MARCH PHILLIPPS, Charles (1779-1862), of Garendon Park, near Loughborough, Leicestershire

A country gentlemen, described in one obituary as ‘a Whig of the Fox school’, March Phillipps briefly supported Peel’s abortive first ministry before reverting to his earlier Whiggery.1Gent. Mag. (1862), i. 788-9. In 1777, his father, Thomas March, who had mercantile antecedents, had inherited the lucrative Phillipps estates in Leicestershire, and thereafter assumed that family’s name.2F. Boase, Modern English Biography (1897), ii. 1500; Derby Mercury, 30 Apr. 1862; M. Pawley, Faith and family: the life and circle of Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle (1993), 1-2. He was succeeded in 1817 by his quick-tempered eldest son, Charles, whose wife had died four years earlier.3Pawley, Faith and family, 7, 20, 76. On two occasions, in 1818 and 1831, divisions within the traditional alliance between local Tories and the Rutland interest allowed March Phillipps to briefly represent the county, the second time with another reformer, Thomas Paget.4‘Leicestershire’, HP Commons, 1790-1820, ii. 241; ‘Leicestershire’, HP Commons, 1820-32, ii. 610-11, 613.

In 1832, March Phillipps was elected in second place behind the duke of Rutland’s nominee for the new constituency of North Leicestershire. However, March Phillipps offended many of his erstwhile supporters by refusing an alliance with the radical candidate, who finished third, and launching an ‘unprovoked personal attack’ on Paget, his former colleague.5Morn. Chro., 25 Dec. 1832. When present at Westminster, March Phillipps’ activity was restricted to the division lobby; he is not known to have spoken or sat on any committees in this period. In 1833, he cast votes in favour of Irish coercion, shortening the duration of parliaments, and abolishing the flogging of slaves, and the following year he supported Althorp’s proposal to replace church rates with a central grant financed from the land tax.

At the 1835 general election, when he was returned unopposed alongside Rutland’s nominee, March Phillipps indicated his drift towards Conservatism, arguing that ‘Between public opinion and popular clamour I see a wide difference’.6Standard, 19 Jan. 1835, qu. in The Parliamentary test-book for 1835 (1835), 128. Believing that it was ‘one of the first principles and duty of government to protect and support the Established Church’, he defended the king’s use of the royal prerogative to dismiss the Whigs, and promised to judge Peel’s new government on its measures.7North Wales Chronicle, 27 Jan. 1835. Shortly after the election March Phillipps was considered by the Examiner to be one of the ‘doubtful men’, reformers whose allegiance was now uncertain.8Examiner, 8 Feb. 1835. He was described as a ‘Conservative at heart’ by local Conservatives, and although he shunned their meetings, his divisions in favour of the address and support for Manners Sutton as speaker suggest that this description was not unwarranted.9Nottingham Journal, qu. in Derby Mercury, 25 Feb. 1835. Thereafter, although his attendance was generally poor, he consistently endorsed the Whigs’ attempts to reform the Irish church and Irish corporations.10In 1836 he voted in 23 out of 195 divisions: An Atlas of the divisions of the House of Commons, 1836 (1836), unpag. Both measures were denounced with increasing vehemence by local Conservatives, who announced before the 1837 general election that they would propose a second candidate prompting March Phillipps’s retirement.11Derby Mercury, 15 Feb. 1837; The Times, 27 June 1837, 19 July 1837. In a defiant farewell address, he defended the Whigs’ record, especially parliamentary and municipal reform and the abolition of colonial slavery, and expressed regret that the government’s attempts to redress ‘three centuries of misrule’ in Ireland had been frustrated by ‘the exercise of a hereditary, irresponsible, patrician veto’.12Morn. Chro., 7 July 1837.

Estimated by his son to have expended £30,000 in total on electioneering, March Phillipps thereafter devoted himself to county duties.13Pawley, Faith and family, 10, 179. In 1857 he was described as ‘well as ever, very lively, more fat than formerly, with rosy cheeks, and [he] walks and talks all day’.14Ibid., 180. March Phillipps died in 1862 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Ambrose March Phillipps, afterwards Phillipps de Lisle (1809-78), whose conversion to Catholicism in 1825 had pained his father, and who was the model for Eustace Lyle in Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844).15Ibid., 19-22; Gent. Mag. (1862), i. 788-9; B. Disraeli, Coningsby, or the new generation (1844; 1870 edn.), 129-30. (In the same book, Eustace’s father was described as ‘the most ultra violent Whig’.)16Ibid., 138. March Phillipps’s brother Samuel (1780-1862) was a legal writer and permanent under-secretary for the home office 1827-48.17M. Lobban, ‘Phillipps, Samuel March (1780-1862)’, www.oxforddnb.com.