HERRIES, John Charles (1778-1855), of 11 Great George Street, Mdx.

Herries, the grandson of a minor Dumfriesshire laird, rose from the obscurity of a treasury clerkship to become chancellor of the exchequer, but acquired a probably undeserved reputation as a ‘rogue’. See, e.g., Northants. RO, Agar Ellis diary, 10 Jan. [1828]; Hatherton diary, 21 Dec. 1835. His father, the younger brother of Sir Robert Herries, founder in 1770 of the London bank of Herries and Company of St. James’s Street, was a Spanish merchant, with premises in the parish of St. Mary Axe. More importantly for the career of his eldest son John Charles, he was a leading figure in the London and Westminster light horse volunteers, of which he was appointed lieutenant-colonel in 1794 and colonel in 1797. Under his command the corps reached a high pitch of efficiency, attracted a large number of politicians and City figures and enjoyed the patronage of George III. Colchester Diary, i. 135; Farington Diary, iii. 1028. The failure of the finance house of Boyd, Benfield and Company in July 1798 irrevocably ruined Colonel Herries, who was declared bankrupt and left penniless. His regimental colleagues subscribed to buy him a life annuity of £1,000, and in 1799 the king conferred pensions of £300 a year on his wife and £150 on each of his three daughters. Hist. Rec. Light Horse Vols. (1843), 109-15; Farington Diary, iii. 1033; Prince of Wales Corresp. ii. 593. The disaster robbed John Charles, who was educated mostly in France and Germany, of a potentially handsome inheritance; but on the death in 1819 of his father, ‘my dearest friend and companion’, who was buried in Westminster Abbey and left personal estate sworn under £6,000, he wrote that it had ‘operated to increase ... [his] happiness ... by terminating at the age of 54 all the painful cares and solicitudes of a mercantile career, which though externally splendid, had in reality been attended with more of disappointment than success’. Add. 57447, memos. 3, 7 Apr. 1819; Gent. Mag. (1819), i. 381, 485; PROB 11/1616/223; IR26/784/391. The colonel’s influential contacts had enabled Herries to be placed as a junior treasury clerk at £100 a year in July 1798. Able and industrious, he was promoted to under clerk in the revenue department (£200) in January 1799 and to assistant clerk (£300) in August 1805. He executed much of the work spurned by his idle departmental chief and in 1800 drafted financial resolutions to be used by the prime minister Pitt (who did not thank him) in the Commons. During the Addington ministry he was employed as private secretary by the secretary of the treasury Nicholas Vansittart*, a light horse volunteer. In 1803 he published a translation of Gentz’s book On the State of Europe before and after the French Revolution and a defence of ministerial financial policy against William Cobbett’s† strictures, A Reply to Some Financial Misstatements. D. Gray, Spencer Perceval, 315. In March 1805 he was seconded to Ireland to assist Vansittart as Pitt’s chief secretary. He returned to England on Pitt’s death in January 1806 and in December was offered by the Grenville administration a customs place at Buenos Aires worth £1,000 a year, but this was thwarted by the government’s fall three months later. Vansittart did not join the Portland ministry, but Colonel Herries persuaded the chancellor of the exchequer Spencer Perceval, treasurer of the light horse, to employ Herries as his private secretary at an additional £300 a year. His career flourished under Perceval, who valued him highly. In 1809 he obtained the sinecure post of secretary to the Order of the Bath, nominally valued at £144 a year but capable of realizing as much as £7,000 in fees, which he held for over 13 years. When Perceval became prime minister in October 1809 he retained Herries, whose undisguised Tory and anti-Catholic partisanship made him obnoxious to some of the Whig opposition, as his private secretary. Colchester Diary, ii. 219; Herries, i. 20-22. In 1811 he published anonymously A Review of the Controversy respecting the High Price of Bullion, and the State of our Currency, an attack on the ‘visionary’ theories of the 1810 bullion committee report. B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce, 38. In June 1811 he was sent to Dublin as private secretary to the new chancellor of the Irish exchequer, William Wellesley Pole*, the duke of Wellington’s brother, having declined to become a lord of the Irish treasury. In his absence Perceval, who told the regent that Herries was ‘one of the best men of business ... [I] ever knew’, asserted his authority to secure his appointment to a vacant comptrollership of army accounts. He never took it up, for in late August Perceval agreed to press for him to succeed the retiring James Willoughby Gordon* as commissary-in-chief, at £2,700 a year, notwithstanding the prior claim of a candidate backed by the regent and Wellington. He got his way, and Herries was installed in the commissariat’s Great George Street office in October 1811. Gray, 325-6; Prince of Wales Corresp. viii. 3097, 3148.

As commissary he continued Gordon’s attempts to reduce the jobbery and administrative inefficiency which had long bedevilled the department, seeking to improve the supply lines for Wellington’s Peninsular army. He now defended the bank restriction as an incentive to the importation of capital. Crucially, from 1814 he organized the successful financing of the invasion of France and defeat of Buonaparte through large infusions of French money into the war chest. In this enterprise he worked closely with the German Jewish financier Nathan Rothschild of New Court, London, whose firm supplied the bullion and established their massive fortune in so doing. Herries also involved in these transactions his friend Baron Limburger, a Leipzig tobacco merchant, whose wife was (before her marriage) the reputed mother of the illegitimate daughter whom Herries had fathered during his student days. (It is possible that the Limburgers were blackmailing him.) While some of the Rothschilds’ methods were highly dubious and they had hastily to cook the books at the end of the war, there is no convincing evidence that Herries acted corruptly, by contemporary standards. Yet he undoubtedly profited significantly from his association with the Rothschilds: he was a regular participant in and beneficiary of lucrative post-war loans to European governments. There was inevitably ‘strong suspicion’ in some quarters that he had feathered his nest by jobbing in the stock market, as Edward Littleton* noted, 21 Dec. 1835: he ‘certainly never inherited any fortune [and] can now spend £10,000 a year. I have never heard any of his friends account for his wealth by any other means than that he turned the early information his office gave him to good account’. Hilton, 38; Herries, i. 23-64; N. Ferguson, House of Rothschild, 1798-1848 (2000), 9, 86-89, 97, 103-4, 154; R.W. Davis, English Rothschilds, 30-34; Gray, 325-30; J.E. Cookson, Lord Liverpool’s Administration, 25; Hatherton diary. In 1814 Herries wrote of ‘the extraordinary pressure of business which the treasury have gradually accumulated upon me, a great deal of it only remotely connected with the duties of this office’; and by 1815 the prime minister Lord Liverpool had come to rely heavily on his advice on financial policy. Herries, i. 64, 114-19; HMC Bathurst, 345-6. When the commissariat was wound up in October 1816 he was granted a pension of £1,350 a year (£1,200 when holding office) and, on Liverpool’s insistence, became the first auditor of the civil list at a salary of £1,500. In the Commons, 8 May 1817, the advanced Whig Henry Grey Bennet* attacked the preferential treatment of Herries, who he alleged had merely kept ‘in motion’ Gordon’s reforms and now received ‘£1,200 for doing nothing and £1,500 for doing little’. Vansittart, now chancellor of the exchequer, and Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, defended Herries and extolled his services, and the motion was defeated by 93-42. Yet he was uncomfortable in the auditor’s job, and on the eve of the general election of 1818 he wrote sourly to an unknown correspondent:

We go on grumbling here against our masters, with whom ... no persons ... are really satisfied ... I cannot perceive that they make up in worth what they lack in talent. As the government is now constituted I hope I shall never be called upon to connect myself more closely ... with it. Some changes that would bring forward younger and better statesmen would alter my inclination ... In the meantime I will gradually withdraw from all extra work for these men and pursue my own way of living, which inclines to domestic enjoyment ... Many very respectable men are retiring from the ... Commons, from the absolute want of any attachment to the government ... These men will I fear be mostly succeeded by reformers and Jacobins, for there is but little management used in supplying these vacancies at the great House. Add. 57418, Herries to ‘Dear Sir’, 8 June 1818.

He welcomed the recommendations of the 1819 committee on the resumption of cash payments, though he dissented from the principles espoused in their report. Hilton, 45; Add. 57445, memo. 1 May 1819. He remained ‘dissatisfied and disgusted’ with his ‘irksome’ job as auditor, which he privately complained involved little more than ‘checking the consumption of eggs and butter and tallow candles, or the expense of close stools in the royal household’. He was also sick of the ‘odium to which I have been exposed for holding it in conjunction with my compensation allowance’, an arrangement which he had been forced into by Liverpool’s belief that ‘the civil list was one of the most dangerous points under his administration’ and that Herries was ‘peculiarly qualified to defend it’. The death in February 1821 of his wife of seven years, a savage blow, inclined him to retire on his pension if he could not get a more congenial office. He indirectly made this known to Liverpool, who he knew had resisted all notions of moving him, but he was persuaded to remain as auditor until a suitable replacement was found. Meanwhile he agreed to become a member of the Irish revenue commission, which was formally constituted on 10 July 1821, standing third of five under the chairmanship of Thomas Wallace*, vice-president of the board of trade. The commission’s powers were enhanced in 1822, when Herries drew up its report recommending merger of the British and Irish revenue collecting machinery. BL, Herries mss, Herries to cos. R. Herries, 25 May 1821; Croker Pprs. i. 208; Herries, i. 118-19. In August Herries retired from the Bath sinecure in favour of his brother William and urged Liverpool to remove him from the auditorship as soon as possible. Liverpool and Wallace were keen to have him in Parliament, and as part of the ministerial reshuffle in February 1823, which saw the replacement of Vansittart at the exchequer by Frederick Robinson*, Herries succeeded Stephen Rumbold Lushington* as junior (financial) secretary to the treasury, while Lushington took over from Charles Arbuthnot* as patronage secretary. Reckoned to be ‘highly delighted with his new office’, he was returned for Harwich on the treasury interest with Canning, the new foreign secretary, as his colleague. Add. 38291, f. 185; 38743, f. 263; 57367, Herries to Liverpool, 3 Aug. 1822; Herries mss, Arbuthnot to Herries [20 Jan.]; Lonsdale mss, Long to Lonsdale, 2 Feb. 1823.

In his first reported speech, 18 Mar. 1823, Herries (a government teller in at least 36 divisions in the 1820 Parliament) opposed repeal of the window tax and argued that although there was some localized distress ‘the general state of the country’ did not justify tax cuts and interference with the sinking fund. He resisted an attempt to legalize the off-sale of small quantities of beer by public brewers, 28 May, and defended the government’s beer duties bill, 13 June. His relationship with the Rothschilds enabled him in October 1823 to broker their contract for settlement of the £2,500,000 Austrian loan, which he explained to the House, 24 Feb. 1824. Add. 38297, ff. 26, 36, 52, 54, 140, 198; 38747, ff. 10, 21; 57367, Liverpool to Herries, 29 Oct., 7 Nov. 1823. His other occasional contributions to debate included a defence of the silk trade bill, 19 Mar., the moving of a successful wrecking amendment against Maberly’s land tax redemption bill, 14 June 1824, and opposition to motions for repeal of the beer duties, 5 May, and the window tax, 17 May 1825. He divided silently against Catholic relief, 1 Mar., 21 Apr., 10 May 1825. Later that year he took ‘unauthorized’ steps to promote the candidature of the Protestant attorney-general Sir John Copley* for Cambridge University, to the detriment of the pro-Catholic sitting Member and war secretary Lord Palmerston. K. Bourne, Palmerston, 243; Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 179. In 1841 he recalled that during his five years service under Liverpool ‘the general financial business of the country devolved mainly upon me’. He had a leading share in consolidation of the customs regulations. Add. 57447, memo. [Sept. 1841]; Hilton, 183. He was at the heart of the treasury’s resistance to the liberalizing tariff reforms promoted by Huskisson at the board of trade and Canning; and in April 1825 he told Mrs. Arbuthnot, the confidante of Wellington, a member of the cabinet, that Huskisson’s ‘indecent presumption and haste in altering the trading laws was creating great alarm and dissatisfaction among the merchants of the City’ and that ‘Rothschild had ... told him that the consequence of admitting foreign goods was that all the gold was going out of the country’. Herries and Vansittart (now chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster as Lord Bexley) tried unsuccessfully that autumn to persuade Robinson not to deflate the economy and to raise the cash needed to redeem exchequer bills by borrowing from the Bank or, preferably, getting the Bank or Rothschild to buy up bills. Herries believed that the delay in advertising exchequer bills contributed to the panic and bank crash of 1825-6. His arguments converted Wellington, who helped to convince Liverpool (reckoned to be ‘afraid’ of Huskisson) that the Bank must be allowed to continue to stamp small notes until October 1826. In negotiations with the Bank in February Herries secured its agreement to lend distressed merchants up to £3,000,000 on security of their goods, which greatly alleviated the crisis. Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 390-1, 426; Hilton, 211-14, 217, 222, 225-6; Add. 57402, Robinson to Herries, 16, 18 Sept. 1825. He defended ministerial policy in the House, 8, 15 Feb. 1826. On the 21st, opposing Hume’s obstructive amendment on the navy estimates, he insisted that they had ‘observed the most rigid economy in every department’ and ‘carried reductions to the utmost extent’. He replied to Maberly’s resolution on the sinking fund, 10 Mar. 1826.

Herries came in unopposed for Harwich at the general election in June 1826. Later that year he oversaw ministerial efforts to relieve the silk workers of Lancashire and Cheshire. Hilton, 84. In the House, 19 Feb. 1827, he refuted Hume’s allegations of discrepancies in the army estimates. At the end of the month he told Sir William Knighton, the king’s factotum, with whom he had developed close links through his involvement in the financing of the projected Windsor Castle and Buckingham House improvements and Nash’s London developments, that he considered Liverpool to be politically dead after his stroke and that he was ‘pursuing my own laborious vocation without looking to the right hand or the left’, being ‘not in the following of any party’. Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1278, 1288. Canning, in temporary charge of affairs, found Herries ‘much mistaken’ about the strength of Tory backbench hostility to the proposed relaxation of the corn laws; and Herries and Lushington were accused by some pro-Catholics of using unscrupulous methods of persuasion to help produce the narrow majority against Catholic claims (in which Herries of course voted) on 6 Mar. At about this time he circulated a memorandum advocating the appointment of a finance committee, but Wellington thought it would ‘not answer’. Ibid. iii. 1292; Canning’s Ministry, 50. Herries told Mrs. Arbuthnot that when he talked with Knighton on 25 Mar. he found him

in a state of the greatest possible distress ... pledged to make Canning minister, but now feeling that it is impossible or at least most highly inexpedient ... He asked Herries whether in his opinion Canning was fit to be minister ... Herries ... said he was in a subordinate situation and would not presume to give an opinion. Sir William pressed him and at least he said that ... [Canning] was not fit, that if he was at the head of affairs he would, from his indiscretion, the violence of his temper and his want of management, get the government into perpetual scrapes, that age and long official habits had not corrected these faults ... [which] rendered him wholly unfit.

Yet Herries, whom Canning ‘courted and flattered up to the eyes’, decided to remain in office under him, even though his natural affinity was with Peel and the other anti-Catholic seceders; he claimed that ‘any junction with the [Whig] enemy’ was the Rubicon which I cannot pass’. When he saw the Lansdowne Whigs being admitted piecemeal to office and discovered ‘more and more how much ... Canning had been for a considerable time implicated’ with them, he grew disgruntled, but it was too late to escape. His suggestion, derived from a notion of Robinson (now Lord Goderich), that he might be put at woods and forests, which ‘would be agreeable to the king’, while continuing to transact ‘a great deal of important [treasury] business ... in Parliament’, was dismissed by Canning. Canning’s Ministry, 133; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 108; Herries, i, 124-6. Herries, who remained in the confidence of Copley (now lord chancellor as Lord Lyndhurst), produced a memorandum for Canning (chancellor of the exchequer as well as first lord of the treasury) arguing that it was vital to apply only a real annual surplus to reduction of the national debt, that economies must be made and that a finance committee was required. Add. 57419, Lyndhurst to Herries [4 May 1827]; Hilton, 252; Herries, i. 139-44. In the House, 11 May, he said that the miscellaneous estimates had been ‘brought down to the lowest possible standard’. He welcomed George Bankes’s bill to exempt Catholics from a double assessment of land tax, 23 May, and was in the Tory minorities against the disfranchisement of Penryn, 28 May, and the Coventry magistracy bill, 18 June 1827. In mid-May he complained to his cousin that ‘the whole of the treasury, deliberative and executive, having rested entirely on my shoulders, Canning has not yet bestowed the least attention upon his office’, and predicted that the imminent completion of the junction with the Lansdowne Whigs (who Canning assured him had agreed to oppose parliamentary reform and to keep the Catholic question open) would ‘sooner or later relieve me of the trouble and fatigue of this office’. He told Mrs. Arbuthnot at the end of June that ‘the government are not in a comfortable position’. Canning’s Ministry, 309; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 129; Herries, i. 126. A few days later he informed Canning that having ‘for some time past experienced a gradual failure of health and strength’ he needed to be relieved of ‘the weight of my present duties, either by being out of office altogether or placed in an office requiring less labour and attention’, such as vice-president of the board of trade or commissioner of woods and forests: there he ‘might perhaps be able to render you more assistance in your financial arrangements ... and more particularly in preparing the materials for the finance committee and attending to its proceedings’. Canning, he learnt from Planta, the patronage secretary, interpreted this as a ‘solicitude’ for an immediate move, and he was anxious to assure the premier that he had only specified alternative places in order to make it clear that he was not angling for ‘an honorary sinecure such as the paymastership’. He refused to take a seat at the treasury board, where he would be ‘wholly lost and out of my natural place ... in the working class of politicians’. He suggested ‘as the best course under the circumstances’ that his intention to leave the treasury should ‘remain secret’ until Canning’s ‘other general arrangements’ with the Whigs had been completed, and that he should be allowed to go at around the end of July, ‘leaving the whole question of future employment to time and circumstances hereafter’. As he wished that ‘it should be clearly understood in all quarters that the motives for my retirement are wholly unmixed with any feelings of discontent or estrangement with respect’ to Canning, he added that admission to the privy council, which had been coupled with the offer of a lordship of the treasury, would ‘help most distinctly to mark the character’ of his retirement. Arbuthnot, one of the seceders, assured him that although it had been ‘no secret’ that he had ‘first intended to throw up office if the Whigs came in’, there were ‘valid grounds’ for his ‘remaining ... rather than be the cause of embarrassment in your particular department of the king’s government’; but he warned Herries that his taking another office in conjunction with the Whigs would damage him in the eyes of his former Tory colleagues and jeopardize his chances of employment if they came in again. Arbuthnot then said as much to Peel, reporting that Herries ‘tells me that Canning and the Whigs are ... wide asunder, that Canning’s time is passed in resisting their encroachments and that ... the two parties are so much at variance that sooner or later they must split’. In mid-July, after Canning had acquiesced in Lansdowne’s appointment as home rather than foreign secretary, Herries told Arbuthnot, who still did not know which way he would jump, that the premier was ‘on the declivity of a hill, and ... was hurried forward without being able to stop himself’. At this juncture Herries explained his situation to his cousin, writing from Montreal, the Kent residence near Sevenoaks which he rented from Lord Amherst:

I have been completely knocked up by the fatigues which the peculiar circumstances of the late session heaped upon me ... I was not only weary but sick of all that was going on and vexed that ... I was unable without dealing fairly by the public service to withdraw myself from the mess ... I am now getting better, but ... a long interval of relaxation is indispensably necessary for my complete restoration ... I have given warning to Canning that I cannot face the double work of my station ... He wants me to take some situation in which I may have more honour and more ease, so as to be able to assist him in finance and in Parliament. I have discouraged these propositions, but I have assured him that I will endeavour as much as possible to meet his convenience in the mode and time of my ultimately giving up my present office.

Two weeks later he welcomed Arbuthnot’s news of a friendly meeting between Wellington and the king:

The more good feeling between them is maintained the greater will be the facility for getting things right again when the proper opportunity arrives. I am quite confident that the new friends cannot long continue so ... The special imprudence and fiery temper of some of the leaders must inevitably lead to a violent separation ... The possession of the government during the remainder of the present reign ... by the Tories will then depend upon the prudence of their management at that juncture ... I am getting out of my trammels, but using my best endeavours to do so without creating inconvenience or embarrassment to anyone. I shall give every assistance in my power to prepare for the difficult arrangements which we have to make in the next session, upon the successful execution of which the stability of the government, let who will be at the head of it, must materially depend.

Arbuthnot, wishing that Herries would ‘not try to lessen ...[ministers’] difficulties’, showed this letter to Wellington and Peel, who doubted the ‘correctness’ of his prediction of a fatal split. By 5 Aug 1827 Herries, whose impending resignation was now public knowledge, was on the verge of embarking on an extended European tour, though he feared that the ailing Canning’s death in the immediate future would ‘embarrass me exceedingly’. Herries, i. 131-6; Canning’s Ministry, 340, 347, 360, 365, 371; HMC Bathurst, 638; Lansdowne mss, Herries to Canning, 2 July; Add. 57370, Arbuthnot to Herries, 5, 31 July 1827.

As Canning lapsed towards his death in the small hours of 8 Aug. 1827, Herries was persuaded by Lyndhurst and Planta to postpone his departure. Herries, i. 150-2. For accounts of the events of 8 Aug.-4 Sept. 1827 see A. Aspinall, ‘Goderich Ministry’, EHR, xlii (1927), 533-43; A. Mitchell, Whigs in Opposition, 204-5, and Bourne, 265-8. Palmerston’s inaccurate retrospective account in Bulwer, Palmerston, i. 182-5 is corrected by Herries, i. 153-236. Later that day the king invited Goderich to form a ministry on the same basis as Canning’s and suggested the appointment of the Canningite William Sturges Bourne*, already in the cabinet as commissioner of woods and forests, as chancellor of the exchequer. Goderich complied, but Sturges Bourne was unwilling to take on the office. Herries, who considered his resignation to have been accepted by Canning, was not initially inclined to involve himself further in office with ‘Whigs and Radicals’. When Wellington’s confidant Sir Henry Hardinge* saw him in London on 9 Aug. he found him

looking very ill ... He says he must for the present resign, as he is completely done up and must be abroad. He said he did not know until lately the extent of the intrigue and dirty work that had been going on ... He thinks he will for the present decline on the score of health, but support as a looker-on ... He advocates oblivion of the past, but rather as it regards Tories in, and did not say anything distinct as to the policy of a mixture of Whigs. Add. 57419, T.P. Courtenay to Herries, 9 Aug. 1827; Wellington Despatches, iv. 75; Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 191.

On 10 Aug. Goderich called twice on Herries, who ‘assured him that he might consider me as remaining attached to his administration’, but told him that his wish to leave the treasury still held and, when sounded about the exchequer, to which the king had suggested appointing him, recommended Huskisson. He then went into the country. Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1381, 1386; Wellington Despatches, iv. 77, 79. On the 12th he was called to London by Planta, who told him that Goderich wanted him to take the exchequer. Next day he met separately Lyndhurst and Goderich, who pressed him to take the post as ‘the king’s appointment’ before going on his holiday. Herries wrote to his sister Isabelle that evening:

I am put in a most perplexing and uncomfortable situation, by that which to most men would be a subject of great exultation ... The government is to remain unchanged except that two Tories, Charles Grant* and myself, are to be introduced ... while no new Whig is to come in. The Whigs it is said are to be kept down. But it is a weak government, and can hardly go on. Ought I to run the risk of going down with it ... or ... without any good reason to allege throw away the opportunity of advancement and the favour of the king by refusing? ... If I refuse ... I must do so upon the ground that I cannot resolve in the present state of my health to take upon me so heavy and anxious a charge ... Pray let me have a line ... stating your opinion, on ... the supposition that though really unwell enough to justify a refusal, I am yet in a state to hope to be soon well enough to justify an acceptance. So that ... the acceptance or refusal must spring in my own mind from political feelings.

Hardinge commented to Wellington that although Herries had ‘openly stated’ that Goderich’s ministry ‘won’t stand the first week of the session’, he had ‘blown so often hot and cold that I think he will not refuse the bait’; but Mrs. Arbuthnot thought it would be ‘strange’ if he accepted. Add. 57419, Herries to sister, 13 Aug. [1827]; Wellington Despatches, iv. 90; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 136. In the event, after a restless night Herries, who was expected to go to Windsor on the morning of the 14th to kiss hands, informed Goderich that he wished not to take the office and wrote to Knighton declining it on the ground of ill health. Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1391; Wellington Despatches, iv. 94. Later that day he received via Knighton a personal message from the king urging him to reconsider, which he felt obliged to do, though when he accepted on the morning of the 15th he sought and obtained permission from Goderich to go abroad with the option of relinquishing the office should his health not improve. Arbuthnot remarked sourly that Herries, who had always regarded Goderich ‘with the most sovereign contempt’ and was himself ‘a good secretary’ but had ‘the farthest from an enlarged mind’, was probably ‘ashamed of himself’ for swallowing the lure and had ‘signed his death warrant as a public man’. Goderich’s weakness and indecision threw matters into chaos. Unknown to Herries, and having been quizzed by Lansdowne and the Whig George Tierney*, master of the mint, about the approach to him, he had offered the exchequer to Palmerston, who was willing to take it, with Herries replacing him as war secretary outside the cabinet. He confessed his quandary to Herries, who on the 15th urged him to make use of his earlier formal refusal and prepared to go abroad. The king vetoed Palmerston, insisted that Herries was the ‘fittest person’, sent Goderich an open letter to Herries commanding him to accept the office and directed that Herries was to attend at Windsor on the 17th to accept the seals. When Goderich saw Herries on the 16th he did not show him this letter, but admitted that his appointment had now become a bone of contention with the cabinet Whigs and hinted that he would like Herries to step aside. Herries retorted that it behoved Goderich, as prime minister, to stand up to the king and asked him to advise George to let him retire. Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 192-3; Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1392; Wellington Despatches, iv. 97-98. When Goderich belatedly showed Herries the king’s open letter on the morning of 17 Aug. they agreed that it was ‘impossible to oppose any further resistance’, and Herries went to Windsor. There took place a bizarre episode, in which Lansdowne and Tierney, aware of mounting Whig rank and file hostility to Herries as a Tory partisan and anti-Catholic bigot, the supposed creature of Knighton and the king and a suspected stock jobber, told Goderich that they would resign if he was appointed. They were also disgruntled over the king’s refusal to admit Lord Holland to the cabinet, and Tierney, an old enemy of Herries, argued that he was not of sufficient parliamentary calibre to lead the Commons should Huskisson’s health give way. Herries was informed of this by Goderich, who urged him not to accept the seals until he had seen the king again. Herries duly informed the king of all that had passed between him and Goderich, declined to take the seals and persuaded the king to see Goderich. At this interview the king agreed to postpone a decision until Huskisson, leader of the Canningites and earmarked for the colonial secretaryship, returned from his European holiday. Yet he still made it clear to Herries that the exchequer seals were his, and had him sworn a member of the privy council. Palmerston reported that before his audience ‘poor Herries [looked] like a victim about to be cast into a den of lions ready to devour him’, but he discounted the Whig belief that he would allow George and Knighton free rein over the contentious royal finances, as he was ‘an honourable man’ who, setting aside his poor health and awareness of his unpopularity with the Whigs, would

‘really be an excellent man for the office’, being ‘a very intelligent, clearheaded man ... of strict integrity’, and who if he had ‘not at present perhaps the scope of mind which belongs to a cabinet situation’ might develop it with time. Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 193-6; Greville Mems. i. 184; Huskisson Pprs. 226-30; BL, Althorp mss, Tavistock to Spencer, 15 Aug.; Add. 38750, f. 39; 51677, Lord J. Russell to Holland, 16 Aug.; Harrowby mss, Sturges Bourne to Harrowby, 19 Aug. 1827; TNA 30/29/9/5/53.

In an interview with Goderich, Lyndhurst and the Whig cabinet member Lord Carlisle, 21 Aug., the king stressed, for the benefit of Lansdowne and Tierney, that while he was willing to await Huskisson’s arrival, he had no intention of admitting Holland to the cabinet and was determined to have Herries. Chatsworth mss, Carlisle to Devonshire, 21 Aug.; Add. 40340, f. 191; 51586, Tierney to Holland, 22 Aug.; Hants RO, Tierney mss 31M70/37c. The Canningite Lord Howard de Walden, foreign office under-secretary, warned Huskisson that Herries, ‘a creature of Knighton’s’, did ‘not stand well in the world’, that ‘people do not like him as a cabinet minister and moreover there are some awkward stories about his connection with Rothschild’. The duke of Devonshire was informed that Herries was regarded in the City as being ‘in Rothschild’s power’ and likely as chancellor to ‘betray the cabinet secrets to a stock jobber’. On 24 Aug. the Morning Chronicle alleged that Whig objections to Herries’s appointment were grounded on these suspicions; but, as Lansdowne perceived, these slurs made it ‘more difficult for him to recede’, especially as there was ‘nothing that can be substantiated’. With Goderich’s blessing and endorsement Herries, now ‘determined to press for his appointment ... in order to prevent any imputation being cast on his character’, wrote to The Times (27 Aug.) to repudiate the allegations, though Lyndhurst talked him out of suing the Chronicle. Add. 38750, f. 75; 40394, f. 202; 51687, Lansdowne to Holland, 24 Aug.; 57419, Hill to Herries, 24 Aug.; Chatsworth mss, Young to Devonshire, 22 Aug.; Castle Howard mss, Lady Carlisle to Morpeth [25 Aug.] 1827. On 25 Aug. he told Isabelle that matters were no further forward and that at a requested interview with Goderich he had encountered

again a scene of unmanly perplexity. I could not learn from him what his real intentions were ... It appeared quite clear, however, that the Whigs had threatened to resign if my appointment were persisted in, and he threw out some indistinct hints of his own disposition to resign if they did. I told him I could not understand his feelings in that respect ... He seemed puzzled by this, but he said there were circumstances which I did not know, and which he could not explain to me ... The king is come to town and I much suspect the affair will thereby be brought to a crisis. Either the Whigs will give way, or he will turn them out ... The Whigs are disseminating lies about me. Add. 57419.

Palmerston felt that the Whigs would be mad to resign over Herries’s appointment, while Henry Brougham*, anxious to keep out the old Tories and secure the party’s hold on power, thought they should swallow it if he ‘satisfactorily’ denied, when questioned directly, that ‘he ever made a farthing’ by stock jobbing with Rothschild. Holland, however, stressed to Lansdowne ‘the utter impossibility of undertaking the business of the House of Commons with a finance minister whose views and principles are unknown to you’ and argued that the rumours about his connections, even if false, were ‘an additional inconvenience’ to an appointment ‘only recommended by Court favour or Court intrigue’. Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 198-9; Chatsworth mss, Brougham to Devonshire [26 Aug.]; Lansdowne mss, Holland to Lansdowne, 27 Aug. 1827. When Huskisson arrived on 28 Aug. Herries, now ‘quite passive in the whole of this business’, as he told Isabelle, kept out of his way; he condemned the ‘vacillating’ Goderich and thought the Whigs could ‘hardly do otherwise’ than resign. Huskisson saw the king on the 29th, declined to take the exchequer himself and suggested the temporary appointment of Sturges Bourne as a way out of the mess. Next day Herries met Goderich, Huskisson, Lyndhurst and Sturges Bourne and was presented with a compromise arrangement, whereby he would become president of the board of trade with management of the finance committee, on the understanding that he would eventually replace Sturges Bourne at the exchequer. To Huskisson’s fury, he refused to submit to what he considered a humiliation; in any case, Sturges Bourne declined to take the exchequer. After Huskisson had consulted Lansdowne, however, Sturges Bourne seemed to change his mind, but Herries would not give way. In a later talk with Lansdowne and Huskisson he was ‘nearly won over’, as the latter saw it; but Sturges Bourne’s final retraction put matters ‘more at sea than ever’. Add. 38750, ff. 145, 149, 152, 158; 51586, Tierney to Lady Holland, 30 Aug., 57419, Herries to sister, 30 Aug.; NLW, Coedymaen mss 199; Huskisson Pprs. 233-5; TNA 30/29/9/5/56; Lansdowne mss, Sturges Bourne to Lansdowne, 31 Aug. 1827. Herries joined Lansdowne in vainly urging Huskisson to take the exchequer, while he stayed at the treasury for the time being. At Windsor on 31 Aug., when Herries, Goderich, Lyndhurst, Huskisson and Sturges Bourne were present, the king insisted on Herries’s appointment, but he still did not take the seals, and it was agreed that Goderich and the king should exhort Lansdowne not to wreck the government. The offer of some concessionary junior Whig places and the king’s personal appeal induced Lansdowne to give way, and Tierney reluctantly complied, though he remained deeply dissatisfied. Add. 38750, ff. 152, 156, 188; 51584, Tierney to Holland, 1 Sept.; 51586, to Lady Holland, 31 Aug.; 51687, Lansdowne to Holland, 2, 5 Sept.; Lansdowne mss, Goderich to Lansdowne, 31 Aug., Holland to same, 3 Sept. 1827; Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 200; A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, 219; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 140-1. Herries, whose appointment was also ‘a bitter pill’ to Holland and others, kissed hands on 3 Sept. 1827 and later that month went abroad for four weeks. Before leaving he told his relatives that while he ‘should certainly have been much better satisfied to have been left alone ... so many compensatory circumstances have occurred to counterbalance the vexations ... that I do not feel I ought to complain’. He claimed, with some justice, that ‘I was most unwillingly drawn into the field of contention of which I was the chief object and at last almost the victim’. Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 143; Lansdowne mss, Holland to Lansdowne, 3 Sept.; Creevey Pprs. ii. 128; Add. 57419, Herries to W. Herries, 8 Sept.; Herries mss, same to R. Herries, 8 Sept. 1827.

His part in the episode which wrecked Goderich’s government four months later was perhaps less innocent. In cabinet in late November 1827 he joined Tierney in opposing Huskisson and Lansdowne’s wish to back the Russian plan to invade Moldavia and Walachia. According to Mrs. Arbuthnot, in a ‘long conversation’ with her husband he

told the same story as [William] Holmes* of the dissensions in the cabinet ... He said the king and Knighton are very hostile to the Whigs and are quite resolved to turn them out if they get into any difficulties. If this does occur, they are determined to send for ... [Wellington]. He said Lord Goderich was laughed at and despised by everybody ... He was positive there must be a break-up ... He added that, if war was determined on, he would retire (the only part of his story I don’t believe).

When informed of this by Arbuthnot, Peel commented:

I distrust all that is said to you by Herries, except so far as it is confirmed by other circumstances. As he has waded up to his chin through the widest part of the Rubicon, he is naturally ashamed of himself. That we should have lived to see the day, when instead of mending the blunders in the malt bill, he, Herries, backed by Tierney, is giving peace to Europe by resisting the invasion of Moldavia and Walachia! Herries, ii. 3-7; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 149-50; Arbuthnot Corresp. 93; Von Neumann Diary, i. 180; Wellington Despatches, iv. 168.

On 28 Nov. Herries was informed by Huskisson that the leading Whig backbencher Lord Althorp, whom ministers wished to cultivate, was being considered as chairman of the finance committee. The idea had originated with Tierney, who had already secured Goderich’s approval and now revealed to Herries that Althorp had accepted in principle. Herries, by all accounts, ‘concurred without qualification’. Next day he told Huskisson that he had had second thoughts, considering Althorp to be a ‘dangerous reformer’. On the 30th Huskisson heard from Planta that Herries was ‘very sore’ and was falsely alleging that he had only found out about the proposal from a backbencher and that the arrangement had been covertly made. Huskisson ordered Tierney to stop considering names for the committee with anyone outside the cabinet and wrote to Herries arguing that Althorp would be ‘safer’ in the chair than as a member of the committee. As Herries did not raise the issue when they met in cabinet on 3 Dec., Huskisson assumed that the ‘misconception’ had been removed and the matter was in abeyance. Tierney did continue to negotiate covertly with Althorp, which gave Herries the semblance of a genuine grievance and a handy pretext for his next move. Add. 38753, f. 199; Tierney mss 4, 85a, b; Herries, ii. 15-17; Add. 75938, Lady to Lord Spencer, 14, 15 Dec. 1827; E.A. Wasson, Whig Renaissance, 153-4. Goderich’s renewed attempt to secure the admission of Holland to the cabinet, the deterioration of Herries’s relationship with Huskisson and his desire, which was partly inspired by pressure from Rothschild, to protect City interests against a reforming finance committee prompted him to try to break up the ministry. He and Lyndhurst were in communication with Knighton, whom the lord chancellor asked to notify the king of Herries and Bexley’s likely impending resignations on 20 Dec. Next day Herries wrote to Goderich tendering his resignation on the ground that the arrangement with Althorp, on a matter central to his concerns as chancellor of the exchequer, had been made behind his back. Huskisson, who believed that Herries was up to his neck in Knighton’s intrigues (a suspicion validated by Herries’s letter to Knighton of 31 Dec. 1827 assuring him that he and Lyndhurst saw ‘matters quite in the same light’), offered to resign, but was talked out of it, though he insisted on going out if Althorp was not made chairman. Herries would not back down and on 7 Jan. 1828 he rejected a last attempt by the dithering Goderich to persuade him to ‘yield’. In a conversation that day with Hardinge, intended to be relayed to Wellington and Peel, he said that the king ignored Lansdowne, ‘disliked Tierney and despised Goderich’, criticized Huskisson and denounced Tierney as ‘an old rogue’. Next day the tearful premier told the king that he could not go on. He was dismissed from office and Wellington sent for. Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 152-3, 155; Wellington Despatches, iv. 168-71, 181-2; Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1447, 1451; Croker Pprs. i. 397; Huskisson Pprs. 268-9; HMC Bathurst, 650-1; Durham CRO, Londonderry mss D/Lo/C83/11, 12, 83; Add. 38753, ff. 45, 159, 167, 185, 199, 223, 242, 282; 38754, f. 24; Lansdowne mss, Goderich to Lansdowne, 4, 8 Jan. 1828; Wellington mss WP1/913/8; Tierney mss 85b; Herries, ii. 44-57; Hilton, 243-5; Aspinall, ‘Goderich Ministry’, 551-5. Herries’s ostensible role in the collapse of the ministry was soon common knowledge, but opinions varied as to the rights and wrongs of his conduct; even some Whigs thought he had been badly treated, but most condemned the ‘odious little clerk’ for conspiring to upset the applecart. Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 157; Howard Sisters, 98-99; Von Neumann Diary, i. 182; Add. 36464, f. 166; 40395, f. 9; Herts. Archives, Panshanger mss D/Elb F78, W. to F. Lamb, 11 Jan. 1828; Greville Mems. i. 196-8. Herries himself, naming Brougham as the chief culprit, privately attributed the government’s collapse to the Whigs’ attempts to force Holland into the cabinet: Goderich ‘felt himself dying of Whig poison and seized the occasion to induce the king out of pure compassion to end his miseries’. Add. 57447, memo. [1828].

The recall of Wellington and Peel did not advance his political career. Wellington’s initial notion to make him chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster was unacceptable to the king, who did ‘not like’ his removal from the exchequer, though he was agreeable to his being appointed president of the board of trade. Meanwhile Herries brokered a deal with Rothschild to lend money, guaranteed by the new ministry, to Dom Miguel. Wellington Despatches, iv. 187, 192, 195; HMC Bathurst, 652; Parker, Peel, ii. 29; Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1463. Huskisson, whom Wellington was keen to take in, regarded Herries as ‘the stumbling block’, and after negotiations with the duke and consultation with his allies Lord Dudley, Palmerston and Grant, he agreed on 17 Jan. 1828 to take office only if Herries was removed from the exchequer, having decided that they could not reasonably insist on his exclusion from the cabinet. Wellington, who despised Herries, had no problem with this: Huskisson stayed at the colonial office, the duchy went to Lord Aberdeen and the exchequer to Henry Goulburn*, and Herries replaced Tierney (‘a good epigram’, thought Huskisson) at the mint, a cabinet office with ‘no departmental influence’. It was in fact ‘almost a sinecure’, hardly appropriate for a man of his financial expertise and administrative experience, especially in view of Goulburn’s ignorance of financial questions. Arbuthnot Jnl., ii. 159; Bulwer, i. 218-19; Herries, ii. 59-61; Add. 38754, ff. 124, 126, 162; 40395, f. 21; Tierney mss 85a; Lonsdale mss, Lowther to Lonsdale, 19 Jan. 1828; Southampton Univ. Lib. Broadlands mss BR23AA/5/1. Herries made an ‘unlucky’ start, for the premature disclosure in the Morning Chronicle of 19 Jan. of the membership of the new cabinet was (incorrectly as it turned out) attributed to his having passed on the information to the advanced Whig John Maberly*, a former army contractor with whom he had a curious relationship. The fault lay with Herries’s clerk, who had been indiscreet, but Wellington rapped Herries’s knuckles and lectured him on the importance of cabinet confidentiality. Wellington mss WP1/914/40; Wellington Despatches, iv. 212; Croker Pprs. i. 405. John Croker* found him ‘feeling ... that he is degraded’ in his peripheral office, away from ‘his Martello tower’ of finance, but was convinced by his lamentation that he ‘must be what he is or nothing’, for ‘he alone could not set up a Tory opposition’ and he ‘could not join the Whigs’. At his first sighting of Herries at a cabinet dinner, 22 Jan. 1828, the second generation peer Lord Ellenborough, lord privy seal, described him as ‘a plain, ordinary-looking, clerk-like man, full of information’ but, as one of ‘the class of under-secretaries’, appearing out of place in a cabinet. Croker Pprs. i. 403, 405-6; Ellenborough Diary, i. 2-3.

In the House, 6 Feb. 1828, Herries squabbled with Hume over the accounts for exchequer bill payments. He advised Peel, the home secretary, on the most acceptable composition of the finance committee, to which he was appointed, 15 Feb. He was very active on it, gave evidence to it and drew up its fourth report, which belatedly endorsed the policy of tariff reform. Add. 40395, ff. 219, 221; Herries, ii. 90-101; Hilton, 257. On 12 Feb. he complained to Ellenborough that in his explanation of the collapse of his ministry in the Lords the previous evening Goderich had omitted some pertinent facts (a view shared by Huskisson, though from a different perspective). Ellenborough Diary, i. 30-31; Add. 38755, f. 30. In the Commons, 18 Feb., Herries followed Huskisson in giving his side of the story: he dismissed Goderich’s allegation that the sole cause of the break-up had been his clash with Huskisson over the chairmanship, denied having intended, still less plotted, to wreck the ministry and read in full his correspondence with Goderich between 21 Dec. 1827 and 7 Jan. 1828, in order to demonstrate the late premier’s feebleness. The initial impression on both sides of the House was favourable, and his speech, though delivered in a ‘very low’ tone, was cheered. But Tierney tellingly exposed some of the inconsistencies in his statement, particularly his three-week silence on the chairmanship, while Tom Duncombe, radical Member for Hertford, anxious to make a splash, associated him with ‘a secret influence behind the throne’ (Knighton) and a ‘master of unbounded wealth’ (Rothschild) and called on Wellington to ensure that the national finances would no longer be ‘controlled ... by a Jew’ or patronage dispensed ‘by the prescription of a physician’. Brougham also attacked Herries to good effect on the 19th. Ellenborough Diary, i. 34-35; Hatherton diary, 18, 19 [Feb.] 1828; Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1504; Broughton, Recollections, iii. 245; Bagot, Canning and Friends, ii. 433-4; Keele Univ. Lib. Sneyd mss SC12/86; TNA 30/29/9/5/62; M.D. George, Cat. of Pol. and Personal Satires, ix. 15515, 15522. While on his feet admitting the ‘injurious effects’ of the 1827 Malt Act, 21 Feb., Herries tried to vindicate himself, insisting that Goderich had left him in ignorance of Huskisson’s threat to resign until it was too late and repeating ‘barefacedly’ but not elaborating on his allegation that there had been a deeper ‘plot’ to destroy the government. He was roughly handled by Brougham, Sturges Bourne, Charles Williams Wynn and Macdonald and emerged very considerably ‘damaged’, as Hardinge reported and Peel was supposed to believe. Hatherton diary, 21 [Feb.]; Agar Ellis diary, 21 Feb. [1828]; Lady Holland to Son, 74; Ellenborough Diary, i. 38; Bagot, ii. 435; Greville Mems. i. 206; Nottingham Univ. Lib. Portland mss PwH 146/1-3; Heron, Notes, 170. He divided silently against repeal of the Test Acts, 26 Feb., and Catholic relief, 12 May, having presented a hostile Harwich petition, 9 May. He now cut a somewhat forlorn figure in the House and in the cabinet, where he kept out of the arguments about the corn laws. Mrs. Arbuthnot noted on 29 Feb. that he ‘never utters, and last night there was a laugh of derision when he was named as a minister’. Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 166; Ellenborough Diary, i. 46, 47, 52. He replied to criticism of expenditure on royal residences and repudiated Sir James Graham’s insinuation that he would take a biased view of it on the finance committee, 24 Mar. He also backed Goulburn’s refusal to postpone the grant of £2,000,000 for the sinking fund and defended the conduct of the Canning and Goderich ministries on life annuities. He opposed Harvey’s motion for more effective control over crown excise prosecutions, 1 May, and on the 16th said that John Wood’s ‘garbled statement’ on the national finances was ‘erroneous’. In April Mrs. Arbuthnot had suspected him of hankering after the idle Grant’s job at the board of trade; and when Grant and the other Huskissonites resigned in the last week of May the king suggested moving Goulburn to the colonial office and giving Herries the exchequer. Wellington ruled this out, ostensibly on the ground that their necessary re-elections would remove them from the House at a ‘very inconvenient’ moment and interrupt Herries’s work on the finance committee. On 28 May Herries appealed directly to the premier for a move:

The office which I now fill is a mere sinecure and ... such as might be held by any person who, by high rank or influential connections, though unqualified by official ability or experience, might add to the strength of your government. My only means of being in any degree useful ... must consist in the efficient discharge of some public duties; and I ... feel myself out of my proper position so long as I occupy an office suited to the station and influence which I do not possess, and unsuited to the exercise of any little ability which I may have acquired ... I feel it to be right, now that you are about making a new distribution of ... offices ... candidly to state that it would have given me more satisfaction if ... it would have accorded with your arrangements to place me in a situation of more labour and responsibility.

Wellington entreated him to ‘be satisfied, and have patience, and be assured that you must rise eventually to offices of more business’, and meanwhile to make the most of his freedom from departmental duties, which allowed him to ‘assist the government on a variety of subjects’. Arbuthnot Jnl. ii.181-2; Ellenborough Diary, i. 118-19; Wellington Despatches, iv. 462, 473-4. In the House, 30 May, Herries defended the compensation to the revenue commissioners. He supported the second reading of Poulett Thomson’s usury laws amendment bill, 19 June, and led the ministerial reply to Taylor’s charge of misappropriation of public money in the liquidation of British claims on France, 23 July. On 11 July he refuted Hume’s allegation that Canning had ‘misled’ the Commons on the sinking fund, dissociated himself from the view of some other members of the finance committee that ministers should abandon attempts to reduce the national debt and lost his temper with Hume. He defended the national debt reduction bill, 17 July 1828.

He was consulted on the question of renewal of the Bank’s charter in September and was briefly ill in November. Wellington mss WP1/952/17; 969/30. At the close of the 1828 session he had told Mrs. Arbuthnot that Peel was ‘fully aware that it was necessary to settle the [Catholic] question’, though he did not foresee that he would concede emancipation while in office. Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 200. He acquiesced in the decision on the ground of political expediency, as he explained in the House on presenting Harwich corporation’s hostile petition, 10 Feb. 1829, when he emphasized that ministers remained determined to ‘preserve inviolate the Protestant establishments’, a line which he asked a constituent to disseminate in the borough. He had to defend himself in the face of some local disgruntlement in March. Add. 57419, Herries to Cobbold, 17 Feb., to [unknown], 14 Mar. 1829. Keen on securities, he voted silently for emancipation, 6, 30 Mar., but according to Ellenborough was in the minority of 20 for an amendment to the Irish franchise bill, 20 Mar. Greville recorded that in mid-March he made it clear to the Whig opposition that hostilities would resume once emancipation was carried, for ministerial ‘policy was conservative, that of the Whigs subversive’. Ellenborough Diary, i. 349, 358, 402; Greville Mems. i. 270. He explained items of supply, 2 Apr., and said that he favoured equalization of the Irish and Scottish malt duties, 14 Apr. He was named to the select committees on the Irish miscellaneous and militia estimates, 9, 10 Apr. At this time Ellenborough, now president of the board of control, who did not trust Herries on domestic financial matters, suggested to Wellington that he might advantageously be made governor of Bombay. The duke doubted that Herries would go, but ‘evidently thought it would be a very good thing if he would’. Yet when Ellenborough broached the idea he suggested to Herries that he might go out ‘as a sort of chancellor of the exchequer to the governor-general’ of Bengal, with a remit for ‘general management of the finances of India’ and the prospect of being able to line his pockets with £5,000 to £7,000 a year. Herries dismissed the notion. Mrs. Arbuthnot thought he was ‘a great fool’ to do so, for he was ‘nul altogether in his present situation’, whereas ‘if he had come back in three years having shown himself to be an able financier, he might have looked with confidence to the post of chancellor of the exchequer’. Ellenborough Diary, i. 398; ii. 12-13, 19; Add. 57410, Ellenborough to Herries, 19 Apr. 1829; Herries, ii. 105-8; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 291-2. He defended the silk trade bill, 1 May, backed Goulburn’s arguments for the redemption of exchequer bills, 8 May, replied at length to Maberly’s attack on the application of £3,000,000 to reduction of the debt, 11 May, and on 22 June 1829 got rid of motions for returns of Anglican archdeacons and Leicester corporation’s expenditure. The government’s deficiencies in debating talent in the Commons, where Herries was deemed to be virtually ‘mute’, prompted Hardinge to press Ellenborough to revive the Indian project ‘with the view of opening the mint’ to a speaker, but he refrained, as Herries had ‘said his domestic circumstances made it impossible, and the duke did not seem to like it at all’. He found Herries ‘rather hostile to the continuance’ of the East India Company’s trade monopoly. Bulwer, i. 335; Ellenborough Diary, ii. 63, 72.

In October 1829 Herries accompanied Bexley to his swearing-in as high steward of Harwich and got away without trouble on the score of his support for Catholic emancipation. Devon RO, Sidmouth mss, Bexley to Sidmouth, 22 Oct. 1829. In January 1830 he was promoted to replace the ailing William Vesey Fitzgerald* as president of the board of trade. He was commended to Wellington by Lord Bathurst as ‘a man of business and experience, neither a decided enemy nor vehement friend to ... free trade’; but Wallace, his former chief in the Irish revenue commission, commented privately that he would be ‘of no use in the House’, did ‘not particularly understand the business’ and was ‘above all’ disqualified by ‘the total want of all public confidence which attaches to him’. The mint could not be disposed of satisfactorily and Herries, who was quietly re-elected for Harwich, retained it. Greville Mems. i. 353-4; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 328; Countess Granville Letters, ii. 57; Wellington Despatches, vi. 401; Northumb. RO, Middleton mss ZMI/5/77/3/1; Lonsdale mss, Lowther to Lonsdale, 25 Jan., 4 Feb. 1830. On 15 Feb. he opposed Hume’s motion for large tax remissions and economies, arguing that the current distress was beyond the reach of legislation and that Hume’s assertion that £8,500,000 could be saved was ‘declamation’. But on 9 Mar. he assured Hume that vacancies in public offices would not be filled unnecessarily. His performance in leading the ministerial reply to Palmerston’s motion for information on relations with Portugal, 10 Mar., was reckoned ‘pitiful’ by the Whigs; and Mrs. Arbuthnot noted that in the debate on the state of the nation, 16 Mar., when he rambled, quoted statistics and called for ‘patient endurance’, he spoke

so woefully ill that nothing else has been talked of ... He seems to have quite broken down and been unable to express himself ... Pushing on Herries has done the duke’s government more harm than anything ... [Wellington] is aware, I think, what a mistake he made when he promoted him ... I am surprised at Herries’s failure, for no doubt he understands all subjects of trade and finance better than anyone, is a very hard headed, shrewd man, and it seems surprising that such a man should be so utterly incapable of putting his ideas into words. Lord Althorp told ... Arbuthnot that, upon the finance committee, nobody gave so much or such valuable information as he did, or proved so clearly how perfectly informed he was upon every subject of finance. Grey mss, Howick jnl. 10, 16 Mar.; Agar Ellis diary, 10 Mar. 1830; Howard Sisters, 125; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 345-6.

In cabinet Herries, who did not believe that the reduction of import duties on foreign goods had caused distress, joined Goulburn and Peel in arguing for the imposition of a property tax in order to reduce the indirect tax burden ‘on the shoulders of the middling and labouring classes’, a policy which he had intended to promote when chancellor. They were overruled by Wellington and a majority of the cabinet. Wellington mss WP1/1164/11; Ellenborough Diary, ii. 212-15; Herries mss, Herries to R. Herries, 8 Mar. 1830. He allowed Littleton’s bill to abolish truck payments to be brought in, 17 Mar., and was one of the committee to whom it was referred, 3 May; he defended it as ‘indispensably necessary’, 23 June, 5 July. He was named to the select committees on superannuations, 26 Apr., and Sierra Leone, 15 June. He opposed Poulett Thomson’s motion for inquiry into a revision of taxation, 25 Mar., and next day promised Hume and Maberly that the government were heeding the recommendations of the finance committee to cut the cost of pensions for public servants. He said the damage done to British shipping by foreign competition had been exaggerated, 2 Apr., but on the 8th announced that he intended to close a loophole which allowed Baltic timber imported via Canada to evade full duty. He resisted inquiry into the state of the shipping interest, deploring ‘vague assertions hostile to our commercial policy’, 6 May. He said ministers would try to alleviate distress in the West Indies, 18 May, and defended their sugar duties proposals, which he foresaw would have to be modified, 21 June. He had a bad tempered exchange with ‘Bum’ Gordon on the subject, 30 June. Ellenborough Diary, ii. 274-5. He opposed currency reform, 8 June, warning that departure from the 1819 settlement would presage ‘a political relapse’ and that if the dual standard was restored ‘tomorrow’s sun would not set without having witnessed panic, ruin and convulsion’. He spoke for the sale of beer bill, 1 July. Criticism of his inadequacies as a parliamentary speaker, especially his inability to assist Peel in general debate, persisted and mounted: Lyndhurst, for example, considered him ‘worse than nul for he was contemptible’. With Sir George Murray*, the colonial secretary, he was being considered for removal by the time of the 1830 dissolution, but Wellington could not ‘see a way to provide’ for them, particularly Herries who, as Arbuthnot observed, was generally recognized as being ‘valuable in a subordinate situation, but ... misplaced where he is’. Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 356, 366, 372-3; Ellenborough Diary, ii. 290; Baring Jnls. 64; Add. 40340, f. 228. After his unopposed return for Harwich Herries predicted that

there will be no considerable change in the relative numbers of the principal parties in the House, but I fear the radical party will be more influential, and radical reforms of all kinds more in favour ... The business of the government, whether in yielding to these demands or resisting them, will be most difficult, and to satisfy the two factions, the conservative and the subversive, or either of them, if it pursues a prudent course, will be quite impossible. NLW, Harpton Court mss C/430, Herries to Lewis, 19 Aug. [1830].

Since April he had been involved in negotiations with the United States for the removal of restrictions on trade between America and the British West Indian colonies. A settlement was concluded before the new Parliament met, and on 8 Nov. 1830 Herries explained his proposals, which he again defended on the 12th as no departure from free trade principles. When Mrs. Arbuthnot asked John Doherty* ‘whether, putting aside the dullness of the speech, there was much information in it, he said I was supposing an impossible case for that he would defy anyone to attend to him’. Herries, ii. 111-14; Wellington mss WP1/1108/7; 1111/28; 1117/40; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 401. He had advised Peel in June on the prospect of opposition to the civil list for the new reign; Add. 40400, f. 217. and on 15 Nov. 1830 he opposed Parnell’s motion for inquiry, arguing that there was already ‘ample information’. He was of course in the ministerial minority in the division, which brought them down; he was named to the select committee.

As the Tory men of business considered how to organize the party in unfamiliar opposition to the Grey ministry, Arbuthnot initially wished to exclude Herries ‘as a cabinet minister’. Ellenborough reflected that he ‘never should’ have been one, but felt ‘it would be difficult to set him aside’, especially as he was ‘an able and practised man of trade and finance’. When Herries called on him a few days later to urge prompt action to secure the services of a daily newspaper, Ellenborough was ‘rather embarrassed’; but in the event he became one of the small opposition press management committee. Herries, who was described by Mrs. Arbuthnot in January 1831 as ‘the most active of the late government’, despaired of doing much with the provincial press, fearing that ‘we have so completely let go of all the lines of this machinery that we shall have difficulty in getting hold of them again’. While Wellington was encouraging, Peel was reported to be averse to ‘attempts to get hold of the press’, which inclined Herries to suggest a temporary suspension of this work, as ‘it would be most unadvisable to adopt any measures in which he did not concur’, though he remained convinced of the ‘necessity for some exertion on our part to obtain a voice for our party, the conservative’. On a visit to Drayton in the third week of April he found Peel

much as usual, extremely circumspect in all that he says and does, but acting very indifferently the character of a country gentleman indifferent to office and politics. He is ... much more hearty in the anti-ministerial cause than he acknowledges ... I made no impression on him with respect to the press: at least, he would come to no conclusion ... My habits of intimacy with him are not such as would have warranted me in pressing any subject much upon him. Upon the whole ... I think he is very well disposed, and will pursue a firm and prudent line in the ensuing session ... But he must cultivate his party with more warmth, or he will lose it.

In the end the committee had to fall back on the Morning Post, and the Albion was recruited under the auspices of the shady McEntaggart. Three Diaries, 23, 26, 27; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 411; Aspinall, Politics and the Press, 329-30, 334; R. Stewart, Foundation of Conservative Party, 68-69, 76; Aberdeen Univ. Lib. Arbuthnot mss, Herries to Mrs. Arbuthnot [21], 31 Dec. 1830, 3, 26 Jan. 1831; Add. 57370, Arbuthnot to Herries, 24, 26, 28 Dec. 1830, 6 Jan. 1831. On 17 Dec. 1830 Herries told Ellenborough that he believed that ministers ‘would have a large majority on pounds, shillings and pence questions’, but ‘would not carry the House with them on any question of general policy’. Three Diaries, 36. In the Commons that day he acquiesced in their postponement of his colonial trade bill, but insisted that it was sound in principle and, in reply to Whig allegations that it restored protection, said that America was ‘altogether wrong’ and Britain ‘altogether right’ in the dispute. On 20 Dec. he confirmed that the late ministry had planned to reduce the barilla duties, but condemned ministers for doing so without consulting Parliament; he thought opposition ‘showed up the new board of trade’. With his few companions on the opposition front bench, he was taken unaware by radical attacks on the existing civil list pensions, to which ministers did not react, 23 Dec., and, disregarding the inclination of Croker and others to stay quiet, he criticized them ‘for abandoning by their silence the cause of the monarchy and the just rights and privileges of the crown’ in the face of ‘unconstitutional trash’. His intervention got a response from Sir James Graham, first lord of the admiralty, to the effect that the government would uphold the principle of non-interference with the royal prerogative to bestow pensions; and Herries told Mrs. Arbuthnot (whose own pension was under scrutiny) that

it appears to have had a good effect ... I saw no evil spirit in the House ... beyond a cowardly desire of many of the Members to curry favour with their constituents by manifestations of anti-corruption, as they are pleased to call it ... The ministry looked dull and black.

He heard that there were ‘symptoms of schism among them on the subject of reform’, and at the turn of the year claimed to know from ‘the most unquestionable authority’ (probably Maberly) that there was ‘serious dissension in the enemy’s camp’. Arbuthnot mss, Herries to Mrs. Arbuthnot [21 Dec. 1830], 3 Jan. 1831; Arbuthnot Corresp. 140; Three Diaries, 37-38. He went with Croker to Wellington’s at Stratfield Saye, 27 Jan., and at a Tory meeting at the Athenaeum, 2 Feb. 1831, was ‘elected leader ... for tomorrow’ in Peel’s absence, but no material business came on. Three Diaries, 42, 45, 47; Surr. Hist. Cent. Goulburn mss Acc 304/67B, Goulburn to wife [4 Feb. 1831]. He declined to censure ministers for treasury intervention on the barilla duties, 7 Feb., but warned them as to their future conduct. He presented an Ashburton petition for tithe reform, 11 Feb., and one from Galway landowners against reduction of the barilla duties, 25 Feb. He urged the chancellor of the exchequer Lord Althorp, whose first budget was under fire, to make a speedy decision on the cotton duties, 16 Feb.; he was said to be confident that opposition would ‘beat the government out of all their taxes’. Arbuthnot Corresp. 143. On 17 Feb. he secured from Parnell clarification of the remit of the public accounts select committee, to which he was appointed. He discussed West Indian affairs with Peel and others, 19 Feb., and two days later received a deputation of ship owners aggrieved at the ministerial timber duties proposals. He and Goulburn were ‘beset by deputations and individual applications for advice and assistance’ from the commercial interest. Three Diaries, 54, 55; Greville Mems. ii. 119. On 18 and 22 Mar. he denounced ministers’ conduct on the timber duties as ‘a political trick’ designed to effect ‘a great change in the policy of the country’ which would wreck British interests in the Canadian trade. It was said that Grey ‘complains of his House of Commons treasury bench suffering such men as Herries to roll them in the kennel without reply’. Broughton, iv. 96. He concurred ‘substantially’ in the principle of the revised colonial trade bill, 11 Mar., but claimed it as his own, before having a shouting match with Hume, who accused him of ‘ignorance’. He was involved in attempts to effect a reconciliation (vital as he saw it) between Peel and the Ultras to combat the government’s reform scheme, which he believed would seal the Tories’ ‘political extinction’ if carried; but as their emissary he made little initial impression on the leader. Three Diaries, 57, 63; Greville Mems. ii. 126; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 416; Arbuthnot Corresp. 145. He voted silently against the second reading of the reform bill, 22 Mar. According to Tom Macaulay*, ‘Mammon’ Herries, as Sydney Smith called him, ‘looked like Judas taking his neck cloth off for the last operation’ when the ministerial majority of one was revealed. Macaulay Letters, ii. 11, 33. Two weeks later he had recovered his spirits and Goulburn found him (and Peel) ‘in good heart, determined to resist the bill most manfully and to do all that may be most likely to effect its rejection’. He commissioned one Nelson Coleridge to ‘get up a pamphlet dissecting the bill clause by clause’ and promoted the sale of 30,000 ‘anti-reform tracts’, commenting to Ellenborough that ‘good tracts may be circulated as well as bad if good men will be as active as bad always are’. He was confident of success on Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment against decreasing the number of English Members, for which he duly voted, 19 Apr. 1831. Arbuthnot Corresp. 145; Three Diaries, 75-76; Goulburn mss 67B, Goulburn to wife, 12 Apr. 1831. He was sure of being returned by the corporators of Harwich at the ensuing general election, despite a canvass by two reformers, but as he and his colleague George Dawson left the borough after a reconnaissance, 23 Apr. 1831, their carriage was stoned. Precautions were taken to avoid trouble on election day a week later, when Herries, defying an angry audience of non-voters, attacked the government and their reform scheme, though he professed to favour moderate reform. Colchester Gazette, 30 Apr., 7 May 1831.

Arbuthnot asked him, at Wellington’s behest, to exert himself to ‘get up our friends’ for ‘the fullest possible attendance’ on the first day of the new Parliament. He was requested by some party understrappers to seek the approval of Wellington and Peel for a non-party dinner to rally anti-reformers. He did so, though he doubted the wisdom of the idea, to which Wellington had no objection but which Peel dismissed. Herries, who was unable to accept Peel’s invitation to join Holmes and Planta at Drayton, now detected among the opposition rank and file a stiffening resolve to oppose reform. Add. 40402, f. 89; 57370, Arbuthnot to Herries, 25 May; 57402, Peel to same, 2 June 1831; Wellington mss WP1/1187/2. He was at the small party meeting of 16 June 1831 when it was decided to subscribe to subsidize the adoption and use of Planta’s Charles Street house as a permanent headquarters. Three Diaries, 93. He voted against the second reading of the reintroduced reform bill, 6 July, for use of the 1831 census to determine the disfranchisement schedules, 19 July, and against the partial disfranchisement of Chippenham, 27 July; but he was ‘not at all well’ that summer and had little to say in debate on the measure. He was informed that his ‘silence’ was causing ‘a good deal of surprise and perhaps misunderstanding’ among Harwich corporation, whose petition against the bill he presented on 11 July. Three Diaries, 115; Aspinall, Politics and the Press, 336; Add. 57420, C.D. to Herries [18 Aug. 1831]. He argued that Cockermouth was entitled to retain two Members, 28 July, and Guildford likewise, 15 Sept. He welcomed the government’s plan to encourage coal exports, but criticized the tax on raw cotton, 1 July. He harped on ministerial divisions over the wine duties, 11 July, and condemned their proposals as an infraction of the treaty with Portugal, 22 Aug. He voted against issuing the Liverpool writ, 5 Sept., and next day contended that the Bank of Scotland had been given too much power by the terms of the renewal of its charter. On 15 Sept. he made what he considered ‘a smart attack’ on the wine duties bill, but felt it was ‘no use to divide’, as he told Mrs. Arbuthnot:

I do not recover from my black fit. The indications of the last few days make me more gloomy. The government are now evidently prepared for defeat in the Lords upon the [reform] bill, and as evidently determined to carry it through ultimately at all hazards ... I have written ... to the duke to let him know this. The wine duties are a hopeless case ... We had a poor attendance, and their troops were well marshalled and ready to stand by them, thick and thin ... Luckily Peel was not there. If he had been ... he would have thrown us overboard. No person who has not seen this House of Commons can form a notion of it. We who have ... can judge somewhat of the character and composition of the future reformed House. Arbuthnot Corresp. 149.

He voted against the passage of the reform bill, 21 Sept., and the second reading of the Scottish measure, 23 Sept. Being ‘pledged’ on the sugar duties, he was ‘induced to stay away’ from the debate of 30 Sept. Three Diaries, 138. On 6 Oct. he complained of the appointment of a select committee on the West Indian colonies so late in the session. From Sussex in mid-October he informed Wellington that the local farmers who had supported reform in the summer were now signing hostile petitions, which he thought augured well for the prospects of securing a modification of the reform bills. A month later he passed on to Wellington and the home office reports of the arming of the Birmingham Political Union. Wellington mss WP1/1199/7; 1201/30; Herries, ii. 160. Soon afterwards he suggested to Peel that the government’s ‘excellent’ proclamation against the unions and rumoured ‘proposed concessions in the new modification of the measure of reform must create an entire division between them and the radicals’ and so drive them to ‘lean for support on the Tories and moderate reformers’. He approved Peel’s ‘judicious’ refusal to enter into any understanding with the ‘Waverer’ peers, but deluded himself that if ministers made even ‘half the concessions’ which were being reported, ‘we may retort on Lord John Russell his quotation, "The Lord hath delivered them into our hands"’. Add. 40402, f. 125; Parker, ii. 194-5.

The revised reform bill, against the second reading of which he voted, 17 Dec. 1831, brought him back to reality; a few days later Arbuthnot told his wife, ‘I have not called on Herries as he would kill me with croaking’. Arbuthnot Corresp. 156. He helped to muster as strong an opposition attendance as possible for the start of the 1832 session and voted against going into committee on the reform bill, 20 Jan. Add. 40402, f. 175; Three Diaries, 175. He had for several months been working up a strong case against government for continuing to pay interest on the Russian-Dutch loan after the separation of Belgium from Holland. With high hopes of a ‘very strong’ division, he moved resolutions condemning the waste of £5,000,000, 26 Jan. For a while ministers seemed likely to be beaten, but a spirited intervention by Palmerston, the foreign secretary, who threatened their supporters with resignation, enabled them to carry the previous question by 239-219 and to defeat Herries’s third resolution by 238-214. The reformer John Hawkins attributed their narrow escape also to ‘the bungling way in which Herries laid down his resolutions, which ... bound many of those who voted for them to a more decided opinion on the meaning of the treaty than they intended to give’. Three Diaries, 180, 184, 185; Add. 57447, memo. [Sept. 1841]; Cornw. RO, Hawkins mss 10/2179. He presented but dissented from a Ludlow glovers’ petition for the restoration of protection, 31 Jan., though he thought they were entitled to have their grievances investigated. He voted against the enfranchisement of Tower Hamlets, 28 Feb. Two weeks later Mrs. Arbuthnot reported that ‘Herries for the first time is cheerful’, having told her that ‘the government is lower and lower’, that ‘even Joe Hume says the Whigs have done more jobs and follies in one year than the Tories did in thirty’ and that there was a belief that Grey would resign if the Lords rejected the bill. Arbuthnot mss 3029/1/2/44. He divided against the third reading, 22 Mar. In early May he provided Ellenborough with ‘an account of the particular interests of each place in schedules C and D’, though he had ‘little hopes’ of the opposition peers being able to use it to force a modification of the bill. When Wellington was invited to form a ministry after the government’s resignation Herries did not immediately refuse to take part, but it soon emerged that he had no intention of doing so. Three Diaries, 237, 244, 250-1; Croker Pprs. ii. 163; Wellington Despatches, viii. 306. Just after the reinstatement of the Grey ministry Benjamin Disraeli† sat between Peel and Herries, a member of the Conservatives’ English election committee, at dinner, and was astonished to discover that ‘old grey headed financial Herries turned out quite a literary man’. Three Diaries, 266; Disraeli Letters, i. 192. He was named to the committee of secrecy on the Bank’s charter, 22 May. He voted for Alexander Baring’s bill to exclude insolvent debtors from Parliament, 27 June, and to preserve the voting rights of Irish borough freemen, 2 July. On 4 June he welcomed the temporary suspension of Russian-Dutch loan payments, but accused ministers of shifting the ground of their defence. When Althorp moved to consider the question, 12 July, Herries proposed an amendment condemning the continued payments as illegal, but it was defeated by 243-197. Further attacks on 16 and 20 July, when he did not speak, were beaten by 191-155 and 191-112; and after the latter division Macaulay wrote:

Old Croker, when we shouted, looked heavenly blue with rage - You’d have said he had the cholera in the spasmodic stage. Dawson was red with ire as if his face was smeared with berries. But of all human visages, the worst was that of Herries. Macaulay Letters, ii. 155.

On 7 Aug. 1832 he seized on ministers’ tardy concession of an extension of the time to allow potential urban voters to pay their rates as proof that the Reform Act could not be ‘final’.

Herries predicted the Conservative debacle at the 1832 general election, when he topped the poll at Harwich, as he did in 1835 and 1837. Herries, ii. 161-2. He remained prominent on the Conservative side of the House and was secretary at war in Peel’s brief first administration. In 1841 he stood for Ipswich, but defeat there cost him a place in the second, to his bitter chagrin. Parker, Graham, i. 308; Add. 57447, memo. [Sept. 1841]. He resurfaced as Protectionist Member for Stamford in 1847 and was president of the board of control in Lord Derby’s 1852 government. He retired from Parliament, at the age of 74, in 1853. He died intestate at his home at St. Julian’s, near Sevenoaks, ‘after a very short illness’, in April 1855. Administration of his estate was granted on 6 June 1855 to his elder surviving son Charles John (1815-83). PROB 6/231/391.