Porchester seems to have caught a passion for continental travel from his father and, according to his heir, he inherited his mother’s ‘amiable and romantic, but rather unpractical temper’. He was also given an early introduction to politics by his father, with whom he attended debates in both Houses in 1812. Educated at private schools before going to Eton, he ‘had a natural power of words and a singularly correct taste in writing’, and his time at Christ Church was ‘marked by constant evidence of ability, but unfortunately without the continuous exertion necessary to success’.
he gravitated by a sort of instinct towards the centres of political disturbance ... Nor was he content to remain a spectator. His interest and enthusiasm were aroused, and he more than once made himself an actor, even at the imminent risk of his life. At Nice he harangued on one occasion a revolutionary mob in French; at Genoa he nearly lost his life in the midst of an émeute.
Add. 60993, ff. 37-56; Carnarvon mss E4/18-31; Carnarvon, 58-63; Hardinge, i. 6-7.
Travelling in the Peninsula in the early 1820s, when he considered himself ‘extremely fortunate in visiting it at this moment of fermentation’, he and Pusey were arrested by Catalan guerrillas as suspected government spies. John Nicholas Fazakerley* noted that, among other travellers’ disappointment with the Spanish ‘Liberales’, ‘I hear Lord Porchester’s reprehensions of their proceedings cited with loud exultation’. He exploited this incident in his historical poem The Moor, which was published in 1825 and reprinted in 1827. In a lengthy preface on the Spanish constitution, he dwelt on the need for the due representation of property, but laid the blame for the failure of the reforms of the Cortes on the ‘injudicious moment selected for carrying them into effect, the unjust and clumsy means by which they were effected and the contempt of circumstances that should regulate the application of all general rules’.
He visited Scotland in 1825, and it was probably that year that his father suggested he should write a pamphlet on the Catholic question. Nothing came of rumours that a ‘ring-fence match’ would take place between Porchester and his cousin, a Miss Morton (probably one of the daughters of the 4th Baron Ducie), or of an engagement to Lady Georgiana North, daughter of the 3rd earl of Guilford.
was heard throughout very favourably and was announced for repetition on Saturday, amidst mingled applause and disapprobation ... It is an extremely able production, exhibits considerable powers of thought and expression, and adds to the reputation which Lord Porchester’s literary and poetical talents have already so deservedly gained him.
The play’s success led his friends to publish it, though the author was in fact absent in southern Spain.
The vehement denunciation of arbitrary principles, the eloquent advocacy of national rights and the enthusiastic cheers of our assenting Parliament are forgotten almost as soon as they are uttered, while the prayers of thousands, ruined by our vacillating policy, are heard with indifference or rejected with contempt.
Add. 46611, f. 88; Greville Mems. i. 371; Lord Porchester, Last Days of Portuguese Constitution, 109-10.
Porchester rejoiced at the acquittal of Queen Caroline in 1820.
I feel that in deference to my father’s opinions and the active part he takes in politics I can get only into the Commons on a Whig interest and though a borough from a friend, by giving me the power of resigning at pleasure, leaves me comparatively unfettered, still such an opportunity may not present itself. I trust in the actual state of parties I may be able to work well with the moderate opposition, but if I should be fettered beyond the line of conduct which I mention to you could not with credit to myself come so into Parliament.
Herbert mss 5/6, Porchester to Harriet Herbert, n.d. [1825], 25, 26 Mar. 1826; Carnarvon mss E4/46; H4/6.
In the end he stood a contest against the Buller interest at East Looe, but was defeated, despite receiving the support of 41 householders who considered themselves entitled to vote, and his petition failed.
He approved Carnarvon’s decision to decline household office in Canning’s ministry in 1827, and wrote to his sister Harriet from Lisbon, 7 Feb. 1828, of the succeeding government that
after Lord Goderich’s first tremors the dissolution of the cabinet was not an event that could surprise me, though recent accounts rather led me to expect that the administration would have become more purely Whig. There appears to be something in the composition of a Whig which unfits him for office as this is their second trial and second failure, nor do they appear to have managed matters brilliantly while in power. This Navarino affair seems to have [been] sadly foolish and injurious to the foreign policy of England. It might probably have been altogether prevented if ministers had sent an overpowering instead of an equal force against the Turks. Poor Canning was a splendid but a dangerous politician and his Whiggish associates readily caught the mantle which he dropped.
Carnarvon mss B17/6, 7; H4/8.
Porchester, whose allowance in 1830 was £1,000 per annum, sought a seat at the general election of that year, and Mahon informed Pusey that he seemed
to feel a little delicacy about pushing his parliamentary views from the idea that they would interfere with mine. Now it is very far from certain that we are nibbling at the same hook, but if even we are, you who have seen more of these things must see that his feeling however amiable is quite mistaken and unfounded, and I depend on your not allowing him to flag in his exertions.
Cent. Kent. Stud. Stanhope mss U1590 C130/9, Mahon to Stanhope, 31 May 1830; Pusey mss C1/14.
He evidently failed to gain an opening in one of Lord Grosvenor’s boroughs or at Chippenham.
In November 1830 Porchester fully sympathized with his father’s indignation at not being offered a position in the newly appointed Grey administration, and believed that he should have no connection with it and should ‘enter into a temperate opposition to government when he can do so without departing from his own political views’.
Wherever I go I hear one pervading feeling of discontent towards existing institutions and I fear a restless desire for extensive changes. That the present administration has hurried on the march of events I have no doubt - moderate reforms would have satisfied the country for some time had they been dextrously proposed ... I question much whether the gale that will eventually sweep aristocracy from the face of this country has not set in. If the falling interest of the great borough holders can be transferred to the land in a great measure and not so much to the towns the balance may yet be maintained and we landed aristocrats may hope to preserve for a short time longer some share of our former influence but I think we are in imminent danger of shipwreck.
Ibid. E4/93; J3/18; Stanhope mss C353.
He was unable to attend the Hampshire county meeting on reform, 17 Mar., because he had to attend the Petersfield election committee, which eventually decided against him, 22 Mar. His worries about the final expenses and the possibility, if seated, of being turned out in the near future, were shown to have been unnecessary. He responded to reports that ministers had intended to make him an offer of employment, and might yet do so, by siding with his father against them, though he claimed that Carnarvon had treated him badly.
Porchester’s literary expertise and continental experiences were used to great effect in his speech (which was later printed) against the second reading of the reintroduced reform bill, 4 July. In one typically rhetorical passage he declared:
I have no parliamentary interest to defend; I bring to the consideration of this great question no party animosity; I stand here a decided but a reluctant opponent of His Majesty’s ministers; for born and bred a Whig, every early sympathy, every political prejudice, every personal partiality was enlisted on their side; and between the period when ... ministers accepted office and pledged themselves to introduce a measure of reform, and the time when they actually redeemed that pledge, I did hope, most fervently did I hope, that if I had a seat in this House during the period of its discussion, I might be enabled to give it a humble, but a sincere and conscientious support. But to the measure which they did actually introduce, to the measure which they have shown themselves determined to carry through the House with no essential modifications, to this bill which will leave us little of our ancient constitution but the name, I must offer, however feebly, however unwillingly, my most unflinching opposition.
He condemned it as inexpedient, inconsistent and dangerous in its exclusion of men of property (including tenants-at-will) from the franchise, and of men of talent from the House. He instead commended the British constitution for its Burkean virtues of stability and the capacity for gradual evolution, in contrast to various experiments tried in Europe, where ‘they did not understand the secret but powerful influences which cement so many naturally discordant elements, and they overlooked the hidden springs which keep our machine in constant and comparatively harmonious movement’. His speech met with immediate and general acclamation: according to John Cam Hobhouse*, he was ‘rapturously cheered’ and was ‘applauded and congratulated by all’. Lord Ellenborough, who found Porchester ‘very intelligent but strangely awkward’, thought it ‘full of historical illustration and good reasoning, well delivered, fluent, correct to a fault in language, and eloquent’.
At Peel’s request and with only a day’s notice, he moved the wrecking amendment against the second reading of the revised reform bill, 16 Dec. 1831.
gave him deep and continued attention, but his speech had not many of those claptraps for applause, which draw forth constant cheering, but was very well received, and I hear Peel’s attention was rivetted. There was certainly great novelty and strength in the argument, and many of the ministerialists said it was quite refreshing to hear a speech from those benches, so free from party spirit or bitterness. Lord Althorp paid him a handsome compliment, and I find all his own party were much pleased.
Carnarvon mss M3, Lady Porchester to Lady H. Howard, 17 Dec. 1831.
Though welcoming some of the alterations, Porchester particularly condemned the unbalancing of the borough and county franchises, which he claimed would exacerbate the already perilous danger of property being overturned by revolution. He duly voted against the bill, 17 Dec. 1831, but the amendment was lost by 324-162. He voted against going into committee on the bill, 20 Jan., and the enfranchisement of Tower Hamlets, 28 Feb. 1832. He was a founder member of the Carlton Club, 10 Mar. In the last of his three major speeches in the Commons, 22 Mar., he forecast a continual struggle between the agricultural and the newly created urban interests, a succession of unstable ministries which would invariably be subject to fluctuations in popular opinion, and the likelihood of well-intentioned liberal reforms giving way to anarchy. He voted against the bill’s third reading that day. In early May he waited anxiously to see if his father, who had voted for Lyndhurst’s wrecking amendment, 7 May, would be offered a position under the duke of Wellington; he was, and Porchester might himself have been given one. His wife, who knew of his objections to that idea, wrote that
it is now understood, that the same bill is to be taken up by the Tories, so that anti-reform speech must be eat up forthwith, which Lord P. and Mr. [Edward Charles Hugh] Herbert think a most bitter dose, but Pusey House swallows it entire without one wry face.
She, who also lived ‘in dread of Lord Porchester’s getting into some quarrel’, as ‘men will not measure their language now’, noted that he was one of those who vainly endeavoured to persuade Peel to accept office.
Porchester declined to offer for Hampshire at the by-election in June 1832, when Baring’s success scuppered a plan to have him returned for the Northern division of the county in place of Charles Shaw Lefevre at the general election later that year. Porchester’s candidacy was approved by Wellington and other leading Tories, and Carnarvon had once suggested a similar plan, but, as he explained:
It would now be an act of aggression on his part provoking an almost certain contest, and his resources would not make it wise in him to provoke such a contest, and my father having been smarted by two Hampshire contests, besides one nearly as expensive at Cricklade, in the last years of his life left me with an entailed estate and no command of money.
Carnarvon mss E4/99; Wellington mss WP1/1229/24; WP4/4/1/15; 2/58; 3/5, 11-17.
He decided to stand instead on Joseph Pitt’s* interest for Cricklade, the earl’s former seat, but thought his chances very doubtful.
beaten after a most strenuous canvass of the hundreds and having entertained but four days before my resignation very sanguine hopes of success. Three fourths of the property of the hundreds were in my favour. My canvass through the country was very prosperous. We had a majority of the old rights with us but were swamped by the new £10 constituency in the towns, which were hostile to me almost to a man.
In a final address, 12 Dec. 1832, he repeated his claim that ‘by far the largest portion of the respectability and property of the hundreds is warmly exhibited in my cause’, but his ‘serio-comic lucubrations’ were ridiculed in an anonymous reply. According to his wife, it was the opposition of their relation Lord Suffolk which sealed his fate, and he recognized that the family interest there had entirely disappeared.
refined, cultivated, poetical; words followed thoughts with remarkable facility, both on paper and in conversation; his fund of anecdote was unusual, and the charm of his graceful and unpremeditated conversation was, as I have often heard, very great ... His early friends seem always to have preserved an affection for him and to the hour of his death he influenced and drew strangers to him. It was in fact an eminently honourable, loyal and chivalrous character.
Carnarvon, 53-54, 70, 75; Hardinge, i. 37-38.