Solicitor to the Bank of England, Freshfield put his legal expertise to good use during his Commons career and was described by the Morning Herald as ‘one of the most upright, intelligent and useful’ of Conservative MPs.1Morning Herald, qu. in The Standard, 3 July 1841. Strongly committed to protectionist and Protestant principles, Freshfield was a longstanding critic of the new poor law and, more generally, regularly contributed on technical points of legislation in the chamber.
A partner in the City law firm of Freshfield and Kaye (later Freshfields) from 1805, Freshfield held the ‘important and lucrative’ office of solicitor to the Bank of England, 1812-40, a position which thereafter passed to his eldest son and namesake.2HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 247-9 (at 247); Gent. Mag. (1864), ii. 258. He was also the ‘legal adviser to many of the great Dock and other commercial companies in London’, including the Globe Insurance Company, of which he was later chairman, and the West India Dock and Royal Exchange Assurance Companies.3Gent. Mag. (1864), ii. 258; Dod’s parliamentary companion (1835), 117. As a trustee of a number of West India proprietors, Freshfield received a portion of the £28,318 4s. 5d. compensation awarded for 820 slaves on three estates in British Guiana and Grenada after the abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1833.4Legacies of British slave-ownership project: British Guiana claim 703; Grenada claim 958A & B, Grenada claim 995A &B, www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs. N. Draper, The price of emancipation: slave-ownership, compensation and British society at the end of slavery (2010), 262-3. He also received, as first claimant, compensation worth £11,584 6s. 9d. for 533 slaves on four plantations in St. Kitts and Trinidad.5Legacies of British slave-ownership project: St. Kitts claim 333; St. Kitts claim 525; St. Kitts claim 746; Trinidad claim 1661; www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs.
Freshfield had been elected for Penryn in 1830, after which he unsuccessfully resisted the constituency’s partial disenfranchisement.6HP, Commons, 1820-1832, v. 248. He stood as a Conservative for the newly amalgamated constituency of Penryn and Falmouth at the 1832 general election but finished third.7McCalmont’s parliamentary poll book, ed. J. Vincent and M. Stenton (8th edn., 1972), 233. However, Freshfield topped the poll for the same constituency at the 1835 general election and was re-elected in 1837.8Ibid. On the latter occasion, he declared the new poor law to be a ‘cruel, severe measure’ and defended the established church as ‘the poor man’s church’.9Cornwall Royal Gazette, 28 July 1837. A local Conservative later commended the hospitality of Freshfield’s wife to ‘the inhabitants of the borough … she was always proud to entertain them, when they visited London’.10Cornwall Royal Gazette, 11 Aug. 1837.
In Parliament, Freshfield was a Conservative loyalist, and had indeed acted as the private lawyer to the party leader, Sir Robert Peel, for a number of years.11The assembled Commons (1837), 77; HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 247. Siding with the Conservatives in the key party divisions of the period, Freshfield strongly opposed the Whig government’s plans to reform the Irish church and Irish municipal corporations. He remarked, 14 June 1836, that he had fruitlessly tried to secure investment into Ireland in the 1820s, but potential investors had been deterred by the lack of security for property, which they attributed to agitation. For Freshfield, the solution was not the Whigs’ conciliatory policy, but a stronger commitment from the government to uphold law and order.12Hansard, 14 June 1836, vol. 34, cc. 512-19. Freshfield was in the majority which reversed the motion to immediately end the West Indies slave apprenticeships, 28 May 1838.
Freshfield made a number of contributions in debates about election petitions and practice.13E.g. Hansard, 24, 26 Mar. 1835, vol. 27, cc. 208, 209, 267, 279. In 1836 he expressed the view that:
It would be highly advantageous to admit well-informed and intelligent women to the discussions of that House [i.e. as spectators in the Strangers’ Gallery] … [as] the knowledge that ladies were present would tend to prevent the recurrence of that want of courtesy which was occasionally manifested during discussions.14Hansard, 10 Aug. 1836, vol. 35, c. 1075.
The following year, Freshfield denied a conflict of interest over a petition from the London and Brighton Railway Company, which had been handled by his son on behalf of the promoters, claiming that he was no longer involved in the day-to-day running of the family firm.15Hansard, 15 Mar. 1837, vol. 37, cc. 458-61. He unsuccessfully proposed that Anglican bishops be allowed to permit non-residence in cases where clergymen or their dependents suffered from infirmity or illness, 8, 18 June 1838, which Lord John Russell thought would lead to ‘evils’.16Hansard, 8, 18 June 1838, vol. 43, cc. 608, 786. Drawing attention to the dysfunctional court of chancery and the endless delays in legal cases tried there, Freshfield suggested that, as in previous times, the court of exchequer take up some of the burden, 16 July 1839.17Hansard, 16 July 1839, vol. 49, cc. 399-408.
Freshfield was a member of the select committee on the poor laws, which he noted, met for ‘four days in every week, and five or six hours each day’ whilst Parliament was sitting.18Hansard, 16 Aug. 1838, vol. 44, cc. 1324-5. Although he expressed a desire to return to the ‘statute of Elizabeth’, Freshfield was pragmatic enough to vote for the poor law commission bill, 15 July 1839, hoping to reduce the term of the commissioners to one year at the committee stage.19Hansard, 16 July 1839, vol. 49, c. 362. He attempted to prevent any further restriction of outdoor relief for the able-bodied poor by the commissioners, 9 Aug. 1839. Freshfield thought that the system could only be viable in manufacturing areas if boards of guardians were given greater discretion, but his amendment was rejected.20Hansard, 9 Aug. 1839, vol. 50, cc. 135-6. Concerned that the government were planning to move the West India packet service away from Falmouth, Freshfield successfully moved for a select committee on the issue, 27 Apr. 1841.21Hansard, 1 May 1840, vol. 53, cc. 1150-1; 27 Apr. 1841, vol. 57, cc. 1153-60. The report of the inquiry, which he chaired, argued that there was no advantage in moving the service from Falmouth.22PP 1841 (409), viii. 224, 228; Cornwall Royal Gazette, 25 June 1841.
Despite his efforts on behalf of local interests, Freshfield did not stand at Penryn and Falmouth at the 1841 general election, but contested Wycombe. He was solicitor to Lord Carrington, the increasingly conservative Whig patron of the borough, but was defeated by two Liberals, after promising support for the corn laws, repeal of the malt tax and denying that he ‘was the secretary of a Brazilian company employing slaves’.23R.W. Davis, Political change and continuity, 1760-1885: a Buckinghamshire study (1972), 151; The Times, 1 July 1841. Freshfield was linked with Evesham at the 1847 general election, but instead offered for the City of London, where, despite his ‘vast City connections’ he finished the worst placed of the four Conservative candidates.24The Examiner, 10 July 1847; The Standard, 10 July 1847. His campaign emphasised his opposition to the grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth and support for the retention of the navigation laws and repeal of window tax.25The Times, 17, 21, 27 July 1841; The Standard, 24 July 1841. Although he backed a revision of the poor law, he conceded that ‘some central board was necessary to effect any beneficial changes in the law as it stood’.26Morning Post, 21 July 1847. The following year Freshfield stood as a protectionist for a vacancy at Derby, but, despite denying that he was an ‘anti-Reformer’ and promising to support parliamentary reform, he was easily defeated by two Liberals.27McCalmont’s parliamentary poll book, 78; Morn. Chro., 2 Sept. 1848; Morning Post, 2 Sept. 1848.
Freshfield broke his run of defeats by being returned for Boston, 22 Apr. 1851, a constituency much more receptive to his advocacy of a fixed duty on corn and criticism of free trade.28Daily News, 19 Apr. 1851; The Times, 22 Apr. 1851. At the general election the following year he declined an invitation to contest East Surrey, where he owned land, and was returned again for Penryn and Falmouth, where, Edwin Jaggard has noted, he was ‘vastly experienced in the ways of surreptitiously filling the electors’ pockets’.29The Examiner, 3 July 1852; McCalmont’s parliamentary poll book, 233; Cornwall Royal Gazette, 25 June 1852, 9 July 1852; E. Jaggard, Cornwall politics in the age of reform, 1790-1885 (1999), 175. Although he took his seat on the Derbyite benches, on religious questions, Freshfield was strongly associated with MPs who were members of the ultra-Protestant National Club. After a long speech, Freshfield proposed that those convicted of breaching the ecclesiastical titles bill should be forced to leave the country, 4 July 1851. However, his amendment was lost as no-one seconded it.30Hansard, 4 July 1851, vol. 117, cc. 231-40. He later supported an investigation into Roman Catholic convents and monasteries together with Richard Spooner’s anti-Maynooth campaign, and opposed Jewish relief.31Hansard, 14 May 1851, vol. 116, c. 978; 8 June 1852, vol. 122, cc. 214-19.
Freshfield’s attempts to amend income tax in 1851, including the proposed exemption of life annuitants from schedule C, were rejected after the Whig chancellor of the exchequer Charles Wood described them as creating a ‘totally new bill’.32Hansard, 28 Apr. 1851, 2, 5 May 1851, vol. 116, cc. 299-301, 432-5, 533. Freshfield supported Disraeli’s budget, 16 Dec. 1852, and described Gladstone’s budget of the following year as ‘a war against property’.33Hansard, 13 May 1853, vol. 127, c. 370. He particularly objected to the extension of succession duty to real estate.34Hansard, 13 June 1853, 7 July 1853, vol. 128, cc. 79-89, 1399-40; 14, 18 July 1853, vol. 129, cc. 206-9, 398-400. In 1852 Freshfield introduced a bill to give a committee of magistrates greater control over county rates.35Hansard, 18 Feb. 1852, vol. 119, cc. 705-8. He was, however, strongly opposed to Milner Gibson’s proposal to establish county financial boards, which he thought unnecessary and likely to give too much power to penny-pinching ratepayers at the expense of the discretion of magistrates.36Hansard, 23 Feb. 1853, vol. 124, cc. 475-8;16 Mar. 1853, 13 Apr. 1853, vol. 125, cc. 262, 267, 1107. Freshfield successfully moved a clause to allow government ministers to discharge any insane person from custody provided they were certified as harmless by two doctors, 11 Aug. 1853.37Hansard, 11 Aug. 1853, vol. 129, cc. 1603-5. He served on a number of select committees in the early 1850s, including those on public business and assurance associations.38PP 1852-53 (478), xxxiv. 67; 1852-53 (965), xx. 8. Thereafter the activity of the octogenarian Freshfield declined, and he voted in just 5 (2.5%) of 198 divisions in 1856.39J.P. Gassiot, Third letter to J.A. Roebuck (1857), 3.
Freshfield retired at the 1857 general election and died in 1864, leaving a personal estate valued at £259,476 16s. 3d. His heir James William Freshfield, had predeceased him and so the family business passed to his other sons, Charles Kaye Freshfield (1808-91), Conservative MP for Dover 1865-8, 1874-85, and Henry Ray Freshfield (1814-95).40M. Stenton and S. Lees, Who’s who of British Members of Parliament (1978), i. 150; J. Slinn, ‘Freshfield family (per. 1800–1918)’, www.oxforddnb.com. The last member of the Freshfield family to be a partner in the business retired in 1927, but Freshfields continued to prosper as a leading City law firm.41Slinn, ‘Freshfield family’. After a merger with two German counterparts in 2000, the amalgamated Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer became one of the largest law firms in the world.42Financial Times, 21 June 2000; Wall Street Journal, 21 June 2000; www.freshfields.com/aboutus/.