YORKE, Joseph (1807-1889), of Forthampton Court, Tewkesbury, Glos.

Yorke was the great-grandson of the 1st earl of Hardwicke, lord chancellor under Walpole, and the grandson of James Yorke (1730-1808), successively bishop of St. Davids, Gloucester and Ely, who had acquired the Forthampton estate in Gloucestershire through marriage.1 VCH Glos. viii. 201, 206, 208. He inherited Forthampton on his father’s death in December 1830.2 The personalty was sworn under £16,000 (PROB 11/1485/729; IR26/1275/1). He was related to both the patrons for Reigate, the 3rd earl of Hardwicke and the 1st Earl Somers, and it was on the latter’s interest that he was returned unopposed at the general election of 1831. He appears to have attended only occasionally during his brief and undistinguished parliamentary career. He divided against the second reading of the Grey ministry’s reintroduced reform bill, which proposed to partially disfranchise Reigate, 6 July 1831. His only known vote in committee was for use of the 1831 census in determining the disfranchisement schedules, 19 July. Either he or his colleague Charles Philip Yorke denied the imputation that patronal influence at Reigate had been corruptly exercised or sold, 20, 30 July. He voted against the bill’s third reading, 19 Sept., and its passage, 21 Sept. He was in the minority of seven who backed Waldo Sibthorp’s complaint of inaccurate parliamentary reporting by The Times, 12 Sept. Although Lord Somers subsequently changed his position and supported reform, Yorke divided against the second and third readings of the revised bill, 17 Dec. 1831, 22 Mar., and the second reading of the Irish bill, 25 May 1832. His only other recorded vote was in the minority for information on military punishments, 16 Feb. 1832.

The surviving seat at Reigate was required for Somers’s son at the general election of 1832, and Yorke never returned to the Commons. A magistrate in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, he maintained his family’s philanthropic traditions on his border estate. His wife’s aunt Lady Lyttelton encountered the Yorkes in 1847 and found them ‘as usual, totally unchanged’.3 The Times, 11 Feb. 1889; VCH Glos. viii. 208; Lady Lyttelton Corresp. 366. He was a director and major shareholder in the Gloucestershire Steam Plough Company, a venture in agricultural mechanization which failed in 1862.4 C. Miller, ‘Glos. Steam Plough Co.’, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xcix (1982), 141-56. He died in February 1889 and left Forthampton to his only son John Reginald Yorke (1836-1912), Conservative Member for Tewkesbury, 1864-8, East Gloucestershire, 1872-85, and the Tewkesbury division, 1885-6.