FELLOWES, Henry Arthur Wallop (1799-1847), of Hurstbourne Park, Hants and 41 Bryanston Square, London

Fellowes was the son and heir of Newton Fellowes, the veteran Whig MP for Andover, 1802-20, and Devon North, 1832-37, who had wrestled the succession to the earldom of Portsmouth from his older brother by having him declared insane and his marriage annulled in 1823, disinheriting any putative heirs.1HP Commons, 1790-1820, iii. 734. He was also a cousin of the leading Whig backbencher Lord Ebrington, his father’s brother-in-law and colleague for Devon. Before the Reform Act the family’s Hurstbourne Park estates had given them significant influence at Andover, where Newton Fellowes was nominally steward of the corporation. In 1831, following the corporation’s decision to back the Grey ministry’s reform bill and the retirement of the sitting Tory members, Fellowes had been returned unopposed as a reformer.2HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 94-5. His re-election following the passage of reform appears to have passed off without comment.

Fellowes, who seems to have been plagued by poor health, remained a lax and silent attender in his final parliament.3A contemporary analysis of 58 key divisions credits him with 10 votes in 1833 and 7 in 1834: R. Gooch, The Book of the Reformed Parliament (1834), 10-11, 32-33. When present he invariably followed his father into the lobbies, giving general support to the Whig ministry on major issues but also siding with the radicals for economy, retrenchment and reform. He was in the radically-inclined minorities for pension and sinecure reductions, 14 Feb. 1833, currency reform, 24 Apr., the secret ballot, 25 Apr., and shorter parliaments, 23 July 1833, 15 May 1834. He also voted for repeal of the malt tax, 27 Feb. 1834 and the admission of Dissenters to universities, 17 Apr. 1834.

At the 1835 general election Fellowes quietly retired from Andover, where the local Tories were determined to recapture one of the seats.4Hampshire Telegraph, 15 Dec. 1834. He remained active in his locality, serving on the Hampshire bench and as president of the North Hampshire Agricultural Society in the 1840s.5Hampshire Advertiser, 7 Apr. 1838, 30 May 1846; Hampshire Telegraph, 21 Sept. 1844. He was also present at a county meeting called by the reformers in Devon, where his father’s Eggesford estates lay, sparked by the bedchamber crisis in 1839.6Morning Chronicle, 10 June 1839. In 1845 he joined the provisional committee of the London, Salisbury and Yeovil Junction Railway.7The Standard, 21 Aug. 1845.

Fellowes, who is conspicuously absent from a twentieth-century history of his family, died unmarried and intestate at Eggesford in February 1847, ‘after a long and lingering illness’.8E. H. Fellowes, The Family and Descendants of William Fellowes of Eggesford (1910); Gent. Mag. (1847), i. 450; The Times, 18 Feb. 1847; Morning Post, 9 Mar. 1847. His father, who succeeded as 4th earl of Portsmouth in 1853, did not ‘take upon himself’ the administration of his personal estate, valued at £6,000. This eventually passed to Fellowes’ half-brother Isaac Newton Fellowes, following his succession as 5th earl in 1854.9PROB 6/230/197.