BOUVERIE, Hon. Bartholomew (1753-1835), of 21 Edward Street, Portman Square, Mdx.

Bouverie, who became a freeman of Winchester in 1811, had houses at Ash, Hampshire, and Chart Sutton, Kent, but apparently lived mainly in London. Hants RO, Winchester borough recs. W/B8/1/1; Countess of Radnor, Cat. of Pictures in Coll. of Earl of Radnor, ii. 82. In October 1814 Lady Jerningham related a scandal concerning his daughters:

Sir Henry [St. John] Mildmay† married the eldest Miss Bouverie [Charlotte] ... a beautiful girl. She died a year after [at the birth] of her first child, who is living. Lord Rosebery married the second Miss Bouverie [Harriet]: they have four children, and she is gone off, with her brother-in-law, Sir Henry Mildmay, who cannot marry her. Mr. Bouverie is in the greatest affliction. Lady Mildmay was his favourite child, and now the dishonour of Lady Rosebery by his son-in-law, is very disastrous.

The couple were married in Württemberg the following year. Bouverie’s youngest daughter, Anna Maria Wyndham, had married St. John Mildmay’s younger brother, Paulet St. John Mildmay*, in 1813, while his eldest child, Anna Maria, had died in infancy. Jerningham Letters, ii. 57; Sir R.C. Hoare, Wilts. Cawdon, 37.

Bouverie played almost no part in public life. Although he had occasionally acted with opposition, at the general election of 1820 he was again returned by his Tory half-brother, the 2nd earl of Radnor, for his pocket borough of Downton, as he had been intermittently since 1779. He remained very inactive in the House, where he is not known ever to have spoken, though he now took a steadily ministerialist line. HP Commons, 1790-1820, ii. 232; Black Bk. (1823), 140; Session of Parl. 1825, p. 452; H. Brougham, Result (1830), 11. He paired against condemning ministers’ conduct towards Queen Caroline, 6 Feb., and repeal of the additional malt duty, 3 Apr. 1821. He voted against Catholic claims, 28 Feb. 1821, and the Catholic peers bill, 30 Apr. 1822. He divided against inquiries into the right of voting in parliamentary elections, 20 Feb., and chancery administration, 5 June 1823. He paired in favour of the Irish unlawful societies bill, 25 Feb. 1825, and against Catholic relief, 1 Mar., 21 Apr., voting against this in person, 10 May 1825. No further evidence of activity has been discovered during that Parliament. He was deprived of his seat at the dissolution in 1826, but was brought back later that year, after his replacement chose to sit elsewhere. It was probably his nephew, Duncombe Pleydell Bouverie, who presented a Salisbury petition against the Malt Act, 18 Mar., but it was he who paired against Catholic claims, 12 May 1828. Early the following year he was listed by Planta, the Wellington ministry’s patronage secretary, among those ‘opposed to the principle’ of the emancipation bill, but who ‘will, when the principle is carried, support the securities’. He duly voted with ministers in its favour, 6 Mar., and paired in this sense on the 30th. Following the death of Radnor in 1828, and the former Lord Folkestone’s* succession to the patronage of Downton, he was removed at the dissolution in 1830 and did not sit in the Commons again. At the 1831 Cricklade election he voted for his nephew Philip Pleydell Bouverie* and another Whig, Robert Gordon*. Cricklade Pollbook (1831), 29.

Bouverie’s eldest son, Henry James (b. 1781), commissioner of customs for Scotland, died from a self-inflicted ‘deep gash across the throat’, 5 Mar., following the death of his mother from burns, 22 Feb. 1832. Bouverie died in May 1835. He divided his estate, including personalty sworn under £18,000, between his surviving sons, the Rev. Edward (1783-1874), prebendary of Salisbury, and the Rev. William Arundell (1797-1877), archdeacon of Norfolk. PROB 11/1847/342; IR26/1376/385; Gent. Mag. (1832), i. 376; (1835), ii. 202; Radnor, ii. 82-83. ‘Bartholomew Bouverie’ was the pseudonym taken by the young William Gladstone† in editing his Eton Miscellany (1827).