Family and Education

b. ?1753, 4th s. of Alexander Cumming of Rosehill and Penrose, Cornw. by Grace, da. and h. of William Pearce of Penryn, niece and h. of John Penrose of Penrose;1 bro. of Alexander Penrose Cumming Gordon*. unm.

Offices Held

Biography

Cumming served with the East India Company, probably in the naval service, and on his return settled in London, where he appears to have become involved in financial speculation. He made a number of unsuccessful bids for a directorship of the East India Company.2

In December 1803 he succeeded his brother as Member for Inverness Burghs where his family and their relatives, the Grants of Castle Grant, had a combined and currently dominant interest. He is not known to have voted against the Addington ministry, but he opposed Pitt’s additional force bill in June 1804, only days after his brother had received a baronetcy from the minister. In the government list of September he was marked ‘doubtful Pitt’. Although he apparently voted twice against Melville, 8 Apr. and 12 June 1805, he was classed as a supporter of Pitt in July 1805 and in his first reported speech, 3 Feb. 1806, he supported payment of Pitt’s debts because he had been ‘a great minister, and an excellent statesman’. On the formation of the ‘Talents’, William Adam placed him among the ‘Dundas etc. interest’, but he seems to have supported the new government and he voted for the repeal of the Additional Force Act, 30 Apr. 1806. At the general election of 1806 he made way for Sir James Grant’s son, his late brother’s nephew.

Cumming was pressed into standing for the burghs in 1807 by his brother’s widow, but he was defeated by a candidate who had captured the crucial returning burgh of Fortrose. He regained the seat in 1818 under an electoral agreement concluded between his nephew Sir William Cumming Gordon and Colonel Francis Grant. He voted with the Liverpool ministry against Tierney’s censure motion, 18 May, and for the foreign enlistment bill, 10 June, but against them, according to one list, on the Windsor establishment, 22 Feb. 1819. He was on the verge of doing so on Ridley’s motion for Admiralty reductions, 18 Mar., until, as he explained ‘in a tone of voice so low as to be inaudible in the gallery’, the speech of Sir George Cockburn changed his mind.3

Cumming, who in his will left £27,100 in 3 per cent consols and cash bequests of £9,000 died 1 May 1834 ‘in the eighty-second year of his age’.4

Ref Volumes: 1790-1820

Author: David R. Fisher

Notes

• 1. C. S. Gilbert, Hist. Survey Cornw. ii. 227; M. E. Cumming Bruce, Fam. Recs. of Bruces and Cumyns, 467.
• 2. Pol. State of Scotland 1788, p. 237; J. Wilson, Biog. Index (1806), 153; Scott Corresp. (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, lxxv), i. 15-16; Macpherson Grant mss 283, A. P. Cumming to Gen. Grant, 12 Feb. 1792 (NRA [S] 771).
• 3. Morning Chron. 19 Mar. 1819.
• 4. PCC 265 Teignmouth; Cumming Bruce, 468.