Twiss’s father was born in 1759, the younger son of an English merchant then residing in Holland, who subsequently settled in Norfolk. He was descended from a junior branch of the Twiss family of Killintierna, county Kerry. His elder brother Richard (1747-1821) made a faintly ludicrous name for himself as a traveller and miscellaneous writer and ended his days in penury after squandering a handsome inheritance in futile attempts to perfect the manufacture of paper from straw.
[He is] very thin, and stoops. His face is ghastly in the paleness of it. He takes absolute clouds of snuff; and his eyes have an ill-natured acuteness in them. He is a kind of thin Dr. Johnson without his hard words (though he is often quaint in his phrase); very dogmatical, and spoilt as an original.
His scholastic bent led him to compile a Complete Verbal Index to the Plays of Shakespeare, a work of great labour but little practical use; mercifully, 542 of its 750 copies were consumed by fire in 1807.
Horace Twiss, whose younger brother John joined the Royal Engineers in 1816, was markedly influenced by this bohemian background. He was bred to the bar, went the Oxford circuit and subsequently practised successfully in the equity courts; but he inherited his mother’s family’s love of the theatre and had literary aspirations and pretensions as a wit and raconteur. It was reckoned that he was retarded in his profession by his vulgar, raffish image and apparent lack of gravitas. He shone as a member of various debating societies, and one of his dinner party pieces was a series of imitations of great parliamentary orators, past and present. He composed the farewell address which his aunt delivered on her retirement from the stage in 1812, and in 1814 published some clever Posthumous Parodies of famous poets and the words to A Selection of Scotch Melodies.
Twiss had parliamentary ambitions. In 1816 and 1818 he contested Wootton Bassett on the interest of the 2nd earl of Clarendon, but on both occasions he was narrowly beaten and failed with a petition.
We ... saw him address the tongs, placed upright against the bars [of the fireplace] as ‘Mr. Speaker’ ... [He] preserved wondrous gravity, and the tongs falling, said to himself, ‘Aye, now the Speaker has left the chair’.
Redding, Fifty Years’ Recollections, iii. 223.
Nothing came of his promised initiative to improve bankruptcy administration, 16 Feb., 1 Mar.
Twiss voted against more extensive tax cuts, 11, 21 Feb., and abolition of one of the joint-postmasterships, 13 Mar 1822. He opposed Wilson’s attempt to bring the circumstances of his dismissal from the army before the House, 13 Feb. On 25 Apr. he spoke at length against Russell’s reform scheme, which he said would lead to the ‘total subversion of the monarchy’, but the Speaker, according to Mrs. Arbuthnot, allowed him to be ‘coughed down’.
In his quest for professional advancement, which began as soon as he entered the House, Twiss, as a pro-Catholic, attached himself to the foreign secretary Lord Londonderry, through whom he applied to Eldon for a mastership in chancery. Eldon refused him this, but held out the prospect of a Welsh judgeship whenever a vacancy occurred. After Londonderry’s suicide in August 1822 Twiss lost no time in sending Canning, his successor as leader of the Commons, an ‘exposition of his pretensions and expectations’. Canning, aware that the Welsh judicature and the propriety of its members being allowed to sit in the Commons were under critical parliamentary scrutiny, suggested to Lord Liverpool that a mastership ‘of the first, second, or third vacancy’ would be the best way to cater for Twiss, whose elevation to the Welsh bench ‘would infallibly bring that question forward under most unpropitious circumstances’. When a vacancy occurred in March 1823 Liverpool, who had a low estimate of Twiss’s abilities, had no compunction in preferring the more senior and respectable Jonathan Raine*. Yet the promise made by Londonderry and Eldon remained, and when the puisne judgeship of Chester fell vacant in September 1823 Twiss duly applied for it through Canning, who told Liverpool:
I really do not see how this application is to be refused, unless we determine never to make a Welsh judge again in the House of Commons (and that determination would come awkwardly after Raine) or never to make a friend (and that would be hardly stateable to friends) ... [Twiss] has unquestionably the best claim of any man on our side. I feel all the inconvenience of the run that may be made against him. But I think it would be injustice in the government to pass him over, and it would certainly be very hard upon me, after Lord Londonderry’s promises. If it is thought expedient to make his going out of the House ... a condition, I have no objection. It would be one thing to say that we will not risk the question of his seat in Parliament, but it is quite another to say that parliamentary services shall be the reverse of a qualification for preferment.
On the other hand, the Welshman Charles Williams Wynn*, president of the board of control, urged the need for ‘care in the selection’, especially as the chief justice of Chester, Charles Warren*, had come to be unusually reliant on his associate judge, because of his own defective knowledge:
Under these circumstances the puisne judgeship requires a person of more knowledge and ability than might be necessary with a different chief justice ... You will probably be applied to by Mr. Twiss, but though he is a good speaker and might be appointed a puisne judge on one of the other Welsh circuits where there is an able chief, I fear that his professional reputation is not such as would render his nomination to this office, which is superior in emolument to any of the other appointments but the chief justiceship of Chester, creditable to the government or useful to the public.
An attempt to fob Twiss off with the chief justiceship of Bombay foundered on the objections of the East India Company directors. In the end Liverpool, feeling obliged to provide for him, but convinced that his elevation to the bench would entail ‘the annihilation of the Welsh judicature’, gave the puisne judgeship to Thomas Jervis, whose post of counsel to the admiralty was conferred on Twiss.
He was not much in evidence in the House in 1824, when he objected to Hume’s attempt to name committing magistrates, 27 May, opposed the game bill, which would ‘considerably increase crime among the lower orders’, 31 May, and appealed to the Catholic Association to dissolve itself before government intervened, 10 June. He voted with ministers on the case of the Methodist missionary John Smith, 11 June, and for the Irish insurrection bill, 14 June 1824. He divided for the Irish unlawful societies bill, 25 Feb., was a defaulter, 28 Feb., but appeared and was excused, 1 Mar., when he voted for Catholic claims. He divided for the relief bill, 21 Apr., and spoke at length for its third reading, 10 May, when he sat down to ‘loud and repeated cheering from all sides of the House’. He defended the level of Eldon’s income from fees, 27 May, and voted for the duke of Cumberland’s annuity, 2, 10 June, and for the spring guns bill, 21 June 1825. He opposed parliamentary reform proposals, 13 Apr., 26 May 1826. On the criminal justice bill, 17 Apr., he made a suggestion concerning depositions which ministers would not accept; and he again diverged from the home secretary Peel and the attorney-general by supporting George Lamb’s bill to allow persons on trial for felony offences to conduct their defence through counsel, 25 Apr. He paired (with Agar Ellis) against the immediate abolition of colonial slavery, 19 May 1826.
In the House, he suggested improvements to Shadwell’s writ of rights bill, 30 Mar., and Lord Althorp’s elections regulation bill, 8 May 1827; in the later case, by establishing a means of determining the validity of dubious votes on the spot. He claimed 17 years later that had Nicholas Tindal* been made attorney-general in Canning’s administration, as was at first expected, he would have replaced him as solicitor-general. When this fell through, Canning gave him the option of taking silk or becoming under-secretary at the home office, and he opted for the former.
a general laugh when, on reading poor Twiss’s patent, it turned out that he was expressly told by the king that he was to have no wages, whereas our royal master allows the rest of us £40 a year. This exception in Twiss’s patent is to preserve his acceptance of the office from vacating his seat in Parliament.
Life of Campbell, i. 446.
To add to his difficulties he was obliged, ‘at no small sacrifice of revenue for higher considerations’, as he later complained, to give up not only his assize and sessions business, but his commissionership of bankrupts.
In the reorganization necessitated by the resignation of the Huskissonites from his government in May 1828 the duke of Wellington, at Peel’s prompting, offered Twiss the under-secretaryship at the colonial office ‘with an assurance’, as Twiss told Huskisson, ‘that I am to be perfectly free upon the Catholic question’:
The only members of the late government to whom I am at all bound are yourself and Lord Palmerston. And I sincerely say to you, as I have said to him, that if Mr. Canning’s friends ... are of opinion that my services can in any way be useful to him as a party disconnected from the government, or that my connections with them, on account of my obligations to Mr. Canning, are such as would make my acceptance of office at present a breach of faith to them, or in any respect a disparagement to my own honour, I shall be most truly obliged by your telling me so, in the frankest manner; I shall then at once decline the offer. If, on the other hand, you concur with Lord Palmerston in the feeling (by which I mean of course a cordial and unqualified feeling) that there is no reason why I should not accept the offer, I shall do myself the pleasure to accept it accordingly.
No objection was raised and Twiss took the office, which did not require re-election.
obstructive through timidity and indecisiveness ... for ever occupied with detail and incapable of coming to a conclusion - routing and grunting and tearing up the soil to get at a grain of the subject.
Taylor Autobiog. i. 117-18.
Many of his interventions in debate after his appointment were on routine colonial matters, but he opposed investigation of Baron de Bode’s compensation claim, 1 July 1828. He handled some legal business, too, such as the fraudulent devises bill, 5 June, the bankruptcy bill, 9 June, and the lunatics’ estates bill, 12 July 1828. He spoke in favour of Catholic emancipation as ‘the boldest and the safest [measure] that was ever propounded for the settlement of an empire’, 18 Mar. 1829. He was a teller for the government majorities on the ecclesiastical courts bill, 21 May, 5 June 1829. Early in 1830 Wellington considered him for the secretaryship to the board of control. Lord Ellenborough, the president, judged him to be ‘a clever man, but rather vulgar’, who, as ‘a lawyer and a very good speaker’, would ‘do very well’; but nothing came of this.
At the general election of 1830 Twiss transferred to Newport, Isle of Wight, on the Holmes interest. According to Palmerston, who was being vainly courted by Wellington, Twiss called on him on 7 Oct. 1830 ‘to say that Peel wished to promote him in course of changes now in contemplation, and he hoped that if I came in, I would help him on instead of opposing any obstacle to his promotion’.
walked home with Twiss ... [who] considers he is out and has lost £2,000 a year. He is about to let his house furnished, put down his carriage, go into lodgings and in the manly way I was sure he would do meet the emergency, live within his income and wait for better times.
CUL, Pollock mss Add. 7564 A/4, Pollock to Alexander , 17 Nov.; Hatherton diary, 24 Nov. [1831].
Twiss supported the Grey ministry’s proposal for an inquiry into the possibility of reducing official salaries, 9 Dec. 1830, but only because it was ‘exceedingly desirable to disabuse the public mind, and to expose the monstrous exaggerations and enormous errors which prevail’. He wished them joy of their clamorous radical allies, 13 Dec. On 21 Dec. he endorsed Inglis’s assertion that the desire in the country for reform was ‘not so great as some suppose it to be’ and doubted whether the government could produce a scheme which would satisfy all reformers. He defended Darling, the governor of New South Wales, against Hume’s attack, 23 Dec. 1830. In January 1831 he stayed with Peel at Drayton, from where his fellow guest Sir John Beckett* reported that he was
very Swiss, and would fight under any banners ... I wish heartily that he could get any decent permanency from the present people that would take him out of Parliament (for he could not with any decency stay in the House if he joined them). He will be of no use to us, for his heart is not Tory, and his interests will soon be Whig. Liking him personally and wishing him well, I wish he was out of Parliament and poverty.
Dyott’s Diary, ii. 102; Lonsdale mss, Beckett to Lowther, 13 Jan.; Pollock mss 7564 C/1, Pollock to Alexander, 22 Jan. 1831.
In the House, 8, 10 Feb. 1831, he was inclined to excuse alleged improprieties in the management of Fisherton gaol. He opposed calls for the abandonment of the colonies, 10 Feb., and criticized the Canada bill, 18 Feb. After Russell had expounded the government’s reform proposals, 1 Mar., Twiss, who, according to Thomas Gladstone*, ‘gained an apparent hold on the attention and even feeling of the House that I was not prepared for’,
until a few short months ago, the most radical reformer was not sanguine enough to dream of beholding a day when the ministers of the British crown - of a mixed monarchy - would bring down to Parliament a bill, sweeping away at once all the proportions of the representation, all the fixed landmarks between the ancient estates of the kingdom.
The disfranchisement of boroughs, he argued, was ‘a violation’ of the constitutional settlement of 1688; and, far from the Commons being unrepresentative, ‘the will of the people already but too often overpowers the calmer and better judgement’ of its Members. The real security required by the House was ‘against the passions and follies of the people themselves, against the efforts of a blind, but a gigantic strength, to pull down the pillars of a constitution, whose fall must be our common ruin’. He claimed to have voted for the transfer of the representation of Grampound (1821) and East Retford (1828) to large towns and still to favour this piecemeal approach as delinquent boroughs were identified. He spoke of the £10 householders whom ministers planned to enfranchise as ‘persons of whom a large proportion must be men of narrow habits, scanty information and strong prejudices, little shopkeepers and small attornies’, who were ‘not men fitted to exercise a discretion in political affairs’. This outburst, from which Peel quickly dissociated himself, provoked accusations, both inside and outside the House, that Twiss had ridiculed and belittled ‘the middle classes’.
Twiss’s connection with Newport was known to be of ‘a very precarious nature’, and at the 1831 general election Lord Yarborough, the most influential of the Holmes trustees, returned ministerialists. Twiss stood unsuccessfully for Hindon and Wootton Bassett. At this time Sir John Benn Walsh* wrote of him:
He was not particularly well received by the House ... He has the advantage of a very elegant distingue appearance, and particularly gentlemanlike manners ... [and] a certain easy assurance which seems to stand his friend in all societies ... He has a delicate, consumptive constitution and a great want of natural flow of animal spirits; though his conversation is occasionally enlivened with anecdote, yet the serious is his style. He is thoroughly ambitious, aspiring and actively pushing, and ... extravagantly vain.
Kentish Gazette, 15 Mar.; The Times, 30 Apr., 3 May 1831; NLW, Ormathwaite mss FG 1/6, p. 179.
Soon afterwards Sydney Smith, mocking the fallen Tory ex-ministers, called him ‘Beelzebub Twiss’.
much amused to hear Twiss’s opinion of the late government ... He had been taken from his practice at the bar, and made under-secretary ... No man had in public or private fought more stoutly for his party. But he is now thrown back into the ranks of his profession, and without a shilling has to commence anew. He had failed in getting a pension for his wife, while [William] Holmes*, their whipper-in, had one, and Sir W[illiam] Rae* also one for his wife. His abuse was worth hearing.
Hatherton diary, 24 Nov. 1831.
In April 1832 Twiss published Conservative Reform, outlining a counterplan to the reform bill which might be brought forward by the opposition in the Lords. He conceded an unspecified degree of disfranchisement of rotten boroughs, to be replaced by large towns, but suggested that all the adult male inhabitants should choose an electoral college of 100-200, to form ‘an intermediate, permanent and highly-qualified body of electors, to guard against the danger of sudden caprices, fluctuations and tumults, on the part of the multitude’. If, in the event of the Grey ministry’s fall, Wellington and Peel still refused to carry a moderate reform scheme, he envisaged ‘a temporary administration of other less distinguished statesmen’ to settle the question ‘on a conservative, rather than on a radical principle’.
He did not stand at the 1832 general election, but in 1835 he secured an expensive return for Bridport after unsuccessfully asking Peel for a place in his new ministry (as judge advocate or admiralty secretary) to tide him over until the chancery mastership which he had been encouraged to expect fell vacant.
The person ... who struck me as having a claim on us as a party, and on the whole not unfit for the situation, is Twiss ... [whose] publication ... which has been so generally lauded, has placed him in a better position before the public than he had before, and would, I think, compensate for any of his previous absurdities.
Peel, who had a soft spot for Twiss, replied:
I think very favourably of Horace Twiss. In all my intercourse with him he has acted like a man of honour and independent spirit, and I really believe him to be in point of knowledge and ability much higher than his reputation. He has had the misfortune to make himself a sort of bye-word by little foolish peculiarities which ought not, however, to detract from his real merits.
Add. 40552, ff. 24, 26, 40, 47, 49, 51; Macaulay Letters, iv. 202, 205; Smith Letters, ii. 844; Gent. Mag. (1849), i. 649-55.
Twiss had time to experience one more electoral defeat, at Bury St. Edmunds in 1847, before he dropped dead while addressing a meeting of the Rock Assurance Society at Radley’s Hotel, Blackfriars in May 1849. His personal estate went to his widow for her life and thereafter to his son Quintin William Francis Twiss (1835-1900), and he left a piece of land in Carlton Gardens, on which he had built a house at a loss, to his daughter Fanny, who successively married two editors of The Times, Bacon and Delane.
the impersonation of a debating society rhetorician. I have often heard his case cited against debating societies. When he got into the House of Commons, though inexhaustibly fluent, his manner certainly was very flippant, factitious, and unbusinesslike; but, without being in a debating society, I doubt whether he would have gained any eminence whatever.
Life of Campbell, i. 143.
His sworn enemy John Cam Hobhouse*, noting his death, commented, ‘Just the sort of man whom the newspapers lament, but I who knew him ...’.