LAMBTON, John George (1792-1840), of Lambton Hall, co. Dur.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1790-1820, ed. R. Thorne, 1986
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

20 Sept. 1813 - 29 Jan. 1828

Family and Education

b. 12 Apr. 1792, 1st s. of William Henry Lambton* of Lambton by Lady Anne Barbara Frances Villiers, da. of George Bussy Villiers, 4th Earl of Jersey. educ. by Dr Thomas Beddoes of Clifton 1798-1805; Eton 1805-8. m. (1) 1 Jan. 1812 at Gretna Green, Harriet (d. 11 July 1815), illegit. da. of George James Cholmondeley, 4th Earl of Cholmondeley, 3da.; (2) 9 Dec. 1816, Lady Louisa Elizabeth Grey, da. of Charles Grey*, 2nd Earl Grey, 2s. 3da. suc. fa. 1797; cr. Baron Durham 29 Jan. 1828; Earl of Durham 23 Mar. 1833; GCB 27 June 1837.

Offices Held

Cornet 10 Drag. 1809, lt. 1810, ret. 1811.

Ld. privy seal Nov. 1830-Mar. 1833; PC 22 Nov. 1830; spec. mission to Prussia, Russia and Austria 1832; ambassador extraordinary to Russia 1835-7; gov.-gen. Canada Jan.-Dec. 1838.

High steward, Hull 1836.

Biography

On the evening before Lambton’s birth his father took a leading part in the formation of the Association of the Friends of the People. He and his brother were taken by their ailing father to Italy in 1796 and after his death there the following year were brought home by their uncle Ralph Lambton who, with Thomas Wilkinson, a family friend, became responsible for their upbringing and education. In accordance with their father’s wishes, they were placed with a private tutor, Dr Thomas Beddoes of Clifton, from whom they received an unusually broad and liberal education. In 1798, Beddoes told Wilkinson that ‘the character of John is very uncommon. I think he is capable of going as far in good or bad as any human being I have ever beheld.’ When Lambton was nine, Beddoes wrote that he ‘exceeds any child I ever saw in industry, intelligence, and active curiosity’, but warned that he seemed vulnerable to the consumption which had carried off his father and expressed concern at his violent spasms of temper, rapidly fluctuating emotions and extreme sensitivity. Lambton gave ample evidence of his wilfulness by insisting on joining the army, rather than going to university as his guardians had intended. His uncle duly obtained him a commission in the Prince of Wales’s Own Hussars, but he saw no foreign service, tired of the life and, having fallen in love with Lord Cholmondeley’s illegitimate daughter, gave up his lieutenancy and eloped with her. Shortly afterwards, Henrietta Cholmondeley met Lambton and told her brother, 9 Feb. 1812, that he was

gentlemanlike and would be well looking, if he had not lost his teeth ... He is full of conversation and certainly above par, but with extreme decision and a temper which can hardly contain itself on the most trifling occasions.1

On 28 Sept. 1812 Sir Charles Monck informed Lord Grey that ‘young Lambton is already become very unpopular’ in Durham ‘and from his disposition and manners likely to grow more so’, a prediction which was to prove wide of the mark. After the general election he was said to be ‘desirous of purchasing himself’ a seat for Camelford, but nothing came of this.2 On coming of age in April 1813 he inherited the family’s 17,000 acre estate in northeast Durham, centred on Lambton Hall (later known as Lambton Castle) on the north bank of the Wear, seven miles south of Newcastle. He continued and completed the rebuilding begun by his father. The estate was primarily a coal-mining property and made Lambton, who took a keen interest in its development, one of the wealthiest men in England, though by the time of his death it was heavily encumbered by mortgages.3 When a vacancy occurred for the county in August 1813 he offered himself as an advocate of civil and religious liberty, a supporter of Catholic relief and an enemy of electoral corruption, though he disowned the ‘wild and improbable theories’ of the extremist reformers. Attempts to raise an opposition to him were unsuccessful, but as a condition of his return, his uncle agreed to vacate his seat for the city to silence complaints of a family monopoly. Three days after his election he addressed the Newcastle Fox anniversary dinner, when James Losh observed that he

has a fine voice, expressed himself with ease and vigour and his manners are graceful. It seems to me that if his health continue good and he can conquer his aristocratic habits, he will become a man of consequence in the state.4

Lambton was elected to Brooks’s on 5 Apr. 1814, voted to censure the Speaker for his anti-Catholic prorogation speech, 22 Apr., and delivered his maiden speech as the seconder of Williams Wynn’s motion condemning the blockade of Norway, 12 May, when he spoke of ‘a magnanimous people offered up on the altar of diplomatic convenience’. He presented a Sunderland petition against alteration of the Corn Laws, 7 June, and voted against the expulsion of Lord Cochrane, 5 July. On the treaties concerning Sicily, Naples and Saxony, 25 Nov. 1814, he deplored ‘the acts of rapine and aggression of the club of confederated monarchs at Vienna’, and on 21 Feb. 1815 moved for papers relating to the ‘criminal’ transfer of Genoa to Sardinia, but was defeated by 115 to 66. He voted against the embodiment of the militia in peacetime, 28 Nov. 1814 and 28 Feb. 1815, was in the opposition minorities on the Spanish Liberals, 1 Mar., Bank restriction, 2 and 9 Mar., and steadily opposed the corn bill in March. On 6 Mar. he complained that the house was surrounded by troops called out to deal with disturbances caused by anti-corn bill demonstrators. When the House went into committee he lodged a formal protest and, although he subsequently expressed satisfaction with the official explanation of the troops’ presence, he vindicated his motives in raising the matter. He voted against the proposed new taxes and the retention of the property tax, 13 Mar., 19 and 20 Apr., the prospect of a resumption of hostilities with France, 7 Apr., and for inquiry into the civil list accounts, 14 Apr.

His wife’s precarious health declined alarmingly soon afterwards and Lambton, granted periods of absence on this account, 28 Apr. and 19 May, took no further part in the 1815 session. Her death from consumption, 11 July, so overwhelmed him with grief that he contemplated retiring from public life, but his friends, principally Henry Brougham, helped to dissuade him. His position in the advanced wing of the Whig party was reflected in Grey’s comment that he was ‘less favourably disposed than others of our friends’ to help George Tierney out of his financial difficulties, being ‘a good deal connected with some of those who would not dislike to get hold of anything that they might think would turn to his disadvantage’. Later in the year he toured Scotland and visited Paris, where he befriended Lafayette and was appalled by the tyranny of the restored Bourbon regime. On his return to England he wrote to his friend Sir Robert Wilson:

nothing can equal the distress that pervades the whole country both in agriculture and commerce. Such are the blessed fruits of a war carried on for the purpose of seating such scoundrels as the Bourbons on their thrones of France and Spain ... It requires ... a true Tory or ‘legitime’ eye to see anything in the peace ... but seeds of discord abroad, and seeds of slavery at home.5

After voting in the small minority against the address, 1 Feb. 1816, Lambton expressed these views in the House, 7 Feb., when presenting a petition, promoted by himself, for repeal of the property tax, reduction of the assessed taxes and regulation of tithes. He voted for Brougham’s attacks on aspects of the peace settlement, 9 and 15 Feb., played host on 18 Feb. to a small meeting of advanced Whigs to consider whether to argue for the insertion of a condemnation of the Bourbon restoration into the compromise amendment adopted for the debate on the settlement,6 but voted for the amendment as it stood, 20 Feb. The previous day, moving for an account of colonial offices, he had accused ministers of paying lip-service to the need for economy, and he voted regularly in support of the ensuing opposition campaign for retrenchment. He favoured a junction of Whigs and Burdettites in Westminster to condemn the property tax,7 backed Brougham in his attack on the army estimates, 28 Feb., moved for an account of the increase in the salaries of auditors of excise, 29 Feb., and spoke briefly against the property tax, 4, 6 and 11 Mar. He was apparently silent in the House for the rest of the session, apart from introducing a bill, recommended by a committee of the whole House, to make destruction of colliery machinery a capital offence, 12 June. The measure alarmed the law reformer Romilly, who alerted Whig peers to it for its passage through the Lords, but it became law on 1 July. At about this time, Lambton greatly encouraged Sir Humphry Davy, an assistant at Dr Beddoes’s establishment during his days there, in his development and perfection of the miner’s safety lamp.8 On 9 Dec. 1816 he married Grey’s daughter, thereby binding himself to the Whig leader, on whom he pledged himself to look as the father he had scarcely known, in a relationship which began in confidence but was to end in acrimony and suspicion. Sydney Smith reported Grey to be pleased with the match, which proved a happy one: ‘The only doubt is that of temper, but a man may be a good husband, and irascible in talk with his fellows’.9

Lambton had already been exhorted by Wilson to add his ‘voice and exertions to obtain more representations, remonstrances and demands against the system of ministers’, and to Grey he in turn stressed the importance of ‘that greatest of all virtues in a politician, activity’:

Our being at present below par with the people, I mean the real people not the rabble, is, I think, owing in great measure to our supineness and want of union among ourselves, which has prevented us from taking any decided line. The Grenvilles! The Grenvilles! has always been the watchword to prevent our taking any step that could identify our cause with that of the people.

He was willing to comply with Grey’s request that he move the amendment to the address, but chafed at Tierney’s indecision on the matter and gladly deferred to the Commons leader Ponsonby when he decided to move it himself.10 He gave a silent vote for it, 29 Jan. 1817, as he did on the composition of the finance committee, 7 Feb., Admiralty economies, 17 and 25 Feb., and lotteries, 18 Mar. In the debate on parliamentary reform petitions, 7 Feb., he argued that reform was urgently needed, but dissociated himself from the radicals and their

wild, foolish and disgusting principles ... which were founded upon the subversion of our constitution, upon the destruction of social order, and of all that was wise, permanent and useful in our invaluable system of law and government.

He voted for receipt of the Lymington reform petition, 11 Feb., and spoke briefly in support of other petitions, 4 Mar. He voted against the suspension of habeas corpus, 26 and 28 Feb., but not against the seditious meetings bill, 24 Feb. and 14 Mar. He subscribed £500 to Brougham’s ill-fated scheme for the establishment of an opposition evening newspaper.11

Lambton voted for Tierney’s motion on the third secretaryship of state, 29 Apr. 1817, and on 6 May moved resolutions condemning the expense of Canning’s embassy to Lisbon as a ‘criminal misapplication of the public money for the most corrupt private purposes’. It is not clear whether, as one account had it, he was put up to it by Brougham, or, as in another version, he took the initiative himself and ignored a remonstrance from Brougham, who saw the advantage of continued ‘guerilla warfare’ as against an outright attack on the subject; he was generally reckoned to have spoken extremely well, though it was admitted that Canning seized the chance to vindicate himself completely.12 Lambton voted against Herries’s appointment, 8 May, for Catholic relief, 9 May, against the lottery bill, 19 May, and for Burdett’s parliamentary reform motion, 20 May, but cast a malevolent vote for the election of Manners Sutton as Speaker, rather than support the Grenvillite Williams Wynn, 2 June.13 He called for a reduction in the grant to the retiring Speaker, 9 June, and was in the minority on the adjournment, 16 June, but left London before the debates on the renewed suspension of habeas corpus, which he thought ‘very tiresome and commonplace, about all the old hackneyed topics’, though he paired against the measure.14

Lambton stayed away from Parliament for the first four weeks of the 1818 session. Encouraged by Wilson, who told him that Grey was ‘very anxious you should be diligent as well as brilliant’ and added that ‘if your volition is equal to your power you will soon be recognized as commander in chief’ in the Commons, and by Brougham, who said he could do more ‘than any one man I know in restoring spirit among us’, he went up.15 He supported Brougham’s demands for inquiry into the truth about the destruction of old tax returns, 4 Mar., and voted against government on the employment of domestic spies, 5 Mar., and the army estimates, 6 Mar. 1818. He announced his intention of opposing the first reading of the indemnity bill, stuck to it despite Tierney’s remonstrance and attacked the bill on 9 Mar. when, in addition to delivering a general condemnation of the past year’s ‘acts of tyranny and oppression’, he raised the question of ‘Oliver the Spy’ and his relations with government and, on the basis of information passed to him shortly before the debate, alleged that Oliver had been seen inciting riot on the day the Regent had been attacked when going to open Parliament in 1817. His speech was loudly cheered, but his killing amendment to the bill was beaten by 190 to 64. He voted against the second reading, 10 Mar., and the following day clashed with Canning, who had poured scorn on the story about Oliver and said that only a ‘dolt and idiot’ would believe it. He was satisfied that he had ‘stood up to’ Canning and did not mean to let the business drop, as it had ‘made a great impression in private society as well as in public’. He collected information about Oliver and took legal advice during the Easter recess, considered raising the question in the House if it could not be brought before the courts, but eventually gave it up.16

A ‘long conversation with Tierney respecting the state of our party’, 25 Mar. 1818, prompted Lambton to write to Grey decrying Tierney’s proposal to appoint ‘an "Eating" leader', which he suspected as a scheme to advance Tierney's own ambitions. Although he admitted the necessity of finding a new Commons leader to hold the party together, he saw no point in doing so with a dissolution pending and beseeched Grey, whatever happened, not to surrender his overall leadership of the party:

There are many who only co-operate because they have confidence in you personally, and there is a very strong party who have serious objections to Tierney's wavering and indecisive system, in whose hands, were you to withdraw, the whole thing would be placed ... if you were to announce your entire withdrawing ... we should be split into five or six parties ... even I received an offer the other day to form a party, from persons of rank and consequences who declared they had perfect confidence in me and that they had not in Tierney.

Grey evidently encouraged Lambton to seek the leadership himself, but he disclaimed any such ambition:

I am sure I have not industry or application sufficient and I know I do not possess a quarter of the talents which ... are absolutely necessary ... All my object is to see a fit person in the office and not an incapable puppet who would throw ridicule as you well say on all our proceedings.17

When Parliament reconvened Lambton spoke in support of a reform petition, 8 Apr., went to Newmarket and returned in response to Brougham's urgent summons for the debate on the Duke of Clarence's allowance, 14 Apr., only to find the House up. When the business came on the following day he declared his opposition to the grant in toto and moved a killing amendment, but he did not press it and voted for Sumner's successful amendment to reduce the grant.18 He presented a booksellers' petition complaining of the Copyright Act, 17 Apr., paired for the repeal of the Irish window tax, 21 Apr., was in the minorities on the purchase of the Burney library, 24 Apr., and the resumption of cash payments, 1 May, and supported Peel's cotton factories bill, 27 Apr. 1818. He denounced the aliens bill, 5 May, moved unsuccessfully for papers concerning it, 7 May, and led the opposition to its second reading, 15 May, when he attacked it as part of a general European conspiracy against liberalism. He voted against the Duke of Kent's marriage grant, 15 May, and for Brougham's motion on education, 3 June, but not for Heron's motion for the repeal of the Septennial Act, 19 May.

At the general election of 1818 Lambton was returned unopposed for the county, successfully exerted the family interest in the city for a Whig and went to assist Brougham in his fight against the Lowthers in Westmorland. He initially refused to sign the requisition calling on Tierney to take the Whig leadership in the Commons, claiming to object to the 'cavalier mode of dictation assumed by the meeting with whom it orginiated', and, as he told Grey, strongly disapproving of the choice of Tierney 'for reasons which I have stated to you over and over again':

As I understand the matter they want to appoint a manager or head in the House of Commons, you being the leader of the Whigs of England. For if I thought you had abdicated that supremacy ... which nominally alone keeps us together, I should make a point, the first day of Parliament, of declaring my entire disconnexion with the party of which Tierney is to be the manager ... I consider Tierney to be unfit even for the secondary duties of that office. He is most timid and vacillating and ever abandoning the great prinicples of our policy or at least softening  them down so as to be imperceptible in order to gain the support of such wretches as the Grenvilles ... He is besides too much of a placehunter for me. I know well that from the moment of his appointment all activity and energy will cease.

Under pressure from Grey and in particular from Brougham, who argued that no dictation had been intended, that the experiment, for all Tierney's shortcomings, deserved a fair trial and that they and the other advanced Whigs would be able 'to keep him straight', Lambton gave in with a bad grace and signed the requisition which was apparently kept back for his adhesion.19

His health gave cause for alarm later in the year, with an intensification of the agonizing neuralgic headaches to which he was always prey after exertion or agitation. When he went to London in January 1819, with typical frankness he told Tierney, whom he had wrongly suspected earlier of intriguing against Grey's leadership, of his reservations about his appointment as leader, but promised him every assistance. He tried to organize a party committee to superintend the press and to set up weekly meetings to keep the new Members together and helped Tierney to arrange 'a great opposition dinner'.20 He gave a silent vote for Tierney's motion on Bank restriction, 2 Feb., and was present in the opposition lobby for most of the divisions from then until Easter, including that on Scottish burgh reform, 1 Apr., but spoke infrequently and briefly. He was named as one of the Members to examine the lists of nominees for the committee of inquiry into the Bank question, 3 Feb., but refused to do so because he argued, its compositon had already been settled by ministers. He favoured investigation of the coal duties by a committee, 4 Mar., called for their equalization the following day for the benefit of consumers, presented a petition from London booksellers for repeal of the Copyright Act, 22 Mar., unsuccessfully tried to have Thomas Goold, a witness in the Wyndham Quin* affair, taken into custody for prevarication, 30 Mar., and on 2 Apr. raised the case of General Gourgaud, a victim of arrest under the Alien Act.

On the death of Romilly in November 1818 Lambton had initially favoured putting up a Whig candidate for Westminster in his place, but he eventually promised his vote to the radical candidate for Westminster in his place, but he eventually promised his vote to the radical candidate John Cam Hobhouse, though he warned him that he could not actively support him if he espoused the 'foolish' and 'dangerous' principles of annual parliaments and universal suffrage, or condoned the radicals' abuse of Grey, and the Whigs at the last Westminster election. At a Fox dinner in January 1819 he, with Grey, attacked the radicals and when they provoked the Whigs into starting George Lamb as their candidate on the eve of the election in February, he became one of his most active campaigners, having remonstrated personally with Hobhouse and withdrawn his support. He rejoiced in Lamb's success as 'a death blow' to the Westminster radical 'rump'.21 Lord Holland later wrote that Lambton annoyed Tierney during the 1819 session by boycotting party meetings at Burlington House because of 'some private quarrel with Lord G. Cavendish', but no supporting evidence has been found.22 His only known speech after the recess was for the repeal of the coal duties, 20 May, and his voting record suggests a somewhat spasmodic attendance. He did not vote for Burdett's parliamentary reform motion, 1 July 1819.

Lambton, convinced that ministers had connived at, if not instigated the Peterloo massacre, helped to promote the Yorkshire requisition and was the prime mover behind the Durham county protest meeting. He had to discipline himself to confine its scope to the subject in hand, avoiding the introduction of economic distress, reform and allied subjects which would play into the hands of extremists. He refused to sign a Gateshead declaration of loyalty, on the grounds that it had not been publicly broached and that the tranquility of the area made it unnecessary, and on 16 Oct. 1819 enjoyed a signal triumph in Sunderland by taking over a secretively convened meeting to vote a loyal address and securing adjournment. At the renewed meeting, 19 Oct., he moved and carried resolutions condemning Peterloo and upholding the people's right to meet, but at the same time he cold-shouldered the local radicals. At the county meeting, 21 Oct., he spoke in similar terms, denouncing the massacre but criticizing the violent language of speakers at an earlier Newcastle radical reform meeting. Reporting to Wilson, whom he had earlier cautioned to 'keep clear' of Henry Hunt and his cronies 'as you would of infection', he wrote:

I suppose I shall see you at the meeting of Parliament. For God's sake, keep a moderate tone. You ruin all if you are violent, for be assured there are equally individuals, not large bodies, harbouring revolutionary designs, as there are those who are pursuing despotic ones.

These activities earned him public attacks from Richard Wharton, ministerialist Member for the city, and from the Rev. Henry Phillpotts, a prebendary of Durham, who accused him of 'playing with the torch of sedition, and wantonly tossing it about, amidst the combustible matter which surrounds him'. Grey approved of his conduct, though he 'could have wished', he told Wilson, 'that he had been a little less warm in some parts of his language'.23

Lambton went to London for the emergency session of Parliament, voted for the amendment to the address, 24 Nov., and for inquiry into the state of the nation, 30 Nov. 1819, and steadily against the ensuing repressive measures. The burden of his speeches of 3, 9 and 10 Dec. was that allegations of widespread unrest and preparations for armed rebellion in the north east were completely unfounded. His motion of 14 Dec. to exclude Durham from the provisions of the seizure of arms bill was negatived, and his attempt to kill the measure at the report stage, 15 Dec., defeated by 94 votes to 38. He angrily refused to allow Castlereagh to class him with the radical reformers, 10 Dec., but on 16 Dec., presenting a petition for reparation from a victim of Peterloo, also gave the lie to allegations that he had dismissed employees in his colleries because of their radical sympathies.

On 6 Dec. 1819 Lambton, on his own initiative, gave notice that after the recess he would bring on a motion for parliamentary reform. His programme embraced shorter Parliaments, the eradication of rotten boroughs and extension of the franchaise to copyholders and householders paying direct taxes. The early dissolution in 1820 prevented him from bringing the issue before the House, but his notice caused trouble within the Whig party and Lord Holland roundly condemned him for it in public. Grey, anxious to avert a major split on the issue, wrote him a patient but firm letter deprecating 'the certain evil' of the destruction of the party by trying to commit it to the 'speculative or doubtful good' of reform, 'more especially when the attainment of that good is itself so problematical'. Lambton, who was ill and in pain, replied that as there was no point in holding the traditional Fox dinner without making reform 'a principal and leading topic', he was trying to organize 'a dinner of the Friends of Parliamentary Reform' at Newcastle. He appreciated Grey's anxiety to keep the party together, but reminded him that Lord Fitzwilliam had deserted the party in the 1790s, and deplored the fact that Grey was prepared to defer to him and Holland 'to the bane of the most important question that ever existed':

As for myself, ... [Holland's] language respecting my motion ... was such that I never will forgive it. Doubtless all this will end in my complete separation from the party. I should not care for that, were you not at the head of it. From any of the others I never received a particle of attention or consideration.

When Grey reproved him for taking the matter personally, Lambton stood his ground:

If my own consequence and interests are to be advanced only by the hypocrisy of smiling on those whom I inwardly despite or detest, then I would infinitely rather remain as insignificant as I am at present. I am greatly obliged to those to whom you allude as anxious for my welfare, but I never can repay their good wishes by a compliance so foreign to my feelings and conscience.24

Lambton and Lord John Russell stood almost alone among the parliamentary Whig in confident advocacy of parliamentary reform in the immediate post-war period. As a peer, he was one of the architects of the 1832 Reform Act, but was one of thr architects of the 1832 Reform Act, but his subsequent career was a disaster. A curious mixture of courage, idealism and honesty, with arrogance, ruthlessness and pettiness, dogged by bad health and often in intense pain which exacerbated his foul temper, he proved an impossible political colleague in office and alienated most of his former associates. Losh wrote in 1817 that he was 'a spirited young man with a good understanding and honourable sentiments, evidently, however, spoiled by prosperity and not without a considerable share of obstinacy and pride'. Creevey, who called him 'King Jog', had little time for him:

He has not much merit but his looks, his property and his voice and power of public speaking. He has not the slightest power or turn for conversation, and would like to live exculsively on the flattery of toadies.

Grey, over whom his influence was considerable, lamented his lack of 'industry and ambition':

the last does not excite him beyond the effort of a speech. When he has obtained the applause of having done well, he is satisfied, and relaxes into those habits of self-indulgence which by the faults of his education, and being too early his own master, he has unfortunately contracted.25

He died 28 July 1840.

Ref Volumes: 1790-1820

Author: David R. Fisher

Notes

See S. J. Reid, Life and Letters of Lord Durham, 2 vols. (1906); C. W. New, Lord Durham (1929); and L. Cooper, Radical Jack (1959).

  • 1. Reid, i. 38-65; New, 1-9; NLW mss 2791.
  • 2. Grey mss; Blair Adam mss, Russell to Adam, 2 Dec. [1812].
  • 3. See D. Spring, ‘Earls of Durham and Great Northern Coalfield’, Canadian Hist. Rev. xxxiii (1952), 237-53.
  • 4. Reid, i. 67-69; Losh Diaries (Surtees Soc. clxxi), i. 27.
  • 5. CJ, lxx. 253, 308; Reid, i. 80-85, 111-12; Grey mss, Holland to Grey [15 Aug.], Grey to Holland, 6 Oct. 1815; Add. 30108, f. 108; New, 11-12.
  • 6. Grey mss, Monck to Grey, 19 Feb. 1816.
  • 7. Ibid. Tierney to Grey, 10 Feb. 1816.
  • 8. Romilly, Mems. iii. 260; CJ, lxxi. 451, 520; Reid, i. 86-89; New, 13-14.
  • 9. Reid, i. 93-94; Cooper, 56; Sydney Smith Letters ed. N. C. Smith, i. 267.
  • 10. Lambton mss, Wilson to Lambton, 23 Oct. 1816; Grey mss, Lambton to Grey, 17 Dec. 1816, 15, 18 Jan. 1817.
  • 11. HMC Fortescue, x. 427; Brougham mss, Brougham to Grey [19 Mar. 1817].
  • 12. Carlisle mss, Abercromby to Morpeth [May 1817]; Heron, Notes (1851), 84; Canning and his Friends, ii. 53-54.
  • 13. Bagot mss, Lyttelton to Bagot, 4 June 1817.
  • 14. Grey mss, Lambton to Grey, 30 June 1817.
  • 15. Grey mss, Grey to Lady Holland, 20 Feb.; Lambton mss, Wilson to Lambton, 23, 27 Feb., Brougham to Lambton, [Feb.] 1818.
  • 16. Grey mss, Lambton to Grey, 6, 10, [12], 22 Mar. 1818.
  • 17. Ibid. Lambton to Grey, 26 Mar., 6 Apr. 1818; Reid, i. 105-6.
  • 18. Grey mss, Lambton to Grey, 17 Apr. [1818].
  • 19. New, 21-22; Reid, i. 106-7; Add. 30108, ff. 17, 19; Grey mss, Duncannon to Grey, 13 July, Lambton to Grey, [19], 21 July; Brougham mss, Brougham to Lambton, [30 July]; Add. 51565, Brougham to Lady Holland, [28 July], [10 Aug.] 1818.
  • 20. Gery mss, Lambton to Grey, 11 Nov. 1818, 14, [15], 21, 29, 30 Jan., 3 Feb. 1819.
  • 21. New, 44-45; Grey mss, Lambton to Grey, 11, 21 Nov. 1818, 12, 13 Feb., 2, 3 Mar. 1819, to Hobhouse, 9 Dec. 1818; Add. 56540, Hobhouse diary, 12, 17 Dec. 1818, 12 Feb. 1819.
  • 22. Further Mems. Whig Party, 267.
  • 23. Grey mss, Lambton to Grey, 23 Aug., 4, [9], [15], 16, 22 Oct., to Milburne, 27 Sept.; Newcastle Chron. 16, 23 Oct. 1819; Reid, i. 125-6; New, 52-53; Phillpotts, Letter to Freeholders, 31; Add. 30108, f. 34; 30109, ff. 58, 78.
  • 24. Add. 51549, Grey to Lady Holland, [Dec. 1819]; Grey mss, Lambton to Grey, [7], 10 Jan. 1820; Reid, i. 129-31; New, 57-58.
  • 25. Losh Diaries, i. 72; Creevey Pprs. ed. Maxwell, ii. 49-50; Grey mss, Grey to his wife, 10 Feb. 1821.