COLQUHOUN, John Campbell (1803-1870), of Killermont, Dumbarton; Garscadden, Dumbarton

Colquhoun possessed ‘a good figure’, an oval face, a clear complexion and sandy hair.1J. Grant, The British senate (1838), ii. 215. His staunch support for Evangelical Protestant causes propelled him into the Conservative party, having initially been a Reformer. During his parliamentary career he was a stalwart defender of the Irish church and gave qualified support to the Evangelical opponents of lay patronage in the Church of Scotland. He broke with Peel over the Maynooth College bill of 1845 and retired at the 1847 general election. Thereafter, as Benjamin Disraeli noted, he took ‘refuge in religious politics’, leading many Protestant campaigns.2B. Disraeli, ‘memorandum’, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Hughenden MSS, A/X/A/13, qu. in J. Wolffe, ‘Colquhoun, John Campbell (1803-1870)’, www.oxforddnb.com.

Colquhoun’s father, Archibald Campbell Colquhoun (1754-1820), had held the important Scottish legal office of lord clerk register. In his youth Colquhoun inherited two estates in Dumbartonshire. A Scottish Episcopalian, his marriage to Henrietta Maria Powys (1799-1870), encouraged his ‘evangelical inclinations’.3Wolffe, ‘Colquhoun’.

Colquhoun was elected as a ‘moderate Reformer’ for Dumbartonshire at the 1832 general election.4McCalmont’s parliamentary poll book, ed. J. Vincent and M. Stenton (8th edn., 1972), 93; Dod’s parliamentary companion (1833), 103. He divided in favour of the Irish church temporalities bill and Thomas Attwood’s motion for a select committee on distress, 11, 21 Mar. 1833. The following year he opposed Joseph Hume’s proposal for a low fixed duty on corn, 7 Mar. 1834. Colquhoun’s only spoken contributions at this time were on Scottish issues. He welcomed the attempts of Sir George Sinclair to amend the system of lay patronage in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 16 July 1833, 27 Feb. 1834.5Hansard, 16 July 1833, vol. 19, cc. 711-12; 27 Feb. 1834, vol. 21, cc. 935-6. Evangelicals in the Kirk were strongly critical of the 1712 Act which gave patrons the power to appoint ministers to parishes without the approval of their congregations, which they considered an unwarranted civil interference in ecclesiastical matters. Colquhoun served on a committee on the issue in 1834, which was ‘vaguely in favour of changing the law’.6PP 1834 (512), v. 2-4; G.I.T. Machin, ‘The Disruption and British politics, 1834-43’, Scottish Historical Review, 51 (1972), 20-51 (at 24). In the same year he proposed expanding parochial education in Scotland, partly by an annual parliamentary grant of £60,000, but he withdrew his bill before the first reading.7Hansard, 17 June 1834, vol. 24, cc. 514-18. Colquhoun was more successful with another bill, which would enable the Kirk to create new ecclesiastical parishes, a key demand of Scottish Evangelical Churchmen.8PP 1834 (65), i. 629-30; CJ, lxxxix. 78, 105, 126, 136, 404, 513, 532, 539. However, Colquhoun’s Act (4 & 5 Will. IV, c. 41) ‘would later cause the Church serious damage and bitter disappointment’, in part because it came with the qualification that new ecclesiastical parishes could only be created if they did not interfere with civil parishes.9S.J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (1982), 234.

Colquhoun retired at the 1835 general election. After hearing two Evangelical speakers in the mid-1830s, he became a stalwart of Protestant causes, especially the defence of the Irish church, and regularly addressed audiences at Exeter Hall and wrote pamphlets on behalf of the Protestant Association.10Wolffe, ‘Colquhoun’; Morning Post, 19 Apr. 1870. The role of such associations, he later observed, was to resist the attempts of Dissenters, Roman Catholics and Liberals to remove religion from the state and overthrow the established churches of the United Kingdom.11J.C. Colquhoun, On the object and uses of Protestant associations (1839), 6-7. As a consequence of this change, Colquhoun became a staunch Conservative.12Wolffe, ‘Colquhoun’. He declared that the ‘Liberal party were inimical to the interests of the Church of Scotland’, when endorsing the Conservative candidate for Glasgow at a by-election in 1837.13Caledonian Mercury, 1 June 1837. At the general election later that year, Colquhoun was elected for Kilmarnock Burghs after ousting the Liberal incumbent.14McCalmont’s parliamentary poll book, 155. His political conversion and fervent speaking style made him an extremely unpopular figure with Scottish Reformers, who described him as ‘a small-minded bigot’, ‘saintly juggler’, ‘shuffling weathercock’, ‘pseudo-statesman’, and ‘hypocritical humbug’.15The Scotsman, qu. in Morn. Chro., 1 Aug. 1837; Ayr Advertiser, qu. in Caledonian Mercury, 1 July 1841; Ayr Advertiser, qu. in The Times, 1 June 1841; Caledonian Mercury, 10 July 1841.

The strength of such denunciations was probably intensified because Colquhoun was no mediocrity, but a talented individual. The Standard considered him to be ‘one of the most able men, and one of the best Protestants in the empire’.16The Standard, 31 July 1837. The parliamentary writer James Grant observed that Colquhoun had ‘great self-possession’ as a speaker:

He has an exceedingly pleasant voice. There is a sweetness in it which is equalled in but few cases in the House. His enunciation is distinct … He is remarkably fluent: sentence follows after sentence with a smoothness and regularity which are not often surpassed by any of our public speakers. His gesture is also in good taste. He stands erect, and stretches out both hands, in some of the happier parts of his speech, in a very graceful manner.17Grant, British senate, ii. 214.

In the latter half of the 1830s, Colquhoun was increasingly preoccupied with two issues: Ireland and the Church of Scotland. By this time, he was a strong opponent of the Whigs’ attempts to reform the Irish church. The title of one of his pamphlets aptly summed up his views on the issue: Ireland: popery and priestcraft the cause of her misery and crime. Although he did not deny the long record of English misgovernment of Ireland, he absolved the Irish church of any blame.18J.C. Colquhoun, The uses of the established church to the Protestantism and civilisation of Ireland (2nd edn., 1839), 11. The ‘state of disorder’ which characterised Ireland was largely due to the influence of Roman Catholic agitators and priests.19J.C. Colquhoun, Ireland: popery and priestcraft the cause of her misery and crime [c. 1836], 1. Colquhoun moved for a return of Catholic attacks on Irish Protestants, 1 May 1838, and rarely missed an opportunity to publicise Catholic violence.20Hansard, 1 May 1838, vol. 42, cc. 755-67; 7 Mar. 1839, vol. 46, cc. 85-93. It was no coincidence, he noted, that Ulster, which was ‘dotted thick with Orange Associations’, was the ‘only part of Ireland where life is safe and manufactures exist, and land is well tilled’.21Colquhoun, Ireland, 40. For these reasons, he was extremely critical of Whig education policy in Ireland, which he thought would simply hand money over to Roman Catholic priests.22Hansard, 19 Mar. 1839, vol. 46, cc. 884-6. In particular, he objected to the grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, which taught ‘men the doctrines of intolerance and persecution, and to send them forth through Ireland to disseminate their virulent poison’.23J.C. Colquhoun, Speech of Mr. Colquhoun at Exeter Hall, on March 11, 1836, upon the subject of the Maynooth College grant (1836), 7. In 1841 Colquhoun introduced a bill to repeal the statutes passed by the Irish Parliament relating to Maynooth, 2 Mar. 1841. Although he did not propose abolishing the grant, his bill was intended to prepare the ground for such an attack by removing the legislative sanction given by the state to the College.24Hansard, 2 Mar. 1841, vol. 56, cc. 1221-36. However, the bill did not progress beyond its first reading.25CJ, xcvi. 167, 202, 225, 299.

By the late 1830s, the Church of Scotland was increasingly divided over the patronage issue. The 1834 Veto Act, passed by the Evangelical majority in the General Assembly of the Kirk, gave congregations a veto over patrons’ ministerial appointments but was ruled to be unlawful by the Scottish supreme court in 1838, a judgment confirmed by the House of Lords the following year.26Machin, ‘The Disruption and British politics’, 25. As Evangelicals, increasingly called Non-Intrusionists, resumed their campaign against lay patronage, their leader Dr. Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) appears to have used Colquhoun as an intermediary with the Conservative leadership.27Thomas Chalmers to Lord Aberdeen, 10 Mar. 1840, 20, 22 May 1840, in The correspondence between Dr. Chalmers and the earl of Aberdeen in the years 1839 and 1840 (1893), 36, 43, 67, 71. Chalmers considered Colquhoun to be the future leader of ‘a religious party in Parliament’.28Colquhoun MSS, bundle 85, 26 June 1841, Cultybraggan Estates Office, Comrie, Perthshire, qu. in Wolffe, ‘Colquhoun’. In late 1839 Colquhoun privately proposed a compromise measure, which Sir James Graham considered ‘[n]either safe [n]or reasonable’, and in some respects even more objectionable than the veto.29Colquhoun proposed that the call (to appoint a minister) be approved by a majority of communicants (i.e. the congregation). Where this was not the case, the Presbytery would arbitrate between patron and congregation and have the power to set aside the presentation (the appointment). Sir James Graham to John Campbell Colquhoun, 25 Dec. 1839, Add. 79726, ff. 61-3 (at 62). Fearing an imminent schism in the Kirk, Colquhoun urged the earl of Aberdeen to bring forward a solution, 23 Dec. 1839.30James Campbell Colquhoun to Lord Aberdeen, 23 Dec. 1839, Add. 43237, ff. 114-15. When Aberdeen’s 1840 bill encountered ‘strong feeling & opposition’ from Chalmers’s party, Colquhoun lobbied the peer to make changes to appease the Non-Intrustionists.31Colquhoun to Aberdeen, 13 May 1840, Add. 43237, ff. 164-7. However, Conservative leaders such as Graham and Aberdeen doubted whether any concession would satisfy Chalmers, whom they increasingly distrusted.32Graham to Colquhoun, 25 Dec. 1839, Add. 79726, ff. 62-3; I.G.C. Hutchison, A political history of Scotland 1832-1924: parties, elections and issues (1986), 20-2; Machin, ‘The Disruption and British politics’, 39. Aberdeen abandoned his attempt, and was ‘greatly surprised’ by a speech Colquhoun made at Kilmarnock in October 1840 attacking his bill, since

I was under the firm impression that he would have supported it. He never gave me the least reason to doubt it, but quite the contrary. However, there is nothing more to be said, and I shall abstain from further communication with him.33Lord Aberdeen to John Hope, 16 Oct. 1840, in Selections from the correspondence of the fourth earl of Aberdeen, 13 vols. (1854-88), iv. 288c.

Even more astonishing, thought Aberdeen, was that Colquhoun sent him a new pamphlet which contained a whole chapter criticising his bill, prompting the nobleman to remark: ‘Is it not strange that he should have left me so much in the dark, with respect to his real opinions and intentions?’ 34Aberdeen to Hope, 6 Dec. 1840, Aberdeen correspondence, iv. 310; J.C. Colquhoun, Hints on the question now affecting the Church of Scotland, addressed to members of the Church of England, with a letter to Viscount Sandon MP (1840), 75-84. Aberdeen’s confidant, the Scottish lawyer John Hope, was more critical: Colquhoun was ‘a most awkward friend, and has in various ways injured the Conservatives greatly in Scotland since he pretended to join them’.35Hope to Aberdeen, 19 June 1841, Aberdeen correspondence, iv. 452.

Colquhoun displayed a great eagerness to turn out the Whigs in his speeches on the confidence motions of Sir John Yarde Buller and Sir Robert Peel, 28 Jan. 1841, 3 June 1841, and in his nomination speech at the 1841 general election, when he was beaten by a Liberal at Kilmarnock by eleven votes.36Hansard, 28 Jan. 1840, vol. 51, cc. 704-19; 3 June 1841, vol. 58, cc. 1049-55; Caledonian Mercury, 5 July 1841. Despite his efforts on behalf of their cause, (which included unsuccessfully lobbying Graham, who was lord rector of Glasgow University, to appoint Chalmers to the vacant chair of divinity), Non-Intrusionists voted against him because he had refused to pledge to vote against Peel on the patronage issue.37Hutchison, Political history of Scotland, 23-4; Graham to Colquhoun, 6, 11 Sept. 1840, Colquhoun to Graham, 9 Sept. 1840, Add. 79726, ff. 86-92. Colquhoun was defeated at the Newcastle-under-Lyme by-election the following year, but was seated on petition, 22 July 1842.38Morning Post, 14 June 1842; The Times, 15 June 1842; CJ, xcvii. 518.

Colquhoun called on the Conservative government to introduce a compromise measure to avert the schism in the Kirk, 7 Mar. 1843.39Hansard, 7 Mar. 1843, vol. 67, cc. 411-14. However, he voted with the party leaders against Fox Maule’s motion for a committee of the whole House on the petition of the Non-Intrusionist General Assembly, 8 Mar. 1843. In two pamphlets later that year, Colquhoun defended himself from accusations of inconsistency on the issue that had been made by Free Churchmen (as Non-Intrusionists became known after their secession from the Kirk in May 1843). He now presented himself as a supporter of Aberdeen’s 1840 bill.40J.C. Colquhoun, Two letters addressed to the deputation from Glasgow and the ministers and elders adhering to the majority of the Church of Scotland (1843), 5; idem, A letter to certain members of the Convocation (1843). Ultimately, Colquhoun’s attempt to position himself as a medium between the Conservative leadership and Chalmers appears to have ended with him being distrusted by both sides.

Colquhoun also returned to the theme of Ireland, welcoming the 1843 coercion bill as necessary given the Irish people’s ‘strong antipathy to the law’.41Hansard, 19 June 1843, vol. 70, cc. 106-9 (at 106-7); 11 July 1843, vol. 70, cc. 932-43. He was an unyielding opponent of the Conservative government’s 1845 bill to convert the annual grant to Maynooth into a permanent endowment, and unsuccessfully moved its defeat at the second reading, 11 Apr. 1845.42Hansard, 11 Apr. 1845, vol. 79, cc. 501-12; 18 Apr. 1845, vol. 79, cc. 1042-5. Colquhoun was a founder member of the ultra-Protestant National Club established in response to the measure, which, he argued, would lead to the endowment of the Roman Catholic church in Ireland, and make it impossible to maintain the Protestant establishment there, 24 Apr. 1845. The bill, he warned, was a first step to subverting the Irish church.43Hansard, 24 Apr. 1845, vol. 79, cc. 1245-57 (at 1247-50). Later that session, he acknowledged that the Maynooth issue had split the Conservative party, for which he blamed Peel. The prime minister had deceived his supporters, who had loyally followed him as leader because they believed he would maintain certain constitutional principles, 16 May 1845.44Hansard, 16 May 1845, vol. 80, cc. 665-82 (at 681).

Colquhoun developed this critique in his speeches on the corn laws in 1846 and in his 1847 pamphlet The effects of Sir Robert Peel’s administration of the political state and prospects of England. Although he divided against the repeal of the corn laws, he had ‘always been moderate’ on the issue, and had supported Charles Pelham Villiers’ motions for inquiry in the late 1830s.45Hansard, 23 Jan. 1846, vol. 83, c. 134. Colquhoun’s position was an idiosyncratic one. He offered no real defence of protection, and although he was sceptical about the benefits of repeal, he doubted that free trade would ruin domestic agriculture as some of its fiercest opponents predicted.46J.C. Colquhoun, The effects of Sir Robert Peel’s administration of the political state and prospects of England (1847), 16-17. In one of many wounding attacks on the premier, which probably owed something to his own ‘frustrated ambition’, Colquhoun argued that Peel’s conversion to free trade was merely the latest in a series of betrayals of his supporters.47J. Wolffe, The Protestant crusade in Great Britain, 1829-1860 (1991), 208; Hansard, 23 Jan. 1846, vol. 83, cc. 140-2. The betrayals included Catholic emancipation in 1829, the Maynooth bill of 1845, but also failing to avert the schism in the Church of Scotland. Peel, Colquhoun declared:

Always appeared to hold his principles loosely – to be riding at a single anchor. At the first appearance of a storm on the horizon, … [Peel] goes to sea, and not only goes to sea, but throws overboard … the whole cargo.48Hansard, 15 May 1846, vol. 86, c. 621.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Colquhoun expressed admiration for the Anti-Corn Law League’s campaign for having dominated and won the public debate.49Hansard, 12 Feb. 1846, vol. 83, cc. 772-3; 15 May 1846, vol. 86, cc. 623-4; Colquhoun, Sir Robert Peel’s administration, 12, 27. This demonstrated that ‘there must be argument for everything; a policy with reason and good reason for your policy’.50Colquhoun, Sir Robert Peel’s administration, 10. See also Hansard, 12 Feb. 1846, vol. 83, cc. 771-2. From this perspective, Peel’s real crime was failing to make ‘an open or earnest defence’ of protection, allowing its opponents to win the argument by default.51Hansard, 12 Feb. 1846, vol. 83, c. 772. See also ibid., 23 Jan. 1846, vol. 83, cc. 140-1; Sir Robert Peel’s administration, 26. At least the Whig leader Lord John Russell was honest in his political opinions and attempted to guide public opinion, Colquhoun added.52Hansard, 23 Jan. 1846, vol. 83, cc. 138, 140, 142; 15 May 1846, vol. 86, c. 623; Sir Robert Peel’s administration, 28. The institutions of the country were not ‘safe’ with Peel as prime minister.53Hansard, 23 Jan. 1846, vol. 83, cc. 140, 142; 12 Feb. 1846, vol. 83, c. 773; 15 May 1846, vol. 86, cc. 620-1; Sir Robert Peel’s administration, 30.

Colquhoun was, perhaps not surprisingly, among the leading opponents of the 1846 Roman Catholic relief bill.54Hansard, 11 Mar. 1846, vol. 84, cc. 957-61; 6 May 1846, vol. 86, cc. 141-8; 24 June 1846, vol. 87, cc. 491-5. In the same session, he offered no opposition to the Conservative government’s latest coercion bill, but doubted whether it would put down disorder in Ireland.55Hansard, 1 May 1846, vol. 85, cc. 1356-61. Ill-health prevented him participating in the 1847 session and he retired at the general election of that year. He did not stand for Parliament again, although ultra-Protestants reportedly sought to put him up for Oxford University, his alma mater, at the 1852 general election.56G.I.T. Machin, Politics and the churches, 1832-1868 (1977), 242. As John Wolffe has written, Colquhoun ‘lacked a sufficiently credible and broad basis of support to become a key major player’ in the Conservative party after 1846.57Wolffe, ‘Colquhoun’. However, he remained an important leader of Protestant causes. From 1858 he was president of the National Club, although he was ‘too lethargic’ to be an effective leader, and later chaired the United Protestant Defence Association.58Wolffe, Protestant crusade, 293; Machin, Politics and the churches, 369. He remained a prolific author on religious questions, and in 1868 published a critique of William Gladstone’s plan to disestablish the Irish church.59J.C. Colquhoun, The progress of the Church of Rome towards ascendancy in England (1868). On his death in 1870, Colquhoun was succeeded in turn by his two sons, Archibald (1828-72), and John Erskine Campbell Colquhoun (1831-1917), a clergyman.60Burke’s landed gentry (1908), 350-1; ibid., (1937), 456-7. Colquhoun’s papers are housed in the Cultybraggan Estates Office, Comrie, Perthshire, and his letters to Graham and Aberdeen are held by the British Library.