Inglis’s father, a native of Edinburgh, had a colourful career in the East India Company’s naval and civil services before returning to England in 1775. Nine years later he married a Bedfordshire heiress and became a director of the Company, serving until 1813. A steady supporter of Henry Dundas† at East India House, he received a baronetcy from Addington, a personal friend, in 1801, and sat for Ashburton as a supporter of Addington and then Pitt in the 1802 Parliament.
That year Inglis’s father secured his appointment as private secretary to Addington (now Lord Sidmouth) as home secretary in the Liverpool ministry.
weakened my conviction that it is necessary to stop short of any further concession of political power to the Roman Catholic body. If we could be morally certain that unconditional submission to their present demands would insure to us the permanent peace and union of all classes, we might, perhaps, admit the anomalies of the measure; but every concession has furnished only the disposition and the means to extort more ... Catholic emancipation will be followed by the abolition of the tithes, the erection of a Roman Catholic establishment, or the separation of the two countries, as successive objects of popular excitement.
Add. 41229, ff. 189, 191; Pellew, 109-12.
He left the home office in 1814 to become one of the three commissioners for investigating and settling the debts of the nabobs of the Carnatic, from whose premises at 11 Manchester Buildings, Westminster, he wrote many of his private letters; he remained on the commission until it was wound up in 1830. He was friendly with William Wilberforce*, his cousins the Thornton brothers (Robert Thornton† was a colleague of his father in the East India Company’s direction) and other members of the Clapham Evangelical group. On the death of Henry Thornton† in 1815 Inglis and his wife became guardians of his nine children, and were associated in the trusts set up for them with Wilberforce, John Thornton, and Charles Grant* and Robert Grant*. They moved into Thornton’s house at Battersea Rise, Clapham Common, and it was there that he introduced Wilberforce to the poet laureate and Tory polemicist Robert Southey* and the visiting Irish clergyman John Jebb, who became bishop of Limerick in 1822.
In May 1824 Inglis was returned on a vacancy for Dundalk on the Roden interest, presumably under the aegis of the Liverpool ministry. He was in their majorities in defence of the prosecution of the Methodist missionary John Smith in Demerara, 11 June, and for the Irish insurrection bill, 14 June. On 9 June 1824 he was a teller for the majority against the orphans’ fund debt bill, and for the minority against the coal exchange debt bill. He voted for the Irish unlawful societies bill, 15, 25 Feb., and against Catholic relief, 1 Mar., 21 Apr. and the Irish franchise bill, 26 Apr., 9 May. He voted for repeal of the usury laws, 17 Feb. Inglis, who was ‘extremely entertaining, and most kind’ to Wilberforce when he visited him in his retirement at Uxbridge, 24 Mar., and remained in touch with Jebb and Peel on Irish matters, was keen to speak on the Catholic question, but was initially ‘guided in my silence’ by Acland, who was ‘not very eager for me to come forward’. He did not expect the relief bill to pass the Commons, let alone the Lords, though he admitted that his ‘very strongest wish that it may never be carried’ might be clouding his judgement.
That summer, so he later claimed, he received ‘strong encouragement’ from both Tories and Whigs to stand for Bedfordshire at the next general election. He ‘waited to be asked to stand’, but when a dissolution was expected in the autumn another Tory, Thomas Macqueen*, who had ‘infinitely more wealth’, took over the ground. Inglis was in any case very strongly disinclined to risk a contest and shy of canvassing openly while he was chairman of quarter sessions. One of the Whig sitting Members announced in December 1825 that he would retire at the dissolution rather than face a contest; but Macqueen was personally unpopular in the county and there remained a chance for Inglis, if he would commit himself. In the event, having made it known that he was unwilling to involve the county in a contest and would only stand ‘in the case of its being the general wish of the country gentlemen’ that he should do so, he ‘very foolishly’ withdrew his pretensions in January 1826, a decision which he came to regret at the time of the general election six months later. He predicted, wrongly, that ‘sooner or later I shall represent it, if it shall please God to continue to me life and health and present inclinations’.
In November 1825 he had observed to Jebb:
I am thoroughly satisfied that the people of this country, though more blindly and madly violent against Papists in 1780, though louder in their war whoop in 1807, were never so firmly enlightened at any period in their opposition to the measures of emancipation as they are now. Their great instructors have been [Daniel] O’Connell*, [Richard] Sheil* and Doyle. Not all the Protestant speeches, sermons, tracts and petitions have done so much to rouse the people of England as the orations and letters of the Roman Catholic leaders themselves ... I am sure that the next Parliament will be a Protestant one. And I have a strong suspicion that partly by change of opinion or at least of vote, and partly by well contrived absences, the majority even in the present House of Commons would be very different next session from what it was in the last, if the Roman Catholics should be ill advised enough to bring the question forward.
Ibid. 6396/238.
In the House, 16 Feb. 1826, when ministers countered Newport’s resolutions against the levy of church rates in Ireland with a bill to deal with them, Inglis, while admitting that irregularities existed, defended the system and warned that he would oppose the measure if it took
from the existing authority, which was not only Protestant, but hierarchically Protestant, the control and expenditure of monies raised for the support of the ecclesiastical establishments of the country, and placed it in hands, which might be Roman Catholic, which might be latitudinarian.
To Jebb, who welcomed his speech, he wrote:
It is impossible to deny that legally speaking there has been a misapplication of the fund raised under the name of church rates. But the misapplication has been general and liberal and honest, instead of being selfish and bigoted and corrupt. And if the flow of the expenditure of that fund be in future narrowed by law and confined within the banks of a land, another stream must be turned to irrigate the lands which will otherwise be left dry and barren.
Ibid. 6396/245.
He conferred with Goulburn, the Irish secretary, on the ministerial measure, detailing his own and Jebb’s reservations and seeking amendments; but he was not satisfied, and on 21 Apr. he stated his objections in the House.
The 4th duke of Newcastle, a leading champion of the Protestant interest, offered Inglis a seat for Aldborough at the general election the following month, but on interviewing him
soon found, which I was not before aware of, that he has a very lenient feeling towards, if not a very strong bias in favour of the Dissenters; besides this he is evidently friendly to the experimental system especially in what regards free trade. I therefore told him that we did not agree in our views and our parliamentary connection could not take place.
Colchester Diary, iii. 435; Nottingham Univ. Lib. Newcastle mss Ne2 F2/1.
Inglis failed to find a seat. He toured Switzerland and France for nine weeks that summer with his stepmother, sister and sickly wife. On his return in late September he found a letter of 6 Aug. from Jebb referring to a possible, though unspecified opportunity to obtain a seat. He correctly assumed that it had now gone by, but remarked that it was ‘exactly the kind of representation which under my circumstances I should like. An annual payment is in fact the only mode which would not be very inconvenient to me, though my ability to bear even that is not very great’. Before going abroad he had seen Southey who, having been returned for Downton by Lord Radnor as an opponent of Catholic claims without his knowledge and against his inclination, was about to write to Radnor to extricate himself from the situation. Inglis later reported that ‘on paper he could not put, what he wished to have said, that he would think well of me to fill the vacant seat’. He heard no more of the matter, and in December 1826 joined in the abortive attempt to make Southey change his mind by purchasing a qualification for him, though he was under the impression that he was in any case disqualified by a pension.
He took a close interest in political events following Lord Liverpool’s stroke in February 1827, when, referring to the current speculation that Peel might go as prime minister to the Lords to avoid a clash with Canning in the Commons, he alerted Jebb to the possibility of his succeeding Peel in the Oxford University seat:
I cannot canvass for it, and should not indeed have now thought of it at all, if my name had not been most unexpectedly brought forward last year. I only mention it now since in case that your lordship or any other Irish prelate who may think me not unfit for the representation ... were unconnectedly and of your own mere motion to suggest my name in reference to it, you would probably serve my interest much.
His name continued to be mentioned in Oxford, ‘as one of those who would be most anxious to do all for the maintenance of the religious and civil institutions of the country’, while the rumours of Peel’s elevation persisted.
I believe in my conscience that the Protestant church would have sunk in Ireland and with it, to a minor object, British connection, if the question had been otherwise decided. As it is, we are safe for this session, and one very high man said to me today, for the Parliament also, in his judgement.
Ibid. 6396/275.
A member, like Acland, of Grillion’s Club, in which ‘we Protestants are in a woeful minority’, he was in Peel’s confidence at this time, but initially thought he was ‘doubly wrong’ in declining to ‘form an administration on Protestant principles’ or to head one including Canning, which led to the latter’s accession to power and the resignation of Peel and the other Protestant ministers. However, he approved of the resignation, feeling that Peel was ‘right in not swelling the ranks of a new government, at the head of which is a man who will certainly lead on his men as many a heathen to that assault’ on the Protestant establishment; and was soon satisfied that Peel had acted correctly throughout.
In February 1828, when Peel was back in power as home secretary in the duke of Wellington’s administration, Inglis was returned on a vacancy for Ripon on the Lawrence interest. He presented petitions in favour of repeal of the Test Acts, 22 Feb., but on the 26th he spoke and voted against that measure: ‘So long as the church remains in its present position, so long it will continue an object of dissatisfaction, and will need the protection of the Acts which it is the object of the motion to repeal’. He presented petitions against repeal, 24, 28 Mar. On the presentation by Hume of the Irish Catholics’ petition against the Vestry Acts, 20 Mar., Inglis defended church rates and alleged that the opposition to them being stirred up by O’Connell and others was essentially ‘an hostility, avowed, indeed, explicitly in the Roman Catholic Association, to the established church in Ireland’. He presented petitions against Catholic relief, 8 May, and the following day, replying to Burdett, opposed it at length:
The more you grant concessions to the Roman Catholics, the more they increase in their demands ... Let us not of our own accord break down the barriers which our ancestors erected for our preservation; and, if perish we must ... let us perish boldly in the face of the day, denying the assaults of our enemies, and not sinking under the treachery of pretended friends, or the fatal consequences of our own credulity.
He voted in the hostile minority, 12 May. He was forced to withdraw an amendment to the pauper lunatics bill to stipulate the appointment of a resident surgeon in every asylum with 50 or more inmates, 1 Apr. He presented a petition from London apothecaries for measures to facilitate the study of anatomy, 1 May, and one from White Roothing, Essex, for the abolition of slavery, 4 June. He pressed for the settlement of outstanding claims on France over war damages, 5, 23 June. He defended the grant for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospels in the colonies, 6 June, and was in the ministerial majority on the ordnance estimates, 4 July 1828. That month he tried to persuade Peel to settle immediately the vexed question of the illegal return of O’Connell, as a Catholic, for Clare, in case the death of the ailing king during the recess precipitated a general election:
To an issue you must bring it: is it not better to choose your own time, with the summer before you, than to suffer the Roman Catholics to enjoy for six or seven months the fancy of a victory, and to try to undeceive them by a struggle at the last? Above all, when you consider that on the life of one man depends the recurrence of a contingency which will try the strongest nerves ... I do not understate (God forbid that anyone should reckon lightly) the evils of rebellion or civil war; but I feel that some such measures as I stated to you ... will, by a mere demonstration of our strength, and of our determination, suffice to prevent the necessity of a blood-shedding, which weak measures, or even the procrastination of strong men, may provoke, but cannot prevent.
Peel would have none of it.
In January 1829, when rumours were rife that ministers intended to announce the concession of Catholic emancipation, Lord John Russell asked Lady Holland if there was any truth in the unlikely story that Inglis was to move the address: ‘As a high flying Tory I should dread him, but in his quality of Saint he is slippery, and for good reasons would follow Antichrist. I don’t know whether it is worth Peel’s while to bag him, but perhaps he thinks so’.
I never will compromise my opinions in religion or politics. Such as I am the University may reject or may elect me; but though the representation of Oxford be the highest external honour to which an English commoner can attain, there is still a higher honour, that of never betraying our principles to our supposed interests ... I should have thought that I had been too high church for the majority: I was certainly more high church than most of the bishops last year in the matter of the Test and Corporation Acts. Above all things, let not Oxford stultify itself, and precipitate the ruin of our cause by re-electing Mr. Peel. Upon that measure depends more than we can yet calculate, in reference to many other plans. Let the University choose the man who as against him will be likely to conciliate the largest support. Let us not be divided: and never think a second about me, unless in your sober judgement you should think that I am the individual.
Inglis, who was condemned by the liberal Tory Edward Littleton* as ‘the prince of bigots’ and by the Whig duke of Bedford as ‘my sanctified and bigoted neighbour’, was swept to victory over Peel largely by the ‘conscience of the English clergy’, as his ward Marianne Thornton put it. In his letter of thanks to the chairmen of his Oxford and London committees he exulted in this vindication of his stance on the Catholic question and asserted that ‘we must ... remain a Protestant people with a Protestant legislature, the only security for a Protestant king’. This gave offence ‘in some quarters’, but in a letter to an Oxford correspondent he denied having meant to attribute corrupt motives to Peel’s supporters and argued that it was perfectly plain that the Catholic question had been the ‘real point ... in dispute’.
Presenting anti-Catholic petitions, 4 Mar. 1829, he asserted that his return showed that the ‘rising talent’ of the country was hostile to emancipation. He privately claimed that two pro-Catholics ‘told me that I did not fail’.
Inglis handled the third reading of the archbishop of Canterbury’s estate bill, 10 Apr. 1829. On 15 May he moved an amendment to Warburton’s anatomy regulation bill to repeal that part of it which directed that the bodies of criminals should be given for dissection. It was rejected by 40-8, but he subsequently carried one intended to ensure that dissected corpses were decently interred. He supported and was a teller for the minority for Osborne’s attempt to kill the measure, 18 May. Although it galled him to subsidize erroneous Papist doctrines, he acknowledged that the faith of Parliament was pledged to vote the Maynooth grant for that year, 22 May; but he promised resistance to it in future. He defended church rates against Hume, 3 June; explained that the end of the Carnatic commissioners’ labours were in sight and objected to the colonial secretary’s observation that colonies should be left to their own devices in the matter of religious institutions, 5 June; and on 12 June presented a petition against compulsory attendance at Catholic worship for Protestant soldiers serving abroad. In October the Ultra leader Sir Richard Vyvyan*, making calculations for the possible formation of a coalition ministry, numbered Inglis among ‘Tories strongly opposed to the present government’. On 12 Dec. 1829 Inglis wrote to Jebb:
The proceedings in Ireland are a melancholy confirmation of the justice of the predictions of those who saw in concession nothing but a new fulcrum for a new power ... I wish for ... [Wellington’s] own sake that I could think as well of his principles as to believe that he will ever admit a consciousness of any error. But I can see no comfort in the contemplation of his conduct public or private, and I shall look on his removal from power, at least from supreme power, as a relief to ourselves from a series of calamities ... No one knows whom to fight, or with whom to unite in the House of Commons in February next. Of two things only am I clear, that the duke cannot stand with the present ministry against the present opposition, a Cerberus of the old Tories, the old Whigs and the Huskissons, and that individually, I should have more confidence in any one of these three heads than in him.
Jebb mss 6397/376.
He duly voted against government on the address, 4 Feb., but he may have been in their majority against the enfranchisement of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, 23 Feb. 1830. On the presentation of a petition for Jewish emancipation, 22 Feb., he stated his objections to a measure which would ‘sever the last link which connects the legislature with the religion of the country’. Despite illness, he led the opposition to Robert Grant’s emancipation bill, 5 Apr., and he voted silently against it, 17 May.
He was returned without opposition for the University at the general election of 1830, after which ministers listed him as one of the ‘violent Ultras’.
To the late government I meant to have given support though I could not give confidence. To the present [Grey] government I can give neither support nor confidence. But, on the other hand, I don’t desire at such a crisis to embarrass them by a vexatious every day opposition. I think that the appointment of Brougham [as lord chancellor], bad as it is in many respects, is almost redeemed by the fact that he must now support his ‘order’. His weight is thrown into a scale which was kicking the beam, and he will bring it down to its fair level. I never was more convinced of the certainty of an event necessarily uncertain ... than [that] a reformed House of Commons will get rid of an unreformed House of Lords. With the Lords will fall the king. As to yielding anything to satisfy the public will, it is more than idle, it is suicide. Little by little will with that view be conceded, till all be gone. Other nations, and indeed our own, might furnish sufficient example of this.
Jebb mss 6397/409.
In the House, 23 Nov. 1830, he agreed with Hume that the Grey ministry was as powerless as any other to create employment, but disputed his assertion that it could improve the condition of Ireland by interfering with church property. He opposed North’s proposed bill to extend the provisions of the Act of 1819 allowing Protestant Dissenters to hold office without taking the sacrament, 2 Dec. Presenting a petition for the abolition of slavery, 13 Dec., he endorsed its prayer, but insisted that the proprietors would have to be fairly compensated. He objected to the printing of several anti-slavery petitions, 21 Dec. He declared his undiminished hostility to Jewish emancipation, 15 Dec. On 17 Dec. his attempt to have Ruthven called to order for calling for tax reductions to alleviate distress was not supported by the Speaker, who rebuked Inglis instead. He said that the abolition of tithes would benefit only landlords, 20 Dec., and when Hume raised a case of alleged abuse of tithes at Havering the following day, he denied church involvement and objected to attempts to make the Commons a court of appeal on such matters. Inglis, who was reported by Hobhouse early in the new year as believing that ‘all our troubles, and amongst them the cry for reform, will subside quietly, and the old Tory principles and practice finally prevail’,
The multitude - the uneducated and unthinking classes - may entertain opinions at the present crisis different from those which they held six months back, or from those which they will probably hold six months hence. I do not mean to deny that, from the late events in France and Belgium, the clamour for a reform of Parliament, excited by speeches in and out of this House, is now far louder and more general than it has been for a long time; but I do deny that the great mass of the intelligence of the country is in favour of reform; and I look forward with confidence to the return of a sound and healthy state of public opinion, generally, on that question.
On 23 Dec. 1830 he admitted that no previous government had contributed less to the burden of civil list pensions than Wellington’s, even though ‘no man ... had a greater want of confidence’ in it. At the turn of the year, when he was busy with quarter sessions, he urged Giffard to do something to correct ‘the system of misrepresentation which is now going on in the London papers’ on the subject of the recent trials at Winchester of ‘Swing’ rioters, who, far from being ‘peasants starved into insurrection’, were mostly ‘well off’. He attributed the ‘quiet’ of Bedfordshire largely to ‘the vigour and judgement of our lord lieutenant Lord Grantham in dividing the county into constabulary districts, and urging the justices to hold their petty sessions once a week instead of once a month, thus showing themselves on the spot at the time in the midst of the people’.
Inglis, who was the subject of an ‘absurd’ rumour that he would second a motion by Hobhouse for repeal of the Catholic Emancipation Act,
On the report of the address, 22 June 1831, he complained at the omission from the king’s speech of any reference to the beneficence of Providence. He upbraided Hunt for assuming to himself ‘the sole manifestation of feeling for the poorer classes’, 8 July. Inglis, who spoke at a meeting at Peel’s to concert opposition tactics for dealing with the reintroduced reform bill,
Inglis protested against the notion of not teaching the doctrines of the Church of England in schools, 14 July 1831, when he glanced at the Maynooth grant. He supported a Glasgow petition against it, 19 July; presented and endorsed a similar one from Irish Protestants, 31 Aug., when he exchanged words with O’Connell; disclaimed responsibility for alleged forgeries in it, 26 Sept., 13 Oct.; and spoke and was a teller for the minority of 47 for Perceval’s motion to end the grant, 26 Sept. He defended the grant for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospels in the colonies, 25, 26 July. He raised objections to petitions brought up by Hunt against the grant for the education of Princess Victoria and for the dismissal of Lord Palmerston*, the foreign secretary, for his failure to support the Poles, 8 Aug. He took even more violent exception to the petition from Preston for repeal of the corn laws, which it said had been ‘passed ... at the point of the bayonet’, presented by Hunt, 12 Aug. He successfully opposed the intended retrospective operation of Grattan’s bill to exclude the recorder of Dublin from Parliament, 12 Aug., and he spoke and voted for the motion of censure on the Irish government for interference in the Dublin election, 23 Aug. He objected to printing a Waterford petition for disarming the Irish yeomanry, 11 Aug., and one from Kilkenny for the abolition of tithes, which contained ‘groundless’ allegations of abuse, 16 Aug. He spoke and was a teller for the minority of 11 for the Irish union of parishes bill, 19 Aug., and voted for Sadler’s motion for making legal provision for the Irish poor, 29 Aug. He presented and endorsed petitions for amendment of the Sale of Beer Act, 29 Aug., 7 Oct. On 27 Sept. he forced O’Connell to withdraw the word ‘brutal’ from his description of the assault on the Deacles. He said that it was too late to proceed that night with the vestries reform bill and deplored Protheroe’s assertion that if thwarted, the people would ‘legislate for themselves’. He was against reception of a petition, presented by Hunt, from an individual complaining of police brutality on Blackfriars Bridge, 11 Oct., but saw nothing offensive in one which called Roman Catholicism ‘impious’, 12 Oct. 1831.
On the address, 7 Dec. 1831, Inglis challenged Burdett’s defence of Grey’s communication with the Birmingham Political Union and said that the opponents of the revised reform bill could not give ground, if it retained its obnoxious features. In response to a conciliatory speech by Lord Clive, 12 Dec., he declared, on a personal note:
I am no party to any arrangement, if arrangement there is, that the new bill shall be met with a more limited hostility than the late bill encountered, if, on examination, the new bill should be found equally objectionable with the old one.
That day he secured the production of returns detailing tithes held by lay proprietors in Ireland. On 17 Dec. 1831 he spoke and voted against the second reading of the reform bill, which was ‘not called for by the wants or wishes of the people’, and was ‘a poor return to God for his blessings’. He condemned the Irish secretary Smith Stanley’s explanation that ministers had decided not to preserve the voting rights of Irish freemen because they did not wish to ‘perpetuate a generation of Protestant freemen’, 19 Jan. 1832. The reason for his inclusion in the list of the government majority for the first clause of the bill the following day was explained to Lady Holland by Thomas Spring Rice*: ‘The best joke of the evening was a practical one. Sir R. Inglis fell asleep in the gallery, and in that state was told among the staunch reformers’.
He was sorry that ministers had allowed Briscoe to promulgate the doctrine that crown property belonged to the public, 17 Jan. 1832. He voted in the majority against the vestry bill, 23 Jan. Disclaiming party objects, he moved and carried a motion for an address for information on the treaties of 1690 and 1704 concerning the protection of the Protestant Vaudois in Sardinia, 24 Jan. He divided against government on the Russian-Dutch loan, 26 Jan. He was named to the select committee on the East India Company, 27 Jan. He approved the principle of Warburton’s anatomy bill, 6, 27 Feb., when he was twice a teller for majorities for recommitting it. On 11 Apr. he secured, by 50-6, the adoption of an amendment requiring an application to the home secretary countersigned by two magistrates for the opening of a school of anatomy. He failed then and on 18 Apr. with other restrictive amendments, and on the third reading, 11 May, lamented their rejection, but did not divide the House against the bill. He was a persistent critic of the government’s scheme for Irish education, 13 Feb., 6, 16 Mar. (when he presented hostile petitions), 9, 11, 16 Apr., 7 May, that day he took issue with O’Connell for denouncing the hostility to it as ‘cant and hypocrisy’. He kept up his resistance to significant interference with Irish tithes. On 14 Feb. he said that by their statements ministers would ‘establish a premium for discontent’ and encourage a combination against rent and taxes as well; and on the 16th he successfully divided the House, by 130-51, against reception of a petition from Leinster for their total abolition. On the ministerial proposals to deal with the problem, 8 Mar., he defended tithes in his usual terms and asserted that the Irish Catholic Members, having contributed to ‘the destruction of the constitution’, were now claiming ‘as their reward that they should be allowed to complete the destruction of the Protestant establishment of Ireland’. Privately, however, he thought Smith Stanley’s ‘speech in reply to the Forty was excellent’.
In the debate on the ministerial crisis, 14 May 1832, Inglis put the last nail in the coffin of Conservative attempts to form a ministry with what the Whig Denis Le Marchant† later termed his ‘blundering officiousness’, when he declared, as an inveterate opponent of Whig principles in general and the reform bill in particular, that if Wellington or any other Conservative agreed to take charge of the measure, it would be ‘one of the most fatal violations of public confidence which could be inflicted’. At dinner later that day Croker, who had found Inglis’s speech hard to follow because of his ‘low’ tone of voice, recorded Peel’s verdict that it had been ‘fatal, and conclusive against any government to be formed of any class of anti-reformers’. Inglis called on Peel to discuss the situation the following day.
Shortly before the general election of 1832, when he came in again unopposed for the University, Inglis wrote to Giffard:
If it be true that there is any hesitation on the part of the king to go all lengths with his present ministers (a hesitation which, I grieve to own, I do not believe to exist, since I think it too clear that they have under his own hand his concurrence in their introduction of the French into the city of Antwerp) that hesitation may be fixed in the right direction by addresses calling upon the king to permit this Parliament to assemble on the day named by himself in his last prorogation, viz. the 11 December, and to decide on the expediency of the Dutch war. The present ministers have no right to complain of the present House of Commons. The session might be limited to an address: if that address should be in their favour, they would have such weight as the House of Commons can give in their scale; if it should be against them, we shall be saved from a war, the probable failure of which is a much less[er] evil than its certain injustice.
Add. 56368, f. 103.
Inglis continued to sit for Oxford University, as the uncompromising champion and defender of the Protestant establishment, who opposed Peel on the Maynooth issue in 1845 and repeal of the corn laws in 1846, until he retired because of ‘impaired health’ in 1855. He died at his London house at 7 Bedford Square in May 1855. By his will, dated 6 Feb. 1854, he left Milton Bryant, his other Bedfordshire property and the town house to his wife.