Yorke, like his father, followed a naval career. His first posting was in the Mediterranean, where he was commended by his captain for his ‘active, spirited and highly meritorious’ conduct during the siege of Algiers in August 1817.
English notions must be abolished, so must all romance of liberty and the children of the ancient Greeks struggling to shake off the yoke of the bloody Turk. Lord Byron knows all this, and is in fact the only man that has ever come out to them who understands the people.
With Byron, whom he met at this time, he enjoyed a useful rapport, and the poet sprang to his defence when his firm handling of a recalcitrant Greek leader brought accusations of bullying from Colonel Leicester Stanhope, envoy of the London Greek committee. Yorke generally regarded the committee’s efforts as misdirected, and Stanhope, he sourly noted, had ‘come out with Jeremy Bentham under his arm to give the Greeks a constitution’. By 1830 he had reached the conclusion that ‘though the Greeks love liberty, they love money better’.
What part in the play am I to act? I wish my mind were made up on this cursed reform question. It will be carried, but I should like to do what I think right and honourable towards myself, that is, act and vote as I really think. We must become republican England as well as republican France (damn France, she is the root of all evil and the branch of no good): it matters little how, whether by reform which will produce national bankruptcy, or by a starving population, which will produce rebellion and civil war.
He landed at Falmouth on 30 June 1831 and was returned for Reigate a fortnight later, after an expected opposition failed to materialize.
In the House he followed his instincts, as well as the views of Hardwicke and his father, by opposing the Grey ministry’s reintroduced reform bill, which proposed to partially disfranchise Reigate. Either he or his colleague Joseph Yorke denied that it was a rotten borough, 20, 30 July 1831; the air of resignation about the bill’s passage, evident in the latter speech, was certainly redolent of this Member’s earlier ruminations. He voted against the partial disfranchisement of Chippenham, 27 July, for the amendment to make borough voting rights conditional on the proven payment of rent, 25 Aug., and against the bill’s passage, 21 Sept. On 10 Oct. he was absent from the call of the House prior to the division on Lord Ebrington’s confidence motion. Shortly afterwards he resigned his seat in order to contest a vacancy for Cambridgeshire, where Hardwicke had a leading interest. In a bullish hustings speech he declared that the reform bill was ‘pregnant with ruin and destruction for the agricultural interest’ and warned that protection would not survive in a Parliament dominated, as he anticipated, by northern manufacturing interests. He therefore welcomed the adoption of the Chandos clause enfranchising £50 tenants-at-will in the counties. He compared the government’s record on retrenchment unfavourably with that of the duke of Wellington’s, and disclaimed the Tory label fixed on him by his opponents. One speaker approvingly observed that he ‘swore so that it would do their hearts good to hear him’, and another supporter claimed that such was the impression he created that he had ‘received numerous offers from ladies (not professional) soliciting his favours for one night’. Nevertheless, he was defeated by a reformer after a four-day poll, in what was widely seen as an important test of opinion.
In October 1832 Yorke recorded in his briefly resumed journal that the state of the country was ‘tranquil (except as always Ireland)’ and that his return for Cambridgeshire at the forthcoming general election was ‘finally secure’. However, he took a gloomy view of the political prospect, observing that ‘in Ireland the return is fought between Catholic and Protestant, in England between high and low church, and in Scotland between aristocrat and democrat’; he predicted that the reformed House of Commons would ‘consist of 300 Whigs, 200 Tories and 150 Radicals’.