SELWIN (AFTERWARDS SELWIN-IBBETSON), Henry John (1826-1902), of 16 James Street, Pimlico, London and Down Hall, Harlow, Essex

‘Tall, well-built, with a handsome head and face, and a fresh complexion’,1Essex Newsman, 18 Jan. 1902 Selwin entered the Commons as a Conservative in 1865, though he did not find his feet until his second Parliament, when he earned a reputation for working across party lines to further progressive reforms.2W. B. Duffield, ‘Ibbetson, Henry John Selwin-, Baron Rookwood (1826-1902)’, rev. H.C.G. Matthew, Oxf. DNB, www.oxforddnb.com. He was the only son of John Thomas Ibbetson, who in 1825 changed his surname to Selwin on inheriting the Down Hall estates of a great-uncle, Thomas Selwin. In 1861 John Thomas succeeded a nephew, Sir Charles Henry Ibbetson (b. 1814) as the sixth baronet.3B. Burke, Genealogical and heraldic dictionary of the peerage and baronetage of the British empire (1865), 988-9. Educated privately at the lavish Down Hall, near Harlow, Essex, Selwin was, according to one contemporary, ‘rather a spoiled child by position and surroundings’ and developed a ‘quick and hasty temper’.4Essex Newsman, 18 Jan. 1902. In 1850 he married Sarah Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Sir John Singleton Copley, 1^st Baron Lyndhurst, who had served as lord chancellor under three Conservative governments.5HP Commons, 1820-32, iv. 740-8. After graduating from Cambridge, Selwin travelled extensively throughout Europe and was present in the Crimea at the declaration of peace in 1856.6Duffield, ‘Ibbetson, Henry John Selwin-, Baron Rookwood’, Oxf. DNB.

Selwin failed in his first two attempts to enter the Commons. At the 1857 general election he was brought forward by the local Conservative party for Ipswich, home to the estate of his late uncle, Sir Philip Bowes Vere Broke, a distinguished royal navy officer. He condemned the bombardment of Canton, while insisting that Palmerston’s ministry deserved to be backed in its efforts to re-establish mercantile relations with China. A dedicated member of the established church, he opposed the Maynooth grant and the abolition of church rates. Despite repeated references to his family connections, however, he failed to overcome his youth and inexperience on the hustings and was soundly defeated in fourth place.7Ipswich Journal, 21, 28 Mar. 1857. He offered again at the 1859 general election, giving qualified support to the Derby ministry’s reform bill, but was narrowly defeated in third place.8Essex Standard, 20 Apr. 1859; Ipswich Journal, 30 Apr. 1859. Selwin was finally returned to the Commons at the 1865 general election, when he came in for the southern division of his native Essex, though his achievement was overshadowed by the death of his wife, which occurred four weeks before polling day. He therefore took no part in the campaign, being represented by the retiring Conservative Member, John Perry-Watlington.9Essex Standard, 5, 7 July 1865.

A regular attender, Selwin followed Disraeli into the division lobby on most major issues. He divided against church rate abolition, 7 Mar. 1866, and for a reduction in the malt duty, 17 Apr. 1866. Although he later became a prodigious contributor to debate in the Commons, in his first Parliament he made only a handful of known interventions. Denouncing the Liberal government’s reform bill as ‘ill-considered and fragmentary’, 13 Apr. 1866, he contended that there was no great grievance in the current system as the labouring classes had a fair share of the representation. For Selwin, the proposed measure would dangerously hand the franchise over ‘to those who were lowest in the scale’. He duly voted against the bill, 27 Apr. 1866, and backed the Adullamite amendment for a franchise based on rateable value rather than a £7 rental value, 18 June 1866. The following year, however, in keeping with the newly-formed Derby ministry’s support for an extensive measure of reform, he declared, somewhat disingenuously, that ‘ever since his election he had strongly and consistently advocated a large extension of the franchise’, 15 July 1867. He voted with Disraeli on all the major clauses of Conservative government’s 1867 representation of the people bill. Following his second marriage, to his cousin’s widow, in July 1867, he took the additional family surname of Ibbetson.10Duffield, ‘Ibbetson, Henry John Selwin-, Baron Rookwood’, Oxf. DNB.

Foreshadowing his later support for some progressive Liberal measures, Selwin-Ibbetson strongly backed William McCullagh Torrens’s artisans and labourers’ dwellings bill, arguing for further state intervention to improve working-class housing, 27 Mar. 1867. He remained, though, suspicious of the reform of religious liberties, and described Gladstone’s resolutions on the Irish church as a dangerous ‘blow’ against the established church in Ireland and England, 27 Apr. 1868. After serving on three consecutive committees on the metropolitan foreign cattle market bill, and consistently voting in support of the proposed measures that formed the final bill, he argued that objections to the legislation were overstated and that the measure would act as a necessary check on foreign imports without jeopardising the food supply to London consumers, 26 June 1868.11PP 1867-68 (227), xii. 2; PP 1867-68 (261), xii. 354; PP 1867-68 (303), xii. 480-599. Selwin-Ibbetson also sat on the 1868 select committee on theatrical licences and regulations: PP 1866 (373), xvi. 4.

At the 1868 general election Selwin-Ibbetson was returned unopposed for the newly created division of Essex West. Thereafter he achieved a series of legislative successes. These included the 1869 Wine and Beerhouse Act (32 & 33 Vict., c. 27), which placed drink-shops under the same licensing authority, and the 1871 Epping Forest Act (34 & 35 Vict., c. 93), which secured public use of the forest.12The Times, 17 Jan. 1902. He was also a prominent supporter of the Liberal government’s elementary education bill and Samuel Plimsoll’s merchant shipping bill.13Duffield, ‘Ibbetson, Henry John Selwin-, Baron Rookwood’, Oxf. DNB. In 1874 he was appointed under-secretary of state to the home office, but his inability to delegate meant he was a rather inefficient administrator. He once admitted to a contemporary that ‘I have no power of devolution’.14Essex Newsman, 18 Jan. 1902. In 1878 he was made parliamentary secretary to the treasury. He later acted as a church estates commissioner in Salisbury’s first and second administrations. He was proposed for a peerage in 1889, but had to wait until the 1892 dissolution to receive it, with the unpopular Conservative government unwilling to risk a mid-term by-election.15T.A. Jenkins, Parliament, party and politics in Victorian Britain (1996), 66. Elevated to the Lords as Baron Rookwood, 18 June 1892, he became less active in political life.16Gloucester Citizen, 17 Jan. 1902.

Rookwood died after a short illness at 51 Welbeck Street, London, in January 1902. A sympathetic obituary described him as ‘a man whose services to the state were undoubted, though they were rendered unobtrusively and were not in their nature such as to make him well known to the general public’.17The Times, 17 Jan. 1902. Another noted that he ‘was at his best as a private member of the House of Commons’.18Gloucester Citizen, 17 Jan. 1902. He was remembered locally as a generous philanthropist, renowned huntsman and keen painter.19Essex Newsman, 18 Jan. 1902. His three marriages having produced no children, the Ibbetson baronetcy and the Rookwood peerage became extinct. He left effects valued at £106,262 8s. 1d.20National Probate Calendar, 13 May 1902. His estates passed to his nephew, Horace Calverley (1862-1929), the eldest son of his sister, Isabella.21VCH Essex (1983), viii. 196-206. A range of his correspondence, mainly from his time in government, is held by the British Library, London.