Stephenson was the acknowledged son of the colourful and eccentric ‘Jockey’ of Norfolk, whose second wife was confined to a lunatic asylum shortly after their marriage in 1771, and Elizabeth, the daughter of Isaac Stephenson and his wife Mary, née Hodgson.
Stephenson fell back on his legal education, and from 1817 he was listed as an equity draftsman at 1 Garden Court, Temple, and, from 1835, at 3 Plowden Buildings. If Le Marchant is to be believed, he did not establish much of a reputation, being ‘one of the most incompetent practitioners in chancery, as the little business he has ever done there abundantly testifies’.
kept waiting in the cold chapel an hour and a half before everything was ready, during which period various peers made the most marked homage to Billy [the duke of Clarence, now heir presumptive], and as Stephenson was the duke of Sussex’s train-bearer, he was privy to all that passed.
Creevey’s Life and Times, 234.
Stephenson married into the Keppel family in 1826, but while his wife’s father was apparently content with the match, her brother-in-law, Thomas William Coke, Member for Norfolk, was ‘furious’.
In 1828 it was rumoured that he would be Lord Fitzwilliam’s candidate at East Retford, and in early 1830 he, as Lord Holland put it, ‘in a most manly, disinterested, but gentlemanlike and conciliatory manner’, declined the offer from the marquess of Cleveland (as Darlington had become) of a seat for Winchelsea. This was because of his ‘pledge to Ld. Fitz.’ and his ‘inability to support ministers’, but nothing came of it. He was one of the counsel for the petitioners against the East Retford disfranchisement bill before the Lords between April and July.
steer its course by the three great principles on which it is avowedly formed - economy, reform and peace. The triumph to the Whigs and to their principles is great, and also to Lord Grey; for during the last ten years many of their principles have been reluctantly, but of necessity, adopted and carried by their political opponents, and Lord Grey is now by the voice of the country and the vote of Parliament forced into power ... I begin to feel a great interest in events and affairs as they are passing before me. The times are exciting; I am proud of my party and cannot help feeling elated that no dirty job, no intrigues of faction, has brought them into power; and that the regeneration and restoration of the country are thus committed to the judgement and abilities of those whom I have looked up to all my life.
Stirling, Coke of Norf. 543-4.
Having failed to gain an appointment when Canning had been premier, he doubly resented Brougham’s failure to find him a legal office, especially as he had promised him a mastership in chancery if he were appointed lord chancellor. By February 1831 Stephenson interpreted this failure as a disparaging judgement on his abilities, and he wrote a highly charged letter to Brougham, which ended: ‘you have thus for a long time sported with, and now wounded so many of my feelings so acutely, as to render it impossible for us to meet in future, except as the most perfect strangers. Farewell’. In another letter he haughtily refused the derisory offer of a commissionership of bankruptcy.
In the last week of February 1831 Stephenson and William George Adam, a king’s counsel, were asked to correct the reform bill, probably on the advice of Durham, who chaired the committee charged with its preparation, and it is unlikely that he played any larger role than this in its composition.
I have, however, always been the steady friend of parliamentary reform, and I have come into the House at my own request to support the present measure considering that the happiness, the welfare and the comfort of the country depend on the destruction of that detestable oligarchical power which has too long existed.
He again divided regularly in favour of its details. On 20 Feb. he indicated that he would move for the first ten boroughs to be disfranchised together, ‘for it is impossible that there can be any discussion upon them’, but dropped the idea when Lord John Russell expressed his disapproval. He also spoke in defence of the formula used to draw up the list of condemned boroughs, and the following day he reiterated that
the vulgar rules of arithmetic are quite sufficient for the purposes required: and, indeed, are so accurately applied, as to place each borough as nearly as possible in its proper relative position, by adding the two sums of taxes and houses together, and dividing by a common divisor, say 100.
He voted for the third reading of the bill, 22 Mar., and Ebrington’s motion for an address calling on the king to appoint only ministers who would carry it unimpaired, 10 May. He divided in the minority of ten against the second reading of the Liverpool disfranchisement bill, 23 May. He voted for the second reading of the Irish bill, 25 May, and against increasing the county representation of Scotland, 1 June. Although wanting it to be amended, he spoke in favour of the bill to exclude insolvent debtors from the Commons, 6 June, arguing that parliamentary privileges were ‘never intended to enable a man to defraud his creditors’. He rebutted criticisms of the general register and anatomy bills, 2, 6 Feb., and denied that he had stigmatized opposition to such measures as ‘ignorant clamour’, 8 Feb. He voted against the production of information on Portugal, 9 Feb., and military punishments, 16 Feb. He divided against an amendment to the navy civil departments bill, 6 Apr., defended Sussex’s rangership of Hampton Court Park, 13 Apr., voted in the minority of 11 for requiring coroners to have medical qualifications, 20 June, and expressed his hope that the punishment of death bill would not be lost, 6 July. His only other known votes were with ministers for the Russian-Dutch loan, 26 Jan., 20 July 1832. By the Reform Act Westbury was deprived of one seat, which Lopes continued to occupy. Stephenson therefore left the House at the dissolution of 1832 and never sat again.
In his Letter to Lord Henley (1833), Stephenson argued in favour of church reform, stating that the
voice of the nation is demanding in every public functionary a higher degree of zeal and purity, and public virtue; that abuses are no longer deemed sacred because they are venerable, nor improvements rejected as rash because they are extensive.
In A Letter to James Abercromby (1833) he advocated extensive reforms of municipal corporations. According to Sir Robert Heron*, after Durham had resigned from the government in 1833, Stephenson
said, in a large company at dinner, ‘That Lord Durham would return to the cabinet before the end of June, in a place of greater importance, though of inferior precedence’. This could not be said without design. It has not been realized.
Heron, Notes, 207.
As an ‘active member of the party at the bar’, Stephenson seems to have retained his status in Whig circles for some years. However, either because his strictures against reckless expenditure proved too much, or because Sussex felt him in some way to blame for his failure to receive a larger grant from Lord Melbourne’s administration, Stephenson left the duke’s service in 1838.
another job (or rather jobbing) coming forward, that of Stephenson, which though small in amount is very discreditable, and shows the laxity and system of favour which prevails with reference to individuals and party hangers-on.
Lord Granville Somerset* raised the matter in the House, 5 Mar. 1840.
wherever the remnants of the old Whig society still met, long missed the well known and well loved figure in the old-fashioned Hessian boots of the man who had been the friend and secretary of the royal duke of Sussex, the brother-in-law of Coke of Norfolk and the life and soul of all their gatherings.
A Royal Corresp. ed. J. Stephenson, 9; Spencer Stanhope Letter-Bag, ii. 126; Keppel, i. 96; ii. 219; iii. 27; Gent. Mag. (1858), ii. 316.
He was survived by his wife, who in 1868 married Samuel Charles Whitbread of Southill, Bedfordshire, Member for Middlesex, 1820-30, who had loved her since his youth.