Edward John Littleton, 1st Baron Hatherton PC, FRS (18 March 1791 – 4 May 1863), was a British politician from the extended Littleton/Lyttelton family, of first the Canningite Tories and later the Whigs. He had a long political career, active in each of the Houses of Parliament in turn over a period of forty years. He was closely involved in a number of major reforms, particularly Catholic emancipation, the Truck Act 1831, the Parliamentary Boundaries Act 1832 and the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. Throughout his career he was actively concerned with the Irish question and he was Chief Secretary for Ireland between 1833 and 1834.
Hatherton was also a major Staffordshire landowner, farmer and businessman. As heir to two family fortunes, he had large holdings in agricultural and residential property, coal mines, quarries and brick works, mainly concentrated around Penkridge, Cannock and Walsall.
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Background and education
Littleton was born Edward Walhouse, and was educated at Rugby and at Brasenose College, Oxford. In 1812, he took the name of Littleton to inherit the large landed estates of his great-uncle Sir Edward Littleton, 4th and last of the Littleton Baronets, of Teddesley Hall, near Penkridge, Staffordshire. In 1835, he also inherited large mineral and manufacturing interests in Walsall and Cannock from his uncle, Edward Walhouse.
Career
Political career, 1812–1833
Littleton also took over his great-uncle's parliamentary seat. From 1812 to 1832, he was Member of Parliament for Staffordshire and then was the MP for the southern division of that county until 1835. He spent most of that time as a Canningite Tory, but moved over to the Whigs after George Canning's death in 1827.
In the House of Commons, Littleton was especially prominent as an advocate of Roman Catholic emancipation. In 1825, as a preliminary to a Catholic Relief Bill promoted by Daniel O'Connell, he introduced an Elective Franchise in Ireland Bill. The objective of this was, paradoxically, to raise the property qualification for Irish voters. However, its underlying aim was to end abuse of a distinctively Irish form of freehold, which had to be renewed by payment to the original landlord, and so allowed large landowners to create large numbers of compliant voters. Both the Relief and the Franchise Bills failed. After crossing the floor of the House to join the Whigs in 1827, Littleton voted for the Catholic emancipation Bill that finally became law in 1829.
From this point, the style and content of his contributions changed completely. For almost twenty years he had been content generally to make short contributions, usually delivering himself of his considered opinions or changed notions (for he sometimes altered his initial stance during debate) in the chamber of the house in a few unmemorable phrases. From 1830 he became closely involved in committee work on important reforms. As his opinions became more radical, he adopted an increasingly trenchant and discursive style, speaking frequently in long, argued statements, laden with factual detail. On one day in September 1831, for example, he made eight speeches of varying length in the House. One of the important factors in this change of style and focus seems to have been his increasingly close contact with middle and working class opinion in the growing Staffordshire towns – Stoke on Trent, Wolverhampton and Walsall. He frequently presented petitions and deployed arguments and reports drawn directly from these disfranchised towns and people. As he became more combative and forensic in his contributions, he was increasingly regarded as a Radical rather than merely a Whig.
After the 1830 General Election ended Tory domination, and brought in a minority Whig government under Earl Grey, Littleton took up the campaign against the truck system. This was the practice by which employees were forced to accept payment or advances in kind, often becoming effectively enslaved to the company store. First he presented numerous petitions against the system from workers in Staffordshire and Gloucestershire. He asked and obtained leave to introduce a bill against the truck system at the end of the year. The 1831 general election completely changed the electoral landscape, ushering in a reforming Whig ministry under Grey, and allowing Littleton to proceed with his bill with a fair certainty of success. Moving the vote on the bill in September 1831, he pointed out that "it was notorious that the universal feeling of the working classes was in favour of some attempt to put down this odious system." He summarised its main purpose simply as that "the workmen must be paid in money." Consolidating and extending numerous earlier acts on the subject, the Truck Act 1831 (actually the Money Payment of Wages Act) was a landmark piece of social legislation, which was invoked as still relevant in Parliament as recently as 2003.
Military career 1814–1833
He was commissioned as Major of the part-time Staffordshire Yeomanry on 11 July 1814 and was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel on 27 September 1819. He was appointed Lt-Col Commandant on 17 December 1829, but resigned the command in August 1833 after he became Chief Secretary for Ireland.
Chief Secretary for Ireland, 1833–1834
In May 1833 Littleton became chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the ministry of Earl Grey, with Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, Littleton's father-in-law, as Lord Lieutenant. The appointments met with the approval of Daniel O'Connell. However, Littleton was part of a shaky coalition of Whigs and Radicals. The Whigs were much more concerned with defending property rights and the position of the established church than the Radicals, who were prepared to sacrifice both if they perceived injustice. He was often forced to take positions which might normally have gone against his political instincts, and he also allowed his loose tongue to get him into further trouble.
The main point of conflict was the issue of Irish Tithes. Incensed by the legal requirement to pay tithes to the Protestant Church of Ireland, the Repealers had launched a campaign of refusal to pay among the mainly Catholic (otherwise Presbyterian) peasantry. This sporadically flared into violence in the Tithe War. Littleton was compelled by the alliance with Whigs to bring in a Tithe Arrears (Ireland) Bill, which set out some concessions in the payment terms but reaffirmed the government's determination to impose tithes on Ireland for the foreseeable future. It was accompanied by one of the many Irish Coercion bills which partially suspended civil rights in Ireland to suppress rural violence.
Initially, Littleton seemed to be steering a compromise course fairly successfully. On the one hand he portrayed the recovery of tithes as a painful necessity, while denouncing unwarranted and sometimes illegal police violence. However, this could not last. As early as 10 July, Littleton upset the Irish Repealers in the Commons. Feargus O'Connor, one of the most radical of the Irish party, brought forward a petition demanding the repeal of the Acts of Union 1800. Littleton responded that: "That was a proposition so utterly devoid of commonsense, that it was scarcely necessary for him to say, that when it was brought forward, it would be met by the most strenuous opposition. He need scarcely use such strong language, for the proposition was so extremely absurd – so opposed to the feelings and interests of both Englishmen and Irishmen, that any strenuous exertion would be totally unnecessary, in order to ensure it a signal defeat." This was clearly far beyond what was necessary to dissociate himself from O'Connor.
However, there was no real chance of repeal going through at that point. Rather hastily he made a compact with O'Connell on the assumption that the new coercion act could not contain certain repressive clauses which were part of the old act. The clauses, however, were inserted; O'Connell charged Littleton with deception; and in July 1834 Grey, Viscount Althorp and the Irish secretary resigned. The two latter were induced to serve under the new premier, Lord Melbourne, and they remained in office until Melbourne was dismissed in November 1834.
Career in House of Lords, 1835–1863
In February 1835, Littleton won re-election to the House of Commons as member for Staffordshire Southern – part of a Whig victory that returned Melbourne to power. Shortly afterwards, the new administration raised Littleton to the peerage as Baron Hatherton, of Hatherton in the County of Stafford. Hatherton took his title from a Staffordshire village which at that time was an exclave of Wolverhampton, where Littleton owned Hatherton Hall, a country house that formed part of the Walhouse inheritance. Since he was now constitutionally barred from serving as a member of the House of Commons, his seat had to be contested again in a by-election in May, won by a fellow Whig, Sir Francis Goodricke.
As a peer, Hatherton was automatically a member of the House of Lords and able to make a contribution to parliamentary debate and processes. This he did until the year before his death, although his contributions tailed off considerably after his Address in Answer to the Speech from the Throne in 1847, perhaps for family reasons.
For several years after his elevation to the peerage, Hatherton was closely involved in campaigns to extend the political reforms of the Whig administration. Most important of these initially was municipal reform. Hatherton presented numerous petitions, and took up the cause of several small towns, in the campaign preceding the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. He served on the Lords committee on the bill and was often acerbic in debate, much as he had been on earlier reforms. Key to the measure was the enfranchisement of ratepayers. When the Tory peers rallied to the cause of the freemen, a rather flexible class who dominated the electorate in many towns and cities, Hatherton observed caustically that:
the freemen, generally speaking, were a very inferior class of persons. They need not possess any property, or pay any rates; and in many instances, their residence was principally in gaols. To show the facilities which they afforded for corruption, the noble Lord read various statements of the vast number of persons who had been admitted as freemen just previous to general elections. For such persons the Bill proposed to substitute a class of men who had paid rates for three years. If their Lordships refused to sanction this proposition, he was afraid they would expose themselves to strong observations out of doors, where it was the universal opinion that they had found the class of individuals which the Bill tended to get rid of extremely convenient, and easily to be managed on certain occasions.
Business and property interests
Hatherton was a very wealthy man, partly because of his inherited interests, and partly because of his own business activities. The Littleton inheritance brought almost the whole of the manor of Penkridge, as well as the former Penkridge deanery manor, and other estates in that area – land accruing in the hands of the Littletons since 1502. The Walhouse inheritance brought large coal mines in Cannock and Walsall, as well as extractive works supplying the construction industry, including sandstone and limestone quarries, brickyards, gravel pits and sand pits. This made him immensely influential as a landlord and employer across a large tract of south and central Staffordshire.
A listing of his economic interests in 1862, the year before his death, includes:
Teddesley Hall, Woods and Farm; Hatherton Hall, Pillaton Gardens, Teddesley and Hatherton Estate Rentals – all in his own occupation
288 holdings in the following townships: Abbots Bromley, Acton Trussell, Bednall, Beaudesert and Longdon, Bosoomoor, Congreve, Coppenhall, Cannock, Drayton, Dunston, Huntington, Hatherton, Linell, Levedale, Longridge, Otherton, Pipe Ridware, Penkridge, Pillaton, Preston, Stretton, Saredon and Shareshill, Teddesley, Water Eaton, Wolgarston
Walsall Estate Rental
236 holdings, in Walsall
Royalties from mineral extraction at Hatherton Colliery, Bloxwich; Hatherton Colliery, Great Wyrley; Serjeants Hill Colliery, Walsall; Hatherton Lime Works, Walsall; Walsall Old Lime Works; Paddock Brickyard, Walsall; Sutton Road Brickyard, Walsall; Serjeants Hill Brickyard, Walsall; Butts Brickyard, Walsall; Old Brooks Brickyard, Walsall; Long House Brickyard, Cannock; Rumer Hill Brickyard, Cannock; Penkridge Brickyard; Wolgarstone Stone Quarry, Teddesley; Wood Bank and Quarry Heath Stone Quarries, Teddesley; Gravel Pit, Huntington; Sand Pit at Hungry Hill, Teddesley. Also land rentals from some of the mine properties.
Tithes from 579 occupiers in Hatherton, Cannock, Leacroft, Hednesford, Cannock Wood, Wyrley, Saredon, Shareshill, Penkridge, Congreve, Mitton, Whiston, Rodbaston, Coppenhall, Dunston, Bloxwich, Walsall Wood.
New Zealand Company
In 1825 Littleton was a director of the New Zealand Company, a venture chaired by the wealthy John George Lambton, Whig MP (and later 1st Earl of Durham), that made the first attempt to colonise New Zealand.
Family
Lord Hatherton married Hyacinthe Mary Wellesley, eldest illegitimate daughter of Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley and Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland, in October 1812. One of the governesses to their children (1821–1825) was Anna Brownell Jameson, later an author and art historian.
Lady Hatherton died after a long illness on 6 January 1849. A daughter, Hyacinth Anne, had already died in 1847. In 1852 Hatherton married Caroline Davenport, née Hurt, (1810–1897) of Wirksworth, Derbyshire. He died at his Staffordshire residence, Teddesley Hall, in May 1863, aged 72, and was buried, with his first wife and daughter, at Penkridge parish church. He was succeeded in the barony by his son Edward.