Wednesday 27 November 2013
330 Sir John Salusbury-Trelawny
Constituency : Tavistock 1843-52, 1857-65, East Cornwall 1868-85
Sir John was a Cornish baronet. He was educated at Westminster and Cambridge and became a barrister in 1841 but never actually practised. He entered Parliament for Tavistock in 1843 but over time his liberal views on religion including support for disestablishment , the Maynooth grant and Sunday trading alienated some of his support and he felt obliged to stand down in 1852. He fought Brighton, Liskeard and Bedford before opinion had moved on enough for Tavistock to accept him back in 1857 with the support of the Duke of Bedford.
Sir John was a radical. He campaigned for franchise extension and the ballot. Although an Anglican himself he took up the Nonconformist Liberation Society's cause of abolition of church rates and managed to persuade Tavistock parish to make the payments voluntarily in advance of national legislation to that effect. His position as champion of the Nonconformists and mastery of parliamentary procedure made him an important backbench figure always consulted by the whips. He introduced annual bills on abolition from 1858 to 1863 when he became uncomfortable with the militancy of the Society's parliamentary committee chairman C J Foster.
Sir John kept a detailed parliamentary diary between 1858 and 1865 which is a valuable source for Palmerston's second ministry illustrating the dilemma for radical MPs in that Parliament. He himself became a warm admirer of Palmerston - "what a slave to his duty" - and won his vote for abolition of church rates from 1859 onwards. In turn John became increasingly lukewarm about parliamentary reform and expressed alarm about Gladstone's 1864 speech on the subject.
In the 1860s Sir John brought in bills to allow atheists to give sworn evidence in court rebuffing his critics with the desire " to sin with Hobbes and Bentham". In 1864 he was largely responsible for the initial Contagious Diseases Act. The following year he again felt obliged to surrender Tavistock after local criticism of his support for Sunday museum opening and pubs remaining free to open on a Sunday.
Sir John returned for East Cornwall in 1868 but thereafter was quieter and more conservative defending the principles of the Contagious Diseases Act against mounting criticism.
He died in 1885 aged 69.
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