PORTAL, Melville (1819-1904), of 12 King Street, ., St. James’s, London; Laverstoke House and Freefolk Priors, Hants

Heir to a Hampshire paper mill owner with ‘large estates’, Portal was ‘groomed’ for high office by his godfather Sir William Heathcote MP.1Hampshire Advertiser, 13 May 1848; R. Foster, The Politics of County Power: Wellington and the Hampshire Gentlemen 1820-1852 (1990), 10. Misidentified as a ‘Peelite’ in a recent biography, Portal in fact sat for his county as a staunch Protectionist with the support of the local Tory gentry, who included Jane Austen’s brother Edward, to whom he was connected by marriage.2See Portal’s entry in the Oxford DNB. Portal’s prize winning pig and his farming credentials helped him to see off opposition to his re-election in 1852, after he made himself unpopular by refusing to support anti-Catholic legislation, but could not save him in 1857, when he was ‘rejected’ for his ‘unpatriotic’ opposition to the China war.3Morning Chronicle, 13 Apr. 1857.

Portal’s ancestors hailed from France, where they had been ‘some of the earliest and most distinguished Protestants’ and owned large estates near Toulouse.4Hampshire Telegraph, 2 Mar. 1889; Hampshire Advertiser, 10 Apr. 1889. Fleeing persecution following the revocation of the edict of Nantes, his great-grandfather Henry Portal (c.1690-1747) had arrived at Southampton around 1706, where he joined other Huguenot émigrés working at the White Paper Makers’ Company. In 1719 Henry had established his own paper mill at Laverstoke with the backing of the local Heathcote family. Aided by the chalk-stream waters of the River Test, which were ideally suited to making crisp paper, in 1724 the company had obtained the sole contract for the manufacture of Bank of England notes from the governor Sir Gilbert Heathcote, an uncle of the Heathcotes. Portals went on to become ‘one of the largest and foremost hand-made paper mills in Britain’.5Foster, Politics of County Power, 4, 10; G. Franklin, Laverstoke Mill, Whitchurch, Hampshire (2010), 1, 5.

In 1826 Portal became the oldest surviving son and heir from his father’s two marriages, his three step-brothers and his older brother all having died young. His remaining siblings included an older half-sister Caroline and his younger sister Adela, both of whom married sons of Jane Austen’s brother Edward Austen Knight, and his younger brother Wyndham Spencer Portal (1822-1905), who took over the family’s paper business in 1848.6Sanditon, The Watsons, Lady Susan, and other miscellanea (1934), ed. R. B. Johnson, 203-4; Journal of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (1905), liii. 1072. After attending Harrow and Oxford University, where he ‘shone conspicuously in the Union’, serving as its treasurer in 1841 and president in 1842, Portal read for the bar.7H. Morrah, The Oxford Union 1823-1923 (1923), 104.Admitted in 1845, his correspondence of the following year shows that he toured the western circuit, contrary to an obituarist’s claim in The Times that he ‘did not practise’.8M. Portal to J. H. Newman, 19 Mar. 1846, cited in H. Ward, Life of Cardinal Newman (1912), i. 617; The Times, 26 Jan. 1904.

Like many alumni of his generation, whilst at Oxford Portal came under the spell of the leading Tractarian John Henry Newman, with whom he ‘took a liberty’ and ‘introduced’ himself. Listed in the subscriptions for some of Newman’s earlier works, Newman’s conversion to Catholicism in 1845 evidently gave Portal pause for thought.9See, for instance, J. H. Newman, Historical Tracts of S. Athanasius (1843), 344. In March 1846 Newman, hearing that he was having ‘considerable doubts about the true Church’, wrote to offer spiritual guidance, noting that ‘you may soon be called into the active duties of life and have no leisure for such important questions’.10Letters and Diaries of J. H. Newman (1961), ed. G. Tracey, xi. 134.Expressing his veneration for Newman in reply, and soliciting his prayers, Portal outlined his determination to remain an Anglican, noting ‘that if Christ is with us here, I dare not seek him elsewhere’.11Ward, Cardinal Newman, i. 617.

By now it was clear that Portal was being ‘more or less groomed’ by his ailing godfather Sir William Heathcote, a long-serving MP for Hampshire North, to replace him as the county’s leading political and administrative figure.12Foster, Politics of County Power, 10.After serving as a vice-president of North Hampshire agricultural society in 1846, and succeeding to his father’s estates in 1848, Portal came forward for the vacancy created by Heathcote’s long-anticipated resignation in 1849, much to the indignation of local tenant farmers, who charged him with being Heathcote’s nominee.13Hampshire Advertiser, 30 May 1846. In an unprecedented move they got up their own candidate, in what was widely seen as a ‘tenants’ revolt’.14Foster, Politics of County Power, 122-3, 141; Hampshire Telegraph, 31 Mar. 1849. A bitter struggle ensued, in which Portal was forced to play up his own farming activities. Billed as a ‘true Protectionist’, who ‘abhors free trade’ and ‘is no Tamworth man and no trimmer’, he secured the firm backing of local Tory landowners, among them Edward Austen Knight, and was returned with a comfortable majority, amidst allegations of unprecedented intimidation and coercion of voters.15Hampshire Advertiser, 24, 31 Mar., 7 Apr. 1849; Daily News, 2 Apr. 1849; Morning Chronicle, 7 Apr. 1849.

Portal was a regular attender in the Commons. He loyally backed the Tory Protectionists in the lobbies, voting steadily against repeal of the navigation laws throughout 1849 and for measures supportive of the agricultural interest. He also sided with the Derbyites on most other issues, voting to censure Palmerston’s handling of the Don Pacifico affair, 28 June 1850, and dividing consistently against further Catholic concessions, Jewish emancipation, the secret ballot and more parliamentary reform. In 1851, however, he broke ranks with Disraeli and other leading Tories to oppose Russell’s anti-Catholic ecclesiastical titles bill. Explaining his motives in a significant maiden speech, 25 Mar. 1851, he argued that the bill would only exacerbate sectarian tensions while failing to impede the progress of Catholicism over ‘the minds and consciences of men’, which Parliament was ‘vainly seeking to control’ by legislation. Citing the need for a much stronger Established Church, he warned that the Church of England had far less to fear ‘from the Pope of Rome as from the Pope of Downing-street’, and ‘less reason to dread the bulls which issued from the Flaminian Gate, than the pastoral letters from the Treasury’ and ‘the hasty effusion of an off-handed Premier’.16Hansard, 25 Mar. 1851, vol. 115, cc. 523-26.

Portal’s heresy on this issue ‘shocked’ his Tory constituents and initially looked as if it might cause him trouble at the 1852 general election. Standing again as a supporter of Derby’s ministry, he staunchly defended his actions, firmly rebutting allegations of ‘Puseyism’.17Foster, Politics of County Power, 124; Hampshire Advertiser, 3 July 1852. After stressing his commitment to the landed interest and his hands-on farming credentials, he eventually secured an uncontested return, aided by his popularity for introducing tenant right on his estates and the much-trumpeted success of his prize-winning pig in a local show. ‘He had been a candidate and carried off the prize for a pig’, he quipped to good effect during the campaign, ‘and next week he should be again a candidate ... for a very different prize’.18Hampshire Advertiser, 10, 17 July 1852; Hampshire Telegraph, 17 July 1852.

Back in the House, Portal was in the die-hard Protectionist minority against free trade, 27 Nov. 1852, and loyally supported the Derby ministry until its defeat on Disraeli’s budget, 16 Dec. 1852. Either by design or default, he now avoided most divisions on Catholic issues, including those relating to the grant for the seminary at Maynooth, although he sided with its Protestant opponents in backing an inquiry into state funding for all religious institutions, 2 Mar. 1853. He also divided steadily against the abolition of church rates. On 16 Mar. 1853 he spoke briefly against the county rates and expenditure bill, drawing on his knowledge of the Winchester Poor Law Union.19Hansard, 16 Mar. 1853, vol. 125, c. 285. A silent critic of the Crimean war, he followed Disraeli into the lobbies in the crucial division on the issue that brought the Aberdeen ministry down, 29 Jan. 1855, and on his failed attempt to censure Palmerston’s subsequent peace negotiations, 25 May 1855. His other key votes included supporting Disraeli’s abortive attack on the Liberal budget, 23 Feb. 1857, and dividing with him for Cobden’s censure of Palmerston following the British bombardment of Canton, 3 Mar. 1857.

At the ensuing election Portal again found himself at odds with his constituents. In his address he insisted that a ‘great wrong’ had been committed in China and defended the ‘honest majority’ of the Commons ‘who had refused to sanction such conduct’. The appearance of two rival Conservatives, who both supported the ‘honour of the British flag’, however, made his defeat inevitable and he withdrew from the field.20Hampshire Advertiser, 28 Mar., 4 Apr. 1857. He was subsequently listed among the 51 MPs ‘rejected’ for their lack of patriotism.21Morning Chronicle, 13 Apr. 1857. ‘One of the reasons why he did not continue to be a member’, noted a more sympathetic commentator thirty years later, ‘was because he took an unpopular view of a particular question’.22Hampshire Advertiser, 15 Oct. 1890.

Portal is not known to have sought re-election to the Commons but he continued to play a significant role in the administration of his county. He served as judicial chairman of the county court for 24 years and as chairman of the quarter sessions for a decade until 1889, during which time he oversaw the restoration of the assize courts in the Great Hall at Winchester Castle, where a portrait of him now hangs, and improved conditions in the county prison.23Hampshire Advertiser, 15 Oct. 1890; Oxf. DNB. He was high sheriff in 1863. In 1889 he was appointed an alderman of the newly created Hampshire County Council, where he was active on various committees and a keen pursuer of retrenchment. A bid to elect him as the council’s first chairman, however, was defeated by 35 votes to 54.24Hampshire Telegraph, 2 Mar. 1889; Hampshire Advertiser, 3, 6, 10 Apr. 1889. Portal was also a lay member of the Winchester diocesan conference.25The Times, 26 Jan. 1904. In 1899 he published an architectural and historical account of The Great Hall, Winchester Castle.

Portal died the ‘oldest magistrate’ on the Hampshire bench in 1904 aged 84, leaving personal estate valued at £82,921.26Ibid. His two eldest sons having predeceased him, the family estates passed briefly to his third son Aleric (1861-1906), a retired naval commander.27His eldest son Melville Raymond Portal (1856-1893), a soldier, had died in Uganda whilst serving with his second eldest son Sir Gerald Herbert Portal (1858-94), a noted diplomat to Africa, who succumbed to typhoid the following year. On his death without issue they reverted to Sir William Wyndham Portal (1850-1931), the heir of Portal’s brother Wyndham, who had been awarded a baronetcy in 1901. A collection of Portal’s papers can be found in Hampshire Record Office.28Hampshire Record Office, 150M89.