Brougham Correspondence - Letters to Charles Hope, Lord Granton, from Henry, Lord Brougham

Letters from Henry Peter, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778-1868) to the Scottish Judge Charles Hope, Lord Granton (1763-1851).

Granton's daughter, Louisa Octavia Hope sent the letters, to the English judge James Plaisted Wilde, 1s t Baron Penzance (1816-1899), in the hope that he would publish them.

The collection includes explanatory notes by Louisa Hope on many of the letters and four letters written by Louisa Hope to Lord Penzance in 1870. There is also a small group of letters addressed to Penzance by various correspondents and a few miscellaneous family letters. Mrs. Middleton's husband, Laurence H.N. Middleton, had a distant family connection with the Wilde family through his cousin, Miss Naomi Whelpton.

The letters in sections 1-3 were transcribed by Eric Collieu and the letters from Brougham to Granton were used by him in an essay on Lord Brougham and the Conservatives in Essays in British History , edited by H.R. Trevor-Roper, London, 1966. Collieu's transcriptions are also included in this collection. Many of the letters are undated and although it is possible to give a fairly accurate date from postmarks and internal evidence, some of the dates must remain approximate. A few of the dates in this list differ slightly from the dates assumed by Collieu. Letters to Brougham from Granton can be found, together with letters from Louisa Hope and from Granton's son, John Hope, Lord Justice Clerk, in the Brougham Papers in the Library (Ref: BROUGHAM).

Comprising letters from:

1. Louisa Hope to James Wilde, Baron Penzance, 1870

2. Brougham to Charles Hope, Lord Granton, 1839-1847

3. Brougham to Granton, 1848-1851

4. Transcripts of letters in the above three files

5. Letters to Penzance, 1824-1892, and miscellaneous letters, [1824]-1912.

Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778 - 1868) was a British statesman who became Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom. As a young lawyer in Scotland, Brougham helped to found the Edinburgh Review in 1802 and contributed many articles to it. He went to London, and was called to the English bar in 1808. In 1810 he entered the House of Commons as a Whig. Brougham took up the fight against the slave trade and opposed restrictions on trade with continental Europe. In 1820 he won popular renown as chief attorney to Queen Caroline, and in the next decade he became a liberal leader in the House. He not only proposed educational reforms in Parliament, but was also one of the founders of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1825 and of the University of London in 1828. As Lord Chancellor from 1830 to 1834 he effected many legal reforms to speed procedure and established the Central Criminal Court. In later years he spent much of his time in Cannes, which he established as a popular resort.

Open

The papers are available subject to the usual conditions of access to Archives and Manuscripts material, after the completion of a Reader's Undertaking.

Mrs. D. Middleton presented the collection the Library in January 1983.

Detailed list available on the online catalogue.

University College London, Special Collections also holds the correspondence and papers of Henry, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (Ref: BROUGHAM), dating from the 1790s to 1866 and comprising a large body of material documenting Brougham's political and other activities, and issues of the day including anti-slavery agitation in the first decades of the 19th century, the "trial" of Queen Caroline in 1820, the Reform Bill of 1832, foundation of the University of London (later University College London), which opened in 1828, and other aspects of educational and legal reform. The correspondence includes letters to and from many prominent political figures.