FANE, John William (1804-1875), of Wormsley Park, Stokenchurch, Oxon

Fane came from a well-established line of Tory MPs for Oxfordshire. His grandfather John had sat for the county for almost 28 years, and on his death in 1824 had been succeeded in the representation by his eldest son, Fane’s father. An independently-minded ultra Tory, the latter survived two expensive contests but declined a third in 1831 on the issue of parliamentary reform, to which he was hostile.1HP Commons, 1820-32, v. 78-80. After attending Cambridge University, Fane took a majority in the county militia and rose steadily through its ranks. An active field-sportsman, he assumed proprietorship of the South Oxfordshire hunt after succeeding to the family’s principal estate at Wormsley on the death of his father in 1850.2Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 28 June 1856. Following the outbreak of the Crimean war three years later, Fane helped to muster and procure funds for a company of about 600 militia volunteers. They left England under his command in June 1855 and served in Corfu until the following year.3Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 10 Feb. 1855, 28 June 1856; Morning Post, 23 June 1855. A month after the company left Oxford for training in April 1855, he was widowed for a third time.4Morning Post, 17 Apr. 1855.

At the 1857 general election it was rumoured that Fane, who had served as high sheriff from 1854-5, would come forward for Oxfordshire, either in opposition to the sitting Liberal George Harcourt, or in his place in the event of the latter’s elevation to the peerage. Neither eventuality occurred and at the nomination Fane proposed the re-election of his kinsman, the Tory Member John Sidney North.5Morning Chronicle, 12 Mar. 1857; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 4 Apr. 1857. He attended a Conservative dinner with Benjamin Disraeli in Slough the following year, and was again mooted as a candidate in 1859, when North was expected to retire, but instead stayed on.6Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 29 May 1858; Birmingham Daily Post, 7 Apr. 1859.

The death of Harcourt at the end of 1861 eventually created a vacancy, for which Fane was invited to stand by the Oxfordshire Agricultural Political Society, a newly formed Conservative organisation bent on ending the long-established division of the county’s three seats between its political parties. Fane initially refused, citing the expense of the likely contest and cost of keeping up an establishment in London, and offered instead to subscribe £50 towards the return of another Conservative. ‘There is not the slightest chance of Fane allowing himself to be dragged into an exciting and expensive contest, engendering ill-will and making enemies where he now has none but friends’, commented the press.7Morning Post, 6 Jan. 1862. After the Conservative Registration Society also offered its backing, however, Fane, at ‘great personal sacrifice’, agreed to stand. In his address he cited his support for Lord Palmerston’s foreign policy and repeal of the malt tax, and his opposition to the ballot and abolition of church rates.8Morning Post, 9 Jan. 1862; Daily News, 29 Jan. 1862. Explaining that he was ‘not an advocate for great speeches’, he quipped ‘that more business would be done and better done, if there were fewer talkers in the House of Commons’.9Standard, 13 Jan. 1862. After ‘one of the most severely contested elections’ in the history of Oxfordshire, he was returned by a modest margin.10Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 1 Feb. 1862; Morning Post, 1 Feb. 1862.

A fairly regular attender, Fane, who took his seat, 6 Feb. 1862, voted silently with the Conservatives on most issues, including against the ballot, franchise extension and the abolition of university tests, but he broke ranks with Disraeli to divide for repeal of the Maynooth grant, 6 May 1862. In his only known speech, 15 June 1863, he unsuccessfully opposed a clause in the militia bill enabling commanding officers to suspend volunteers and institute courts of inquiry, arguing that the power was not asked for and ‘having had the command of a militia regiment both at home and abroad, he knew that circumstances were constantly occurring which were calculated to irritate and annoy commanding officers; and this certainly would be a very oppressive power to put into the hands of any man who might happen to lose control over his temper’. Re-elected unopposed in 1865, Fane voted against the Russell ministry’s reform bill, 27 Apr. 1866, and continued to divide against the ballot and abolition of church rates.11Daily News, 18 July 1865. He loyally supported the Derby ministry’s reform bill in the lobbies the following year, and was added to the select committee on electric telegraphs, 1 July 1868.

At the 1868 general election Fane, as ‘the junior member’, agreed to retire from Oxfordshire after the Conservatives resolved to run just two candidates, owing to the reduction of votes held by each elector from three to two under the minority clause of the 1867 Reform Act. Describing himself as ‘an unwilling captive of an arrangement necessitated by the effect of recent legislation’, he explained that he had given way in order to prevent a contest, but hoped to offer again.12Daily News, 17 Aug. 1868; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 22 Aug, 12 Sept., 7 Nov. 1868. He retired as commander of the county militia in 1872 and died ‘after a long illness’ at his London townhouse, 34 Cavendish Square, in November 1875. He was succeeded in his estates, proved under £40,000, 4 Jan. 1876, by his eldest son John Augustus Fane, an army captain, and interred in the family vault at Lewknor church.13Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 27 Nov. 1875.