BARHAM, John Foster (1799-1838), of 26 Queen Anne Street, London; Appleby Castle, Westmoreland; Trecwn, Pemb. and Stockbridge, Hants.

Barham, who was ‘tall, with small eyes and a reddish face and rather tigerish in appearance’, was the eldest son of Joseph Foster Barham, Whig member for Stockbridge, 1807-32.2The Gascoyne Heiress: the life and diaries of Frances Mary Gascoyne-Cecil, 1802-39, ed. C. Oman (1968), 94-5, 97. Brought in by his father for Stockbridge at the 1820 general election, Barham, an ‘idle’ member, opposed the Liverpool ministry on most major issues and supported Catholic claims before retiring at the dissolution in 1826 when his father was in dispute with another patron. Returned again for Stockbridge in 1831, he backed the Grey ministry’s reform bill, and offered no opposition to his own borough’s extinction.3HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 200-2.

In September 1832 he succeeded his father to estates in Pembrokeshire, Stockbridge and the West Indies, where his family, who ‘took a special interest in their slaves’ by inviting missionaries to educate them, had owned and operated the Mesopotamia estate for over a century. In contrast, Barham ‘never visited Jamaica and took little interest in his property there’.4R.S. Dunn, ‘The story of two Jamaican slaves: Sarah Affir and Robert McAlpine of Mesopotamia Estate’, in R.B. Sheridan and R.A. McDonald (ed.), West Indies accounts: essays on the history of the British Caribbean and the Atlantic economy in honour of Richard Sheridan (1996), 188-210; N. Draper, The price of emancipation: slave-ownership, compensation and British society at the end of slavery (2010), 40. The two Jamaican estates he inherited comprised 636 slaves and in 1835 he was awarded £11,485 18s. 15d. in compensation.5Information provided by Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

At the 1832 general election Barham was brought forward for Westmoreland, where his mother’s family, the earls of Thanet, had influence. Although he stated his support for Grey’s ministry, he insisted that he was ‘unfettered and unpledged to party’.6Barham’s election poster, 6 Aug. 1832, Papers of John Foster Barham MP, card 235, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Following a campaign in which a hostile local press dismissed ‘his qualifications as a Member for the county’ and suggested that ‘his private character is not what it ought to be’, he was defeated by the Tory Lowther interest.7Westmoreland Gazette, 10 Nov., 8, 22 Dec. 1832. However, in 1833 he was invited to fill the vacancy at Kendal caused by the death of James Brougham. He confirmed he would support the government ‘without being pledged to any party’ and was returned unopposed, 17 Feb. 1834.8Kendal Chronicle, 18 Jan. 1834. He voted for Lord Althorp’s motion to replace church rates with a land tax, 21 Apr. 1834, but appears to have been largely absent for the remainder of the session. He is not known to have spoken in the reformed Parliament and there is no evidence of any select committee service.

At the 1835 general election he offered again for Kendal, after abandoning his intention to once more contest Westmoreland.9In July 1834 Barham had been approached by the Westmoreland election committee who informed him that he was ‘the only man to keep the party together’. However, after a preliminary canvass, he abandoned his intention to stand. Richard Wilson to John Barham, 15 July 1834, quoted in J. Coohill, Ideas of the Liberal Party: perceptions, agenda and Liberal politics in the House of Commons, 1832-1852 (2011), 4. Responding to reports that he had gone over to the Conservatives, he insisted that ‘I am no Tory’ and expressed his ‘regret’ at Melbourne’s removal from office. He called for shorter parliaments, an amendment of the corn laws, the removal of all abuses in the established church, and the removal of the temporal possessions of the Irish church.10Parliamentary Test book (1835), 12. Re-elected without opposition, he underlined his opposition to the Tory party by dividing for Abercromby as speaker, 19 Feb. 1835, the Whig amendment to the address, 26 Feb. 1835, and for Irish church appropriation, 2 Apr. 1835.

In January 1836 Barham recorded that he was ‘under strict medical superintendence and shall be perhaps for some time to come’. The following month he informed his agents that he was too ill to present a petition and thereafter he is not known to have attended the Commons.11Bodl. Clarendon dep. c.382, bdle. 4, Barham to Nicholson, 24 Feb.; c.389, bdle. 16, same to Stanley, 28 Jan., to Richards, 18 Feb. 1836. In March 1837 he was certified by a commission of lunacy, with the jury determining that he had been of unsound mind since April the previous year.12HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 201. He died, without issue, in May 1838. His widow, who administered his estate, sought advice from Lord Brougham over anticipated difficulties from Barham’s brother and next of kin, William, ‘a shadowy figure who appears to have died soon afterwards’.13Ibid. The estates in Pembrokeshire and the West Indies were entailed on the next brother Charles (1808-78), briefly Whig Member for Appleby in the 1832 session.14Haverfordwest and Milford Haven Telegraph, 21 Aug. 1878. Barham’s papers and correspondence are held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.15Papers of John Foster Barham MP, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS Car. Dep. b.33-8, c. 357-91, c. 428-32.