Background
Robert Lowe was born at Bingham, Nottinghamshire, on 4 December 1811, the second son of Robert Lowe, the rector of that parish, and Ellen Pyndar, his wife.
Robert Lowe was born at Bingham, Nottinghamshire, on 4 December 1811, the second son of Robert Lowe, the rector of that parish, and Ellen Pyndar, his wife.
He went to Winchester College in 1825 and then to University College, Oxford, and graduated in 1833. In 1835 he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he became embroiled in the ecclesiastical disputes that divided academics there in the early 1840s.
At the same time as he was teaching students at Oxford, he also was studying law; and in 1842 he was called to the bar at Lincolns Inn. From 1842 to 1850 he practiced law in Sydney, Australia, where he was responsible for ending imprisonment as a penalty for debt. He returned to England in 1850 and began to contribute feature articles for the Times.
He was elected M.P. for Kidderminster in 1852, and held that seat until 1859. He then became M.P. for Caine in the 1859 general election, winning the seat through the influence of Lord Lansdowne, and was offered the vice presidency of the Committee of Council on Education by Lord Palmerston, which effectively meant that he was the governments minister of education.
Free of government responsibility, Lowe found himself in a position to oppose Russell s reform bill of 1866 (which was passed as the parliamentary Reform Bill of 1867). The bill extended the parliamentary vote to some working tnen, provoking Lowe to warn his colleagues of the dangers of uncontrolled, uneducated democracy. He felt that he had been “deceived and betrayed” , for the franchise in the boroughs had become a household franchise, and that in the counties had been reduced to a £12 limit.
Lowe’s own constituency disappeared as a result of the bill, and Lowe subsequently became the first M.P. for the University of London in 1868. He was appointed chancellor of the exchequer on 9 December 1868, in W. E. Gladstone’s government, thus becoming, for the first time, a member of the cabinet. He remained chancellor until 10 August 1873 and was generally considered effective and efficient. His 1869 and 1870 budgets were popular due to their reduction of income tax by a penny on the pound; but Lowe faced strong opposition in the Commons to his idea of introducing a tax of a half-penny per pound on each box of lucifer matches (the United States had introduced a similar tax), and the measure was rejected. In his later budgets he moved to reduce taxes on sugar, to increase income tax allowances, and to further reduce in-come tax. However, his popularity plummeted after he refused to purchase Epping Forest as a national park for the nation. As a result, he resigned the post of chancellor on 9 August 1873 and accepted that of home secretary. The latter appointment was brief, since Gladstone’s ministry was dissolved on 20 February 1874.
Lowe’s career as a leading politician was now at an end. In May 1880, when Gladstone and the Liberals returned to power, he was raised to the House of Lords as Viscount Sherbrooke of Sherbrooke, in Warlingham, Surrey. He was rarely involved in the activities of the House of Lords, and gradually drifted out of the public eye. He died on 27 July 1892 an almost forgotten figure, although there is no denying his political importance and the significance of his controversial work in the 1860s.
He was married to Georgiana Orred.