Family and Education

b. 15 Mar. 1779, 2nd s. of Sir Peniston Lamb*, 2nd Bt., 1st Visct. Melbourne [I], and bro. of Hon. George Lamb* and Hon. Peniston Lamb*. educ. privately by Rev. Thomas Marsham, curate of Hatfield, 1785-8; Eton 1788-96; Trinity Coll. Cambridge 1796-9; by Prof. Millar at Glasgow 1799-1801; L. Inn 1797, called 1804. m. 3 June 1805, Lady Caroline Ponsonby, da. of Frederick Ponsonby*, 3rd Earl of Bessborough [I], 1s. surv. d.v.p. suc. fa. as 2nd Visct. Melbourne [I] and 2nd Baron [UK] 22 July 1828.

Offices Held

Chief sec. to ld. lt. [I] Apr. 1827-June 1828; PC [UK] 30 Apr. 1827 and [I] 16 July 1827; sec. of state for Home affairs Nov. 1830-July 1834; first lord of Treasury July-Nov. 1834, Apr. 1835-Sept. 1841.

Capt. Herts. vol. inf. 1803, maj. 1804.

Biography

The chronique scandaleuse attributed William Lamb’s paternity to Lord Egremont, whom he evidently resembled in person and character. ‘Already a warm politician’ at Eton, he moved in the world of the Whig grandees to which his ambitious mother was hostess, even when his father and elder brother deserted them. Fox himself admired Lamb’s Cambridge prize oration ‘On the progressive improvement of mankind’, quoting from it in the House and inviting its contemplative and sensitive author to St. Anne’s. Fox’s partiality to him sealed Lamb’s loyalty. He was cosseted at Holland House as ‘a rising genius’, ‘very clever and very pleasing’, despite his ‘love of singularity’ and his lisp.1

Lamb was a fledgling barrister on his first northern circuit when the death of his elder brother in 1805 made him his father’s heir. He gave up the bar, made what later developed into a tragic marriage which reinforced his Whig connexions, and at the end of the year was bought a seat for the rest of that Parliament by his father for 2,000 guineas. It was for Leominster, at the instigation of the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Kinnaird, the latter having intended Lamb to replace him there when he succeeded to the title. It was also Fox’s express wish. Fox had sponsored Lamb’s membership of Brooks’s Club, 28 Apr. 1805, and his nephew Lord Holland subsequently referred to ‘my uncle’s particular and almost paternal interest about him which I know to have been stronger than about any young man now in Parliament’. Nevertheless, his support of his friends in power was silent during that session. He was disappointed not to be brought forward ‘in some situation’. He had intended to vote conscientiously against Lord Ellenborough’s having a seat in the cabinet in March 1806, but had let it be known and was dissuaded and therefore stayed away, Fox having advised him to act as he felt right. This was a bad start. He had, in any case, inhibitions about utterance in debate:

I can walk in the shrubbery here at Brocket Hall and reason and enlarge upon almost any topic; but in the House of Commons, whether it be from apprehension or heat, or long waiting, or the tediousness of much of what I hear, a torpor of all my faculties almost always comes upon me, and I feel as if I had neither ideas nor opinion, even upon the subjects which interest me most deeply.

Moreover, although Lamb and his brother George were seen to be among the most disconsolate mourners at Fox’s funeral, he viewed the situation of the Whig party with critical detachment. He believed that the Foxite creed relied too much on shibboleths when it attributed its own failure to the influence of the crown and the corruption of the people; that the party was too confident that its ‘superiority in wit and literature’ outdid the sheer experience in government of its opponents and, above all, that the party had followed a wrong course in the American and French revolutionary wars in making its patriotism open to suspicion, the very policy which at the beginning of the century had damaged the Tories to the Whigs’ advantage. This and other ‘regular old rules and tactics’, as he later put it, were inflexibly adhered to without reference to ‘the exigency of the time and state of Europe’. Lamb’s mother-in-law had feared that he would be ‘reckoned too scrupulous and conscientious for a good party man’ and she was proved right, though he was no deserter. His maxim was:

in politics you may serve the cause of wisdom and justice better by remaining with those to whom you have attached yourself, even after you disapprove much of their conduct and prefer that of their adversaries, than by leaving them.2

At the election of 1806, Lamb was to have been returned free of charge for Camelford by the Duke of Bedford but, to accommodate Lord Lauderdale’s heir, he was returned instead by Lauderdale for Haddington Burghs. The premier, Lord Grenville, had at first suggested that he should stand for Hertfordshire in conjunction with Thomas Brand. As it was, a notion of displacing him at Haddington in favour of Lord William Russell* had to be discarded. He was to have seconded the address but, on Walter Fawkes’s declining to do so, he moved it, 19 Dec. 1806. Sheridan thought he ‘acquitted himself admirably’, and Earl Fitzwilliam that he ‘made a capital opening, showed powers much beyond the common run; matter, language, delivery all good and promising. He will make a figure.’ But it was a set speech and he ‘immediately relapsed into the habit of silence’. He voted with ministers, but against his own opinion, on the Hampshire election petition, 13 Feb. 1807, defended a Westminster electors’ petition, 27 Feb., and on 9 Apr. in another prepared speech seconded Brand’s motion against the pledge to the King given by the new ministry, but felt that he made ‘no progress towards becoming a useful and efficient debater’. He was also excluded from the newly appointed committee of finance of which, as a member since February, he had drafted the report in the preceding session.3

Lamb was unprovided with a seat in 1807, despite the Duke of Bedford’s good intentions. He prepared the ground for his return for St. Albans next time and meanwhile purchased an Irish borough for £5,000. He voted steadily with the Whigs in opposition, also for more radical motions, but apart from an attack on the credit of the East India Company, 16 July 1807, made no mark in debate. He approved George Ponsonby’s leadership of the party in the Commons in December 1807, although he soon saw that it would not do. His votes against the attack on Copenhagen in February 1808 were a matter, he later recalled, of party loyalty, not of personal conviction. Although he voted for Whitbread’s peace resolution, 29 Feb. 1808, he was becoming an alarmist about French imperialism and he espoused the Spanish resistance to it. He disliked the captiousness of opposition (of which he himself partook in a speech of 25 Jan. 1809) in taking a distinct line from ministers with little justification: but liked still less the clumsiness with which ministers handled a good case, as it ‘often makes them appear to be in the wrong’. On the Duke of York’s misconduct of army patronage, due at worst, he thought, to ‘indiscretion or to give it the hardest name—folly’, he would not vote for Wardle’s censure motion and otherwise supported opposition, 17 Mar. 1809, with ‘less satisfaction than I ever voted upon any other question’. He informed a Hertfordshire county meeting that the only point to be made was against ‘the influence and interference of mistresses in public affairs’. Although he voted for the motions against ministerial and official corruption, 17, 25 Apr., 1 and 11 May 1809, he became disillusioned with the ‘high popular party’, finding that

they were for the most part entirely ignorant of the constitution and the laws, which they pretended to restore and amend, that their arrogance and presumption were equal to their ignorance and incapacity, that either from passion or prejudice or error they were guilty of every species of misrepresentation; that many among them were bold enough to make and the rest credulous enough to believe any assertion which served their immediate purpose, that the bold were abashed by no detection and the credulous convinced by no explanation—their sweeping condemnation of all who differed from them, their exclusive claims of credit for integrity and abilities, the haughtiness with which they demanded from all who had not satisfied them, explanations of their conduct, in short the whole use, which they made, of the temporary influence over the public mind, which the recent transactions had given them, proved amply to me, that from them, if ever they should obtain power in the country, might be expected measures, more illegal and oppressive in themselves, than any which had ever been attempted by kings, and nobles.

He particularly disliked Sir Francis Burdett’s bid, as he saw it, ‘to unite his party, who call themselves the People, with the crown for the purpose of diminishing the power of the aristocracy and the House of Commons’.4

Lamb, weaned from radicalism, remained in opposition to an incompetent government and in the session of 1810 developed confidence as a debater. According to the premier and The Times, it was he rather than his friend Thomas Brand who called for a straight censure, without inquiry, of the Walcheren expedition, 23 Jan. 1810.5 On 12 Feb. he was a critic of sinecures, awarded to such as ‘would at all times be ready to sell their votes for their offices’, thereby rendering opposition the more factious. He consistently voted for their abolition. He was a critic of the army staff establishment, 1 Mar., and on 1 May unsuccessfully moved an amendment against the Sicilian subsidy. Although he was in the minorities of 5 and 16 Apr. against the martyrdom of Burdett and Gale Jones, he expressed his reservations about the Middlesex petition for Burdett’s release, 2 May, and weakly, so he afterwards thought, supported the adjournment of the question. On 21 May he voted for Brand’s motion for parliamentary reform. On 25 May he was a keen advocate of Catholic relief, for which he had voted in 1808.

Lamb was brought forward by his party in the debates on the King’s illness in December 1810. After speaking ‘admirably’ on the 21st, he was ceded the lead by Tierney in the attack on the Regency resolutions on 31 Dec. Lady Holland, who described him as ‘certainly one of the most rising men in public’, thought this a good move; as did others, not least because ‘it is the surest barrier against coalitions’. This referred to the partiality of some Whigs for an alliance with Canning, who in speaking after Lamb on 31 Dec. claimed political as well as personal friendship with him. Lamb, although he favoured the Whigs’ making overtures to Canning if they took office, did not go so far; he again attacked the Regency restrictions, 23 Jan. 1811, but privately hoped that the King’s recovery would render the measure superfluous.6

Lamb declined a lordship of the Treasury or an under-secretaryship of state when his friends were cabinet making at this time: he refused office altogether, disappointed to find ‘of how little value I was considered’ and believing that his inferiors were preferred to him. Above all, he hated the obloquy of being a placeman and had characteristic doubts about the wisdom of Lords Grenville and Grey’s hostility to the war in the Peninsula. Perceval’s ministry’s continuation of that struggle was the one thing that commended it to him and he informed Grey that ‘for the present at least he was determined to remain unpledged’. On 12 Feb. 1811, on the address, he admonished ministers in the absence of national disaster to practise strict economy, and on 22 Mar. he was a critic of the short-sightedness of the commercial credit bill; but his only known votes in the minority that session were three on Catholic questions, and he disagreed with his party on John Palmer’s* claims and their vendetta against the reinstatement of the Duke of York as commander-in-chief, 31 May, 6 June. Brougham complained at the end of the session that Lamb was ‘always there some part of the debate, but never at the division. He durst not vote either one way or another.’ This no doubt referred specifically to Stanhope’s bill on paper currency, in which Brougham claimed that Lamb was drawn to the Carlton House line. His father, formerly a groom of the bedchamber to the Prince, was shortly to be awarded the same situation in the Regency household.7

Lamb himself was now thought ripe for plucking by Perceval’s ministry. After he had advocated coercive measures against Luddite violence and rebuked Folkestone for his attack on foreign troops in British pay, 18, 23 Feb. 1812, he was offered, through the Regent, a vacant seat at the Treasury board. This proposition was ‘a death blow’ to his vanity, showing as it did that ministers valued him no higher than had his friends the year before. He declined the offer, 25 Feb., claiming that

upon all the great questions of foreign and domestic policy except upon the question of war in Spain and Portugal my opinion has either been expressed or manifested in opposition to the system upon which his Royal highness’s present ministers have conducted, and still profess to conduct the affairs of the country.

The claim was fair, much as Lamb irritated the Whigs. He was perhaps wrongly reported to have gone away before the division on 21 Jan. 1812; as for his stand against the Luddites, he had indicated, on 6 Feb., that he favoured inquiry rather than coercion, provided there was no mob violence: that must be quelled as swiftly as possible. In February 1812 he apparently divided more often with opposition than in the whole of the preceding session, and after declining office (which remained a secret), he made a cutting attack on ‘a divided, distracted and inefficient administration’, 27 Feb., in supporting Turton’s motion, which he did ‘from a wish to see a vigorous policy pursued abroad, and a liberal one adopted at home’. In declining office, he had informed his mother that he had no confidence in the Regent’s hopes of a patchwork administration. His regret, expressed in the same speech, at the departure of Lord Wellesley from the government made the orthodox Whigs suspect him and his friend John William Ward* once more of angling for alliance with Canning. When Ward went over to Canning later that year, Lamb, who voted in favour of a stronger administration on 21 May, admitted his inclination to do the same, but ‘strong habits of friendship and party would make it too difficult’. It was one of his maxims that ‘the greatest check and limitation of the natural liberty of action’ was ‘the influence of relations and friends’. During the remainder of the session, despite a further hint from Carlton House that it was time to change his tack with the reward of office, he had voted staunchly with opposition, speaking against McMahon’s ‘unconstitutional’ appointment as secretary to the Regent, 14 Apr., against public commemoration of Perceval, 15 May, and more critically than before on measures for the preservation of the public peace, 10, 13 July.8

The election of 1812 found Lamb unprovided with a seat. His wife had just attempted to elope with Lord Byron and, to prevent further mischief, he had taken her to Ireland. He was resolved not to spend a farthing of his own, or embarrass his father, for the purchase of a seat. Tierney heard of one going for 5,000 guineas, but an immediate answer was required and none was forthcoming. Here was a fine test of how much his party valued his services. His mother and mother-in-law pressed the grandees to find him a berth and he let them get on with it. Lady Bessborough approached Earl Fitzwilliam, pointing out that Lamb, like Fitzwilliam, frowned on reform of Parliament and had thereby disqualified himself in the Duke of Bedford’s eyes while the Duke of Devonshire had intended to offer him an opening at Youghal, but preferred her son William Ponsonby. As Lady Bessborough wished Lamb to have Peterborough, the seat reserved for George Ponsonby, Fitzwilliam, who had no vacancies, did not even reply. Lamb’s mother, who believed he could have come in for St. Albans at less expense than he imagined, assured Lady Holland ‘there is no use in thinking about a person who will not think for themselves’ and brushed aside the notion that the cost of a seat would embarrass Lord Melbourne. Lamb admitted he was ‘actually cutting my throat’ and being deprived of ‘the great object of my life’. Having arrived, so he believed, at ‘the most critical moment ... in my life’, he ventured on his valediction, intended as a reproach to the party leaders, at the election dinner at Kilkenny. After he had won over his audience by recalling his constant support of Catholic relief, he added that his political career was now finished, whereupon ‘there was a general burst of no no no from every part of the table.’9

The Whig grandees thought all was not lost for Lamb when his friend Thomas Brand’s mother was reported to be at death’s door in October 1812 and Lord Holland endeavoured to muster support for Lamb as Brand’s replacement for Hertfordshire. He discovered that Brand had another protégé in mind and also, from Whitbread, that Lamb’s political conduct was unpopular. No vacancy in fact arose and Holland had to be satisfied with assuring Whitbread that Lamb’s ‘errors’ proceeded ‘from too much candour not from want of real firmness or zeal in the cause of liberty’.10 Lamb was left out in the cold, in company with Tierney, Romilly, Horner and Brougham. He then treated the Whig grandees to a display of his excessive candour. On 3 Nov. 1812 he addressed a remonstrance intended for them all to Lord Grey. After stressing his loyalty to the party at critical moments and his having hitherto served them at his own expense, but without mentioning the offers made him by the other side, he complained:

it is not in human nature that comparison should not be drawn between the manner in which every man who has but shown himself in behalf of the ministry has been eagerly taken by the hand, brought forward and raised to the highest situations, and the cold neglect, the thankless indifference ... which prevails in the management of the party opposed to them ... I must put it to yourself and to your own candour whether those who afford so little mutual assistance can in any reasonable sense of the word be said to act together, and whether it is to be expected that where there is no party support, there will remain much of party feeling or party attachment.

Grey replied that the leaders of the party could not be blamed if the Whig borough proprietors were prevented by ‘personal engagements, family connection, private friendship and local interest’ from accommodating the talents of the party in preference to ‘comparatively inefficient Members’. Holland thought Lamb’s letter ‘damned nonsensical and wrongheaded’, as he had refused to co-operate in the search for a seat for himself. Fitzwilliam, in view of his approximation to Lamb’s line on the war and on parliamentary reform, was touché: it was ‘a public and a heavy party loss’, but he had no available vacancy. Lamb’s rejoinder to Grey, 29 Nov., while disclaiming vindictiveness, demonstrated that the Whigs had nevertheless been better organized in finding seats for their men of talent in 1807 than in 1812, and there the matter rested.11

amb found little consolation in writing his autobiography and still less in his attempts to repair his broken marriage. In the summer of 1815 (while at Brussels, rejoicing in the allied victory) he was offered a vacancy at Peterborough, on the supposition that George Ponsonby was vacating it for an Irish county seat: but no vacancy arose. He had been prepared to accept the offer, knowing his politics to be consonant with Fitzwilliam’s. He had no joy, either, of an opening for his former seat of Portarlington placed at the party’s disposal in December 1815. Lord Holland, prompted by Tierney, catechized him on this occasion without naming the seat. Lamb’s response was more than candid. Aware of the differences among the party grandees on ‘the question of legitimacy’, he stated frankly that he saw no leader he could follow and would require ‘the fullest and most unquestioned liberty of acting’; moreover, he favoured the restoration of the Bourbons in France as the quickest solution to achieve European tranquillity and, if necessary, a powerful military establishment for the same purpose. As a Whig of the revolution of 1688, he renounced ‘a heap of modern additions, interpolations, fancies and fictions’ and did not doubt that his indifference to parliamentary reform and the abolition of income tax would further disqualify him for the opening in question. He did not get it and on 26 Mar. 1816, having discovered that Portarlington was the seat, wrote to reproach Holland for submitting him to a political test: he was sure that the patron and retiring Member cared nothing about such refinements and concluded that ‘there is for others a toleration which is not extended to me’. He further pointed out that the party had made nothing of the question of legitimacy, which had been made so crucial in his cross-examination: ‘I seemed to myself to entertain in fact a stronger opinion than those who asked it me’. He professed himself nevertheless satisfied with Holland’s explanation.12

The quest for a seat for Lamb was now renewed. It was supposed that his father’s having received an English peerage in 1815 might rule out Hertfordshire. Tierney thought of Seaford where (Sir) John Leach* might seat him: if seated, Lamb ‘would have never voted against the Prince on any question personal to him, and yet would have appeared to be an opposition Member’; but Leach awarded the seat to a ministerialist. In April 1816 Fitzwilliam brought him in for Peterborough, when George Ponsonby was chosen for Wicklow. From 25 Apr. 1816 (on which day he voted for the reduction of public expenditure and spoke against the aliens bill) until the dissolution, Lamb was a very active Member. He was prominent among the opposition speakers who called for retrenchment: on 7 May 1816 he explained that his absence from the House had ‘but served to confirm his conviction of the embarrassed state of the country, and of the extraordinary symptoms which had accompanied the return of peace’: it was now up to the government to put its house in order. On the address, 28 Jan. 1817, he explained that economy was in his view the best remedy for the ‘tumult for liberty and right’, which could only lead to ‘a political tyranny, or military despotism’; next day he voiced his disapproval of all plans for parliamentary reform. On 24 Feb. 1817 he defended the secret committee of inquiry into sedition, of which he was a member, and four days later the suspension of habeas corpus. On 20 May he dismissed Burdett’s plea for parliamentary reform as visionary, as well as historically false, though he had no objection to some piecemeal improvements in the electoral system such as those proposed by Brand and Tierney: ‘excess always produces the very evil it intends to shun’. He welcomed the appointment of opposition Members to the revived secret committee on sedition, 5 June, but found that the second report did not substantially differ from the first; he accordingly on 27 June gave his vote, ‘with regret and anxiety, but without doubt’, for the renewed suspension of habeas corpus, as he believed Luddism to be no ‘temporary ebullition’. On George Ponsonby’s death, Lamb made an éloge ‘in very good taste’ for the departed leader in moving the new writ for Wicklow, 11 July 1817, which he did because Lord Proby, who was to have been the mover, was absent in Ireland.13

When the Whigs considered the question of a new leader in 1817, Lamb’s name was mentioned, though the contemptuous Brougham thought he was just the kind of inept choice they might contrive if pushed to it, and others concluded that his support of the suspension of habeas corpus dished his prospects. He evidently intended to be silent on this question during the next session, but he could not: on 17 Feb. 1818 he opposed an inquiry into unjust detentions and on 11 Mar. he vindicated the alarmist view taken by government of sedition during the last year, which led to ‘a great conservative measure of state’; as the powers granted under it had not been abused, he now indemnified the government, which had a permanent minority of malcontents in the manufacturing districts to keep in check. Tierney wrote to Grey next day that Lamb had no right to make such a speech from the opposition bench and, if he would not go over to ministers, should join the ‘third party’. Brougham had rebutted Lamb in the House, but he pertinaciously kept his opposition seat. On 2 June he was one of the most vehement critics of Burdett’s proposals for parliamentary reform. He informed Sir Robert Heron about this time: ‘If the people should ever become seriously and perseveringly desirous of it, I should think it my duty to support it’.14 He signed the Whig requisition to Tierney to act as their parliamentary leader that autumn.

Lamb was selected for the committee on the Bank, 3 Feb. 1819. He doubtless disappointed the Whigs further by his support of the care of the King’s person bill, 5 Feb. 1819, but after sitting on the select committee he supported the reduction of the Windsor establishment as a matter of economy, 16 Mar., and paired in favour of burgh reform, 1 Apr.; indeed, on the most partisan issue of the session, Tierney’s censure motion of 18 May, he was a cordial Whig, anxious for a change of government. In November 1819 he exchanged Peterborough for a county seat, being returned unopposed for Hertfordshire on Brand’s succession to the peerage. An opposition had seemed possible, embarrassing for Lamb, who had again disagreed with his friends in deprecating public meetings to deplore the Peterloo tragedy: but he received ministerial support in the county.15 On 30 Nov. he supported Althorp’s motion for an inquiry into the state of the country, emphasizing that the conduct of the magistrates at Peterloo, legal as it might have been, must be scrutinized. Although he at first gave a general support to the seditious meetings bill, he voted for its limitation to three years, 6 Dec., and two days later supported its being confined to certain disturbed counties; on 13 Dec., at the third reading, he voted against the bill as it then stood and also for the exemption of Ireland from it.

Wilberforce thought Lamb had the makings of a fine Speaker of the House of Commons,16 but high politics remained his métier and the mantle of the Whig leadership eventually devolved on him as premier in succession to Grey. He died 24 Nov. 1848.

Ref Volumes: 1790-1820

Authors: J. M. Collinge / R. G. Thorne

Notes

• 1. Lamb’s autobiog. (Herts. RO, Panshanger mss, box 16) and Lloyd C. Sanders’s Lord Melbourne’s Pprs. have been used throughout and biographies by Lord David Cecil and P. Ziegler consulted. Jnl. of Lady Holland, i. 225; ii. 100; Letters of Lady Harriet Cavendish, 43.
• 2. Windham Diary, 455; Add. 47566, ff. 233-4; D. M. Stuart, Dearest Bess, 152; Leveson Gower, ii. 180, 462; Panshanger mss, Lamb’s commonplace bk. ff. 95, 96.
• 3. Grey mss, Tierney to Howick, 19 Oct.; Carlisle mss, Lady to Ld. Morpeth, 24 Oct.; Blair Adam mss, Bedford to Adam, 7, 19 Oct., Lauderdale to Adam, 6 Nov. [1806]; Sheridan Letters ed. Price, ii. 307; Fitzwilliam mss, Ld. to Lady Fitzwilliam, Mon. [Dec. 1806].
• 4. Blair Adam mss, Lamb to Adam, 2 May; Carlisle mss, Lady to Ld. Morpeth, Tues. [5 May]; Add. 51558, Lamb to Holland, 18 Dec. 1807; Parl. Deb. xii. 152.
• 5. Geo. III Corresp. v. 4074; The Times, 24 Jan. 1810; Lady Bessborough and her Family Circle, 203.
• 6. Grey mss, Whitbread to Grey, 23 Dec., Lady Holland to same, Mon. [Dec. 1810]; Jnl. of Lady Holland, ii. 280; Lonsdale mss, Ward to Lonsdale, 1 Jan. [1811]; Phipps, Plumer Ward Mems. i. 334, 348.
• 7. P. H. Fitzgerald, Life of Geo. IV, ii. 30; Ward, Letters to ‘Ivy’, 125; Leveson Gower, ii. 342; Add. 38738, f. 58; 52178, Brougham to J. Allen [19 July]; Brougham mss, Brougham to Grey, Tues. [23 July 1811].
• 8. Lady Airlie, In Whig Society, 106; Geo. IV Letters, i. 16; Leveson Gower, ii. 465; Horner mss 5, f. 170.
• 9. Wentworth Woodhouse mun. F127/107; Add. 51847, Lady Melbourne to Lady Holland, 23 Sept., 7 Oct.; 51585, Tierney to same, Tues. [Sept. 1812]; In Whig Society, 109; PRO NI, T 2647/15, Lamb to Lady Melbourne, 9 Oct. 1812; PRO 30/29/6/8, f. 1437.
• 10. PRO 30/29/6/8, f. 1442; Whitbread mss W1/1925-1928; Add. 51576, Whitbread to Holland, 30 Oct., 1 Nov. 1812.
• 11. Grey mss, Lamb to Grey, 3 Nov., reply 12 Nov. and rejoinder 29 Nov., Holland to Grey [Nov.], Fitzwilliam to Grey, 18 Nov.; Add. 51551, Grey to Holland, 21 Nov., 13 Dec.; Fitzwilliam mss, box 80, Grey to Fitzwilliam, 15, 22 Nov. 1812.
• 12. Fitzwilliam mss X1607, Fitzwilliam to Lamb (extract), 30 June; box 83, Lamb’s reply 15 July; Grey mss, Tierney to Grey, 8, 23 Dec.; Add. 51584, Tierney to Holland [Nov.], 30 Nov.; 51558, Lamb to Holland, 10 Dec. 1815, 26, 28 Mar. 1816.
• 13. Grey mss, Tierney to Grey, 10 Feb. 1816; Brougham mss 129; Grey mss, Rosslyn to Grey, 14 July 1817.
• 14. Brougham mss, Brougham to Lambton [10 July]; Carlisle mss, Mrs George Lamb to Lady Morpeth, 10 July [1817]; Grey mss, Tierney to Grey, 12 Mar. 1818; Heron, Notes (1851), 225.
• 15. Wentworth Woodhouse mun. F49/74; Fitzwilliam mss, box 99, Thanet to Fitzwilliam, 20 Oct., Lamb to same, 24 Oct.; Spencer mss, Althorp to Spencer, 17 Oct. 1819.
• 16. Life of Wilberforce (1838), iv. 374.