WILMOT, Sir John Eardley Eardley (1783-1847), of Berkswell Hall, nr. Coventry, Warws.

A bête noire of the radical election agent Joseph Parkes, who described him as ‘a nasty betwixt & between semi-Whig, semi-Tory’, Wilmot’s opinions retained a shade of ambiguity, despite his support for Peel, Lord Stanley and Sir James Graham, as he was less interested in the political and religious questions which animated partisans than humanitarian and legal issues.1Joseph Parkes to Lord Durham, 18 Jan. 1835, Lambton MSS. Wilmot owed his baronetcy, granted in 1821, to his family’s legal eminence, particularly that of his grandfather Sir John Eardley Wilmot (d. 1792), who had been lord chief justice of the court of common pleas, and had inherited Berkswell Hall, near Coventry.2Burke’s peerage (1949), 2144. Wilmot’s father, John Eardley Wilmot (1750-1815), was a barrister and sat for Tiverton, 1776-84, and Coventry, 1784-96.3Ibid.; ‘Wilmot, John’, HP Commons, 1754-1790, iii. 645-6; ibid., 1790-1820, v. 598-9. The lack of a significant rent roll combined with the cost of raising a large family meant that Wilmot was anxious to boost his frail finances by finding a position, and he wrote the first of many place-hunting letters to Robert Peel, then home secretary, in November 1825.4Sir John Eardley Wilmot to Robert Peel, 8 Nov. 1825, Add. 40382, f. 321. However, Wilmot’s public career was also motivated by a desire to escape from an unhappy private life. As he later confided in Peel, 12 Sept. 1841:

In consequence of the ill-heath & religious turn of one of my family, my domestic comfort & family privacy has been destroyed; and it was this change in my home, which induced me originally to go into Parliament and live so much in London. I went to Parl[iamen]t as an occupation.5Wilmot to Peel, 12 Sept. 1841, Add. 40486, f. 273.

Hitherto regarded as a Tory, Wilmot offered as a Reformer for Warwickshire at the 1831 general election, but his unpopularity forced a swift retirement from the contest.6‘Warwickshire’, HP Commons, 1820-1832, iii. 120-9 (at 126-7). In 1832, he stood for the new constituency of North Warwickshire and was elected in first place with the split votes of the Tory candidate, who was also returned, which left a second Reformer in third place. Dod listed Wilmot as pledged to support the ballot and shorter parliaments, but, according to the press, this was because he had allowed himself to be ‘catechised by that upstart attorney, Mr. Joe Parkes’ at the nomination.7Dod’s parliamentary companion (1833), 176; Morning Post, 26 Dec. 1832. Wilmot endorsed the Irish coercion and church temporalities bills, but although he professed his backing for Grey’s government, 26 Apr. 1833, he said that unless they repealed malt duty ‘it was not his intention to continue that support’.8Hansard, 26 Apr. 1833, vol. 17, c. 698. At the 1835 general election, Wilmot ‘buttered Peel at the nomination’, and again profited from the splits of both parties to top the poll, being returned with a Conservative, leading one newspaper to describe him as ‘a trimmer and not to be relied upon’.9Parkes to Lord Durham, 18 Jan. 1835, Lambton MSS; The Examiner, 8 Feb. 1835. Although not listed by Stanley as a member of the ‘Derby dilly’, Wilmot identified himself with that faction in his speech on the address, 27 Feb. 1835, promising conditional support for Peel, providing he remained committed to reforming measures.10Hansard, 27 Feb. 1835, vol. 126, cc. 438-9. R. Stewart, The foundation of the Conservative party (1978), 378 describes Wilmot as a Reformer who voted for Manners Sutton for the Speakership in 1835, rather than a member of the ‘dilly’. He later told Peel that he had become a ‘humble supporter, ever since, with Ld. Stanley & Sir J. Graham, I was convinced, that your opponents were the enemies of the Constitution’.11Wilmot to Peel, 22 Mar. 1842, Add. 40505, f. 31.

At the 1837 general election, Wilmot was opposed by two Reformers who condemned his ‘slippery policy and shifty voting’, but with the support of Conservatives he was re-elected in second place.12The Standard, 28 July 1837. An infuriated Parkes described the him as an ‘impostor’ and ‘the Varlet’, as well as ‘an ugly customer – [who] takes all pledges – slavery, flogging, every sort of humbug, except politics’.13Parkes to Edward John Stanley, 5, 13 Aug. 1837, MS Kingsland. Amid the invective, the last criticism accurately identified Wilmot as not much of a partisan, which explains the complaint of local Conservatives that he had ‘often either been absent from the house, or has declined to vote against the ministry, or has actually voted for some of their infamous measures’.14‘A voter for North Warwickshire’: The Times, 14 Aug. 1837.

Instead, humanitarian issues, especially penal policy and slavery, were Wilmot’s uppermost concerns. As chairman of the Warwickshire quarter sessions Wilmot had become alarmed by the problem of juvenile offenders in the mid-1820s, writing a memorandum to Peel and publishing a pamphlet on the issue.15Wilmot to Peel, 17 Oct. 1824, Add. 40369, f. 86; Wilmot, ‘Memorandum on juvenile delinquency’, 26 Oct. 1824, ibid., ff. 173-82; Sir J.E. Wilmot, Letter to the magistrates on the increase in crime (1827). Wilmot believed that the increase in crime was attributable to the incarceration of juveniles with ‘the more aged & hardened offenders’.16Wilmot, ‘Memorandum’, 26 Oct. 1824, Add. 40369, f. 175. This meant that they ‘came out worse than they went in; and thus the great end of punishment, the prevention of crime … was signally defeated’.17Hansard, 16 Apr. 1833, vol. 17, c. 148. His solution was to give magistrates the power to summarily try and punish juveniles, who would thus be kept out of prison. He introduced bills to this effect in 1833, 1837 and 1840, the last of which reached the Lords before being discharged.18Hansard, 16 Apr. 1833, vol. 17, cc. 146-9; 27 May 1840, vol. 54, cc. 656-61; CJ, lxxxviii. 276, 291; ibid., xcii. 274, 277, 384; ibid., xcv. 62, 118-19, 261, 294, 376-7, 532; LJ, lxxii. 596; PP 1837 (224), ii. 695-9; 1840 (48), ii. 687-92; 1840 (344), ii. 699-704. Despite Wilmot’s good intentions, critics rightly protested out that the measure would give magistrates the power to whip juveniles with few checks or the sanction of a jury.19Peel to Wilmot, 10 Jan. 1825, Add. 40369, ff. 183-4; Hansard, 27 May 1840, vol. 54, cc. 656-61.

Wilmot’s staunch hostility to slavery was first expressed through his opposition to the Grey government’s proposed £20 million compensation to West Indian plantation owners, 30, 31 July 1833.20Hansard, 30, 31 July 1833, vol. 20, cc. 129-30, 196-7, 202, 205-6, 220. Wilmot returned to the issue when he successfully moved for the immediate cessation of slave apprenticeships, 22 May 1838, which he described as ‘a new species of slavery under the mask of liberty’.21Hansard, 22 May 1838, vol. 43, c. 89. Although his speech impressively dismantled the justifications for the apprenticeships, Wilmot’s victory by three votes in a thin House, was because ‘nobody expected an early division, and people were scattered all over town’.22Greville memoirs (1888), iv. 98; Hansard, 22 May 1838, vol. 43, cc. 87-92, 123-6. In particular, Wilmot ridiculed the idea that the apprenticeships were necessary to ‘train’ slaves for liberty, pointing out that if a slave had the money he could purchase his freedom immediately. He concluded that ‘money, and that alone, was the object of the slave-owner’: ibid., 92. Anxious that the vote would cause uncertainty and unrest in the West Indies, Lord John Russell repeatedly asked Wilmot whether he intended to act on his resolution, and received a characteristically ambiguous reply.23Hansard, 24, 25 May 1838, vol. 43, c. 149, 279-80. The baronet thought that the resolution would ‘have a stronger, more powerful, and more successful effect towards inducing slave-owners’ to end apprenticeships voluntarily than a compulsory bill, but he reserved the right to introduce such a measure.24Hansard, 25 May 1838, vol. 43, cc. 279-80. This did not satisfy the government, who successfully carried a motion reversing Wilmot’s resolution, 28 May 1838.25Hansard, 28 May 1838, vol. 43, cc. 430-4. Greville sniped that Wilmot’s ‘only object was to create a difficulty, whatever might be the consequences, and to exhibit himself … as the successful asserter of a principle’.26Greville memoirs, iv. 99. However, the baronet reiterated his criticism of the West Indian planters in supporting the Jamaica government bill, 6 May 1839, but opposed the equalisation of foreign and colonial sugar duties, 14 May 1841, which he believed would encourage the importation of slave-grown sugar.27Hansard, 6 May 1839, vol. 47, cc. 886-7; 14 May 1841, vol. 58, cc. 445-6. The following year Wilmot was a member of the select committee investigating the West Indian colonies, especially the economic effects of abolition.28PP 1842 (479), xiii. 2-5.

Utilising his considerable experience as a magistrate, after serving on an 1834 select committee Wilmot in 1836 unsuccessfully introduced a bill, with Joseph Hume, to establish councils elected by county ratepayers to levy, collect and spend county rates.29PP 1834 (542), xiv. 2; 1836 (508), iii. 117-18; CJ, xci. 815; Hansard, 21 June 1836, vol. 34, cc. 693-5. The following year Wilmot’s bill permitting magistrates to refer uncertain points of law to a judge was passed by the Commons, but not the Lords.30PP 1837 (166), iii. 300; 1837 (213), iii. 304; CJ, xcii. 28, 66, 227, 270, 307; LJ, lxix. 402. Wilmot had more success with his bill to enable grammar schools to broaden their curricula, which received Royal Assent on 7 August 1840.31PP 1840 (60), ii. 581-600; 1840 (383), ii. 601-20; CJ, xcv. 59, 285, 435, 488, 617, 628; 3 & 4 Vict., c. 77. His position on other issues was often distinctive. In the debates on the 1834 poor law amendment bill, he suggested that central government should directly maintain the poor: ‘local taxation would then entirely cease, and the poor would be supported out of the general taxation of the country’.32Hansard, 26 May 1834, vol. 23, c. 1335. A protectionist, Wilmot supported the restoration of the prohibition on foreign ribands to alleviate distress among the ribbon weavers of Coventry, 23 May 1834.33Hansard, 23 May 1834, vol. 23, c. 1273-4. Yet in 1839 he made an original proposal for revising the corn laws, advocating an ‘annual fixed duty, to be settled by the first meeting of every session of Parliament’, based on the average prices of corn in Britain and Europe for the previous year, with a duty set at ‘the difference between the two prices’. 34Derby Mercury, 20 Feb. 1839. He, however, opposed the Whigs’ proposed fixed duty on corn at the 1841 general election, when he was returned unopposed.35The Times, 7 July 1841.

With the Conservatives now in office, Wilmot anxiously solicited a public appointment from Peel, and was one of a number of MPs behind an abortive attempt to block the re-election of Shaw Lefevre as Speaker in August 1841.36N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel (1972), 267; Wilmot to Peel, 8 Aug. 1841, Add. 40486, ff. 59-60. He also sought appointment to the vacant position of chairman of ways and means in September 1841, pressing his claims upon the prime minister, Stanley and Graham, and emphasising his ‘habits of business, my constant attendance in Parliament, & my accomplishments with law’ as qualifications.37Ibid., f. 60; see also copy of letter to Graham, 30 Aug. 1841 and Wilmot to Peel, 12 Sept. 1841, ibid., ff. 271, 273-4. Despite being passed over, Wilmot continued to lobby Peel, complaining that the ‘very large sum of money’ spent in three contested elections, had ‘reduced my means very considerably’, and also of feeling ‘totally unoccupied & isolated’ in London.38Wilmot to Peel, 27 Dec. 1842, Add. 40521, ff. 133-4. Unless he found some ‘active employment or prospect of it’, he threatened to retire from public life, ‘as I find not sufficient interest or occupation in parliamentary duties … to fill the void, which my domestic misfortune has created’.39Wilmot to Peel, 12 Sept. 1841, Add. 40486, f. 274; see also Wilmot to Peel, 22 Mar. 1842, Add. 40505, ff. 31-2.

Despite describing Wilmot as a ‘muddle-brained blockhead’, the colonial secretary, Stanley appointed the baronet, who resigned as an MP, as lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in February 1843.40Lord Stanley to Peel, Dec. 1842, Add. 40467, f. 315, qu. by I. Brand, The convict probation system: Van Diemen’s Land, 1839-1854 (1990), 24. The surprise appointment was criticised by the Times as a ‘bad one’, as Wilmot had ‘never performed any services but at home, and there only those which the country could easily have dispensed with’.41The Times, 1 Mar. 1843. It was Wilmot’s misfortune to be appointed to a job beyond his capabilities and given the probably impossible task of implementing the colonial office’s probation system, a new method of managing convicts, who would be grouped into supervised gangs and reformed. The expense of the new system, which central government did little to alleviate, was exacerbated by a local recession, which also meant that there was little demand for labour, a problem made even worse by the continuing arrival of thousands of convicts.42Brand, Convict probation system, 2; P. Chapman, ‘Wilmot, Sir John Eardley Eardley- (1783-1847)’, www.oxforddnb.com; L. Robson, A history of Tasmania (1983), i. 387-90, 413-19; M. Roe, ‘Eardley-Wilmot, Sir John Eardley (1783-1847)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, online edition; A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the colonies (1966), 295-301; J. West, The history of Tasmania, ed. A.G.L. Shaw (1971; first pub. 1852), 498-9. The consequences of the policy, with large groups of convicts terrorising the Tasmanian countryside, were glossed over by Wilmot in his despatches.43Ibid., 503-5; Brand, Convict probation system, 38. A further issue was the spread of the ‘nameless crime’, a euphemism for homosexuality, amongst the convicts.44Shaw, Convicts and colonies, 304; C. Gilchrist, ‘ “The victim of his own temerity”?: silence, scandal and the recall of Sir John Eardley-Wilmot’, Journal of Australian Studies, 28 (2005), 151-61, 250-4; K.E. Fitzpatrick, ‘Mr. Gladstone and the governor: the recall of Sir John Eardley-Wilmot from Van Diemen’s Land, 1846’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1 (1940-1), 31-45 (at 36-8). The embattled Wilmot’s attempts to cut spending were frustrated by the resignation of six members of the colony’s Legislative Council, who quit in protest at the cost of the probation system in October 1845.45Shaw, Convicts and colonies, 305-7. By this stage, rumours regarding Wilmot’s private life were being eagerly fed to William Gladstone, the new colonial secretary, by the governor’s many enemies, including Bishop Nixon, with whom he had clashed over the relative authority of church and state in the colony.46R. Border, Church and state in Australia, 1788-1872 (1962), 114-15, 126-39; Brand, Convict probation system, 32-3; Fitzpatrick, ‘Mr. Gladstone and the governor’, 32-4; Robson, History, 393-410, 428-9.

Gladstone publicly recalled Wilmot, 30 Apr. 1846, citing administrative failings and inattentiveness to the convicts’ moral welfare, but really making the governor the scapegoat for a policy failure at the colonial office, as Gladstone’s Whig successor Henry Grey, 3rd earl Grey, recognised.47Ibid., 425-6, 432-3; Shaw, Convicts and colonies, 308-9; Earl Grey, The colonial policy of Lord John Russell’s administration (1853), ii. 6-10. Gladstone also wrote a private letter to Wilmot, explaining that he could not offer him reappointment to another governorship, as ‘certain rumours have reached me, from a variety of quarters, relating to your private life’.48William Ewart Gladstone to Wilmot, 30 Apr. 1846, Add. 44364, f. 61; Brand, Convict probation system, 40-1. When Wilmot eventually received the news of his recall, he published the private letter, and challenged Gladstone to name his informants and the precise allegations.49Chapman, ‘Wilmot’. However, by the time Gladstone wrote a grudging half-apology, 9 Mar. 1847, Wilmot had died of a ‘complete exhaustion of the frame’ in the colony, where he was buried, with a Gothic mausoleum in his honour erected in 1850.50Gladstone to Wilmot, 9 Mar. 1847, Add. 44364, f. 123; The Times, 3 June 1847. A posthumous parliamentary debate, 7 June 1847, cleared Wilmot’s private character, but did not question the decision to recall him.51Hansard, 7 June 1847, vol. 93, cc. 189-229. Wilmot was succeeded as 2nd baronet by his eldest son from his first marriage, Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot (1810-92), Conservative MP for South Warwickshire, 1874-85.52Burke’s peerage (1949), 2144; M. Stenton, Who’s who of British MPs (1976), i. 413.