Brian Thompson - A Monkey Among Crocodiles - The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of Mrs Georgina Weldon – a disastrous Victorian [Text only]

When the dust settled and the vote was finally taken, in a booth festooned with his supporters’ trousers, the Rattler found himself bottom of the poll, bested even by his running mate Fyler.

Then as now, there was no disgrace in failing at your first attempts to enter Parliament. What marked out the Coventry election of 1832 was not just the scale of the rioting, but its aftermath. To the disgust of the Whig Ministry and the outrage of the battered townsfolk, Morgan at once petitioned the House of Commons, contesting the result on the grounds that the electors had been intimidated. This was particularly rich coming from him. In the following year, after the case had been thrown out in Committee, Halcomb, the member for Dover and a fellow lawyer of the Inner Temple, raised the issue on the floor of the House. When they found they could not silence him, the Ministry departed en masse to watch the Boat Race. As he left the Chamber, Ellice was heard to remark of Morgan with awful prescience: ‘That man will never represent Coventry as long as I draw breath.’

The Rattler’s humiliation was complete, but the victors had failed to identify something it would be his daughter’s misfortune to emulate. No shame was too great for a man possessed of manic powers. Morgan Thomas contested Coventry another four times in his life, finally being elected in 1863. His stubbornness was comical, but it was also touching. The Tory interest in Coventry took early pity on him, and he made a second attempt at the seat in the year of Georgina’s birth. Perhaps this time there was slightly more urgent reason to do well and in one sense he was to be admired for putting his head in the lion’s mouth. The Whigs were waiting for him. One of the broadsheets read: ‘And they went to the man Morgan, who is commonly called Tommy the Truckler, because he weareth two faces – one for Cambridge which looketh blue , and one for Coventry which is an orange yellow …’

Again he came bottom of the poll. His supporters softened the blow by presenting him with a Warwickshire watch. He wore it like a campaign medal. Just before the opening of the new Parliament in 1838, Peel invited more than 300 jubilant new Tory members to his London house. Some of them had been Morgan’s contemporaries at Trinity, some he had met through the Inner Temple. Counselled by Peel in small meetings, cajoled, flattered, cosseted and inspired, the new Members were in no doubt they were the breaking wave of an almighty sea change. Three hundred of them fresh from the hustings, shoulder to shoulder in Peel’s house at Whitehall Gardens and surely soon to be the government of the country! Morgan was left on the outside looking in.

His participation in the age was to be more or less confined to such disastrous outings. When the entail on her father’s estate was settled, Louisa’s inheritance would give her husband that small portion of England – a few acres of East Sussex – sufficient to allow him to describe himself as a landed proprietor. Wanting to be the Member for Coventry was a personal and not a political goal: he wanted it because it had been denied to him. His Toryism was of the old-fashioned and reactive kind. What he saw of what was happening around him he did not like and would not join. Yet, behind the hauteur and exasperated bad temper was another more small-minded calculation – for all his disappointments, this was a world in which he did not absolutely have to compete. He was – but only just – a private gentleman. He could not fall; he need not rise. Even as early as 1837, there was a kind of redundancy about his position. He had no friends, the fashionable world outraged him and in his own family he had been made to look a fool, not once but several times.

The search for a place in England appropriate to his idea of himself was too much for him to contemplate. In 1840, he took himself and his wife off to Florence, along with Georgina and a new child, a solemn boy called Morgan Dalrymple. The ostensible reason for their flight was the state of Louisa’s health. In fact, they stayed off and on in Florence for twelve years, and the consequences to Georgina were to be enormous. Nothing blossomed in Florence: a dangerously narrow man took his bitterness with him and, as his children grew up, inflicted it upon them.

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