PENNYMAN, Sir James, 6th Bt. (1736-1808), of Ormsby, Yorks.

Pennyman entered Parliament as a Rockingham Whig and subsequently supported Shelburne and Pitt. His property and his connexion with the corporation gave him a considerable interest at Beverley. During the hotly contested election of 1790 the opposition interest in the borough decided that ‘considering that Sir James must have less importance in the House than a man of Egerton’s fortune’ and also that he was ‘attended by some popular gentlemen in the neighbourhood’, he should be brought in again for the second seat.

No speech by Pennyman is known after 1790. He applied to Pitt for patronage, once for a clergyman son of his. He was listed among opponents of the repeal of the Test Act in Scotland in 1791. He did not stand for re-election in 1796, but, he wrote to Pitt three years later, ‘no one Member in the House serv’d you with more steadiness than myself, and [I] flatter myself I shall be in Parliament the next return, when I shall serve you as I have always done’. He did not re-enter Parliament. He died 27 Mar. 1808. His second marriage displeased his family, who complained that in his will (made soon afterwards) he left everything to ‘that wretched woman and not naming a child he had’.1See BEVERLEY; PRO 30/8/166, f. 39; Grey mss, Elizabeth Pennyman to Grey, 17 Apr. 1808.