FLEMING, Thomas James Willis (1819-1890), of South Stoneham House, Hants

Described in 1865 as the ‘scion of a Conservative family which had spent thousands of pounds in the cause’, Fleming’s inability to trade on his family’s formidable political reputation in Hampshire was striking, even to contemporaries.2Hampshire Advertiser, 15 July 1865. Lacking the vast wealth and political wiles of his father, however, he struggled repeatedly to secure election, alienating traditional Tories and even his older brother with his various stratagems. He finally secured a berth as Conservative MP for Winchester, only to be ousted a year later by ‘his own friends and a reserve of radicals’ in one of the city’s ‘strangest political struggles’.3Ibid.

Fleming was the second son of John Fleming, the county’s long-serving Tory MP and spendthrift election organiser, whose bribes to voters precipitated his fall from grace and retirement from the Commons in 1842.4See the entry for John Fleming, HP Commons, 1832-68. After attending Eton and Cambridge Fleming read for the bar, where he was called in 1843 but apparently never practised.5Although he is listed in J. Foster, Men at the Bar (1885), 157, no counsel work has been found. That year he joined his parents on a lengthy cruise around the Mediterranean, travelling in a separate yacht with his friend the amateur botanist Albert Hambrough of Steephill Castle, Isle of Wight.6http://www.willisfleming.org.uk/collections/guide/ms.1333/ The tour ended tragically with the death of his father near Athens in July 1844, and although Fleming was amply supported in his father’s will, the estates proved too encumbered with debt to deliver.7The Times, 13 Sept. 1844; IR26/1674/468. Thereafter he assisted his elder brother John Browne Willis Fleming (1815-72) in obtaining an Act of Parliament permitting the sale of the family’s entailed estates, which included an incomplete Grecian mansion at North Shoreham, on which their father had allegedly spent £100,000.8Gent. Mag. (1844), ii. 544. By 1854 Fleming was living at South Shoreham, their father’s former home, which he later purchased from his brother.9http://www.willisfleming.org.uk/estates/hants_and_iow/South_Stoneham_House

Fleming first tried to enter parliament in 1847 for the Isle of Wight, where his family held substantial estates.10Daily News, 12 Apr. 1859. Claiming political views ‘identical with those of his father’ and citing his distrust of free trade and staunch opposition to further concessions to the Catholics, his candidature as a ‘true Protestant’ was initially welcomed by the island’s leading Tories. The Gosport attorney Robert Cruickshank, on whose behalf his father had solicited Peel for ‘a place’ in the 1830s11For his father’s application to Peel see Add. 40413, f. 308., welcomed him as ‘a chip off the old block’.12Hampshire Telegraph, 3 July 1847. Fleming’s ‘pharisaical’ manner and hesitancy about proceeding to the poll, however, soured his campaign, contributing to a defeat that was later blamed on ‘youth’ and ‘inexperience’.13Hampshire Telegraph, 7 Aug., 21 Aug. 1847; Hampshire Advertiser, 3, 14 Aug. 1847. Rumours that he would offer again at the 1851 by-election proved groundless, and he instead seconded the candidature of another unsuccessful Tory.14The Examiner, 3 May 1851; Hampshire Advertiser, 24 May 1851. The following month he chaired a meeting of the Hampshire Loyal Political Association for the Protection of Native Industry and Capital.15Hampshire Telegraph, 7 June 1851.

What prompted Fleming’s ill-considered political volte face at the 1857 general election is unclear. Explaining that he had ‘now shaken off his old Tory politics and become as liberal as his opponent’, he offered again for the Isle of Wight as ‘neither a Radical Liberal or a Tory Conservative’, but as ‘a Liberal in opinion as well as Conservative’, who would consider voting for the ballot and the abolition of church rates. This was too much for both sides, who combined to give him a ‘sound thrashing’. Amidst uproar at the hustings, he berated the ‘crowd below’ for refusing him a hearing, denouncing the ‘amalgamation of Tories, Whigs, Radicals, Churchmen, Dissenters, and Papists who had formed a cabal ... to insult him’.16Hampshire Telegraph, 4, 11 Apr. 1857.

Offering again at the general election two years later, Fleming appeared to revert to type, citing his ‘general support’ for the Derby ministry and its recent reform bill, but reserving his right to differ from it ‘upon matters of detail’. Three days after publishing his address, however, his elder brother John, who headed the family interest, publicly withdrew his support, forcing Fleming to quit the field. ‘It is not from any personal feeling’, Fleming’s brother explained in the press, but on account of ‘a conversation I had with him some years ago’, which ‘my brother will not have forgotten’.17Isle of Wight Observer, 9 Apr. 1859; Daily News, 12 Apr. 1859. What this referred to is unclear, but it did not deter Fleming from transferring his candidature to Winchester, where he stood on the ‘same principles’ alongside a long-serving Tory. Unable to prevent many of the latter’s supporters from giving their second votes to the Liberal candidate, however, he was narrowly defeated by just six votes.18The Standard, 3 May 1859. Praised by the Tory press for his forbearance, when the Tory MP retired in 1864 Fleming came forward as his replacement. After carefully avoiding talk of ‘party politics’ in his campaign, he was returned in the first uncontested election at Winchester for over thirty years.19Hampshire Telegraph, 13 Feb. 1864.

An apparently silent member during his brief stint in the Commons, Fleming nevertheless attended regularly and gave loyal support to the Conservatives in the lobbies. He voted steadily against the abolition of university tests, radical motions to extend the borough and county franchises, and the secret ballot, and was in Disraeli’s minority for censuring the Palmerston ministry over its handling of the Danish-Prussian war, 8 July 1864. He was appointed to the select committee on salmon fisheries, 19 May 1865. At that year’s general election he stood for re-election at Winchester, denying that he was a ‘bigotted old Tory’ and citing his belief in free trade and support for extending the franchise to ‘fully educated men’. After a ‘fierce contest’ between Fleming and another Tory, who both demanded plumpers and refused to coalesce, he was narrowly defeated in one of the city’s ‘strangest’ elections, which was decided by the second votes of Liberal voters.20Hampshire Telegraph, 12 July 1865; Hampshire Advertiser, 15 July 1865.

Fleming is not known to have sought a return to the Commons, but in 1868 proposed the abortive candidature of a ‘Mr. Spooner’, an ‘agriculturalist’, at the 1868 South Hampshire election.21The Standard, 23 Nov. 1868. Three years later he was residing at 1 Camden Crescent, Bath with his wife (14 years his junior) and 83 year old father-in-law, the younger five of his six children and five servants.221871 census. He died in March 1890 at the Villa Schamzenberg, Berne, Switzerland, leaving estate to his widow and executrix proved under £390, 18 June 1890.23National Probate Calendar (1890). Documents relating to the Fleming family and Stoneham estates are being collated at http://www.willisfleming.org.uk.