MORETON, Hon. Augustus Henry Reynolds (1804-1862), of Woodchester Park, Glos. of 2 Seamore Place, London, Mdx. of Bembridge, IoW

align="left">One of eight children of the 4^th baron Ducie, Moreton’s family had been established in Gloucestershire since the seventeenth century. He was educated at Rottingdean1It was here that Edward Bulwer Lytton MP claimed to have cemented his reputation as ‘the best pugilist of the school’ by beating ‘a boy somewhat bigger than myself, named Augustus Moreton’: Earl of Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton (1913), i. 44. and Oxford, and during the early 1830s frequently attended royal functions, including the queen’s birthday celebrations in 1833 and 1836.2Morning Post, 13 May 1831, 15 June 1832, 16 May 1834; Morning Chronicle, 21 Feb. 1833; Standard, 25 Feb. 1836. Moreton was a nephew of the 2^nd earl of Carnarvon, and brother-in-law of William Basil Percy, 7^th earl of Denbeigh.3Gent. Mag. (1862), i. 515; R.B. Mosse, The Parliamentary Guide (1837), 196; The Assembled Commons; or, parliamentary biographer (1838), 161. Of his other sisters, three married MPs: Lady Julia to James Haughton Langston, Liberal MP for Oxford, 1826-35, 1841-63; Lady Charlotte to Captain Maurice Frederick Fitzhardinge Berkeley, later 1^st baron Fitzhardinge of Bristol, Whig MP for Gloucester, 1831-33, 1835-37, 1841-57; and Lady Emily to Admiral Sir James Whitely Deans Dundas, Liberal MP for Greenwich, 1832-5, 1841-52 and Devizes, 1836-8.4A. Lambert, ‘Berkeley, Maurice Frederick Fitzhardinge’; J.K. Laughton, rev. A. Lambert, ‘Dundas, Sir James Whitely Deans’, Oxf. DNB, v. 386-7; xvii. 283-4; HP Commons, 1820-1832, iv. 261-2; vi. 39-42.

Of ‘Whig principles’, Moreton came forward in June 1832 for West Gloucestershire as a friend of independence, reform and economy, citing his family’s history as ‘staunch advocates of liberal policy’.5Dod MS, iii. 815; Bristol Mercury, 14 July, 1 Dec. 1832. Having ‘stated his political principles at great length’, he was narrowly returned ahead of the Conservative, Lord Edward Somerset.6Morning Chronicle, 20 Dec. 1832.

Moreton is not known to have spoken in the House. He supported the ministry on the Irish coercion bill, 11 Mar. 1833, and opposed the abolition of flogging in the army, 2 Apr. He divided against Matthias Attwood’s motion for currency reform, 24 Apr., and, unlike his brother Henry, a member for East Gloucestershire, opposed the ballot, 25 Apr. (and would do so again at least four more times, 1836-9). He voted for the removal of Jewish disabilities, 22 May, and that month sat on the select committee on Irish vagrancy.7CJ, lxxxviii. 358; PP 1834 (394) xvi. 323. He voted for the removal of the appropriation clause of the Irish Church temporalities bill, 21 June,8Although he was wrongly reported as having opposed this amendment: Morning Chronicle, 24 June 1833. supported a deferment of the bank charter, and opposed Hume’s proposal for a grant of £35,000 to build a new House of Commons.9Bristol Mercury, 13 July 1833. He divided against shorter parliaments, 23 July, and in favour of admitting Dissenters to the universities, 28 July. He supported Joseph Brotherton’s unsuccessful amendment to the factory regulation bill, 13 Aug., which aimed to increase the maximum number of working hours for children under 13 years of age from 8 to 10 hours, and backed Buckingham’s motion to inquire into alternatives to naval impressment, 15 Aug. 1833, although in the following session he voted against the proposal, 8 Mar. 1834.10Parliamentary Review (1833), 552; Morning Chronicle, 8 Mar. 1834. He voted for a revision of the pension list, 18 Feb. 1834, but opposed Hume’s motion for a committee of the House to consider the corn laws, 7 Mar. 1834.11Dod MS, iii. 815; Parliamentary Test Book (1835), 109.

Moreton had, according to one newly-enfranchised voter, ridden ‘triumphantly into the House of Commons on the skirts of [the senior member’s] coat’, so that after the Forest of Dean voters were struck off the register in 1833 he found himself ‘without a reasonable prospect of success’ in West Gloucestershire.12Bristol Mercury, 12 Oct. 1833, 24 Jan. 1835. At the 1835 general election, therefore, he came forward in the place of his elder brother, Henry, for East Gloucestershire. Having criticised previous Conservative governments for their ‘profligate and improvident expenditure’ in November 1834, he had no confidence that Sir Robert Peel’s ministry would effect necessary and practical reforms, and stated that he would ‘probably feel it’ his duty to oppose the government in a ‘fair and straightforward’ manner. He was returned unopposed alongside a Conservative, with whom he had agreed to share the representation.13The Times, 24 Nov. 1834; Morning Post, 3 Jan. 1835; Parliamentary Test Book, 108-9.

Moreton voted with the Whigs on the speakership, 19 Feb. 1835, the address, 26 Feb., and Irish Church appropriation, 2, 6 and 7 Apr., and while he had voted for Chandos’s motion to repeal the malt tax, 10 Mar., he thereafter voted steadily with Lord Melbourne’s ministry, following its reappointment, including Sir William Follett’s attempt to protect the voting rights of freemen from the operation of the Municipal Corporations Act, 23 June, and Peel’s motion to divide into two bills the Whigs’ Irish Church measure.14Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (1840), 183. In 1836 he supported the Whigs on the address, 4 Feb. 1836, and was that month directed by the relevant committee to bring in a bill for the enclosure of waste lands in the parishes of Alvestone and Elmstone Hardwick in Gloucestershire.15Morning Post, 5 Feb. 1836; Bristol Mercury, 20 Feb. 1836. He supported the Irish municipal corporations bill, 8, 28 Mar., 10 June, and opposed William Sharman Crawford’s motion for the immediate abolition of tithes, 1 July 1836.16Mosse, Parliamentary Guide, 196.

In February 1837 Moreton had an interview with Lord Melbourne at Downing Street, and the following month attended the prime minister’s parliamentary dinner.17Morning Post, 13 Feb., 13 Mar. 1837. He supported Spring Rice’s resolution for the abolition of church rates, 23 May, and after attending a dinner for Lord John Russell at Stroud in July 1837, was re-elected without opposition.18Standard, 31 July 1837; Morning Chronicle, 1 Aug. 1837. Shortly afterwards he married the young and ‘beautiful’ Mary Jane Macdonald-Lockhart, a grand niece of the duke of Leinster, at St. George’s, Hanover Square, and added the name of Macdonald to his patronymic Moreton.19Mosse, Parliamentary Guide, 196; Morning Post, 20 June, 16 Aug. 1837. When his wife died in December 1851, it was reported that she was then ‘in her 30th year’, which would have made her barely 16 when she married: Gent. Mag. (1852), i. 208.

Severe ill health prevented Moreton from attending Westminster in the early part of the 1838 session, but he returned in time to support the government’s proposal that surplus Irish Church revenues be used for ‘moral and religious education of all classes of the people, without distinction of religious persuasion’, 15 May 1838, and voted for Charles Shaw Lefevre as speaker, 27 May.20Morning Post, 20 Mar. 1838. A protectionist, he opposed Villiers’s motion that evidence be heard complaining of the corn laws, 19 Feb. 1839, and divided against his proposal that whole house go into committee to consider them, 18 Mar. Later that year he published a pamphlet on the corn laws, in which he considered the possible damaging effects of their abolition on the condition of the working classes in his native county, and opposed another of Villiers’s motions on the issue, 26 May 1840.21A.H. Moreton, Thoughts on the Corn Laws, addressed to the working classes of the county of Gloucester (1839). That June he chaired a committee on the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway.22F. Boase, Modern English Biography, vi. 243; Caledonian Mercury, 4 June 1840. He supported the Whigs’ proposed revision of the Irish franchise, 29 Apr. 1841, and opposed Lord Sandon’s motion for the reduction of the duty on foreign sugar, 18 May 1841.

Having backed the ministry in confidence votes over the government of Ireland, 19 Apr. 1839, Jamaica, 6 May, and policy towards China, 9 Apr. 1840, Moreton recorded his vote in favour of the ministry at its fall, 4 June 1841, before retiring at the ensuing general election.23Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 27 May 1841. He remained active in the politics of the Isle of Wight, where, as a keen yachtsman, he had long resided, and nominated Liberal and free trade candidates at elections in 1847 and 1851.24Hampshire Advertiser, 10 Aug. 1839; Hampshire Telegraph, 7 Aug. 1847; Northern Star, 17 May 1851; Isle of Wight Observer, 2 Apr. 1859.

A noted author, in 1836 Moreton published Civilization, being a brief analysis of the natural laws that regulate the numbers and conditions of mankind as a race.25Standard, 3 June 1836. He was an active campaigner for homeopathy, and was on the management board of the Hahnemann Hospital at 39 Bloomsbury Square, London.26He also helped to found the London Homeopathic Hospital at Golden Square in 1851: http://sueyounghistories.com/archives/2008/09/27/augustus-henry-moreton-1804-1862/ He rebuilt Largie Castle, Argyllshire, and in 1860 gave evidence before the Lords’ committee on the eastern extension of the Isle of Wight railway.27Hampshire Advertiser, 24 Mar. 1860. He died at Gloucester Place, London in February 1862 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Charles Moreton Macdonald (1840-79).28Morning Post, 17 Feb. 1862; Gent. Mag. (1862), i. 515. His collection of paintings and ‘rare portraits’ was auctioned in London in July 1863.29Daily News, 7 July 1863.