Brabourne, Lord
Address: Mersham Hatch, Nr Ashford, Kent, Ashford
Occupation: Former Member of Parliament for Sandwich
Called on: Day 20
Witness Type: Other
Party: Liberal
Known as Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen before becoming a peer, he was questioned about his knowledge of the borough as its former MP, a seat he had held since 1857.
Testified that he found it very much abused now and would have liked to have said a word or two to show that there was some good in it. Stated that “Such a thing as theft in Deal or Walmer is almost unknown. They are as honest a race of men as you will find anywhere, and I do not believe that the bribery and corruption, which has proved to exist, ever would have existed if there had not been very great temptation held out to the people by men of superior position, who are more to blame than the poor men themselves.”
Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen was one of the two Liberal Members of Parliament for Sandwich, a seat he had held since 1857.
He was admitted to the Privy Council in 1873 and raised to the peerage in 1880 as Baron Brabourne, of Brabourne in the County of Kent, following the April election of that year, an event which resulted in the subsequent by-election investigated here.
Shortly after becoming a peer he joined the Conservative party, citing his opposition to the interventionist policies of Radicals like Joseph Chamberlain.
He wrote many well-known short stories of fantasy and faery, producing a book or two of these popular stories each year from 1869 to 1894. JR Tolkien recalled them as his childhood bedtime reading.
Brabourne also edited the first edition of the novelist Jane Austen's letters, published in 1884. This edition included about two-thirds of her surviving letters, and was dedicated to Queen Victoria. He inherited the letters after his mother's death in December 1882.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Knatchbull-Hugessen,_1st_Baron_Brabourne.
