Staunton, a descendant of the Galway branch of the Staunton family of Nottinghamshire, was the son and protégé of the diplomat and colonial administrator George Leonard Staunton, who was awarded an Irish baronetcy in 1785. George Thomas, who, according to the dedication in Charles Butler’s Reminiscences, had the same ‘great and good qualities’ as his father, was page to Lord Macartney during his embassy to China in 1791, and subsequently visited that country several times while in the service of the East India Company.
he amused me much ... He has a jiffle and a jerk in his bows and salutations which give him a ludicrous air; but he is perfectly gentlemanly, and I believe in every way respectable. He is a great traveller, a bachelor and a man of letters.
Crabb Robinson Diary, ii. 60.
Late the following year, Maria Edgeworth described him as
grown very old and lean and chou-chouing in quick time in the oddest manner. I never saw anything as droll as his bows and I thought they would never cease at every fresh word I said on meeting him - chou! chou! - as if he had been pulled by a string and brought up again by a spring to perpendicular then churning head and whole body up and down as you might push up and down a figure of old on spiral springs jumping up on opening a snuff box. Sir G. however is very good natured.
Edgeworth Letters, 450.
‘No opportunity of free election being as yet open to me’, as Staunton later recalled, he was returned unopposed for Mitchell at the 1818 and 1820 general elections by the 4th Viscount Falmouth, as ‘an affair of money’, but ‘on terms of perfect independence’.
In his Memoirs, Staunton related how the
attendance and associations of a parliamentary life were, in the first instance and, I may say, for some years, highly gratifying to me, even under the disadvantage of sitting for a close borough. To hear matters of the highest and most momentous interest discussed night after night by the most splendid orators of the age, and especially the illustrious Canning, in the meridian of his glory, was an intellectual feast, not likely soon to pall upon the appetite. The opportunity also which my attendance in Parliament gave me to extend my acquaintance with public men, and generally with men eminent for their merits and talents, in all the higher walks of life, was extremely interesting and pleasant, and I readily concurred in opinion with those who pronounced the House of Commons to be (though rather an expensive one) the best club in London! Gradually, however, I became less contented with my position. I began to say to myself, with the Roman poet, ‘semper auditor tantum, numquamne reponam?’ Still, never having had any practice in public speaking, I had not self-confidence sufficient to enable me to break the ice without the stimulus of necessity, and this stimulus was never presented to a Member for a close borough. I had no constituents for whom it might have been both my right and my duty to plead, and I, therefore, naturally shrank from the ordeal of a first address to so awful an assembly, when I had no other plea than that of my own powers to amuse or instruct, for occupying its attention. I had literally nothing to do, and, therefore, I hope it will not be a very serious charge against me, that I did nothing!
He insisted, however, that he had given ‘like many others, many a silent and, I trust, honest and conscientious vote’.
There is another defect in the position of a Member for a close borough, of which I soon became deeply sensible, and which it appears to me impossible to any ingenuous mind to contemplate without some degree of humiliation and pain, and which consequently appears to me very much to strengthen the argument for the abolition of those boroughs. I felt that I entered the House under false colours! I felt that I was not what I professed to be, really the representative of the borough for which I was nominally returned. I came into Parliament by means which, under the circumstances of the case I conceived to be perfectly justifiable, but which, being illegal, I could not rise up publicly in my place and avow. It may have been useful and right that a certain number of seats in Parliament should be attainable by purchase, or through the influence of certain wealthy commoners or peers; but I consider the false position in which Members for close boroughs were placed in the House, under the old system, wholly indefensible.
Ibid. 119-20.
Staunton, who visited the continent from September 1826 to May 1827, and in January 1829, set off on another tour in May 1830, but travelled back on hearing of the death of George IV, ‘with a view to a seat in the new Parliament’. Yet, although his return to the House at the subsequent general election, which he found ‘most agreeable’, was on ‘the same terms of perfect independence’ as before, it was for another rotten borough, Heytesbury, on Lord Heytesbury’s interest.
so reluctant, indeed, was I to give a vote against the party with which I had hitherto acted, that I hesitated to the last moment; and did not, in point of fact, go out into the lobby until I saw Sir Thomas Acland do so, of whose honesty and independence I had conceived the very highest opinion.
Ibid. 110-11, 115.
He made his first reported speeches, 16 Dec. 1830, when he spoke briefly in favour of a Galway petition for extending the elective franchise to local Catholics, and, having served on the election committee, called for Evesham’s disfranchisement. He argued that the newly installed Grey ministry had pledged itself
to bring forward some measure of safe, temperate and constitutional reform; I hope, therefore, that they will take the first step towards redeeming that pledge this night. I fear that our professions of a disposition in favour of reform generally, will be little valued if, when a practical case occurs, we flinch from our duty and decline to deal with it. I believe that most persons regret the half-measures which were pursued respecting East Retford in the last Parliament, and I trust we shall now set a better example. I hope that the representation of Evesham will be conferred on one of those great commercial cities whose non-representation is certainly the greatest blot in our elective system. All reformers, I conceive, of every shade and degree, must concur in that opinion. Even many of those who are against reform as a general measure, do not object to punish specific cases of delinquency.
He was appointed to the select committee on the East India Company, 4 Feb. 1831.
Staunton encapsulated his views on reform in a detailed private memorandum, dated 25 Feb. 1831, the first of a series that provides an unusual insight into the views of an ordinary backbencher during the reform crisis.
upon the balance of conflicting arguments and considerations the result promises on the whole to be beneficial. This is all which, with our limited capacities and in our uncertain state here on earth, can be predicated of any prospective measure whatsoever.
Indeed, while the aristocracy would retain its ‘full and fair share of influence in the state’, by ‘giving the representation to the householders or middle classes the principle appears to me to be strictly conservative’, and he doubted that it would lead to further popular reform measures, such as the ballot, which he abhorred. However, since he thought it ‘safe and well to diminish the direct influence of the aristocracy by twenty or thirty votes, and yet very dangerous to do so to the extent of one hundred or more’, he was shocked by the scale of Lord John Russell’s reform proposals, 1 Mar. In notes dated 3 and 10 Mar. he expressed his admiration for much of the bill, particularly the provisions for counties, non-resident voters and unenfranchised towns, although he would have preferred a £20 borough qualification. His main objections, however, were to the ‘violent and sweeping’ nature of the disfranchisement, which he thought ‘so great a change that no man who reasons calmly and impartially will venture to predict the result’; the lack of finality in its scope, as ‘not only universal suffrage, but the ballot, short parliaments and the exclusion of placemen and pensioners from the House are now openly avowed as objects for further discussion’; and the replacement of the balance of monarchical, aristocratic and popular interests in the Commons by a republic, which ‘is not nor never was the constitution of England’. Nevertheless, he continued to steer a middle course. He presented and endorsed a reform petition from neighbouring Havant, 19 Mar., when he expressed ‘my regret that I cannot give my unqualified support to the bill as it stands at present’. He added, however, that ‘I shall vote for the second reading, with a hope that the part which I object to may be amended in the committee’. Having duly divided in its favour, 22 Mar., he reiterated, 25 Mar., that the recent division ‘appeared to me to be on the question of reform or no reform; and looking to the state of public feeling, and in deference to that, I agreed to the second reading. I trust that in the committee the measure will assume the character of a moderate reform’. He voted for Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment to preserve the relative size of the English representation, 19 Apr. 1831, ‘this being one of the modifications I required’.
Staunton regretted that the government’s defeat meant that the discussion on reform would be curtailed, and a dissolution made inevitable. He condemned the ‘furious and unprincipled demagogues’ who dominated the ensuing general election, and found it
impossible not to fear that the Parliament now electing under the influence of the prevailing excitement will prove a revolutionary Parliament, a Parliament which will not allow the ministers to retrace their steps although anxious and willing to do so - which will fanatically persist in that which the people in their recovered senses will no longer desire.
By an address, dated 24 Apr. 1831, he declined to accept a requisition to stand for Hampshire, until the bill had passed, and he defended his last vote against a clause which was a
direct violation of the terms of those solemn compacts by which the legislative union of the three kingdoms had been effected, which, moreover left all our great colonies and vast possessions in the East and West Indies, as well as our various important commercial and funded interests, without the protection of either a virtual or a direct representation in Parliament.
Hants Chron. 2 May 1831; Wellington mss WP4/4/3/28.
He was again returned unopposed for Heytesbury.
In a memorandum, 24 July 1831, he described Russell’s speech reintroducing the reform bill that day as ‘able and argumentative and historical’, but he was irritated by it, and detailed instances ‘of plausible and as he appears to think triumphant argument, which appeared to be decidedly false’. Although hostile to the bill, he still believed that a
beneficial reform is very conceivable in theory - but it cannot be reduced to practice because its principles, though good, would not be popular -and that which is now popular, is decidedly not good. In this case, how much to risk with the view of saving the rest, is a difficult question.
He was convinced ‘that the advocates of the measure hope and believe it would produce no effect at all’, and that its opponents feared ‘that it will not only do no good but a great deal of harm’. He was again appointed to the select committee on the East India Company, 28 June, when he spoke in defence of its monopoly of trade with China, for which he undoubtedly continued to press during its sittings.
The old road he admitted might be rough and even dirty, but the new he asserted was at the edge of a dangerous precipice - and although you might adopt it in defiance of his warning and escape for a time, his warning was not the less justifiable.
He was accidentally shut out, 19 July, and therefore unable to vote, as he had intended, for using the 1831 census to determine the boroughs in schedules A and B, ‘conceiving that admitting population to be the measure of disfranchisement it ought to be the actual population’. He did, however, vote against the disfranchisement of Appleby that day, considering that if the borough was extended into neighbouring parishes, its population would have warranted the retention of one seat. He divided against the disfranchisement of Downton, 21 July, ‘because it came under this rule, and the rule however good or bad, was better than no rule at all’. He voted against the disfranchisement of St. Germans, 26 July, for the same reason, and against the partial disfranchisement of Dorchester, 28 July, ‘because although the borough is within the line, the town is above it’. However, he voted to remove one of the seats from Cockermouth, 28 July, ‘because I do not object to take one Member from the small towns and because it diminishes the preponderance given by the bill to northern counties’, and from Guildford, 29 July, as the town had ‘no peculiar claims, having supported and petitioned for the bill’.
Staunton’s opinions changed back towards a grudging support for reform in the autumn of 1831 because of the popular unrest which followed the defeat of the bill in the Lords. ‘Unfortunately the question now is’, he wrote on 17 Nov., ‘not how shall we improve the system of our representation, but how shall we prevent a revolution’. On 10 Dec. he commented that
although I always have and always shall disapprove of the entire reform bill, thinking that it will on the whole do more harm than good, introduce or aggravate more abuses, than it will either remove or alleviate, I am by no means confident that I shall continue to resist it.
Acknowledging that there had been a major and permanent shift in public opinion and that changes were unavoidable, he judged that
if the Whigs are the immediate, the Tories are the remote cause of our present difficulties. Their pertinacity in resisting the most moderate reforms, and their dissensions on the Catholic question, has thrown the country into the hands of their enemies; and since we cannot no [sic] longer hope to prevent mischief, let us do as little as possible ... In consequence of having so long refused to do anything, we are now driven to do too much.
By 24 Dec. 1831 he was reassured that the bill would bring some advantages, for example that there would be ‘fewer very young men and mere loungers’ in the House, and he now believed that there would be little further pressure to remove the still sufficiently powerful nomination interests. He voted for going into committee on the revised bill, 20 Jan. 1832, but the following day, in another private paper, he revealed his growing frustration with its progress:
I have never entered very warmly into the merits of the details of the reform bill, especially those of the disqualification clause. Not only does the overwhelming importance of the measure put every other question connected with it in the shade; but I do not think that this question whether Malton or Calne is or is not within the line, has much to do with private justice.
He divided against the enfranchisement of Tower Hamlets, 28 Feb., when he was listed among those ‘who generally vote for reform’. On 8 Mar., while pointing out that no significant changes had been made since the first bill, he observed on paper that ‘the evils and dangers if not removed are considerably mitigated’. He listed the ‘scale of houses and taxes’ instead of population, the approximate restoration of the ‘proportion between the three kingdoms’, the Chandos amendment by which ‘the legitimate influence of land is materially increased’, a hope that the Lords would reverse the enfranchisement of the metropolitan boroughs, the proviso that £10 householders ‘must also be ratepayers for a twelvemonth preceding’, and the fact that schedule B was much reduced. According to his own account, however, he absented himself from the division on the third reading, 22 Mar., and left the House before the vote on Ebrington’s motion for an address calling on the king to appoint only ministers who would carry the bill unimpaired, 10 May.
By the summer Staunton was publicly expressing himself reconciled to the provisions of the Reform Act, by which his seat at Heytesbury was abolished. Having declined to enter for Hampshire at the by-election in June, he accepted an invitation to stand for the Southern division later that year, and in his addresses he advocated reforms of the church, the corn laws, slavery, the Bank of England, the East India Company and the public finances, as well as a pacific foreign policy. Despite his poor record of voting in favour of reform, and John Croker’s* opinion that he was ‘as little cut out for a popular knight of a shire as any man I know’, he ‘went bowing unopposed through the country like a Chinese mandarin’.
he had never blindly followed the ministers of the day, but had voted for or against them as his judgement led him to approve or disapprove of their measures. Neither he nor his family has ever received one farthing of the public money, and private interest could not, therefore, bias his votes, which he had ever given on all subjects that came before him, without personal consideration or partiality.
Mems. 121-8, 192; Hants Advertiser, 15 Dec. 1832.
He sat as a Liberal for Hampshire South for two years, and subsequently represented Portsmouth. Later in life he reviewed his political career:
From the first day that I took my seat in the House of Commons, in January 1819, down to the present hour (January 1852), I have sided with that section of our great political parties which, previous to 1830, were usually denominated the ‘Liberal Tories’, who acknowledged Mr. Canning as their leader; and who, soon after his death, seceded from the Tories of Lord Liverpool’s school, and became amalgamated with the Whigs. With them, I gave a general and independent support to Lord Liverpool’s administration. With them, I invariably opposed Lord Liverpool and the Ultra Tories upon the Catholic question. With them, I finally and entirely separated from that party, on the occasion of the duke of Wellington’s celebrated declaration of unqualified opposition to all parliamentary reform. With them, lastly, I have ever since given to the Liberal party a free and independent support.
Mems. 110-11.
He retired at the dissolution in 1852 because of ill health.