HUGHES, Edward (d.1734), of Hertingfordbury, Herts.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1715-1754, ed. R. Sedgwick, 1970
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

1722 - 26 Jan. 1734

Family and Education

Prob. s. of John Hughes of Hertingfordbury, sheriff of Herts. 1718. m. 26 Nov. 1713 (with £2,000), Elizabeth, da. of Richard Harrison of Balls Park, Herts., 2s. 1da.; bro.-in-law of Edward and George Harrison.1

Offices Held

Judge advocate gen. of the army 1714-d.

Biography

Hughes’s family seems to have been well-established in Hertfordshire, where he himself was J.P.2 Marrying into an influential and wealthy local family he was returned for Saltash on the Admiralty interest in 1722, and again in 1727, though Richard Edgcumbe reported to Newcastle that ‘at Saltash they don’t relish Mr. Hughes, but make no difficulty of choosing a better man’.3 He voted with the Administration except in the divisions on the excise bill and on the repeal of the Septennial Act, from which he was absent, speaking for them in the debate of 12 Feb. 1730 on Dunkirk, and on 18 Feb. supporting the petition from the African Company for a subsidy towards the maintenance of its forts and settlements. A member of the gaols committee in 1728-9, he told the 1st Lord Egmont in February 1730 that:

there was great occasion to revise the committee, to keep the judges in order, who had behaved strangely, and used us so contemptuously ... Mr. Hughes added he could tell me something that would make me stare, and reached even to the judges. I did not encourage him to impart it to me, knowing his warmth against the judges, and great freeness in these affairs ... However, I commended his zeal, and that deservedly, for he seemed a very honest and conscientious man.

He was referring to a charge against the lord chief justice of the common pleas, which was found by the committee on investigation to be groundless. In 1732, when a bill enabling the Charitable Corporation to raise new capital was before Parliament, Egmont learned that Hughes had complained to the directors of the corporation of being ‘ill used by them’, in having ‘no shares given him for being for the bill’.4

He died in debt 26 Jan. 1734, his widow renouncing the executorship of his will to his principal creditor.5

Ref Volumes: 1715-1754

Author: Eveline Cruickshanks

Notes

  • 1. PCC 35 Ockham; Clutterbuck, Herts. ii. 186, 206.
  • 2. Hertford County Recs., Sessions Rolls 1699-1850, pp. 65, 70.
  • 3. 14 Aug. 1727, SP Dom. Cal. Geo. II.
  • 4. HMC Egmont Diary, i. 42, 45, 46, 51, 243; O. C. Williams, Clerical Organization of the House of Commons, 325 seq.
  • 5. PCC 35 Ockham.