WHITBREAD, William Henry (1795-1867), of Southill, Beds.

On his father’s death Whitbread inherited unencumbered landed property worth over £20,000 a year, but also some large debts, which had ‘rather increased than diminished’ by 1817. He had no stake in the profits of the family brewing business until 1819, when he and his brother Samuel Charles joined the controlling partnership and Whitbread himself secured a personal share in the trade of £45,000.Add. 51658, Whishaw to Lady Holland, 25 Nov. [1815]; Waldegrave mss, Waldegrave to his wife, 7 Feb. 1817; P. Mathias, Brewing Industry in England, 311-12. His first marriage was evidently an unhappy one and, a year before it occurred, John Cam Hobhouse recorded that Whitbread’s mother was ‘maudlin about her son and his piece’.G. Blakiston, Lord William Russell and his Wife, 146; Add. 47235, f. 15.

He was elected to Brooks’s on 7 May 1816, returned unopposed for Bedford on the family interest at the general election of 1818 and divided regularly with the Whig opposition during the first session of the new Parliament. He did not support Burdett’s motion for parliamentary reform, 21 June 1819, and, to Brougham’s disgust, refused to promote a county meeting in Bedfordshire to call for inquiry into the Peterloo incident,Brougham mss 65. but he participated fully in the opposition to the government’s repressive legislation in the short session of November and December 1819. He is not known to have spoken in the House before 1820, evidently had none of his father’s energy and political commitment and made no mark in politics. He died 21 June 1867.