Background
James Robert George Graham was born in 1792, the son of Sir James Graham and Lady Catherine Stewart, daughter of John, seventh Earl of Galloway. He was raised at Netherby, in Eskdale, in northern England.
James Robert George Graham was born in 1792, the son of Sir James Graham and Lady Catherine Stewart, daughter of John, seventh Earl of Galloway. He was raised at Netherby, in Eskdale, in northern England.
He was taught at a private school at Daldston, in Cumberland. At age 15, he was sent to Westminster School. In 1810 he enrolled at Christ Church, Oxford, but he left in 1812 to tour Spain and Sicily.
While traveling abroad, he was asked to become the private secretary of Lord Archibald Montgomerie, who was on a diplo-matic mission at Palermo to dissuade King Joachim Murat from supporting Napoleon. Montgomerie became ill during this mission, and much of the responsibility for diplomatic negotiations fell on Graham’s shoulders.
In 1818 he won the Hull seat in the general election, at a cost of £6,000. His political career was slow to gather momentum. He became M.P. for St. Ives, in Cornwall, in 1820, but opposed by some of the ratepayers, he retired in 1821 to attend to his father’s estates at Crofthead, near Netherby. While indulging in these activities he produced a pamphlet entitled Corn and Currency, which pointed to the failure of the protective Corn Laws to regulate prices and to the need for both free trade and free banking. He inherited the Netherby estates on his father’s death in 1824; and in 1826 he was returned as a Whig/Liberal candidate for Carlisle, in an election noted for a riot that Graham helped defuse. In 1827 he was returned as M.P. for the county of Cumberland. However, he did not begin to make a mark for himself until 1830, when he moved to reduce the official salaries of government ministers and of privy councillors—a motion of no confidence in the government. The Duke of Wellington’s government fell; and in November 1830, Lord Grey, the newly appointed Whig prime minister, gave Graham the post of Lord of the Admiralty. In this role Graham focused on fiscal reform of the Admiralty. He continued in this post through the turbulent period that surrounded the passage of the Great Reform Bill of 1832.
When the Grey ministry fell, Peel offered Graham a position in his new Tory administration—a sure sign that Graham’s political position was shifting. He refused the post but did attack some of his former Whig colleagues in the general election of 1835. At this point he seemed to have returned to the House of Commons as an Independent rather than a Whig or Tory; but soon after, he moved across the floor of the Commons to the Conservative opposition benches, to challenge Lord Melbourne’s new Whig government. His conversion to Toryism was complete when, in September 1841, he accepted Peel’s offer of the post of home secretary, having just been elected to represent the constituency of Dorchester in Parliament.
Graham was home secretary for the entire period of Peel’s ministry, from 1841 to 1846.
Out of office, Graham was attacked by the protectionist Conservatives, and was loath to return to his Whig roots. As a Peelite he was part of a small band who sat in the opposition benches, across from the Whig government of Lord John Russell. In 1847 Russell offered Graham the governor-generalship of India. He refused it and remained in the House of Com- tnons, as M.R for Ripon. He also refused the possibility of a post at the Admiralty. After Peel’s death (from 1850 on), he was effectively leader of the Peelites. In this role he was courted by Russell and his Whig government, especially in its opposition to the protectionist moves being advocated by Benjamin Disraeli and the Conservatives; but he declined various offers, including the presidency of the Board of Trade.
Lord Derby, the fourteenth Earl, and the Conservatives came to office in 1852, and Graham returned to the opposition benches, becoming, once again, M.P. for the Carlisle seat. However, when Derby’s government was defeated and replaced by Lord Aberdeen’s coalition government, Graham took up his old post at the Admiralty, to work on improving administrative efficiency. In this role he was responsible for appointing Sir Charles Napier as commander of the British fleet in the Baltic, with orders to block the Russian fleet from access to the Crimean battle zone. Although Napier was unhappy at his relative inactivity, and the Aberdeen government was criticized for the problems and failures that accompanied the Crimean adventure, Graham seems to have escaped most of the criticism. He remained in his post in the government of Lord Palmerston, which was formed in 1855, but resigned soon afterward, along with William Ewart Gladstone, in protest against the establishment of a committee of inquiry into the prosecution of the Crimean War while the war was still being fought.
From then on, Graham played a limited role in politics. His health was suffering, and he was gready upset by his wife’s death in 1857. He died at Nerherby on 25 October 1861.
Returning to London in 1814, Graham declared himself a Whig, committed to constitutional reform, in contrast to his father, who was a Tory.
He was not, and will not be, remembered as a talented politician or an outstanding home secretary; he was far too contentious. Nevertheless, he was an efficient administrator and one of the great reformers of the Admiralty in the early and mid-nineteenth century.
In 1819 he married Fanny, the daughter of Colonel Callander of Craigforth in Stirlingshire, Scotland.