Described by a contemporary as being ‘tall and very thin, with prominent features, and bushy hair’, William Hutt, whose parliamentary career lasted over forty years, was an expert on colonial and commercial questions who served as vice-president of the board of trade in Palmerston’s second administration.1T. Johnson, Sketches of Hull celebrities (1876), 456. Born in the parish of St Mary, Lambeth, and educated at the private schools of Ryde, Isle of Wight, and Camberwell, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1822, before graduating five years later. In 1831 he married Mary, dowager countess of Strathmore, the mother of the influential Liberal coal-owner and MP for South Durham, John Bowes, whom he had tutored while at Trinity, which brought him coal-holdings in north Durham and a nearby home at Gibside.2G.C. Boase, rev. H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Hutt, Sir William (1801-1882)’, Oxf. DNB, www.oxforddnb.com; W. Stokes, ‘Sir William Hutt MP (1801-1882)’, in G.R. Batho and V. Smithers, ed., Durham biographies, iv (2005), 58.
Hutt offered in the Liberal interest for the notoriously venal borough of Kingston-upon-Hull at the 1832 general election, after being invited by the local Radical James Acland, and was returned in second place. Re-elected in 1835, he was defeated by William Wilberforce at the 1837 general election, but seated on petition, 7 May 1838, after the former was unable to prove his qualification.3Ibid., 457. As MP for Kingston-upon-Hull, Hutt was an assiduous attender, and his votes during Grey’s administration, such as for the ballot, 25 Apr. 1833, for a low fixed duty on corn, 7 Mar. 1834, and for the repeal of the Septennial Act, 15 May 1834, reflected his radical sympathies. He voted for Lord John Russell’s motion on the Irish church, 2 Apr. 1835, which brought down Peel’s short-lived ministry, and generally divided with the Melbourne administration thereafter, while maintaining his staunch opposition to the existing operation of the corn laws.
A prolific speaker in the Commons, Hutt regularly addressed shipping issues affecting the port of Hull, but, unlike the majority of MPs from maritime constituencies, he did not blame the reciprocity dues for the difficulties faced by British shipping.4Hansard, 5 June 1834, vol. 24, cc. 227-8; S. Palmer, Politics, shipping and the repeal of the navigation laws (1990), 28. He was, however, a staunch opponent of the duties levied on passing ships at the town of Stade by the King of Hanover, and, following a lengthy speech attacking the toll, 21 Feb. 1839, he became a tireless campaigner, both inside and outside the Commons, for their extinction. He published Stade duties considered (1839), and later received the thanks of the London shipowners’ society for his work on this matter.5Boase, rev. Matthew, ‘Hutt, Sir William’. Hutt also took an active part in colonial questions. In May 1835 he was appointed a commissioner for South Australia, and as a founding member and chairman of the New Zealand Company in 1839, he was instrumental in annexing New Zealand to Great Britain, leading to the Heretaunga River on the North Island of the colony being renamed Hutt River.6T.A. Bowdem, Manual of New Zealand geography (2009), 70.
In March 1839 Hutt, whose Gibside home was nine miles south of Gateshead, accepted a formal requisition from 360 of the borough’s electors to become their next Liberal candidate, and was returned without opposition at the 1841 general election.7F.W.D. Manders, A history of Gateshead (1973), 271-2. As a local colliery owner with impeccable connections to the business leaders who dominated the town council, Hutt’s seat was secure, and he was re-elected a further six times, facing opposition only in 1852 and 1868.8N. McCord, ‘Gateshead politics in the age of reform’, Northern History, iv (1969), 177-9. Although a less assiduous attender whilst MP for Gateshead,9In the 1849 session he was present for 19 out of 219 divisions, Hampshire Telegraph, 20 Oct. 1849; in the 1853 session he was present for 117 out of 257 divisions, Daily News 21 Sept. 1853; in the 1856 session he was present for 56 out of 198 divisions, J.P. Gassiot, Third letter to J.A. Roebuck: with a full analysis of the divisions of the House of Commons during the last session of Parliament (1857), 6. he retained his interest in colonial and commercial reform. As chairman of the 1840 and 1842 select committees on bonded corn,10PP 1840 (472), v. 5; PP 1842 (333), xiv. 2. Hutt introduced a bill to allow home-produced bonded corn to be manufactured into flour and biscuit, and supplied to shipping at free-trade prices, 15 Mar. 1842, the success of which, according to Sir James Graham, ‘rendered the further maintenance of the corn laws almost impossible’.11Local collections; or, Records of remarkable events, connected with the borough of Gateshead (1852), 43. As chairman of the 1843 select committee on the laws affecting aliens, he also moved to bring in a bill for the naturalization of foreigners, 20 Feb. 1843, arguing that ‘the progress of nations in the arts of civilization ... has been more dependent on the freedom of their commerce, and on the liberality with which they have treated foreigners, than any other circumstance beside’, 8 Mar. 1843. The subsequent Naturalisation Act of 1844 ensured that foreigners could become British subjects by a certificate from the home secretary, rather than by a private Act of Parliament.
An opponent of the British policy of suppressing the slave trade through the use of naval force, Hutt successfully moved for a select committee ‘to consider the best means which Great Britain can adopt for providing the final extinction of the slave trade’, 22 Feb. 1848, and chaired the subsequent inquiries.12PP 1847-48 (272), xxii. 1; PP 1847-48 (366), xxii. 283; PP 1847-48 (536), xxii. 467; PP 1847-48 (623), xxii. 705. The mass of evidence produced by the investigations was inconclusive, and at the end of the 1849 inquiry, it was only on Hutt’s casting vote that the withdrawal of the British naval squadron was recommended.13PP 1849 (410), xix. 182; D.R. Murray, Odious commerce: Britain, Spain and the abolition of the Cuban slave trade (2002), 211-14. Not surprisingly, therefore, his motion that Britain should ‘desist from all acts for suppressing the slave trade by force of arms’ was defeated, 19 Mar. 1850, and his attempt to reintroduce his motion eight years later failed miserably, 12 July 1858. Undeterred, he insisted that he would renew the discussion in the next session, but his efforts came to nothing.
Although Hutt spoke less in the House in the 1850s, his addresses to Gateshead electors, particularly on foreign affairs, were notable. For example, initially supportive of the efforts of the Aberdeen ministry to delay war with Russia, he later ‘condemned in unmeasured terms the imbecility and incompetency of that government when once the war was entered upon’, and subsequently backed the new premier Palmerston for his ‘energy and wisdom on taking the reins of power’.14Newcastle Courant, 27 Mar. 1857. He divided with ministers on most major issues during Palmerston’s first administration, including voting against Cobden’s censure motion on Canton, 3 Mar. 1857, but he opposed Palmerston’s conspiracy to murder bill, 19 Feb. 1858, because ‘no foreign prince or foreign power, if I can prevent it, shall ever dictate to the English people how they shall measure out their hospitality’.15Ibid., 22 Apr. 1859.
Hutt’s advocacy of commercial questions was rewarded in February 1860 when Palmerston appointed him vice-president of the board of trade and paymaster-general.16Boase, rev. Matthew, ‘Hutt, Sir William’. As a member of the government, however, his contributions to parliamentary debate dropped sharply, as did his visits to his constituency, and he confined his attention to pressing for a reform of the merchant shipping bill and the Thames conservancy bill, an issue on which he chaired two select committees.17PP 1863 (454), xii. 1; PP 1864 (373), viii. 431; Stokes, ‘Sir William Hutt’. In early 1865, he led the British delegation at Vienna for a treaty of commerce with Austria, a protracted process in which he found ‘he had many enemies in Austria’, and was replaced in the autumn.18The Times, 11 July 1865; T. Frank, Picturing Austria-Hungary: the British perception of the Hapsburg Monarchy, 1865-1870 (2005), 59-60. In the government reshuffle following Palmerston’s death in October 1865, he lost his cabinet post, but was made a KCB, 27 Nov. 1865, as compensation.19Stokes, ‘Sir William Hutt’, 59; Boase, rev. Matthew, ‘Hutt, Sir William’. He remained loyal to Russell’s short-lived second administration, however, and, although it has been asserted that his ‘sympathy lay with the anti-democratic stance’ of Robert Lowe,20Stokes, ‘Sir William Hutt’, 59. he divided against the latter, 27 Apr. 1866, by supporting the ministry’s reform bill. He was, though, in the minority for Lowe’s amendment to introduce cumulative voting into the representation of the people bill, 5 July 1867, but divided with Gladstone on all the other major clauses, and backed his resolutions on the Irish church, 3 Apr. 1868.
At the 1868 general election, Hutt comfortably defeated his Conservative opponent. He continued to be an active parliamentarian, with his public parks, schools and museums bill, which enabled a person to bequeath land for such purposes, becoming law in 1871, and retired at the dissolution in 1874. He returned to the family estate at Appley Towers, Ryde, Isle of Wight, where he died in November 1882. Although Hutt was twice married, he left no children, and his landed property was inherited by his brother, Sir George Hutt (1809-1889), a distinguished army officer.21Boase, rev. Matthew, ‘Hutt, Sir William’.
Although his obituarist wrote that he was always ‘too much of a Whig for the advanced Liberals’,22Gateshead Observer, 2 Dec. 1882. and one historian has labelled him ‘a veteran if lukewarm radical’,23E.D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855-1865 (1991), 84-5. Hutt’s voting record during his lengthy parliamentary career undoubtedly reflected a consistent support for the extension of civil and religious liberties and significant franchise reform. For example, he was in minorities for non-denominational education, 18 May 1843, for the abolition of Anglican oaths at Oxford and Cambridge universities, 12 July 1843, for free, secular schools paid out of local rates, 22 May 1851, for Locke King’s county franchise bill, 13 Mar. 1861, and for Edward Baines’ borough franchise bill, 10 Apr. 1861. The assumption, therefore, that he frustrated his more advanced Liberal colleagues does not bear the weight of further analysis, and Hutt’s obituarist was arguably measuring his radicalism against the more advanced Liberalism of the post-Second Reform Act era, rather than assessing Hutt in his own political context.
Hutt’s correspondence with major political figures such as William Gladstone and Sir Robert Peel is located in the British Library, London. His extensive correspondence with William Henry Brockett, the influential leader of the Gateshead town council, is located at the Gateshead local studies library.