PARKER, Thomas Augustus Wolstenholme (1811-1896), of Eynsham Hall, Oxon.

Parker, a captain in the Oxfordshire yeomanry, was parachuted into the 1837 county election in order to prevent the unopposed return of a prominent local Catholic. Only son of Colonel Thomas Parker of Eynsham Hall, Parker was heir presumptive (after his father) to the 4^th earl of Macclesfield (d. 1842), a former Tory MP for Woodstock and a long-serving member of the royal household, whose Oxfordshire estates included Shirburn Castle.1HP, Commons 1790-1832, iv. 720-21. On 7 July 1837 Parker was invited to stand as a third candidate at a meeting of the Oxfordshire Conservative Association, chaired by its staunchly Protestant leader William Henry Ashhurst. Issuing his address three days later, he promised ‘to uphold the integrity of the constitution in church and state, institutions which must ever be endeared to a Protestant and an Englishman’. Branded a ‘child of the Conservative Association’ by his opponent, after a highly sectarian contest he was returned in third place alongside two other Conservatives.2Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 8, 15, 22, 29 July, 5 Aug. 1837; D. Eastwood, ‘Toryism, Reform and Political Culture in Oxfordshire, 1826-37’, Parliamentary History (1988), vii. 108-111.

There may have been more to Parker’s declaration in his address that he had been ‘induced to offer’, since he clearly found Westminster uncongenial and later explained that in accepting the role of ‘public man’, ‘my private inclinations did not correspond to the wishes of my friends’.3Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 5 Aug. 1837, 19 June 1841. He was, however, initially a regular presence in the lobbies, where he voted steadily against the Melbourne ministry on issues such as the established Church, Irish municipal reform and their policy in Canada, whilst also opposing the secret ballot and any revision of the corn laws. It is possible that it was he, rather than Robert Townley Parker, the Conservative MP for Preston, who spoke briefly against the proposed introduction of county councils, 21 Aug. 1839, but given that the other speeches attributed to T. Parker in Hansard are patently Townley Parker’s, it is more likely that he was silent in debate. He may, however, have been the T. Parker who brought up petitions condemning the Irish registration bill, 4 May 1840, against which he also voted, 11 June 1840, the new poor law, 22 Feb., 15 Mar. 1841, and the Maynooth grant, 9 Mar. 1841. He was in Peel’s majority on the confidence motion which brought down the Whig ministry, 4 June 1841.

At the 1841 general election Parker announced his retirement, to the evident relief both of himself and the Oxfordshire Conservative Association, whose chairman, responding to criticism of his selection, insisted that ‘although the candidate was young, I felt assured that he would well discharge of the duty of a representative’.4Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 19, 26 June, 10 July 1841. He made no known attempt to re-enter the Commons and in March 1850 succeeded his father to the Lords, where he fared little better and faded into obscurity. On his death in 1896 he was succeeded in the earldom by his grandson George Loveden William Henry Parker (1888-1975). His fourth son Francis Parker (1851-1931) sat as a Conservative for Henley from 1886-95.