CHRISTMAS, William (c.1799-1867), of Whitfield Court, co. Waterford and 10 Dover Street, London

The scion of a family that had been active in the politics of Waterford since the mid-seventeenth century, Christmas was an indefatigable campaigner for the Conservative cause in his native city.1Burke’s Landed Gentry (1862), i. 245. Although sympathetic to measures of reform, he was firmly committed to maintaining the ‘close connexion’ between Great Britain and Ireland which he believed was ‘essentially necessary to the stability of the empire, and the welfare and happiness’ of both countries.2Hansard, 29 Apr. 1834, vol. 23, cc. 232-3. He was an active participant in almost every parliamentary election held in Waterford between 1826 and 1866, the last of which contributed to his untimely death.

Christmas’s family originated in Guildford, Surrey but since 1666 had resided at Whitfield, about four miles from Waterford.3E. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament 1692-1800 (2002), iii. 415. His father Thomas Christmas (1759-1821) had served as high sheriff of Waterford in 1789, and his grandfather William Christmas (1734-1803) had sat in the Irish parliament for Kilmallock, 1776-83.4Christmas’s grandfather was the third generation of the family to sit in parliament, Waterford City having been represented first by Richard Christmas of Whitfield (1661-1723) in 1695-9 and 1703-13: Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament, iii. 415-7. Having attended but not graduated from his father’s old college at Cambridge, in 1821 Christmas inherited the paternal estate of more than 4,000 acres at Whitfield and included smaller holdings in counties Tipperary, Kilkenny, Wexford and Limerick.5www.landedestates.nuigalway.ie:8080/LandedEstates/jsp/estate-show.jsp?id=2524. In 1883 the family still held 4,026 acres in county Waterford and 579 in Kilkenny: J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain (4th edn., 1883), 89. In June 1828 he married the daughter of a late colonel in the East India Company, who was the niece of Sir Thomas Frankland MP, 6^th bt., of Thirkleby Park, Yorkshire.6Hull Packet, 24 June 1828.

Christmas prided himself on being a resident proprietor of his native county, and was regarded as ‘not an unkind landlord’.7Freeman’s Journal, 14 Sept. 1865, 26 Mar. 1867. In 1826 he seconded the staunchly Protestant Lord George Beresford at the contest for County Waterford and, as a former high sheriff and Brunswicker, was expected to stand as a Conservative for the city at the 1830 general election. However, having ‘partially acceded’, he failed to appear and later pleaded ‘shortness of time’.8HP Commons, 1820-1832, iii. 907. He did, however, pledge to stand at another opportunity and in December 1830 spoke in favour of reform, which would transfer ‘the right of representation from small worn out boroughs to large unrepresented towns, such as Manchester and Birmingham’.9Freeman’s Journal, 15 Dec. 1830. He came forward for Waterford in 1831, but declined a poll after an unfavourable show of hands.10HP Commons, 1820-1832, iii. 907.

Christmas was, however, quick to present himself again at the 1832 general election as an avowed enemy of the Whigs.11Morning Post, 28 Sept. 1832. Despite rumours that he had received funds from the Conservative Society, he denied being a member of that party, although this attempt to mollify Waterford’s reformers did not convince Daniel O’Connell, who concluded that after meeting the candidate some years earlier, he believed ‘he was a Christmas of the darkest and most ungenial winter’.12Morning Chronicle, 29 Dec. 1832; Freeman’s Journal, 28 Nov. 1832. Nevertheless, John Galwey, the repeal MP for Dungarvan, later claimed that O’Connell had not opposed Christmas’s return, although the latter subsequently ‘never once voted’ with him in parliament: Morning Post, 15 Sept. 1834. Benefitting from a division between the Liberal and Repeal parties in Waterford, Christmas was returned ahead of a sitting Liberal member, Thomas Wyse.13Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (1833), 101; HP Commons, 1820-1832, iii. 907.

Although some Liberals remained hopeful that Christmas would prove to be ‘a strong supporter of the general policy of the Government’, he spoke frequently against Whig policies and proved a robust defender of the Union.14Morning Chronicle, 21 Jan. 1833. His conduct in parliament was ‘marked by a consistent adherence to high Conservative principles’, and he was quick to defend the reputation of the corporation of Waterford against a charge that it had embezzled ‘vast sums of money’.15Freeman’s Journal, 25 Mar. 1867; Hansard, 14 Feb. 1833, vol. 15, cc. 654-5. He voted against the first reading of the Irish church temporalities bill, 11 Mar. 1833, and, in supporting the Irish coercion bill, argued that it had become necessary to suppress unrest in Ireland by ‘whatever means might be employed’.16Hansard, 13 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, c. 629. He voted for Matthias Attwood’s motion for currency reform, 26 Apr. 1833, but opposed further parliamentary reform. Having declared in 1830 that the ballot would do not away with corruption and that it ‘had long been the pride and glory of Britons to act as they pleased, and to avow their actions openly and fearlessly’, he divided against a motion for the ballot, 25 Apr. 1833, and subsequently voted against shorter parliaments.17Freeman’s Journal, 15 Dec. 1830. In April 1833 he served on the Linlithgow election committee, and in the following month joined the inquiry into manufactures, commerce, and shipping.18Caledonian Mercury, 4 May 1833; CJ, lxxxviii. 328; PP 1833 (690) vi. 1. He backed Stanley’s motion to strike out the appropriation clause of the Irish church temporalities bill, 21 June 1833, and twice voted in favour of Lord Ashley’s factory reform bill that July.

In the following session Christmas voted against both a scrutiny of the pensions list, 18 Feb. 1834, and Hume’s motion for a fixed low duty on corn, 7 Mar. 1834. He divided in favour of Lord Althorp motion that church rates be replaced by a grant raised from a land tax, 21 Apr. 1834, and backed Lord Chandos’s motion for the relief of taxation on the agricultural interest, 7 July. That month he found himself in the unusual position of voting with a small minority of radicals and repealers against the renewal of the Irish Coercion Act, but only because he believed that too many clauses of the original measure had been dropped from the renewal bill.19Hansard, 18 July 1834, vol. 25, c. 178.

Although Christmas was prepared to support ‘gradual and cautious’ reform, he complained that ‘the people of Ireland were always inclined to jump to conclusions’, and ‘seemed to think that systems, the growth of centuries, were to be removed … at a blow’. While he did not believe that the House ‘ought to be independent of public opinion, when that opinion was steadily impressed by a majority of the thinking portion of the community’, he warned O’Connell in February 1834 that he ‘might find at last the fierce democracy he had roused turn round upon him and refuse to submit longer to his control’.20Hansard, 20 Feb. 1834, vol. 21, cc. 623-4. He favoured Irish tithe reform but counselled the House that tithes were ‘not a tax which could be imposed or removed at pleasure’, but constituted ‘a separate property’ of the Church and ‘therefore, … of the nation’ which could not be extinguished at will.21Hansard, 14 June 1833, vol. 18, c. 850. He accepted that occupying tenants must be relieved from tithes, but insisted that the measure brought forward by the Whig government would prove too complicated for Irish farmers to understand, and would ‘put the landlord in collision with his tenant’.22Hansard, 20 Feb. 1834, vol. 21, cc. 624; 31 July 1834, vol. 25, c. 811.

Christmas believed that the Commons had demonstrated a willingness ‘to pay every attention to Irish affairs’, and so discounted any need to repeal the Union.23Hansard, 26 Feb. 1834, vol. 21, c. 832. In April 1834, he made a long speech against O’Connell’s motion on the subject, in which he asserted that the agitation was of a quite different nature to that of Catholic emancipation. Repeal, he argued, received no support from either the Whig or Tory parties and could therefore only be carried ‘against the entire opinion of this country’. Impatient with historical arguments against the legitimacy of the Union, he declared that the ‘length of time during which the Union had passed unquestioned, should be sufficient in itself to give it all the force and validity of law’, and instead examined its practical effect on the welfare of Ireland. While admitting that ‘destitution and misery’ existed in the countryside, he claimed that the causes of this distress were ‘entirely independent of the Union’, and that Ireland could not expect any commercial advantage from repeal and a consequent ‘war of protecting duties with England’. Arguing that ‘Ireland was not made a province by the Act of Union, but an Integral part of the British empire’, he warned that repeal would mean ‘ipso facto, a separation’ which would further damage Ireland’s welfare and ‘give unlimited power to the democracy’.24Hansard, 29 Apr. 1834, vol. 23, cc. 224-32.

Faced by a reunited Liberal party at Waterford and the consequent opposition of the Catholic clergy, Christmas was pushed into third place by two Liberals at the 1835 general election.25Rev. J. Sheehan to D. O’Connell, 14 Jan. 1835: O’Connell Correspondence, ed. M.R. O’Connell, v. 258-9; Belfast News-letter, 16 Jan. 1835. His attempt to regain his seat at the 1837 general election proved futile and he did not go to the poll.26Morning Post, 6 July 1837. Undeterred, he came forward again as a Conservative at the 1841 general election, and topped the poll, having benefitted from the assessor’s decision to disqualify a significant number of Liberal voters.27Morning Post, 10, 15 July 1841.

During his second Parliament Christmas provided consistent support for the administration of Sir Robert Peel. Having voted in the minority for Henry George Ward’s amendment for a select committee on burdens on the landed interest, 14 Mar. 1842, he backed the second and third readings of the ministry’s corn importation bill, 9 Mar., 7 Apr. 1842, and divided in favour of the reintroduction of income tax. In April 1842 he sat on the select committee on the Irish drainage bill. That June he was unseated on petition after a committee scrutinised the return.28PP 1842 (246), xiv. 387; CJ, xcvii. 356; Standard, 9 June 1842; The Times, 10 June 1842.

Having turned his attention to local affairs, Christmas was in April 1846 appointed chairman of the relief committee for two baronies in county Waterford.29NAI, Famine Relief Commission Papers, 1845-1847: RFLC3/1-2 (Ancestry.co.uk). He had been an ex-officio poor law guardian of the Waterford Union since 1839. He did not offer at the 1847 general election but came forward again for Waterford in 1852, when he ‘unreservedly’ condemned the Ecclesiastical Titles Act and plans to withdraw the Maynooth grant. He remained a protectionist, seeing no benefit to Ireland from the ‘free admission of foreign wheat, oats, and barley’, but did not believe that it would be expedient to re-introduce protective duties. He did, however, argue that a remission of taxation on the agricultural interest was the best means of restoring national prosperity.30The Times, 14 June 1852. Brushing aside an insinuation that he was ‘the descendant of a Cromwellian trooper’, he went to the poll in spite of attracting only four backers at the show of hands, and finished a poor third behind two Liberals.31Freeman’s Journal, 14 July 1852; Morning Chronicle, 14 July 1852.

Christmas does not appear to have taken a prominent part in subsequent elections at Waterford, and by 1865 had reached the conclusion ‘that free trade was the best thing for any country’.32Freeman’s Journal, 14 Sept. 1865. A life-long proponent of agricultural improvement, he was a leading light of the Portlaw agricultural society, and an active member of the Waterford Hunt.33Standard, 20 Oct. 1854; Morning Post, 5 May 1854. His final foray into electoral politics took place in December 1866 when he seconded Captain William Talbot at the stormy County Waterford by-election. Severely beaten by ‘a set of ruffians’ as he left the polling place, he failed to make a full recovery and died at his residence in March 1867.34Freeman’s Journal, 27 Dec. 1866; Standard, 26 Mar. 1867. Christmas had sold some of his estates in 1862 and Whitfield passed to his great-nephew, William Osborne Christmas, in 1868.35Walford’s County Families of the United Kingdom (1888), 203.

Christmas was remembered as a man ‘of more than ordinary ability’ who was respected by even his political adversaries.36Freeman’s Journal, 25 Mar. 1867. At his death it was stated that he had been ‘declared by O’Connell himself to be one of the most useful members sent to the British Parliament’, but the provenance of this unlikely tribute remains a mystery.37Standard, 26 Mar. 1867.