According to Harriette Wilson, who once took him to the opera, Graham was ‘a beauty: a very Apollo in form, with handsome features, particularly his teeth and eyes; sensible too and well educated’.
Out of Parliament, Graham read widely, studied the works of David Hume, John Locke, and the political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo*, and initially spent more time with his wife and children at Croft Head near Longtown, Cumberland, where he relieved his ailing father of much of the management of their neglected 26,000-acre Netherby estate, which had a gross rental of £17,946 in 1818.
I ever have been and ever shall be opposed to high prices attained by any such exaction. If it were of use, I am most ready to join in a petition for a large reduction in our overgrown establishments, and for a correspondent diminution in the taxes, which sustain them. The reduction is most requisite in the civil list and expenses of the collection of the revenue, for these are at once the causes of the most corrupt influence and the most profligate expenditure. The relief likewise is certain and immediate, for the taxes might be instantly taken off to the amount of the reduction, and, not withstanding all the jargon on the subject of prices, it is clear that taxation curtails the demand of the consumer and the net profit of the grower. I say, if it were of use, I am ready to petition; but ... I never again will join in a petition to Parliament which does not mention the necessity of some reform in the representation, because to me it appears worse than delusion to address a body with the air of confiding hope, from which I expect nothing but scorn, contumely and evil. The ... Commons constituted as it now is, seems to me the greatest curse of this unhappy country, for it keeps up the semblance of free government when the reality is torn from us and lost. The petition of this year would say no more than the petition of last, and would be treated with the same indifference and contempt. The country people also are weary of meeting and petitioning in vain. Annual attendance destroys the novelty, and, with it, the interest of these proceedings; and thus by frequent repetition it diminishes their importance ... Retrenchment of expense and reduction of taxes must advance together and at equal paces; for I confess I am an advocate for a clear surplus [of] revenue, thinking it of the most importance to the landed interest that credit should be maintained.
Brougham mss, Graham to Brougham, 3 Mar. 1822.
On succeeding his father in April 1824 he contemplated selling out and becoming a merchant banker with the ill-fated Pole, Thornton, Downe and Company, a scheme he had been considering since 1822, but the Bristol banker James Evan Baillie* dissuaded him.
If the country gentlemen were half as honestly resolved to enforce a reduction of expenditure and of establishments [as the urban working classes] some hopes of averting a serious convulsion might still remain, but the knowledge of flagrant abuses on the one hand, weighed with bitter suffering, and on the other, the boldest adherence to the corrupt system without the least regard to consequences, would seem to lead inevitably to some fatal crisis, which may shake even property itself.
Add. 51542.
He criticized the ministry’s projected emigration schemes to relieve distressed manufacturing districts like Carlisle as ‘contrary to the spirit of our laws, and opposed to many of our most ancient regulations’, 7 Dec. 1826. Next day, the colonial under-secretary Horton replied that the matter remained unresolved and would be decided by a select committee on emigration. (Graham was appointed to it, 15 Feb. 1827.)
If it be your wish that I should support the new administration, I am only desirous that it should be known I do so as your follower ... It is possible that owing my seat to a popular election I may be compelled by a sense of duty to give an occasional vote in favour of particular measures, which it may not be expedient for a minister of the crown directly to sanction.
Canning’s Ministry, 266.
He spoke, 18 May, and voted, 28 May, for the disfranchisement of Penryn, and for Lord Althorp’s bill limiting election expenses, 28 May, and presented constituents’ petitions for Catholic relief and repeal of the Test Acts, 7 June.
The recent struggle of parties has been highly injurious to the public interests; and never was a session less productive of solid advantage to the community. I am not pleased with the present position of affairs; and I fear that for some time the government will be disorganized and public attention dedicated to the character and conduct of men without much reference to measures. Every day’s additional experience convinces me more and more of the soundness of our views respecting the currency; the bill of 1819 lies at the foundation of all our difficulties. Corn laws, customs regulations, emigration reports and relief to the manufacturers, all are but the fringes of this one great first cause, on which our difficulties and our fate depend.
Sir James Graham mss 1, bdle. 2, Graham to Rooke, 29 June 1827.
He dined with the Whig leaders at Charles Tennyson’s*, 8 July 1827, and, after sounding opinion at Boodles, left with his family for Switzerland, so distancing himself from Carlisle, where his brother-in-law Wilfrid Lawson lost narrowly to a Tory at the by-election in August.
Graham has sometimes occurred to me, because he would probably work, is connected with Scotland, with the great advantage of being [in] England, is judicious, steady but moderate, and perfectly well disposed. But no one can appreciate the fitness of any person for the situation of representative for Scotland, without knowing his weight in the House; and as to Sir James’s I know nothing.
NLS mss 24749, f. 42.
He kept a high profile throughout the 1828 session, querying the expenditure proposals of the duke of Wellington’s new administration, attending to the ailing Curwen’s constituency business and matters affecting Scotland and the Borders. He voted, 26 Feb., and presented a petition from South Shields for repeal of the Test Acts, 2 Apr., and brought up others, 24, 30 Apr., and divided for Catholic relief, 12 May. He promoted bills for the better regulation of elections and turnpikes and made the campaign to retain one and two pound notes issued by country banks his own. In July the radical Whig John Hobhouse* described him as a ‘favourite’, who ‘has £15,000 a year and the prettiest woman in London for a wife, and is besides really a clever, painstaking, and prepossessing man’, and ‘foremost’ with Edward [Smith] Stanley* ‘of the youngsters’.
Graham refused to accept that the appointment of a finance committee by Wellington precluded investigation into official salaries and moved successfully for detailed returns, 27 Feb. 1828. His speech seconding Hume’s motion for information on the ‘profligate’ sale of commissions by half-pay officers embarrassed the secretary at war Lord Palmerston, 12 Mar.; but his questions to George Bankes on the remit of the select committee on public works were confused and inappropriate, 24 Mar. He was pre-empted in his plan to expose abuses in the Irish registry of deeds by the Irish secretary William Lamb, 27, 31 Mar.
Perpetuating the assumption that Graham was the author of Rooke’s Free Trade in Corn, on 27 Mar. The Times recommended it ‘to all legislative landowners ... as a sedative to their alarms and a text book for their speeches on the approaching discussion of the corn laws’.
Predicting possible ministerial blunders following O’Connell’s return for county Clare, he wrote on 15 July to urge Smith Stanley to ‘take the field in force’ and grasp a ‘golden opportunity of forming a party in the ... Commons on some broad and intelligent principle, without any reference to leaders in the ... Lords and without any direct compact with Brougham’.
Personally, I know nothing of him and what little I have heard from the Lowthers has not prepossessed me in his favour; but he speaks remarkably well with a natural flow of words and a great deal of good sense. Once or twice he has left the violents to vote and even speak with us and I suppose [he] might be induced to come over under the shadow of Calcraft. I doubt whether in real powers he be second to Stanley, but (at worst) he is the next to him at that side of the House.
Add. 40320, f. 51.
Abandoning the immediate prospect of minor office, Graham helped Althorp, Brougham and Smith Stanley to dictate the pace of Peel and Wellington ‘conversion’ to Catholic emancipation in the closing months of 1828. The rise of the Brunswick Clubs alarmed him:
This appeal to club law is insane on the part of the aristocracy: the reaction is certain; conflict is the tendency; religion will infuse only the venom of its hatred, but redress of civil wrongs will be the cry; and the appeal to numbers and to physical force is madly made by the weaker party. Brunswickers will be met by reformers, No Popery by Dissent from the church establishment, the government, feebly hesitating, will be overborne and a convulsion ensue, which may shake the whole fabric.
Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 211-12; Add. 51542, Graham to Holland, 4 Nov.; 51564, Brougham to Lady Holland, 13 Aug.; Sir James Graham mss 1, bdle. 2, Graham to Brougham, 8 Oct. 1828; NLS mss 24770, ff. 23, 29.
Directly Curwen died, 11 Dec. 1828, Graham vacated Carlisle and declared his candidature for Cumberland, whereupon the Tory Cumberland Pacquet commented waspishly:
His corn law dreamings the farmers ... justly consider inapplicable to men who are awake and have their senses about them. His party pledges and connections are certainly not of a kind best calculated to secure his independence; the trading politicians, for their own special purposes, are understood to have obtained too great an ascendancy over his inexperience’.
Cumb. Pacquet, 16 Dec. 1828.
Abercromby also had reservations about Graham, ‘who has almost an undue importance in the House’. Fears that the Lowthers would intervene or Lord Carlisle (as Morpeth had become) seek to regain a Cumberland seat for his son proved unfounded and he was unopposed, 16 Jan. 1829.
an adherent of that small party still remaining in the ... Commons who maintain the rights and privileges of the people in opposition to the power and influence of the Court; and although I consider party as the best depository of public principles, by the power it has in holding men to their professions, I am no advocate of faction and can never be made the tool of any party.
He expressed qualified praise for Wellington, whose concession of Catholic emancipation he endorsed, and condemned the violence of the Catholic Association and the Brunswick Clubs.
Speculation that he would be offered a place by Wellington remained unfounded.
He dissociated himself from Davenport’s intended motion on the state of the nation, 3 Mar. 1828, and stayed away, like Morpeth and Smith Stanley, from the Whig meeting that day which invited Althorp to become leader ‘for one definite object, namely the reduction of expenditure and of taxation’. Althorp’s friends in turn (he reported to Smith Stanley) tested his loyalty with ‘a sort of motion respecting the treasurership, from which the sting of censure has in great measure been extracted: if I move it in this shape they will support it; if in my own, I conclude they will move it as an amendment’. Biding his time, he consulted Littelton, Palmerston ‘and others’, ordered returns, 5, 9 Mar., and voted for information on the interference of British troops in Portugal, 10 Mar. Supported by Grey’s son Lord Howick, but not Althorp, and with Huskisson in his minority, his motion criticizing ministers for missing an opportunity to save the treasurer’s £3,000 salary failed by 188-90, 12 Mar.
it would ... have been better had he confined himself more strictly to the subject. Superannuations had nothing to do with it. He also exaggerated his case most amazingly, which, as it happened, was all in our favour, but if it had been exposed, as it might have been, would have told very much against him.
Howick jnl. 13-15 May 1830
He presented petitions and agitated for concessions on the Clyde navigation bill, 17, 21, 26, 28 May, 10 June, Scottish paupers, 21 May, lead imports, 25 May, and the corn laws, 26 May. According to Lord King, ‘he got a great victory’ over Peel on the four-and-a-half per cent Barbados and Leeward Island duties, which the minister promised to place under parliamentary control, 4 June.
Graham divided for Lord Blandford’s reform proposals, 18 Feb., the transfer of East Retford’s seats to Birmingham, 11 Feb., 5 Mar., the enfranchisement of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, 23 Feb., inquiry into Newark’s petition of complaint against the duke of Newcastle’s electoral influence, 1 Mar., and Lord John Russell’s parliamentary reform motion, 28 May 1830. He voted to reform the divorce laws, 3 June, and to abolish the death penalty for forgery, 24 May, 7 June. He moved for correspondence on the 1829 Greek blockade and accounts of civil list pensions, 8 June. His recent dealings with Huskisson encouraged speculation, and he still considered an overture to Grey from the Wellington ministry likely when he attended an opposition meeting at Althorp’s for the first time, 4 July. As he and Smith Stanley had hoped, they resolved to ‘go into regular opposition’ in the next Parliament should the Wellington administration ‘do no better’.
Before Parliament met, he assumed an interest in the Scottish representation with a view to joining Brougham in pressing for reform in the new Parliament. He predicted that Wellington would ‘yield’ only ‘to the extent of conferring the elective franchise on some of the larger towns’.
junction of the Whigs with Palmerston and the Grants, if it took place, should precede the meeting of Parliament; and ... the leading principles on which the new party is formed should be announced to the public, comprehending, as it were, the scheme on which the government would be conducted if the duke were removed from power; and in my humble judgement this scheme should include a substantial measure of parliamentary reform, a reduction of salaries and of establishments, a review of the taxation of the country in the sum of [Sir Henry] Parnell’s* admirable book, law reform on your model, commutation of tithes and a better provision for the working clergy ... by a new valuation of tithes and first fruits; and the abolition of the feudal game laws, substituting in their stead the right of property. In a word the new party should stand pledged to the maximum of reform consistent with the safety of our present form of government, and believe me this maximum after all will be found the minimum with which public opinion will rest content. A pledge also should be given not to accept office separately. A leader should be chosen, and constant attendance promised when notes by his desire are sent. Something of this sort should be done before the fight begins; for the duke has no chance unless from divisions and disorganization among Members.
Brougham mss, Graham to Brougham; Grey mss, Durham to Grey, 4 Oct.; Lansdowne mss, Macdonald to Lansdowne, 22 Oct. 1830.
Mistrusting him still, in October Edward Ellice* suspected that Graham was the author of The Answer, an influential pamphlet which independently reviewed the state of the parties and suggested coalition.
Graham’s re-election was unopposed, 8 Dec. 1830, and afforded him an opportunity to ascertain the views of the radical Member for Carlisle William James on the ballot and annual parliaments.
excepting the corn laws, there is hardly one great subject in our domestic policy, which we shall not be prepared to deal ... Croker and the underlings breathe fury. Peel and the duke pretend moderation; but with the latter forbearance is only caution, and boundless hostility is common to the crew ... I like my colleagues and we are firmly united. If we fail, show me the government that can save the country’.
Castle Howard mss, Graham to Morpeth, 24 Jan. 1831; Lambton mss, same to Durham, 27 Jan.; Sir James Graham mss 1, bdle. 3, Palmerston to Graham, 31 Jan.; TNA GD30/29, Holland to Granville, 1 Feb. 1831.
Making light of opposition by Calcraft and Hunt, he defended the civil list in what the Wellington ministry’s president of the India board Lord Ellenborough considered ‘a very high Tory speech’, 4 Feb., and commended the stock transfer tax proposed in Althorp’s budget, 14 Feb.
In view of the king’s close interest in the navy and the need for retrenchment, Graham consulted the Tory Admiral Hotham and Sir Samuel Pechell* on naval matters, and Palmerston on developments in the Mediterranean and the Scheldt, and read Wellington’s secret evidence to the finance committee on the defence of the Canadian colonies before drafting his estimates.
Conservative by comparison with Duncannon and at least initially more pragmatic than Russell, his ‘two sine qua nons’ for the reform bill became a uniform £10 voter qualification in the boroughs and the principle of disfranchisement; but he also, at different times, advocated the ballot and quinquennial elections, registration, short polls, increased county representation and enforcing a residence qualification. He initially recommended a £20 franchise.
He attended the pre-session reception at Lansdowne House, 27 May 1831, and, before Parliament met, he authorized additional dockyard provisioning and dispatched Codrington’s squadron to the Mediterranean, a frigate to the Tagus and guardships to Ireland, where, he advised Smith Stanley
no government can allow its people to starve according to the most approved rules of political economy: only be it observed that the necessity of such extraordinary aid proves the urgency of taking into consideration some scheme for the relief of the poor by local assessment.
Macaulay Letters, ii. 16; Sir James Graham mss 1, bdle. 5, Graham to Grey, 5, 7 June, to Stanley, 31 May, 6 June 1831; Ward, 112.
He moved the adjournment in Althorp’s absence, 14 June, and met his colleagues regularly over the next week to discuss alterations to the reform bill.
No more important change can be made in our original measure; none which will more justly excite the alarm of the aristocracy. If the £10 qualification for cities and boroughs be sacred, this countervailing arrangement of the subdivision of counties cannot be reversed without seriously affecting the whole measure.
Sir James Graham mss 1, bdle. 5, Graham to Grey, 17 June 1831.
On 27 June, responding to criticism from Lord Mahon, who attributed the dissolution to his failure to carry the army and navy supplies (28, 29 Mar.), he explained that the discovery of a surplus fund had rendered voting them through unnecessary. He afterwards defended the ministry’s Irish policy. Francis Thornhill Baring* noted that his reply ‘showed more pluck than last session’.
He initially regarded the reform bill’s defeat in the Lords as a resignation matter, and wrote to Grey, 8, 17 Oct., pressing for proof of the king’s loyalty in the prorogation speech that month and requesting the dismissal of Byam Martin and Lord Howe from his department for failing to support reform.
Probably ... Graham will save us the trouble of having many more difficulties to contend with. For if he goes out on the grounds that he has now taken [immediate peerage creations] the people will desert us because we have not followed his advice and the peers, knowing that we have not secured the power of creating as many as we like, will be totally unmanageable.
Add. 76373.
He sent a letter of support to the 15 Nov. Cumberland reform meeting, and his protest to the sheriff over the Carlisle Patriot’s subsequent misrepresentation of the reformer Philip Howard’s* speech elicited a vicious response from the Lowther newspapers. They also exploited the recent appointment of his brother Fergus Graham as postmaster of Carlisle.
He divided with his colleagues on the Russian-Dutch loan, which he privately conceded he would have attacked in opposition, 26 Jan., 12, 16, 20 July 1832.
a party of eight or ten met at the admiralty in consequence of a suggestion of mine ... to hear an explanation of his plan of reduction of the navy civil establishment ... We were all charmed with Graham’s expose, and urged him to introduce as part of his plan a curtailment of the right to sit in Parliament now belonging to the lords of the admiralty ... to three. He promised to consult the cabinet and the king. I expect a great effect from his statement.
Hatherton diary, 9 Feb. 1832.
He forwarded the draft bill to William IV that day, requested his opinion on the anticipated charge that it created placemen by replacing the commissioners with admiralty lords, and warned that Clerk, Cockburn, Croker and Byam Martin, ‘a weight of authority and of official experience’ were against it.
Convinced that it was both prudent and the king’s wish, in cabinet, 4 Mar., he again recommended creating peers sooner rather than later to avert a second Lords defeat.
Graham came into the committee ignorant of the subject and indifferent about it. I am much mistaken, if he did not leave it convinced of the policy, or rather the necessity of a rapid emancipation. He made the best of chairmen.
Brougham mss, Buxton to Brougham, 2 Aug. 1832.
He struggled to overcome Hume and Byam Martin’s criticism of the navy estimates, 29 June, and announced ‘after further scrutiny’ that he had waived his objections to half-pay naval officers receiving their salaries while on coast guard duty, 8 Aug., and justified the admiralty’s inaction in the case of the deserter Popjoy’s compensation claim, 11 Aug. 1832. He went to Goodwood for the races directly the king’s prorogation speech was agreed and to the Isle of Wight on the admiralty yacht.
He certainly is a very timid, irresolute man. He speaks in the House as if he was under an awful sense of his responsibility, which is singular, as he was remarkably bold and splashing when on the opposition side. No man ever was more changed by the move. In private life he is agreeable, mild, courteous and well bred, and more modest than perhaps beseems a cabinet minister ... He has not much general information but he is well skilled in figures and very practical in his views. Lord Althorp does not approve of his opposition to Peel’s bill, but I fear Ld. A could not write so well on the subject as Graham has.
Three Diaries, 288-9; Add. 51563, Brougham to Holland Sept. 1832; Broughton, iv. 257.
Patronage requests, Torrens’s unauthorized absence, voter registration and resignation threats by Brougham and Smith Stanley, which he tried to avert, preoccupied Graham before the general election that month, when he stood jointly as a Liberal for Cumberland East with Blamire and came in unopposed, advocating ‘some protection for agriculture’, and was criticized over the ‘economy’, ‘retrenchment’ and ‘the Dutch war’.
He resigned from the cabinet with Smith Stanley in April 1834 over the Irish church question, kept his Cumberland seat at the general election of 1835, but lost it in 1837 following his defection to the Conservatives with the ‘Dilly’. Seats were found for him at Pembroke Boroughs, Dorchester and Ripon in the next three Parliaments. As rector of Glasgow University, 1838-40, he organized the Scottish Conservatives and opposed the church seceders. ‘Frenetic’ as home secretary ‘Paul Pry’ in Peel’s second ministry, he had to contend with social unrest, Chartism and the campaign for Irish home rule. He resigned with Peel from the Carlton Club over the repeal of the corn laws, came in for Carlisle as a Liberal in 1852 and returned to the admiralty as first lord in Lord Aberdeen’s coalition ministry. He resigned, embittered, from Palmerston’s administration in 1855 rather than face inquiry into the Sebastapol defeat, in which he was implicated. He remained an important political figure and a Liberal until he died of a heart attack at Netherby in October 1861. He had been predeceased in 1857 by his wife, and was succeeded in the baronetcy and estates by his eldest son Frederick Ulric Graham (1820-88). His will was proved in London, 12 Nov. 1861.