Читать книгу Crap MPs - Dr. Grosvenor Bendor - Страница 8

(1721–76) Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, 1744–7

Before the Parliamentary Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 abolished corrupt electoral practices, many seats in the House of Commons were controlled by aristocrats simply for the benefit of their sons. Sometimes a peer’s son was made an MP to give him something to do, with the Commons seen as a political nursery before assuming the responsibilities of a seat in the House of Lords. In the case of Robert Carteret, however, the Commons was his nursery in the fullest possible sense of the word, for he was completely mad.

His insanity was well known even before he was elected MP at the age of just twenty-three. Once, while a guest at Woburn Abbey, he suddenly woke his hosts, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, at five in the morning, covered in blood. He held up his coat, and presented them with a great mass of horses’ ears. A guest wrote: ‘He had been in the [Duke’s] stable and cropped all the horses.’ According to another contemporary, Carteret was ‘deficient in his intellects, fond of low company, profuse, fickle and debauched’. He spent most his time wandering aimlessly in St James’s Park, dressed in the garment of a groom or a coachman.

Nevertheless, his father, Earl Granville, was determined that he should represent the family in the Commons, and he was elected for Yarmouth in 1744. There is no record of Carteret ever speaking in debates, and he seems to have figured out how to vote only once, in 1746. He stood down at the 1747 general election. He did manage to marry one Molly Paddock, ‘a woman of vile extraction, bold, loose, and vulgar’, but evidently did not succeed in working out the rest, for he died without issue in 1776, the last of his line.