COLLINS, Thomas (1825-1884), of 2 Hare Court, Temple, London, and Knaresborough, Yorks.

A ‘constant attendant’ and ‘frequent speaker’ at Westminster, Collins, who sat for Knaresborough in this period, became a well-known character in the Commons.1The Times, 28 Nov. 1884. This owed less to any political achievements than to his penchant for having the House counted out when inquorate and for ‘giving expression to his opinion of bores’,2Morning Post, 28 Nov. 1884. which earned him the nickname ‘Noisy Tom’.3Vanity Fair, cited in Sheffield Independent, 29 Mar. 1880. Vanity Fair had depicted Collins as ‘Noisy Tom’ in a ‘Spy’ cartoon of 1873. He did, however, make well-informed contributions, particularly on religious and electoral matters, and was instrumental in securing additional representation for the West Riding. Formerly a protectionist, he was described in 1859 as ‘a somewhat liberal tory, but a rigid churchman’.4R. J. Richardson, The lower house; or the peers and aristocracy (1859), 26. His electoral career was sustained in part by his family’s influence through the so-called ‘cow-house’ vote at Knaresborough.

Originally from Sussex, a branch of the Collins family had settled in Knaresborough, Yorkshire, in the seventeenth century.5Burke’s landed gentry (1879), i. 345. Born at Barningham, Yorkshire, where his father was rector, Collins was the second son of Reverend Thomas Collins (1780-1870).6R. B. Gardiner, The registers of Wadham College, Oxford (1895), ii. 418; R. L. Arrowsmith, Charterhouse Register 1769-1872 (1974), 89. His father was subsequently perpetual curate of Farnham,7S. Lewis, A topographical dictionary of England (1844), ii. 215. and rural dean of Boroughbridge and Knaresborough.8Leeds Mercury, 9 May 1870. Unlike his three brothers,9Burke’s landed gentry (1879), i. 345-6. Collins did not follow their father into the Church, instead training as a lawyer. Called to the bar in 1849, he went on the northern circuit and attended at the West Riding and Leeds sessions.10The Times, 28 Nov. 1884. A bachelor noted for his thrift,11Preston Guardian, 21 Feb. 1885. he ‘always lived in the Temple’ when in London.12The World, cited in York Herald, 6 Dec. 1884.

The Collins family wielded some electoral influence at Knaresborough through their ownership of fields on which cow-sheds were erected and rented to voters to assist them in meeting the £10 franchise qualification.13On these so-called cow-shed or pig-sty votes, see P. Salmon, Electoral reform at work. Local politics and national parties, 1832-1841 (2002), 30. In 1838 Reverend Collins controlled 24 out of 49 cow-houses in the borough, while his brother owned another two.14B. Jennings (ed.), A history of Harrogate and Knaresborough (1970), 361. Collins shared his father’s Conservative sympathies, and in January 1850 told a local meeting that ‘protection was necessary for the working classes generally, in order to secure for them a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work’.15The Standard, 4 Jan. 1850. That May he was a delegate to a meeting of the National Association for Protection of Industry and Capital in London.16Morning Post, 8 May 1850. In November he wrote to the press giving his views against the establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales (the ‘papal aggression’).17The Standard, 15 Nov. 1850; Morning Post, 19 Nov. 1850.

Collins seized the opportunity to contest a vacancy at Knaresborough in July 1851, despite his relative youth. It was initially reported that he offered ‘on Church and State and Protectionist principles’,18York Herald, 5 July 1851. but his first election speech made it clear that he had revised his views on protection, and he was subsequently described as a ‘moderate conservative or Peelite’.19Leicester Chronicle, 19 July 1851. Although he believed that the agricultural interest ‘ought to be relieved of every special and peculiar burthen’, he was opposed to renewal of ‘the Bread Tax’. He voiced his objections to Catholic endowment and his support for retrenchment and a non-interventionist foreign policy, but was non-committal on the ballot and the franchise. Asking electors to back him as ‘a fellow-townsman’, he emphasised his family’s long residence in the borough.20Leeds Mercury, 12 July 1851. His strong ‘local influence’ prompted a Liberal opponent to withdraw, but Collins was unexpectedly denied a walkover when the borough’s former MP, Andrew Lawson, a protectionist, was nominated in his absence.21Daily News, 14 July 1851. Lawson had promised not to oppose Collins, but subsequently clarified that this promise had only applied while a Liberal opponent remained in the field: The Times, 19 July 1851. Lawson’s belated and half-hearted involvement in the contest did not prevent Collins’s return.22Leeds Mercury, 2 August 1851. However, he met a hostile reception at the declaration, where he and his supporters were attacked with eggs, stones and bludgeons, and was badly cut on the head as he retreated.23York Herald, 19 July 1851; Leicester Chronicle, 19 July 1851; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 20 July 1851.

Collins was sworn in, 21 July 1851. Coming from a clerical family, he took a ‘very active interest’ in church questions, and his maiden speech was on the Church Buildings Act amendment bill, 30 July.24The Times, 4 Dec. 1868. His other intervention in his first session drew on his legal experience, arguing against an increase in judicial salaries under the county courts extension bill, but urging that hard-working assistant clerks be better remunerated, 1 Aug. 1851. Collins generally divided with the Conservatives, voting against the ballot, 30 Mar. 1852, equalisation of the county and borough franchises, 27 Apr. 1852, and repeal of the paper and newspaper stamp duties, 12 May 1852.

When Collins sought re-election in 1852, there were conflicting reports about his political affiliation. While the Leeds Mercury identified him as ‘one of Lord Derby’s party’ who had reluctantly disavowed protection, The Standard described him as a Liberal Conservative.25Leeds Mercury, 27 Mar. 1852; The Standard, 2 July 1852. As in 1851, he contended that the landed interest could be given adequate relief without re-imposing the corn laws. On the hustings he expressed his opposition to any extension of the franchise which would ‘deprive persons of property and education of their legitimate weight’ by placing power ‘in mere numbers’, and endorsed state-funded education with ‘a comprehensive scheme of religious teaching’.26Morning Post, 9 July 1852. The contest resulted in an unusual triple return: three candidates received the same number of votes, with Collins in fourth place just four votes behind. He was said to have ‘lost the confidence of some of the more influential conservatives, owing to his tractarian tendencies’, including his vote against Edward Horsman’s motion for an inquiry into allegations of ritualism made against the vicar of Frome, 20 Apr. 1852.27Huddersfield Chronicle, 26 June 1852. Several petitions, including two from Collins, 25 Nov. and 6 Dec. 1852, were lodged against the result, although those of Collins were subsequently withdrawn, 17 Mar. 1853.28W. W. Bean, The parliamentary representation of the six northern counties of England (1890), 897-8. Following a compromise between the parties, the election committee declared one Conservative and one Liberal elected, 23 Apr. 1853.

Conservative registration gains, including additional ‘cow-house’ votes, meant that Collins’s prospects looked better in 1857.29HP Commons, 1832-68: ‘Knaresborough’. At the nomination he stated that ‘he did not consider himself either a Palmerstonian or a Derbyite’ and ‘would never place himself under the wing of any man, party, or section in the House of Commons’. He expressed his ‘strong affinity’ with the Peelites, although his claim that he ‘never was a Protectionist’ drew dissent from the crowd. Collins asserted that his opinions were shared by ‘the moderate and best parties’ and hoped also ‘to satisfy the whole of the Liberal section of the town’. He again voiced support for retrenchment, a non-interventionist foreign policy and state-aided education.30Leeds Mercury, 28 Mar. 1857. He was elected in second place behind his fellow Conservative. This was repeated at the 1859 election, when the victors were forced to flee a riotous declaration, where they were ‘trampled’ by the mob, with Collins’s coat ‘torn to shreds’. They ‘finally found their way home over the tops of high walls and houses’.31Bradford Observer, 5 May 1859. The Collins family’s involvement with the cow-house vote apparently caused particular resentment.32Jennings, History of Harrogate and Knaresborough, 364. Collins appeared at the 1859 revision court to defend the voting qualifications of his brothers, one of whom was struck off.33The other two retained their votes: York Herald, 1 Oct. 1859. Collins was later involved with Conservative efforts to improve their position on the North Riding register, being one of several Yorkshire MPs who subscribed 30 guineas each towards the purchase of cottages which would secure freehold votes: York Herald, 24 Oct. 1863.

His ‘awkward and ungainly’ appearance heightened by his ‘strikingly rustic hat and his invariable umbrella’, Collins became a notable figure at Westminster, where he was active in the chamber and committee-rooms.34The World, cited in York Herald, 6 Dec. 1884. Alongside his service on private bill committees,35PP 1857-58 (0.101), xlvi. 781; PP 1860 (0.122), lvi. 33; PP 1861 (0.94), l. 440; PP 1862 (0.98), xliv. 28-9; PP 1865 (0.98), xliv. 401. he sat on inquiries into the oaths taken by members, competitive examinations for junior civil service appointments and the registration of county voters.36PP 1857 sess. 2 (253), ix. 480; PP 1860 (440), ix. 2; PP 1864 (203), x. 409. He spoke in favour of open competition for civil service appointments, 1 Apr. 1862. He also sat on the committees on the Thames conservancy bill, Westminster new bridge bill, burials bill and pilotage order confirmation bill.37PP 1859 sess. 2 (0.39), xxvi. 169; PP 1862 (306), xvi. 574; PP 1865 (0.99), xliv. 430. He generally joined the Conservatives in the division lobbies, voting against the abolition of the property qualification for members, 10 June 1857, and opposing Palmerston on the conspiracy to murder question, 9 and 19 Feb. 1858. He consistently divided against the ballot and backbench proposals to extend the franchise. He explained, however, when voting against Locke King’s county franchise bill, 27 Apr. 1858, that he did not consider the 1832 Reform Act a final settlement, and spoke in support of the Derby ministry’s reform bill, 31 Mar. 1859, having (temporarily) overcome his unease about equalising the suffrage in boroughs and counties, although he wished to see wider changes such as restoration of the ‘scot and lot’ franchise. He suggested that householders outside enfranchised boroughs should return ‘district’ MPs, which he hoped would be a ‘counterpoise’ to an influx of working-class voters, 3 May 1860. His concern that enfranchising £10 householders would ‘create a dominant town interest in county constituencies’ prompted another speech against Locke King’s bill, 13 Apr. 1864. Collins routinely divided against the abolition of church rates and in support of the Maynooth grant.38His fellow Conservative MP for Knaresborough, Basil Woodd, voted the opposite way on Maynooth. He voted against the abolition of religious tests at Oxford university, 16 Mar. 1864.

Collins became best-known, however, as ‘the arch-interrupter’ of the Commons: ‘many a discourse, good, bad, and indifferent, has been sharply and suddenly cut off by him’.39Vanity Fair, cited in Sheffield Independent, 29 Mar. 1880. He once quipped that as he was not ‘in the habit of making speeches in order that his constituents or his wife might read them the next morning in the newspapers, he had little sympathy with hon. Members who did so’.40Hansard, 10 June 1861, vol. 163, cc. 162-3. He was quick to seize an opportunity to have the House counted out and could also deploy ‘a number of curious and discordant cries’,41The World, cited in York Herald, 6 Dec. 1884. For an occasion on which Collins had the House counted out see Hansard, 4 Mar. 1862, vol. 165, c. 1061. which earned him ‘the half grateful, half reproachful, name of Noisy Tom’.42Vanity Fair, cited in Sheffield Independent, 29 Mar. 1880. He was ‘a great favourite’ on both sides of the House, with Disraeli among those who ‘appreciated his bonhomie and shrewd common sense’.43Morning Post, 28 Nov. 1884. Collins ‘liked to amuse the House’ with his ‘boisterous jocularity’, and never took himself too seriously.44Daily News, cited in York Herald, 29 Nov. 1884. Nonetheless his frequent contributions to debate were usually insightful and to the point. Ready to intervene on a wide range of subjects, there were two areas on which he spoke most regularly and at greater length: religious questions and electoral law.

The first major issue to concern Collins was parliamentary oaths. He objected to the fact that the oaths bills of 1857 and 1858, which aimed to settle the question of admitting Jews to Parliament, retained a separate oath for Catholics, 25 June 1857, 10 Feb. 1858, describing this as ‘the last rag of intolerance’, 22 Mar. 1858. Collins’s concerns about discrimination against Catholics may have had a personal dimension, as his brother Henry converted to Catholicism in 1857.45W. G. Gorman, Converts to Rome: a biographical list of the more notable converts to the Catholic church in the United Kingdom during the last sixty years (1910), 61. Returning to the question in 1865, he secured several parliamentary returns on oaths.46PP 1865 (266), xlv. 154, 170, 180. He entered the opposite lobby from many of his party to support the second reading of the Roman Catholic oath bill, 17 May 1865, when he suggested that Nonconformist bodies such as the Liberation Society posed a greater threat to the Anglican church than Catholics did. He was a staunch opponent of the ‘repugnant’ and ‘distasteful’ 1857 divorce bill, arguing that Parliament’s ‘boasted omnipotence’ could not ‘destroy the law of God’, 4 Aug. 1857. He also spoke on church rates, being keen to substitute some voluntary system, ‘unhampered by the interference of those declined to contribute’, 13 May 1858, and successfully blocked the second reading of the church rates commutation bill, 23 Feb. 1859. He moved but then withdrew the second reading of the facilities for divine service in collegiate schools bill, a measure dealing with school chapels, which had originated in the Lords, 20 July 1864.47He also recommended the withdrawal the following year of the educational and charitable institutions bill, which contained similar provisions, 21 June 1865.

Collins demonstrated his interest in the conduct of elections with several brief interventions regarding constituencies where petitions had exposed corruption.48See his speeches of 15 Feb., 20 Apr., 29 June 1858, 26 Jan., 23 Mar., 25 May 1860, 19 June 1863 and 11 Apr. 1864. He successfully moved that where an election had been voided on grounds of bribery, no motion for a new writ should be made without two days’ notice, 27 July 1859, a provision extended to seven days, 26 Jan. 1860. He was keen to deter corruption by placing the costs of inquiring into electoral misdeeds on constituencies rather than on candidates, 26 Jan., 1 May 1860. He seconded an unsuccessful motion for an inquiry into existing corrupt practices legislation, 1 June 1864. He was also involved with various attempts to tidy up anomalies in electoral law. His name appeared on bills relating to poor rates and the municipal franchise; the jurisdiction of election petition committees in cases of scrutiny; and municipal election procedures, but he does not appear to have contributed to the debates on these measures.49PP 1857-58 (49), iv. 39-42; PP 1857-58 (82), ii. 119-22; PP 1859 sess. 1 (16), ii. 303-8; PP 1863 (83), iii. 115. In the 1859-65 Parliament Collins also put his name to bills on registration of county voters, building labourers’ cottages, and raising debentures on the security of land, but made little contribution to the related debates. The last of these passed as the 1865 Mortgage Debenture Act (28 & 29 Vict., c. 78): PP 1861 (210), iii. 38; PP 1864 (112), i. 612; PP 1865 (79), ii. 414. His name also appeared on a bill considered in the 1857-9 Parliament relating to legislation on the printing of newspapers: PP 1859 sess. 1 (27), ii. 343-6. He unsuccessfully moved the second reading of the elections bill, which aimed to fix the same timetable for giving notice of elections in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 23 Feb. 1859.50PP 1859 sess. 1 (15), i. 705-8. He backed several bills aimed at shortening the notice period for by-elections during the recess, and moved the second reading, 22 Apr. 1863, of what became the Elections in Recess Act (26 & 27 Vict., c. 20).51PP 1857-58 (189), iii. 599-602; PP 1862 (222), ii. 28; PP 1863 (48), ii. 160. He also succeeded in moving the second reading of the borough residence uniform measurement bill, which sought to remove discrepancies in how the seven mile limit for borough voters was measured, 22 Apr. 1863.52PP 1863 (49), i. 194. He was assisted by some Liberal support and a ‘strong Whip’ from the Conservative party, although the Conservative whip Henry Whitmore initially hesitated. Collins suspected that this stemmed from Whitmore’s fears about the effects on his Bridgnorth constituency, but Whitmore explained to Disraeli that ‘I should not have hesitated on the subject but knowing Collins’s extreme views whenever he has a bill before the House, I thought he had waylaid you’.53M. G. Wiebe et al. (eds.), Benjamin Disraeli letters 1860-1864 (2009), viii. 269n. Collins’s triumph proved short-lived, as the bill was defeated at the committee stage, 30 Apr. 1863.

Collins’s most notable success was in securing additional representation for the West Riding when the seats stripped from Sudbury and St. Albans were redistributed in 1861. He first mooted the division of the West Riding into two constituencies returning two members each, 25 Feb., and spoke at length in support of granting two extra MPs to the West Riding (rather than the proposed one), 10 June 1861. A week later, he had the satisfaction of Palmerston endorsing his recommendation, after alternative plans to give representation to Kensington and Chelsea or a third member to Middlesex were rejected, 17 June. His persistence also paid off when it came to selecting Wakefield rather than Pontefract as the election town for the southern division of the West Riding, 1 and 8 July 1861.

Addressing a Conservative election meeting in 1865, Collins was critical of the Palmerston ministry’s actions regarding the Schleswig-Holstein question, arguing that ‘people should never bark unless they intended to bite’. He emphasised his commitment to maintaining the connection between Church and state. Declaring himself ‘tooth and nail’ opposed to household suffrage, he warned of the dangers of ‘Americanising’ British institutions.54Leeds Mercury, 24 June 1865. He reiterated these views on the hustings, where he claimed that he had never given a single illiberal vote in the Commons, but was forced to deny charges of having sought to influence the votes of his father’s tenants.55Leeds Mercury, 14 July 1865. After a closely-fought contest, he was ousted by just four votes by a Liberal opponent. He remained politically active thereafter, writing to The Standard in 1866 to denounce the Liberal ministry’s ‘crude and ill-digested’ reform bill.56The Standard, 4 June 1866.

Knaresborough was reduced to one seat by the Second Reform Act, and in 1868 Collins instead secured election for Boston, Lincolnshire, where he was defeated in 1874.57An election commission appointed after the 1874 contest found that Collins had provided £200 to settle additional bills at Boston after the 1868 contest, in violation of electoral law: Pall Mall Gazette, 28 Mar. 1876. As his older brother James had died in 1859,58Gent. Mag. (1859), ii. 656. Collins succeeded to the family estates in Knaresborough on their father’s death in 1870.59Bradford Observer, 10 May 1870. He was elected to the London school board as a Church candidate for Marylebone in 1876, but did not seek re-election three years later.60Pall Mall Gazette, 13 Oct. 1876, 2 Dec. 1876; The Times, 13 Nov. 1879. At the 1880 election he stood for Derby, but polled a distant third. The unseating on petition of Knaresborough’s Liberal MP gave him the opportunity to contest a vacancy there in May 1881, when he was returned, thirty years after his first victory.61York Herald, 13 May 1881.

Having been ‘in indifferent health’ for eighteen months,62Sheffield Independent, 28 Nov. 1884. Collins died at Harrogate in November 1884.63Daily News, 28 Nov. 1884. He was buried at Knaresborough parish church.64York Herald, 6 Dec. 1884. He left personal estate valued at £200,048 10s. 10d.,65National Probate Calendar, 31 Jan. 1885. although this included some funds belonging to his siblings, whose finances he had managed since their father’s death.66Morning Post, 27 Feb. 1885. He was survived by several sisters and his brother, Henry (1828-1919), who had taken holy orders in the Anglican church, but was later received into the Catholic church and became a Cistercian monk.67The Tablet, 15 Feb. 1919. Collins left his house at Knaresborough, adjoining cottages and an annuity of £1,000 to his cousin, Dr. Francis Collins, for life. These would then pass in turn to Collins’s sister Jane and his nephew William, who also inherited the residue of Collins’s estate.68Morning Post, 27 Feb. 1885.