LANE FOX, Sackville Walter (1797-1874).

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832, ed. D.R. Fisher, 2009
Available from Cambridge University Press

Constituency

Dates

1831 - 1834
24 Jan. 1840 - 1841
17 Aug. 1842 - 1847
1847 - 1852

Family and Education

b. 24 Mar. 1797, 2nd s. of James Fox Lane† of Bramham, Yorks. and Hon. Maria Lucy Pitt, da. of George Pitt†, 1st Bar. Rivers; bro. of George Lane Fox*. educ. Eton 1811. m. 22 June 1826, Lady Charlotte Mary Anne Osborne, da. of George, 6th duke of Leeds, 2s. 2da. d. 18 Aug. 1874.

Offices Held

Ensign and lt. 1 Ft. Gds. 1814, lt. and capt. 1820, ret. 1822.

Biography

Like his elder brother George, Lane Fox was an inveterate and largely unsuccessful gambler. His ceremonial army career was brief. His marriage to the only daughter of the 6th duke of Leeds was the key to his first return to Parliament, for it was on Leeds’s commanding interest that he came in unopposed for Helston at the general election of 1831. He voted against the second reading of the Grey ministry’s reintroduced reform bill, 6 July, and presented a hostile petition from the corporation and inhabitants of Helston, 12 July. He divided for using the 1831 census to determine the disfranchisement schedules, 19 July, to postpone consideration of Chippenham’s inclusion in B, 27 July, and against the passage of the bill, 21 Sept. He voted against the second reading of the Scottish reform bill, 23 Sept. He was in the minority for O’Connell’s motion for swearing the depleted Dublin election committee, 29 July. A devoted supporter of the Church of England, he voted in the diehard minority of 47 against the Maynooth grant, 26 Sept. He divided against the second, 17 Dec. 1831, and third reading of the revised reform bill, 22 Mar. 1832. He voted against the second reading of the Irish bill, 25 May, and for an attempt to preserve the voting rights of Irish borough freemen, 2 July. He divided against government on the Russian-Dutch loan, 26 Jan., 12 July, and in a minority of 29 against the Irish party processions bill, 25 June 1832. He is not known to have spoken in debate in this period.

At the general election of 1832 Lane Fox was returned unopposed as a Conservative for the one seat retained by Helston under the Reform Act.1 He stood down in 1834, but subsequently sat for Beverley and Ipswich. His defence of the Church became increasingly obsessive and eccentric: for example, he wrote to Peel in 1843 to inform him of the imminence of the second coming.2 He died in August 1874. His elder son Sackville George, an army officer, inherited the baronies of Darcy and Conyers from his uncle the 7th duke of Leeds in 1859.

Ref Volumes: 1820-1832

Author: Martin Casey

Notes

  • 1. West Briton, 14 Dec.; R. Cornw. Gazette, 29 Dec. 1832.
  • 2. Add. 40528, f. 200.; K.J. Atton, ‘Municipal and Parl. Politics in Ipswich’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1980), 214, 242.