Politician - Abingdon on Thames Town Council

Edward Loveden Loveden

Edward Loveden Loveden was a regional magnate, economically powerful and politically influential throughout north Berkshire and especially in Abingdon.

He was born as Edward Loveden Townsend into a wealthy family in Cirencester and educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford. Loveden was his mother’s family name. His father died while he was still a minor, and in 1772 he inherited the Buscot Park estate from his maternal relatives. The terms of the will obliged him to adopt Loveden as a surname.

He was now a very wealthy young man, and In 1773 he married Margaret Pryse, heiress to a 30,000 acre estate near Aberystwith and became even richer. He built the present Buscot Park mansion on its hilltop site overlooking the Thames. Completed in 1782, it was said to be one of the finest houses in Berkshire.

Loveden became prominent in a number of fields. Maintaining his intellectual interests, he gained a Doctor of Laws degree, and had a fine library at Buscot Park; he was a member of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries. As a patron of charity, he was a governor of the Bethlem hospital for lunatics in London. As a businessman, he was deeply engaged in the development of the local canal network. In the 1780s he was one of the proprietors of the Thames and Severn Canal which linked Bristol with Lechlade, and he tried to promote a further stretch from Lechlade to Abingdon as a shorter route to London. When this failed, he built a lock and wharves at Buscot which would later provide a good proportion of his income. In local affairs, he was High Sheriff of the county in 1780 and 1781 and a lieutenant-colonel in the Berkshire militia – a sort of Home Guard to counter the danger of a French invasion – in the 1790s. It went with his status that when in 1795 a regiment stationed in the county behaved badly, it was he who protested to the Duke of Cumberland, head of the army, on behalf of the north of Berkshire. His opposite number and rival, Charles Dundas of Kintbury, did the same for the south.

He became MP for Abingdon in 1783, claiming to be of no party but generally supporting the younger Pitt. Surviving letters show him to have been on friendly terms with many leading Abingdon townsmen, including the influential Baptists of the Tomkins family. His agent and friend was the town clerk, Samuel Sellwood. He gave up the Abingdon seat in 1796, preferring to stand for one of the two county seats. But in this he failed because of the hostility of Charles Dundas who held the other. He re-entered Parliament in 1802 sitting for Shaftesbury, but continued to be actively engaged, largely through Sellwood, with politics in Abingdon. He supported George Knapp through his several attempts to win the Abingdon seat, which he finally did in 1807.

But sadly for Loveden’s reputation, what fame he achieved in his lifetime was through a well-publicised scandal. His first wife, Margaret Pryse, died in 1784. The second was a wealthy widow, Elizabeth Nash, who died in 1788. In 1794 he foolishly married Anne Lintall who was less than half his age. Ten years later, childless and bored, she began a passionate relationship with a young academic friend of her husband, Tom Barker. The lovers were indiscreet, the domestic staff at Buscot scandalised, and Loveden initiated proceedings for divorce.

At this time, divorce could only be granted by Parliament after a sequence of findings in the civil and ecclesiastical courts. It was a complex and expensive process. Eventually, the House of Lords did grant the divorce, but it was then the Commons who had to decide the financial settlement. Loveden was to pay his ex-wife £400 per year. He refused, and persuaded the Lords to rescind their verdict. The affair raised considerable interest, not exclusively for its legal complications, and the intimate evidence given to the courts was widely published.

Loveden and his first wife had two surviving daughters and one son. The daughters were both sickly. Margaret married Samuel Wilson Warneford much against her father’s wishes. She died insane just three years later, and the money she had brought her husband went towards building the Warneford Hospital in Oxford. Jane Elizabeth was a cripple who remained at Buscot Park. The son, Pryse, took his mother’s surname and inherited her estate in Wales; as Pryse Loveden Pryse, he had a long career as MP for Cardigan Boroughs.

© AAAHS and contributors 2020

Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College

Archie Kirkman Loyd

Archie Kirkman Loyd was twice MP for the Abingdon Division of Berkshire, from 1895 to 1905 and from 1916 to 1918. Born in India and trained in England for a career in the Indian Civil Service, he opted instead for the law. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1868 and became a Queen’s Counsel in 1892. In 1885 he married Henrietta Louisa Clutterbuck, of a wealthy landed family in Chippenham. They resided first at West Ilsley and later at Downs House, East Hendred. There were four sons, one of whom was killed in the early months of the First World War.

Loyd was a second cousin of Harriet Sarah Loyd, daughter and heiress of the very rich banker Samuel Jones Loyd, Lord Overstone. She married Robert Lindsay – who changed his name to Loyd-Lindsay – in 1858 and settled at Lockinge, near Wantage. Loyd-Lindsay was a figure of great influence in North Berkshire. He was one of the MPs for the county of Berkshire from 1865 to 1885 when he became Lord Wantage, and his cousin Charles Lindsay sat for Abingdon from 1865 to 1874.

Archie Loyd was very close to Harriet and her husband. Loyd-Lindsey was one of the founders of what later became the British Red Cross. That organisation met its first great challenge in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and Loyd became Loyd-Lindsay’s private secretary in a period of hectic activity. They went together to organise humanitarian relief in the Serbo-Turkish war in 1876, narrowly escaping being caught up in the extremely bloody battle of Alexinatz, and Loyd personally headed the mission to the Russo-Turkish war a year later. He received the thanks of the Tsar at an audience at Plevna in present-day Bulgaria. When in 1883 Loyd-Lindsay, convalescent after an illness, took a long trip to South Africa, Loyd accompanied him. In 1887 Loyd’s wife gave birth at Lockinge; the boy was named Robert Lindsay Loyd and no doubt had Lord Wantage as godfather.

It was Lord Wantage, as head of the constituency Conservative Association, who nominated Loyd as parliamentary candidate in 1895. The Abingdon division extended as far as Faringdon, Wantage and Wallingford; it was a safe Conservative seat, and Loyd took it with a much increased majority.

Loyd was unopposed in 1900, but did not stand in the election of 1906 because of ill health. In 1916, the then MP, Harold Henderson, resigned, and Loyd came out of retirement to replace him. He was unopposed at the by-election, and held the seat until 1918. His nephew, Arthur Thomas Loyd, would be MP for the Abingdon division from 1921 to 1923.

Archie Loyd was assiduous if unspectacular as an MP. One of his earliest preoccupations was with the level of death duties to be paid on an estate that went to a widow when there were no children – a matter of obvious concern at Lockinge House. Following his patron’s example, he was always ready to take up the cause of ex-servicemen in difficulty with civilian bureaucracy. As a former assize barrister, he was active in reforms of the criminal law, and as MP for a largely agricultural constituency, supported the interests of tenant farmers and worked to get better housing and old age pensions for their labourers.

Loyd was a Berkshire JP and deputy-lieutenant, and a member of the Berkshire County Council. He was a governor of Abingdon School from 1901 till his death. But his abiding interest was the British Red Cross, of which he was vice-chairman, remaining active until late in his life. He published a book on the organisation of the Red Cross during the First World War, as well as several treatises on the law relating to cheques and promissory notes.

Loyd’s career is defined by his relationship with both the Loyd-Lindsays. Harriet refers in her memoir to his ‘life-long affection and devotion’, and made him significant gifts of property after her husband’s death. It was his nephew, Arthur Thomas Loyd, who inherited the major portion of the Lockinge estate.

© AAAHS and contributors 2021

John Maberly

John Maberly, Abingdon’s MP from 1818 to 1832, was an entrepreneur and a businessman before he became a politician. Born in London in 1770, he started working with his father as a currier (a tradesman who finishes and dyes leather), invested in steam engines, and, with the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars, became a supplier of uniforms and clothing to the army. This made him a very rich man, but it was his dissatisfaction with the inefficiency and corruption of the military supply chain that brought him into contact with government figures and tempted him in 1816 to enter Parliament.

This was before the reforms of the 1830s; his first seat was in Rye, a pocket borough where he was obliged, against his principles, to support the government. He began nursing the Abingdon constituency. In 1817 he gave ‘a splendid dinner’ to Abingdon voters at the County Hall and made generous donations to local charities. In the next year, he was elected without a contest.

Maberly was the sort of active independent back-bencher that ministers hate. He believed that all that was wrong with the British economy was that the government was spending and taxing too much, and was a fanatical opponent of almost all government spending. He was passionate, well informed and highly numerate. He spoke frequently and at length in debates, and was assiduous in committees.

On non-financial matters, he generally followed the moderately reforming agenda of the Whigs. He favoured the abolition of rotten boroughs and redistribution of their seats to the newly expanding industrial towns, but not extension of the franchise. The Corn Laws, protecting agriculture at the expense of townspeople, should be loosened but not abolished. This was broadly acceptable to Abingdon voters, and his local support was much increased when he voted for the repeal of the Test Acts which had kept religious Dissenters, who in Abingdon were numerous and generally prosperous, out of public affairs. There was anger at his support for Catholic emancipation which was popular neither with Anglicans nor with Dissenters. The Abingdon corporation, mostly Tory, produced a petition opposing the measure; he took it into the House of Commons as he had to, but made clear his dissent. There were limits on how far he was willing to compromise his principles to please his electors; when they complained to him of the decline of their hemp industry, he told them frankly that the fault was in their lack of skill and energy, and offered to send some of them to his factory in Aberdeen for training. Nonetheless, it is plain that he kept the confidence of the Abingdon voters; on the one occasion when there was a contest for his seat, in 1830, he easily saw off an outsider by 159 votes to 94.

In spite of his intense parliamentary activity, Maberly continued as an entrepreneur. This would be his undoing. His factory in Aberdeen, weaving jute and linen, was suffering from the excessive charges levied by the Scottish banks. In 1818 he opened a bank of his own, halving and then quartering the cost of transferring money between London and Scotland. The Scottish banks were furious, and determined to bring him down. They succeeded, and in 1832 he was made bankrupt and moved abroad to avoid the risk of imprisonment for his debts.

It was the end of Maberly’s parliamentary career, but what was possibly his greatest business achievement was still to come. Until 1834 he is heard of occasionally in Brussels or Madrid acting as foreign correspondent for the Morning Chronicle. But at some later time he settled in Amiens, a French industrial centre striving to catch up with the British lead in the production of specialty textiles. With local entrepreneurs, he set up a joint stock company, then still a rarity both in France and England, with himself as managing director. He introduced linen spinning to the region, building a large factory equipped with the latest English machinery that had to be assembled locally with expatriate labour to avoid British export restrictions. The business was in rapid expansion when he died in 1839. His memorials are a Maberly Street in Aberdeen and a Rue Maberly in Amiens.

Maberly married in 1796 Mary Rose Leader with whom he had eight children. She died in 1812, and in 1813 he married Anne Baillie, who would give him a further five. Maberly and his second wife are buried in Amiens.

In his public activities, Maberly was a conviction politician, who wined and dined his voters but followed his own principles. Yet he seems to have been well accepted by his electorate, and even after his disgrace there were some who wanted to retain his services. He was long remembered as an outstanding figure among Abingdon MPs.

© AAAHS and contributors 2016

Thomas Medlycott

Thomas Medlycott was recorder of Abingdon, 1675-86 and 1687-9. He had been born in London in 1628, son of James Medlicott or Medlicote who was described as a dyer. His mother, born Elizabeth Joyner, was from Newbury. He was educated at Merchant Taylors School, Christ’s College Cambridge, and the Middle Temple, and was called to the bar in 1653. Little is known of his career before 1675, when he was made a JP for Middlesex.

He came to Abingdon in 1676, having been selected by the corporation to replace Thomas Holt as recorder. The official reason for Holt’s dismissal was that he was also recorder for Reading and spent much of his time there. But it was probably also relevant that Holt supported the Court party, soon to be known as the Tories, and Medlycott the proto-Whigs. Holt sued, and the Corporation paid £29 19s 4d in legal expenses. Medlycott later moved into a house that Holt had previously occupied, the present 28 East St Helen Street.

His appointment was at first welcomed by his future political opponent John Stonhouse, and he and Stonhouse worked together in 1678 on the prosecution of the MP for Milborne Port (Somerset), Michael Malet, for alleged lèse-majesty during the Berkshire county by-election of that year. Malet had commented in public that the Earl of Stirling, the court candidate, was as great a rogue as the king. He spent some months in the Tower, but, having a long history of outrageous utterances, he was considered half-mad and finally released without being brought to trial.

Medlycott was made a Berkshire JP in 1678 as was usual for a recorder, but dismissed in the purge of 1680 as politically unreliable. He was reinstated a year later.

In 1683, an Abingdon Corporation member, George Winchurst, supported by Lord Norreys, the future Earl of Abingdon, wished to be elected mayor. As a Tory, he stood little chance, and wanted to restrict the polling to men who had taken oaths of allegiance to the regime. Medlycott advised that this would be illegal, thus making himself, and Abingdon, unpopular with the central government of the time. The result was that a new revised charter was forced on Abingdon in 1686. Among many other changes, Medlycott was replaced as recorder by the Tory William Finmore.

But soon after, James II changed his religious policies, hoping to be able to give Catholics the civil rights they lacked under cover of giving them also to Protestant Dissenters. To general consternation, he began to claim a royal dispensing power to allow evasion of the existing restrictive laws. His judges held their office ‘during (the king’s) good pleasure’ and would be sacked if they did not comply. In July 1686, Medlycott was defending a large group of Abingdon and Berkshire Dissenters being prosecuted by Finmore for attending their own services rather than those of the Church of England. One of the judges was Richard Holloway, an extreme Tory. Medlycott taunted him: “your lordship has served the defendants more effectually than I, and they owe you greater thanks – you and the judges have declared your opinion that His Majesty is a sovereign prince, the laws are his laws and he can dispense with them when necessary, and he is judge of that necessity, and has so judged and has provided a patent under the broad seal”. He then produced the dispensatory document that he had obtained from the king’s minister the Earl of Sunderland, and the case collapsed.

When William of Orange invaded in 1688, Medlycott came out in his support. James’s changes to town corporations had by then been rescinded, and he was once more recorder. William stayed briefly at his house in East St Helen Street on his erratic route from Exeter to London. Medlycott was elected to represent Abingdon in the convention called after James’s flight into exile. The electoral campaign against Stonhouse was violent and chaotic.

Medlycott was already entering his sixties, and had left his parliamentary debut rather late. Also, Stonhouse had appealed and his tenure might be brief. So he lost no time in making his mark. On 28 January 1689, he called for an immediate vote on the knotty problem of the vacancy of the throne. On 19 February, after the first speech from the throne by the new-made William III, he proposed that the convention declare itself a parliament, which after further discussion it did. But in May the House of Commons, considering the violence at his election, ruled that it had been invalid. He chose not to stand again.

Abingdon now turned against him. The Holt family was still influential and it seems that it was by their machinations that he was finally dismissed as recorder in October 1689 in favour of the future Lord Harcourt. At this point he seems to have retired both from legal and political activity.

Medlycott and his wife had six sons and a daughter. Two of his sons would become lawyers and MPs in their turn. One of them, Thomas jnr, had bought an estate at Malet’s old constituency of Milborne Port, and it was there that his father died in 1716.

© AAAHS and contributors 2016

Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe

Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, Abingdon’s MP from 1796 to 1807, was an excellent example of what at the time were called nabobs. Nabobs were young men who went out to India with little or nothing and returned in middle age rich beyond the dreams of any stay-at-home save the greatest of merchants or of the landed aristocracy. Long-established social hierarchies were dislocated as these men sought to take the places their wealth entitled them to. Their first thought on disembarking was always to buy a landed property not too far from London – Berkshire was particularly favoured – and the second, very often, was a seat in Parliament. Parliamentary elections in the late eighteenth century were very expensive indeed, and a candidate who could pay for his own was sure of a welcome from any party or faction.

Metcalfe was born in 1745 into a family that claimed a Yorkshire origin but actually came from Ireland. His father was an army chaplain and his mother a clergyman’s daughter. He went to India in 1767, entering the army of the East India Company where he reached the rank of major. In 1782 he married Susannah Sophia Smith, widow of a fellow-officer. In the same year he became keeper and purchasing agent for military stores in Calcutta, which made his fortune in ways that are best not enquired into. In 1786 he returned to England. He bought a house in Portland Place in London, and, perhaps somewhat later, the 200-acre Fernhill estate at Winkfield in Berkshire with an originally Elizabethan, but modernised, manor house.

It was a time of difficulty for the East India Company, an object of contention among political groupings for the enormous patronage it controlled. The government exerted control through the secretary of state Henry Dundas, and in 1789 with Dundas’s backing Metcalfe became a director of the company. There were twenty-four directors; they were not supposed to serve more than four years, but he remained one for the rest of his life. He may have been one of the three members of the ‘secret committee’ which cooperated with the government but could not tell the others what was discussed. In 1792 he applied to become civil governor of Bombay but was not successful. In 1796 his name appeared on a list of men whom the government wanted to get into Parliament.

At the elections of that year, there was a vacancy in Abingdon. Edward Loveden Loveden, its member, had decided to seek a more prestigious seat as a knight of the shire. His nominee for the succession, Charles Abbott, after a detailed consideration which included the bribes he would have to pay, declined to stand. Metcalfe and another nabob, John Prinsep, disputed the succession. Metcalfe was said to be the Treasury candidate and spent money freely; he got the support of the brewer Edward Child, leader of a local faction, and, it seems, of Loveden’s agent Samuel Sellwood, the town clerk. Prinsep withdrew before the election.

Metcalfe retained the seat at several subsequent elections against powerful local opposition, but it is not clear that he ever did much for the constituency beyond providing a stand of colours for the militia force that Sellwood formed in 1798, a sort of home guard that would act seriously only in case of a French invasion. His parliamentary activity was concerned solely with the interests of the East India Company. He became a baronet in 1802.

In later years, Metcalfe found himself in a minority, often a minority of one, in the Court of Directors of the company. This is because of his consistent support of the governor-general, Lord Wellesley, whose objectives tended to be military and political rather than mercantile. One possible reason was that Wellesley had established a sort of staff college at Fort William in Calcutta where Metcalfe’s son Charles was a promising student.

Metcalfe’s principal opponent in Abingdon was George Knapp, who campaigned on his credentials as a local man and who was supported by the local Dissenters. Knapp won the election of 1807 by seven votes, but only after the mayor had disqualified nine voters. Metcalfe was expected to petition the House in protest but decided not to. Wellesley had been recalled in 1806 and this probably reduced his incentives for remaining in parliament. When Knapp died unexpectedly in 1809, Metcalfe was invited to stand again, but it happened that he was High Sheriff of Berkshire that year and therefore could not.

Metcalfe had four sons and two daughters. Three of the sons made their careers in India; the second, Charles, became a major figure in the administration, went on to be governor-general of Jamaica and of Canada, and finished as a baron. Charles had three sons but as his wife was Indian they could not be formally acknowledged or succeed to the barony. Nonetheless, his son James was educated in England and made a successful military career in India as his grandfather had done.

Metcalfe died in 1813 and is buried at Winkfield where there are memorial tablets to him and his son Charles.

© AAAHS and contributors 2019

John Morton

John Morton was Abingdon’s MP from 1747 until 1770 and its recorder from 1753 until his death in 1780. Like several of his predecessors and successors, he found it profitable to combine the careers of politician and lawyer.

He came from a wealthy family long established in Tackley, some five miles north-east of Woodstock. Born in or about 1715 and educated at Abingdon School, he went on to Trinity College, Oxford, and then to the Inner Temple, being called to the bar in 1740. His early career is obscure, but in 1747 he became MP for Abingdon, replacing John Wright who did not contest the seat. Wright had been recorder as well as MP, but in 1753 that position also was given to Morton. Wright’s political opinions were not those of Abingdon’s corporation at that time, and his dismissal was brusque.

Morton progressed faster in his legal than in his political career. He was a bencher – a senior member – of the Inner Temple in 1758, and became a King’s Counsel in 1760. In 1761 he was considered as a candidate for Speaker of the House of Commons, but was turned down because of his political views and at least in part as being considered of too low a social origin. Perhaps in consolation, he was made Chief Justice of the county palatine of Chester, a function which seems to have been lucrative without requiring too much personal attendance. According to some newspaper reports, he also became a judge in the court of exchequer which carried the courtesy title, but not the other prerogatives, of a baron, but this is probably incorrect.

In his politics, Morton was a Tory, even though under the first two Hanoverian monarchs this meant exclusion from government office. He was close to the Leicester House court of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and married the sister of one of its high officials, the solicitor-general Paul Jodrell. But when the prince died in 1751, he made no move towards any of the Whig factions. Only when George III succeeded his grandfather in 1760 and suspicion of Tories as actual or potential Jacobites began to be relaxed, did he move into the ambit of the new minister, Lord Bute.

He remained a back-bencher, though increasingly influential especially where his legal knowledge was of use. He generally supported the government, notably in its American policies and in its response to the challenges set by the populist agitator John Wilkes. But he retained his old allegiance to the Leicester House interest; when the government wanted to exclude the king’s mother, the dowager Princess of Wales, from a regency council, it was he who ensured that her name would be on the list.

But although Morton would remain a member of Parliament until his death, he would not represent Abingdon after 1770. The election of 1768 was a disaster for him. His position in Abingdon had always depended on the active support of the Corporation which was solidly Tory while the population in general, and especially the large Dissenting minority, was overwhelmingly Whig. To ensure his re-election against Nathaniel Bayly the Corporation took measures that went well beyond the degree of corruption that was acceptable at the time. In the run-up to the poll, two new poor rates were levied. The lists of people to be charged – who would also have the right to vote – were augmented by a total of 55 names, almost all of whom would vote for Morton. The final result was a win for Morton by just two votes in 250. The Whigs published the poll book with annotations, and on their calculation voters from the pre-1768 list had rejected Morton by 117 to 79.

Bayly petitioned, and the matter hung fire for a couple of years while negotiations took place behind the scenes. Somehow, Bayly was able to dredge up three separate matters on which Morton might credibly be accused of accepting bribes, which would put an end to his legal career. He gave in, and the government found him an alternative seat at New Romney and later another at Wigan. He was made solicitor-general to Queen Charlotte. Towards the end of his life, Morton began to take a radical view on the misuse of public money.

Morton memorial in Tackley Church by John Bacon
(Photo by Norfolkboy-1)

We know little of Morton’s private life. His home was at Hill Court in Tackley, which had been acquired by his great-grandfather before 1659. He greatly enlarged it, and enclosed a large tract of land to the south of the village. He later bought property at Medmenham in Bucks where he was living at his death. There were apparently no surviving children of his marriage, and in his will he enjoined his wife Elizabeth to make a will of her own immediately after his death to ensure the estate would descend ‘to such person or persons as she shall deem the properest objects of her kindness and courtesy’. He was buried at Tackley. What had been the family house at Tackley was demolished in 1959.

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John Thomas Norris

John Thomas Norris was Abingdon’s MP from 1857 until 1865. He was particularly helpful to the town in opposing the threatened closure of the Old Gaol, although this did take place after his time.

Norris was born in Bledloe, Bucks, in or about 1809, son of Edmund Norris. By 1834, Edmund had an interest in the paper mill at Sutton Courtenay. In 1839, father and son were jointly leasing it at £3120 per year, and in 1853, after Edmund’s death, John Thomas is described as the owner. But from the 1830s John Thomas was based primarily in London, acquiring or setting up a printing and stationery business in Aldersgate which provided an outlet for the products of the mill.

It was a time when political passions were strong, and a number of organisations were beginning to come together to form what would later be the Liberal party. Daniel O’Connor, the campaigner for Irish emancipation, was recruiting prominent Londoners into his association, and in 1837 Norris was deemed important enough to be one of them. In 1840, he stood successfully for Aldersgate in the elections for the London Common Council, in spite of being challenged on the grounds that he was not resident in the ward. In 1851 and again in 1852 he was nominated for the position of Sheriff of London, a stepping-stone to becoming Lord Mayor, but was not elected. His main activity as a London politician was in the campaign to remove the livestock market from Smithfield, which was achieved in 1855.

Norris seems to have divided his time between London and Sutton Courtenay. In London, he had an establishment near Russell Square, with servants and a coachman. In Sutton Courtenay, his residence was the Mill House. He made himself popular in the village when, in 1850, he addressed a meeting of protest against an offensive article that someone had written in the Morning Chronicle describing the inhabitants as unusually depraved, drinking, living together before marriage, and playing quoits on Sundays. He was also making himself known in Abingdon.

The Liberal MP for Abingdon, General Caulfield, died in 1852 soon after being elected. Norris offered himself for the seat, but had to withdraw when a local magnate, Lord Norreys, having switched from the Conservatives, decided to stand. There was an understanding that Norris would have the nomination when next the seat became vacant, and this duly happened two years later when Norreys succeeded his father as Earl of Abingdon and moved to the House of Lords.

Unfortunately another candidate appeared, an obscure young man totally unknown in Abingdon, Haythorne Reed. Norris had, it seems, somehow offended a few important people in Abingdon and was not considered by some to be of high enough social status for the honour of representing the town. George Bowes Morland suggested with sarcasm that his failure to attain the London shrievalty disqualified him from standing for parliament in Abingdon. Reed, as an ex-junior officer of the 17th Lancers, trumped the wealthy stationer. Norris and his supporters remained optimistic but, in a poll that featured ‘strong beer’, violence and highly credible accusations of bribery, Reed won by 125 votes to 117.

However, at the next election in 1857 Reed decided to go elsewhere. He tried his luck at Finsbury in London, failed, and was bankrupted by his expenditures. Norris walked over in Abingdon. There were celebrations in Sutton Courtenay with bell-ringing, and music and dancing on the green till late.

Norris was a moderately active MP, generally following the Liberal line. The one notable exception was in a debate on a trade treaty with France in 1860 when he argued at length that, however desirable free trade might be in principle, there should still be a protective tariff on imported paper. For Abingdon, he was a great asset in the struggle against the closure of the Old Gaol. He repeatedly lobbied successive Home Secretaries and wrote an impressive paper setting out the town’s case. As a JP in Sutton Courtenay, he could attend the county Quarter Sessions, where magistrates from the south of Berkshire were campaigning for closure on grounds of economy.

At the same time, Norris kept up his business career. The Aldersgate print works must have been a sizable operation; in 1856 eighty of its employees were treated to a two-day holiday jaunt to Sutton Courtenay and Abingdon at Norris’s expense. He invested in railways, becoming an active shareholder of the GWR and a director of the Eastern Counties Railway.

But in 1865 his world collapsed. In the election of July of that year, he was defeated by the Conservative Charles Lindsay. Then the manager at Aldersgate died and the plant’s finances were found to be in serious deficit. In November, Norris was made bankrupt and his public activities were at an end.

Norris retired to Sutton Courtenay, where the mill was put on sale in 1866. Nonetheless, he still seems to have been running it and claiming to be its owner in 1869 when there was an explosion that killed a workman. He died in 1870. The mill was advertised for lease in 1881, but there were no takers and it was closed in that year.

Norris is buried in Sutton Courtenay. He married in 1840 Emily Francis Choppin; she died in 1854 at the age of 32, and in 1858 he married a young widow Selina Victoria von Dadelszen, née McKenzie. There were no children from either marriage.