Lewis, whose father and grandfather had represented New Radnor Boroughs, aimed to re-establish his family’s political supremacy in Radnorshire, where enclosures and crown land sales enabled him to increase his holdings.
Lewis was included on select committees on issues associated with poverty, including the employment of agricultural labourers, vagrancy and emigration, as a matter of course throughout the 1820s. On questions of trade and finance he shared Grenville’s tendency to strict economic liberalism, and generally aligned with Canning, John Herries, William Huskisson and Thomas Wallace I. He intervened briefly ‘in the interests of trade and navigation’ to support the call for government action over London Bridge, 4 May 1820, and advocated concessions for the Baltic trade under the 1821 Timber Act, 5 Apr., and deregulation of the colonial woollen trade, 14 June 1821. He was appointed to the select committees on foreign trade, 1821-4, and on the combination laws and protective legislation prohibiting tools and machinery exports, 1824-5. He believed that the agriculture committee conceded to Holme Sumner, to which he was appointed, 31 May, was unlikely to realize the expectations of the petitioners complaining of distress, and had said so when justifying his opposition to its establishment, 30 May 1820. He shared Holme Sumner’s commitment to extended inquiry and improved means of regulating the corn laws, but he recommended a duty of 20s. a quarter on corn, when Holme Sumner proposed 40s., and warned that protection and overregulation of the currency would themselves induce distress and higher taxes.
He presented the Berkshire freeholders’ petition for shorter polls, 19 June, and chaired the investigative committee, 29 June, 3, 4 July 1820, bringing up its report, 13 July.
the meaning of the statute [of 1601] ... was to inflict compulsory labour by way of punishment, not to afford labour for the mere purpose of maintenance. It was anything but in the nature of giving the poor personal property.
He agreed with the bill’s ‘great objects’, but joined Calcraft in pressing for its deferral, 20 June, arguing, in what Williams Wynn described as ‘an extremely good speech’,
Lewis’s overture to Lord Londonderry* when the Grenvillites went over to government in January 1822 brought no definite promise of office, but he congratulated Peel on his appointment as home secretary and sought Lord Harrowby’s patronage for a cousin.
Having chaired and drafted the report of the 1820 select committee on turnpikes and highways,
He was one of several supporters of Catholic relief to vote against Newport’s motion on Catholic burials, 6 Feb. 1824.
In January 1825 Williams Wynn received and circulated ‘a long, most interesting and satisfactory letter from Frankland Lewis on his recent visit to Ireland, which I thought showed so much observation and good sense that I sent it down to Bath to Lord Liverpool’. The Grenvilles remained personally and politically committed to doing all they could to bring about Lewis’s appointment as Irish secretary, and, commending him to Buckingham, Wynn wrote:
He mentions that he has been himself in 22 counties, and that with his colleagues, he may say that they have really been in every corner of Ireland, and that they all agree in the opinion that there is no ground for immediate alarm and that the Catholics are too well aware of the advantage which they enjoy from Lord Wellesley’s government to hazard his recall and the revival of the high Orange system, which would be the probable effect of any insurrection.
Coedymaen mss 1012; Harpton Court mss C/589; Buckingham, ii. 192.
Grenville acknowledged the value of such ‘local information, which I have not, and which is so necessary for a right judgement’, when assessing policy on the Catholic Association.
Newport’s motion for accounts of the previous session’s grants for Irish education, 7 Mar. 1826, brought an admission from Goulburn that government policy was undecided, and Lewis now promised that all the commission’s reports except that on Maynooth College would be presented in time. He was against confining Spring Rice’s local jurisdiction bill to Ireland, 9 Mar., and, explaining that Radnorshire was similarly short of suitable magistrates, he suggested that the shortfall could be remedied by using crown appointees, provided ‘chartered and corporation rights’ were also honoured. He defended the commission and the Kildare Place Society when the Irish estimates were voted, and saw off attempts to reduce their funding and transfer administration to the lord lieutenant in Dublin, 20, 22 Mar. As teller for the government majority on the corn importation bill, 8 May, he stressed his reliance on ‘income from the land’ and refuted charges that the measure had been hurriedly adopted and would harm the landed interest. ‘Gold’, he added, ‘it was true, must go out for corn; but as we have no gold for that purpose in this country, we must send goods abroad in order to purchase it’. He opposed the abortive freeholders in districts bill, 2 May, and Russell’s resolutions denouncing electoral bribery, 26 May 1826. Lady Bulkeley’s death on 3 Feb. had left him searching for a safe seat at the impending general election. He started canvassing Radnorshire, but soon realized that his interests would be better served if he adopted a higher local profile and refrained from challenging the ailing and elderly Walter Wilkins, so he went to Ireland to be returned for Ennis on the O’Brien interest.
On 3 Feb. 1827 he warned Peel that the education commission would submit two reports and enclosed that adopted and ‘signed only by Grant, Blake and myself - Foster and Gladstone having declined to put their names to it’. He attributed their differences
to animism. We could not agree either as to the extent to which it is promoted or disseminated by the [Belfast] Institution ... [or on] the arrangements which were necessary to guard against it. I kept back the report as long as I could in the hopes of our agreeing, but finding it was not likely to take place, I have taken the only step which was open to us.
Add. 40391, f. 198; PP (1826-7), xiii. 1137-42.
He endorsed the Irish bishops’ petition, expressed continued support for Catholic relief, 2 Mar., and divided for it, 6 Mar. When he represented the Canningite John Gladstone on the Berwick-upon-Tweed election committee which voided his election, 19 Mar., his opponent Lord Howick repeatedly complained to his father Earl Grey that Lewis’s ‘experience in the House and plausible manner give him great influence over the other members of the committee’.
glad you have made the enquiry; because while I rather wished that you should be apprized of the existence of the disposition towards you which I have here declared, I felt that in the absence of all power on my part to specify the when or the how, the time or place of the probable occurrence of such an opportunity, the gratuitous expression of such a disposition might have appeared but a cheap and barren compliment.
Harpton Court mss C/379.
‘At the desire of Lord G[oderich]’, and briefed by Williams Wynn, Lewis remained in London during the ministerial negotiations which followed Canning’s death in August 1827. He was nervous lest he should be offered the treasury secretaryship under Herries, and informed his wife, 20 Aug., that he considered bringing
my political matters to a crisis, and having it distinctly understood that either I must now know what I have to depend upon, or at once retire. To go into the House of Commons to support Herries and Tom Courtenay as finance ministers (and if Huskisson was ill they would be effectively managers of the business) would be too degrading, and I for one have no wish to undergo it. I intend to see Planta today and I will endeavour to explain myself fully to him; and I will also try to see Lord Lansdowne, to spirit him up if I can, to put his wits upon Herries. All this is very disagreeable. I will write again in the course of the day if any thing occurs.
He also had doubts about accepting a place on the India board ‘that by the good will of Lord Goderich and of Charles Wynn I presume I might fill’, although ‘several of my friends have told me I ought not to refuse it, as it is more easy to be promoted with an office in hand than without, and that it is in all respects on a par with the other secretaryships’.
I have by chance been thrown into business with him three or four time in committees of the House of Commons, etc., etc., and after Huskisson and Herries I should esteem him as the best man of business amongst all the Commons and far superior to many holding places in the cabinet, [such]as Palmerston, Wynn, C. Grant. However, time will show, and in my opinion I think he will be soon thought qualified to hold a higher situation.
Ibid. C/416, 419; Buckingham, ii. 350; Lonsdale mss, Lowther to Lonsdale, 10 Sept. 1827.
Lady Williams Wynn saw the appointment, with its income of £3,000-£4,000 a year, as one of several gains for ‘the House of Cornewall ... the only people who have profited in the late storms’.
Lewis made way for George Dawson at the treasury when the duke of Wellington formed his coalition ministry in January 1828.
Wilkins’s death, 17 Mar., gave Lewis his opportunity in Radnorshire, and he resigned his seat and declared his candidature, 21 Mar. 1828, having first ensured that Wilkins’s son would not stand.
By undertaking to discharge the arduous duties which devolve upon the chief secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, I should be placed in a situation of so much embarrassment in consequence of the withdrawal of so many persons with whom I have been to a certain degree politically connected, that I feel it politically incumbent upon me to decline.
Wellington mss WP1/943/19.
Ellenborough noted, 30 May, ‘I find Frankland Lewis resigns too. He mars his fortune at the very moment when it would have been made’.
I decided not to hold office with the present ministry. I trust I have done right, though it is certainly not so clear a point as I could wish, considering how important a decision it has been. Certainly, it would have been in my power to prevent much mischief in Ireland, and if a Tory lord lieutenant and secretary are sent there the evils will be very great. Again there is nothing to look forward to. The Whigs are divided and no one confides in them as a mass. We who are now gone out are an important and respectable body, but not now strong enough to do much alone, and with whom are we to unite? Time and chance however are open, and at all events we shall have might enough in the House to prevent the government from being influenced to any great extent by their Tory supporters. If the government had held together six months longer we should have gone on very well. For myself, I own that every day increased my good opinion of the duke. His worst quality is that he sometimes thinks he understands things of which he knows nothing but he listens to the practical people who are brought before him, and governs himself by their statements. I was very much struck with this at the meeting with the governors of the Bank on the last day of my official existence ... I was tired of Ireland and felt that it would absent me so much from home that in addition to other considerations I could not bring myself to like the idea of taking the office. It is however a great sacrifice considering the position in which I started, the change it will make, and the prospects which it opened. All this honour must now be set aside and there is nothing now but to attend to what is going on and to look forward.
Harpton Court mss C/601.
Lord Palmerston* observed privately on 19 June how the appointment of Lord Francis Leveson Gower (as Irish secretary) and Calcraft (as paymaster to the forces)
have struck with bitter repentance the breast of Frankland Lewis. He feels about Ireland as a capricious young lady when she sees a more interested and less romantic fair led to the hymenal altar by the wealthy young squire whom she had lately rejected. He told [Lord] Minto the other day that if he had known what he now knows (God knows what that is) he should certainly not have left government. ‘Well’, said Minto, ‘but you know if you had not left the government you might have kept your office, but you could not have kept your character, and so on the whole it is as well as it is’. Whether Lewis agreed in this he did not say, but he was sitting all last night on the treasury bench as if to recall to his recollection happiness gone by, or to preface the way for happiness to come.
Southampton Univ. Lib. Broadlands mss BR2 3AA/5/3.
In the Commons, 2 June, Lewis claimed that he had supported and voted ‘from the first’ for sluicing the franchise at East Retford with the neighbouring hundred, disfranchising only those voters found guilty of corruption, and said he would do so again ‘in the same sense and with the same object as I did before’. He remained hostile to transferring East Retford’s seats to Birmingham, and when challenged in debate by Tennyson and Williams Wynn, 27 June, he confirmed his preference, as previously stated, taking New Shoreham and Cricklade as his precedents. Later that day, justifying his support, as a majority teller, for the borough polls bill, which he had previously opposed, at its third reading, he claimed that 90 per cent of the original bill had been ‘taken away’. Proposing an amendment to his 1827 General Turnpike Act in order to reduce the personal liability of trustees, 3, 26 June, he argued that without it the whole turnpike system would be put at risk, as trustees stood only to gain the market rate of interest on their investments whereas liabilities could total £11,000,000. He defended the policy of abolishing the tariffs on foreign wool when Lincolnshire petitioned for protective duties, 3 June. However, on presenting a similar petition from Radnorshire, 12 June, he suggested doubling the current import levy to a penny a pound and reducing that on exports to 6d. a hundredweight. Knatchbull congratulated the wool producers on changing his mind, but Lewis said that he still believed that high duties would not work. On 4 July 1828 he carried an amendment to the customs bill, making the duty on wool nominal. As a speaker for the bill restricting the circulation of low denomination Scottish banknotes in England, 3 June 1828, he cited statistical evidence from the 1825-6 crisis, endorsing the 1819 Act, and repeated his arguments in favour of gold coinage and against a paper, silver or dual standard. He approved the £80,000 Windsor Castle grant, 6 June, and the game bill, 13 June. Heartened by the tone of Wellington’s speech on Catholic relief, and ever anxious for office, he flaunted his knowledge of Irish affairs when supplies were voted, 23 June, catching the former secretary Lamb unprepared with a detailed question on the Cork Institution, and launching into a staunch defence of the Belfast Academy’s right to government funding.
As the patronage secretary Planta predicted in February, Lewis voted for Catholic emancipation, 6, 30 Mar. 1829. He also refused to endorse Radnorshire’s anti-Catholic petition, 9 Mar.
Prompted by William Vesey Fitzgerald’s* illness he consulted Charles Arbuthnot* and Planta in January 1830, fuelling speculation that he would go to the mint or return to the board of trade; but he had to be content with the treasurership of the navy, then targeted (as a sinecure) for attack by the radicals.
those mischievous dreamers who propose not a fixed, but some fluctuating standard, which the government and this House may change at their pleasure, would by such a measure hazard the safety of all descriptions of property, but would also never be able to avert the distress whenever it threatened any particular interest. I am convinced their opinions are founded in error and, therefore, I hope never to see them adopted in this country.
He ordered a detailed breakdown of accounts of London’s wool exports and imports, 30 Mar. He attributed the rise in imports complained of in the Colchester flour manufacturers’ petition to ‘Ireland’, rather than defects in the corn bill, 28 May. He divided against Jewish emancipation, 5 Apr., 14 May. Ever scornful of Owenite ideas, in committee on the poor law amendment bill, 26 Apr. 1830, he was among the many who argued strongly on humanitarian grounds against the clause empowering parishes to remove children from parents unable to support them, which was defeated by 91-9. He agreed that ‘the procreation of children without the means of supporting them is a very great evil’, but he did not consider a retarding system appropriate and reiterated his preference for the Scottish relief system. Although critical of the government’s cavalier attitude, 27 Apr., he refused to make common cause with his constituents or Welsh Members opposed to the administration of justice bill, by which the Welsh judicature and courts of great sessions were abolished, and had backed similar proposals since 1817. Its provision for holding joint-assizes for ‘Welsh’ Breconshire and Radnorshire, however, grieved him, for he had hoped for an arrangement with Hereford.
According to the 5th Earl of Oxford’s heir Lord Harley, Lewis had no money to fight a contest when he came in for Radnorshire unopposed at the 1830 general election.
He longs for the Grants. I told him it would not do, and what sort of man Charles Grant was. Frankland Lewis does not seem to like his office, but he says he shall bring it into order if he remains there, and make it a privy councillor’s office without drudgery. He and indeed all seem to wish they were better and more boldly led in the House of Commons.
Ellenborough Diary, ii. 407-8.
Lewis divided with his ministerial colleagues on the civil list when they were brought down, 15 Nov. 1830, and resigned with them. He briefed Lord Grey, as premier, on the problems of combining the navy treasurership and vice-presidency of the board of trade, 24 Nov. 1830;
I distrust a measure which at once blows hot and cold ... I dislike it because I find it popular in places where bribery habitually, systematically and shamelessly prevails amongst electors with whom the receipt of money for their votes has not been confined to the low or the needy. The provisions of the bill not only do not provide an efficient remedy for this species of corruption, they tend, I fear very materially to enforce it.
His failure to present the Radnorshire petition before the dissolution was resented and, though eventually unopposed, he faced intense pressure to represent his constituents’ views on reform.
Speaking with ‘candour and sincerity’, before dividing for the reintroduced reform bill at its second reading, 6 July 1831, he said that as he had supported the original bill before learning its details, he felt ‘bound in deference ... to go as far as I can in support of this bill, consistently with the free exercise of my own judgement, which I can never consent to surrender’. He made it clear that although he intended voting to consider it in committee, ‘it must wear a different and a fairer shape than at present, before I can give it my vote that it shall pass into a law’. He pointed to disfranchisements proposed ‘not for the purpose of improving, but of destroying’ - a principle he could never approve - and argued against applying the same voting qualifications nationwide. He confirmed that he had voted for Gascoyne’s amendment as a fair proposition, not anticipating that it would cause the bill to be abandoned, and warned of the threat which additional Irish Members would pose to the Union. The minister Spring Rice noted, ‘We have gained an unexpected recruit in Frankland Lewis’.
Lewis was named to the select committee on Windsor Castle and Buckingham House, 23 June 1831, and corresponded with the colonial secretary Goderich on the ‘irregularity’ of Nash’s subcontracting policy.
Lewis was at Gorhambury with Lord Harrowby and moderate anti-reformers early in September, and he reported regularly to Williams Wynn in Montgomeryshire on the bill’s progress in the Lords. He considered Lord Ebrington’s confidence motion of 10 Oct. ‘little less than seditious’ and wished it ‘had never appeared, as it binds the House to something like the old bill’.
After an arduous canvass, Lewis came in unopposed for Radnorshire at the general election in December 1832 and assisted the Conservatives at Hereford and Ludlow, which were ‘sharply fought’.