HAMILTON, Sir John James, 2nd bt. (1802-1876), of Woodbrook, co. Tyrone and Gloucester Place, Portman Square, London

Remembered for ‘his elegance of speech and dignity of character, which he carried with the grace of a true aristocrat, combined with the soft feelings of a perfect old English gentleman’, Hamilton’s service as Conservative MP for the notoriously venal borough of Sudbury owed its brevity not to his use of corrupt practices, but his determination to resist them.2Carmarthen Journal, cited in Freeman’s Journal, 20 Jan. 1876. This honourable stance cost him his only chance to sit at Westminster, but although his later attempts to secure a return at Marylebone failed, he remained a significant presence in the local affairs of that parish for several decades.

Born in Londonderry, Ireland, Hamilton was the only son of Sir John Hamilton (1755-1835), whose distinguished army career, during which he rose to the rank of lieutenant-general, had earned him a baronetcy in 1814.3H.M. Chichester, rev. P.B. Boyden, ‘Hamilton, Sir John’, Oxf. DNB [www.oxforddnb.com]. Hamilton followed his father into the army, and ‘served for a long period in America and the colonies’, most notably as aide-de-camp to Sir James Kempt, governor-in-chief of British North America, 1828-30.4The Standard, 30 Dec. 1835; Morning Post, 6 Jan. 1830; P. Burroughs, ‘Kempt, Sir James’, Oxf. DNB [www.oxforddnb.com]. He married in 1834, the same year in which he became a major (by purchase), and succeeded as second baronet on his father’s death in 1835.5London Gazette, 28 Nov. 1834. The following year the king granted him a coat of arms, in recognition of his father’s lengthy military service.6London Gazette, 3 May 1836.

Offering for Sudbury in 1837, Hamilton cited his loyalty to the crown and the established Church, and his wish to maintain the rights and privileges of freemen (who made up the bulk of Sudbury’s electors), to preserve liberty of conscience, and improve existing institutions ‘with a hearty disposition to preserve them’.7Ipswich Journal, 22 July 1837. After costly and ‘unrestrained’ bribery at the 1835 general election8Bury & Norwich Post, 2 Aug. 1837., both parties were determined to resist expectations of similar practices, and Hamilton at the nomination insisted that the electors must choose between ‘gold and freedom’. Drawing on his military experience, he corrected remarks made by one of the Liberal candidates, William Smith, regarding courts martial, but, foreshadowing his later interests, declared that he shared Smith’s hostility to significant aspects of the new poor law, notably the separation of man and wife in the workhouse, and the treatment of poverty as a felony.9Essex Standard, 28 July 1837. He and his fellow Conservative, Sir Edward Barnes, won the show of hands, but Hamilton and the second Liberal candidate, Thomas Turton, subsequently agreed to retire, thus hoping to spare their colleagues the expense of a contest. Having pledged that should either of them be elected, they would resign, they left the town. This compact ‘vexed and mortified’ many of Sudbury’s venal voters, and the poll went ahead nonetheless, returning Hamilton in second place behind Barnes.10Essex Standard, 28 July 1837; Bury & Norwich Post, 2 Aug. 1837. However, in keeping with his pledge, he resigned his seat, 12 Dec. 1837, and he does not appear to have voted in any divisions prior to that date.11The Times, 12 Dec. 1837.

Following this political disappointment, Hamilton returned to his military career, and in January 1838 went to Canada as one of the newly appointed field officers charged with organising the militia during the Canadian rebellion.12The Standard, 12 Jan. 1838. That August he was appointed as brigade major on the staff of Sir John Colborne, commander of the forces in Canada, but resigned the position in November and returned to England.13The Standard, 23 Aug. 1838; Essex Standard, 9 Nov. 1838. He does not appear to have resumed active service thereafter, although it was not until 1852 that he sold his commission and retired.14London Gazette, 7 May 1852. After his return from Canada he turned to politics again, and in 1840 canvassed as a Conservative in Londonderry city.15Morning Post, 8 July 1840. However, he quit the field shortly before the general election the following year – for which he was said to be ‘out of favour’ for allowing the Liberal incumbent to walk over16Bradford Observer, 24 June 1841. – and instead accepted a requisition to offer at Marylebone, where he had been resident for almost 30 years.17The Times, 7 June 1841; Morning Post, 11 June 1841. His protests about ‘his want of eloquence’ appear to have been false modesty, for his electioneering speeches were described as ‘very lucid’.18Morning Post, 11 June 1841. A staunch defender of established institutions, he declared himself ‘averse to rash innovation’. The central plank of his campaign was hostility to the poor law, many clauses of which were ‘contrary to God’s and nature’s law’ and ‘should always meet with his unremitting, untiring, unswerving opposition’.19The Times, 10, 12 June 1841. The Times noted his ‘frank and soldierly bearing’ on polling day, when he finished in fourth place behind a fellow Conservative.20The Times, 2 July 1841.

Hamilton remained active in Marylebone’s politics after this defeat, taking a particular interest in the affairs of the vestry and the administration of the poor law.21Poor relief in Marylebone was administered by an Incorporation of the Poor. At a public meeting in 1846 he moved that Marylebone should not be united to other parishes for poor law purposes, given its size, and protested that proposals to create district asylums were the thin end of the wedge and would mark an end to local self-government.22The Times, 27 Jan. 1846. (Ironically Hamilton was later a well-regarded member of the Metropolitan Asylums Board.) The following year he represented Marylebone at a metropolitan conference on the health of towns bill, which he described as ‘a most tyrannical invasion on popular rights’.23Morning Chronicle, 12 Apr. 1847. For Hamilton’s involvement with vestry and poor law politics during this period, see also The Times, 17 Apr. 1843; The Era, 15 Nov. 1846; Morning Post, 13 Feb. 1847. At the last minute he was persuaded to offer again as the lone Conservative candidate at Marylebone in 1847, when the Marylebone Constitutional Association subscribed for his expenses.24The Times, 30 July 1847; Daily News, 21 July 1847. With the Catholic William Shee in the field as a third Liberal candidate, Hamilton urged all Protestants ‘to sink their differences’ and ‘not allow the Catholic religion to reign supreme’. He also emphasised his support for local self-government; education based on the Bible; modification of the game laws; repeal of the window tax; abolition of the death penalty (save in cases of murder or ‘the violation of female chastity’); and an Irish poor law which would put the burden on Irish landlords, of which he was one, rather than English ratepayers.25Morning Post, 21 July 1847; Morning Post, 24 July 1847; Daily News, 26 July 1847. He found it difficult to get a hearing at the nomination, and polled third, well short of the victorious Liberals, but ahead of Shee and a Chartist.26Daily News, 30 July 1847. Having announced that he would not contest Marylebone again, he declined approaches in 1854 and 1865, noting on the latter occasion that a few years previously he had turned down the opportunity to offer unopposed at Monmouth.27The Times, 2 Aug. 1847; Morning Post, 14 Dec. 1854; Pall Mall Gazette, 24 Apr. 1865. Nonetheless he remained involved with the Marylebone Conservatives’ efforts to secure a parliamentary seat, proposing their candidate at the 1861 by-election and attending victory celebrations in 1874.28The Times, 18 Apr. 1861; The Standard, 14 May 1874.

Hamilton and his wife possessed considerable property in Pembrokeshire, Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire, some of which had been inherited from Lady Hamilton’s father, and Hamilton was considered as a candidate for Carmarthenshire in 1857.29http://www.archiveswales.org.uk/anw/get_collection.php?inst_id=32&coll_id=12338&expand=; The Standard, 8 June 1857. He proposed one of the Conservative candidates for that county at the nomination in 1868.30The Times, 24 Nov. 1868. He served as a local JP and was president of the Carmarthen Bay branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, as well as supporting the local volunteer movement.31The Standard, 25 Nov. 1869; The Life-Boat (1868), vi. 121; Western Mail, 30 July 1870. In 1870 he was part of a Welsh deputation to Gladstone on the education question, at which he asserted that in his local Welsh parish Dissenters sent their children to Anglican schools without objection.32Cheshire Observer, 14 May 1870. Hamilton also maintained a presence on his Irish estates in county Tyrone, and when he attended a ploughing match at Woodbrook in 1871, one of those present asserted that ‘instead of lurking behind a ditch to shoot their landlord there was not one of the tenants who would not expose themselves in protecting him’.33Belfast News-Letter, 20 Mar. 1871.

It was, however, London politics, particularly in Marylebone, which continued to occupy the bulk of his attention. He chaired public meetings on subjects ranging from the abolition of income tax in 1857 to the formation of a volunteer rifle corps in 1859, and was a keen supporter of the latter, suggesting on one occasion that no lady should allow herself to be courted by a gentleman who was not a member.34Morning Chronicle, 2 Feb. 1857; Morning Chronicle, 28 June 1859; The Standard, 13 Jan. 1865. He served as crown churchwarden for Marylebone, and instigated improvements in the local cemetery in 1857.35Morning Chronicle, 28 Jan. 1857. He was also active as a guardian of the poor, in which role he demonstrated his staunch Anglicanism, declaring upon the refusal of an application to celebrate mass in the workhouse in 1848 that ‘he would as soon see [a] mad bull enter [the] workhouse as a Roman Catholic Priest’.36Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 2 Dec. 1848. On Hamilton’s continued opposition to the holding of Catholic services in the workhouse, see The Standard, 21 Mar. 1870. He remained a committed supporter of local self-government in the administration of the poor law, raising concerns with regard to the 1867 Metropolitan Poor Bill, and asserting in 1869 that it was not the poor law board but local guardians who ‘were the best judges as to what was necessary for the parish’.37The Standard, 21 Feb. 1867, 25 Dec. 1869. He was involved with a wide variety of other local institutions from the Marylebone savings bank to Anglican schools, and was remembered by his colleagues on the Metropolitan Asylums Board for ‘his genial manner and kindly feeling towards every one with whom he was associated’.38The Standard, 7 Feb. 1851, 14 May 1853; Morning Post, 17 Jan. 1876.

In 1870 Hamilton survived a serious mishap when he accidentally drank a draught of laudanum at his Welsh residence, Plas Llanstephan, Carmarthenshire.39Morning Post, 30 Sept. 1870. He died in 1872 from bronchitis at his London home, 6 Portman Square.40Pall Mall Gazette, 13 Jan. 1876. As he had no children, the baronetcy became extinct upon his death. He left an estate valued at under £70,000. Among his bequests were donations totalling £1,200 to schools, almshouses and other charities in Marylebone, as well as legacies for his sister, nieces, nephews and servants, and for the labourers employed at Llanstephan. His estate at Woodbrook, county Tyrone, was left for life to his wife, and then to his nephew, Sheffield Grace, of Knole House, Sussex, who in 1880 assumed the name of Hamilton in addition to his own. His wife, who died in 1892, received a life interest in the rest of his property, together with £12,000, and a mortgage for £3,000.41Freeman’s Journal, 25 Feb. 1876; London Gazette, 5 Mar. 1880; The Standard, 19 Mar. 1892. Another of his nephews, Hamilton Noel Hoare, also took the additional name of Hamilton by royal licence in 1884: Walford’s County Families (1904), 449.