WIGNEY, Isaac Newton (1795-1844), of 13 Cockspur Street, Mdx. and 19 & 21 Brunswick Square, Brighton, Suss.

Wigney’s return as a ‘decided radical’ for Brighton in 1832, ‘under the very nose of the court’, shocked London society.1Greville Mems. ed. H. Reeve (1879), ii. 335; Raikes Jnl. i. 123. A prominent local banker, whose father was alleged to have initiated the family’s rise to fortune by passing off French francs as shillings, Wigney never quite shook off his parvenu status, despite a top-drawer marriage to the niece of John Walter MP, the proprietor of The Times. His unpopular drift to the Whigs during his time in the Commons and fondness for high-society living ensured that his public humiliation as a bankrupt in 1842 was widely regarded as poetic justice for his ‘pride and vanity’.2C. Fleet, Glimpses of our ancestors in Sussex (1883), 47-51. However, his bank’s disastrous collapse was less of a moral tale than his critics liked to imply.

Wigney’s father William is thought to have come from the north of England to Brighton and set up as a draper in North Street. After marrying the daughter of the Brighton brewer Robert Killick in 1782, he established a successful brewery in Ship Street. A Baptist, he served as a trustee of the Union Street Congregational Chapel and had his children baptised in the nearby Salem Chapel in Bond Street. In 1794 he founded the Brighthelmston Bank, initially in partnership with the Quaker banker and brewer Richard Peters Rickman of Lewes. It prospered and survived various runs, including the panic of 1825, becoming the region’s leading country bank. A founding member of the town commission that governed Brighton from 1810, William lived the life of a country squire at Newtimber Place, a moated country seat near Hassocks, after 1815, leaving the day-to-day management of the brewery to his eldest son William and second son George, both of whom were also town commissioners. Wigney, another commissioner and treasurer of the Brunswick Square commission from 1830, and his younger brother Clement took over the bank as partners.3P. Jenkins, Country bank failures: the Brightlemston bank of Messrs. Wigney (2004), passim.; http://www.bandhpast.co.uk/barcombe/b1200other.php; A. Dale, Fashionable Brighton 1820-60 (1987), 137; M. Ray, ‘Who were the Brighton town commissioners?’, Sussex Archaeological Collections cxxvii (1989), 214.

At the 1832 general election Wigney, ‘a man of dash and enterprise’ and evidently much the ‘favourite son’, came forward for the newly enfranchised borough with the support of the Brighton Political Union, citing the fact that he had been ‘born, bred and educated’ in the town and supported reform when its ‘bare avowal’ was ‘attended with the greatest danger’. He topped the poll with ease, distancing himself from an unseemly contest between his closest rivals.4Jenkins, Country bank failures, 11; Fleet, Glimpses of our ancestors, 48; The Times, 14 Nov. 1832. Initially a fairly regular attender, he voted for most radical causes, including the ballot, shorter parliaments, reduced taxation, Church and tithe reform and the removal of Jewish disabilities.5Parliamentary Test Book (1835), 171. On 15 Feb. 1833 he successfully moved for papers on the house and window tax. He divided steadily against the Whig ministry’s Irish coercion bill, and spoke and was a minority teller for the remission of the sentence being served by the editor of the Brighton Guardian for libel, 4 Mar. 1834. His attitude to the malt tax or ‘duty on the poor man’s drink’, however, which he insisted should be completely repealed rather than reduced, and his failure to take a firm stand against the government’s new poor law, created growing dissatisfaction among Brighton’s more extreme radicals, who accused him of toadying up to the Whigs in the hope of promotion. His re-election in 1835 alongside a Whig-Tory courtier, with whom he evidently shared many votes, and the defeat of his radical colleague left him persona non grata.6Morning Chronicle, 13 Sept. 1833, 1, 8 Jan. 1835. As his radical opponent’s local newspaper put it:

We Radicals believed that Mr. Wigney and his friends wished to get rid of the connection with the ‘low radicals’ – that Mr. Wigney and his friends preferred his being returned with a ‘gentleman’ – and one moreover who might assist him in his pursuit of a baronetcy! They have obtained their wish! Mr. Wigney is now the nominee of the court nominee! ... But ... now that the court has got one nominee, does Mr. Wigney suppose that the same influence will not be exerted to reject a parvenu like himself to make way for another gentleman? ... Does he imagine that the Tories will ever forgive his obscure birth, his connection with the Radicals, and his plebeian supporters?7Brighton Patriot, 17 Mar. 1835.

Wigney voted with the Whig opposition to Peel’s brief ministry on the speakership, 19 Feb., the address, 26 Feb., and Irish church appropriation, 2 Apr. 1835, and thereafter gave general support to the reappointed Whig government on most major issues, including Irish municipal reform, though he was in the radical minorities for the abolition of military flogging, 13 Apr. 1836, and repeal of the window tax, 4 May 1837. (He appeared in 38 of the 116 recorded divisions for 1836 and 28 of the 99 for 1837.) On 13 Feb. 1836 he joined Brooks’s, sponsored by the home secretary Lord John Russell and the Irish viceroy Lord Mulgrave. He endorsed his Whig colleague’s bill to prevent French encroachments into Brighton’s fisheries, 11 Feb. 1836, and unsuccessfully moved for the salary of Thomas Collett, an attendant in the Members’ lower waiting-room, to be raised from £200 to £400, on account of ‘the arduous nature of the duties he had to perform’, 29 June 1836.

At the 1837 general election Wigney offered again, rebutting radical assertions that he had ‘approved the principle’ of the new poor law and been ‘seduced’ into Whiggery. After a vitriolic campaign, in which he was accused of ‘pertinacious obstinacy’ for refusing to retire in favour of the radical candidate, he was narrowly beaten into third place by a local Tory, much to the delight of the extreme radicals.8Brighton Patriot, 11, 18, 25 July; The Times, 26 July 1837. His defeat was evidently a ‘severe blow’ to the Wigney family, whose status had been already undermined by the death of Wigney’s father the previous year and the division of his assets, which were less valuable than expected, among his four sons.9Fleet, Glimpses of our ancestors, 49. This had left the Brighton bank under-capitalised, not least because in 1832 Wigney had agreed to underwrite a new merino shawl manufactory in Glasgow, got up by Sir Thomas Troubridge MP and Captain Charles Stuart Cochrane, which had gone sour after the latter’s death. Houldsworths and Sons, who had supplied its innovative spinning machinery, had assumed control and continued to issue bills of exchange against the bank, draining its capital and refusing to wind up the mill.10Glasgow: 1830 to 1912, eds. W. Fraser and I. Maver (1996), vol. ii. 109.

In an attempt to stave off disaster, both Wigney and his brother sank their £10,000 share of their father’s brewery into the bank’s coffers, whilst also investing in a business making India rubber goods, which unfortunately came to nothing.11Jenkins, Country bank failures, 11-15. Wigney’s appearance as a witness in the scandalous card cheating case of Lord De Ros at Graham’s Club, which ‘threw such discredit on the highest circles’, also did little to instill confidence, and from around this time Wigney, as he later recalled, was ‘obliged to live on “hope which maketh the heart sick”, suffering tortures both of body and mind, such as scarcely can be conceived’.12The Standard, 11 Feb. 1837; Fleet, Glimpses of our ancestors, 50; Jenkins, Country bank failures, 31. An account written half a century later conjectured that ‘at this time, such as knew Isaac Newton Wigney could but be struck by the care-worn lines on his face, and the quickness with which he seemed to age’.13Fleet, Glimpses of our ancestors, 50.

Following the loss of his seat, Wigney came out firmly against the new poor law and its possible extension to Brighton, and by February 1841 was happily sharing a platform with local Chartists on the issue and seconding their resolutions for a petition, although he baulked at their demands for universal suffrage.14The Times, 16 Feb. 1841. Aided by the court’s hostility to the Tories, and a rapprochement with the radicals, at the 1841 general election he was re-elected in second place, alongside his Whig colleague of 1835.15Morning Post, 2 July; The Times, 2 July 1841. See also S. Djabri, ‘A letter from Brighton, 1841’, Sussex Family Historian, vol. 11, no. 3 (Sept. 1994), 92-100. He voted with the Whig opposition to the Peel ministry on the address, 27 Aug., and supplies, 17 Sept., and brought up a petition for repeal of the corn laws, 24 Sept. 1841. On 27 Sept., after explaining that ‘he was one of those who had suffered so much from the cry against the poor law’ and ‘been so used on the hustings and elsewhere on this question’, he spoke and was in the minority of 36 to prevent husbands and wives being separated in the workhouse. He divided against extending the powers of the poor law commissioners next day, and for repeal of the corn laws, 16, 25 Feb. 1842.

On 4 Mar. 1842 Wigney’s bank was forced to suspend payments, causing a ‘major sensation’.16Fleet, Glimpses of our ancestors, 50; Djabri, ‘A letter from Brighton’, 137. Bankruptcy proceedings were hastily commenced, and at a humiliating public hearing in Brighton town hall, 22 Apr. 1842, the bankruptcy commissioners determined that Wigney and Co. had effectively been insolvent since 1836, having, as the Sussex Agricultural Express put it, been ‘completely fleeced by the wily Scotch’ in charge of the Glasgow mill. To add to Wigney’s misery, it emerged that his wife had attempted to hide a ‘large tin box’ stuffed with silver and other valuables and sent other items away, prompting accusations of ‘unlawful concealment’ and an investigation which revealed sordid details of their personal items, including the family’s undergarments. The debts of the bank were discovered to be £120,000, for which its creditors eventually received just one shilling in the pound.17Jenkins, Country bank failures, 15-32. Wigney’s declaration as a bankrupt barred him from attending the Commons and gave him a year to settle his debts before forfeiting his seat, but he took the Chiltern Hundreds, 30 Apr. 1842.

Most accounts of Wigney’s fall from grace adopt a moral tone.18See Fleet, Glimpses of our ancestors, passim. and Djabri, ‘A letter from Brighton’, 95. Yet he and his brother Clement clearly went out of their way to rescue a concern impoverished by bamboozlers and the division of its founder’s capital. Wigney repaid all his personal debts in full, but the affair left him a broken man.19Dale, Fashionable Brighton, 137. He died in February 1844 at Porchester Place, Hyde Park, ‘after years of ill-health and months of severe suffering’.20Northern Star, 17 Feb. 1844. His sons Clarence Walter Wigney (b. 1826) and Cecil Willoughby Wigney (b. 1833) both entered the army of the East India Company.