Paget was the heir to extensive family estates and political influence in Anglesey, Caernarvonshire, Dorset, Somerset, Staffordshire, Wiltshire and Ireland. Like others of his family, he attended Westminster School, where his particular friends were Lord Lichfield and Sir Francis Grant. While there he gained a reputation as an excellent athlete, cricketer, horseman and ‘crack shot’, and lost a few front teeth in a holiday riding accident.
Uxbridge remained a serving army officer and, as a radical publication of 1825 noted, he ‘attended very seldom and voted with ministers’ in his first Parliament.
Uxbridge will start for Anglesey where he deserves to be kicked out. My friends there are really most kind in tolerating him, for he has sadly neglected them. I hope, however, they will continue to tolerate him in the hope of reformation. ... He really did mean to pass this autumn there, and will still go, but I believe he did not like to appear in public whilst the business of the separation of himself and his wife was in the height of buz and therefore he has rather delayed his journey there.Plas Newydd mss i. 215
Uxbridge indeed attended the Beaumaris Hunt week in November with his brother William and uncle Berkeley, and he was the chief mourner at his brother Arthur’s funeral in January 1826.
He and his brother William, who had come in for Caernarvon Boroughs, voted against Catholic relief, 6 Mar. 1827. He was excused attendance later that month on account of his wife’s illness - an excuse which, though genuine, provoked much laughter.
So far from wishing to control your and your brother’s opinion upon the great question of emancipation, a subject upon which I was peculiarly interested, I allowed you both to quit me, without ever ascertaining what course you meant to pursue.PRO NI, Anglesey mss D619/32G, p. 127.
He paid more attention to politics after his wife died in July 1828, and spent more time at his mother’s cottage at Halnaker, which was conveniently close to his brother-in-law the 5th duke of Richmond’s seat at Goodwood, where he kept his best racing horses.
I opposed this bill because I considered it altogether unnecessary. We have been told that this forty shilling franchise has been used to promote the success of an ulterior object - emancipation. But now as that object is about being attained, the inducement for such an abuse of the franchise will no longer exist; and I therefore conceive that this bill is quite needless and that there is not the least necessity for interfering with the existing state of the elective franchise in Ireland.
He opposed the measure to the last, 27, 30 Mar., and voted against permitting Daniel O’Connell to sit without taking the oath of supremacy, 18 May 1829. Expressing Anglesey’s opinion, he said that the master-general of the ordnance should not be expected to combine his duties with those of the lieutenant-general, and voted against the opposition amendment to abolish the latter post, 29 Mar. However, aware that in doing so he differed from his political friends, he stated that he still had
no hesitation in expressing my decided hostility to His Majesty’s government, from a conviction of its inefficiency, and a general disapproval of its policy, both internally and in regard to our foreign relations; and I am determined to give my feeble aid in forcing upon them every measure of economy and of retrenchment which may be consistent with the well-being of the state; but on the present occasion I must (although very reluctantly I own) give them my support.
He was omitted from Vyvyan’s October 1829 list predicting Members attitudes towards a Tory realignment, but was nevertheless among the hard core of Ultras in the Commons who now chose to abstain or vote with the Whig opposition. He divided for Knatchbull’s amendment criticizing the failure of the address to notice distress, 4 Feb. 1830, and steadily with the revived opposition until 14 May. He presented his constituents’ petitions against the government’s proposals to abolish the Welsh courts of great sessions and judicature, 4, 14 May 1830.
Ministers listed him as one of the ‘violent Ultras’, but he did not divide on the civil list when they were brought down, 15 Nov. 1830, although he had been in the House earlier that evening to present a petition from Holyhead’s Baptists against colonial slavery. He presented further anti-slavery petitions, 8 Dec. 1830, 13 Apr. 1831, and others from the vicarage of Clare, requesting equal trading rights for Galway’s Catholics and Protestants, 11 Feb., and from Rahoon, Galway, seeking additional parliamentary representation, 13 Apr. In February he intervened to free his brother William from custody in Portsmouth, where, after being honourably acquitted at a navy court martial, he was immediately imprisoned for debt.
In the meantime, Uxbridge remained in the Commons, where he presented Llangefni’s petition to become a contributory borough of Beaumaris, 25 June 1831. He voted for the reintroduced reform bill at its second reading, 6 July, and to disfranchise Appleby, 19 July, but chose not to vote on the schedule B disfranchisements. He voted to enfranchise Greenwich, 3 Aug., and to give Gateshead separate representation, 5 Aug., and paired for the enfranchisement of Chatham, Rochester and Strood, 9 Aug. On the Dublin election controversy, 8 Aug., he denied Hunt’s allegations that Anglesey was implicated in corruption and called for an inquiry ‘to convince the world’ that his father was ‘guiltless of the very gross charge thus made against him’. Gratified, Anglesey responded, 9 Aug., with suggestions for his next speech:
I see you have been fighting manfully in my cause, and have cleverly exposed your adversary. I only regret you had not one more worthy of you than Citizen Hunt ... I will endeavour to sketch what you might say, only saying it in your own way ... That so decided an advocate was I ever for freedom of opinion and action, that very early in life, when the late earl of Uxbridge, your grandfather, as a king’s friend, asked me if I would have any objection to join him in the support of a government which had replaced Mr. Pitt, I immediately declined, and begged to go out of Parliament, as I could not abandon the person I had supported, and would not oppose my father’s wishes, and that I therefore went out. ... That it is well known I placed the learned Member now sitting for Drogheda [John Henry North] in a borough (which you might say, by the by, I without the slightest reluctance abandoned to its fate upon principle) for the express purpose of supporting the late Mr. Canning’s administration. That subsequent events produced an entirely different course of politics between that ... Member and myself; but that it had never occurred to me to make even the slightest attempt to influence ... [his] vote ... That I have not an agent upon any property who will not vouch that in the various applications made for my interest, my invariable answer has been, ‘Let these tenants know to whom I give the preference, but let every one vote as he pleases’.Anglesey mss 32G, p. 127.
Uxbridge spoke as directed on Gordon’s censure motion, 23 Aug., and before dividing with ministers to defeat it, he added his own defence of Anglesey’s private secretary Tuyll, whom the opposition sought to summon to testify at the bar of the House. Lord Holland, who knew of the activities of the ‘active and guilty Baron’, informed Anglesey, ‘I heard much of the debate but not Uxbridge’s speech, which handsomely and successfully sustained the only weak point, viz., Baron Tuyll’s indiscretion’.
Uxbridge, who was too short of money to go to Newmarket, attended to his absent father’s election business in the autumn of 1832.