GLOVER, Edward Auchmuty (1815-1862), of 28 Grosvenor Street West, Eaton Square, London, Mdx. and The Oaks, Ospringe, Kent.

On taking his seat in 1857, Glover was described as ‘not a bad-looking man… rather tall, stoutly made, and, on the whole, of passable appearance. He affected rather the swell – wore a hat with a curled brim, and a rather ponderous watch-chain’.2W. White, The inner life of the House of Commons (1904), i. 54. His career as MP for Beverley, after a series of failed candidatures, was short-lived, as he was unseated on petition on grounds of disqualification. His fall from grace was compounded when, in a landmark case, he was put on trial and sentenced to four months imprisonment for having made a false declaration regarding his qualification. Given that, as The Times remarked, ‘in many instances the property qualifications of the Members of the Lower House would not bear a strict legal investigation’, Glover was seen by many as an unfortunate scapegoat,3The Times, 14 Apr. 1858. and his ‘martyrdom’ became the catalyst for the ‘speedy death’ of the property qualification in 1858.4Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 18 Apr. 1858. He therefore had the dubious distinction of being the last MP to be unseated on this score.

Glover’s family had been settled in Ireland since the seventeenth century, when his ancestor John Glover received estates in counties Cork and Limerick as a reward for military service.5J. Grove White, Historical and topographical notes, etc. on Buttevant, Castletownroche, Doneraile, Mallow, and places in their vicinity (1916), iv. 115 [consulted at http://www.corkpastandpresent.ie]. Born at Mount Glover, county Cork, Glover added the name Auchmuty to his own in compliance with the wishes of the distinguished army officer, Sir Samuel Auchmuty (1758-1822),6Dod’s parliamentary companion (1857, new parliament), 198. ‘a near relative’.7Hull Packet, 10 Nov. 1854. Glover trained for the bar at King’s Inns and Middle Temple, and in 1840 was called to the Irish bar, where he practised. In June 1849 he was imprisoned in the debtors’ prison at the Four Courts Marshalsea, Dublin, and filed for relief as an insolvent debtor. He was discharged from custody in March 1850, when his debts stood at £13,326.8York Herald, 30 May 1857. It was later claimed that his financial difficulties were due to ‘having incurred liabilities for others when quite a young man’,9Morning Post, 20 July 1858. although Glover himself confessed in 1854 that ‘at one time he had only a limited income and lived up to it, and perhaps a little above it’.10York Herald, 16 Sept. 1854. After his release he took up residence in England,11Dublin Daily Express, cited in Hull Packet, 15 May 1857. although he was in Ireland in November 1851 when he addressed Kinsale’s electors in anticipation of a by-election.12Daily News, 11 Nov. 1851. He did not pursue this candidature. Called to the English bar in 1852, he joined the Northern circuit, but does not appear to have practised for long.13The Times, 10 July 1852. When he sued the Great Northern railway company after suffering ‘concussion of the spine’ in an accident at Hatfield, 12 Jan. 1856, he was described as ‘not in practice, but engaged in literary pursuits’. Although the defence suggested that Glover had exaggerated his injuries and his earning potential, he was awarded £560 in damages.14Ibid., 3 July 1856. Alongside his literary pursuits, later said to earn him £1,500 a year,15White, Inner life of the Commons, i. 58. Glover had a ‘partiality for scientific studies’, and in 1852 was reported to have invented a device for raising sunken ships.16Freeman’s Journal, 4 Aug. 1852. In 1853 he became a director and acting harbour commissioner of the Warkworth Dock Company in Northumberland, but petitioned to wind up the company in 1856.17The Times, 31 Aug. 1853, 17 Apr. 1856.

Glover made the first of several abortive attempts to win an English parliamentary seat at the 1852 general election. He issued an address after meeting a Conservative deputation from Pontefract, but withdrew as his prospects appeared poor.18Bradford Observer, 1 July 1852, 23 June 1853. Glover appeared in court in June 1853 to defend himself (successfully) against a claim for election expenses incurred by Robert Saward of Pontefract. Instead he offered at Beverley, where he gave full rein to his ‘considerable oratorical powers’ when addressing the constituency.19Daily News, 18 Aug. 1854. Glover’s loquaciousness was also evident when he testified in the Saward v. Glover case, with the judge declaring that ‘the witness rather required a rein than a prompter’: Bradford Observer, 23 June 1853. He urged that as farmers were no longer protected by ‘high prohibitive duties’ on corn, they should be relieved from the burden of taxation,20Hull Packet, 2 July 1852. but refuted claims that the Derby government would re-impose the corn laws.21Ibid., 9 July 1852. He favoured withdrawing the Maynooth grant, and complained of the ‘encroaching spirit which appears to indicate that nothing will satisfy the ambitious spirit of the Catholic hierarchy’.22Ibid., 2, 9 July 1852. While he advocated ‘a system of national education’, this must be ‘Protestant in its character as well as in its teaching’. A ‘friend to religious toleration in its widest sense’, he nonetheless opposed admitting Jews to Parliament.23Ibid., 2 July 1852. On the hustings he declared himself ‘a manly and independent supporter’ of Derby’s government.24Daily News, 7 July 1852. He was beaten by two Liberals. The following month he went to Great Malvern to convalesce from bronchitis.25The Standard, 13 Aug. 1852.

In August 1854 Glover, who had family connections to Kent, offered for a vacancy at Canterbury, where there was considerable confusion about his political affiliation. The Times reported that he had ‘announced himself as a Liberal-Conservative, but has since advocated Radical views’.26The Times, 15 Aug. 1854. His election address declared free trade to be ‘the life and soul of our financial and commercial legislation’ and promised to support ‘any well-considered measure of parliamentary reform, calculated to extend the franchise more generally’,27York Herald, 8 July 1854. sentiments which he reiterated on the hustings, where he sparred verbally with one of the Conservative candidates, Charles Lennox Butler, and blamed the outbreak of war on Aberdeen’s ‘weakness and inertness’.28Daily News, 18 Aug. 1854. He won the show of hands but retired at 10 a.m. on polling day, after encouraging his supporters to back the Liberal Sir William Somerville and the Conservative Charles Lushington.29The Times, 23 Aug. 1854. Keen to counter the impression that he was an inconsistent political adventurer, Glover informed The Times that he had ‘never advocated any opinion which bears even the complexion of Radicalism’, and was ‘a temperate reformer, anxious to correct abuses, but at the same time to maintain unimpaired the monarchical and Protestant institutions of the country’.30Ibid. He later alleged that it was rumours about him telegraphed from Beverley which had scuppered his chances at Canterbury.31Hull Packet, 13 Mar. 1857.

To his disappointment, Glover had not been asked to contest a vacancy at Beverley the previous month, one reason being that some election bills from 1852 remained unpaid.32Ibid., 15 Sept. 1854. Glover later recalled how he paced up and down his library waiting for a telegram to arrive to summon him to the Beverley contest. That September he visited the borough to insist that he would ‘return to woo his first love’ at the next dissolution,33Hull Advertiser, cited in Bradford Observer, 21 Sept. 1854. and settled outstanding claims from publicans and cab proprietors totalling £100.34Hull Packet, 15 Sept. 1854. In an unguarded speech – which the sympathetic Hull Packet praised for its ‘remarkable eloquence, occasionally sparkling with wit’,35Ibid. but the hostile York Herald depicted as ‘incoherent and disjointed’36York Herald, 16 Sept. 1854. – Glover admitted that he had not expected to win Beverley without money, but protested that the £1,300 he had provided should have been sufficient, and accused his agents of keeping much of this for themselves and leaving bills unpaid.37Hull Advertiser, cited in Bradford Observer, 21 Sept. 1854. His agents subsequently rebutted this charge: Hull Packet, 22 Sept. 1854. He also made calculations as to how much might have been spent in bribing on his behalf.38Hull Packet, 15 Sept. 1854. These indiscreet revelations did little to ease the strained relations between Glover and his erstwhile supporters, but he made it clear that he would stand again, and claimed that ‘if he were required to pay down £10,000, he could do so at once’.39Hull Advertiser, cited in Bradford Observer, 21 Sept. 1854. A lawyer acting for his family wrote to the Hull Packet in November 1854 to deny claims that Glover was a parvenu, citing several distinguished family connections.40Hull Packet, 10 Nov. 1854. For a similar defence of Glover’s respectability, see White, Inner life of the Commons, i. 58.

Glover made yet another unsuccessful attempt to secure a seat at a by-election at Abingdon in December 1854. He ‘indignantly repelled’ reports that he had offered ‘at several places... professing any political creed that might happen to favour his success’, but nonetheless described himself as ‘a truly liberal and independent conservative’. He voiced his support for ending the Maynooth grant; admitting Dissenters to universities and exempting them from church rates; extending the franchise (but not the ballot); and education ‘sublimated by religion’.41Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 25 Nov. 1854. However, he withdrew before the nomination.42The Times, 5 Dec. 1854. That winter he lectured at Beverley Mechanics’ Institute on ‘the rights of Labour and Capital’, and the history of commerce.43Hull Packet, 15 Dec. 1854, 2 Feb. 1855. In September 1855, anticipating a dissolution, he issued an address at Beverley which advocated ‘temperate progression, diffusion of education amongst the people, economy in the management of state affairs’ and ‘being slow to make war, but vigorous in the prosecution of it’.44Hull Packet, 28 Sept. 1855. When Glover visited Beverley the following year, it was reported that the borough’s Conservative leaders ‘have determined not to help him. They now pretend that he is a man of no fixed political principles’.45York Herald, 26 Jan. 1856.

Undeterred, Glover stood on his own account at the 1857 election, when he claimed to have declined invitations from two other constituencies.46Ibid., 14 Mar. 1857. At his first public meeting he appeared ‘without a chairman or one friend at his back’, although two leading Conservatives proposed him at the nomination.47Ibid., 14 Mar. 1857, 27 Mar. 1857. Glover claimed that it was only one section of the Tory party he had quarrelled with, but also sought to court Liberal support. He would have backed Palmerston ‘with all his might’ on the Canton question, but found ‘great fault’ with growing centralisation in government. He favoured cuts in defence spending so that excise duties on spirits and tobacco could be reduced.48Hull Packet, 13 Mar. 1857. His electioneering was overshadowed by claims that he lacked a sufficient property qualification, and when he went riding the day before the nomination, there were rumours that he had stolen the horse and fled.49Ibid., 29 May 1857. Two outsiders appeared at Beverley during the contest to lay evidence against Glover over his Irish insolvency and the encumbered nature of his English estates. Richard Martin, a barrister and editor of the Evening Sun, had known Glover in Ireland, while Philip Toker was related to Glover by marriage, his uncle John being married to Glover’s aunt.50York Herald, 4 Apr. 1857. Martin claimed that while they were both barristers in Ireland Glover had obtained money from him ‘by false pretences and false securities’: The Times, 13 July 1857. Although John Toker regarded Glover as the ‘best and truest friend I ever had in my life’, his nephew in contrast thought him a charlatan who ‘had behaved extremely ill to my family’, and was keen to expose him.51PP 1857 sess. 2 (243), v. 179, 209. Glover declined Martin’s challenge to meet him, and Philip Toker, advised that he would be ‘in bodily danger’ if he appeared at the hustings, stayed away.52York Herald, 4 Apr. 1857. Glover was, however, served on nomination day with a demand to state his qualification, which he duly did before a magistrate.53York Herald, 30 May 1857.

Glover secured second place in the poll behind a Liberal, but faced an election petition.54Following his return Glover presented a gold cup to be run for at the Beverley, Hull and East Riding races: Morning Post, 13 June 1857. He later claimed that the central Liberal organiser, James Coppock, had offered him three ‘Ticklers’ (£3,000) to resign the seat, as it would be cheaper than a petition.55Hull Packet, 30 July 1858. Although Dod’s parliamentary companion listed Glover as a Liberal, The Times felt that his politics were ‘of a nondescript character’, but classed him as Conservative.56Dod’s parliamentary companion (1857, new parliament), 198; The Times, 13 Apr. 1857. He displayed no clear voting pattern during the small number of divisions for which he was present in the 1857 session. He divided against the ballot, 30 June, and his last known vote was on an adjournment motion, 17 July. He was unseated for failing to possess a sufficient property qualification, 3 Aug. 1857.57For the full detail of the petition charges, see York Herald, 30 May 1857. The election committee found that Glover’s county Cork property, formerly owned by his father, had been vested in assignees since his Irish insolvency in 1849. The Toker family, into which his aunt had married, had conveyed properties in Kent to him, but these were so heavily mortgaged that they did not constitute a sufficient qualification. The committee recommended that as Glover had made a false declaration regarding his qualification, the matter should be laid before the attorney-general with a view to further proceedings.58The Times, 3, 4 Aug. 1857. The Kent properties were The Oaks, Ospringe, which Glover claimed was worth £300 a year, and a farm in the Isle of Harty, supposedly worth £325 a year.

Intending to offer at the by-election which followed his unseating, Glover issued ‘a somewhat vague address’, but subsequently withdrew, leaving the field clear for Henry Edwards as Conservative candidate.59Hull Packet, 7 Aug. 1857. It later emerged that he had effectively been paid to stay away so that he did not jeopardise Edwards’ prospects, receiving £200 from a local Conservative who was reimbursed by one of Edwards’ employees.60The Times, 18 Sept. 1869. Glover petitioned for a fresh inquiry into his qualification, but the Commons declined to receive his petition, 15 Aug. 1857.61Ibid., 17 Aug. 1857. In an unprecedented step, the attorney-general was ordered to prosecute him, 8 Dec., and a warrant was issued for his arrest, 15 Dec. 1857.62York Herald, 19 Dec. 1857. Three days later Glover wrote from Brighton, complaining that he had been ‘subjected to a persecution unequalled for bitterness and relentlessness by any ever recorded in the history of electioneering tactics, political hostility, and personal spite’.63Morning Post, 23 Dec. 1857. He was arrested on returning to London, 23 Dec., and spent Christmas Day in Newgate prison before he could be bailed.64The Times, 28 Dec. 1857. He made three successful applications to postpone his trial; the first, in January 1858, was on the grounds that more time was needed to prepare his defence, while the third, in February, was on health grounds, as Glover was suffering from erysipelas, a recurrent problem since a fall from his horse in November 1856.65The Standard, 5 Jan. 1858; The Times, 2 Feb. 1858, 23 Feb. 1858.

Glover’s trial eventually took place at the Central Criminal Court in April 1858. The prosecution presented a similar case to that in the election petition, noting his Irish insolvency and arguing that the conveyance of the Kent properties to Glover, which took place when he offered for Canterbury, ‘was merely a sham, and was only done for electioneering purposes’, and that he was aware that they were heavily mortgaged.66The Times, 10 Apr. 1858. The defence endeavoured to prove that the Kent properties were worth more than the prosecution allowed, that Glover had believed himself qualified, and also contended that the law on property qualifications was mired in uncertainty.67Ibid., 12, 13 Apr. 1858. The jury found Glover guilty, but recommended mercy, on the grounds that this was the first prosecution of its kind, and because of ‘the loose way in which declarations are made at the bar of the House of Commons’. Swayed towards leniency, the judge sentenced Glover to four months in Newgate as a first-class misdemeanant.68Ibid., 13 Apr. 1858. At Glover’s request he was subsequently transferred to the Queen’s Bench prison.69Morning Post, 28 Apr. 1858.

Glover’s imprisonment produced ‘a strong feeling of sympathy’, from the knowledge that his was ‘by no means a solitary case’.70Preston Guardian, 17 Apr. 1858. The York Herald was not alone in arguing that the property qualification ‘ought either to be totally abolished, or most carefully enforced’, rather than the current ‘mere sham’.71York Herald, 17 Apr. 1858. While measures to abolish the property qualification had been before the Commons previously – notably as part of Russell’s 1852 reform bill and in Locke King’s 1857 bill – Glover’s case was seen as ‘the death-blow’, and having been introduced less than two weeks after his trial concluded, an act abolishing the qualification (21 & 22 Vict., c. 26) received royal assent, 28 June 1858.72W.L. Burn, ‘Property qualifications in the House of Commons’, Parliamentary Affairs (1948-9), ii. 282. The measure passed its first reading in the Commons, 22 Apr., its second reading, 6 May, and its third reading, 3 June 1858. Glover was thus in the bizarre position of being in prison as a result of his breach of a law which had now been repealed. During the debates Christopher Griffith, MP for Devizes, raised the possibility of asking the crown to remit or mitigate Glover’s sentence.73Hansard, 6 May 1858, vol. 150, c. 225; The Times, 8 May 1858. An appeal for mercy was also made by members of the jury that had convicted Glover. In the light of new information about the value of Glover’s Kent property, eight of them signed a declaration to the home secretary expressing regret at their guilty verdict, and three others endorsed a memorial for Glover’s immediate liberation.74Daily News, 6 July 1858. Having made detailed enquiries about Glover, the jury had found him to be ‘regular in his habits, exemplary in his character, a gentleman of remarkable abilities and acquirements’: Morning Post, 20 July 1858. Glover did secure an early release, on health grounds,75Daily News, 6 July 1858. and was ‘loudly cheered’ by fellow inmates upon leaving prison, 3 July 1858.76North Wales Chronicle, 10 July 1858. Rumours during his imprisonment that Glover was engaged to ‘one of the richest heiresses in the kingdom’, who was determined to marry him once he was freed proved to be unfounded: Nottinghamshire Guardian, 10 June 1858. After his release Glover appealed to Edwards, who had filled his place at Beverley, to restore the seat to him, but Edwards unsurprisingly demurred.77Daily News, 15 July 1858. Later that month Glover addressed a meeting at Southwark on parliamentary reform,78Lancaster Gazette, 24 July 1858. chaired by one of the jurymen from his trial, who paid to free Glover when he was arrested for a debt of £1,000 after the meeting.79Hull Packet, 30 July 1858.

The persecution he had suffered became Glover’s main theme when he visited Beverley soon thereafter. Despite not arriving until midnight, he was greeted by ‘a salvo of cheers’, a brass band and a 1,000-strong crowd. Disclaiming ‘any egotism’ on his part, he contended that no other MP could have borne his ordeal ‘with such an undaunted heart... Were he but to tell them a tithe of what he had gone through, their blood would freeze with horror’. He described himself as ‘the victim of libel, of monied power, of envy, and of unjust accusations’. Although three other boroughs had invited him to become their candidate, he intended to contest Beverley at the next election.80Hull Packet, 23 July 1858. During this visit Glover chaired an Oddfellows’ dinner, at which two of the jurymen appeared in his support.81Ibid., 6 Aug. 1858. That September he was among those on a boat feared missing on a trip from Alderney to Guernsey, but emerged unscathed.82Morning Chronicle, 25 Sept. 1858. His mother died unexpectedly that November, having apparently ‘never recovered [from] the painful shock’ of her son’s misfortunes.83Nottinghamshire Guardian, 18 Nov. 1858.

At the 1859 general election Glover offered for Beverley ‘in the “Liberal Conservative” interest’.84Hull Packet, 15 Apr. 1859. On the hustings he advocated a £5 borough and a £10 county franchise.85Ibid., 29 Apr. 1859. He was not supported by the local Conservative party, polled only 54 votes, and stayed away from the declaration.86Ibid., 6 May 1859. He petitioned against the victorious Edwards and the Liberal Ralph Walters, but desisted during the election committee hearing as it merely replicated a case being presented by other petitioners.87The Times, 6, 9 Aug. 1859. This marked the end of his connection with Beverley. He offered for a vacancy at Marylebone in April 1861, when he declared that ‘my political principles are well known – Liberal without being revolutionary, Conservative without being reactionary’,88The Standard, 15 Apr. 1861. but withdrew before the nomination.89Morning Post, 18 Apr. 1861. Never in robust health, he died unmarried and childless at 65 Denbigh Street, Pimlico in March 1862.90Boase, Modern English Biography, i. 1158.