STOPFORD, Hon. Edward (1766-1837).

Stopford served in Flanders during the French revolutionary war and commanded a battalion and afterwards a brigade of Guards in the Peninsula. He took part in the battles of Talavera, July 1809; Vittoria, June 1813, and the Nive, December 1813, and was wounded at Bayonne, 14 Apr. 1814.

Since 1810 he had been his kinsman the 1st Earl of Ailesbury’s Member for Marlborough, but there is no evidence of parliamentary attendance until 1815. In fact the Speaker firmly declined to thank him in person on behalf of the House for his Peninsular services ‘because he stayed abroad for several months for his own private amusement after the war was over’. He voted with ministers on the civil list, 8 May; on the Regent’s expenditure, 31 May, and for the Duke of Cumberland’s establishment bill, 3 July 1815. He was in the majorities on the army estimates, 6 and 8 Mar. 1816; paired with government on 17 June and voted with them 20 June on the public revenue bill; supported the suspension of habeas corpus, 23 June 1817, and was in the ministerial minority on the ducal marriage grants, 15 Apr. 1818. No speech of his is reported. He retired at the dissolution. Stopford died 14 Sept. 1837.1Gent. Mag. (1837), ii. 530; Colchester, ii. 537, 543, 545.