuts. On 27 Feb. he drew attention to the operation of the 1817 Civil Offices Compensation Act, which he condemned as one to ‘incorporate the dealers and traders in politics ... into a ... corporation ... with the same precise and methodical division of the profits of the concern that always takes place in any other trading body’, and attacked Henry Bankes and the 1817 finance committee. He told his stepdaughter:
My benefit went off ... as well as possible. The ‘front row’ of course could not attend, so I ... occupied it with myself and my books ... I disported myself for upwards of an hour ... Our lads were in ecstasies, and kept shouting and cheering me ... Brougham and Sefton were among my bottle holders, and in common with all our people complimented me hugely.
Mackintosh thought the speech was one of ‘very ingenious and effective mischief, full of sophistry and unfairness, but very galling’.
full of injustice and malignity but irresistibly droll and very powerfully sarcastic. The calm impudence with which he said the most offensive things and the dry way in which he stated his jests gave an effect to it of which no report can give the least conception.
Samuel Moulton Barrett*, though a political ally, believed that Creevey’s personalities and the feebleness of his reply ‘created a strong feeling of prejudice’ against him and would ‘detract from his talent as a speaker’. Creevey flattered himself that he had ‘made a very good speech ... to the universal satisfaction of the House’, damned Tierney for his ‘hollow support’ and admitted that Canning’s rejoinder had been effective; he regretted that he had let ‘the Joker’ off ‘so easily’, thereby missing a chance to mock his impending ‘banishment to India from want of honesty’.
There was a coarse vulgarity of manner and a bitterness of mind, with little regard to correctness ... but he was not deficient in that sort of malevolent sharpness which enabled him to say what men of more gentlemanlike habits would have avoided saying with a pointed and sarcastic force. He used to put me in mind of Sheridan in his worst manner, when he was labouring for wit but could produce nothing beyond ill humour.
Dorset RO D/BKL Bankes jnl. 139 (26 June 1822).
That summer Creevey, who got himself into a ‘damnable mess’ by spreading a story that Lord Hardwicke had been killed by a cricket ball,
Such an exposure has been made of the House of Commons, such a breaking-in effected upon its modern ways of proceeding, that a practical reform of that body may be considered as begun ... and if supported by the vigilant and active co-operation of the people [it] cannot fail of producing the most important consequences (pp. 1-2)
After a long stay at Cantley, near Doncaster, where his friend and butt Michael Angelo Taylor* and his wife entertained Whigs and the duke of Sussex, Creevey went to Sefton’s seat at Croxteth, near Liverpool, in November 1822. He was astounded and amused to learn from John Lambton, Member for County Durham (‘King Jog’), that ‘all the Whigs are either fools or rogues enough to believe that our monarch is really fond of them, and that ... if we ... could but arrange our matters between ourselves, the sovereign would be happy to send for us’.
Creevey found the part of the king’s speech about the Franco-Spanish conflict, 4 Feb. 1823, ‘much better than I expected’, and had ‘no difficulty’ in persuading Brougham to drop his ‘projected amendment’. Anticipating the start of parliamentary business ‘in earnest’ on 17 Feb., he steeled himself to renew his attack on supply procedure ‘on that or some early day, if my nerves are equal to it; but I find them fail me more and more every day’. In the event he moved an instruction to consider the grievances of the people, which was negatived. He voted against the appointment of a lieutenant-general of the ordnance in peacetime, 19 Feb., when opposition ‘got into a fine mess’ and were trounced. On the 17th, supporting the London reform petition, he had suggested that before debating the subject the House should obtain electoral statistics from the returning officers of the English boroughs. Russell took up this proposal, 20 Feb., when Creevey, who privately considered it ‘admirably suited for mischief’, duly spoke and voted for it. He reported that Russell was ‘exceedingly pleased with the result, and so were all our people, except Brougham, who was not even there’, and whom he suspected of making himself available to an offer from Canning, the new foreign secretary; he concluded three weeks later that Brougham was ‘mad ... to be in power’.
Creevey, who spent ‘a most agreeable’ late summer with Sefton at Stoke Farm, near Windsor, and joined him at Croxteth towards the end of the year, was increasingly seduced by the luxurious attractions of fashionable Whig society in London and the country. As a generally welcome guest, he moved with assured ease in this world and chronicled its foibles, scandals and splendours with impish objectivity. At Kinnaird’s, 10 Feb. 1824, he ‘cracked my jokes with such success that old Rat Warrender was compelled to ask me to drink wine with him’; and at the end of the month he made his ‘long owing visit’ to Holland House. He is not known to have spoken in debate that session, when he voted for reform of Edinburgh’s representation, 26 Feb.; to accuse lord chancellor Eldon of a breach of privilege, 1 Mar.; for repeal of the window tax, 2 Mar.; to act on the findings of the Scottish judicial commission, 30 Mar.; against the aliens bill, 2 Apr., and the grant for new churches, 9 Apr.; for inquiry into Ireland, 11 May, and better use of Irish first fruits revenues, 25 May, and to condemn the prosecution of the Methodist missionary John Smith in Demerara, 11 June. From Cantley in September 1824 he went to Lambton Castle, where Hobhouse met and took a dim view of him:
He seemed to me a very wag, and one who would let no principle of any kind stand in the way of his joke. When he had no jest to excite laughter he tried grimaces ... Of Creevey’s superior abilities there can be no doubt. He had a strong and a quick memory ... Raillery of the present and detraction of the absent were his weapons for general talk; but when serious he showed sound and honest views ... and discovered qualities which might adorn a higher character than he had endeavoured to acquire.
Broughton, iii. 80-81.
His year’s end visit to Croxteth was punctuated with excursions to Lord Derby’s at Knowsley and Colonel Hughes’s at Kinmel; and at the turn of the year, after coming to a tentative arrangement with his sister over his need to raise money on his moiety of the Eaton inheritance to pay some modest debts, he went to his friends the Ferguson brothers at Raith, Fifeshire. News of the death of Thanet in France in late January 1825 raised doubts about his continuance in his seat: he told Bessy Ord that not only was he unconcerned, but the event ‘makes a great difference in my feelings as to parliamentary attendance. It was due to him to be at my post; I feel no such obligation to the present earl or my dear constituents’. On his way south he called at Raby Castle (Lord Darlington’s) and Cantley, where he perceived that the Taylors ‘without saying a word to me are at work for a seat for me’.
That autumn Creevey composed two Letters to Lord John Russell on parliamentary reform in which, drawing on Prynne, he argued that the ‘original constitution’ of Parliament had been ‘subverted and reversed’ by changes since the fifteenth century. After scrutiny by Brougham, the Letters were published in 1826. Russell thought them ‘excellent, and calculated to do good when money ceases to be uppermost in everyone’s thoughts’, though he had reservations about some of the technical arguments; Creevey dismissed him as ‘a conceited little puppy’, jealous of the pamphlet’s success. He was indignant at Brougham’s ‘perfidy and villainy’ in delaying its promised notice in the Edinburgh Review. His brother-in-law Charles Brandling, Member for Northumberland, died on 1 Feb. 1826 and he went to Gosforth for the funeral. While there he played a part in starting Brandling’s nephew Bell for the county and he remained on the spot for a month to assist in his successful contest against the Tory Liddell. He accompanied Bell to London in mid-March.
Thus Creevey had no part in the 1826 or 1830 Parliaments, though there was idle talk of his coming in for Winchelsea in January 1830, when Brougham, embarrassed by Darlington’s adhesion to government, transferred to the Knaresborough seat made vacant by Tierney’s death. No offer was made, and in any case Creevey could hardly have accepted one in the circumstances.
He possesses nothing but his clothes, no property of any sort; he leads a vagrant life, visiting a number of people who are delighted to have him, and sometimes roving about to various places, as fancy happens to direct, and staying till he has spent what money he has in his pocket. He has no servant, no home, no creditors; he buys everything as he wants it at the place he is at; he has no ties upon him, and has his time entirely at his own disposal and that of his friends ... he suffers none of the privations of poverty and enjoys many of the advantages of wealth. I think he is the only man I know in society who possesses nothing.
Greville Mems. i. 320.
When he came to power in November 1830 Grey, prompted by Brougham and Sefton, earmarked Creevey for the treasurership of the ordnance. Creevey’s only reservation was that ‘if it is to be made a point that I am to be in the House of Commons, I can’t and won’t go there if I am to vote against reform’. At first it seemed that there would be no need for him to be in the House, but the plan began to look ‘very ill’ when Grey told Brougham that ‘he was so beset by people who insisted upon the necessity of the person who held the office being in Parliament, that he could not give it to me’. However, Brougham argued Creevey’s case and Grey got the king’s permission for him to take the place without a seat for the time being, and ‘of his own unsolicited and free will’ promised him ‘the first seat ... that he had at his disposal’. Creevey was delighted, not least with the remuneration of £1,200 a year, and he was flattered to be invited by Russell to consult with Lord Althorp*, the chancellor of the exchequer, on what savings could be made in public salaries.
It was all very well for an historian like Thomas Creevey to lay down the law, as he did in his pamphlet, that all these rotten nomination boroughs were modern usurpations, and that the communities of all substantial boroughs were by law the real electors; but here is a little fellow ... Lord John Russell ... who, without talking of law or anything else, creates in fact a perfectly new House of Commons, quite in conformity to the original formation of that body ... What a coup it is! It is its boldness that makes its success certain.
Creevey mss, Creevey to Miss Ord, 18 Feb., 23 Mar. 1831.
He was supposed to take a seat for Cleveland’s borough of Ilchester in April, but this fell through; and at the general election precipitated by the defeat of the reform bill Radnor returned him for Downton, where he was not required to show his face.
Creevey is not known to have uttered a syllable in debate during the 1831 Parliament (the House, populated by ‘a set of low devils’, filled him with ‘disgust’); but as a ministerial underling he was steady in the lobbies in his support for the details and principle of the re-introduced and final reform bills. In November 1831 he visited the ordnance survey office in Ireland.
All that I have to hope is that there will be the same dawdling in making out my successor’s patent as there was in making out mine. I regret certainly the loss of position and of doing agreeable things to myself with my official resources; but it was quite an unexpected windfall to me, has lasted much longer than I expected, and the recollection of the manner in which it fell to my lot will always be most agreeable to me. And so there’s an end to the business, and it will never affect me more.
He was reprieved by his friend the duke of Wellington’s failure to cobble together a reform administration, a ‘false move ... which ... has saved the country from confusion, and perhaps the ... monarchy from destruction’. After witnessing the third reading of the reform bill in the Lords, 4 June 1832, he counted it as ‘the third great event of my life at which I have been present, and ... to a certain degree mixed up [in]’, after Waterloo and the queen’s trial.
Downton was disfranchised by the Reform Act. Creevey was led to believe in June 1832 that he would be started for the new metropolitan district of Finsbury at the forthcoming general election, but he was not. In November 1832 ministers, hinting that ‘my place would be more usefully filled by a House of Commons man’, tried to tempt him with the ‘place for life’ of receiver-general of the Isle of Man - ‘salary £500 - residence in the said romantic island nine months only out of twelve’. Creevey, who franked his last letter on 1 Dec. 1832, laughed in their faces. His ordnance post was abolished in 1834, but before he resigned the premiership in July that year Grey got him the snug place of commissioner of Greenwich Hospital, worth £600 a year with a free house, coal and candles. Creevey called it ‘the most agreeable finishing touch to my political life’.