LEWIS, Wyndham (1780-1838), of Greenmeadow, Tongwynlais, Glam. and 1 Grosvenor Gate, Park Lane, London

A ‘canny Welshman’, whom Benjamin Disraeli considered ‘one of the oddest men that ever lived’, Lewis is probably best remembered today for bankrolling the future prime minister’s entry to Parliament.1M. Hardwick, Mrs Dizzy. The life of Mary Anne Disraeli Viscountess Beaconsfield (1972), 29; Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1835-1837, ed. M. Wiebe et al (1982), ii. 646. An immensely wealthy businessman, barrister and co-owner of the world’s largest ironworks in Wales, Lewis had acquired a reputation for disreputable conduct in his private life and early political career. By the 1830s, however, he was becoming known for public acts of philanthropy. Aided by his vast purse he created a formidable electoral interest in Maidstone, where he sat as a Conservative from 1835 until his sudden death in 1838. In 1837 he returned Disraeli, his wife Mary Anne’s ‘political pet’ and ‘parliamentary protégé’ (whom she later married), as his colleague.2The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, ed. W. Monypenny (1910), i. 379; Disraeli Letters: 1835-1837, ii. 644.

Lewis had inherited entailed family estates in Wales and Gloucestershire from his clergyman father whilst still a minor. By 1798 he was a solicitor’s clerk and two years later had established his own practice at Pentyrch, near Cardiff, with a London agent.3TNA IND 1/4584, p. 91; New Law List (1808), 149. The death of his childless uncle William Lewis in 1810 made him and his brother, the Rev. William Price Lewis, major shareholders in the Dowlais ironworks in Methyr, run by Josiah John Guest MP, with whom he began to work closely on finance and contracts whilst reading for the bar. A year after being called Lewis entered the unreformed Commons on Lord Bute’s interest for Cardiff, ostensibly as an ‘independent’. However, he soon fell out with Bute and became embroiled in controversy for ‘abusing’ his position as an MP, by obtaining lucrative contracts for Dowlais and blocking industrial pollution controls.4The Cambrian, 20 July 1822. An unsuccessful Tory candidate in 1826 at both Camelford and Maidstone, where he spent freely, in 1827 he was given a temporary berth at Aldeburgh by the Tory jeremiah John Wilson Croker MP. Unable to support the Wellington ministry’s concession of Catholic emancipation, however, in 1829 he made way for Wellington’s heir.

Lewis apparently made no attempt to re-enter the Commons in 1830 and 1831, but at the 1832 general election he stood again for Maidstone, where his agents had been carefully attending to the new electoral registers.5Bodleian Lib., Dep. Hughenden 181/2, f. 142. His opponents accused him of supporting old Tory borough-mongering practices and of paying his workers via the ‘abominable truck’ system, but after stressing his acceptance of the Reform Act he undertook a highly successful canvass, walking ‘ten hours every day … on the hard gravel walks’, as he informed his wife.6Ibid. 171/1. ff. 117-8, 125. His defeat in third place was blamed on bribery and intimidation by his radical opponents.7Maidstone Gazette, 27 Nov., 4 Dec. 1832; Morning Post, 15 Dec. 1832. Sensing their expenditure was unsustainable, he continued to cultivate the borough, funding the creation of local Tory associations and the admission of freemen voters.8Dep. Hughenden 182/1, ff. 11-12, 43, 65, 68, 81. Armed with £1,500 on account and ‘an additional £500’ in his pocket ‘to meet contingencies’, he offered again in 1835, citing his support for Peel’s newly appointed Conservative ministry.9Ibid. 182/1, f. 112; Parliamentary Testbook (1835), 98. ‘Public feeling appears to be very much altered’, he noted privately, observing ‘there is a complete reaction for us’.10Dep. Hughenden 171/2, ff. 5, 7. Aided by his ‘Tory gold’ he topped the poll with almost 500 plumpers.11J. A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs (1992), 115.

In his third spell in the Commons Lewis was apparently silent in debate and rarely troubled the division lobbies, averaging less than 20 recorded votes per session. In an important reminder of the work performed by MPs that usually went unrecorded, however, his surviving papers suggest that he was fairly active in assisting his Maidstone constituents.12Dep. Hughenden 181/2, passim. He received a personal whip from Peel requesting his attendance, 2 Feb. 1835, and was present to support him on the speakership, 19 Feb. 1835, address, 26 Feb., malt tax, 10 Mar., and Irish church, 2 Apr. 1835.13Ibid. 171/2, f. 16. Thereafter he opposed the reappointed Whig ministry on most major issues, with one notable exception. On 15 Mar. 1837 he voted alongside his Whig business partner Guest for the ministry’s proposal to abolish church rates. Given his opposition to the Catholic marriages bill, 11 May 1836, and continuing resistance to church reform, especially in Ireland, this was unexpected.14No correction has been found: The Times, 17 Mar. 1837. He had no qualms about presenting an address to the king against the measure from the Maidstone Constitutional Society a few months later, however, and was conspicuous by his absence from the next division on the issue: ‘voted for last time, absent this’, commented one report.15North Wales Chronicle, 9 May 1837; Brighton Patriot, 30 May 1837. The only other time he and Guest entered the same lobby was clearly business related, when they opposed adding the Glamorgan canal bill to the committee overseeing the Merthyr Tydfil railway bill, 9 May 1836. He also joined Guest in overseeing the final stages of the Dowlais market bill, which received royal assent, 15 July 1837 (7 Will. IV & 1 Vict. c. 128).16CJ, xcii. 630, 662.

Lewis’s known constituency work included bringing up a Maidstone petition condemning the municipal reform bill, 14 July 1835, after he had voted against the bill’s attempt to abolish the freeman franchise, 23 June 1835.17Hansard, 14 July 1835, vol. 29, c. 537. ‘The freemen have been greatly exasperated’, his agent Richard Hart advised him, adding that Lewis could now be ‘more certain’ of returning two members at the next election.18Dep. Hughenden 182/2, f. 60. He also backed the local vested interests opposing reform of the Medway Navigation Company, 17 Mar., 19 July 1836, and supported an attempt to improve transport links with Essex by reviving a ferry crossing at Purfleet, 22 Apr. 1836. His committee work included service on the Cork and Inverness-shire election inquiries of 1835.19CJ, xc. 287, 412. A string of votes for and against various railway bills in early 1837 probably reflected his personal business interests, but beyond his ownership of shares in the Taff Vale Railway and the horse-drawn Dyffryn Llynfi and Porthcawl Railway, his involvement with the fledgling railways of this decade is unclear and requires further research.20Dep. Hughenden 179/1, ff. 1-69.

Assisted by a well-publicised Christmas donation of £600 to the ‘necessitous inhabitants’ of Maidstone in 1836,21He and wife both contributed £300: The Times, 16 Dec. 1836; Examiner, 18 Dec. 1836. See also Disraeli Letters: 1835-1837, ii. 644. Lewis again topped the poll with ease at the 1837 general election, despite being out-classed by the ‘splendid oratory’ of his new colleague Disraeli, who, as he informed his wife, ‘astonished the people’.22Dep. Hughenden 171/2, f. 37. His and Disraeli’s joint election address cited their opposition to the ‘heartless’ new poor law and support for the ‘Protestant religion’, without, it seems, raising any eyebrows.23Disraeli Letters: 1835-1837, ii. 632. Disraeli’s entire share of the £4,500 bill was advanced by Lewis, whose delighted wife revelled in Disraeli’s success, noting ‘they call him my parliamentary protégé’.24Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1838-1841, ed. M. Wiebe et al (1982), iii. 702; The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, ed. W. Monypenny (1910), i. 376. ‘Tell Dizzy he will be wanted in London the latter end of this week’, Lewis advised her shortly before the meeting of the new session.25Dep. Hughenden 171/2, f. 67.

Lewis’s public munificence at Maidstone was evidently not matched by a similar largesse at home. Inclined towards parsimony, he refused to assist his wife’s impecunious brother Major John Viney Evans with his financial woes. ‘His fondness for money is to me unaccountable’, she apologised to her brother.26Hardwick, Mrs Dizzy, 26-9, 62. Lewis’s hold on the purse strings also extended to his own offspring and was clearly the provocation behind a character assassination in verse published in Dublin by John Westerman May, who had married Lewis’s illegitimate daughter Frances. Entitled ‘Lewisiana, or hypocrisy unmasked’, and dedicated to the electors of Maidstone and inhabitants of ‘Merthyrtyvil’, among other places, its explanatory preface accused Lewis of reneging on promises to employ May as his ‘town agent’ and settle £100 a year on Frances. It then claimed that her mother had been Lewis’s housekeeper, a ‘poor relative’ called Sarah Williams, who had been duped into a sham marriage by Lewis, ‘he being a Protestant and she a Catholic’, before he abandoned her and ‘broke her heart’. Another liaison with ‘a person in a very low station of life, whom Mr Lewis seduced’ had produced an illegitimate son, who had been ‘apprenticed, by his money-loving-Dad, to a carpenter!’ Explaining Lewis’s neglect of both children, May described how Mrs Lewis had engaged in ‘flagitious behaviour’ with other men, and that ‘in consequence of ****** it is, and always has been physically impossible that Mrs Lewis could ever have a family, and hence her jealous hostility towards her husband’s unoffending offspring’. ‘He is so completely under petticoat government’, May added, ‘that he would not dare to vote on any question in the House of Commons without the sanction of his wife’.27W. May, Lewisiana; or hyprocrisy unmasked (1834), passim.

Mrs Lewis’s extra-marital affairs remain the subject of historical speculation, particularly the extent of her involvement with Disraeli before her husband’s death.28Hardwick, Mrs Dizzy, 62-72; J. Ridley, ‘Mary Anne Disraeli’, Oxford DNB. However, there is no doubting her genuine affection for her first husband, whatever his faults.29See, for instance, her pencilled remarks on his final letters and keepsakes of his hair in Dep. Hughenden 171/2. After casting just eight votes in the 1838 session, including one against the secret ballot, Lewis died suddenly from heart failure whilst writing at his desk, having been ‘slightly indisposed for a day or two’. Contrary to press reports that he ‘leant forward’ and ‘expired without suffering’, Guest’s wife, who encountered the corpse at his London home an hour later, noted that ‘his face was calm but livid from his disease of the heart’, and there was ‘a deep gash on his cheek where he had struck the sofa’.30Morning Post, 26 Mar. 1838; Wimborne mss, 14 Mar. 1838. I am indebted to Lord Rowlands CBE for providing access to his transcripts of Lady Charlotte Guest’s journals, based on those in the possession of Lord Wimborne at Ashby St. Ledger.

Under the terms of Lewis’s will of 23 Aug. 1833, the bulk of his estate, valued for probate at a staggering £120,000, 9 Apr. 1838, was divided between his widow during her lifetime, providing her with an income of about £5,000 a year, and his brother, the Rev. William Price Lewis, who inherited all his Dowlais shares and banking stocks.31W. D. Rubinstein, Who were the Rich? (2009), i. 478-9; IR26/1489/147. On his brother’s death in 1848 these reverted to his nephew Wyndham William Lewis (1827-71), who sold out to Guest for £200,000 in 1850.32Iron in the Making. Dowlais Iron Company Letters 1782-1860 (1960), ed. M. Elsas, 239; Lady Charlotte Guest. Extracts from her Journal 1833-1852 (1950), ed. earl of Bessborough, 251. Two children of another brother also acquired £1,000 each. Lewis’s illegitimate ‘natural daughter’ was provided with an annuity of £60 ‘for her sole and separate use’, ‘not to be subject to the control ... of her ... husband’, while Thomas, the son of one Mary Jenkins of Marylebone, received an income of £30.33PROB 11/1894/255; Disraeli Letters: 1838-1841, iii. 746. An epitaph prepared by his widow for his tomb in Kensal Green cemetery stated, perhaps ambiguously, ‘He was renowned for his charity, which in him did not cover a multitude of sins, but only heightened many riches’.34Dep. Hughenden 171/2, f. 74.

On 28 Aug. 1839 Mrs Lewis married Disraeli, twelve years her junior, and began funding his political career. She was rewarded with the rare honour of a peerage in her own right four years before her own death in 1872.