Lieutenant-Colonel John Baker Holroyd, 1st Earl of Sheffield, (21 December 1735 – 30 May 1821) was a British Army officer, politician and writer. He was a leading authority on agriculture and commerce and appointed President of the Board of Agriculture in 1803. He is also remembered as the close friend and patron of eminent historian Edward Gibbon, to whom he acted as literary executor and editor.
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Biography
Holroyd was the eldest son of Isaac Holroyd (1708–1778), Esq. of Dunamore, County Meath, and Dorothy Baker (1708–1777). His grandfather was Isaac Holroyd (1643–1706), merchant, belonging to an old Yorkshire family which settled in Ireland after the Restoration. He first took the name of Baker on inheriting the estates of his uncle, Rev. James Baker, in 1768 and added Holroyd on the death of his own father in 1778.
During the Seven Years' War, Holroyd was commissioned into the British Army's 21st Light Dragoons (Royal Foresters) at the rank of cornet in 1760, serving under Lieutenant-general John Manners, Marquess of Granby. He was promoted to captain in 1761 and was discharged in 1763 when the war came to an end. During the American War of Independence, Holroyd rejoined the British army in 1779 and was promoted to acting major. In the same year, he raised the 22nd (Light) Dragoons to defend against a planned Franco-Spanish invasion of Britain which ultimately was never carried out, serving as the regiment's lieutenant-colonel commandant. The regiment was disbanded in 1783 following the end of the war, bringing Holroyd's military career to an end.
In 1763 he travelled for a while on the Continent and in 1764 at Lausanne, Switzerland he became close friends with the writer and historian Edward Gibbon, later the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. On his return he used his inherited wealth to buy in 1769 the country house of Sheffield Hall in Sussex for £31,000 from Lord De La Warr. In 1780 he was elected to represent Coventry in the House of Commons, where he was prominent against the anti-Catholic Lord George Gordon and the Gordon rioters.
In 1781 he was created a Peer of Ireland as Baron Sheffield, of Dunamore in the County of Meath, and in 1783 was further created Baron Sheffield, of Roscommon in the County of Roscommon, with a special remainder in favour of his daughters. As Irish peerages they did not interrupt his Parliamentary career and he was re-elected for Coventry in 1781 and for Bristol in 1790. His Parliamentary career did end however in 1802, when he was created a Peer of the United Kingdom as Baron Sheffield, of Sheffield in the County of York. In 1816, he was also created Viscount Pevensey and Earl of Sheffield in the Peerage of Ireland.
In 1783 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He married Abigail Way, daughter of Lewis Way of Richmond, Surrey with whom he had a son and two daughters. Abigail died in 1793. In 1795 he married The Hon. Lucy Pelham (22 February 1763 – 18 January 1797), daughter of Thomas Pelham, 1st Earl of Chichester. His third marriage was to Lady Anne North (16 February 1760 – 18 January 1832), the daughter of the former Prime Minister Lord North on 20 January 1798.
Lord Sheffield died in 1821 and was buried in the Sheffield family mausoleum attached to the north transept of the Church of St Mary and St Andrew, Fletching, East Sussex. When Edward Gibbon died in 1794 while visiting Lord Sheffield, he too had been buried in the same mausoleum as a mark of respect. The Holroyd family are commemorated in the surrounding panels. The Earl's son and grandson succeeded in turn as second and third Earls of Sheffield, the latter being a well-known patron of cricket and on whose death the earldom became extinct.
The Earl of Sheffield's daughter Maria Josepha married John Stanley, 1st Baron Stanley of Alderley on 11 October 1796, and therefore the Irish barony, under the special remainder, later passed to Edward Stanley, 4th Baron Stanley of Alderley, who thus became the fourth Baron Sheffield.
Works and publications
In 1783, he wrote his opinions on the state of trade and commerce between Great Britain and its former subject America. The pamphlet Observations on the Commerce of the American States (Dublin, 1783), which ran six editions, made a comparative analysis of export and import calendar between two countries. It chronicled the amount of traded staple commodities during the prosperous year of 1773 and its disastrous year a decade later, the fluctuations in exports and imports during peacetime and war, and all the imports and exports to West Indies among many others. The Observations was written in opposition to the bill introduced by William Pitt in 1783, proposing to relax the navigation laws in favour of the United States. Pitt abandoned the proposal after it received considerable opposition. Edward Gibbon later said that in the Observations, "[t]he Navigation act, the Palladium of Britain, was defended, and perhaps saved, by his pen; and he proves, by the weight of fact and argument, that the mother-country may survive and flourish after the loss of America".
In 1790, he published Observations on the Project for Abolishing the Slave Trade, in which he took a conservative position on the debate over abolitionism, condemning the "inconsiderate and impracticable manner in which a great proportion of the community profess a disposition to relieve Negroes from slavery." Fearful of interfering with the right of enslavers to their human "property", he claimed that "nothing is more vain and empty than the idea that the British Legislature could immediately abolish slavery", and commended what he perceived as the "disposition shewn by the West-Indian assemblies to do everything that might be suggested for the advantage of the Negroes."
In Observations on the Manufactures, Trade, and Present State of Ireland (London, 1785), he also talked about the free trade and why Ireland and Great Britain should not proceed with its tariff war on their respective products like wool, woolens, cattle produce, fisheries, and variety of manufactures.
But in terms of agriculture, he maintained a more protectionist stance. He supported discussions on the agriculture to be of paramount importance as it tends to the true greatness and stability of a nation.
He opposed the kingdom's reliance on importation of corn, wheat, and other grains. He then published a series of pamphlet that tackles how the parliament should take care of its food production. On Observations on the Corn Bill (London, 1791), he advocated in higher yet stable price of corn, cultivate inferior land instead of using it for pasture, and emphasized that higher corn price is beneficial for manufactures.