EATON, Henry William (1816-1891), of 16 Prince’s Gate, Hyde Park, Westminster, Middlesex; Tyttenhanger Park, Hertfordshire

A wealthy London silk merchant, Eaton was a Conservative loyalist who followed Disraeli’s lead over parliamentary reform. He was regarded as the ‘best-dressed man’ in the House, with a ‘pleasant presence’ and ‘genial features’.1The World, 7 June 1876, qu. by T.W. Whitley, The parliamentary representation of the city of Coventry (1894), 377. The son of a London merchant, ‘after serving an apprenticeship in a commercial house in the City, he embarked in the silk business, and raised the firm of H.W. Eaton and Son to a foremost position in the silk trade’.2The Times, 5 Oct. 1891.

Eaton’s involvement in the silk trade, led him to organise and raise £3,000 to relieve distress in Coventry, a centre of that industry. Many in the city blamed the decline of the staple trade on the 1860 Anglo-French commercial treaty negotiated by Richard Cobden for allowing cheap French imported silks.3Whitley, Parliamentary representation of Coventry, 337. When a vacancy arose for the city in October 1863, Eaton issued an address declaring that ‘I much deplore the fatal effect which the recent commercial treaty … has had on the staple trades of your city’, although he conceded that it could not be repealed.4Qu. by Coventry Evening Telegraph, 3 Oct. 1891. He withdrew to support another Conservative, but when another vacancy arose for Coventry in June 1865 Eaton accepted a requisition from over 2,000 electors to stand and was elected after a contest.5Whitley, Parliamentary representation of Coventry, 343-5.

Eaton was re-elected in first place at the general election a month later, but faced criticism regarding his involvement in a local railway scheme. In 1863 a new line had been proposed that would connect Coventry with the Great Western and Midland Railways, and provide a second link to London. A bill was passed in 1865 and a resolution passed by a public meeting, chaired by the mayor, entrusted Eaton with raising the money to fund the scheme. However, there was no legal obligation for Eaton to do so, and the scheme failed to attract the necessary capital.6Whitley, Parliamentary representation of Coventry, 348.

Eaton voted with the Conservative leadership and the Adullamites in all the key votes on the Liberal government’s 1866 reform bill, including in favour of Grosvenor’s amendment for a parallel redistribution scheme and Dunkellin’s amendment for a ratable rather than a rental borough franchise, 27 Apr., 18 June 1866. He divided against the ballot, 17 July 1866. Eaton’s voting behaviour followed a similar pattern in the divisions on the Conservative ministry’s 1867 representation of the people bill. Like most Conservative MPs he opposed the enfranchisement of compound ratepayers, lodgers and urban copyholders and leaseholders. He also voted against granting extra representation to the largest towns at the expense of the small boroughs and reducing the residency qualification.

Eaton opposed Gladstone’s Irish church resolutions, 3 Apr. 1868, and, in his only spoken contribution in this period, queried the accuracy of the board of trade’s statistics regarding the quantity of imported foreign ribbons, 29 June 1868.7Hansard, 29 June 1868, vol. 193, cc. 308-9. He was re-elected in first place at the general election later that year, but was again forced to defend his conduct regarding the railway scheme, asking rhetorically: ‘is it likely that a man in trade, like myself, could undertake to make a line that might cost two hundred thousand pounds?’8Whitley, Parliamentary representation of Coventry, 364.

His hustings protestations notwithstanding, Eaton reputedly spent £100,000 on purchasing the Coventry Park estate in 1871.9Ibid., 373. He was returned again at the 1874 general election, but was narrowly defeated in 1880. However, he was re-elected for Coventry at the 1881 by-election and sat until his creation as 1st Baron Cheylesmore in 1887. He died at Warsaw in October 1891 after accompanying the Queen’s equerry on a tour of Moscow and St. Petersburg.10The Times, 5 Oct. 1891. A famous art collector, Cheylesmore had purchased Edwin Landseer’s celebrated painting The Monarch of the Glen (1851) for £6,510 in 1884, which was sold for £7,245 after his death.11J. Grego, ‘The art collection at Bell-Moor, the house of Mr. Thomas J. Barratt’, Magazine of Art, xxii (1898), 264. He also owned Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833), which his family later bequeathed to the National Gallery.12W.B. Owen, rev. S. O’Connell, ‘Eaton, William Meriton, second Baron Cheylesmore (1843-1902)’, www.oxforddnb.com. Cheylesmore left a personal estate sworn under £102,015.13G.E. Cockayne, The complete peerage (1913), iii. 191. His title passed successively to his two surviving sons William Meriton Eaton, 2nd Baron Cheylesmore (1843-1902) and Herbert Francis Eaton, 3rd Baron (1848-1925). The former contested Macclesfield, another centre of the silk trade, on three occasions, 1868, 1874, and 1880, and Coventry for the vacancy caused by his father’s ennoblement in 1887, all without success.14McCalmont’s parliamentary poll book, ed. J. Vincent and M. Stenton (8th edn., 1972), 191; Whitley, Parliamentary representation of Coventry, 396.