PONSONBY, Hon. William Francis Spencer (1787-1855), of Canford House, nr. Poole, Dorset and 20 St. James’s Square, Mdx.

‘Willy’ Ponsonby, ‘a monument of empty languor’, was an idle but popular member of the inner circle of leading Whigs, who included his brother Lord Duncannon, the proposer of his accession to Brooks’s, 17 May 1837, and his brother-in-law the premier Lord Melbourne.1Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, Lady Lyttelton 1787-1870 (1912), ed. Mrs. H. Wyndham, 103. His childlike charm and generosity, especially to his spendthrift younger brother Frederick, endeared him to all, but eventually left him in financial difficulties. Married to the 5th earl of Shaftesbury’s only daughter and heiress, who according to Lord Alvanley was ‘as stupid as a post’, in the 1820s he had settled at Canford Manor, a ‘great estate’ near Poole inherited from her maternal grandfather Sir John Webb.2Complete Peerage, iv. 176; Lady Bessborough and her family circle, (1940), eds. earl of Bessborough and A. Aspinall, 285; J. Sydenham, The History of Poole (1839), 58-60; D. Le Marchant, Memoir of Althorp (1876), 54. He had sat comfortably for that borough on the Canford interest as a silent Whig until September 1831, when he resigned with ministerial backing to make a principled stand in the Dorset by-election in support of their reform bill, which was about to go up to the Lords. His unexpected defeat by an anti-reformer, and unsuccessful attempt to overturn the result on petition, cost an estimated £30,000, leaving him ‘pretty well cleaned out’.3HP Commons, 1820-32, vi. 849-50; Bedfordshire RO, Russell mss R766, Ponsonby to Russell, 22 Oct. [1831].

Ponsonby’s hopes of returning to Poole at the 1832 general election were complicated by the Reform Act’s controversial enlargement of the borough, which appeared to bolster his interest, laying the Whigs open to charges of gerrymander. He reluctantly opted to try again for the county, which had been increased to three Members. Despite falling off his horse and being unable to appear in person, he was elected unopposed.4Dorset County Chronicle, 23 Feb., 14 June, 5 July, 23 Aug., 22 Nov., 20 Dec. 1832, 3 Jan. 1833. A fairly lax attender, when present Ponsonby continued to follow the Whigs into the lobbies on most major issues, voting against radical motions on distress, 21 Mar. 1833, currency reform, 24 Apr. 1833, the ballot, 25 Apr. 1833, inquiry into pensions, 18 Feb. 1834, and lower corn duties, 7 Mar. 1834. He was in the majority for Jewish emancipation, 25 May 1833.

The unexpected 1835 general election found him in Naples and unable to return.5Parliamentary Test Book (1835), 130. Re-elected unopposed in absentia, he missed the crucial tests of strength for the new Peel ministry on the speakership, 19 Feb., address, 26 Feb., and Irish church appropriation, 2 Apr. 1835, but was back to support the reappointed Melbourne ministry on their municipal reform bill, 24 June 1835. The following day he broke almost a decade of silence to defend the trial and conviction of the Dorchester labourers, which had recently been overturned, explaining ‘in a very low tone of voice’ that he had been ‘one of the grand jury’ and there had been ‘no difference of opinion amongst them’.6The Times, 26 June 1835. (He had acted as their foreman).7P. Ziegler, Melbourne (1978),160. More active during the 1836 session, he gave steady support to the ministry’s Irish tithes bill, with its appropriation clause, and their Irish municipal corporations bill, but was in a minority of five against their commons field enclosure bill, 17 Aug. 1836, and another of 19 against their accepting Lords’ amendments to that measure, 19 Aug. 1836. He divided for an inquiry into the first council elections in Poole, 7 July, and for the resulting bill invalidating the Conservative victory, 25 July 1836. In his last known vote he opposed the abolition of church rates, 12 June 1837.

At that year’s general election Ponsonby offered again for Dorset. Finding his support for the appropriation of the surplus revenues of the Irish church had made him unpopular, however, he ‘cut and run’.8Morning Post, 13 July 1837. ‘His vote for alienating the property of the church’, commented the press, had made it ‘impossible to face his constituents’.9The Times, 8 July; Morning Post, 8 July 1837. At Poole he put up his eldest son Charles, who had just come of age, and secured his return after a hard-fought contest in which his agents were accused of ‘scandalous’ bribery and intimidation.10CJ, xciii. 85-7, 382. The following year he was awarded a coronation peerage, taking his title from a barony that had been in abeyance since 1415, to which his wife was one of the heiresses. His increasing financial troubles, which Lady Holland attributed in part to his ‘giving up his own fortune’ to his brother Frederick at the instigation of his wife, eventually forced him to part with Canford Manor in 1846.11Elizabeth, Lady Holland to her Son, 1821-45 (1946), ed. earl of Ilchester, 217; Lady Charlotte Guest: extracts from her journal, 1833-1852 (1950), ed. earl of Bessborough, 164-5, 171, 180, 188. His procrastination over the sale exasperated the wife of the purchaser, who characterised him as ‘that weak man Lord de Maulay’.12Lady Charlotte Guest, 176.

Ponsonby died in May 1855, ‘a cultivated man and a perfect gentleman’, remembered in Poole, where he was buried, for his ‘private kindnesses and public benefits’.13Complete Peerage, iv. 176; The Times, 19 May; Poole and South-Western Herald, 24 May 1855; Gent. Mag. (1855), ii. 92. His estate, proved under £35,000, was divided between his three surviving children: Charles Frederick Ashley (1815-96), Liberal MP for Poole, 1837-47, and Dungarvan, 1851-2, who succeeded him as 2nd Baron de Mauley; Ashley George John (1831-98), who was Liberal MP for Cirencester, 1852-7 and 1859-65; and Frances Anna Georgiana (1817-1910), wife of the 9th Lord Kinnaird.14PROB 11/2215/597; J. Ponsonby, The Ponsonby Family (1929), 180-1.