YOUNG, Sir William Lawrence, 4th bt. (1806-1842), of Marlow Park, Buckinghamshire

A youthful baronet and West India proprietor, Young offered silent support to the Conservative party and agricultural relief during his brief parliamentary career. The fortunes of the family had been established by Sir William Young, 1st baronet (1724-88), governor of Dominica. He bequeathed four Caribbean plantations as well as Delaford Park, Buckinghamshire, to his son and namesake the 2nd baronet (1749-1815), who was governor of Tobago from 1807 until his death, and sat on the Grenville interest as MP for St. Mawes, 1784-1806, and Buckingham, 1806-7.1E. I. Carlyle, rev. R.B. Sheridan, ‘Young, Sir William, second baronet (1749–1815)’, www.oxforddnb.com; R.B. Sheridan, ‘Sir William Young (1749-1815): planter and politician with special reference to slavery in the British West Indies’, Journal of Caribbean History, 33 (1999), 1-26; HP Commons, 1754-1790, iii. 685; ibid., 1790-1820, v. 677-80. Young succeeded his father, the 3rd baronet, in 1824, and became heir to Hughenden House, Buckinghamshire, on his marriage to Caroline, daughter of John Norris, in 1832.2Burke’s peerage and baronetage (1949), 2191-2. After the abolition of slavery in 1833, Young claimed compensation from the Slavery Compensation Commission for the estates owned by his grandfather, but received nothing, with money instead paid to mortgagees ‘and others with prior claims’.3Legacies of British slave-ownership project, ID: - 2081597774; N. Draper, The price of emancipation: slave-ownership, compensation and British society at the end of slavery (2010), 5. He subsequently complained:

The munificence of Parliament has placed a large sum of money at the disposal of the Commissioners to reimburse West India proprietors for the interest they possessed in their slaves, but it never was in contemplation of the legislature to confer a boon upon those who by fraud and the most iniquitous proceedings have become possessed of the property of others.4Sir William Lawrence Young to the Commission, 2 Oct. 1835, Slave Compensation Commission Records, The National Archives: T71/1602, bundle 2, qu. in Draper, Price of emancipation, 201-2.

Young stood for Buckinghamshire at the 1835 general election and was elected in second place along with two other Conservative candidates. His support for the established church, repeal of malt duty and the corn laws echoed that of his running mate and self-styled ‘farmers’ friend’, the marquis of Chandos (a member of the Grenville family).5R.W. Davis, Political change and continuity, 1760-1885: a Buckinghamshire study (1972), 121; The Times, 17 Dec. 1835. However, Young conceded that ‘some alterations’ were necessary in the Anglican church, although he opposed the appropriation of its revenues, and also voiced support for the commutation of tithes and the Dissenters’ marriage bill, as well as the popular election of municipal corporations.6The Times, 12 Jan. 1835.

A silent member, Young voted with the Conservative leadership for Manners Sutton on the speakership, for the address and against Russell’s Irish church resolutions, 19, 26 Feb. 1835, 2 Apr. 1835. However, he was in the minorities in favour of Chandos’s motions for the repeal of malt duty and for a select committee on agricultural distress, 10, 25 May 1835, and E.S. Cayley’s motion for a silver standard, 1 June 1835. His votes followed a similar pattern thereafter, opposing the Whigs’ Irish policy and radical political reform, but again backing Chandos’s motion on agricultural distress, 27 Apr. 1836. At the 1837 general election, when he was re-elected in third place, Young emphasised political and constitutional issues, rather than agricultural distress. He declared that he had ‘no confidence in the Whigs’ and was ‘disgusted in seeing the Irish faction having such prevailing interests in their councils’.7Morn. Chro., 31 July 1837. Absent from the votes on the immediate cessation of slave apprenticeships in the 1838 session, thereafter Young strongly opposed the anti-corn law motions of Charles Pelham Villiers, and backed the vote of no confidence in the Whig ministry, 4 June 1841. At the subsequent general election, when he topped the poll, the baronet condemned the Whigs’ proposed alterations to the corn laws and timber duties, but especially the duties on sugar:

They proposed to lower the duty on slave-grown sugar, and thus encourage the competition of the Brazilians with our West Indian colonists. He for one thought this bad policy, and therefore he voted against it. He thought it would injure the colonies, and not benefit the consumer, and he would not therefore give his sanction to any measure which would be of so little benefit to the community, while it would jeopardize the great experiment of negro emancipation.8The Standard, 6 July 1841.

The following year, Young cast votes in favour of Peel’s revised sliding scale on corn, the reintroduction of income tax and against radical political reform, before dying at the age of 35. He was succeeded in turn by his three eldest sons: after the deaths of the 5th and 6th baronets in the Crimean War the title passed to Sir Charles Lawrence Young, 7th baronet (1839-78), a barrister.9Burke’s peerage and baronetage (1949), 2191-2. In 1848, the executors of Young’s father-in-law’s estate sold Hughenden House to Benjamin Disraeli, who had been elected for Buckinghamshire the previous year.10R. Blake, Disraeli (1966), 250-4.