TOWNSHEND, Hon. Charles (1725-67), of Adderbury, Oxon.

Returned for Yarmouth in 1747 at the age of 21, Charles Townshend lost no time in pressing his claim for promotion. In April 1748 he told his father that he hoped to relieve him of part of the burden of maintaining him by acquiring ‘a creditable post at the board of Trade’, or, better still, at the Admiralty, which ‘would strengthen and establish immovably’ the Townshend interest at Yarmouth. In December he asked Pelham for a seat on the Admiralty board,1HMC Townshend, 363, 366-7. but had to content himself with the board of Trade, where he ‘distinguished himself on affairs of trade and in drawing plans and papers’.2Walpole, Mems. Geo. II, i. 340. He moved the Address on 16 Nov. 1749. On 8 Mar. 1753, in a debate on Jamaica, he argued in favour of making the island bear the cost of its own defence works, maintaining that it was wrong that the mother country should be sacrificed to the interests of the colonies.3AECP Angl. 436, ff. 10-15. He attacked Hardwicke’s clandestine marriage bill two months later, when Horace Walpole describes him as

a young man of unbounded ambition, of exceeding application, and, as it now appeared, of abilities capable of satisfying that ambition ... His figure was tall and advantageous, his action vehement, his voice loud, his laugh louder ... He spoke long and with much wit, and drew a picture, with much humour ... of his own situation as the younger son of a capricious father, who had already debarred his son from an advantageous match.4Walpole, loc. cit.

Horace Walpole concluded that Charles Townshend ‘seemed marked by nature’ to become one of the leaders of the Government of his country. Thus before the end of his first Parliament he had developed and displayed the views and qualities which produced the disastrous Townshend duties a few months before his premature death, 4 Sept. 1767.