Paget was named after his father’s sailor brother William, who had died in 1794. Like most of his family, he attended Westminster School, leaving in December 1816 to join the navy shortly after his fourteenth birthday as a first class volunteer on the Glasgow, 1 Apr. 1817. He served on her in the Mediterranean, the home station and the West Indies before being made a lieutenant, 18 Apr. 1823. His father, an eminent soldier and courtier who had been created marquess of Anglesey in recognition of his gallantry at Waterloo, feared that his promotion might have been delayed because of his own lack of favour.
He was made a post captain, 18 Oct. 1826, and spent much time in Bath wooing Fanny, the daughter of General de Rottenburg, a veteran like Anglesey of the 1809 Walcheren campaign. He married her in January 1827 despite his father’s objections.
As Lady William Paget is far advanced in her state of pregnancy and your Lordship is a man of gallantry, I am sure you, my excellent and old friend, will approve my having this day signed the commission.
Lord William Paget mss 644G/21.
She was seriously ill following their eldest son’s birth, and Paget subsequently claimed that de Rottenburg’s £1,000 loan to provide her with a carriage and £120 allowance towards their expenses had encouraged him to live lavishly in Ireland,
how liable such a step is to misconstruction both here and in Ireland, how much it will be exaggerated beyond its real importance and how many unfounded influences will be drawn from it ... I am very much afraid that the presence of persons so high in your household and so entirely in your confidence will be considered by the Roman Catholics as a sanction of their proceedings and, what is still worse, will give great offence to the Protestants and incite in them feelings of suspicion and distress, if not of alienation and enmity.
Replying, 29 Apr., Anglesey acknowledged that it was ‘an unfortunate occurrence and I have felt it much, but there is no use grumbling about it’.
I am persuaded that if the Catholics of Ireland were placed on a footing of equality with their Protestant brethren, they would speedily forget and forgive all the injuries which they have endured; and would exhibit as much loyalty and good conduct as any other class of the community. I ... shall vote in favour of a cause, the success of which I honestly and conscientiously feel and believe to be intimately connected with the peace and prosperity of Ireland and the well-being of the empire at large.
John Croker* thought his words ‘very well conceived and delivered with modesty and taste’ and Edward Littleton* considered the speech ‘most useful’; while others regretted that ‘the noise in the House and the lowness of the Hon. Member’s voice prevented our catching the purport of his first sentence’.
I cannot consider myself entitled to the thanks of the Roman Catholics as a distinct body. Whilst I am anxious that in discharging my duty as an independent Member of Parliament, consulting for the general interests of the empire at large, I wished to forward that important question which in my conscience I believe to be as much for the interests of the Protestants as of the Catholics.
Dublin Evening Post, 31 May, 3, 5, 14, 16 June; N. Wales Chron. 26 June 1828.
Asked by the O’Gorman Mahon* to stand at the county Clare by-election, ‘he very properly said he would never take another step but by ... [Anglesey’s] sanction and that he was sure ... [he] should object to that’.
I must and will, upon all vital questions be unfettered. I will fearlessly and conscientiously support or oppose any and every measure as I shall believe it to be for the good of the empire, without for an instant allowing party or local attachments to influence my conduct’.
N. Wales Chron. 2 Oct.; Dublin Evening Post, 3 Oct.; Shrewsbury Chron. 10 Oct. 1828; Machin, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1962), 90.
The marquess’s agent John Sanderson thought it the best speech heard in Caernarvon and arranged for it to be printed in the North Wales Chronicle; while the Dublin Evening Post reported, ‘this rash young man has again rushed into print and wantonly forced himself once more upon public notice’. It did little to improve his prospects of a second unopposed return.
Paget had been accumulating more debts than he could discharge from his patrimony of £10,000 since at least the autumn of 1825, and in March 1829, when the consequences of his extravagant lifestyle could no longer be avoided, his father was informed. He rejected a suggestion that he should live rent free at Druids Lodge on the Plas Newydd estate, and instead took High Beeches, Waltham Forest, spending £1,300 on furnishings.
More than one execution is on the point of being put upon my property, poor and scanty, God knows as it is. ... Under these circumstances and after many thoughtful days and sleepless nights I do not hesitate to say that I feel no alternative is left to me but that of giving up my seat in Parliament and surrendering my person, when, if it appears that I am in fact totally bereft of property, I shall be ready and am indeed fully prepared to pay in my person whatever penalty the law may deem me liable to and thenceforward be exempt from my present hourly vexations.
Ibid. 644G/1/14.
Anglesey, who liked to blame de Rottenburg for William’s plight and conduct,
I have long doubted Lord William Paget’s feelings of honour and am therefore scarcely surprised at the circumstances you announce ... I will merely say that he is the worthy son-in-law of such a man as his father-in-law and that he has ably profited by the lessons he probably got from a scoundrel in Dublin who very narrowly escaped hanging and with whom I found him clearly connected. ... [Druids] would not have answered his purpose ... He can ... keep his seat till the first dissolution when he ought to go abroad and hide himself. Of course I would not, if I could again, return him to Parliament, and if after the present relief he chooses again to play the rogue, he must incur the penalty.
Ibid. 644G/1/14A.
With £20,000 needed to reimburse London, Dublin and Anglesey traders and pay off navy debts in Dublin, London, Plymouth and Portsmouth, Anglesey judged William to be ‘irretrievably ruined, for his character is gone’; and he resolved to ‘speak openly of him and throw myself and my family and this degraded young man at the mercy of the admiralty’.
Neither your privilege of Parliament, nor your rank in the public service, nor even your highly honoured name would protect you from the consequences of hostile proceedings by those of your creditors who hold dishonoured drafts ... In short, my dear Lord William, ask yourself the question whether the result might not be expulsion from Parliament, a suspension from the service and possibly a criminal process.
Ibid. 644G/2/109.
While his debts continued to mount and legal action threatened, the trustees (Lord Forbes, Captain Hart and Sanderson) made repayment of Irish creditors their priority.
The North Star’s voyage was marred by the death of a ship’s boy, William Heritage, who threw himself overboard rather than face the dozen lashes ordered by Paget as punishment for his carelessness with the ship’s water. Courts of inquiry at Bermuda and Halifax absolved Paget, and when a new inquiry was ordered at Portsmouth in January 1831, he rejected it as ‘offering me a third loophole’, and elected to be tried by court martial. His acquittal with honour, 7 Feb., did much to heal the breach with Anglesey, who had returned to Ireland as the Grey ministry’s lord lieutenant, and received good reports of William’s conduct from Grey, Lord Holland and the first lord of the admiralty, Sir James Graham.
Loving Lady William however and my darling boy as I do, I cannot but feel my absence from them and from him particularly at his interesting age. But I love them too well to drag them about the ocean with me.
Lord William Paget mss 644G/3/124; Goodwood mss 1433, f. 145.
With prosecutions then pending, he proved hard to assist, and no sooner did he step ashore than he was arrested for debt, forcing Uxbridge to intervene to pacify his creditors before he could put safely to sea again, 28 Feb.
Lord William must be aware that a return to Parliament, although securing to him for the time freedom from arrest, would tend to increase the irritation of his creditors and I cannot omit to call to his recollection that there are some circumstances in this case which might render a public disclosure extremely detrimental to himself.
Plas Newydd mss i. 45, 46.
Between 1830 and 1840 Paget’s debts cost his family £26,916. The 1830 settlement was substantially revised in 1836, following his imprisonment in the Marshalsea, and again in 1840, when, after fighting against Don Carlos in Spain, he returned to Britain to escape creditors at Pau.