AGLIONBY, Henry (1790-1854), of 5 Brick Court, Temple, London; Manor House, Caterham, nr. Croydon, Surrey; Newbiggin Hall, nr. Carlisle, Cumb. and Nunnery, Ainstable, Cumb.

Aglionby, who was regarded as ‘one of the few men who are in advance of the party with whom they generally act’, described himself as a ‘Radical’, believing that ‘the principle of Radicalism was not to destroy, but to amend the institutions, so that they should become a blessing instead of a curse to the people’.1Carlisle Journal, 4 Aug. 1854; 29 July 1837. As MP for Cockermouth for over two decades, he ‘spoke out boldly and fearlessly on all occasions – neither truckling to the minister of the day nor flattering popular prejudices’, and became a tireless reformer of the criminal justice system, with a deep attachment to improving prisoners’ rights.2Ibid., 4 Aug. 1854. His career was not without controversy, though, and his zealous defence of the New Zealand Company, of which he was a director, made him unpopular with Peel’s second ministry.

Aglionby was the only son of the Reverend Samuel Bateman, rector of Farthingstone, Northamptonshire. Following the death without issue of his maternal uncle, Christopher Aglionby, the family’s Cumbrian estates were partitioned among Christopher’s four sisters, and in 1813 Henry assumed the name of Aglionby in lieu of Bateman, in compliance with the will of his aunt, Elizabeth Aglionby.3R.S. Ferguson, Cumberland and Westmoreland MPs from the Restoration to the Reform Bill of 1867 (1871), 333. In 1840, on the death of his cousin, Francis Aglionby, MP for Cumberland East 1837-40, he succeeded to his Nunnery estates in Cumberland. Called to the bar in 1816, he was a barrister on the northern circuit, and also practised as a special pleader.4W.W. Bean, The parliamentary representation of the six northern counties of England (1890), 76. In 1829 he was brought forward by the local Whig hierarchy to contest a vacancy at Carlisle, where his great-grandfather, Henry Aglionby, had sat, 1721-27, but was defeated after a tumultuous contest.5HP Commons, 1820-1832, ii. 219-28.

Refusing to canvass ‘on principle’, Aglionby was returned ‘independently’ in second place for Cockermouth at the 1832 general election.6Carlisle Journal, 10 Jan. 1835. He immediately established his radical credentials, voting for the abolition of naval and military sinecures, 14 Feb. 1833, the ballot, 25 Apr. 1833, scrutiny of the pension list, 18 Feb. 1834, a fixed duty on corn, 7 Mar. 1834, and shorter parliaments, 15 May 1834.7In a recent compendium of the most assiduous radical MPs in the division lobbies, Aglionby does not appear until 1837-41: D. Nicholls, ‘Friends of the people: parliamentary supporters of popular radicalism, 1832-1849’, Labour History Review, 62, 2 (1997), 132-5. He also opposed Irish coercion, 11 Mar. 1833, and frequently intervened in debates on the Irish established church, claiming that it was ‘forced upon the majority of the Irish people against their will’, 5 Aug. 1833, and condemning the government for ‘perpetuating and supporting the church of Ireland’, 17 Aug. 1833.

Aglionby was initially ‘considered somewhat a tedious speaker’ but ‘in the course of a session or two ... after he had flung aside the tendency to diffusiveness which he had acquired at the bar’, he ‘mastered the knack of parliamentary speaking’ and ‘won a position of considerable influence’.8Ibid., 4 Aug. 1854. Assiduous in attending to his parliamentary duties, he was appointed to a wide range of select committees, including those on victualling-house licences, Commons’ divisions, judges’ salaries, official houses, inns of court, metropolitan sewers, election expenses and hand-loom weavers’ petitions, an issue that was intimately connected to Cockermouth, whose weavers were suffering from acute poverty.9PP 1833 (585), xv. 262; PP 1834 (147), xi. 326; PP 1834 (438), xi. 2; PP 1834 (480), xi. 450; PP 1834 (503), xviii. 328; PP 1834 (584), xv. 198; PP 1834 (591), ix. 264; PP 1834 (556), x. 2.

At the 1835 general election Aglionby further explained his stance on canvassing:

He ... had never solicited any man for his vote – never had a paid agent. ... He wanted the electors to be unbiased – to think and to act for themselves. ... He hoped no elector would think himself neglected because he had not called upon him – because he had treated him as a man, not a child.10Carlisle Journal, 10 Jan. 1835.

He was equally insistent that he offered ‘independently’, and ‘acted on the principle of measures, not men, and it was therefore of little importance to him individually who were the ministers’.11Ibid. However, his dislike of the Tories, who he believed would ‘not trouble us long’, was manifest.12Parliamentary Test Book (1835), 6. Re-elected in second place, he opposed Peel on the speakership, 19 Feb. 1835, and the address, 26 Feb. 1835. He voted for Irish church appropriation, 2 Apr. 1835, and thereafter supported the Melbourne ministry’s Irish policy. He also championed the government’s municipal reform bill, declaring that ‘for the last one hundred years, a more important boon had never been conferred by any government, the Reform bill excepted’, 22 June 1835.

It was on the issue of criminal justice that Aglionby made his first significant mark in the Commons. In April 1836 he successfully introduced a bill to repeal parts of the 1828 Offences of the Person Act (10 Geo. 4. c. 34) which made it obligatory for judges to order the execution of murderers to be carried out forty-eight hours after conviction. Believing that ‘where the criminal law had received some mitigation, the number of commitments and convictions had declined’, he proposed that the period between sentence and execution should be lengthened to between 14 and 27 days.13Hansard, 28 Apr. 1836, vol. 33, cc. 466-70. His murderers’ execution bill received the royal assent, 14 July 1836 (6 & 7 Will. 4. c. 30).14The Times, 15 July 1836. He also gave vocal support to the prisoners’ counsel bill, 2 May 1836, which gave felony defendants the right to be represented by a counsel in the English courts.

At the 1837 general election he reiterated his independent stance, insisting that ‘he stood there as he always had, for himself alone’, and topped the poll.15Carlisle Journal, 29 July 1837. He continued to support the Whig government on most major issues, and voted for equalisation of the borough and county franchise, 4 June 1839, the abolition of capital punishment, 5 Mar. 1840, and the Maynooth grant, 23 June 1840. He also remained assiduous in his select committee service.16Aglionby sat on a range of select committees, including those on charities, PP 1835 (449), vii. 632; public bills, which he chaired, PP 1836 (606), xxi. 142; church leases, PP 1837 (538), vi. 626; copyholds enfranchisement, PP 1837-38 (707), xxiii. 190; county courts bill, PP 1839 (387), xiii. 184; private business, PP 1839 (520), xiii. 158; and New Zealand, PP 1840 (582), vii. 448.

Re-elected in first place at the 1841 general election, Aglionby defended his support for the Poor Law Amendment Act and called for a fixed duty on corn.17Standard, 3 July 1841. By now a voracious speaker in the Commons, he contributed to the most high profile debates of Peel’s second ministry. On the corn laws, he supported Villiers’ motion for immediate repeal, explaining that his decision was justified by ‘the enormous amount of suffering and distress which existed’, 24 Feb. 1842, but the following day, after declaring that ‘he would be the judge of his own consistency’, he backed Peel’s sliding scale on corn duties, as he ‘wished to get the lowest duty’, 25 Feb. 1842. Four months later he announced that ‘nothing but repeal of the corn laws ... would give to the famishing people the relief to which they were entitled’, 11 July 1842, and thereafter consistently voted for repeal, 26 June 1844, 10 June 1845, 15 May 1846. Although he ‘did not object to the general principles of the poor law bill’, he called for its ‘hard’ provisions to be ‘mitigated’, 12 July 1842, and was particularly scornful of the measures relating to outdoor relief, describing them as ‘disgustful to the poor, and, in general, unsatisfactory to the ratepayers of the United Kingdom’, 23 Feb. 1843. His regular interventions in debates concerning railway legislation, meanwhile, reflected his belief that ‘there could be no doubt that Parliament must interfere with the railway system’, 19 Mar. 1846, and he championed the rights of the public rather than companies, 6 Mar. 1845, 11 Feb. 1847.

During Peel’s second ministry Aglionby obstinately defended the New Zealand Company, of which he had been a director ‘with a small pecuniary interest in it’ since 1840. Following the Wairau incident in June 1843, when 22 Europeans and four Maori were killed when an armed party of New Zealand Company settlers and Ngati Toa clashed over the purchase of land, the financial position of the company had been steadily deteriorating, and the situation was brought to a head in 1844 when the colonial office withdrew an advance of £40,000 to the company after it discovered it was already owed money. In April 1844 the company’s directors suspended their operations and applied to Parliament ‘to redress the wrongs inflicted on the company’.18The Times, 27 Apr. 1844. Aglionby successfully moved for a select committee of inquiry, though Stanley, the colonial secretary, noted that it was odd ‘to have the committee nominated by a gentlemen who was himself a leading member of the company’, 27 Apr. 1844.

Although the select committee, on which Aglionby sat, condemned the New Zealand Company for sending settlers to the islands in defiance of the crown, it criticised the Treaty of Waitangi as ‘part of a series of injudicious proceedings’ between the British government and the Maori, and reported that the New Zealand Company had the right to the land ‘without reference to the validity or otherwise of its supposed purchase from the Natives’.19PP 1844 (556), xiii. 2. Tellingly, these recommendations were only adopted by a narrow majority in committee, and, as they would have meant a complete reversal of British policy, were rejected by the government.20P. Burns, Fatal success: a history of the New Zealand Company (1989), 254-5. Appalled at the machinations of the Aglionby and his fellow company members on the committee, Stanley informed Peel that he was ‘disgusted by the perpetual small trickery which from first to last has characterised their proceedings’.21Quoted in P. Temple, A sort of conscience: the Wakefields (2002), 374-5.

Undeterred, Aglionby, alongside his fellow New Zealand Company MP Charles Buller and the leading colonial promoter Edward Gibbon Wakefield, continued to put ‘unremitting pressure on the government’, whom they blamed for its troubles.22Burns, Fatal success, 264. He urged Peel to grant the New Zealand Company ‘the redress they required’, 11 Mar. 1845, and, in tense exchanges with the premier, was heavily critical of Stanley’s leadership at the colonial office, 14 Mar. 1845. Aglionby’s role in the New Zealand question, however, was far from beyond reproach, and in April 1845 he was forced to defend himself in the Commons against an accusation, printed in The Times, that he had induced a member of the 1844 select committee on New Zealand to modify his evidence.23Hansard, 9 Apr. 1845, vol. 79, cc. 377-80; The Times, 1 Apr. 1845. He continued to zealously defend the character of the New Zealand Company in Parliament, 18 June, 21 July 1845, but his desire that the country be split into two - the North island for the Maori and missionaries and the South island to be made a self-governing province - flew in the face of government policy and it came to nothing.24Burns, Fatal success, 264. He ultimately backed the Russell ministry’s New Zealand bill, 12 July 1847, but his blatant distaste for the Treaty of Waitangi remained, believing that ‘the whole of the lands in the island’ had been given ‘without distinction’ to the ‘natives’ because ‘they were born there, or because they had eaten somebody who had possessed the lands before’, 9 Feb. 1848. Even in 1852 he refused to accept the shortcomings of the New Zealand Company, insisting, during a debate on the New Zealand Government bill, that ‘the opposition of certain persons in authority had produced the distress into which it had fallen’, 4 June 1852.

Returned unopposed in 1847 and re-elected in second place in 1852, Aglionby attended steadily and supported Russell’s ministry on most major issues.25In the 1849 session he was present for 91 out of 219 divisions: Hampshire Telegraph, 20 Oct. 1849. In 1853 he was present for 63 out of 257: Daily News, 21 Sept. 1853. He remained a staunch advocate of the ballot and voted for the equalisation of the borough and county franchises, 27 Apr. 1852, and church rate abolition, 21 June 1854. He directed the majority of his efforts towards reform of the law relating to copyhold property. Believing that the voluntary system of enfranchisement had failed, he successfully introduced his copyholds enfranchisement bill, 6 June 1849, which called for the compulsory enfranchisement of lands of copyhold and customary tenure, but owing to the lateness of the parliamentary session, it came to nothing. He reintroduced the bill the following year, 28 Feb. 1850, but a motion to withdraw the bill was subsequently passed, 24 July 1850, prompting Aglionby to protest that ‘if it were thrown out, he would introduce such a bill again and again’. In 1851 he chaired the select committee on the enfranchisement of copyholds bill, displaying a mastery of the subject, and following the reintroduction of the bill, 10 Feb. 1852, the 1852 Copyhold Act (15 & 16 Vict. c. 51), which allowed tenants to demand enfranchisement, became law.26PP 1851 (550), xiii. 2.

Aglionby maintained his desire to reform the criminal justice system until the end of his life. In April 1854 he introduced the larceny bill, which sought to enable magistrates sitting in petty sessions to take the pleas of prisoners pleading guilty, 4 Apr. 1854. The bill, whose object, according to Aglionby, was ‘to rescue youthful offenders from the contamination to which they were exposed in the weeks and months which they were not unfrequently [sic] obliged to pass in gaol between their committal and their trial’, 8 June 1845, was part of the wider 19^th-century trend of increasing the use of magistrates’ courts in the criminal justice system.

Aglionby, who had been suffering from ill health during his last parliamentary session, died without issue at his residence in Caterham, Surrey, in July 1854.27Era, 6 Aug. 1854; Gent. Mag. (1854), ii. 307. In a well-judged assessment of his parliamentary career, one eulogy noted that he had been:

[M]ost diligent in the performance of his duties on committees – was well versed in the forms of the House – and his bonhomie and frank generous disposition rendered him a general favourite. ... [O]f late years, there have been few members whose opinions were received with more respect.28Carlisle Journal, 4 Aug. 1854.