Warrender, a former Grenvillite Whig who had defected to take junior office in the Liverpool ministry in 1812 and so branded himself as a ‘rat’, often cut a preposterous figure. A fat, garrulous and rather stupid man, he was pompous, quick-tempered and coarse.
At the general election of 1820 Warrender was again returned unopposed for Sandwich on the government interest, having turned down Lord Falmouth’s offer to bring him in for his former seat at Truro.
In a debate on Scottish petitions in support of Queen Caroline, 31 Jan. 1821, Warrender admitted her popularity among those ‘least informed’, but declared that ‘the great mass of the persons of landed property in Scotland were decidedly friendly to ministers’. He was hounded by Creevey, Hume and others when he presented the navy estimates, 2 Feb.; and according to Creevey he ‘was so cursed sore upon my fire into him ... that he did nothing but bluster and vow vengeance upon me ... at White’s, telling everyone that the first opportunity, he would blow me up sky high in the House of Commons’. Creevey decided to ‘anticipate his shot’, and on 14 Feb. attacked Warrender as ‘a sinecure and sham lord’ of the admiralty, ‘once himself a tip-top patriot ... who combatted much for retrenchment’. Warrender, he later wrote, ‘looked like the damnest idiot you ever saw, and could not produce a single word in reply’; but the following day Warrender demanded a private apology through Lord Binning* who, with Creevey’s representative General Ronald Ferguson*, reached ‘a settlement’ after four hours’ negotiation.
In fact, the duties of the office so much interfered with his private pursuits, arrangements and interests, that it had formed one strong ground with him relinquishing a situation he had long held, and with so much satisfaction.
(Robert Hay, Melville’s private secretary, 1812-23, told Greville in 1830 that in his experience Warrender ranked second only to Sir George Murray* for total inefficiency in office.)
Warrender played host to an eclectic range of guests during the king’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822, when he was supposed to be in unrequited love with the young widow, the Vicomtesse de Noailles.
At the general election that summer Warrender abandoned Sandwich, pleading ‘the state of my health’, and came in unopposed for Westbury with its patron, Sir Manasseh Masseh Lopes.
In October 1826 Warrender had written to Melville on the subject of a ‘considerable’ balance of money allegedly owed by the treasury to the estate of Hugh Warrender on account of his ‘secret and confidential services’ as crown agent. He evidently got no satisfaction, and in July 1827 voiced his grievance to Melville’s kinsman William Johnstone Hope*, who reported to the Scottish solicitor-general John Hope that he
talked a great deal of nonsense. At the same time, he talked of the ill usage he had met with from Lord Melville, but I own I could not discover in what he had been injured. But he held out a threat, that I think you ought to know and perhaps would be glad to put out of his power to execute. It was, ‘that it was lucky for the Melville interest in Scotland that he was an honourable man, as he had in his possession ... all the accounts of the secret service money that was disbursed in Scotland for the whole time Hugh Warrender was crown agent, and that he could a tale unfold’.
Johnstone Hope was inclined to buy him off, but John Hope, who thought ‘Warrender’s jaw is so loose that one cannot rely on there being even the pretext of a foundation for what he says’, was prepared to call his bluff; and Melville declared that ‘he might have advertised ... [the vouchers] in all the newspapers, as far as I cared, either on my father’s or my own account’.
Warrender’s language when I saw him ... was rather tending to despondency than fronde, and he quoted certainly pretty high authority for some of the gloomy views he took. With respect to Scotland he has been a frondeur from the beginning, taking always as I thought, very unsound views of the real interests of ... [Canning] and his government ... But I suppose he must have been haranguing while he was in London, for I received a letter from him from thence in which he says that he concludes he shall be supposed to be a frondeur ... I believe that let him talk as he will, he is desirous to uphold the present government, and to act with the friends of Canning. He always speaks of you with real interest and regard. He is, as old Dean Jackson used to tell him, ‘a strange creature’.
Add. 38752, ff. 85, 177.
On the collapse of the Goderich ministry and the duke of Wellington’s accession to power Warrender, though professedly not upset by Huskisson’s acceptance of office, resigned his place at the India board; he told Melville, the new president, that he had asked Goderich the previous September not to include him in any future commission.
Warrender disapproved the reference in the king’s speech to Navarino as an ‘untoward’ event, 31 Jan. 1828. On 18 Feb. he defended Huskisson against charges of inconsistency, but said he could not give ‘entire confidence’ to the new ministry because of its ‘decided opposition to the Catholic question’. He presented petitions for repeal of the Test Acts, 22 Feb., and voted thus, 26 Feb. When Peel flounced out of the chamber in pique with a phalanx of ministerialists during the debate on the formal resolution for repeal two days later, Warrender ‘poured a violent philippic’ on him. The Whig Lord Milton* thought his speech ‘admirable’ but, like the Canningite Lord George Cavendish Bentinck*, considered its effect was ruined when Warrender ‘ate up his words as fast as he had uttered them’ on being told that Peel, who returned to hear the end of his attack, had left merely to avoid the division.
He voted for the amendment to the address, 4 Feb., and, from the government side of the House, 12 Feb. 1830, praised the Whig Sir James Graham’s speech advocating retrenchment. He voted for the transfer of East Retford’s seats to Birmingham, 11 Feb., 5 Mar., and for inquiry into alleged electoral malpractice at Newark by the duke of Newcastle; but he divided against Lord Blandford’s reform scheme, 18 Feb., and the enfranchisement of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, 23 Feb. He supported the navy estimates, 1 Mar., though he agreed with some of Hume’s detailed criticisms. He also questioned the accuracy of Hume’s statement of the extent of distress, yet on 15 Mar. he insisted that it was so bad in Perthshire that he could not raise ‘a farthing of rent’ on his local estates. He was in the opposition minorities on British involvement in Portugal, 10 Mar., and the Terceira incident, 28 Apr. He spoke and voted for Graham’s unsuccessful motion to subsume the treasurership of the navy in another office, 12 Mar., but opposed Smith’s bid to reduce its salary by £1,200, 22 Mar., blaming the House and not the government, in which he now professed to have ‘the greatest confidence’, for the rejection of the earlier proposal. He voted for a revision of taxation, 25 Mar., and to do away with the post of lieutenant-general of the ordnance, 29 Mar.; but he opposed an attempt to reduce the salary of the chief treasury clerk because it was ‘mistaken economy to attempt to pare down the salaries of efficient public officers’, 10 May. That day he presented Scottish petitions against any increase in spirit duty and to extend jury trial to the provincial courts. He voted against government for abolition of the Irish lord lieutenancy, 11 May, information on privy councillors’ emoluments, 14 May, and against the grant for consular services, 11 June. On 18 June he called for the Scottish court of session bill to be postponed and got ministers to admit that it was intended as a foundation for increases in judges’ salaries. He threatened to divide the House against its third reading, 21 June, but when it came on, 23 June, he agreed not to do so in return for being allowed to rehearse his objections to it, which no one could understand. At the same time he tried to discomfit Rae by pointing out that he had been passed over for the post of chief baron of the exchequer in favour of the renegade Whig James Abercromby*, elevated by the very men who had denounced him for joining Canning’s ministry as judge advocate. Warrender’s prediction that the measure would be substantially amended in the Lords proved inaccurate. He voted against the increase in recognizances required by the libel law bill, 9 July 1830.
At the subsequent general election Warrender came in unopposed for the venal borough of Honiton and was ‘a happy witness’ of the return of the Whig Ferguson for Nottingham. He took a prominent part in the Haddingtonshire contest, supporting George Grant Suttie, one of the county’s ‘great landed proprietors’, in unavailing opposition to the ministerialist outsider Lord John Hay. In a controversial speech he referred to his own pledge of 1820 ‘never to trouble the county’ as a candidate and deplored the ‘somewhat new and extraordinary’ degree of government interference there and elsewhere:
He would tell ministers ... such was the view taken by the public of their interference, that they would lose all the counties and great towns in England, though they might gain by it in the rotten boroughs and in Scotland ... He did not wish it to be supposed that he had become a convert to any wild scheme of parliamentary reform. He had always uniformly voted against it, because he had always considered that the elective franchise was wisely distributed and fairly exercised; but from what he had recently seen he doubted very much whether at the end of this general election he might continue of the same opinion.
Hay asked him what property he had at Honiton.
I anxiously hope nothing may arise to break up our little society in the House of Commons. We are all so well together and there is nothing so delightful ... as a small and united party who command general respect both in the House and in the country, and who avoid the extremes to which others go.
He was hostile to ‘a second junction with Peel and the duke’, but considered some of Brougham’s recent speeches on reform to have been ‘quite wild’.
Warrender voted against the ministry on the civil list, 15 Nov. 1830. Soon afterwards he informed Hay that as ‘a strong anti-reformer’ he had ‘written to some of his friends in the north to get up petitions against any degree of reform’.
I said that if I could be convinced that the majority of the middle classes and the reasonable part of the community were desirous of reform, I did not know that I might not change my opinions. I should be sorry to be so misrepresented to the public, as to be understood to be decidedly hostile to every plan of reform, for that is not the case.
Warrender was willing to support the transfer of Evesham’s seats to Birmingham if a case could be made out, 18 Feb. 1831, but he feared that the impending ministerial reform scheme would be ‘too extensive’. He thought Hume’s advocacy of the confiscation of church property showed that ‘the state is in danger’, 26 Feb., and said that naval lords of the admiralty should be allowed to keep their allowances, 28 Feb. He condemned the reform bills as ‘a violation of ancient charters and sacred rights’, 7 Mar., but criticized preceding Tory governments for resisting the enfranchisement of large manufacturing towns, which he now claimed consistently to have supported. With mounting fury, he predicted that ‘a large portion of the intelligence and property of Scotland’ would oppose reform, forecast that all surviving boroughs would be under treasury influence and professed contempt for recent attacks on him in the national press. He voted against the second reading of the English bill, 22 Mar. He supported the civil list grant, even though he considered it inadequate, 25, 28 Mar., when he deplored the proposed disfranchisement of the Anstruther district of burghs but said he would support ‘a just, proper and moderate reform’. He denied that the salaries committee had made an invidious distinction between the army and the navy and did not consider ministers pledged to accept its recommendations on pensions, 30 Mar. He welcomed the abolition of the office of lieutenant-general of the ordnance, 13 Apr., but opposed Hume’s attempt to reduce the civil list allowances for the royal dukes, 14 Apr. That day he admitted that in the light of communications from Scotland he had changed his mind on reform there, and now believed that ‘a popular system of election’ was desirable, though he remained hostile to all disfranchisement. He therefore spoke and voted against Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment to the English reform bill, 19 Apr. 1831, contending that if its proposed veto on any reduction in the number of English Members was carried, the ‘general wealth and intelligence of Scotland’, notably in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, would have no chance of adequate representation. The reformers John Fazakerley and Thomas Spring Rice reacted favourably to his ‘good speech’, which they hoped would have a beneficial effect on the Scottish Members; but the Tory Lord Ellenborough thought he had ‘behaved shabbily’.
Warrender voted against the second reading of the reintroduced reform bill, 6 July, but on 12 July 1831he expressed his approval of some of its details, while advising ministers against wholesale disfranchisement. He presented a Jedburgh petition for all existing Scottish electors to be allowed to retain the franchise for their lives, 14 July. He dissented from the prayer of an anti-Maynooth petition from Glasgow, 19 July. He presented one from the inhabitants of Chelsea asking to be allotted a separate Member, though he condemned the plan to create metropolitan district constituencies, 27 July, when he voted against the partial disfranchisement of Chippenham. Next day he put in a word for Honiton which, though scheduled to lose a Member, had over 300 £10 houses and 550 resident electors, and attacked schedule B as the worst feature of the bill, threatening to move at the report stage that no borough with over 400 resident electors should be disfranchised. Later, responding to a personal attack by Denman, the attorney-general, he said that ‘to destroy a decayed borough is intelligible’, but to deprive ‘considerable towns’ of ancient rights was ‘founded on nothing but a reckless spirit of innovation’. He delivered ‘a short funeral oration’ on Honiton, 29 July, but did not divide the House, which had become ‘a court of injustice to convict innocent and unoffending boroughs’. On 11 Aug. he opposed printing the Waterford petition for disarming the Irish yeomanry in the aftermath of the Newtownbarry massacre, wishing to ‘establish the welfare and tranquillity of Ireland’ by assuaging ‘violent religious and party feelings’. He voted with ministers for the division of counties, 11 Aug., said he would welcome any scheme to give two Members to the more populous Scottish counties, 16 Aug., and spoke and voted against the censure of government’s alleged interference in the Dublin election, 23 Aug., observing that ‘some degree of undue influence is proved’, but ‘unless the exercise of some influence is allowed, the business of government cannot be conducted’. Explaining that he had abandoned his motion to preserve boroughs with over 400 resident electors in order to avoid a charge of offering ‘vexatious opposition’ to the bill, 1 Sept., he addressed ‘some young Members’ on his own side of the House who ‘look upon me as a suspicious character’: as ‘an independent Member’, he did ‘not seek to please them, but to do my duty’. On the government’s concession of additional Members for some Welsh counties, 14 Sept., he urged them to do the same for Scotland; and the following day he again attacked the ‘gross injustice’ of schedule B and of ‘the whole of this bill’, though he conceded that ‘a very considerable and extensive reform is necessary’. He voted against the passage of the bill, 21 Sept. On 23 Sept. he approved the idea of Scottish university representation and supported the second reading of the Scottish reform bill, although he cavilled at some of its details and wanted at least five more Members; he acknowledged that ‘I now stand in a situation in which I shall get credit with neither party’. He admitted that he had concurred in the salaries committee’s recommendation of a reduction for the president of the India board, 29 Sept., and supported the government amendment to Hobhouse’s vestries bill, 30 Sept. He backed Murray’s unsuccessful bid to secure eight additional Scottish county Members, 4 Oct. He saw no reason to ban the appointment of non-residents as lord lieutenants of Irish counties, 6 Oct., but objected to the government’s Scottish exchequer court bill, 6, 7 Oct. He thanked Peel for his work in setting up the metropolitan police force, 11 Oct. He dissociated himself from Wetherell’s charge that ministers had connived in the disturbances provoked by the loss of the reform bill in the Lords, 12 Oct., and spoke for suspension of the Liverpool writ on account of the ‘mass of corruption’ revealed there. He supported the sugar refinery bill and Brougham’s reform of bankruptcy jurisdiction, 15 Oct. 1831.
In November 1831 Littleton had ‘excellent fun’ at dinner with Warrender, who
we discovered, had written and printed a letter to his constituents at Honiton expressing his regret that his avocations and the state of his health (robust) would not allow of him going down to them this winter, and sending them a printed copy of his speech on the case of Honiton ... Quite clear from the tone of the letter that friend Warrender finds that his anti-reform votes are putting him in the wrong box in their estimations.
A few days later he made Warrender ‘very angry’ by describing him as ‘a Zephyr entre deux Flores’ when seated between his own wife and the pretty Mrs. Twiss.
Warrender decided not to stand at the 1832 general election because of ‘the state of my health, and the determination of passing several winters out of England’.
Warrender was very kind and hospitable, and had a great deal to say, particularly about the men with whom he had lived, Canning being the chief: but he verged on the absurd and talked too much of himself, and how he was employed and treated by Canning.
Broughton, Recollections, v. 16.
A year earlier Warrender had brought an action in the court of session for divorce on the ground of adultery by his wife, then living in France. She entered objections, based essentially on a claim that a Scottish court could not dissolve a marriage contracted in England between a resident Englishwoman and a domiciled Scotsman. They were dismissed in an interlocutor of 28 June 1834, but Lady Warrender appealed to the Lords and Warrender’s attempts to have the appeal disallowed were unsuccessful. After several delays, the Lords heard counsel on the case in May 1835; and on 27 Aug. 1835 Brougham and Lyndhurst, arguing that in law a wife’s domicile became that of her husband, upheld the interlocutor of the lower court. It does not appear, however, that Warrender subsequently proceeded with the case in Scotland.