Maberly is best known for his career as a civil servant and administration of the Post Office, where his opposition to the introduction of the penny post put him at odds with popular campaigners for reform, not least Rowland Hill (1795-1879), with whom he remained locked in a bitter and public dispute for almost twenty years.1C. R. Perry, ‘Maberly, William Leader’, Oxford DNB [www.oxforddnb.com].
Eldest son of the pugnacious entrepreneur and ‘troublesome’ radical MP John Maberly, who in 1832 fled abroad following the collapse of his Scottish banking empire owing £200,000, Maberly suffered from inevitable comparison with his formidable father during their thirteen years together in the unreformed Commons.2The Croker Papers (1885), ed. L. J. Jennings, i. 419. Distracted by an army career, he struggled to make his mark, despite delivering some promising speeches and helping to initiate the campaign that resulted in the corporate funds bill.3HP Commons, 1820-32, vi. 218-22. On the corporate funds bill see P. Salmon, ‘“Reform should begin at home”: English municipal and parliamentary reform, 1818-32’, 109, in Partisan Politics, Principle and Reform in Parliament and the Constituencies, 1689-1880, eds. C. Jones, P. Salmon and R. Davis (2005). At the 1830 general election he did not stand for re-election. His marriage later that year to a ‘beautiful and brilliant’ cousin of Lord Duncannon, the Whig chief whip, however, propelled him into the inner circle of Whig society, and following the accession of the Grey ministry, he was allocated a junior ministerial post worth £1,200 a year and found a safe seat.4HP Commons, 1820-32, vi. 221-2; E. Yates, Memoirs of a man of the world (1885), 64; J. Wade, The Black Book (1832), 551; Dorset County Chronicle, 5 May 1831.
At the 1832 general election Maberly, who had evidently made no trouble about making way for Lord Holland’s illegitimate son as surveyor-general and being moved to a clerkship, 30 Nov. 1832, offered for the newly created borough of Chatham with treasury support.5London Gazette, 4 Dec. 1832. After a fractious campaign against another Liberal, whom Maberly managed to provoke out of retirement with an ill-judged address, he was returned at the head of the poll.6Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1832. His candidacy for Abingdon, where he was put up by his father’s former supporters and defeated, seems to have been unsanctioned.7Berkshire Chronicle, 15 Dec.; Times, 28 Dec. 1832.
A regular attender, Maberly continued to support ministers in the lobbies, casting no known wayward votes. He steadily opposed most radical initiatives, including motions for the ballot, 25 Apr. 1833, and shorter parliaments, 23 July 1833, 15 May 1834, and was in the majorities against the abolition of military flogging, 2 Apr. 1833, and naval impressment, 4 Mar. 1834. That month, in his only known spoken contributions of this period, he defended his department’s estimates from the attacks of his father’s former associate Joseph Hume and other retrenching radicals. Announcing that he ‘had been able to effect reductions even beyond the most sanguine expectations’, 21 Mar., he contended that Hume had ‘mixed up the charges for the various departments in such a manner that he found it extremely difficult to reduce them ... into intelligibility and order’. Using his military expertise to justify each cost, he added that the expenses were now less than ’in the golden time of the honourable Member, namely 1792’.8Hansard, 21 Mar. 1834, vol. 22, cc. 543, 558-60. Speaking in similar terms, 24 Mar. 1834, he dismissed Hume’s complaints about expenditure on Canadian defences, observing that ‘Halifax had undergone many changes since the period’ when Hume had last visited it, making him ‘ignorant of the great and fertile sources of wealth’ that now required protection.9Hansard, 24 Mar. 1834, vol. 22, cc. 605-9.
In June 1834 Maberly, who had lost considerable sums to his father and was remembered as being ‘fond of money’, secured a customs post, which made him ineligible to sit in the Commons.10HP Commons, 1820-32, vi. 217-8; Yates, Memoirs, 63. Promoted by the premier Melbourne to the Post Office two years later, with a salary of £1900, he began to implement ‘many important reforms’, but firmly resisted the introduction of the penny post in 1840, a measure that he believed to be ‘utterly fallacious’.11W. Lewins, Her Majesty’s Mails (1865), 162; H. Robinson, Britain’s Post Office, (1953), 287. Giving evidence before a select committee in 1843, he insisted that the loss of revenue that had resulted from this ‘sudden change’ had made further improvements extremely difficult.12Robinson, Post Office, 157. His ongoing feuds with the penny post’s promoter Rowland Hill, who became secretary to the postmaster-general in 1846, dominated the rest of his administration, which ended with Maberly’s ignominious transfer to the audit office and replacement by Hill in 1854. Maberly also made enemies within his own department, including the aspiring novelist Anthony Trollope, who later ridiculed him as the nepotistic windbag Sir Boreas Bodkin in his novel Marian Fay (1883).13A. Sanders, Anthony Trollope, (1998), 9. Another former clerk and novelist with no axe to grind recalled him as ‘a clear-headed man of business’, distracted by the management of his wife’s Irish estates, and with unorthodox working practices:
The colonel, a big, heavily-built man, would sit in a big chair, with a handkerchief over his knees and two or three private letters before him. Into a closely neighbouring seat the clerk would drop, placing his array of official documents on the table. Greetings exchanged ... the clerk would commence reading aloud one of his documents. The colonel, still half engaged with his private correspondence, would hear enough to make him keep up a running commentary of disparaging grunts: “Pooh! Stuff! Upon my soul!” etc. Then the clerk, having come to the end of the manuscript, would stop, waiting for orders, and there would ensue a dead silence, broken by the colonel, who having finished his private letters, would look up and say, “Well my good fellow, well?”. “That’s all, sir”. “And quite enough too, go on to the next!” “But what shall I say to this applicant sir?” “Say to him? Tell him to go and be d[amne]d, my good fellow!”, and on our own reading of these instructions we had very frequently to act.14Yates, Memoirs, 64-5.
Maberly’s fashionable and indiscreet wife, who published a string of historical romances from 1840, brought him place but also embarrassment, especially when she embarked on a platonic but nevertheless ‘ridiculous and unbecoming liaison’ with Duncannon (by now 4th earl of Bessborough) during his dotage. Her ‘ostentatious effrontery’ following Bessborough’s appointment as Irish viceroy in 1846 produced ‘universal ridicule and disgust’, not least because ‘she meddled with everything’, and his death the following year was considered ‘fortunate’ by the Whig diarist Greville.15Greville Memoirs, ed. R. Fulford and L. Strachey (1938), v. 338, 356, 446; D. Howell-Thomas, Duncannon: reformer and reconciler, 1781-1847 (1992), 314-6.
Maberly, who retired from the civil service with a pension of over £1,700 per year, died ‘one of the last survivors’ of the unreformed Commons in February 1885.16Times, 11 Feb. 1885; C. R. Perry, ‘Maberly, William Leader’, Oxford DNB. A widower, he left all his property to his younger brother Evan. His will, dated 31 Mar. 1876, was proved under £56,915. A codicil dated 15 Apr. 1879 provided annuities of £50 to Emma Rosanna Harding (known as Bingham) of 353 Edgware Road, two married women in Paris, and one of their daughters.17Will with codicils, proved 24 June, 28 Aug. 1885.