The Heneage family, owners of the Hainton estates situated seven miles south east of Market Rasen, had long played a part in local and national government. John Heneage was MP for Grimsby in 1494. His son, Sir Thomas Heneage, was a private secretary to Thomas Wolsey and later filled various offices under Henry VIII. His nephew and heir, Sir George Heneage, was MP for Lincolnshire and for Essex as well as holding office under Elizabeth I. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Heneages were excluded from holding office on account of their Roman Catholicism. Heneage’s father, however, became a Protestant in time to serve as Lincolnshire’s high sheriff in 1813. George Fieschi Heneage, known as ‘Fish’ in Lincolnshire circles as a result of his second name, was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Though very well read, he was a lethargic man and not given to public speaking. On the hustings he was invariably drowned out by shouting from the crowd, and he appears to have spoken in the Commons on only three occasions. One contemporary observed of him that he ‘is sometimes apparently in a trance and dead as it were to all around him and then starting up, making some absurd observation, and then laughing the most curious laugh at his own wit’. In January 1833 Heneage married into a Yorkshire Catholic family, the Tasburghs, his wife Frances being described as ‘not at all pretty but on a very large scale’. Later that year he inherited the Hainton estates of over 10,000 acres.1F. Hill, Victorian Lincoln (1974), 16-17, 29-34. He was the patron of six livings.2Bury and Norwich Post, 17 May 1864.
By this time Heneage had already represented Great Grimsby and Lincoln in the Whig interest, having first entered the Commons in 1826. He was re-elected at Lincoln in 1832, although his relations with his election committee became increasingly strained. The Lincoln radicals saw Heneage as a timid supporter of reform. An infrequent attender, he had divided for reform of the Irish church, 11 Mar. 1833, but paired against the ballot, 25 Apr. 1833, and opposed Joseph Hume’s motion for a low fixed duty on corn, 7 Mar. 1834. Some of his erstwhile supporters made clear their intention to plump for Edward Bulwer at the next opportunity if that was what was required to secure the return of the second reform candidate. 3Hill, Victorian Lincoln, 19. Heneage, however, was not prepared to be forced out. On 4 December 1834 he issued a defiant letter announcing his intention to defend his seat. He countered accusations that he had neglected his parliamentary duties, referring to unspecified ‘painful circumstances’ in which he had been placed during the greater part of the last session. This declaration, however, did not silence his opponents, and Heneage responded with a second letter on 12 December 1834 announcing his withdrawal.4Lincoln poll book [published by Brogden] (1835). He then offered instead as a candidate for North Lincolnshire. However, he failed to gain the backing of the Whig Yarborough interest and found that his Catholic connections counted against him with many Nonconformist electors, and did not go to the poll.5T.R. Leach, Lincolnshire country houses and their families (1998), 172. After this rebuff, Heneage retreated to Hainton, and although he was mentioned as a possible candidate for a potential vacancy at North Lincolnshire in 1846, he was to remain out of parliament for eighteen years.6Daily News, 19 Sept. 1846.
Heneage reappeared at the general election of 1852. He was certainly not the first choice of the Lincoln Whig protectionists, but there was no one else. In his letter to the electorate in April 1852 Heneage described himself as ‘the friend of civil and religious liberty’ and ‘[w]ith respect to the great question of protection of British agriculture, [he had] always steadily supported it whilst in Parliament and [he would] do his best to aid it at the present time’. His views on the suffrage confirmed the earlier suspicions of the Lincoln radicals: he would not support a household suffrage as low as £5 per annum. Heneage attempted to speak at the nomination, but, owing to the noise made by the non-electors, could not be heard.7Lincoln poll book [published by Arkrill] (1852). However, his protectionist sentiments were enough to secure him second place behind Colonel Charles Sibthorp.
Back in Parliament, Heneage rarely contributed to debate, does not appear to have served on any select committees, and was a lacklustre attender, present for 41 out of 257 divisions in the 1853 session and 40 out of 198 in 1856.8Daily News, 21 Sept. 1853; J.P. Gassiot, Third letter to J.A. Roebuck: with a full analysis of the divisions in the House of Commons during the last session of Parliament (1857), 11. He divided alongside Sibthorp in the protectionist minority of 53, 27 Nov. 1852, and opposed Hume’s motion for the removal of the remaining import duties, 3 Mar. 1853. Otherwise, he generally divided with the Liberals, opposing Disraeli’s budget, 16 Dec. 1852, but supporting Gladstone’s, 2 May 1853. He consistently opposed the ballot and divided against Locke King’s motion for the equalisation of the borough and county franchises, 19 Feb. 1857. He supported the removal of Jewish disabilities, but his stance on the abolition of church rates shifted during this Parliament, from dividing against abolition, 21 June 1854, to supporting it, 16 May 1855, 5 Mar. 1856. He rallied to ministers against Disraeli’s hostile motion on the conduct of the Crimean war, 25 May 1855, but was in the minority for A.H. Layard’s motion on administrative reform, 18 June 1855. He supported Palmerston on Cobden’s critical motion on the Canton affair, 3 Mar. 1857.
In March 1857 Heneage issued a letter stating that he intended to defend his seat. In his opinion the Crimean War had been ‘a necessity which could not be avoided’ and the country needed to maintain ‘considerable’ military power; in a flicker of his old Liberalism, he tacked on a call for a ‘good, sound system of national education’. Above the noise on nomination day, Heneage praised Palmerston and claimed that he was a reformer still, though this went no further than suggesting that there was scope to transfer some seats to towns in Middlesex, Surrey and Lancashire.9Lincoln poll book [published by Arkrill] (1857). Heneage managed to secure second place for himself, 100 votes ahead of the radical Liberal John Hinde Palmer. Back at Westminster, he supported Palmerston on the conspiracy to murder bill, 9, 19 Feb. 1858. He divided against Sir John Trelawny’s church rates abolition bill, 17 Feb. 1858, possibly because Sir George Grey promised to bring in a government measure on the question if this bill were defeated, but voted in favour of abolition once again, 8 June 1858, 15 Mar. 1859. He joined his party in opposing the Derby ministry’s reform bill, 31 Mar. 1859.
At the 1859 election Heneage held on to second place, though his majority over Palmer fell to only 29. In his address he declared that educational advances now permitted him to support a limited extension of the franchise and that, though church rates should not be abolished, Nonconformists should be excused from paying them.10Lincoln poll book [published by Arkrill] (1862). It was on the subject of church rates that Heneage made his only notable intervention in the Commons, 6 Mar. 1861, in a brief contribution which concluded that ‘the law was in the most unsatisfactory state’. However, he was evidently not satisfied with the details of Trelawny’s abolition bill that session, dividing against its third reading, 19 June 1861. He continued to oppose the ballot, but backed the county franchise bill, 13 Mar. 1861, and the borough franchise bill, 10 Apr. 1861.
With support for him declining in Lincoln, Heneage seized what appeared to be a new opportunity in 1862.11York Herald, 18 Jan. 1862. He resigned his Lincoln seat to offer on the interest of the earl of Yarborough for his former constituency of Grimsby, explaining that he wished ‘to close his public career where he began’.12The Standard, 18 Jan. 1862. Heneage was a major local landowner in the area, and his brother Edward had sat for the constituency, 1835-47. He reminded electors that he had voted for Catholic emancipation and the Reform Act, and took care to mention his directorship and large shareholding in the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway, which was transforming the fortunes of the constituency.13Grimsby poll book (1862). He promised support for Palmerston’s government, and declared on the issue of church rates that ‘they did not want the money of dissenters; but don’t let dissenters come to vestry meetings to interfere in the management of their affairs’.14Hull Packet, 14 Feb. 1862. After an unruly contest he was only defeated by 12 votes by the Conservative John Chapman. An election petition alleging bribery was lodged against Chapman, but was rejected by a committee.
Heneage died on 11 May 1864 from ‘water on the chest’.15Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury, 20 May 1864 As a pioneering landlord at Hainton, his two-decade building plan cost him £76,800 and provided labourers with well-built houses, each with a garden.16Leach, Lincolnshire country houses, 173. Though his aunt described him as the greatest bore she had ever known and his neighbours, with his long periods of silence and outbursts of laughter at dinner, found him something of an oddity, Heneage was regarded as an intelligent, sincere and kind man.17Hill, Victorian Lincoln, 16. In the Commons he was virtually silent, and the Lincoln Liberals soon lost patience with him. Heneage himself believed that his votes spoke for him and that, as his family had before him, he had unobtrusively carried out his public duty. He bequeathed his Brackenborough estates, £20,000 and income from £14,000 in stocks and securities to his younger son Charles, and gave his daughter Georgiana Mary £20,000 to double her marriage portion. The remainder of his estates passed to his eldest son Edward (1840-1922), Liberal MP for Lincoln, 1865-8, and Great Grimsby, 1880-92, 1893-5 (latterly as a Liberal Unionist), and who was elevated to the Lords as Baron Heneage in 1896.18HP Commons, 1820-32, v. 573.