Family and Education

b. 24 June 1726, 1st surv. s. of Charles Cholmondeley. educ. Westminster 1740-3; St. John’s, Camb. 1743. m. 29 Oct. 1764, Dorothy, da. and h. of Edmund Cowper of Overlegh, Cheshire, 6s. 3da. suc. fa. 30 Mar. 1756.

Offices Held

Biography

In 1756 and 1761 Cholmondeley was returned unopposed. In Bute’s list he was classed ‘Tory, Pitt’. He voted against the peace preliminaries, December 1762; in autumn 1763 was marked by Jenkinson as ‘contra’, and voted with the Opposition on Wilkes, 15 Nov. 1763, and general warrants, February 1764; and was classed by Newcastle, 10 May 1764, as a ‘sure friend’. Rockingham, July 1765, classed him as ‘doubtful’, but he did not vote against the repeal of the Stamp Act, and on 18 Apr. 1766 George Onslow, in a letter to Newcastle, included Cholmondeley among ‘our people’ who had voted with the Administration on the budget.1 Rockingham, November 1766, classed him as ‘Whig’; Townshend, January 1767, as ‘Rockingham’; Newcastle, 2 Mar. 1767, as ‘Tory’. He voted against Administration on the land tax, 27 Feb. 1767,2 and on the nullum tempus bill, 17 Feb. 1768.

Three speeches by Cholmondeley are recorded: when on 5 Mar. 1763 William Beckford, fulminating against standing armies, instanced Richard II’s ‘rabble from Cheshire’, this ‘drew up Cholmondeley to say a word for his Cheshire friends’;3 on 21 Mar. 1764 he spoke in support of the militia bill; and on 10 May 1765 for including the Princess Dowager in the Regency bill.

William Blackett wrote to his kinsman Sir Edward on 10 Dec. 1766 (in a letter of which the paper is torn):4

Mr. Cholmondeley’s friends seem very confident he will ... again for the county, if he stands on his own bottom ... does not take that pains to ingratiate himself ... gentlemen and freeholders of the county, so that his interest will decline daily as his estate is at rack rent, and the Stamford interest will gain ground in the county.

Cholmondeley did not stand in 1768, and died 2 June 1779.

Ref Volumes: 1754-1790

Author: Mary M. Drummond

Notes

• 1. Add. 32974, ff. 425-6.
• 2. He appears in two out of the three lists of the majority in this division.
• 3. Harris’s ‘Debates’.
• 4. Blackett mss at Matfen, Northumb.