WALLACE, Robert (1773-1855), of Kelly, Wemyss Bay, Renfrew

A Scottish landowner and West India proprietor, Wallace was an indefatigable Radical Reformer. The Times dismissed him as an ‘exemplary political quack’, and another observer remarked that his ‘honesty of purpose is frequently interfered with by a blundering style and dogged obstinacy’.1The Times, 18 July 1837; Anon., Sir Robert Peel, and his era: being a synoptical view of the chief events and measures of his life (1843), 276. However, the Westminster Review thought that Wallace was ‘in many respects, a model of what a liberal Member of Parliament should be … He has preferred to do a few things thoroughly rather than to fritter away his activity in trifling with many’.2‘First report from the select committee on postage’, London and Westminster Review, xxix (1838), 225-64 (at 226). Principally, Wallace campaigned for the reform of the Scottish judiciary and the post office, and he played a crucial role in the establishment of the penny post in 1840. ‘Stoutly and compactly made’, Wallace, who dressed plainly, was bald, flat-nosed with ‘small, dark blue laughing eyes’ and a ‘rather low and slanting’ forehead.3[J. Grant], Random recollections of the House of Commons (1836), 293-4.

Self-confessedly ‘born with a silver spoon in his mouth’, Wallace hailed from a wealthy Glasgow merchant family.4Hansard, 4 Apr. 1842, vol. 61, c. 1273. His father John Wallace was a partner in Somerville, Gordon & Company and the King Street Sugar House, Glasgow, and owned three sugar plantations, Glasgow, Cessnock and Biscany, in Jamaica, as well as landed estates in Neilstonside, Renfrew; Cessnock, Ayr; and Kelly in Wemyss Bay.5A. Orr Ewing, Views of the Merchants House of Glasgow (1817; repr. 1866), 533; Burke’s landed gentry (1846), ii. 1495-7. Wallace inherited Kelly and the West Indian properties on his father’s death in 1805, and was later a partner in the merchant house of Wallace, Hunter & Company, Greenock.6F. Boase, Modern English biography (1901), iii. 1160. A self-described ‘Radical Reformer’, Wallace was the chairman of three political unions in western Scotland during the agitation for the reform bill, 1830-2.7Glasgow Evening Post, 14 May 1831, qu. in G. Pentland, Radicalism, reform and national identity in Scotland, 1820-1833 (2008), 126; Hansard, 27 Aug. 1841, vol. 59, c. 345. Although he advocated a larger extension of the suffrage than that proposed by the Grey ministry, Wallace was pragmatic enough to ‘declare for the whole and nothing but the bill’ in May 1831.8Glasgow Evening Post, 14 May 1831, qu. in Pentland, Radicalism, reform and national identity, 126.

Wallace was elected for the new borough of Greenock as a ministerial supporter at the 1832 general election, but, as he noted in his maiden speech, 11 Mar. 1833, since being returned he had ‘found it to be his duty to oppose them’ on the address, sinecures and Irish coercion.9Hansard, 11 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, c. 476. In the first reformed parliament, Wallace generally voted in Radical minorities for retrenchment of military and naval expenditure, sinecures and pensions. He cast votes for a property tax, 26 Mar. 1833, and the repeal of house and window tax, 1 May 1833. The following year he supported a low fixed duty on corn, the repeal of malt duty and the newspaper stamp, and the removal of bishops from the House of Lords. He opposed the third reading of the poor law amendment bill, and endorsed Jewish relief and the admission of Dissenters to universities.

Wallace was more limited in his spoken contributions, although during the debate on burgh reform, 26 July 1833, he voiced support for a £5 municipal and parliamentary franchise and unsuccessfully proposed an elected magistracy in Scotland.10Hansard, 26 July 1833, vol. 18, cc. 1245, 1247. According to the writer James Grant, Wallace was

a very indifferent speaker. He is always audible, but there is something hard and shrill about his voice which grates on the ear: it has no flexibility: it is the same key and the same tones from beginning to end. His enunciation is rapid; occasionally, but not often, he stammers slightly. His language has no pretensions to eloquence: it is plain and unpolished.11[Grant], Random recollections, 296.

Wallace had never studied law ‘except by observation’, but had become increasingly critical of the Scottish judicial system, especially the Court of Session (also known as the Scottish Supreme Court).12PP 1834 (438), xi. 176. Styling himself as the champion of Scottish public opinion, in an 1830 pamphlet Wallace attributed the ‘monstrous evils’ in the Scottish courts to the replacement of the ancient principles of jury trial and viva voce procedure by a ‘tedious, uncertain, and expensive system of loose and endless written and printed pleadings’ determined by judges.13R. Wallace, Letter to Sir Edward Sugden (1830), 4, 7. He also opposed the Court of Session’s ability, through Acts of Sederunt, to issue rules regulating civil procedure independently of Parliament, which he thought was tantamount to legislative power.14Ibid., 8. Wallace’s ideas were not to the taste of leading Whigs like Henry Cockburn, the Scottish solicitor-general, who wrote to Thomas Francis Kennedy, 26 Mar. 1833: ‘For God’s sake resist – and to the death – all crazy schemes – by Wallace or others – about Scotch judicial changes’.15Letters chiefly connected with the affairs of Scotland, from Henry Cockburn, solicitor-general under Earl Grey’s government, afterwards Lord Cockburn, to Thomas Francis Kennedy, MP … 1818-1852 (1874), 460. In the same session, Wallace introduced two bills to reform the Court of Session and sheriff and burgh courts, both of which failed to get a second reading and in 1834 he lobbied the committee on Scottish judicial salaries.16CJ, lxxxviii. 475-6, 546, 573, 603; PP 1834 (438), xi. 170-8, 194-201. An active committee man, Wallace also served on the inquiries into Scottish church patronage, tea duties, handloom weavers, and Joseph Hume’s 1834 investigation which recommended that all lighthouses in private ownership be transferred to a public authority.17PP 1834 (512), v. 2-4; 1834 (518), v. 2-3; 1834 (556), x. 2-4; 1834 (590), xii. 2-5; J. Taylor, ‘Private property, public interest and the role of the state in nineteenth-century Britain: the case of the lighthouses’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 749-71 (at 759-61)

Wallace commenced his other campaign in a speech lasting three hours, 6 Aug. 1833, which assailed the management of the post office, prompting some observers like James Silk Buckingham, Radical MP for Sheffield, to question whether he had been manipulated by interested parties.18Hansard, 6 Aug. 1833, vol. 20, cc. 369-81; [Grant], Random recollections, 295; Parliamentary Review (1833), iii. 411. Wallace repeated his complaints, 26 June 1834, and although his motion for a committee of inquiry was rejected, his proposal that the post office’s mail coach-building contracts be thrown open to competitive tender was subsequently adopted by the government, producing annual savings of £17,000.19Hansard, 26 June 1833, vol. 24, cc. 855-66, 880-1; E.C. Hill Smyth, Sir Rowland Hill: the story of a great reform (1907), 98; G. Birkbeck Hill (ed.), The life of Sir Rowland Hill and the history of the Penny Postage (1880), i. 258-9.

Wallace seems not to have spoken or voted on the abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1833. He later remarked that as he ‘had a deep interest in the colonies … he never uttered a word against the measures before the House, although he had great interests at stake, and had suffered severely by the passing of those measures’.20Hansard, 25 Feb. 1842, vol. 60, c. 1143. Wallace owned five Jamaican plantations and received £10,987 in compensation for his 547 slaves.21Information provided by Legacies of British slave-ownership project, www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs. A few years later, eyewitnesses commented that Wallace’s Glasgow estate was among the worst in Jamaica for the treatment of slaves, although they believed that, as an absentee owner, he was probably ignorant of this.22J. Sturge and T. Harvey, The West Indies in 1837 (1838), 252.

After his unopposed return at the 1835 general election, during which he called for the duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel to be impeached, Wallace resumed his twin campaigns in Parliament.23Caledonian Mercury, 15 Jan. 1835. With Joseph Hume he introduced four bills, 19 May 1835, to reform the Scottish judicial system, particularly by streamlining procedure and extending jury trial, but none of them received a second reading.24Wallace’s bills aimed to reform the Court of Session, the courts of judicature, sheriffs’ courts and small debts courts respectively. CJ, xc. 267, 326, 392, 398-9; PP 1835 (281), iv. 193-226; 1835 (327), iv. 227-388; 1835 (282), iv. 389-426; 1835 (330), ii. 275-300; Hansard, 19 May 1835, vol. 27, cc. 1242-3. Wallace was also among the Radical MPs, who, after serving on an 1835 inquiry on Orange lodges, called for them to be dissolved as unconstitutional and dangerous secret societies.25PP 1835 (605), xvii. 2, 26-7; Hansard, 6, 10, 19 Aug. 1835, vol. 30, cc. 111, 237, 686, 689. However, Wallace was increasingly preoccupied with his war against the post office. He withdrew his motion for a select committee on its management, 9 July 1835, after the Whig government conceded a commission of inquiry.26Hansard, 9 July 1835, vol. 29, cc. 372-95; M. Daunton, Royal Mail: the Post Office since 1840 (1985), 16; Hill Smyth, Sir Rowland Hill, 98. As Wallace was ‘already recognised as the leading Post Office reformer of the day’, Rowland Hill sent him his pamphlet Post Office reform, which proposed a uniform penny rate of postage, in January 1837.27Birkbeck Hill, Life of Sir Rowland Hill, i. 266-7. Wallace thought that the pamphlet ‘hits the mark’ and immediately began to circulate it among the provincial press to mobilise public opinion.28Robert Wallace to Rowland Hill, 16 Jan. 1837, 16, 28 Mar. 1837, 14 Aug. 1837, Add. 31978, ff. 7, 31, 37, 54. Although Hill’s daughter later commented that Wallace had no ‘detailed plan of wholesale reform’, Martin Daunton, the modern historian of the post office, has noted that the Scotsman’s ideas anticipated elements of Hill’s scheme.29Hill Smyth, Sir Rowland Hill, 99; Daunton, Royal Mail, 34-5.

Wallace abandoned his motion for a select committee on Hill’s plan, 9 May 1837, but after being re-elected for Greenock at the general election that summer, an inquiry was granted.30Hansard, 9 May 1837, vol. 38, cc. 755-60; Daunton, Royal Mail, 17. As chairman of the 1838 select committee on postage, which sat for 63 days hearing evidence, Wallace played a crucial role in the eventual adoption of Hill’s scheme.31Birkbeck Hill, Life of Sir Rowland Hill, i. 295. He coached Hill before he gave evidence, in particular advising him to rely on the official statistical returns of the number of letters posted rather than use his own projected estimates as ‘nothing can be better for you than accuracy’.32Wallace to Hill, Dec. 1837, Add. 31978, f. 80. Wallace also continued to work the press and cultivate other members of the committee.33R. Wallace, Address to the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland, and, especially, to the conductors of the periodical press, 18 Sept. 1837; Wallace to Hill, 18 Jan. 1838, 22 Apr. 1838, Add. 31978, ff. 66, 87, 156. Most importantly, when the committee divided evenly on a uniform rate of postage, it was Wallace’s casting vote as chairman that secured this ‘vital principle’.34Birkbeck Hill, Life of Sir Rowland Hill, i. 532; PP 1837-38 (708), xx, pt. I, pp. 517, 520. Although the committee did not endorse a penny rate, their report expressed Hill’s argument that by hindering communication, high rates of postage retarded commercial, moral and intellectual progress.35Ibid., 520-6. Much to Wallace’s irritation, his successor as chairman, Henry Warburton, delayed the publication of the report, which Wallace wanted to ‘be given to the public thro’ the medium of the press’ in the 1838-9 recess.36Wallace to Hill, 30 Nov. 1838, Add. 31978, f. 200. A strong press and petitioning campaign forced the government to introduce a bill in 1839, to implement Hill’s scheme, which was passed as the Penny Postage Act (2 & 3 Vict., c. 52), with the rate coming into force on 10 January 1840.37Daunton, Royal Mail, 19. For Wallace’s support for the measure: Hansard, 5 July 1839, vol. 48, cc. 1383-7. Paying tribute to his comrade, Hill later said of Wallace that his ‘exertions were unsparing, his toil incessant, and his zeal unflagging’.38Hill Smyth, Sir Rowland Hill, 129. He was rewarded with the freedom of a number of Scottish cities and towns, including Glasgow, Paisley, Aberdeen, Perth, and Inverness.39Boase, Modern English biography, iii. 1160.

Alongside his involvement in the penny post campaign, the energetic Wallace had continued to voice criticism of the Court of Session, and unsuccessfully moved for inquiries into sheriffs’ courts and the administration of justice in Scotland, 22 Mar. 1838, 12 Feb. 1839, 2 Mar. 1841.40Hansard, 23 June 1836, vol. 34, cc. 843-4; 10 Feb. 1837, vol. 36, cc. 411-12; 11 Dec. 1837, vol. 39, cc. 963-4; 22 Mar. 1838, vol. 41, cc. 1127-30, 1134; 12 Feb. 1839, vol. 45, cc. 314-24, 335; 2 Mar. 1841, vol. 56, cc. 1210-16, 1221. In 1839 Wallace opposed government legislation to increase the salaries of Scottish supreme court judges without reforming the system and he later complained that ‘all the judges in this country were overpaid’.41Hansard, 15, 25 Feb. 1839, vol. 45, cc. 479-81, 493, 875-7; 12 Apr. 1839, vol. 46, cc. 1327, 1333-4; 30 Mar. 1840, vol. 53. c. 244 (qu.) Wallace’s motion for a parliamentary inquiry on the Court of Session, 11 Feb. 1840, was passed 128-111, but the ensuing committee rejected his calls for a reduction in the number of judges.42Hansard, 11 Feb. 1840, vol. 52, cc. 116-19, 130-3; PP 1840 (332), xiv. 2-9, 13. This prompted Wallace to vent his frustration at the influence of Andrew Rutherfurd, the Lord Advocate, 10 July 1840, complaining that:

no Scotch representative can carry on successfully any public measure affecting Scotland without his nod and concurrence. He is commander-in-chief of all our Parliamentary business. No independent member can move a peg, or get a bill forward a single stage, without his approval.43Hansard, 10 July 1840, vol. 55, cc. 599-617 (at 613).

Wallace was also increasingly alarmed at the mounting economic distress in the country, which he attributed to the corn laws and a restrictive monetary system.44Hansard, 30 June 1837, vol. 38, c. 1735; 30 May 1839, vol. 47, c. 1151; 16 Jan. 1840, vol. 51, c. 122. He approved of the Whigs’ proposed alterations to import duties and supported them in the vote of no confidence, 4 June 1841.45Hansard, 2 June 1841, vol. 58, cc. 1000-1002. After his re-election at the 1841 general election, Wallace was among the Radical supporters of Sharman Crawford’s unexpected amendment to the address of the Whig ministry, 27 Aug. 1841.46Hansard, 27 Aug. 1841, vol. 59, cc. 345-7. During the ensuing furore ‘hearty old Wallace of Greenock cried out “Who cares for you? Who cares?” amidst the roars of the House’.47Richard Cobden to Frederick Cobden, [28] Aug. 1841, Add. 50750, ff. 51-2, qu. in The letters of Richard Cobden, ed. A.C. Howe (2007), 232. Despite being a landowner, Wallace was a staunch free trader, and told the 1842 anti-corn law conference of Scottish Dissenting ministers that agricultural protection was just ‘a matter of rent’.48J.R. Fyfe and W. Skeen, Report of speeches delivered at the conference of ministers and members of dissenting churches, held at Edinburgh, on the 11th, 12th, and 13th January 1842… (1842), 27. In the same year he opposed Peel’s revised commercial tariff and reintroduction of the income tax, which Wallace denounced as resulting from a ‘horrid system of class legislation’.49Hansard, 25 Feb. 1842, vol. 60, cc. 1142-4; 4 Apr. 1842, vol. 61, cc. 1271-3; 26 Apr. 1842, vol. 62, c. 1155 (qu.) Wallace argued that the Reform Act had proved to be a failure and so supported Sharman Crawford’s motion, 21 Apr. 1842, for a radical reform of the representative system.50Hansard, 21 Apr. 1842, vol. 62, cc. 921-3.

Wallace also condemned the House’s treatment of public petitions, and unsuccessfully proposed that the restriction on speaking on petitions in the chamber be relaxed, 7 Feb. 1842.51Hansard, 7 Feb. 1842, vol. 60, cc. 105-22. The following day he called for a commission of inquiry into distress in Paisley, but withdrew his motion after a discouraging response from Peel, Sir James Graham and Lord Stanley.52Hansard, 8 Feb. 1842, vol. 60, cc. 177-81, 189-91. Later in the session, he attempted to prevent the prorogation of Parliament until an inquiry into distress had been granted and the government proposed remedial measures, but his motion was defeated 174-49, 8 July 1842.53Hansard, 1, 8 July 1842, vol. 64, cc. 861-78, 1238. As well as repeal of the corn laws and a silver standard, Wallace suggested government-funded public works as a solution to distress.54Hansard, 30 June 1842, 7 July 1842, vol. 64, cc. 789, 1151. In 1843 he forwarded Peel a memorial from Greenock praying for a grant of public money to alleviate relief, something the prime minister would not countenance.55Robert Wallace to Sir Robert Peel, 17 Nov. 1843, Add. 40519, ff. 48-9; Peel to Wallace, 22 Nov. 1842, ibid., ff. 51-3. However, Wallace successfully moved for a select committee on the unemployed and poor in Paisley, 7 Feb. 1843, after making clear that the purpose of the inquiry was to document the nature and extent of distress rather than make political capital from it.56Hansard, 7 Feb. 1843, vol. 66, cc. 224-6; PP 1843 (115), vii. 2-12.

In his last years in the Commons, Wallace twice attempted to cut the Scottish supreme court from thirteen judges to nine, and abandoned another motion to restore parliamentary speaking on petitions.57Hansard, 28 Apr. 1842, vol. 62, cc. 1211-23, 1226-8; 25 Feb. 1845, vol. 77, cc. 1163-5, 1173; 2 Feb. 1844, vol. 72, cc. 147-55. He condemned the system of lay patronage in the Church of Scotland and grew increasingly critical of the self-serving and obstructive behaviour of interested MPs in debates on the 1844 railway bill which proposed subjecting the industry to greater state control and regulation.58Hansard, 4 May 1842, vol. 62, c. 105; 5 Feb. 1844, vol. 72, cc. 286, 295-6; 8 July 1844, vol. 76, cc. 474-5. Wallace’s last significant contribution was to suggest in February 1845 that a select committee be set up with a view to reforming the conduct of private business.59Hansard, 5 Feb. 1845, vol. 177, cc. 133-8. He later withdrew his motion after Peel, who was much concerned with the House’s ability to cope with ‘the immense mass’ of railway bills, promised to consult with senior MPs about the best way to proceed.60Hansard, 7, 11 Feb. 1845, vol. 177, cc. 208, 297-8.

The septuagenarian Wallace resigned suddenly on 3 April 1845, prompting Richard Cobden to complain that ‘the crotchety old fellow gave no warning to his friends’.61Richard Cobden to George Wilson, 2 Apr. 1845, Greater Manchester County Record Office, Wilson papers, M20, vol. 8, qu. in Letters of Cobden, i. 383. The reason, Wallace privately noted, was that ‘my once highly productive West India estates [are] now … in debt in place of affording me livelihood’.62Wallace to Peel, 18 June 1845, Add. 40569, f. 149. As a consequence of his ‘much depreciated’ Jamaican property, Wallace had to sell Kelly and was left ‘with scarcely a wreck left of his former ample fortune’.63The Standard, 5 Apr. 1855. In 1850 Hill helped to raise a public subscription to provide him with an annuity worth £500.64Birkbeck Hill, Life of Sir Rowland Hill, ii. 148-9. Wallace died, probably from bronchitis, at his seaside cottage five years later.65Caledonian Mercury, 2 Apr. 1855; The Standard, 5 Apr. 1855. He left no heirs. Although Wallace could be cantankerous, Peel thought that he ‘was influenced by pure & disinterested motives’ which entitled him ‘to the respect of his political opponents’.66Peel to Wallace, 14 May 1845, Add. 40566, f. 317. His papers are held by the Watt Library, Greenock, and his letters to Hill by the British Library.