ROBARTS, Abraham (1779-1858), of 15 Lombard Street and 26 Hill Street, Berkeley Square, London and Roehampton, Surr.

Robarts continued to sit for the venal borough of Maidstone aided by a long purse. The eldest of three MP sons of the banker Abraham Robarts MP, from whom he had inherited over £250,000 and a country estate in 1816, all his brothers had predeceased him by 1829, leaving him further substantial bequests. His vast fortune included banking partnerships in Robarts, Curtis and Co. in the city and Lechmere’s at Worcester, East India interests and slave holdings in Dominica, for which he and his co-proprietors secured state compensation of £4,338 in 1836.1HP Commons, 1820-32, vi. 974-5; N. Draper, The Price of Emancipation (2010), 251; data from Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/.

As a nephew of the former Commons’ opposition leader George Tierney, Robarts’s Whig credentials ought to have been impeccable. As late as 1837, however, a contemporary guide was still referring to his having ‘voted against Catholic emancipation’, a wayward diversion of 1821.2Dod’s Parl. Comp. (1837), 157; HP Commons, 1820-32, vi. 975. In a similarly qualified vein the Whig diarist Greville commented in 1835 that he was:

A reformer, and supports all Whig and reforming governments; but he does so ... from fear. What he most dreads is collision, and most desires is quiet, and he thinks non-resistance the best way.3Greville Mems. iii. 184.

Returned at the head of the poll for Maistone in 1832, Robarts continued to give steady but silent support to the Whigs on most major issues, though he was in the radical minority for abolition of military flogging, 2 Apr. 1833, and in the majority against ministers for repeal of the malt duty, 26 Apr. 1833. (He had brought up a constituency petition for repeal of the house and window tax and duties on malt, hops and soap, 17 Apr. 1833.)4The Times, 18 Apr. 1833. He was appointed to committees on agriculture, 3 May 1833, and the bankrupt estates bill, 27 Feb. 1834, and presented further Maidstone petitions against the ministry’s poor law amendment bill, 13 June 1834, and their church rates bill, 27 June 1834.

At the 1835 general election Robarts was returned in second place after a severe contest, in which he claimed to be ‘devoted to reform’.5Parliamentary Test Book (1835), 137. He voted against Peel’s shortlived ministry on the speakership, 19 Feb., the address, 26 Feb., and Irish Church appropriation, 2 Apr. 1835, and opposed Chandos’s motion for repeal of the malt tax, 10 Mar. 1835. He was in the majorities for a charter for the University of London, 26 Mar. 1835, and against Cayley’s motion for a silver standard (as a pair), 1 June 1835. Thereafter he gave general support to the reappointed Melbourne ministry in the lobbies, including on the Irish church and Irish municipal reform, and divided with the chancellor of exchequer for an inquiry into joint stock banks, 6 Feb. 1837. Commenting on the ‘incautious manner in which these new establishments’ had ‘poured their notes into circulation’ and the ensuing ‘commercial panic’, 11 Apr. 1837, the diarist Thomas Raikes recalled receiving

a letter from an old friend, Robarts, one of the greatest bankers in London, who says that the anxiety he has felt for the last three or four months exceeds everything he had ever known in commercial affairs.6Journal of Thomas Raikes, iii. 156-7.

It has been suggested that at the 1837 general election Robarts withdrew from another contest at Maidstone because he was ‘in trouble financially and physically’.7J. A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs (1992), 118. His public explanation was that his canvass showed that the Conservative candidates, among them the young Benjamin Disraeli, had ‘secured at least two-thirds of the constituency’.8Standard, 18 July 1837. He was well enough financially and physically to contest two vacancies at Maidstone the following year, and pursue two petitions against the return of his Conservative opponent for corrupt practices, the first successfully, 6 June 1838. His second petition, which followed his defeat at the last by-election, was rejected as ‘vexatious’ by the election committee, 19 July 1838.9The Times, 27 Mar.; Morning Post, 28 Mar. 1838; CJ, xciii. 93, 450, 578, 662, 726.

Out of Parliament Robarts continued his career in banking, becoming chairman of the committee of bankers by the time of his death.10The Times, 4 Apr. 1858. He also indulged his passion for old masters, mainly Dutch, establishing a fine collection which included works by Cuyp, Rubens, Jan Steen, and Van Dyck.11G. Waagen, Galleries and Cabinets of Art (1857), 158-65. He died after a short illness in April 1858, an obituary noting that ‘no member of the financial world ever held a higher position or was more universally esteemed’. His two eldest sons Abraham George and Henry Christopher inherited the bulk of his estate, proved under £300,000, 23 Apr. 1848, and continued as partners in his city bank. As Robarts, Lubbock and Co. it became one of the last private houses before amalgamating with Coutts and Co. in 1914.12The Times, 5 Apr. 1858; Oxford DNB.