Adeane’s own property lay in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, but in 1774 his son, then a child, inherited the estate of Babraham (6½ miles outside Cambridge) under the will of his maternal grandfather, and in November 1776 Adeane announced his intention of standing for Cambridge at the next vacancy. He assiduously cultivated an interest there, and according to Dr. Ewin, a Cambridge correspondent of Lord Hardwicke, declared that he would spend £10,000 to secure his return.
clear in his seat for this town, indeed the attention he pays to it by his almost constant weekly visits and making a point of buying everything he wants here, gains him many friends, and he makes himself all things to all men, rather too much so.
Nevertheless, a sudden demand for his qualification just before the poll so confused Adeane that, according to Ewin,
In Parliament Adeane seems at first to have supported North’s Administration; was classed as ‘pro’ in Robinson’s survey of February 1781,
At the general election of 1784 Adeane was returned for Cambridge unopposed. During this Parliament his only reported votes were in favour of Pitt’s parliamentary reform proposals, 18 Apr. 1785, and Richmond’s fortifications plan, 27 Feb. 1786. In the debate of 18 May 1786, when John Mortlock, Adeane’s fellow Member for Cambridge, was accused of altering several names in a list of commissioners for executing the Land Tax Act, Adeane, who had officially delivered the list, intervened several times to pursue the charges, and produced a resolution of 1780 ‘stating that any person’s altering any paper belonging to that House, was to be deemed and considered as highly criminal’—his only reported speech before 1790.
When in May 1789 the death of Sir Henry Peyton vacated one of the Cambridge county seats, Adeane used his appointment as groom of the bedchamber five years previously as a means to vacate his seat at Cambridge, and with the support of the Rutland family
Adeane died 15 Apr. 1802.