TURNER, Thomas Frewen (1811-1870), of Cold Overton Hall , Leicestershire

A youthful squire, Turner was an undistinguished and increasingly absent Conservative country member who resigned, citing ill health, after barely a year in Parliament. Descended from the Frewens of Northiam, Sussex, in the mid-eighteenth century his grandfather Thomas Frewen (d. 1791) inherited the Turner estates in Leicestershire. He was succeeded by his eldest son John (1755-1829), who added Turner to the patronymic and moved the family to Cold Overton Hall, their Leicestershire seat.1Burke’s landed gentry (1838), i. 657-63; H. Warne, A catalogue of the Frewen archives (1972), 3 and family tree (unpaginated). Turner succeeded his father, an inactive MP for Athlone, 1807-1812, in 1829, although he did not come of age until three years later.2HP Commons, 1790-1820, iii. 842-3. Whilst at Cambridge, he ‘made a balloon ascent’ from Warwicker’s yard, Barnwell, to the parish of Swaffham Bulbeck.3Al. Cant., pt. II, vi. 253; J. Cooper, Annals of Cambridge (1852), iv. 570.

At the 1835 general election Turner offered for South Leicestershire as a second Conservative. The incumbent Reformer withdrew, and he was returned unopposed.4The Times, 16 Jan. 1835. In his nomination speech he offered a strong defence of the royal prerogative, and promised to ‘spare no exertions’ in his parliamentary duties.5The Times, 17 Jan. 1835. Expanding on his political opinions at a celebratory meeting, 17 Feb. 1835, he contended that the Conservatives were the true heirs of the principles of the Glorious Revolution, which were epitomised ‘in our favourite brief but comprehensive toast, “Church and King”’. The modern Whig party were not ‘governed by any fixed principles’ and were undermining the ‘ecclesiastical polity’, the monarchy and the constitution, the three pillars of Conservatism.6Report from Nottingham Journal, qu. in Derby Mercury, 25 Feb. 1835.

Turner, who is not known to have spoken at Parliament or served on any committees, supported the Conservative leadership in major divisions such as the speakership, the address to the king and the Irish church, but his attendance deteriorated over the session.7Hansard, 19, 26 Feb. 1835, vol. 26, cc. 60, 412; ibid., 2 Apr. 1835, vol. 27, c. 776; Derby Mercury, 8 Apr. 1835. On 14 January 1836, Turner, who suffered from ‘indifferent health and recurring melancholia’ throughout his life, took the Chiltern Hundreds, citing his ‘impaired state of health’.8Derby Mercury, 13 Jan. 1836; M. Frewen, Melton Mowbray and other memories (1924), 13. His younger brother Charles Hay Frewen (1813-1878) who sat for East Sussex, 1846-57, and repeatedly contested North Leicestershire as an independent Conservative thereafter, was more robust and displayed greater assiduousness in his parliamentary duties.9F. Boase, Modern English Biography (1892), i. 1108.

In 1836 Turner returned to Brickwall, his Sussex seat and the following year he reverted to his family’s original surname after discovering that the additional patronymic, which had been a stipulation of the will of John Turner (d. 1753), was no longer necessary to claim the Leicestershire estates.10Ibid.; Burke’s landed gentry (1838), i. 657; W. White, History, gazetteer and directory of Leicestershire (1846), 254. Frewen served as high sheriff of Sussex in 1839, and in the subsequent year helped to establish Rye Conservative Association.11The Times, 1 Jan. 1840. In 1845 he offered at the West Kent by-election, but this was merely a tactic by local Conservatives to force out the official candidate, whose support for the Maynooth grant they opposed. Once this object had been achieved Frewen withdrew in favour of a candidate agreeable to both factions.12The Times, 16, 17 Apr. 1845. Although he took little further part in politics, Frewen remained an ‘unrepentant Protectionist’ to the end of his days.13Frewen, Melton Mowbray, 13. In later years he devoted much time to studying his family history, and expended considerable sums on ‘wild land in Connemara’, county Galway, which he had purchased to build Anglican schools to counteract Popery, and on agricultural improvements to his Innishannon estate in county Cork, which he had inherited through a distant relative.14Ibid., 23, 25-27 (at 23); Warne, Frewen archives, 3-4, 17-18, 24. A devout Anglican and patron of two livings, on his death in 1870 Frewen was described as a ‘genuine English gentleman, standing high above most men of his time, like an oak towering over shrubs’.15W. Colles, “Called and Chosen, and Faithful”: a sermon suggested by the death of Thomas Frewen (1870), 16-18 (at 16); Dod’s parliamentary companion (1835), 171. He was succeeded by his eldest son from his second marriage, Edward Frewen (1850-1919).16Burke’s landed gentry (1886), i. 689; ibid., (1937), 842-3. Another son Moreton (1853-1924), who married a New York heiress, was a late Victorian adventurer, whose disastrous speculations in American land earned him the sobriquet ‘Mortal Ruin’. He briefly served as an eccentric Nationalist MP for North East Cork, 1910-1911.17E. Kehoe, Fortune’s daughters: the extravagant lives of the Jerome sisters: Jennie Churchill, Clara Frewen, and Leonie Leslie (2004), 94-100, 104-9, 178-9, 251-54, 264-5.