VILLIERS, Frederick (1801-1872), of 11 Paper Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn, London; later of Bury Street, St. James’s Square, London.

Villiers, a Liberal who was unseated twice on petition, had a personal history as chequered as his parliamentary career. Born in Derbyshire, he and his brother Charles were the natural sons of Charles Meynell, whose father Hugo had sat in the Commons from 1762-80.2HP Commons, 1820-32, vii. 563. Villiers inherited £1,500 and a half-share in a trust fund on his father’s death in 1815, and was educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he was known as ‘Savage Villiers’ and befriended Edward Bulwer Lytton.3Ibid.; J.S. Mill to Harriet Mill, 24 Feb. 1855, in F.E. Mineka & D.N. Lindley (ed.), The later letters of John Stuart Mill 1849-1873 (1972), xiv. 342. According to one of Bulwer Lytton’s biographers, the ‘clever, fashionable and dissolute’ Villiers was a prime example ‘of the promising young man who came to nothing’. Although Bulwer Lytton later dismissed him as ‘rather a bore’, Villiers, with whom he visited brothels, ‘had been an early model for hero worship’.4L.G. Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton: the rise and fall of a Victorian man of letters (2003), 98. He admired his ‘cool self-possession’, notably during a duel on the sands at Boulogne in 1825, which followed a quarrel at a boarding-house with a British army officer, and where Bulwer Lytton served as his second.5Earl of Lytton, The life of Edward Bulwer First Lord Lytton (1913), i. 127-32. Villiers was the model for the dandyish hero of his novel Pelham, or, The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), but their friendship seems to have waned after a second trip to France together in 1836. In contrast with this favourable depiction, Bulwer Lytton’s estranged wife Rosina detested her husband’s ‘amiable Epicurean debauchee [sic] friend’, and cast him in her novel Cheveley (1839) as the failed diplomat and barrister Frederick Feedwell, with a reputation that ‘was bad, even among the bad’, and ‘a degree of affectation that left him with “nothing natural but his birth, his selfishness and his stutter”’. For good measure, she gave the character a French mistress and suggested that he also had homosexual leanings.6Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton, 98. Villiers did occasionally suffer from a stutter: Lytton, Life, i. 132-3.

Villiers had meanwhile been called to the bar, and entered Parliament as MP for Saltash on the interest of his friend William Russell in 1831. He generally supported the reform bill, although he was hostile to some elements. Its passage ended his first spell in the Commons when Saltash lost its representation.7HP Commons, 1820-32, vii. 563. Villiers sought to re-enter Parliament in 1835 at Canterbury, where he arrived accompanied by Bulwer Lytton’s older brother Henry, who had initially agreed to contest Canterbury, but then withdrawn in order to stand at Marylebone. In his stead he recommended Villiers as ‘a man of distinguished abilities – a tried man... a man beyond the pale of suspicion’.8Morning Chronicle, 1 Jan. 1835. Villiers, who made ‘a very clear and able speech’ at the hustings, declared his support for the ballot, triennial parliaments, Irish church appropriation and the admission of Dissenters to universities, and his opposition to unearned pensions and flogging in the military.9Morning Chronicle, 8 Jan. 1835. He secured the second seat behind another Liberal, Lord Albert Conyngham, but only two votes ahead of the lone Conservative, Stephen Lushington. At a dinner celebrating the return of his ‘intimate friend’ Joseph Hume for Middlesex,10The Times, 7 Jan. 1835. Villiers boasted that at Canterbury he had won ‘a victory over the influence of property and parsons. He had gone into the stronghold of Toryism and monopoly – he had completely taken the bull by the horns’, and succeeded despite ‘the utmost influence of the Cathedral and the Corporation’.11Morning Chronicle, 5 Feb. 1835.

Villiers divided with the Liberals on the speakership, 19 Feb. 1835, and the address, 26 Feb. 1835. He appears to have backed Chandos’s motion for repeal of the malt tax, 10 Mar. 1835. His only known contributions to debate in this period related to his Canterbury contest. Presenting a petition from the borough for the ballot and freedom of election, he claimed to have witnessed intimidation by clergymen, 18 Mar. 1835.12The Examiner, 22 Mar. 1835. He repeated these charges, 23 Mar. 1835, shortly before he was unseated on petition, 26 Mar. 1835. (Lushington had petitioned for a scrutiny, complaining that through ‘gross partiality’ in the conduct of the poll, votes for him had been disallowed on technical grounds, while similar votes for Villiers had been allowed.)13J.W. Knapp & E. Ombler, Cases of controverted elections in the twelfth Parliament of the United Kingdom (1837), 131-5. Although Villiers availed himself of the right to counter-petition, Lushington’s return was confirmed, 26 May 1835.

Villiers returned from the Continent to offer again at Canterbury in 1837, but finished bottom of the poll, while Conyngham retained his seat.14Morning Chronicle, 26 June 1837. Canterbury’s Reformers rewarded his services with a snuffbox, and the Morning Post mocked that even this lacklustre tribute may have required Villiers himself to make up the subscription list. Undaunted, Villiers pledged to offer again, but relations with the main body of the local Liberal party were rapidly deteriorating.15Morning Post, 31 Oct. 1837. He was said to have accused Conyngham of using bribery to secure his return16M.S. Millar, Disraeli’s disciple: the scandalous life of George Smythe (2006), 74., something which the impecunious Villiers had resisted.17M.H. Fisher, The inordinately strange life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo-Indian MP and chancery ‘lunatic’ (2010), 178. This may have been the reason that the two men fought a duel at Wormwood Scrubs in August 1838, where, after receiving Conyngham’s fire, Villiers fired into the air.18The Examiner, 12 Aug. 1838. (Fearing that Conyngham would kill Villiers, his second, Lord George Bentinck, had privately suggested to Villiers’s second, Edward Bulwer Lytton, that no ball should be put in, which Bulwer Lytton angrily refused. Recalling the event, Bentinck observed, ‘When I fight a duel, God defend me from having a poet as my second’.19Temple Bar (1886), lxxvi. 49.) Villiers subsequently complained publicly that his role in assisting Conyngham’s re-election in 1837 had gone unacknowledged, and that he had been snubbed by not being invited to a local Liberal dinner celebrating the coronation. In turn, Conyngham’s supporters denied his claims about the 1837 contest, and criticised him for reneging on his promise to subscribe £20 towards voter registration.20The Standard, 22 Aug. 1838.

Despite this ill-feeling, the tenacious Villiers proved difficult for Canterbury’s Liberals to drop. In September 1839 he received a requisition asking him to relinquish his claims on Canterbury’s Liberal voters, but refused to do so, having promised the Radical Association that he would offer again.21Morning Post, 9 Sept. 1839. When Conyngham’s resignation prompted a by-election in February 1841, Villiers was again ‘coolly thrown over by his professed supporters in the hope of disgusting him with Canterbury’. It was said that any Canterbury Whig ‘will reluctantly tell you that Mr. Villiers’s character, as far as he knows, is unimpeachable; his opinions of the first Liberal water; that he is a fluent and able public speaker, a good electioneerer’, and that their chief reason for rejecting him was that ‘Mr. Villiers is poor, and can’t spend money’.22Morning Post, 18 Jan. 1841. However, as Villiers nonetheless retained support from Radicals who thought him ‘ill-used’, the Whig candidate John Henniker Wilson had to negotiate with him. Villiers endorsed Wilson after receiving ‘the most satisfactory guarantee’ of mutual support at the next general election. Press reports also hinted that this ‘unblushing... electioneering bargain and sale’ had a financial side to it.23Morning Post, 23 Jan. 1841.

Villiers had acknowledged that Conservative victory at the by-election would scupper his future chances at Canterbury, and this proved to be the case. Instead at the 1841 general election he offered for Sudbury, where his running-mate David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre provided the funds necessary to win over the borough’s notoriously venal voters. He and Dyce Sombre won the show of hands, following which Villiers declared the key election question to be ‘cheap or dear bread – whether the produce of the labourers’ industry should be monopolised by the aristocracy or enjoyed by the labourer himself’, and proclaimed that he had come to free Sudbury from the Tories. However, having ‘fought many political battles’, he contended that ‘it was not the eloquence of the Candidate, but the voice of the people that won it’.24Essex Standard, 2 July 1841. Much of the £3,000 provided by Dyce Sombre was used in flagrant bribery – with Villiers’ brother Charles among those involved25Bury and Norwich Post, 1 May 1844. – and thus although both Liberals were victorious, they faced petitions against their return, 30 Aug. and 6 Sept. 1841.26Fisher, Dyce Sombre, 179-80. As well as alleging bribery, treating and intimidation, the petitions claimed that Villiers did not possess a legal property qualification. This charge was not, however, pursued, and it was on grounds of ‘great, systematic, and extensive bribery’ by their agents that Villiers and Dyce Sombre were unseated, 14 Apr. 1842, with the election committee recommending that Sudbury be disfranchised.27The Times, 9 Apr. 1842. Villiers had given his last vote in the Commons the previous day, when he divided with Russell in opposition to Peel’s income tax, and he had unfailingly voted with the Liberals during his brief spell as one of Sudbury’s last representatives, opposing the sliding scale on corn, 16 Feb. 1842, and supporting immediate cessation of the corn laws, 24 Feb. 1842.

Villiers apparently left England for the Continent a few days after the select committee on the Sudbury disfranchisement bill concluded its proceedings in 1843. He did not give evidence to that inquiry, nor to the commission which investigated Sudbury’s murky electoral history the following year. His brother Charles appeared before the latter body, but refused to answer most questions for fear of incriminating himself, although he revealed that Villiers had last been heard of in Milan.28PP 1844 [538], xviii. 252, 254. Villiers resumed residence in Italy around 1853, having found Madeira ‘too relaxing’ for his wife’s health, and John Stuart Mill, a past acquaintance, encountered him at Palermo in 1855, by which point he had added his father’s name to his own. Mill noted that ‘I did not like the man formerly, & I expect I should like him less now’, and disapproved of his disparaging remarks about the ignorance of local people.29J.S. Mill to Harriet Mill, 24 and 27 Feb. 1855, in Mineka & Lindley, Later letters of John Stuart Mill, xiv. 341-2, 353-4. In 1857 Villiers Meynell was appointed as one of the registrars of deeds for Middlesex by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, who had been part of the same set at Cambridge.30Sadleir, Bulwer and his wife, 208; Huddersfield Chronicle, 14 Sept. 1867. In his first year in the post he attended the office daily, but quickly found that ‘it was really only, what is called, high clerk’s work’, best left to his deputy, who found Villiers Meynell’s presence ‘an obstruction’.31PP 1870 [C.20], xviii. 679-80. Thus, ‘in weak health’, he continued to reside abroad – in the 1860s he was reportedly living at Genoa32HP Commons, 1820-32, vii. 564. – but nonetheless drew an annual income of over £2,000 from his post.33Huddersfield Chronicle, 14 Sept. 1867. He died in 1872 at Haywards Heath, Sussex, where he was buried at St. Wilfrid’s church, and left an estate of just under £9,000.34National Probate Calendar, Index of Wills and Administrations, 2 July 1872; http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/Details/Default.aspx?id=303023&mode=quick His widow Anna lived in London and Nice.35HP Commons, 1820-32, vii. 564.