HANBURY, Capel (1707-65), of Pontypool, Mon.

Hanbury inherited from his brother large estates in Monmouthshire, to which he added considerably, and forges, furnaces, and iron works at Pontypool,A. A. Locke, Hanbury Fam. i. 165-7. started by his family in the 16th century. In Parliament, Hanbury was an ‘Old Whig’ voting steadily with the Government. In 1761 he received Newcastle’s parliamentary whip through Andrew Stone; in September 1762 he is again marked as ‘to be sent for’ by ‘Duke of Newcastle, Mr. Stone’; and in the list of 13 Nov. is counted by Newcastle as on his side. He was absent from the divisions on the peace preliminaries—he wrote to James West from Pontypool, 23 Jan. 1763: ‘I have now been nine weeks in my bed, and am but just ... recovered so much as to sit up.’West mss at Alscott. Both in this letter and another of 1 Feb. he mentions having had letters from Henry Fox (a friend of his brother Charles Hanbury Williams), who was obviously trying to gain him over to the Government side. On 17 Mar. 1763, Fox, when recommending Hanbury’s nominee for surveyor of the port of Chepstow, wrote to Bute: ‘Mr. Hanbury has great right to ask favour of this kind having come to town in a very bad state of health on purpose to attend.’Bute mss. Soon after that a difference must have arisen between them: Fox left for abroad on 11 May, and in the parliamentary list drawn up for Bute in December 1761 but used by Jenkinson till November 1763, the remark appears against Hanbury: ‘Fox has quarrelled with him’; and a ‘doubtful’ is added in Jenkinson’s hand. In fact, he joined the Opposition over Wilkes and general warrants; appears as voting with them in all four extant division lists (15 Nov. 1763 and 6, 15, and 18 Feb. 1764); and on 10 May is included by Newcastle among his ‘sure friends’. Rockingham classed him in July 1765 as ‘pro’.

Although not a Dissenter, he sympathized with them and, during Newcastle’s tenure of the Treasury, drew from secret service money £100 a year ‘for the Dissenting ministers in Monmouthshire’.Namier, Structure; Add. 32906, f. 88. The bounty was not applied for under the Bute and Grenville Administrations.List at Windsor in C. Jenkinson’s handwriting of persons who have not applied for ‘private salaries’. On 12 Oct. 1765 Newcastle included it among payments ‘particularly recommended’ to Rockingham, marking that none had been received since he left the Treasury,Add. 32970, f. 296. but no such payment appears in Rockingham’s secret service accounts—possibly because Hanbury’s death intervened. He died 7 Dec. 1765.