Edward Monckton (3 November 1744 – 1 July 1832) was a British colonial administrator and nabob, a Whig politician, a member of parliament for 32 years, and an important Staffordshire landowner.
Background and early life
Monckton was the fifth surviving son of John Monckton, 1st Viscount Galway (1695–1751) by his second wife, Jane Westenra of Rathleague, Queen's County, Ireland, a relative of the Barons Rossmore. The distinguished soldier and colonial administrator Robert Monckton and William, the second Viscount, were older half-brothers, by Lady Elizabeth Manners, who died in 1730. The Viscount's Irish peerage was purely a convenient way of ennobling a government supporter while still allowing him to sit in the House of Commons. The family were of Yorkshire origin, based at Cavil, near Howden and Hodroyd, near Barnsley. The family borough was Pontefract, secured by the first Viscount's purchase of 77 burgages, and represented in Parliament by Moncktons for more than 70 years. The Viscount also extended the family's property by the building of a new seat: Serlby Hall in north Nottinghamshire.
Viscount Galway had married Jane Westenra in 1734 while serving as Commissioner of Revenue in Ireland. They had three surviving sons together, of whom Edward was the third, and a daughter. University of Nottingham: Biography of John Monckton, 1st Viscount Galway (1695–1751) Edward's father died when he was six years old, although his mother survived until 1788. The children of the second marriage lived with Jane Westenra, who had a house in London where she often entertained Samuel Johnson,James Boswell: Life of Johnson, vol. 4, at Project Gutenberg and where Edward's younger sister, Mary learned the skills of the literary hostess.
Monckton was educated at a private school in Chelsea,The History of Parliament: Members 1790–1820 – MONCKTON, Hon. Edward an area where there were many schools developing alternatives to public school education.J.S. Cockburn, H.P.F. King, K.G.T. McDonnell (Editors): Victoria County History – Middlesex, vol. 1, chap. 38. As the younger son of an Irish peer, he was compelled to seek his own fortune. He entered the civil service of the East India Company at the age of 18. Such posts were awarded through patronage, not merit. They were in the gift of the company's Directors and were usually obtained through use of family and political contacts. They could be a source of great profit, although the legitimacy of some practices engaged in by company civil servants was debatable,Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies Inc.: The East India Company & British India He was sent to Madras, winter capital of the Madras Presidency and the life expectancy of Europeans in India was not high.
India Monckton was employed initially as a Writer, a junior clerk responsible for maintaining correspondence and accounts. He rose steadily through the ranks of the Company bureaucracy, becoming a factor in 1768, sheriff in 1770, junior merchant in 1771; assay master at the mint in 1773, and senior merchant in 1774. At the time of Monckton's posting, the Governor and Commander-in-Chief at Madras was George Pigot, a self-made man who had risen from the post of writer to total supremacy in the Presidency, holding it against the French in the Seven Years' War. Pigot returned to England in 1763, only a year after Monckton's arrival. Nevertheless, his career was to overshadow Monckton's own and to determine the general course of the remainder of his life in many ways.
Pigot was welcomed by the Whig government and loaded with honours: a baronetcy, closely followed by an Irish peerage. He set himself up at Patshull Hall, between Bridgnorth and Wolverhampton and became MP for Bridgnorth in 1768.The History of Parliament: Members 1754–1790 However, his situation altered drastically in 1770, with the coming of the Tory ministry of Frederick North, Lord North, which was supported by George III. North's supporters sought to attack the Whigs by discrediting the record of their allies in the colonies, particularly Robert Clive. Pigot defended his friends and colleagues, not always temperately. Having alienated the ministry at home, Pigot then found that his financial position had deteriorated. Much of his wealth derived from an annual pension of 12,000 pagodas (about £4500) paid to him by the Nawab Muhammed Ali Khan Wallajah of Arcot for services rendered.
In 1772 Monckton was sent on a mission to the Sultanate of Kedah. The Nawab seems to have ceased his payments around 1773, forcing Pigot to return to paid employment. He was able to resume his old post at Madras after the Whig opposition demanded the Company reinstate him. He arrived in Madras in December 1775.
It was at this point that Monckton effectively staked his career on an alliance with Pigot, marrying Sophia, the governor's illegitimate daughter, on 14 March 1776. However, Pigot almost immediately precipitated a major political scandal that led to his own downfall. Reversing the company's policy of alliance with the Nawab of Arcot, Pigot declared the restoration of the Raja of Tanjore, whose property had been handed over to the Nawab. This opened up a rift between the governor and many on his council – a rift that rapidly widened as Pigot asserted his own interest in the Tanjore estates. Pigot's enemies carried out a coup d'état on 24 August 1776 and imprisoned him some miles from Madras. Both sides appealed to the Company in London. Pigot was declared reinstated but ordered to return to London. However, he died on 11 May 1777, still in confinement, before the judgement arrived in India.
Monckton resigned from the East India Company's service a few months later and returned to England in 1778. Within a year, he and Sophia had moved into Somerford Hall in Staffordshire, a few miles north-east of Patshull Park. A year after that Monckton was elected an MP for Stafford.
Staffordshire estates
It is not clear whether Monckton had been negotiating for Somerford before the Pigot's fall, but it seems likely that the Pigot connection played some part in directing him to this part of Staffordshire, an area in which he had no previous interests. The children of the Viscount's first wife retained the Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire connections, while Edward's brother John had bought Fineshade Abbey in Northamptonshire. Somerford established a focus for this junior branch of the Monckton family. Edward's mother, Jane, the dowager Viscountess Galway, was buried in Brewood church in 1788, and so were Edward himself and Sophia in due course, and in 1840 Edward's younger sister Mary Boyle, Countess of Cork and Orrery. Monckton took a leading part in county life from the outset, becoming a Justice of the Peace and an officer in the Staffordshire Yeomanry, which he joined as Lieutenant-Colonel when it was raised on 20 September 1794, and which he commanded as Colonel from March 1800 until his retirement aged 86 in December 1829.Capt P.C.G. Webster, The Records of the Queen's Own Royal Regiment of Staffordshire Yeomanry, Lichfield: Lomax, 1870, pp. 2–72; Appendix.
The Somerford estate had been bought in 1734 for £5,400 by Robert Barbor, of the Inner Temple, and he had erected a substantial Georgian house. Barbor had also bought the manor of Coven in 1744 and joined it with Somerford. Coven was rapidly transformed by the building of the turnpike road in the 1760s and the construction of the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal around 1770. Despite these economic advantages, Robert Barbor's descendants seem to have got into financial difficulties and were several times in danger of losing the house before Monckton bought it.Victoria County History – A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 5: East Cuttlestone hundred, L. Margaret Midgley (editor), 1959, chapter 8: Brewood, Section 3: Manors The purchase of the Hall brought him both the manor of Somerford and that of Coven, together making up the south-eastern corner of Brewood parish.
Brewood parish was at that time an intensely conservative area, dominated by the Giffard family of Chillington Hall, a short distance south-west of Somerford. The Giffards were wealthy and had large holdings in land, but as Roman Catholics were excluded from public office by the Penal Laws, so their direct power never matched their influence. Most of their tenantry were Catholic too, while the other landowners and farmers were mainly Tory High Churchmen, worshipping at the parish Church of St. Mary and St. Chad, where they dominated the vestry. Monckton was an improving landlord with innovative schemes.
Monckton soon set about improving the house, having a large porch built and stucco applied to the walls. He planted large numbers of trees to replace the timber taken by the previous cash-strapped owners and then built or refurbished large numbers of farm buildings. A waterworks was installed on the nearby River Penk to bring water to the house, where it was stored in a rooftop reservoir, and the surplus from the system was run out into the gardens and grounds to water flowers and strawberry beds.
Monckton's improving zeal soon brought him into conflict with his neighbours, as the road from Brewood to Wolverhampton passed close to Somerford Hall and through its grounds, which Monckton was reforesting and improving. At a hotly contested vestry meeting in 1781 he tried to have it routed further south, to cross the Penk at Somerford Mill. The existing bridge at that point was of good quality but suitable only for foot traffic, and its maintenance was Monckton's responsibility. It emerged that, even if he paid for a new route, the cost of maintaining a new carriage bridge might in future fall on the parish, which the other members of the vestry refused to countenance. Later Monckton came up with a compromise scheme. He agreed to divert the road to the north of his property instead and paid for the construction of a new, straighter section to Four Ashes, on the main turnpike road between Wolverhampton and Stafford.
Monckton soon began to extend his property interests in the area, buying several more estates in Brewood parish. First seems to have been Aspley, a small estate near Coven, on the bank of the canal, which he acquired shortly after Somerford itself. In 1780 he leased the Deanery Manor of Brewood from the Dean of Lichfield Cathedral, giving him land and houses around the centre of the town: this land was to remain leased by the Monckton family until 1903, after which they bought it outright. Monckton bought Engleton Hall, on the Penk north of Somerford, in 1785. Engleton Hall was intended as a home for Monckton heirs, starting with his son, also called Edward, but it was later let as a farm. With it came Brewood Hall, a substantial 17th century house on the eastern edge of Brewood, which Monckton earmarked in a jointure as a home for his wife after his death: in fact, Sophia never moved into it. The purchase did not include all of the Engleton estate, which had been divided in two as long ago as the 14th century, and Monckton was not able to purchase the rest of it until 1811.
MP for Stafford