EGERTON, Sir Philip de Malpas Grey, 10th bt. (1806-1881), of Oulton Park, Tarporley, Cheshire and Albemarle Street, London.

Egerton is best known as a leading Victorian palaeontologist, who specialised in the collection and study of fossilised fish. His achievements as an ichthyologist and other services to science have been well documented and an oriental bird, Actinodura egertoni, bears his name.1Oxford DNB. Alongside his scientific interests, however, he was also an active antiquary with an eye for electoral history, a zealous campaigner on behalf of the established church, and one of the longest-serving Conservative MPs in the Commons, where he managed to clock up 46 years continuous service.

Egerton’s forebears included a string of MPs, but the most recent politician in the family was his uncle Sir John Grey Egerton, who had sat for Chester from 1806 until 1818 as an opponent of the local Whig Grosvenor family. On his death in 1825 the baronetcy and 9,000 acre Oulton Park estate had passed to Egerton’s father, a clergyman, whom Egerton succeeded in 1829, making him a wealthy man.2HP Commons, 1790-1820, iii. 676. The following year Egerton was elected unopposed for Chester. An unapologetic opponent of the Grey ministry’s ‘crude and dangerous’ reform bill, he had judiciously quit the field in 1831.3HP Commons, 1820-32, v. 16-17. Bolstered by his marriage into the influential Tory Legh family, however, in 1832 Egerton stood for the newly created Cheshire South constituency, armed with funds of £5,000 raised locally and with ‘assistance’ from the Carlton Club.4Morning Chronicle, 19 Dec. 1832. After a ‘violent contest’, in which he denounced both reform and the unconstitutional passage of Catholic emancipation, he was narrowly defeated, there being, as one of his opponents remarked, ‘a strong Tory feeling in this end of the county’.5G. Huxley, Lady Elizabeth and the Grosvenors. Life in a Whig family, 1822-1839 (1965), 103-4.

At the 1835 general election Egerton offered again for Cheshire South with the support of its recently established Conservative Association, citing his unaltered ‘attachment’ to church and state. Attempts to get up a contest came to nothing and he was returned unopposed.6Parliamentary Testbook (1835), 54; The Times, 21 Jan. 1835. A steady presence at Westminster, at least until the late 1840s, Egerton loyally supported the Conservatives throughout his career and ‘although not distinguished in debate’, acquired a reputation as ‘one of the hardest workers in committees’.7Geological Magazine (1881), viii. 240. Appointed to the 1835 committee on the British Museum, of which he was a trustee, he served diligently on similar inquiries in later years, and from 1847 until 1850 was a member of the royal commission on its operation. In the lobbies, he voted steadily against the ballot, municipal reform, and any revision of the corn laws, and was a fixed presence in the minorities for a bill to enforce greater observance of the Sabbath.

Speaking at a Cheshire Conservative Association meeting in October 1835, Egerton lambasted the Whigs for pandering to the Irish agitator and ‘Papist’ Daniel O’Connell, whom he denounced for his ‘arrogance’, ‘impudence’ and the ‘Jesuitical duplicity of his speeches’.8Morning Post, 12 Oct. 1835 His seat was correctly deemed ‘safe’ at the 1837 election, when he absented himself from an ill-mannered contest for second place to attend to his ill mother in Germany.9Morning Chronicle, 7 Aug. 1837. Speaking at a constituency dinner that autumn, he contended that there were ‘but two parties in Parliament, viz. the supporters and enemies of the established religion’.10The Times, 12 Oct. 1837. Warming to his theme at another event in 1839, he urged Protestants to ‘buckle on their armour’ in defence of the established church and appealed to the Almighty to show the way in protecting the constitution.11The Times, 31 Jan. 1839.

Egerton’s first known speech in the Commons, 19 May 1840, was to introduce a bill enabling extra churches to be built in Cheshire using surplus funds from the river Weaver tolls, in order ‘to check demoralization’ and ‘support religion and morality among the community’. Despite fierce opposition, not least from his Liberal colleague and the Melbourne ministry’s chief whip E. J. Stanley, he successfully steered the bill through commitee and on to the statute book as 3 & 4 Vict. c. 24, 4 Aug. 1840, allegedly ‘with the help of the Carlton Club’, as one local paper put it.12CJ, xcv. 607; Chester Chronicle, 21 May 1841. He was in the Protestant minority of 42 who voted for a cessation of the grant to the Irish Catholic seminary at Maynooth, 23 June 1840, and backed Peel’s confidence motion that brought the Whig ministry down, 4 June 1841.

At the ensuing general election Egerton, whose piety evidently attracted some ‘sarcastic’ commentary during his campaign, was re-elected in first place, after citing his support for the existing corn laws, promotion of the Weaver churches bill, and ‘time and trouble’ spent in attending committees on railway bills.13Chester Chronicle, 25 June 1841; The Times, 19 July 1841. On 9 Aug. 1841 Egerton informed the newly appointed premier Peel that he and his brother-in-law George Legh would ‘follow the party line’ on the subject of Lefevre’s remaining Speaker.14Add. 40486, f. 72. He voted against Villiers’ motion to repeal the corn laws, 24 Feb. 1842, but loyally backed Peel’s replacement of the fixed duty on corn with a sliding scale, 9 Mar. 1842. He also supported Peel’s reintroduction of income tax later that year. On 25 May 1842 he spoke in defence of the ministry’s exemption of cheese from recent tariff reductions and urged even greater protection, citing the baneful effects that American cheese imports had had on Cheshire’s cheese producers. According to a local Conservative newspaper, he and his Tory colleague had ‘by their unremitting applications to the board of trade’ secured the omission of cheese from the cuts in duty, along with assurances that all American cheese passing through Canada would be adequately branded at the border.15Hansard, 25 May 1842, vol. 63, cc. 744-51. Suggestions that they had exercised an unfair ‘private’ influence were firmly rejected by Peel and William Gladstone, the board’s president.16Ibid. c. 747. He spoke briefly against proposals to reduce the duration of county polls to a single day, 17 Mar. 1843, and raised the ‘shocking’ matter of recently buried corpses being dug up and burnt ‘in the bone house’ at Clerkenwell churchyard to reduce overcrowding, 26 Feb. 1845.17Hansard, 17 Mar. 1843, vol. 67, cc. 1092, 26 Feb. 1845, vol. 77, c. 1234.

Egerton went into opposition to Peel over the Maynooth grant in 1845 and voted steadily against his repeal of the corn laws the following year. Unlike many disaffected Tories, however, he rallied to the premier on the Irish coercion bill, 25 June 1846, the issue that finally brought the ministry down. In 1847 he joined other Cheshire MPs in a campaign on behalf of the region’s salt producers against the salt monopoly of the East India Company, attending local meetings on the issue.18Morning Chronicle, 21 May 1847.

Re-elected without opposition as a Protectionist in 1847 (again in absentia owing to family illness), Egerton enjoyed an uninterrupted run of uncontested returns as an ‘old and tried member’ for the next six general elections.19Morning Chronicle, 9 Aug. 1847; Chester Chronicle, 13 Aug. 1847. His voting behaviour, such as his opposition to the repeal of the navigation laws and abolition of church rates, continued to reflect his ultra Protestant and protectionist sympathies, and with the exception of the Derby ministries’ reform bills, he steadily opposed most changes to the representative system, including the ballot and any extension of the franchise. However, he broke ranks with Disraeli to back Palmerston’s handling of the Crimean war, 25 May 1855, and although he remained ‘a Conservative in principles [sic.]’, at the 1857 general election he firmly disclaimed any ‘firm attachment to party’.20Lancaster Gazette, 21 Mar. 1857; Morning Chronicle, 6 Apr. 1857.

Egerton’s spoken contributions were by now rare and usually confined to constituency matters, such as Cheshire’s constabulary arrangements or the local impact of the cattle plague.21See, for example, Hansard, 9 May 1856, vol. 142, c. 309; PP 1866 (214), lix. 309-12. He also made occasional interventions concerning museums’ policy. Echoing his earlier stance on the Sabbath, for instance, he came out forcefully against opening the British Museum on Sundays, insisting it was unnecessary in view of the public access available ‘at an early hour on Saturdays’, and refuting complaints about a ‘want of room’, 4 June 1858. He voted steadily against the admission of Dissenters to universities from 1864-65. The following year he was an active member of the select committee on mines and a regular questioner of its witnesses.22PP 1866 (431) xiv. 1-557. During the committee stages of the second reform bill Egerton rebelled against a Conservative-backed proposal that the universities of Durham and London, of which he was a senate member, share their parliamentary representation, 17 June 1867, which was subsequently dropped.23For more details of this episode see J. Meisel, Knowledge and Power: The Parliamentary Representation of Universities in Britain and the Empire (2011), 49-50. He was otherwise a loyal supporter of the Conservative measure, which redistributed the seats in Cheshire. Unsurprisingly he steadily opposed Gladstone’s proposals for disestablishment of the Irish Church prior to the dissolution of Parliament the following year.

Returned at the 1868 general election for the newly created division of Cheshire West, Egerton continued to sit unopposed until 1880, when he topped the poll as a Conservative. He was chosen to second the re-election of the Speaker Henry Brand at the start of his last Parliament, when he claimed to have been an MP ‘for a longer period than anyone sitting on this side of the House’, and with the single exception of Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot, ‘for a longer period than any Member on the ministerial’ benches. Among the many tasks performed by the Speaker, he noted, was having ‘to hear long and tedious speeches, platitudes, and reiterations, very often with only a mere handful of Members in the House’.24Hansard, 29 Apr. 1880, vol. 252, cc. 8-11.

Egerton died suddenly almost a year later, it being remarked that ‘only two days before’ he had been ‘in his place in Parliament, but a chill caught during the lately prevalent east winds proved rapidly fatal’.25Nature (21 Apr. 1881), xxiii. 579-580. As well as contributing over 80 papers on fossilised fish to various scientific journals, Egerton collected and published material regarding Cheshire’s elections in the previous two centuries, drawing on his own family papers, and produced a short account of his ancestral seat at Oulton.26Papers relating to Elections of Knights of the Shire for the County Palatine of Chester, from the death of Oliver Cromwell to the accession of Queen Anne (1852); ‘Papers referring to elections pf knights of the shire for the county palatine of Chester’, Journal of the Architectural, Archaeological and Historic society for the county, city and neighbourhood of Chester (1857), i. 101-112; A short account of the Possessors of Oulton (1869). He also wrote a history of his club Grillions.27Grillion’s Club from its origin in 1812 to its fiftieth anniversary (1880).

The baronetcy and entailed estates passed to his eldest son Philip le Belward Grey Egerton (1833-91), a guards officer. By his will, proved under £30,000, he also made provision for his widow (d. 1882), two daughters and younger son Rowland, to whom he bequeathed his unentailed estates and vast collection of fossils.28Chester Chronicle, 9 Apr. 1881; National Probate Calendar. In line with his wishes, this was later acquired by the British Museum for the Natural History Museum.