ASTLEY, Sir Jacob (1797-1859), of Melton Constable, Norf. and 7 Cavendish Square, London

Resident at Melton Constable, Norfolk since 1236, the Astleys had long provided county representatives, among them Astley’s grandfather, Edward, and father, Jacob Henry. The latter, whilst professing his independence, had inclined firmly toward the Whigs.1Annual Register (1860), 432; Norfolk Lists from the Reformation to the Present Time (Norwich, 1837), 28-33; HP Commons, 1790-1820, iii. 285-6; iv. 90-1; A.E.D. Astley, Astley of Melton Constable 1236-1936 (London, 1936), unpaginated. Astley’s grandfather had married Rhoda, daughter of Francis Blake Delaval of Seaton Delaval, Northumberland in 1751. Following the death of Edward Hussey Delaval without issue, 14 Aug. 1814, this estate was inherited by Astley’s father: T. Moule, The English Counties Delineated (1837), ii. 368; HP Commons, 1790-1820, iv. 90. Following his father’s death in 1817, Astley, who had not yet come of age, announced his own intentions to stand in due course.2The Times, 6 May 1817. He established himself as a prominent individual in the county, serving as sheriff in 1821.With estates in Norfolk and Northumberland, Astley was concerned particularly with agricultural affairs, petitioning the Commons for remedial measures to combat distress, 7 Feb. 1822.3CJ, lxxvii. 8. Although he was rumoured to be starting as a candidate for Norfolk in 1826, Astley instead offered at Seaford, but only polled third.4The Times, 25 May 1826, 2 June 1826. A ‘small man whose stature and good looks earned him the soubriquet of the “pocket Adonis” but [whose] looks and size only served to accentuate a dynamic personality’, in 1827 Astley became embroiled in an adultery case.5Astley, Astley of Melton Constable; PP 1831-32 (199), xxiv. 384; Fairburn’s edition of the trial between Sir Jacob Astley, Bart. plaintiff, and Thomas Garth, defendant…(London, 1827). Seeking compensation from one Captain Garth for eloping with his wife, lurid counter-allegations were levelled at Astley himself.6The Times, 20 Feb. 1827. He was proved to have formed ‘a connexion with divers[e] women of bad character’ and it was found that he had been ‘resorting to a house of ill fame, and… committing adultery’.7The Times, 9 June 1828. Astley’s failure to procure a divorce in 1828 led to a bloodless duel with Garth, in which the police intervened.8The Times, 16 June, 23 June, 24 June 1828. His licentious behaviour was not forgotten by later satirists.9In a skit on bathing regulations in 1832, The Satirist, mocked ‘Lord Ellenborough, Sir Jacob Astley, Granby Calcroft, and all who can establish similar claims, may have the use of Cuckold’s Point; nor will there be any objection to their spending the season at Cape Horn…’, 8 Jul. 1832. See also The Satirist, 28 Jul. 1833, 11 Nov. 1838. Lady Astley died in July 1835, at which time Garth was imprisoned in the King’s Bench, ‘where Lady Astley has also lived, until the scarlet fever has suddenly put an end to her sufferings’.10The Times, 3 Jul. 1835.

Astley had meanwhile maintained his interest in agricultural questions, petitioning for legislation regarding Norfolk enclosures, 6 Feb. 1829, and attending a Norwich meeting which discussed reduction of malt duties in October 1830.11CJ, lxxxiv. 8; The Times, 25 Oct. 1830. He witnessed first-hand the violence provoked by agrarian discontent, displaying ‘courageous spirit’ in suppressing riotous proceedings amid rumours of planned attacks upon his Melton Constable residence, and reportedly ‘retreating under a shower of stones’ when visiting local villages in December 1830.12Norfolk Chronicle, 27 Nov. 1830; Bury and Norwich Post, 1 Dec. 1830, 8 Dec. 1830. Astley later claimed that he had declined two requisitions to offer for Norfolk in 1830, and he did not seek election until 1832, when he stood for the newly-created West Norfolk constituency.13Norfolk Chronicle, 17 Jan. 1835. Endorsed by the retiring local Whig grandee, Thomas Coke, who had been a stalwart supporter of Astley’s father throughout the latter’s parliamentary tenure, and whom Astley had nominated at the previous year’s election,14Morning Chronicle, 20 Dec. 1832; HP Commons, 1790-1820, iii. 285-6; A. M. W. Stirling, Coke of Norfolk and his Friends (London, 1908), 331; The Times, 17 Jul. 1802, 9 May 1831. he declared that he would enter parliament ‘with no particular bias, but with a dutiful feeling of respect’ for the ‘patriotic ministers’ who had carried the Reform bill.15Norfolk Chronicle, 8 Dec. 1832, 22 Dec. 1832; Morning Chronicle, 12 May 1835; The Poll for Two Knights of the Shire for the Western Division of the County of Norfolk (1837), xii. He was returned unopposed alongside his fellow Whig Sir William Ffolkes.16Norfolk Chronicle, 22 Dec. 1832.

Though Astley is not recorded as having contributed to parliamentary debate – he admitted to being ‘not much of a public speaker’ – he dealt with local legislation relating to the road network, land drainage, and harbour improvement.17Norfolk Chronicle, 7 Feb. 1835; CJ, lxxxviii. 81, 176, 199; lxxxix. 54, 122, 153, 298, 493-4. He sat on the Bath election petition committee.18CJ, lxxxviii. 132. On the hustings, Astley had vowed to attend ‘especially to the Agricultural and Commercial Interests of this County’ and whilst he opposed ministers in supporting Attwood’s motion for a committee on distress, 21 Mar. 1833, abolition of house and window tax, 21 Apr. 1833, and Torrens’s resistance to the renewal of the Bank of England charter, 28 June 1833, his repeated failure to vote for the reduction of malt duties led to dissension among his constituents.19Norfolk Chronicle, 8 Dec. 1832. One farmer, commenting in 1834 on Astley’s absence from Ingilby’s motion on the malt tax the previous year, grumbled that ‘this is neither the first nor the second time the Honourable Bar. ha[s] left us in the lurch when important divisions of the agriculturists ha[ve] been debated’.20Norfolk Chronicle, 22 Mar. 1834. For reasons discussed below, it is unclear whether he was the ‘Sir J. Astley’ who voted in favour of Cobbett’s motion for the repeal of the malt tax, 17 Mar. 1834, a vote which the farmers at the meeting might have been unaware of. The Parliamentary Test Book for 1835 suggested that he had voted for abolition of the malt tax in the previous Parliament: Parliamentary Test Book (1835), 9. Regardless, Astley had failed to support Ingilby’s motion halving the malt duties, 26 Apr. 1833. Complaints that Astley had not been as attentive ‘as he ought’ to his parliamentary duties were still allegedly being muttered some eleven months later.21Norfolk Chronicle, 14 Feb. 1835; see also, Norfolk Chronicle, 27 Dec. 1834. Whilst Astley was one of seventeen county members to support the ballot, 25 Apr. 1833, he opposed proposals for shorter parliaments, 15 May 1834.22Ipswich Journal, 4 May 1833. Unfortunately, the presence of Sir John Dugdale Astley (North Wiltshire, 1832-35) means that the attribution of votes in division lists during this period is not always straightforward.23It is unclear, for instance, whether Astley was the ‘Sir J. Astley’ who opposed clauses of the new Poor Law which related to the erection of workhouses and the removal of magistrates’ traditional powers, 6, 13, 21 June 1834.

The presence of a Conservative nominee at the 1835 election awakened Astley from his ‘slumbers of security’, although previously one newspaper had declared the prospects of any opposition ‘perfectly hopeless’, such was the influence of Astley and Coke.24Norfolk Chronicle, 17 Jan. 1835; Morning Chronicle, 30 Dec. 1834. At the hustings, brandishing a riding-whip, Astley vociferously denied claims that the constituency was a ‘close borough’.25The Times, 15 Jan. 1835; Norfolk Chronicle, 17 Jan. 1835. He finished second in the poll, though the defeated Conservative, William Bagge, later questioned how Astley would have fared, ‘had not… Ffolkes turned over a number of his votes to him?’26Ipswich Journal, 28 Feb. 1835. Having declared that he would support Peel’s administration ‘so far as they brought forward liberal measures’, Astley was later criticised in certain quarters for his backing of Abercromby as speaker, 20 Feb., and his votes for Russell’s Irish church resolutions, 2, 6 Apr. 1835, which appeared to indicate a preference for the swift restoration of the Whig regime.27Norfolk Chronicle, 16 May 1835. His support for Chandos’s motion for repeal of the malt tax, 10 Mar. 1835, and the government’s tithe commutation bill, 27 June 1836, fulfilled election pledges.28Norfolk Chronicle, 27 Dec. 1834. He extolled the importance of municipal corporation reform, ‘without which… it was idle to think that Lynn, Yarmouth, or Norwich would return such representatives as were really the choice of the people’.29Morning Chronicle, 12 May 1835. As he had done in the previous Parliament, he opposed any alteration to the corn laws, and consistently supported efforts to relieve agricultural distress. Astley, ‘patron of ten livings’, intermittently backed sabbatarian motions, whilst his support for the London university charter, 26 Mar. 1835, and Spring Rice’s church rate propositions, 23 May 1837, demonstrate concerns to propitiate Dissent.30Morning Chronicle, 12 May 1835; PP 1835 (67) xxii. 712; Astley divided in favour of sabbatarian motions, 11 Mar. 1834; 25 Mar. 1835; 21 Apr. 1836. He was in the minority of forty-four in favour of an amendment to the Established Church bill, 14 Jul. 1836, proposing to further reduce episcopal salaries in order to bolster the stipends of the lesser clergy; with his second son a curate, Astley would have been acutely aware of the financial disparities in the church hierarchy.31Astley of Melton Constable. He reversed his earlier support for the ballot, 7 Mar. 1837. In response to the possibility of the Whig government’s resignation following the peers’ recalcitrance over Irish corporation reform, which he had consistently supported in the division lobbies, Astley insisted in May 1837 that provided the ministry had the support of the Commons, Melbourne had ‘no right to run away’: ‘when the people express their will, the… Lords must bend to th[eir] wishes’. 32Norwich Mercury, 18 May 1837.

Astley finished fourth at the 1837 election, which marked the end of Whig dominance in Norfolk, where both he and Ffolkes were replaced by Conservatives. Commenting on his defeat, Astley blamed ‘a degree of intimidation, coercion and bribery unexampled in a contested County Election’.33Poll for Two Knights… 1837, xii. Other onlookers, however, emphasised the damage of the ‘anti-Poor Law yell’ and a report apparently circulated by the Conservatives suggesting that Astley was to be made a peer.34Morning Chronicle, 22 Aug. 1837. With a number of ‘extinct’ peerages in the family, Astley’s elevation had been rumoured as early as 1818.35The Times, 10 Apr. 1818, 9 June 1832, 10 May 1838; Ipswich Journal, 27 June 1835; The Age, 20 Aug. 1837, 12 Nov. 1837; John Bull, 15 Jul. 1838, 329. Passed over in 1837-38, and unsuccessful in his claim to the title Baron Camoys, Sep. 1839, Astley was eventually summoned to the Upper House as heir to the long-abeyant Barony of Hastings, 18 May 1841.36John Bull, 8 Jul. 1838, 317; 15 Jul. 1838, 329; Essex Standard, 11 Oct. 1839; The Times, 28 June 1839, 18 Jul. 1840, 26 Mar., 15 May 1841; Annual Register (1841), 51; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage (1841), 165; Norwich Mercury, 22 May 1841; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage (1854), 495. Despite his Whig loyalties, Astley later came out vehemently against repeal of the corn laws, presiding at a meeting of the West Norfolk agricultural protection society in January 1846.37Norwich Mercury, 10 Jan. 1846; C. Mackie, Norfolk Annals (1901), i. 452. However, he subsequently returned to the Liberal fold, having played an important part in engineering the 1857 West Norfolk electoral compromise between J. Brampton Gurdon and G.W.P. Bentinck.38Norfolk Chronicle, 21 Mar. 1857.

During the severe agricultural distress of the early 1830s, Astley had taken a leading role in the creation of a subscription to aid poorer local individuals wishing to emigrate, and, in 1835 he reduced rents on his Northumberland and Norfolk estates by ten and twenty to twenty-five percent respectively.39Essex Standard, 24 Mar. 1832; Bell’s Life and Sporting Times, 22 Mar. 1835; Newcastle Courant, 28 Nov. 1835. The Melton Constable schoolhouse and the salary of the mistress were financed solely by Astley.40PP 1819 (224) ix-c. 1471; PP 1835 (62) xl-ii. 156. Nevertheless his image is tarnished somewhat by reports of one of his labourers receiving eighty lashes for ‘being idle in the gravel pit’, to which the Poor Man’s Guardian pronounced ominously that at ‘the day of retribution... the name of SIR JACOB ASTLEY… shall not be forgotten’.41Poor Man’s Guardian, 9 Feb. 1833. He was trustee of the Norwich Union fire insurance company and sat on the London committee of the Northern and Eastern railway company.42The Times, 4 Mar., 28 Mar., 16 Oct. 1822, 30 Nov. 1836; 10 Jul., 26 Oct. 1835. However, it was as a devotee of the turf and keen hunstman – he was master of the county’s foxhounds, 1822-6 – that he ‘was better known and appreciated’ locally.43Norwich Mercury, 31 Dec. 1859; Bell’s Life and Sporting Times, 27 Feb. 1825, 30 Aug. 1835, 15 Mar. 1840; The Times, 3 Nov. 1825, 21 Sep. 1839; Essex Standard, 7 Sep. 1833, 20 Nov. 1835; Ipswich Journal, 12 Sep. 1835; Astley, Astley of Melton Constable; Norfolk Chronicle, 31 May 1834. He also had a ‘considerable knowledge and taste in art’.44Norwich Mercury, 31 Dec. 1859. His collection included ‘many fine Cabinets… pitched out of the Tuileries by the mob at the time of the Revolution’: H.B.J. Armstrong (ed.), Armstrong’s Norfolk diary (1963), 110. His ‘autocratic disposition’45Astley, Astley of Melton Constable. and hot-headed nature embroiled him in another court case in 1857, after ‘endeavouring to incite John Henry Tillett to fight a duel’ following a disagreement over a newspaper article, but he succeeded in his application for bail, and subsequently apologised.46Mackie, Norfolk Annals, ii. 60. He died suddenly two years later ‘from an attack of paralysis’.47The Times, 29 Dec. 1859. He was succeeded in the barony and his estates by his eldest son Jacob Henry Delaval, a former army officer, whose ‘disastrous’ marriage to Frances Cosham in 1860 (a match that his father had blocked during his lifetime), led the family to fall ‘on evil days’.48Astley, Astley of Melton Constable; Gent. Mag. (1860), i. 182.