Career in House of Lords, 1835–1863
In February 1835, Littleton won re-election to the House of Commons as member for Staffordshire Southern – part of a Whig victory that returned Melbourne to power. Shortly afterwards, the new administration raised Littleton to the peerage as Baron Hatherton, of Hatherton in the County of Stafford. Hatherton took his title from a Staffordshire village which at that time was an exclave of Wolverhampton, where Littleton owned Hatherton Hall, a country house that formed part of the Walhouse inheritance. Since he was now constitutionally barred from serving as a member of the House of Commons, his seat had to be contested again in a by-election in May, won by a fellow Whig, Sir Francis Goodricke.
As a peer, Hatherton was automatically a member of the House of Lords and able to make a contribution to parliamentary debate and processes. This he did until the year before his death, although his contributions tailed off considerably after his Address in Answer to the Speech from the Throne in 1847, perhaps for family reasons.
For several years after his elevation to the peerage, Hatherton was closely involved in campaigns to extend the political reforms of the Whig administration. Most important of these initially was municipal reform. Hatherton presented numerous petitions, and took up the cause of several small towns, in the campaign preceding the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. He served on the Lords committee on the bill and was often acerbic in debate, much as he had been on earlier reforms. Key to the measure was the enfranchisement of ratepayers. When the Tory peers rallied to the cause of the freemen, a rather flexible class who dominated the electorate in many towns and cities, Hatherton observed caustically that:
the freemen, generally speaking, were a very inferior class of persons. They need not possess any property, or pay any rates; and in many instances, their residence was principally in gaols. To show the facilities which they afforded for corruption, the noble Lord read various statements of the vast number of persons who had been admitted as freemen just previous to general elections. For such persons the Bill proposed to substitute a class of men who had paid rates for three years. If their Lordships refused to sanction this proposition, he was afraid they would expose themselves to strong observations out of doors, where it was the universal opinion that they had found the class of individuals which the Bill tended to get rid of extremely convenient, and easily to be managed on certain occasions.
When a similar measure was proposed for Ireland in 1838, Hatherton defended it trenchantly in the Lords, taking particular exception to attempts to tamper with the franchise. In a substantial, detailed speech he used his old tactic of marshalling demographic and financial detail to swamp rhetorical argument. Everywhere he perceived possible corruption, he entered his name in the lists against it. So in 1837, for example, we find his name among the six radical Lords wanting to pursue an urgent enquiry into the statutes of the Oxbridge colleges, on the grounds, among others, that the colleges were "of very ancient foundation, and many of their statutes, contemplating a state of society very different from the present, and a religion other than that now established, are totally inapplicable to the present times, and impossible to be observed."
Another cause was the struggle against the Church Rate, the compulsory levy for maintenance of Anglican parish churches that so offended both Catholic and Protestant Dissenters. The Church Rate agitation was part of a wider campaign for reforms of position of the established Church, which broke its monopoly over the recording of births, marriages and deaths in 1837, but poor rates were not made voluntary until 1868, five years after Hatherton's death. In fact, after this disappointment, and especially in the early 1840s, a period of Tory dominance that brought Robert Peel to power, Hatherton's contributions slackened for a time in number and in focus. Without a clear programme of government reforms to promote, he tended to moralise or equivocate.
Hatherton was always a zealous promoter of Lord's Day observance, a cause which united almost all the churches. Both Hatherton and his ecclesiastical allies were at least as concerned with the hours and conditions of the workers as with due decorum on a day of worship. Hatherton presented many petitions on the subject in the 1830s and in 1840 he focussed his attention on the demand for a law to stop Sunday traffic on the canals and railways. Hatherton had a major economic interest in canals, and the Hatherton Canal was only part of the network that served his mines and quarries in Staffordshire. He sought legislation to impose a solution on the canal owners, who would not agree among themselves to a holiday for their workers. This issue preoccupied him for the next two years, gradually shading into arguments about working conditions more generally.
Hatherton made a number of important speeches in the period leading up to Mines and Collieries Act 1842. As a coal-owner, his economic interests were even more closely involved than in the case of the canals. His economic liberalism was thus brought into conflict with his zeal for social reform. A Commission, headed by Lord Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, had investigated conditions in the mines and its proposals for reform included prohibitions on female and child labour underground. Hatherton found himself in the unusual and uncomfortable position of defending the status quo alongside Charles Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, a Tory grandee hated in the mining areas of Northumberland and Durham. However, Hatherton claimed that conditions in the Midland coal mining areas were much better than in the north and portrayed the miners as an aristocracy of labour, with the child labourers as "apprentices". Partly through his intransigence, the age lower limit for boys to work underground was set at ten. On the other hand, Hatherton welcomed a ban on women working in the mines and defended against all attempts to dilute it.
The Railway Mania of the 1840s saw Littleton trying to get to grips with the pace of modernisation. Early in 1845 he spoke at length in support of a petition from the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal Company, attacking predatory pricing by railways. A little later he encouraged people affected by railway development to group together in corporate bodies to defend their joint interests. and speaking in defence of the coastal trade in coal. The following year, however, he was showing a very positive attitude and was advocating a streamlined system for dealing with railway development. In fact, he had informed himself sufficiently to hazard the opinion that broad gauge was the future.
Proposed changes to the Game Act 1831 (1 & 2 Will. 4. c. 32) also gave him a chance to advertise himself as a modern and improving landlord. He proposed removing hares from the status of game, so that tenants might eliminate them from their land and boasted of his near-extermination of hares and rabbits on his own estates: "he could scarcely exaggerate the satisfaction which had resulted from that course, both to himself and to his tenants."
However, the Irish Question was again coming to dominated debate and it had never ceased to be one of Hatherton's major concerns. During the 1830s he had spoken often on Irish matters, steering a tortuous path. On the one hand he supported most of the causes of equality and social reform dear to Irish nationalists. In 1836, for example, we find him defending the suppression of Orange lodges and denouncing the poor representation of Catholics on public bodies. However, he also supported coercive Government measures to suppress disorder, often taking a hardline position. In 1844 Hatherton promoted a reform popular with Irish Catholics: the Charitable Bequests (Ireland) Act, which created a corporate body to accept bequests in favour of the Irish clergy. In so doing, he seized the opportunity to attack the poor provision for Catholic clerical education. This helped stoke the agitation that led to the Maynooth Grant of 1845, with its disastrously divisive consequences for the Tory party.
However, the disaster of the Great Famine soon pushed even these important issues to the periphery. Peel recognised that the famine could not be ended while the Corn Laws, major protective tariffs on food imports, continued in force. Although it had never dominated Hatherton's radicalism, he had long been loyal to the anti-Corn Law cause and had spoken most effectively on the subject when he presented no less than six petitions from Wolverhampton in 1839 There was never any doubt of his support for the repeal of the laws in 1846, a volte-face for the Tory party that split it more disastrously and more permanently than Maynooth and brought down Peel's government. The minority Whig government of John Russell, 1st Earl Russell dealt with the famine, as closely as possible according to laissez-faire principles, through the administrator Charles Trevelyan. He was so preoccupied with a market solution that he restricted relief through public works and forced millions to starve or emigrate.
From August 1846, Parliament was continuously prorogued and the government avoided facing its critics. As 1847 began, the government was forced to think again, and decided to bring in soup kitchens and outdoor relief. Parliament was reconvened on 19 January and the government's revised strategy sketchily outlined to in Speech from the Throne that gave Ireland prominence but wandered across such topics as the marriage of the Spanish Infanta, and problems in Poland and Argentina. As a senior Whig peer, Hatherton rose to make a formal Address in Answer. He immediately stated that the condition of Ireland was topic of "all-absorbing importance" and went on to give a long speech in which all other matters were relegated to a formal mention at the end. He stressed the vast scale of famine and the inadequacy of government attempts to tackle it. He welcomed public works programmes but declared that if they were now pointless or impractical, other means of relieving the famine had to be found. Hatherton stated that his purpose was to "implore their Lordships, in considering this question, to make the case of Ireland their own" and demanded the government treat it exactly as if it had happened in England. He asked the peers to consider what would have been their response if some pest had destroyed England's cotton imports: would they leave Manchester to its own devices? He demanded abolition of all residual restrictions on food imports. The government was proposing to finance relief from future taxes on Ireland. Hatherton rejected this explicitly. What would be the response to a famine in England: would Parliament really expect English landlords to pay thee entire cost of relief. Hatherton made clear that he was not speaking on the government's behalf:
These remarks emanated solely from himself, and had not been made at the suggestion of any party; but he could not have undertaken the duty of proposing the Address to the Crown, unless he had been allowed free license to express his own opinions. Whatever might be the issue of this fearful calamity, one thing was certain, and that was, that it was the bounden duty of all parties, both in England and Ireland, from the highest Minister of the Crown, down to the lowest member of society, to combine, and by every exertion, and by every personal sacrifice, if necessary, to do all in their power to arrest the fearful progress of this giant evil. Let them reflect what would have been the condition of England if the Channel had not existed between the two countries. The consequence to England would then have been as dire as if the calamity had occurred in England itself.
His speech, which had departed far from the usual formal paean to the monarch's words and criticised the central pillar of government policy, elicited considerable outrage. It was the peak of his career as a working peer. From this point, his contributions became briefer and less frequent. This roughly corresponds to the onset of important family bereavements. Hyacinth Anne, his daughter had died in July 1847 after a long struggle against tuberculosis. His wife, Hyacinthe Mary, too became seriously ill, dying at the beginning of 1849. Hatherton served as Lord Lieutenant of Staffordshire between 1854 and 1863—an honorific local post with considerable ceremonial duties that perhaps filled his time as he himself became less able to travel. His last contribution to debate, in 1852, was characteristically trenchant attack on the arrogance of the telegraph companies who inconvenienced residents without notice, and a demand that they pay compensation.
