TOWNSEND FARQUHAR, Sir Robert Townsend, 1st bt. (1776-1830), of 13 Bruton Street and 2 Richmond Terrace, Whitehall, Mdx.

Townsend Farquhar came from a cadet branch of the Farquhars of Gilminscroft, Ayrshire, who migrated to Aberdeenshire in the seventeenth century. His grandfather, the Rev. Robert Farquhar (1699-1787), was minister of Garioch. Robert’s fourth son Walter, who was born in 1738, studied medicine at Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, but did not graduate. He entered the army medical service and took part in the expedition to Belle Isle in 1761. On leave of absence he pursued his studies in France for 18 months, before quitting the army on account of poor health. He settled in London, set up and flourished as an apothecary and was transmogrified into a physician. He built up a fashionable practice, and in 1788 Edward Gibbon (whose last illness he was to treat unsuccessfully five years later) recommended him as ‘lequel sans être de la faculté les a supplanté les Medicins dans les premières maisons de Londres’. In 1796 he obtained the degree of MD from Aberdeen, was admitted a fellow of the Edinburgh College of Physicians and a licentiate of the London College and created a baronet (1 Mar.) Four years later he was appointed personal physician to the prince of Wales, with whom he remained a firm favourite. He attended Pitt in his fatal illness in January 1806 and became one of his many posthumous creditors, to the tune of 1,000 guineas. Oxford DNB; Gibbon Letters ed. J.E. Norton, iii. 700, 867, 874, 875; Prince of Wales Corresp. iv. 1440, 1562, 1564, 1821; vi. 2292; Add. 34456, ff. 315, 336; 42772, ff. 286-93; HMC Bathurst, 51; Farington Diary, vii. 2673, 2708; viii. 2869. It was said that his ‘professional forte’ lay in his ‘acute’ recommendation of ‘suitable medicine’; but John William Ward* blamed him in 1811 for the early death of the duke of Devonshire, ‘another [added] to the list of Farquhar’s victims’. By 1809 it was reckoned that his star was on the wane:

Sir Walter Farquhar had a run for some time, being supported by the duchess of Gordon, Mr. Pitt, etc., but he is now only in the third or fourth line. He never had the opinion of the other physicians with him, and it has been observed that unless a physician is supported in his reputation by the acknowledgement of his claim by the corps of physicians his reputation will only be temporary. Farington Diary, viii. 2809; x. 3536; Ward, Letters to ‘Ivy’, 144.

Farquhar largely retired from practice in 1813 and died on 30 Mar. 1819; his personalty was sworn under £40,000. PROB 8/212 (30 June 1819).

He had provided in his lifetime for his three sons, on whom he doted. PROB 11/1617/271. The eldest, Thomas Harvie Farquhar (1775-1836), became a partner in the London bank of Herries, Farquhar and Company. The two younger, Robert Townsend and Walter, entered the service of the East India Company, the former after being instructed in book-keeping by James Pierson of Castle Street. BL OIOC J/1/15, ff. 216-17. He went out to Amboyna, one of the Indonesian islands recently captured from the Dutch. He became commercial resident there in 1798, but in 1801 was severely censured by the Madras government for exceeding his brief in organizing a successful attack on the neighbouring Dutch settlement of Ternate. He was superseded by a soldier and declined the option of continuing as resident with restricted powers. Even though he was ‘deprived of all emolument, of all command, and [was] indisputably in a state of degradation’, and had ‘already suffered much from the climate, by repeated attacks of the epidemical Banda fever’, he martyred himself by voluntarily remaining until May 1802 to assist his successor. Gent.Mag.(1802), i. 69; Add.13869, ff. 15, 16, 19, 24, 29 and passim. On reaching Calcutta in October he beseeched the governor-general, Lord Wellesley, to whom he submitted an elaborate defence of his conduct, to intercede to clear his name. Wellesley, who had taken a benevolent interest in Townsend Farquhar’s career from the start, was sympathetic, and secured his appointment as commissioner to supervise the restoration of the former Dutch settlements in the Moluccas. Add. 13869, f. 1; 13870, ff. 1, 3. He then made him lieutenant-governor of Penang, in the Malayan peninsula, and commended him to Lord William Henry Cavendish Bentinck*, the new governor of Madras:

Your Lordship must be fully apprised of his meritorious character and services, and ... his zeal, integrity, and attainments ... Mr. Farquhar’s conduct in both these situations has been highly meritorious and exemplary, and merits my entire approbation. In addition to these public considerations, I feel a great personal regard for Mr. Farquhar, and I take a most cordial interest in his welfare and success. Add. 13712, f. 184.

Whether Townsend Farquhar obtained from the East India Company the compensation which he sought for serving in the Moluccas on a reduced salary is not clear. What he did get early in 1805 was a blow in the form of news that he was to be superseded in the government of Penang, where new arrangements were to be introduced. Wellesley, alerted by Sir Walter Farquhar, who invoked his aid ‘for the revival of my son’s hopes and the amelioration of his prospects’, was extremely supportive. He offered Townsend Farquhar an equivalent position in India or, if he wished to return to England, passage there in his own suite on his impending departure from Bengal. Townsend Farquhar, who bemoaned ‘the triumph of interest over every consideration of justice and propriety’ (though as ‘Leadenhall Street never was the meridian of either’ he had half expected this setback), was keen to return home, if only ‘to prove to the directors, or at all events to an impartial public, that their new arrangements respecting this Island have neither been planned with common prudence and circumspection, nor exercised with common zeal for the public interests’. He commended to Wellesley’s protection his brother Walter, collector of revenue at Penang, who stood to lose 40,000 rupees a year. (Walter was subsequently provided for in India, but died at St. Helena in 1813.) As it happened Townsend Farquhar was unable to leave for England until early 1806. He did so furnished with a complimentary letter of introduction from Bentinck to his father, the 3rd duke of Portland. Add. 13712, f. 203; 13870, ff. 115, 156, 162, 163; 13874, ff. 164, 166; 37283, f. 280.

It was with the encouragement of Wellesley and Portland’s fledgling ministry that Townsend Farquhar stood for Canterbury in conjunction with Stephen Rumbold Lushington* at the general election of 1807. Lushington would have compromised with their opponents for one seat, but Townsend Farquhar, who was not quite open with him, would have none of it. On the hustings he endorsed Lushington’s attack on the late Grenville government’s attempt to force the king’s conscience on Catholic relief, paid lip service to ‘independence’, promised residence if he was elected and declared his support for the plan to link the city to the sea by canal. He and Lushington were comfortably beaten after a heavy poll, at a personal cost of about £5,000 each. Add. 38281, f. 11; Cent. Kent. Stud. Harris mss C67/37/1; Kentish Chron. 1, 5, 8, 12, 15 May 1807. The same year Townsend Farquhar published Suggestions for supplying the West Indian colonies with labourers from China after the abolition of the slave trade and made another unsuccessful bid to secure the governorship of Penang. Wellington mss WP1/177/107. In 1810 he joined the expedition sent against the French islands of Bourbon and Mauritius by Lord Minto, the governor-general of India, who on 30 Mar. earmarked him to assume the interim administration of both in the event of success. Townsend Farquhar, who wrote in anticipation to Wellesley, now foreign secretary, asking him to secure his confirmation in these posts, took control at Bourbon on 8 July and at Mauritius on 6 Dec. 1810. Add. 37292, ff. 17, 137, 173. To his father, who had already pestered ministers on the subject, he wrote:

As this is to be a king’s government, the bugbear will be that I am a Company’s servant. As I have no mark in the hand which stamps me a Company’s servant, or disqualifies me from serving the king, I can only say that I offer my resignation and hereby again authorize you to give it in, if that be an obstacle. I expect that Lord Wellesley and all the ministers will support me. You must take an immediate opportunity of urging my claims and bringing to their recollection that I exerted myself when in England to support their cause at a heavy and ... very inconvenient expense to myself, for which hitherto I have not received the compensation which all others similarly situated have already obtained. I sacrificed my views in Leadenhall Street and every prospect in the world to Lord Wellesley. He and his colleagues have it now in their power to realize their promises and make me compensation for my services ... I can hardly anticipate so unjust a measure as my supercession, yet until I receive my confirmation from home, I cannot but feel anxious about the success of a question, involving all my future prospects in life. Add. 37292, ff. 103, 171, 278, 282; 38323, f. 109.

It was rumoured that he was to be replaced by Lord Robert Somerset*, but he was confirmed in the government, worth £10,000 a year, in March 1811. He was briefly in England soon afterwards, and returned to Mauritius in the late summer. HMC Fortescue, x. 123; PP (1816), xiii. 322.

Just before receiving his confirmation Townsend Farquhar wrote to Wellesley:

The improvement of my circumstances, occasioned by a very happy marriage, and the recovery of some property at Madras, have already placed me in a very independent state, and I trust that three or four years more on this side of the Cape will enable me to return to my family and friends with sufficient means, not only to live, but to do good to them, and to enable me to gratify the honourable ambition ... of ranging myself under your Lordship’s banners, in political life. Add. 37292, f. 264.

As things turned out, he found himself in a very difficult situation in Mauritius, where the transition to British rule was painful: charges of impropriety in his administration of its affairs were to haunt his later years and dog him to the grave. In an early dispatch, 15 Feb. 1811, he reported that the ‘laws, customs and usages’ of Mauritius, which he had been instructed to safeguard, included a flourishing slave trade, essential to the island’s economic survival, and argued, mistakenly, that the British Abolition Act of 1807 did not apply to colonies subsequently acquired. He insisted that he was ‘not by any means disposed to be a supporter of slavery’, but feared that ‘any sudden alteration’ in policy on the trade would agitate the colony’s 60,000 slaves, who seemed to expect immediate emancipation. The colonial secretary, Lord Liverpool, emphatically corrected his ‘extraordinary misapprehensions’ regarding the legality of the slave trade and instructed him to take every step to suppress it. Although the trade was formally abolished in Mauritius in 1813 and vice-admiralty courts were established to deal with offenders, it is clear that for the next few years the illicit traffic in slaves continued on a significant scale. Townsend Farquhar, anxious to conciliate the French settlers, and inadequately furnished with means of law enforcement, adopted a lenient attitude, which to his critics seemed tantamount to connivance. On 23 Oct. 1817, however, he concluded a treaty with King Radama of Madagascar, which promised effectually to check the trade. Imperial Reconstruction ed. F. Maddon and D. Fieldhouse, 780-2; PP (1826), xxvii. 136-8; H.T. Manning, British Colonial Government, 466-73; Camb. Hist. British Empire, ii. 110, 473; A. Toussaint, Hist. Mauritius, 58-61, 66-67, 77; J. Addison and K. Hazareesing, New Hist. Mauritius, 45; C. Lloyd, Navy and Slave Trade, 197-9; D. Napal, British Mauritius, 1-6, 33.

Townsend Farquhar had been painfully unwell in 1812 (when his spirits were temporarily lifted by a false report that Wellesley had become prime minister) and a recurrence of illness forced him to take leave of absence in November 1817. On his arrival in London he found his father terminally ill and himself suffered a relapse, but he lost no time in paying court to Liverpool, now premier. Add. 37293, ff. 165, 240, 242; 38270, f. 246. His deputy in Mauritius, General John Gage Hall, was soon complaining to the British government that the slave trade had ‘attained to a daring pitch’ there, but Townsend Farquhar countered that he was confusing the trade with slavery. He failed, as he had all along, to interest ministers in his ideas for the establishment of a strong British influence in Madagascar, which he had had charted for the first time. PP (1821),xxiii. 353; (1825), xxv. 814; (1826), xxvii. 279, 344-5; Toussaint, 77; L. Geoffroy, Chart of Madagascar (1819); Add. 38276, f. 314. He had discussions with William Wilberforce* and other abolitionists on the best means of suppressing the slave trade off east Africa. At one such gathering in March 1819 Maria Edgeworth recorded that ‘I never heard one word he said nor do I believe he said any one worth hearing’. Edgeworth Letters, 185. By the end of that year Townsend Farquhar’s health was improved and he was ordered to resume his post, but he did not depart without seconding Lushington’s successful nomination for Canterbury at the 1820 general election and soliciting ‘some public mark of the approbation and confidence of my government’, particularly one which, given the dangers posed by a tropical climate to his ravaged constitution, could be passed on to his son: he received a baronetcy in 1821. Add. 38276, f. 314; 38281, ff. 11, 13, 15; Kentish Chron. 10 Mar. 1820. By then Townsend Farquhar, who claimed that Hall and Ralph Darling, acting governor, 1819-20, had stirred up trouble among the slaves, had renewed the treaty with Radama, which Hall had broken. A treaty with the Imaum of Muscat followed and when Townsend Farquhar finally left Mauritius in May 1823 he assured Lord Bathurst, the colonial secretary, that ‘it is a source of great satisfaction to me to leave this island freed from the stigma of the slave traffic’. Loudon mss, Townsend Farquhar to Hastings, 11 Dec. 1820 (NRA 15459, p. 509); Add. 41265, ff. 1, 25, 28, 53, 64; HMC Bathurst, 522; Lloyd, 199; Wellington mss WP1/767/13. He lost no time in fawning on Liverpool on his arrival in London in September 1823. Add. 38296, f. 273; 38298, f. 4. George IV’s request that Bathurst should ‘take care’ of ‘that good man, Sir Robert Farquhar’ related to a forthcoming treasury report in the financial administration at Mauritius of Theodore Hook, the accountant-general, who had been held responsible for a deficiency of £12,000 and sent home a prisoner in 1818. The report implicated other officials but not Townsend Farquhar who, as Bathurst replied to the king, would ‘stand clear of any charge except what may arise from the facility with which his amiable disposition allowed others to practise upon him’. HMC Bathurst, 544; Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1088. In mid-November 1823 he declared his candidacy for the next vacancy in the East India Company’s direction, but he did not secure election until March 1826. The Times, 6 Jan. 1824. In February 1824 local difficulties dished an attempt by the duke of Wellington to have him adopted as ministerial candidate for Berwick-upon-Tweed at the next general election; but in April 1824 he indicated that he would stand for Canterbury if there was a vacancy. Wellington mss WP1/784/11; Kentish Chron. 23 Apr. 1824. In February 1825 he secured his return as a supporter of government on a vacancy for Newton on the Legh interest.

Townsend Farquhar divided in the minority for repeal of the usury laws, 17 Feb. 1825. He voted for Catholic relief, 1 Mar., 21 Apr., and the duke of Cumberland’s annuity, 6, 10 June. In the debate of 17 May on the customs consolidation bill, by which the produce of Mauritius was placed on the same footing as that of the West Indian colonies, he responded to Bernal’s insinuation that the slave trade still prevailed there with the assertion that ‘there had been no slave trade in the island for the last five years at least’. The issue was discussed at greater length on 3 June when Townsend Farquhar, who was supported by Huskisson, president of the board of trade, insisted that although there had been some smuggling of slaves by French privateers before 1820, the traffic had since been eradicated at Mauritius and was confined to Bourbon (returned to France at the peace). He supported the customs bill, both then and on 6 June 1825, as an act of justice to Mauritius, whose commerce, ‘sacrificed to European policy’, had been allowed to stagnate. The Times, 7 June 1826. He voted in the minority of 39 against the government’s proposed bank restriction, 13 Feb., but divided with them in defence of the Jamaican slave trials, 2 Mar., and the salary of the president of the board of trade, 10 Apr., and against parliamentary reform, 13 Apr. 1826. The exchanges of 1825 on the slave trade had presaged the attack which the abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton, primed by Hall and Edward Byam, former commissary-general of police at Mauritius, launched the following session. The government directed commissioners to visit the colony to investigate. In the House, 9 May 1826, Buxton moved for the appointment of a select committee to inquire into whether and to what extent the trade had prevailed at Mauritius. He alleged that there had been ‘a regular, systematic and unceasing importation of slaves’ from 1810 ‘almost to the present moment’ and implicated Townsend Farquhar, along with his private secretary Telfair and the colony’s administrative hierarchy, in connivance in the traffic. In reply, Townsend Farquhar complained that Buxton had ‘artfully spread his facts over a space of 16 years, taking very good care to direct the attention of the House to the earlier period, keeping altogether clear of the last six years’, when only a single incident of smuggling had occurred. He denied the charges against Telfair and, while admitting that up to 1820 there had been ‘several extensive debarkations of slaves’, stated that they had been ‘to a comparatively trifling extent’. He tried to explain away defects in the slave register and the demographic evidence adduced by Buxton, made light of his dispatch of 1811, disclaimed any responsibility for slave trading in the distant Seychelles, detailed the treaties with Madagascar and Muscat and, courting ‘the fullest inquiry’, observed:

Every measure of his government ... had for its object to put an end to that trade. But he had not thought it expedient to tell those who had been employed in the trade that they were felons, his wish being to avoid irritating the people. His object had been to produce a just moral feeling on the subject in the minds of the people ... From the anomalous state of the law, he did not think it prudent to proceed with the utmost severity ... He had done all he could, with the tools he had ... A moral feeling, a disgust towards slavery, had taken place in the Mauritius. By this means, and the measures he simultaneously took, he had been enabled to state last year, that the slave trade had ceased there.

He was defended by Wilmot Horton, the colonial under-secretary, who accused Buxton of pursuing a personal vendetta; but Canning, government leader in the Commons, sanctioned the inquiry ‘upon the ground of its being a question of national honour’. Bodl. (Rhodes House), Buxton mss Brit. Emp. s. 444, vol. 2, p. 239, Hannah to E. and H. Buxton, 10 May 1826; Buxton Mems. 182-6. Townsend Farquhar was named to the committee which, in the event, sat for only six days in May, being handicapped by Hall’s illness and overtaken by the dissolution. Its brief report and minutes of evidence were inconclusive, but the former welcomed the government’s continued commitment to sifting the business to the bottom. Lloyd, 200; PP (1826), iii. 87; (1826-7), iv. 287.

At the general election of 1826 Townsend Farquhar declined an invitation to stand for Canterbury and was returned unopposed for Hythe, where money and Company patronage were telling factors. Kentish Chron. 14 Mar., 4 Apr. 1826. Buxton, aided by Dr. Stephen Lushington*, continued to collect evidence on the Mauritian slave trade, in particular from soldiers who had served there. Bathurst was inclined to obstruct the proceedings of this ‘self-elected court’, but Horton pointed out that ministers were ‘in a certain degree’ pledged to support them. He agreed with Bathurst that the evidence so far published was ‘anything but conclusive’, yet thought it had to be assumed that Buxton, whose credit and that of his associates was ‘very deeply implicated in this business’, had a substantial case:

My opinion of the weakness of their case would be extremely increased, were it not for the easiness of Farquhar’s character ... I acquit him in toto of knowledge, much more of participation, but I think it possible that he may have been systematically juggled and deceived, and consequently I do not share the absolute conviction which he appears to entertain that the whole is a farce from beginning to end, and that Buxton has not a shadow of case behind, although he has made so poor a figure (which I admit) in the committee. Buxton Mems. 189-95; HMC Bathurst, 607-12.

On 21 Feb. 1827 Buxton tried to secure a renewal of the inquiry but, failing to get ministerial support, he postponed his motion until 26 May. Townsend Farquhar voted for Catholic relief, 6 Mar. He again declined to stand for Canterbury that month. Kentish Chron. 27 Mar. 1827. When William Smith alleged, 15 May, that a clandestine slave trade continued at Mauritius, Townsend Farquhar stood by his declarations of the previous two years. He complained that the case against him, which in his opinion had virtually collapsed, rested on evidence procured in the ‘most scandalous and foul manner, from the lowest and most profligate persons’, and angrily challenged Buxton to prove his allegations. Buxton retorted that he would show that the trade ‘had been carried on to a most enormous extent’ under Townsend Farquhar’s administration, but four days later he suffered a nervous collapse, from which he did not recover until the day designated for his motion had passed. His health remained precarious and in March 1828 he offered to hand over his evidence to the Wellington ministry if they would take up the case. Huskisson, now colonial secretary, declined to do so, assuring Buxton that the trade had long since ceased and exhorting him to await the outcome of the commission of inquiry. Buxton Mems. 201, 206; R.H. Mottram, Buxton the Liberator, 78-79, 86.

Townsend Farquhar had personally promised his support to Wellington on his appointment as prime minister in January 1828: ‘"A Wellesley ... in the cabinet and a Wellesley in the field" is the surest pledge for the maintenance of the national honour and fame abroad, and the general prosperity of all classes at home’. He asked Wellington to obtain a junior diplomatic posting for his legitimate son Walter when he left Oxford, and the duke secured his attachment to the Vienna embassy, though he observed privately to the foreign secretary Lord Aberdeen that ‘I am very unfortunate in having a very numerous acquaintance of gentlemen in Parliament who have served in their different lines and whom I cannot convince that although the minister of the country I can do nothing to forward their views or those of their friends and relations’. Wellington mss WP1/913/30; 951/62; 1032/4; 1036/1; 1085/8; Wellington Despatches, vi. 42-43. Townsend Farquhar voted for Catholic relief, 12 May, and in the ministerial majority on the silk duties, 14 July 1828. At the end of the year he was accused in the Anti-Slavery Reporter of having done nothing during his government of Mauritius to ameliorate the appalling conditions in which the slave population existed. Invited to comment by the new colonial secretary Sir George Murray*, he replied that the allegations were ‘a tissue of atrocious calumnies’ invented by the abolitionists to advance their ‘visionary experiments’. He boasted that he had ‘effectually done at least as much ... to abolish the slave trade, foreign as well as English, as the whole [abolitionist] party put together’. Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, ii. 332-40, 374-5; iii. 13-14, 19-24, 45-49; PP (1829), xxv. 95-101. He had been suffering from ‘severe indisposition’, but was present to vote, as expected, for Catholic emancipation, 6, 30 Mar. 1829. In August 1829 he sent Wellington extensive material on his pet scheme for the introduction of ‘mint notes’ to replace metal coins. The duke gave it short shrift: ‘We cannot make ourselves inhabitants of the moon’. Wellington mss WP1/1039/8; 1044/1; 1048/17; Wellington Despatches, vi. 146-8.

Townsend Farqhuar secured a number of returns bearing on the Mauritian slave trade, including his reply to the Reporter, 6 Apr., and presented and endorsed the petition of Jean Roudeaux of Mauritius for liquidation of his claims on the French government, 4 May 1829. On 25 May he was goaded by the West Indian Bright to repeat his previous assertions regarding the trade, which prompted Buxton to explain why he had not pressed the issue for over two years. Townsend Farquhar then complained that it was ‘extremely hard that a public servant should have a charge hanging over his head for three years, when it might be so easily brought forward and investigated’. When Buxton moved for papers concerning the treatment of slaves in Mauritius, 3 June, Townsend Farquhar challenged him either to renew the inquiry or apologize in his place. Buxton pledged himself to reopen his case next session and, while he conceded that Townsend Farquhar’s ‘courting inquiry’ seemed to tell in favour of his innocence, warned him that he would expose a sordid tale of cruelty, deception and greed. Tempers flared out of control as the exchanges continued, and Townsend Farquhar rounded on ministers:

In this long and almost unprecedented persecution of me, I have not received, neither have I craved, the assistance, support or countenance of any of the officers of government ... Whether from intimidation, or from the principle of government, daily gaining ground, of conciliating the enemy, or from the love of ease ... I cannot say; but ... those from whose department I might naturally have expected support have rather, if anything, lent themselves to the opposite party; and, instead of throwing their shield over one of their own servants, whose conduct and services had been approved by his king and country, they have kept aloof, and afforded the means to my enemies of protracted delay ... All I ask for is fair play, and the termination of the inquiry, involving my character, which has been now suspended for upwards of three years.

A week later Townsend Farquhar, in a letter to Murray, dismissed the commissioners’ report, which he had been invited to peruse, as ‘the most inconclusive, vague, incoherent and frivolous rhapsody that was ever produced in the shape of a public document’. He protested, too, that preceding ministries had gone behind his back in altering the commissioners’ terms of reference with ‘special instructions’, and insisted that if Buxton failed to proceed with the case, ministers should publicly repudiate him. The report, in which the commissioners blamed a conspiracy of silence in Mauritius for their failure to get properly to the bottom of allegations that civil servants had connived at or participated in the trade, indicated that the illicit traffic had continued for several years after the British takeover. Yet it acknowledged the importance of Townsend Farquhar’s treaties with Madagascar and Muscat and stated that there had been no direct import of a whole cargo of negroes since March 1821. PP (1829), xxv. 49-93, 135-9; Buxton Mems. 224-8. Buxton was bent on prosecuting the case in the next session, but Townsend Farquhar’s sudden death in March 1830 put him out of reach. The following month, according to Buxton, Murray privately admitted that ‘slave trading to a vast extent had prevailed at the Mauritius, and that all our statements had been well founded’. Buxton Mems. 228-30. To the delight of the abolitionists, Murray said almost as much in the House, 13 May, when he attributed the great increase in the Mauritian sugar output to the illegal import of ‘a great number of slaves’; but on 17 May 1830 he tried to correct this ‘erroneous impression’ by explaining that those imports had occurred between 1814 and 1821.

In his will, dated 21 Mar. 1820, Townsend Farquhar provided his wife with £3,000 a year, gave legacies of £1,000 each to his four sisters and left £2,000 to his bastard son Walter Farquhar Fullerton and £500 to one George Harrison, ‘whom I have taken under my protection and educated’. His personalty was sworn under £20,000, 22 Mar. 1830, and resworn under £16,000, 19 May 1832. His estate was left unadministered by his brother, and on 3 July 1841, after his widow and brother-in-law, the two other surviving executors, had renounced probate, administration was granted to William Morgan, one of his creditors. PROB 8/223 (22 Mar. 1830); 11/1768/166. His only legitimate son, Sir Walter Minto Townsend Farquhar, 2nd bt. (1809-66), represented Hertford as a Conservative, 1857-9, 1865-6, and was succeeded in turn to the baronetcy, which became extinct in 1924, by the first four of his six sons with the illegitimate daughter of the 7th Lord Reay. His fifth son, Horace Brand Townsend Farquhar (1844-1923), was Liberal Unionist Member for West Marylebone, 1895-8, and died childless as 1st Earl Farquhar.