Grandson of the radical 3rd Earl Stanhope, nephew of the famous Levantine traveller Lady Hester Stanhope and eldest son of a scholarly Whig turned Ultra Tory, who succeeded to the earldom in 1816, Mahon came from a family whose members were renowned for their diverse talents and eccentricities. He displayed a precocious ability at languages and composition, and excelled in the course of literary and practical education prescribed for him by his father.
Mahon’s father refused to countenance his desire to enter the army, having parliamentary ambitions for him instead. As he thought that there was no possibility of acquiring an ‘independent seat’, he wrote to advise Mahon to side with the ‘government party’, led by the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, as the lesser of two evils, 23 Apr. 1825. His son replied from Rome, 19 Feb. 1826, that it
seems to me that the present unanimity of most people tends very much to diminish the importance of party, but I concur with you in thinking that from the present prosperous situation of the country, one would be most inclined to enlist with those to whom we are indebted for it, that is the present administration.
Stanhope mss C130/3; C316/1.
Returned to England, he attended debates in the Commons: for example, he later commented there (22 Mar. 1831) that he had been present to hear Canning’s speech on the silk trade, 13 Apr. 1826. No opening occurred at the general election later that year, and nothing came of soundings made by Stanhope in 1827 about vacancies in Ireland, which had been thought a possibility because Mahon, unlike his father, was strongly in favour of Catholic emancipation.
On 18 June 1829 his close friend Philip Pusey*, whose writings on finance and politics he greatly admired, raised the possibility of one or other of them standing for two unnamed constituencies, which were almost certainly Rye and Seaford. Mahon replied that
my father’s wish as to my seat is not to give a round sum at once but to fix an annual payment and he has authorized me to offer as much as £1,000 a year. If the thing could be settled even at this ‘eleventh hour’ of the session I could make a payment immediately, but I fear that he would decidedly object to incurring the risk of a speedy dissolution by paying £3,000 down.
Their joint expenses at Seaford amounted to about £100, but while Pusey was successful at Rye in March 1830, Mahon was left empty-handed. On 5 Aug. 1829 he had his first interview with the diplomat Viscount Strangford, who also set about trying to find him a seat. Troubled by bouts of ill health throughout that year, he remained essentially optimistic about the march of events:
For when I consider what numerous and terrible gales the vessel of the state has weathered and overcome during the last forty years, I can hardly imagine the possibility of any impending shipwreck, though not without apprehensions of tossing from a tempest. Increase of population beyond all reasonable means of maintenance - this is the circumstance which in my mind most darkens the horizon.
Stanhope mss C296/1; Pusey mss C1/1, 4, 13, 26, 31, 36, 43.
Mahon’s search for a constituency began in earnest in May 1830, when the king’s death seemed imminent. Stanhope now put up £3,500 to buy him a seat, but none was initially available at that price. He considered Canterbury, where with his local connections he might have been able to replace the ministerialist Member, Stephen Rumbold Lushington, who was resident in India. Stanhope, however, strongly opposed the idea of Mahon engaging in what would probably prove to be an expensive contest there, though his friends advised him to keep the plan in reserve. On 21 May Strangford wrote that
between ourselves, I strongly suspect that Mahon has had some sort of intimation from Lord G[ranville] S[omerset]* that government, satisfied with the sort of general support which M[ahon] is disposed to give them, will not set up a candidate in opposition to him. This is merely my conjecture, but I think there must be something in it, from the change in Mahon’s tone, within the last 48 hours, when speaking of the manifold inconveniences and vexations of a contest - of which he now, comparatively, makes light, and above all, from the more decided manner in which he talks of supporting government.
Mahon, however, pledged himself to take an independent stance and said that he ‘would not as my mother advises accept of a treasury seat on any account’, but he urged his father to agree, 24 May:
I fully admit the objections in my circumstances to a contest, and I only wish for one in case a purchase should be impossible at the price which we propose. You must not therefore look upon the alternative as a purchase but as not being in Parliament at all. Now many things are comparatively good which are not positively good. If I don’t come into Parliament now, there is an end of my political prospects for life, since at the next election I should be too old to enter upon them with any prospect of success and should have fixed upon another (probably a literary) turn.
He nevertheless abandoned the idea of Canterbury when a ministerialist candidate started. Meanwhile, his maternal grandfather Lord Carrington had failed to bring him in for Hedon, where he would also have had to face a contest, or at any of his other boroughs, and he was just beaten to the purchase of a vacancy at Lymington.
He was listed by the Wellington ministry among the ‘doubtful doubtfuls’, probably because he had left England, 11 Aug. 1830, to restore his health on the continent.
expect to find a revolution in future a sort of easy transfer from a bad government to a good one, without any infringement of vested property or legal rights, as a sort of storm, which is to last but a few days or hours, and end like other storms only in the clearing and purifying of the air.
On 2 Oct. he observed that ‘of all forms of government none perhaps is so bad as progressive government which does not rest on institutions or look back to former periods of its national history but hurries forwards in pursuit of theories’.
had I been in England my vote would have been with the minority the other night [15 Nov.], both on that question itself - for I think that retrenchment in the civil list is already carried to the utmost verge of national prudence or national dignity - and also with reference to the probably effect of a defeat in dissolving the ministry. I looked upon the talent and decision of the duke of Wellington as our safeguard for tranquillity at home, upon his renown in Europe as our best security for peace abroad and I much lamented that the country should be deprived of the services of the greatest hero she has ever, though fertile in heroes, produced.
Carnarvon mss J3/17; Stanhope mss C130/11.
In a similar letter to Pusey, he added that
to curtail, I mean to any extent, our public salaries sounds popular, and is readily swallowed by the mob, and yet it is in fact a most aristocratical and exclusive system since it tends to prevent any man from entering the public service without a good patrimonial fortune of his own.
Pusey mss C1/41.
With the occasional exception, such as over his allowance, Mahon and Stanhope rarely differed personally, but they did do so, albeit usually amicably, over politics. Mahon, for instance, could not follow the Ultra line in favour of parliamentary reform, and in a letter to Mrs. Arbuthnot, 19 Dec. 1830, he condemned the
Protestant gentry and Protestant clergy, who if you get the soundest of them sometimes in private by their firesides, will tell you, very many of them, that the House of Commons does not properly represent the people or that measure [Catholic emancipation] could not have been so carried.
Stanhope mss C130/9, Mahon to Stanhope, 31 May 1830; Newman, 228-30, 252-3, 301-2; Aberdeen Univ. Lib. Arbuthnot mss.
Mahon arrived back in England, 26 Jan., and took his seat, 3 Feb. 1831.
I am now quite full of a speech I am to make tonight. Not finding a good opportunity, or not able to catch the Speaker’s eye last night, I moved an adjournment at three this morning which was carried and which will give me ‘possession of the House’ as it is called at five this afternoon. Damned awful this prospect! I am in a great funk and much afraid of failure.
Ibid. C130/11.
Strangford related that he
chose a bad moment for getting up, and much of the beginning of his speech was lost, owing to the confusion and shuffling of feet in taking places, etc. But when he was heard, he was heard with much attention, and had evidently a perfect command of the good will of the House.
Ibid. C138/2, Strangford to Stanhope, 26 Mar. 1831.
He started by rebutting several of the reformers’ standard arguments, notably by denying that either Pitt or Canning, whose principles he claimed to follow, would have approved of the bill. His main point was that it would improve the House in talent, but that this would not be ‘honesty’, ‘not practical information, not liberal knowledge, not statesmanlike views, but a low, selfish pettifogging sort of talent - I ought rather to have called it cunning’. Similarly, independent country gentlemen of the type of Sir James Graham would be replaced by ‘some attorney’s clerk - some fellow without a virtue or a shilling’, or men ‘without any fixed principles of action - without any stake in the country’, who were ‘the delegates of local interests or particular prejudices’. He also declared that he had an ‘eager and an anxious wish to satisfy the people’, but only by ‘changes that do not go the fearful length of establishing a new constitution’, and he duly voted against the bill’s second reading. Somerset reported to Stanhope the next day that ‘I heard but one opinion of his performance. The House constantly cheered him’. His speech, which (like that of 2 Mar.) he corrected and published, was indeed widely praised, not least by Wellington, with whom he soon established a close friendship.
because I thought it right and becoming to show that I was not afraid of meeting the people the very next day after the vote I had given, and because I felt convinced that the great unpopularity which must at present necessarily attend that vote, would be not aggravated but diminished by my stepping forward firmly and boldly in vindication of it.
Stanhope mss C316/2, Stanhope to Mahon, 19, 25 Mar.; C130/11, Mahon to Stanhope, 26 Mar. 1831.
His plea for more moderate reform was given an impatient and hostile hearing, and he was forced to write to the press to deny an allegation made by another speaker that he derived £1,000 a year from borough influence.
He criticized ministers for advising a dissolution and complained that they had concealed the significant principles of the bill, 21 June 1831. He also condemned the recent elections, ‘which did not proceed from the calm judgement of the country, but rather from its inflamed and misguided passion’, and argued that the bill was only supported by those who thought it preferable to no reform at all, or those who saw it as a first step towards the overthrow of monarchical institutions. In default of a more senior alternative, Sidney Herbert† forwarded to Mahon the anti-reform petition of the resident bachelors and undergraduates of Oxford University, which he presented and endorsed, 1 July.
Nevertheless, he wrote to his mother, 1 Dec. 1831, that ‘in politics things look blacker than ever and it daily becomes more evident that the question is not one of privileges or of parties but of property’; and, on 7 Dec., that he had gone to London and had ‘plunged at once into politics in which, sink or swim, I must continue immersed for many months’.
if you had but looked to practical grievance, rather than theoretical anomaly - if you had first enfranchised the large towns, and then, to make way for this increase, struck off an exactly equal number of small boroughs - why you might have expected to frame, not only a moderate, but a final reform.
He boasted that his speech ‘has been successful beyond my wildest expectations’ and was considered superior to that of his colleague, which was a ‘very high and certainly a very undeserved comment’. Others were critical, however, and thought it was chiefly notable for having provoked what Mahon himself, admiring ‘merit in an adversary’, called a ‘great speech’ by Macaulay.
this comes to you from a man half dead with sitting up in the House of Commons till five this morning at a temperature something like the famous Black Hole at Calcutta. I had however the satisfaction of seeing the ministers completely put down in argument and to observe how many of their friends had ‘sudden business in the country’ or ‘severe indispositions’ and stayed away from the division.
NLS mss 3870, f. 73.
While aware of the dangers of the ‘vigorous opposition’ inheriting the blunders of an ‘imbecile administration’, he continued to hope that the latter might be replaced, and, as he wrote to Pusey, 9 June, he thought that Wellington’s attempt to form a government should have been
supported at all risks, because then we had a chance, nay a certainty, of greatly modifying the reform bill and of supporting the independent privileges of the House of Lords. Our feelings of delicacy have lost us this last opportunity of rescue. The bill has passed unmodified and the authority of the peers as an independent body has received a deep and perhaps deadly wound.
He regretted Peel’s ‘fatal hesitation’ which had brought this about, but recognized, 5 Aug., that the
majority of our staunch friends were not yet convinced, as all discerning men nearer headquarters have been for many months, of the necessity, after what had passed, of granting a considerable measure. We have all become moderate reformers in London, though we never declared ourselves so as a party, but the country is still full of anti-reformers, and I think that had we pursued a different course collectively, we should have disgusted them without conciliating the enemy.
Pusey mss C1/12, 22, 32.
Although he could make an impressive set speech, Mahon was not an able debater, and Lord Ellenborough thought he would never be very effective as a speaker. He was, however, active in the House, and apparently attended committee sittings regularly (at least on the reintroduced reform bill), as he once reported to his father that
we continue billing (but certainly not cooing, for we are very fierce and angry) on Wednesdays and sometimes on Saturdays, and you will therefore easily believe that all this especially on the dog days is very trying to the health and spirits.
Stanhope mss C130/11, Mahon to Stanhope, Sun. [n.d.]; C255, same to Griselda Teckell, 4 July 1831; Three Diaries, 310; Newman, 253, 272, 276, 309-10.
Facing the loss of his seat at Wootton Bassett, he was anxious to find an opening elsewhere. An initial sign that he might be supported at Sandwich came to nothing, and he also ruled out a contest for (probably the Eastern division of) Kent. He had hopes of Aylesbury, but lost the chance of what he considered would have been a seat for life when, in July 1832, Lord Nugent’s expected appointment as commissioner of the Ionian Islands threatened a by-election (which did not, in fact, take place) and, as Mahon felt that he could not vacate and enter the lists so soon before a dissolution, his friends were obliged to switch their support to another candidate.