Robert (Wilmot) Wilmot-Horton Bt
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Robert John (Wilmot) Wilmot-Horton Bt (1784 - 1841)

Rt Hon Sir Robert John "3rd Baronet Wilmot of Osmaston" Wilmot-Horton Bt formerly Wilmot
Born in Osmaston by Derby, Derbyshire, Englandmap
Ancestors ancestors
Brother of [half] and [half]
Husband of — married 6 Sep 1806 in Croxall, Derbyshire, Englandmap
Descendants descendants
Died at age 56 in Petersham, Surrey, Englandmap
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Profile last modified | Created 11 Dec 2019
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Preceded by
Robert Wilmot (abt.1752-1834)
Baronet Wilmot of Osmaston
1834-1841
Succeeded by
Robert Edward (Wilmot) Wilmot-Horton (1808-1880)

Contents

Biography

Robert was baptized 28 Dec 1874 at Osmaston, Derbyshire, England. He was the son of Robert Wilmot. [1]

In 1806 he married Anne Beatrix Horton, daughter of Eusebius Horton of Horton. [2]

He used the surname Wilmot-Horton after his father-in-law died in 1823; and his son Sir Robert Edward also picked up the name in 1872. [2]

He was undersecretary of state for War and the Colonies 1821-1828, and Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Ceylon, 1831-1837. [2]

Additional Biography

— the following additional biography and additional sources are by Jonathan Cutmore, author of John Murray's Quarterly Review: Letters 1807-1843 (Liverpool University Press, 2019), from his Writing and Reading the Quarterly Review (manuscript, 2015), used by permission. Jonathan Cutmore (c) 2021

Born Robert John Wilmot, his mother, Juliana Elizabeth Byron, a daughter of Admiral John Byron and the widow of William Byron, died when Wilmot-Horton was in his infancy. Wilmot-Horton’s father, Sir Robert Wilmot, the second baronet, was a well-connected civil servant.

Wilmot-Horton was educated at Eton College, in 1802; he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1803 (BA 1806, MA 1815). At Oxford he became the close friend of Reginald Heber and Robert Hay, men who would become writers for the eminent conservative periodical the Quarterly Review. In 1813, Heber wrote to John Thornton, ‘next to yourself, I esteem and love [Wilmot-Horton] most warmly’ (Heber, Life, I, p.373). He was a close friend of another Quarterly reviewer, John William Ward, Lord Dudley and he corresponded as well with the Quarterly’s sheet anchor John Barrow.

Shortly after he graduated, in September 1806 he married Anne Beatrix Horton (d. 1871), the daughter and coheir of Eusebius Horton of Catton Hall, Derbyshire. An exceptionally beautiful woman, the statesman George Canning was smitten by her and it was about her that Byron (who was Wilmot-Horton’s second cousin) wrote the famous lines, ‘She walks in Beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies’. Byron flirted with her, a false rumour circulated about an affair, and he penned contemptuous lines about her husband: ‘From Canning the tall wit / To Wilmot, the small wit, / Ward’s creeping companion and louse’.

In 1823 Horton adopted the name Wilmot-Horton in compliance with a stipulation in his father-in-law’s will.

Energetic, ambitious, and in need of a career and a steady income, Wilmot-Horton was determined to make his mark in politics. Even before he entered parliament, in 1818, his circle consisted mainly of political men. With several other men who had been close friends at Christ’s College, in winter 1807-8 he attended lectures in Edinburgh given by Stewart, Playfair, Hope and others.

In 1812 he co-founded Grillion’s, a London dinner club that welcomed prominent politicians (a large number of men closely associated with the Quarterly Review were early members, including Stratford Canning, Henry Gally Knight, Robert Grant, Henry Luttrell, Robert William Hay, and Reginald Heber).

After failing in 1815 to win a seat in the Commons, he spent some months in 1816 travelling on the continent with Lord Dudley. He then expended 6000 guineas of his own money to gain the riding of Newcastle-under-Lyme in the general election of 1818.

As an MP, Wilmot-Horton opposed the reform of parliament, but he supported a number of liberal measures, including criminal law reform; Catholic Emancipation; the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts; the reform of the Poor Law; national education; and the resumption of cash payments. Despite the consistency of his views with those of Canning, Wilmot-Horton denied that he was a member of Canning’s party. He thought too well of himself to be anyone’s subordinate, and he believed it unwise to be tied to another man’s fate. Others, however, including William Gifford, the first editor of the Quarterly Review and George Canning's friend, regarded him as Canning’s able lieutenant. Certainly there was little to distinguish between him and other Canningites in his personal and professional associations, in his choice of intellectual mentors, and in the policies he supported and pursued.

A student of political economy and a disciple of Malthus, Wilmot-Horton was the leading parliamentary advocate of emigration. He saw emigration as a panacea for the nation’s agricultural distress, as a way to combat radicalism, and as the most humane, effective, and fiscally beneficial way to manage the nation’s ‘surplus population’. He had a good chance to put his ideas into practice when in 1821 Bathurst appointed him undersecretary of state for War and the Colonies. Wilmot-Horton took the post in part because it did not require him to vacate his parliamentary seat and seek re-election, a costly formality that he could ill afford.

Upon Wilmot-Horton’s recommendation, in 1825 Lord Liverpool restructured the War and the Colonies department so as to admit the appointment of a second secretary. The new post, which evolved into the position of permanent undersecretary, was given to Wilmot-Horton’s friend and fellow Quarterly reviewer Robert Hay.

Wilmot-Horton appears to have escaped the fevered religiosity of some of his relatives and closest friends. His father was president of the Derby British and Foreign Bible Society, an organization dominated by evangelicals. His friend Reginald Heber was a watchword in the nineteenth century for piety. John Thornton was a second-generation Clapham Sect Evangelical. Evidence suggests that Wilmot-Horton was at best conventionally religious. Indeed, despite his friendship with Thornton, he was hostile to aspects of the Evangelicals’ broader social and humanitarian programme. In a defence in the Quarterly Review of the Colonial Office’s policy on the emancipation of slaves, he insinuated that evangelical abolitionists were meddling hypocrites.

In July 1823, Wilmot-Horton sent the Quarterly's publisher, John Murray of Albemarle Street, the outline of a proposed Quarterly Review article that Sir John Beverley Robinson had drawn up at his request. (Robinson, at the time attorney general of Upper Canada, was temporarily in England.) Robinson had yet ‘to methodize it’, as Wilmot-Horton put it, which is to say, to work it up into an article. Wilmot-Horton ordered Murray to have ‘someone’ take Robinson’s rough materials and produce from it a finished article that he, Wilmot-Horton, would then ‘approve or no’. In making such a request (or rather, in giving such a direction) he showed he misunderstood the way Murray and Gifford managed the business of reviewing. Few writers besides John Wilson Croker, John Barrow, and Robert Southey had an automatic entrée into the Quarterly and Murray and Gifford had no ‘staff writer’ who on demand could turn someone else’s ideas into an article.

Oblivious to standards he had yet to meet, Wilmot-Horton wrote confidently to Murray in June 1824 that he intended to insert two or three articles on political subjects; of these, one on the West India question was foremost in his mind. He had decided to become a mainstay of the journal, he told Murray, and he had worked out a plan to fit reviewing into his busy schedule: he would dictate his articles to an amanuensis whom the lawyer and reformer Hudson Gurney had ‘confidentially’ identified for him; he then expected Murray to employ a ‘sub-editor to polish his text so that’, a thoughtful touch, ‘Mr Gifford shouldn’t have to’. ‘Then’, he wrote, ‘I could give you [Murray] four articles a year without much trouble to myself’. He reasonably concluded that his labours, thus arranged, ‘might be worth having, as they would probably [be] related to subjects upon which I had some peculiar advantages of information’ (John Murray Archive manuscripts, 16 June 1824, 18 June 1824).

Presumably because, as Benjamin Disraeli later put it, Murray considered Wilmot-Horton his ‘private friend’, and because Murray and Gifford were pleased to have the cooperation of a man they had pursued for years as a potential contributor, neither man complained about his behaviour, which, in any case, may have been prompted by a request from Murray.

In December 1824, Wilmot-Horton insisted upon the insertion of an article on his pet topic, emigration: ‘I have also completed an article on Emigration as connected with Ireland and on Colonial Policy … I shall be much disappointed if you refuse it admission in your next Review’, he wrote to Murray. When May 1825 rolled around, the Quarterly had a new editor in John Taylor Coleridge, and Wilmot-Horton was still imperiously demanding that room be made for the emigration article and for the other one he had in mind, on the West Indies. ‘I shall be very anxious to have room for two articles in your next Quarterly’, he told Murray (John Murray Archive manuscript, 5 May 1825).

When all was said and done, Wilmot-Horton published only two reviews in the journal. Probably at the request of his friend Reginald Heber, who was then beating the bushes for new recruits for the Quarterly, in 1813 he submitted a review article on an odd topic, Gregor von Feinaigle’s then-popular method for enhancing memory.

The only other article he produced for Gifford was his major policy statement on the West Indies, published in 1824 in Number 60. In the course of preparing that article, he successfully followed his system: he dictated the article, he told Murray, ‘to a short-hand writer sent me confidentially by Mr. [Hudson] Gurney’ (John Murray Archive manuscript, 28 Aug. 1824). The article was buttressed by information from Charles Rose Ellis, Robert Hay, and others.

Besides these two articles, Wilmot-Horton’s primary involvement in the Quarterly Review was in the aftermath of John Wilson Croker’s February 1823 article on Dr O’Meara, Napoleon’s physician. Lieutenant-Colonel Gideon Gorrequer, aide-de-camp to Sir Hudson Lowe, governor of St Helena at the time of Napoleon’s death, objected to the use of his name in Croker’s article. Should the Quarterly’s editor not publish an explanation and Gorrequer’s disclaimer, Gorrequer threatened to publicize his complaint in the newspapers. He also told Hudson Lowe that he would write to a French general whom Croker mentioned in the article, Count de Montholon, to apologize for a passage in the article where Croker referred to Montholon as a coward.

Because Montholon and Lowe were then at the centre of an international scandal over Great Britain’s treatment of Napoleon in exile, Wilmot-Horton intervened in the matter on behalf of government. He recast a draft of Gorrequer’s letter to Montholon and he drew up an explanatory note for insertion in the Quarterly. Under great pressure from Wilmot-Horton, Gorrequer withdrew his threats and the note did not appear. The complete dossier on the Gorrequer-Lowe-Montholon affair, including multiple drafts of Wilmot-Horton’s note for the Quarterly, is preserved at the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office).


He died in 1841.

Sources

  1. "England, Derbyshire, Church of England Parish Registers, 1537-1918," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QGKD-MQ3Z : 16 January 2018), Robert John Wilmot, 28 Dec 1784; citing 28 Dec 1784; citing Christening, Osmaston, Derbyshire, England, United Kingdom, Derbyshire Record Office, England.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Wilmot-Horton of Osmaston and Catton", D3155 Derbyshire Record Office, National Archives.

Additional Sources

  • Derbyshire RO, D 3155 M/C 5938, Wilmot-Horton corr.
  • National Library of Scotland. John Murray Archive.
  • National Archives manuscripts, PRO J 76/7/1, papers relating to the 1823 O’Meara article in the Quarterly Review.
  • Wilmot-Horton, Robert', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
  • R. Thorne (ed.), History of Parliament. The House of Commons.
  • R. H. Ghosh, ‘The Colonization Controversy: R. J. Wilmot-Horton and the Classical Economists’, Economica 31 (1964), pp.385-400.
  • P. Buckner, ‘The Colonial Office and British North America, 1801-50’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, eds. J. Hamelin and F. G. Halpenny (15 vols, 1966- ), VIII, xxiii-xxxvi.
  • H. J. M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy, 1815-1830: ‘Shovelling out Paupers’ (1972).




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