Family and Education

b. 11 June 1797, 2nd but 1st surv. s. of Henry, 1st Mq. Conyngham [I] and 1st Bar. Minster [UK], and Elizabeth, da. of Joseph Denison, banker, of St. Mary Axe, London; bro. of Lord Albert Denison Conyngham† and Henry Joseph Conyngham, earl of Mount Charles*. educ. Eton c.1811; continental tour 1814. m. 24 Apr. 1824, Lady Jane Paget, da. of Henry William Paget†, 1st mq. of Anglesey, 2s. 4da. styled Lord Francis Nathaniel Conyngham 1816-24, earl of Mount Charles 1824-32; KCH 1821; GCH 1823; suc. fa. as 2nd Mq. Conyngham [I] and 2nd Bar. Minster [UK] 28 Dec. 1832; KP 27 Mar. 1833. d. 17 July 1876.

Offices Held

Cornet (half-pay) 1820, lt. 1821; lt. Life Gds. 1821; capt. (half-pay) 1823; maj. 1827; lt.-col. 1841; col. 1854; maj.-gen. 1858, lt.-gen. 1866, gen. 1874.

Page of honour to prince regent; first groom of bedchamber and master of the robes Apr. 1820-July 1830; under-sec. of state for foreign affairs Jan. 1823-Feb. 1825; ld. of treasury June 1826-Jan. 1830; postmaster-gen. July-Dec. 1834, 8-30 May 1835; PC 20 May 1835; ld. chamberlain May 1835-May 1839.

Lt.-col. Clare militia 1834; vice-adm. Ulster 1849-d.; ld. lt. co. Meath 1869-d.

Biography

Conyngham, the possessor of ‘very blue and beautiful’ eyes and an interesting cough, was described by Harriette Wilson, with whom he had an entanglement, as ‘rather cold, but amiable and truly unaffected’.1 John Croker* thought him ‘a good-natured, well-meaning young fellow’, and Lady Gower wrote of ‘the great attraction of his manner’, which disarmed criticism.2 A younger brother of Lord Mount Charles, who sat on the family interest for Donegal, in 1818 he had been thought of as a potential candidate for Clare, where a seat had been held by his father Lord Conyngham’s twin brother Francis Nathaniel Burton until 1808. Instead Conyngham had come in for Westbury as an inactive supporter of the Liverpool administration.3 Considered likely to continue to sit for an English borough, his name was rightly discounted in Clare at the general election of 1820, when, however, the sitting Member William Vesey Fitzgerald was warned that he meant to stand.4 In the end he did not seek re-election that year, during which his domineering mother was installed as George IV’s mistress and he became something of a royal favourite himself. In April he was appointed first groom of the bedchamber and master of the robes, at a combined annual salary of £1,300, and five months later he was given the first step in his purely decorative army career.5 His father, who had been promoted to a marquessate in 1816, was compensated for his public humiliation as the king’s cuckold with the stewardship of the household and a British peerage in 1821. Conyngham accompanied George IV to Hanover in the autumn, and by the end of the year had ‘supplanted’ Sir Benjamin Bloomfield† in the royal favour. It was noticed that he ‘now performs almost all the functions which formerly appertained to Bloomfield’, but ministerial fears that he would actually succeed the latter as the king’s private secretary, which would have caused a row, were not realized, as Sir William Knighton was appointed to that post early in 1822.6 Bloomfield’s fall from grace was naturally attributed to the influence of Lady Conyngham, whose flaunting of her carnal relationship with the besotted king was sometimes too much for Lord Francis, even though his own moral code was not conspicuously austere.7

Although one report had it that he was to go as a lowly secretary of legation to Berlin, in December 1822 ‘the favourite’s pleasing son’, as Lady Holland called him, was offered by Canning, the new foreign secretary, an under-secretaryship, worth £2,000 a year, which had been rejected by at least four other better qualified men.8 George Agar Ellis* thought it a bad, if politically astute, appointment, since Conyngham ‘is stupid and ignorant ... speaks no [foreign] language ... [and] I should think his powers of writing were but slender’.9 The king, who had for some time been ‘trying to get something’ for Conyngham, gave his blessing to the appointment, which temporarily improved his relations with Canning.10 Yet not long afterwards it was reported that, in a candid acknowledgment of the power which his own infatuation gave Lady Conyngham, ‘he said, "Look at that son of hers, Francis, a very good boy but nothing in him, and see how he is loaded with places"’.11 Joseph Planta*, the other under-secretary, a ‘very old friend’ of Conyngham, whose acceptance of the post made him ineligible for the seat in Parliament which had recently been earmarked for him, commented that ‘I must only make him work hard and stick to his desk, and Canning will help me in that’.12 In fact, Conyngham did little work in the office. Instead, dubbed ‘Canningham’, he became Canning’s ‘active friend at court’ and ‘regular spy’, used by the secretary of state to help him counteract the influence of the ‘Cottage côterie’ of Holy Alliance diplomats who sought to undermine his foreign policy.13

In 1822 Conyngham had come close to marrying Lady Jane Paget, Lord Anglesey’s daughter, but had shied off. He was conducting a notorious affair at court with the promiscuous Emily Lamb, wife of the 5th Earl Cowper, whose legion of lovers included her eventual second husband, Lord Palmerston*.14 Canning told his wife, 3 Apr. 1824:

The king and his family have insisted upon his marrying. He has agreed, has renewed his attentions to Lady Jane Paget, proposed and been accepted ... It was on ... [31 Mar.] that I first learned from F.C. ... what had been passing at Windsor. He was then, or professed to be, worried and annoyed beyond measure by the king’s importunities ... The king sent him word by Sir W. Knighton that he had spoken to him upon the subject for the last time; and that if he chose to neglect his advice and admonitions, he must take the consequences; and that Knighton would come up to town on ... [1 Apr.] for his answer ... F.C. came to me and said that he had not had courage to speak to me himself, that he wished that they would leave him alone, that he had had no thoughts of marrying, and then ... he threw himself into my arms and wept upon my shoulder like a child. I of course advised him to conform to the king’s wishes, if there was any one to whom he was sufficiently attached ... Knighton came up and obtained F.C.’s promise of compliance. That day he renewed with Lady Jane by a note and yesterday came to an understanding. Since then everything has gone full gallop. His uncle [William Joseph] Denison* gives him £1,000 a year and settles £20,000 upon his children. The king gives him the house in Pall Mall and a place (Holly Grove he thinks) in Windsor Park, and in short is ready to do everything for him that he can.15

Canning wondered whether the king’s real motive for bullying Conyngham into marriage at this juncture was a notion that a wife of his would provide ‘an admirable chaperon’ to lend a veneer of respectability to the European jaunt which he wished to undertake with Lady Conyngham. At the same time, he admitted that the king had been ‘excessively angry with F.C. for his usage of Lady Jane Paget’ and had recently ‘told him roundly to look to his behaviour’. The king also hatched a scheme to secure the lordship of the treasury currently held by Lady Jane’s uncle Berkeley Paget* for Conyngham who, on Paget’s projected transfer to the excise, would also step into his seat for Milborne Port on Anglesey’s interest. In the longer term, it was said, he would be brought forward for Clare in an attempt to re-establish the family interest there. Canning, whose initial assumption was that Conyngham would have to leave the foreign office because ‘between the king and Lady Jane I should have little good from him’, saw considerable merit in this scheme, which would enable him to make Conyngham ‘useful’ in ‘conveying right impressions of what passes in the House of Commons to the king’ and in keeping in line ‘younkers disposed to go astray’. He doubted, however, whether the treasury was compatible with Conyngham’s household posts, a problem which had not occurred to the king. When Lord George Cavendish Bentinck*, his nephew, turned down the under-secretaryship, and he discovered that Conyngham ‘would be too happy to stay’, with the duties and salary divided between himself and the current précis-writer, Lord Howard de Walden, Canning reconsidered:

He does not do his full work ... but his intercourse with the king is of great facility to me, and sometimes of great importance. The king tells him almost everything, and he tells me most things that the king tells him, and puts me upon my guard in a hundred little matters ... and though F.C.’s abilities are not of the first order ... yet he is a better judge of the world than any young man of his age, and he is discreet (and will be discreeter, I presume, now that Lady Cowper is superseded by his marriage) and has a tact which nothing but living in courts can give. He is at the same time affectionate as well as trustworthy, and ... [has a genuinely] humble opinion of himself.

Canning, using Conyngham himself as the messenger, disabused the king of his notion that Lord Liverpool had raised an objection to his going to the treasury:

It was I who started it, and the objection was that if F.C. became a lord of the treasury, and Member of Parliament and then did not attend Parliament regularly, he would not only discredit himself, but do mischief to the government ... The king ... said that he quite agreed with me, and that as Francis certainly could not attend regularly, on account of the danger of late nights to his health, and as besides his uncle Denison was very desirous that he should not come into Parliament, he (the king) gave up all notion of the treasury, and would certainly be most happy if I could keep him with me, though he admitted that I could not do so without a new arrangement of the foreign office.

In deference to the king’s insistence that this reorganization ‘should not disparage F. C. in the eyes of the world, which he thought a direct division of his ... department into two would do’. Canning promised to make a ‘tripartite division’ of the under-secretaries’ duties between Conyngham, Howard and one other, as soon as Planta’s expected promotion to the patronage secretaryship of the treasury took place. The king signified ‘his exceeding satisfaction with the proposed arrangement’, and Canning reflected that

I am very glad to keep F.C. His being about the king would not answer at all the same purpose. He could never see me without an effort, and without its being known, and now I hear from him every day the king’s remarks upon the proceedings or arrivals of the day before.16

On the eve of his marriage Conyngham became embroiled in the quarrel between the king and Canning over the latter’s attendance at the annual Easter dinner given by the lord mayor of London, who at the time was the king’s bête noir Robert Waithman*. According to Knighton, Conyngham reported the king’s fury to Canning, but refused Canning’s request to put in a good word for him with his mother.17 Howard deputized for Conyngham during his honeymoon with ‘Crazy Jane’, who was given to ‘hunting’ him ‘from corner to corner’ and liked to ‘scold’ him in public; she later went mad.18 On his return, 26 May 1824, the under-secretaryship was divided between himself and Howard, even though Planta, whose transfer to the treasury subsequently fell through, was still in place; had Stephen Rumbold Lushington* finally proceeded to India, Planta’s expected departure would have allowed Conyngham and Howard, who ‘now repose together’, to have ‘separate and better beds’, as Robert Plumer Ward* joked.19 In August Canning apparently tried to have Conyngham appointed under-secretary ‘resident at Windsor’ to act, as the outraged Mrs. Arbuthnot put it, as ‘a sort of ambassador and spy between him and the king’.20 Lord Bathurst took a more relaxed view:

There could not be a safer person appointed if such an appointment were to take place. He is too mild and too much in awe of the king to be anything but devoted to him; and more mischief would be done by irritating the lady, which an opposition to the appointment would create, than can happen by any influence which Lord Francis would ever exert.21

Lady Conyngham and the king were said to be keen on the scheme, but Knighton’s influence proved strong enough to thwart it. Yet uncertainty as to the nature of Conyngham’s situation and duties continued for several weeks, and in November he was reported as heaping abuse on the duke of Wellington, who was currently at loggerheads with Canning.22 On 26 Dec. 1824 Conyngham’s elder brother died at Nice. Despite persistent rumours that he had produced a son by a secret marriage, no obstacle presented itself to Conyngham’s assumption of the courtesy title of earl of Mount Charles as his father’s heir apparent. When the news reached England in January 1825 he was ‘most anxious to stay’ with Canning, whom he told that he had been ‘able to escape Parliament for the present, and remains at the foreign office’.23 The reprieve was brief, for within six weeks he was returned in absentia for Donegal in his brother’s room, presumably at his father’s insistence, and was thus compelled to resign the under-secretaryship.24

Mount Charles voted for Catholic relief, 21 Apr., 10 May, and the duke of Cumberland’s annuity, 6, 10 June 1825. Later that year, facing a potential challenge, he put in a reluctant appearance in his county, including as foreman of the grand jury, but was privately withering about the Orange prejudices of his constituents.25 He was apparently inactive in the 1826 session, when he lingered in Ireland.26 Canning engineered his appointment as a lord of the treasury on the eve of the general election, when an earlier threat of opposition in Donegal came to nothing.27 He presented a Donegal petition for Catholic relief, 21 Feb. 1827, and voted for that, 6 Mar., notwithstanding his first-hand knowledge, shared by few, of the strength of George IV’s hostility to it.28 He was in the minority against the spring guns bill, 30 Mar. It was falsely reported in July 1827 that he had resigned from the treasury, ‘not from any love for the seceders’ from Canning’s ministry, but ‘from domestic differences with his parents’. He was also supposed to have declined a British peerage and to be ‘on bad terms’ with Knighton, who was said to be jealous of his intimacy with the king.29

Croker speculated that Mount Charles, ‘a decided Tory’, would ‘resign if another Whig comes into power’ on the collapse of the Goderich ministry in January 1828.30 As it happened, he seems fleetingly to have contemplated resignation on Wellington’s appointment as premier, which he had accurately forecast. Yet, as he told Knighton:

I shall never give up, without His Majesty’s positive commands, my situation in his family after the king’s constant amazing kindness to me. I should indeed be more than ungrateful were I to quit his service, or to pledge my vote in any manner in opposition to His Majesty’s wishes.31

He duly stayed in place, although the gossips had it that he shared his uncle’s disgust with his mother’s continued liaison with the king, and joined him in a bid to persuade her ‘to leave her fat and fair friend and to go abroad’.32 Mount Charles voted against repeal of the Test Acts, 26 Feb., but for Catholic relief, 12 May, having presented Irish Catholic petitions in its favour, 7, 20 Mar., 6 May. In late May he used a Canningite intermediary to inform the ousted cabinet minister William Huskisson* that the king was not yet reconciled to his departure; in the event, the Huskissonites did leave office, but the expected resignation of Mount Charles, among others, did not materialize.33 His name does not often figure in the surviving division lists, but he was, of course, in government majorities on the ordnance estimates, 4 July, and the silk duties, 14 July 1828.

In November 1828 Mount Charles solicited his wife’s appointment to the outrangership of Windsor Park, worth £500 a year. In return, he was willing to vacate his place at the treasury, which had become increasingly irksome to him. His application was unsuccessful. He was by now on bad terms with his parents, moaning that ‘it is sufficient for me to wish a thing for them to put an extinguisher upon it’.34 His discomfiture was aggravated by Wellington’s recall of his father-in-law as Irish viceroy, his adoption of Catholic relief and the king’s unabated hostility to it. Yet he did not act on Greville’s advice to resign. He claimed to have ignored the king’s incessant blandishments on him to usurp Knighton, and to have refused in earlier years several offers of a peerage ‘on condition of his voting against the Catholics’. Now, according to Mrs. Arbuthnot, he confessed that ‘by the king’s order, he had written to the household to say the king is opposed to the concession and will never forgive any of them who vote for it’; but he allegedly told Greville that he had refused to execute this order.35 He stood his own ground by voting for emancipation, 6, 30 Mar., and presenting favourable Catholic petitions, 9, 17 Mar. 1829. On 18 Mar. he spoke at some length in the House in warm support of the measure as ‘a harbinger of brighter days to Ireland’, and heaped encomiums on Peel, the now pro-Catholic home secretary. He was prepared to swallow his strong objections to the disfranchisement of the Irish 40s. freeholders. The king was ‘very much annoyed’ at this show of defiance, ‘having always hoped that he was at heart too indifferent about it to take a decided line or express publicly a strong opinion’. He did not conceal his displeasure, and Mount Charles kept out of his way.36 A report in April 1829 that he had refused an offer of missions to Naples or Turin drew from Greville the comment that this was ‘hard enough upon those who have been toiling for years through the subordinate offices of diplomacy’.37 Three months later Mount Charles, who voted to prevent Daniel O’Connell taking his seat unimpeded, 18 May 1829, was in hot water with Wellington for having supposedly ‘intrigued’ to secure a Hanoverian honour for Robert Gordon, the ambassador to Turkey.38

On 20 Nov. 1829 Greville recorded:

A few days ago Mount Charles told me that he had with all his children and Lady Mount Charles been turned out of Cumberland Lodge; that his own family had done this out of jealousy; that the king was consenting though he believed he regretted the departure ... He was in a great rage, abused his own family, by whom he considers himself shamefully treated, and gave me to understand that the king had rather not resisted than countenanced this proceeding ... One pretext they seem to have made use of, was the expense which they considered to have been increased by his being there with his family.

According to Greville, Wellington denied all knowledge of the episode; but several months later he was told by the king’s valet that the duke had in fact brought about the expulsion by reporting to George IV ‘some indiscretion’ of Mount Charles’s ‘in talking either of what passed in the House or in letting out some political matter’.39 Whatever the truth, Mount Charles resigned from the treasury on the eve of the 1830 session. Wellington claimed to be unable to account for it, beyond having heard that he ‘intended to live in the country’; and Lord Conyngham, professing surprise, presumed that ‘his health is the motive, as he frequently mentioned he dreaded the close attendance in Parliament’.40 Lord Ellenborough thought he had done it ‘to annoy his father, and force him to give him a larger allowance, unaccompanied by the condition of constant attendance in the House of Commons’; while Mrs. Arbuthnot regarded it as an act of sheer spite, deliberately timed to be ‘inconvenient’ to the government.41 Whig observers seized on it as a source of embarrassment to ministers, and a symptom of dissensions amongst the Conynghams and with the king.42 Creevey put his own, probably quite misleading gloss on it:

Wellington has turned Lord Mount Charles out of the treasury. It seems my lord was much too fine to attend to treasury notes requiring his attendance in the House of Commons, so the duke said, ‘If you don’t like it, I must get somebody who does’. So the Buck has lost £1,500 a year, and according to his uncle Denison ... he was never more in need of it, as he is over head and ears in debt, and Denny says he won’t give him a farthing after such folly.43

Edward Ellice* had more the right of it, informing Lord Grey, 27 Jan., that ‘Denison’s story is that he did not like the attendance in Parliament and is, moreover, attached to Lord Anglesey, and Huskisson’s party in politics, but on that ground surely he should have resigned or government should have taken from him his situation in the household’.44 Mount Charles voted against Lord Blandford’s reform scheme, 18 Feb., and Jewish emancipation, 17 May 1830.

On the death of George IV, Mount Charles, who with his mother stood out among the ‘merry’ mourners at his funeral as being ‘deeply affected’, resigned from the household, as did Lord Conyngham. He declined William IV’s offer of a bedchamber post because, in Greville’s words, ‘his wife can’t bear it and he don’t like it nor to go to Windsor under such altered circumstances’.45 A week before his unopposed re-election for Donegal, when he defended his pro-Catholic votes and vaunted his independence from government, Peel and the Irish secretary agreed to grant his request for a piece of local patronage for, as the latter remarked, ‘in spite of his recent resignation and Paget connection [he] is warmly with us’.46 Ministers duly listed him among their ‘friends’, but he was absent from the division on the civil list which brought them down, 15 Nov. 1830. He dined with Peel and leading members of the Tory opposition, 5 Mar., but in the House, 22 Mar., he declared his support for the second reading of the Grey ministry’s reform bill.47 He did so, he claimed, in redemption of a voluntary pledge to his constituents to ‘give reform every dispassionate consideration in my power’, because ‘the tide of public opinion was so strongly running in favour of parliamentary reform that it was impossible to turn aside its current’. Reserving his right to oppose details of the bill, he supported it in principle as a matter of ‘expediency and necessity’, on account of ‘the general increase of intelligence throughout the country, coupled with the frightful height that bribery and corruption have attained in our representative system’. At the same time, he deplored the ‘too great democratic tendency’ espoused by radical reformers, lavished praise on Peel and declined to commit himself to support government except on a reduction of taxation:

I will candidly tell them I place not the slightest confidence in them; call it ... early Tory prejudice, that looks with the greatest suspicion on Whig measures. Be it so; I cannot shake those prejudices off with the same facility with which I see many ... [Members] adopt, one day, one set of principles, and the very next day those diametrically opposed to them; nor can I fall into that hackneyed beaten path of looking entirely to measures and not to men, though ... I am not actuated by motives of factious opposition to any government.

He voted for the second reading later that night and against Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment, 19 Apr. No corroboration has been found of Croker’s allegation that he was bribed to support reform by Denison’s undertaking to pay his debts.48 Although he was mentioned by the Irish under-secretary as a suitable candidate for Drogheda, he was expected to stand again for Donegal at the 1831 general election, when an interloping Dublin barrister puffed up his and Mount Charles’s chances of being returned in tandem as reformers.49 However, in the event he gave up his seat and, with his brother Lord Albert Conyngham (who later came in for Canterbury) unable to attend, the family interest lapsed.50

Nothing came of a report following the announcement of the coronation peerages in September 1831 that Mount Charles was soon to be summoned to the Lords.51 In November Ellice reported to the prime minister that he had requested a peerage, but offering no grounds save ‘the very slight one of having lost my seat for the county of Donegal by voting for the reform bill’; Ellice added that in any case ‘his father will not keep him waiting long’.52 Commenting on the possibility of creations being needed to secure the reform bill in the Lords, Holland wrote to Anglesey, 22 Feb. 1832, that ‘Mount Charles, I am sorry to hear, though once desirous of a seat in the Lords, would demur being raised and voting with a batch’.53 Late that year he succeeded his father and entered the Upper House as Baron Minster in the United Kingdom peerage. His appointment by Lord Melbourne as postmaster-general in July 1834, which was seen as a sop to Anglesey, was widely ‘sneered and laughed at’; the duchesse de Dino wrote that ‘he is a young and good-looking man of fashion with many love affairs, who writes and receives more billets-doux than serious letters, and is therefore called "the postmaster of the twopenny post"’.54 As lord chamberlain, he broke the news to Princess Victoria of the death of her uncle in the early morning of 20 June 1837, and was the first person to kiss her hand as queen.55 On Denison’s death in 1848 he received £30,000, and had his children handsomely provided for.56 He devoted the last 40 years of his life largely to yachting and the development of his racing stud in Ireland. He died at his London house in Hamilton Place, Piccadilly, in July 1876, four days after undergoing an operation for lithotomy.57 He was succeeded in his titles and estates by his elder son George Henry (1825-82). His younger son, Lord Francis Nathaniel Conyngham (1832-80), was Liberal Member for Clare, 1857-9 and 1874-80.

Ref Volumes: 1820-1832

Authors: David R. Fisher / Stephen Farrell

Notes

• 1. K. Bourne, Palmerston, 198; Harriette Wilson Mems. (1824), ii. 669; T. Ambrose, King and Vice-Queen, 158, 163.
• 2. Croker Pprs. i. 252; Howard Sisters, 266.
• 3. Hist. Irish Parl. iii. 323; HP Commons, 1790-1820, ii. 632-4; iii. 343, 494.
• 4. Dublin Weekly Reg. 12 Feb.; Dublin Evening Post, 19 Feb. 1820; NLI, Vesey Fitzgerald mss 7858, pp. 172-3.
• 5. Countess Granville Letters, i. 152, 157; M. D. George, Cat. of Pol. and Personal Satires, x. 13893, 14181; Ambrose, 49-50, 70.
• 6. Hobhouse Diary, 75; Greville Mems. i. 122-3; Fox Jnl. 95, 105; Prince of Wales Corresp. viii. 3420; HMC Bathurst, 527; George, 14396-7, 14404; Ambrose, 137, 187-8.
• 7. Geo. IV Letters, ii. 1026; Arbuthnot Jnl, i. 91, 138, 147-8.
• 8. Keele Univ. Lib. Sneyd mss SC12/53; Blakiston, Lord William Russell, 63; Geo. IV Letters, ii. 1053, 1054; Hobhouse Diary, 98.
• 9. Northants. RO, Agar Ellis diary, 28 Dec. 1822.
• 10. Broughton, Recollections, iii. 13; Private Letters of Princess Lieven ed. P. Quennell, 214, 216, 218-19, 224.
• 11. Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 232.
• 12. Bagot, Canning and Friends, ii. 148-9.
• 13. Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 256, 263; Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 155; Bucks. RO, Fremantle mss D/FR 46/10/46.
• 14. Private Letters of Princess Lieven, 149; Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 148, 298; Bourne, 198.
• 15. Harewood mss WYL 250/8.
• 16. Ibid. Canning to wife, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 Apr. 1824.
• 17. Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 305-6, 310.
• 18. Bourne, 225; Howard Sisters, 124; Disraeli Letters, ii. 652.
• 19. Buckingham, Mems. Geo. IV, ii. 102-3.
• 20. Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 332.
• 21. Arbuthnot Corresp. 60.
• 22. Ibid. 61; Private Letters of Princess Lieven, 323-4, 326; Huskisson Pprs. 179-80; Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 336, 354, 356.
• 23. Harewood mss, Canning to wife, 10, 12 Jan. 1825.
• 24. Strabane Morning Post, 8, 15, 22 Feb. 1825.
• 25. NLW, Coedymaen mss 18, Fremantle to Williams Wynn, 28 Aug. 1825; PRO NI, De Ros mss MIC573/7/9/2.
• 26. Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1232.
• 27. Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 12; Add. 40331, f. 147; Strabane Morning Post, 13 June, 4 July 1826.
• 28. The Times, 22 Feb. 1827; Greville Mems. i. 170-1, 192.
• 29. Arbuthnot Corresp. 83; Greville Mems. i. 178.
• 30. Croker Pprs. i. 399.
• 31. Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1462.
• 32. Creevey Pprs. ii. 148.
• 33. Add. 38756, f. 156; TNA 30/29/9/5/71.
• 34. Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1546, 1551.
• 35. Greville Mems. i. 235-6, 258, 261, 264-5, 279; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 243.
• 36. Ellenborough Diary, i. 381; Greville Mems. i. 279-81; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 259.
• 37. Greville Mems. i. 285-6.
• 38. Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 297.
• 39. Greville Mems. i. 333, 341; ii. 31-32.
• 40. Wellington Despatches, vi. 436, 439-40, 443.
• 41. Ellenborough Diary, ii. 180-1; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 328.
• 42. Lady Holland to Son, 107; Add. 51600, Lady Cowper to Lady Holland [28 Jan.]; 51680, Russell to same [31 Jan.]; Grey mss, Durham to Grey, 5 Feb. 1830; Ambrose, 189, 200-1.
• 43. Creevey mss, Creevey to Miss Ord, 22 Feb. 1830.
• 44. Grey mss.
• 45. Ambrose, 224; Greville Mems. ii. 4, 6, 10; Wellington Despatches, vii. 115, 117; Add. 51568, Anglesey to Holland, 17 July 1830.
• 46. NLI, Leveson Gower letter bks. Leveson Gower to Stapleton, 6 Aug.; Enniskillen Chron. 26 Aug. 1830.
• 47. Three Diaries, 63; Add. 51577, Rice to Lady Holland [22 Mar. 1831].
• 48. M. Brock, Great Reform Act, 179.
• 49. Derby mss 920 Der (14) 121/2, Gosset to Smith Stanley, 26 Apr.; Enniskillen Chron. 28 Apr. 1831; PRO NI, Anglesey mss D619/33B/3, 20, 23.
• 50. The Times, 10 May; Belfast News Letter, 10 May; Impartial Reporter, 19 May; Enniskillen Chron. 9 June 1831.
• 51. Add. 37726, f. 189.
• 52. Grey mss, Ellice to Grey, 12, 21 Nov. 1831.
• 53. Anglesey mss 27A/151.
• 54. Greville Mems. iii. 47; Raikes Jnl. i. 248; Lady Holland to Son, 150; Mems. of Duchesse de Dino ed. Princess Radziwill, 92.
• 55. Girlhood of Queen Victoria ed. Lord Esher, i. 196.
• 56. PROB 11/2100/746.
• 57. The Times, 18 July 1876.