GRAHAM, Lord Montague William (1807-1878), of Stoke Edith Park, Ledbury, Herefs.

Son of the duke of Montrose, Graham was a moderately active Conservative backbencher in the 1850s and 1860s, who was particularly vocal in debates on the army estimates. He made enough of an impression to be singled out by Disraeli in 1863 as one of the ‘new men’ who were suitable for junior office in the next Conservative government.1Benjamin Disraeli letters, ed. M.G. Wiebe et al, viii. 290.

Lord William Graham (as he was generally known) had been returned as a Tory for Dumbartonshire, where his father owned land, in 1830. The following year he was re-elected by five votes, but was attacked by a mob and had to hide and make his escape on a small boat down the Clyde. He retired at the 1832 general election. He received £10,000 on his father’s death in 1836, and an annuity of £800 on his mother’s death in 1847.2HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 361-2.

Graham re-entered the Commons after a twenty year absence in 1852, when he was elected in second place for Grantham, a constituency with which he appeared to have no prior connection. His opponents jibed that he was a stranger ‘fished up ... at the Carlton club’.3Lincolnshire Chronicle, 9 July 1852. Siding with the Derbyites in all the key divisions on free trade and the rival budgets of Gladstone and Disraeli in the 1852-3 session, Graham also backed Spooner’s motion for an inquiry into the Maynooth grant. He served on an 1853 inquiry into the National Gallery that recommended moving the institution from Trafalgar Square to a new site in Kensington Gardens. He spoke against admitting Jews to Parliament, 11 Mar. 1853, voicing the standard objection that it would weaken the connection between the state and the established Anglican Church and would be the thin end of the wedge. He also voted with his party leadership against the Aberdeen coalition’s financial measures to fund the Crimean War, 9, 15, 22 May 1854.

Most of Graham’s spoken interventions were short questions to ministers, or contributions to debates on the estimates. Shortly before the outbreak of the Crimean war, for example, he questioned Sidney Herbert, secretary at war, about the rations for troops, 13 Feb. 1854. He was in the majority that voted the Aberdeen coalition out of office, 29 Jan. 1855, and repeatedly questioned the new prime minister Lord Palmerston about weapons supplied to the Sardinian troops joining forces with Britain and France in the conflict, 29 Mar., 3, 7 May 1855.

In the same session, Graham questioned the wisdom of the government’s Scottish education bill, arguing that landlords ‘were willing to support the parish schools without the aid of a rate’, 22 June 1855. He also mooted, unsuccessfully, excluding Roman Catholics from serving on the proposed education board. He later suggested (correctly) that the bill was unlikely to be passed by the Lords, 2, 12 July 1855.4PP 1852-53 (867), xxxv. 2, 15.5The bill was ultimately dropped because it failed to appease the competing factions of Scottish Presbyterianism. Graham backed the censure motions on the prosecution of the war proposed by Disraeli and Roebuck, 25 May, 19 July 1855. In the next session, he asked about the response of officers and the army to the critical Crimean commission report, 8, 19, 21 Feb. 1856. After the peace treaty had been concluded, Graham asked Palmerston for clarification that the Russian fleet would not be allowed in the Black Sea under its terms, 2 May 1856. He also inquired whether the recent reinforcements of the Cape colony frontier meant that an outbreak of war was imminent, 15 July 1856, and for a statement regarding the repayment of money loaned to the Sardinian contingent by Britain to bankroll their participation in the late war, 27 Feb. 1857.

Graham voted in the majority in favour of Cobden’s Canton motion that defeated Palmerston’s government, 3 Mar. 1857. He was, however, beaten at the ensuing general election after his opponents smeared him as a crypto-Catholic. His rival declared that ‘he was sorry to find so much Popery intermixed’ with Graham’s religious opinions.6Lincolnshire Chronicle, 3 Apr. 1857. There seems little to justify such claims, which were probably electoral rhetoric.

Graham made a swift return to the House with his unopposed election for Herefordshire in December 1858. Although he did not own an acre in the county, the influence of his sister, Lady Emily Foley, of Stoke Edith, widow of Edward Thomas Foley, former Conservative MP for Herefordshire, 1832-41, secured his election. The Hereford Journal noted that:

The high esteem in which his lordship’s noble sister, the Lady Emily Foley, is so universally held, has been found to operate as a most potent influence, not only in the district immediately around this city, but in more distant parts of the county, where her ladyship’s deserved “popularity” has stood her brother in good stead.7Hereford Journal, 8 Dec. 1858.

In his nomination speech, Graham informed electors that ‘I don’t think I can tell you how often it has been said to me, “well sir, if you be as good a man as Lady Foley is a lady you will make us a good member”’. Noting how party distinctions were ‘now very much softened down’, Graham was willing to give Palmerston some credit for the conclusion of the war. But the premier’s truckling to Napoleon III over the conspiracy to murder bill had ‘excited a universal feeling of shame in the country’. Having previously opposed electoral reform, Graham now declared that he was willing to support an extension of the franchise that allowed ‘an honest, industrious working man’ the vote, possibly through savings banks qualifications.8Hereford Journal, 22 Dec. 1858.

Back in the Commons, Graham led the opposition to Locke King’s real estate intestacy bill, 2 Mar. 1859, which he derided as a ‘crochet’. While the great landowners would be unaffected, small yeomen and freeholders who died intestate (without making a will) would have their land subdivided, even though it might have been held by one family for generations. The measure unwisely tampered with the system of primogeniture, he protested, which was ‘inherent in the character, customs and feelings of Englishmen’. Other MPs agreed, and backed Graham’s wrecking amendment by a large majority.

Graham defended the appointment of six magistrates, all Conservatives, at Hereford, 15 Apr. 1859. He supported the Derby government’s abortive reform bill and was re-elected without opposition at the ensuing election, when even the Liberal Hereford Times described his address as ‘statesmanlike’.9Hereford Times, 9 Apr. 1859. On the hustings, he quipped that Lord John Russell was ‘always trying to upset some administration or another’.10Hereford Journal, 4 May 1859. He later asked Russell, the new foreign secretary, about rumours of a gathering of the French fleet across the English Channel, 15 July 1859. In view of the 1857 Indian Mutiny, Graham inquired whether the military oath should be amended, 15 July 1859, 31 Jan. 1860.

In the 1860 budget debates, Graham drew attention to how farmers were assessed for income tax, which in his view, meant that they were unfairly burdened, 9 Mar. 1860. He later added that it was a ‘mere delusion’ to claim, as the chancellor of the exchequer, William Gladstone had, that the income tax was only being extended for a year, 23 Mar. 1860. The state of Europe meant that British military and naval expenditure must be maintained, if not increased, which made it impossible that income tax would be reduced from its current rate of 10d. in the pound, let alone abolished, he added. In the same session, Graham complained that the air in the National Gallery was ‘more deleterious, noxious, and pestiferous than that of a common privy’, and the Houses of Parliament were scarcely better, 4 May 1860. In the same session he served on the select committee that scrutinised the performance of the recently opened South Kensington Museum, later and better known as the Victoria and Albert Museum.11PP 1860 (504), xvi. 528.

Despite his hustings professions in favour of franchise extension, Graham regularly voted against the various electoral reform schemes proposed by Liberal backbenchers, such as Peter Locke King and Edward Baines, in the early 1860s. He repeatedly questioned the government about land sold at Portsmouth, Harwich and other admiralty ports in the recent past, 21 June 1860, 16 July 1860, 3 June 1862. The cost of repurchasing such land, to reinforce coastal defences, would be exorbitant, Graham argued, and he doubted whether the master of ordnance had possessed the power to authorise such sales. He also complained on a number of occasions that the cost of colonial military expenditure was ‘so scattered’ throughout the estimates that it was impossible for MPs to identify the total amount spent on each colony, 18 Apr., 7 June 1861, 6 Mar. 1862. Graham made no further contributions after the 1863 session, when three out of his four interventions were on the army estimates.

Graham retired at the 1865 general election. He strengthened his Herefordshire connections by marrying the sister of Charles Spencer Bateman Hanbury, another former MP for the county, in 1867. The union was childless, and Graham died from ‘congestion of the lungs’ in 1878.12Glasgow Herald, 25 June 1878. Probate of a personal estate sworn under £800 was awarded to his widow, and he was interred at Stoke Edith, his sister’s seat.13Birmingham Daily Post, 29 June 1878; National Probate Calendar, 26 July 1878.