CLIFFORD, Henry Morgan (1847-1865), of Perrystone, Herefordshire and Llantilio, Monmouthshire

A very occasional speaker, Clifford, who represented Hereford for nearly twenty years, was more active in the committee rooms, and was described as a ‘man experienced in habits of business’.1Hereford Times, 31 July 1847. Rather Whiggish when first elected, Clifford styled himself as a ‘constant and devoted reformer’, who was prepared ‘to support liberal men and liberal measures’, but developed more advanced opinions during his political career.2Hereford Times, 31 July 1847. He provides a good indicator of how the centre of gravity within the middle rank of parliamentary liberalism shifted during the 1850s and 1860s. During this period a majority of Liberal backbenchers gradually came to support reforms such as the ballot or extension of the franchise that had previously been the preserve of more Radical MPs.

Clifford’s grandfather had inherited land in Herefordshire, and also acquired the Llantilio estate in Monmouthshire.3Burke’s landed gentry (1879), i. 324. In 1847 Clifford became chairman of the former county’s quarter sessions. In the same year, he was returned unopposed for the county town as a late replacement for another Liberal. On the hustings at Hereford, Clifford declared himself in favour of popular education and abolishing other monopolies to extend free trade principles.4Hereford Times, 31 July 1847.

Never a very assiduous attender, Clifford voted in 20% of divisions in the 1849 session, 15% in 1852-3 and less than 10% in 1856.5Hampshire Telegraph, 20 Oct. 1849; Daily News, 21 Sept. 1853; J. Gassiot, Third letter to J.A. Roebuck (1857), 8. When present he cast votes in favour of Jewish relief and in support of the repeal of the navigation laws in 1849, while opposing Disraeli’s motions for agricultural relief. He later confessed to an elector that he had voted against the last because it ‘would have been tantamount to a defeat of [the] Government’ if passed.6‘A Voice from the Lane’, letter, Hereford Journal, 30 June 1852. He was more active in committee, however, serving on the 1848 and 1850 inquiries into the fees of clerks to the courts and other public bodies. In line with earlier investigations into parliamentary clerks, the committees concluded that fees and emoluments should be replaced with fixed salaries and the number of offices reduced.7PP 1847-48 (158), xv. 2; 1847-48 (307), xv. 216-18; 1850 (711), xiii. 721, 723-31.

When first elected, Clifford had been described by his colleague Sir Robert Price as ‘one of the good old Whig sort’.8Hereford Times, 31 July 1847. In 1849 the radical liberal Daily News complained that Clifford and his colleague were to be found in the ranks of the ‘lagging ministerialists’ rather than advanced opinion.9Daily News, 3 Sept. 1849. However, his political opinions became steadily more radical after 1850, when he reversed his earlier opposition to Joseph Hume’s ‘little Charter’ of political reforms. His subsequent votes in 1851 and 1852, including in favour of Locke King’s attempt to equalise the borough and county franchises, meant that when Hereford’s branch of the National Parliamentary and Financial Reform Association sought pledges from him, it was pointed out that he had already supported the ballot ‘and every other Liberal measure’.10Hereford Times, 20 Mar. 1852. Remarking on Clifford’s metamorphosis, the Conservative Hereford Journal sniped that it was ‘strange’ that a man ‘so mild, so gentlemanly, in mind and manner, should be in politics an ultra-Radical’.11Hereford Journal, 7 July 1852. However, Clifford was at pains to emphasise that he was ‘no restless democrat, desirous of overturning old and valued institutions’ and never seems to have described himself as a radical.12Hereford Times, 10 July 1852. After admitting that ‘his voice was not very powerful’, Clifford advocated an extension of the franchise, but only to those who owned property or paid taxes, on the hustings at the 1852 general election.13Ibid.

After his re-election in second place, Clifford co-sponsored a bill to make the appointment of superintending constables compulsory in rural counties. As he explained to the 1853 committee on the bill, the introduction of such constables had proved to be effective in reducing crime in Herefordshire, and also far cheaper than establishing rural police forces.14PP 1852-53 (715), xxxvi. 268-72. In the event, however, it was not passed. In the same session Clifford was in the free trade majorities that passed Villiers’s motion, and endorsed Gladstone’s financial scheme after rejecting Disraeli’s budget. In 1854 Clifford cast the first of many votes in favour of the abolition of church rates. He also served on the inquiry into crown forests, which found, as previous investigations had done, that the financial return was slight, as much of the capital was absorbed by the large numbers of officers necessary for maintenance.15PP 1854 (377), x. 433-4.

He was in the majority that voted the Aberdeen coalition out of office over the appointment of a committee on Sebastopol, 29 Jan. 1855, but missed the divisions on administration reform that were subsequently proposed, although he later claimed to have supported such measures. On 23 Mar. 1855 he broke his silence in the House to ask for clarification regarding the provisions of the recently passed Militia Act. A longstanding advocate of retrenchment, Clifford later told constituents that ‘I am not ashamed to confess that I have frequently followed Mr. Cobden into the lobby, and that with very few companions’, particularly in divisions on the army estimates.16Hereford Times, 28 Mar. 1857. However, he parted company with the Manchester school on foreign policy, admiring Palmerston’s ‘manly’ policy and supporting the premier in the crucial division on Canton, 3 Mar. 1857.17Hereford Times, 14 Mar. 1857.

At the ensuing general election, Clifford declared that he belonged to the ‘more advanced section of the Liberal party’. He complained that the recently dissolved parliament had contained too many men who advocated reform on the hustings but pleaded that the time was not yet ripe when those issues were brought up at Westminster. Impatient with such obstruction, Clifford asserted that their baneful influence was to be blamed for the ‘changeable decisions, the inconclusive legislation, and, I may add, the general inefficiency which characterised it, perhaps beyond any Parliament of the present century’.18Hereford Times, 28 Mar. 1857. A further mark of the advance of his opinions was his conversion to the abolition of capital punishment.19Ibid. He was returned unopposed at the nomination, when he displayed his maturity as a public speaker, his oration being described by one admirer as ‘straightforward and manly; in matter, sound; and in arrangement, lucid’.20Ibid.

Absent from the division on the conspiracy to murder bill that ousted Palmerston’s ministry, 19 Feb. 1858, Clifford clashed with its Conservative successor, 15 Apr. 1859, over the appointment of six new magistrates (all Conservatives) for Hereford. The accessions to the bench were unnecessary and had been made for partisan reasons, he alleged, protesting that the ‘whole affair was one of the grossest political jobs on record’. He opposed Derby’s 1859 reform bill, justifying his conduct at the subsequent general election, when he was again unchallenged. He objected to disenfranchising urban freeholders in the counties, and added that the bill did not expand the borough franchise or include the ballot.21Hereford Times, 9 Apr. 1859. Defending the Liberal party’s handling of the issue, he denied that the bill could have been adequately amended as ‘all with any experience knew, that it was vain to hope for any material changes in the committee. There a government is always the strongest party’.22Hereford Times, 30 Apr. 1859.

An unpaid commissioner of lunacy since 1852, Clifford served on the inquiry that sat during the 1859 and 1860 sessions on the treatment of those in public and private asylums, the criminally insane and those certified as insane by the court of chancery. He was an active member of the committee, which rejected abolishing private asylums, as lobbied for by Lord Shaftesbury, but instead proposed greater supervision and oversight. It also recommended that commissioners, aided with additional resources, should visit workhouses and private asylums more frequently. Most of Clifford’s amendments to the report were rejected.23PP 1859 session 2 (156), vii. 502-3; 1860 (495), xxii. 351-65.

Clifford loyally supported the Liberal leadership in all key party divisions, such as the repeal of the paper duties in 1860. He continued to cast votes in favour of the borough and county franchise bills proposed by Liberal backbenchers, and made a handful of speeches in what proved to be his final parliament. He spoke against the abolition of pilotage charges, which shipowners had long demanded, 15 May 1862. He defended Lord Llanover, the lord lieutentant of Monmouthshire, when the maverick MP John Arthur Roebuck (wrongly) alleged that the peer had blocked a gentleman’s appointment to the county militia on account of his assuming a new name without a royal licence, 5 June 1862, 17 Mar. 1863. Finally, he backed a proposal to introduce electric illumination to lighthouses, arguing that the cost would be ‘very slight’, 17 Apr. 1863.

Defeated for Hereford at the 1865 general election, when he praised the Liberal government’s financial stewardship in particular, Clifford was again beaten when he stood instead for Monmouthshire at the 1868 general election.24McCalmont’s parliamentary poll book, ed. J. Vincent and M. Stenton (8th edn., 1972), 206; Birmingham Daily Post, 13 July 1865. Predeceased by his only son, on Clifford’s death in 1884 he was succeeded by only his surviving child, Marion, Baroness Dunboyne, who was awarded probate of his personal estate, sworn under £8,284.25National Probate Calendar, 20 Aug. 1884.