Bloomsbury Square, and its immediate surroundings, have long been associated with prominent political figures. In 1706, several peers had residences in the square, notably the (2nd) duke of Bedford and the earls of Northampton and Chesterfield. Close neighbours residing in Great Russell Street, were the duke of Montagu (whose house later became the British Museum), the earl of Thanet and Lord Haversham, and John Hough, at that point bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. By 1727, things had changed somewhat. Montagu was still living in Great Russell Street, now joined by William Baker, bishop of Bangor, shortly after translated to Norwich. But Northampton’s heir had left Bloomsbury Square for Grosvenor Street, though another house had been taken by the earl of Nottingham. [Jones, ‘London Topography’]

Jump forward half a century, and Bloomsbury Square remained a place closely associated with the aristocracy. It was still home to the (5th) duke of Bedford and he had been joined by one of the foremost legal minds of the time: William Murray, earl of Mansfield, who had moved there from Lincoln’s Inn Fields a few years previously. According to Mansfield’s biographer, the square ‘conveyed a delightful atmosphere of leisure and repose, where often the only sounds came from the twittering and chirping of birds’. [Poser, 167] In June 1780, this ‘delightful’ haven was to be turned on its head and Mansfield’s residence was to become one of the principal targets of the Gordon rioters, who flocked to the square on the night of 6/7 June determined to torch the place.

Much has been written about the Gordon riots, which brought London (and other cities) to a virtual standstill for several days in June 1780. The immediate cause was the Protestant Association’s petition calling for the repeal of the 1778 Catholic Relief Act. Having gathered in St George’s Fields on Friday 2 June, members of the Association, led by their president, Lord George Gordon, processed to Parliament to present the petition. While things had begun calmly enough, in the course of the day more unruly elements flocked to Westminster and MPs and members of the Lords found themselves besieged within their chambers.

Thus, what began as a relatively focused cause was soon taken over by general lawlessness, and as Bob Shoemaker and Tim Hitchcock have argued persuasively, many of those involved in the later stages of the rioting had as their target the criminal justice system itself and were far less driven by concerns about religion. [Hitchcock and Shoemaker, 346, 349-50] Consequently, several prisons were attacked and the inmates released; lawyers in and around the inns of court went in fear of assault (or worse) and prominent judges, like Mansfield, became very obvious targets. The fact that Mansfield had also been vocal in his support of the Catholic Relief Act made him doubly susceptible.

Mansfield had been singled out for special treatment even on that first day. Arriving at Westminster, his carriage had been attacked and he had had to be rescued by the archbishop of York. After the day’s proceedings were adjourned, Mansfield was forced to make his way out of the Lords via a back door and travelled home by river as his coach had since been torn to pieces.

Over the next few days rioting gripped London. By Tuesday 6 June Mansfield’s nephew (and eventual heir) David, 7th Viscount Stormont, felt the need to advise the officer commanding the guards in London that he had received ‘reliable information’ that several houses were in need of additional protection, among them those of the marquess of Rockingham and Mansfield. [TNA, SP37/20/54, ff. 76-6] Despite Stormont’s efforts, Mansfield himself decided that too visible a military presence might only infuriate the crowd, so he requested the guards remain at a distance. It was a fatal mistake. When a band of rioters arrived outside Mansfield’s house on the night of 6/7 June, they found it undefended and set to work pulling down the railings before breaking into the house itself. There, they gave vent to all their destructive power, burning his library and gutting the building. Mansfield and Lady Mansfield only narrowly escaped, by using the back door onto Southampton Row.

Mansfield’s losses were significant. Consigned to the flames were his own legal notebooks, along with his library and pretty much the entire contents of the house. Efforts to save the building were stymied because when firefighters arrived on the scene, they refused to get involved until the soldiers (who had by then made themselves known) withdrew, in case they got caught in the middle of fighting between the crowd and the troops.

According to one paper, Mansfield’s losses amounted to £30,000, the library constituting a third of the total. [Morning Chronicle, 9 June 1780] Another paper attributed the destruction to Mansfield’s own ‘ill-judged lenity’, after he had ‘humanely requested [the troops] not fire upon the deluded wretches’. The same paper detailed some of the irreplaceable items that had been destroyed, including a portrait of Viscount Bolingbroke by the poet, Alexander Pope, ‘which, though not having the merit of a professed artist, was always esteemed a great likeness’. [Whitehall Evening Post, 10-13 June 1780]

The tragedy of the Gordon Riots and its impact on Bloomsbury Square did not end on 7 June. Precisely how many people were killed and injured in the rioting remains unclear, but among the rioters well over 300 were killed. Some troops were also among the dead, one of them a cavalrymen posted in Bloomsbury Square, who came off his horse and was finished off by the crowd. [Whitehall Evening Post, 8-10 June 1780] Retribution for some of those involved came quickly and within days there were numerous arrests. By the end of the month the first trials were underway.

As was so often the case, it was the very recognizable among the most marginalized who ended up being handed in. One such was John Gray, whose case has been written about extensively. A native of Taunton in Somerset, who had made his way to London, Gray was one of many on the fringes of society, eking out a living by feeding horses for hackney carriages. [London Courant, 24 July 1780] Although described as ‘a stout made man’, he appears to have had a clubfoot and to have needed a crutch to walk. He seems also to have had mental health issues. He stood out in the crowd taking part in pulling apart one of Mansfield’s outhouses and a few days later was arrested after being spotted trying to pick someone’s pocket.

Gray was convicted at the Old Bailey (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/) and, in spite of a petition for mercy subscribed by several prominent Taunton residents, one of them the chaplain to Lord Bathurst, [TNA, [SP37/21/132, f. 250] and other recommendations that his case was one worthy of the king’s consideration, [TNA, SP37/21/91] the appeals for clemency were rejected. On Saturday 22 July, he was conveyed back to Bloomsbury Square with two others and hanged on a gallows positioned so that their last view was the remains of Mansfield’s burnt-out former residence.

RDEE

Further reading:
Clyve Jones, ‘The London Topography of the Parliamentary Elite: addresses for peers and bishops for 1706 and 1727-8’, London Topographical Record, xxix (2006)
Norman S. Poser, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (2013)
Tim Hitchcock and Bob Shoemaker, London Lives: poverty, crime and the making of a modern city 1690-1800 (2015)

The recent increase in the number of disabled people in Britain – who have a physical or mental health impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on their ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities – to almost one in four (24%) or 16 million people, means that the salience of disability in the public life is growing. This is reflected in greater attention to improving accessibility and inclusion for disabled persons in political discourse (e.g., in the context of the Restoration and Renewal programme) and through legislation (e.g., the British Sign Language Act 2022; Mental Health Bill 2022-23).

There are also frequent calls from disability rights campaigners to improve political representation of disabled people in the House of Commons to bring the composition of the House closer to that of the British population – with only 5 MPs (0.8%) out of 650 having declared themselves disabled at the last General Election, though it rose to 8 MPs (1.2%) by 2022. This aims to normalise the presence of disability in a political space by making it more visible and strengthen recognition of political rights of disabled persons in line with the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). It would also improve quality of legislation and policy making by enabling disabled persons to feed into these processes directly rather than through intermediaries. Achieving these aims relies on politicians being open about their physical and mental health impairments, and this is a big ask in the context of a national, elected legislature.

There are several reasons why Members of Parliament may be unwilling or unable to be more open about their disabilities. They stem from their relationships with the world outside Parliament (e.g., their constituents, the media and wider public) and with their political parties, as well as their desire to protect privacy on a personal matter on health and wellbeing.

Starting from the pre-parliamentary stage of political careers, Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs) are reluctant to declare disability for fear of electoral penalty resulting from commonly held stereotypes around disability and even ‘openly expressed prejudices’. Expectations of prejudice are not unfounded and resonates with experiences of PPCs of being pitied and treated as weak or incapable during the selection process and on the campaign trail. Interestingly, evidence from experimental research casts doubt in the prevalence of the public’s perception of physically disabled candidates as incompetent. Rather, they are seen as more honest, compassionate, and hard-working than non-disabled candidates. Despite these encouraging insights, the recent rise in abusive and intrusive behaviours towards politicians, whereby four out of five MPs reported experiencing such behaviours in 2015, is likely to be particularly detrimental to disabled persons as ‘experience or threat of harassment, stalking or violence may lead to profound psychological effects, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, fear, anxiety, and avoidant behaviour’. The rise in such inappropriate behaviours has been partly associated with the increase of exposure of politicians to less regulated channels of communication such as social media and other online interactions.

Political parties – both in constituency and in Parliament – are a support network and occasionally an obstacle for disabled politicians, with experiences of resourcing, accessibility and attitudes varying greatly between and within political parties and for candidates with different types of impairments. Once elected, a parliamentary party becomes a source of support and guidance for a Member, with whips undertaking both managerial and pastoral duties with regards to their Members. On the one hand, this makes them the most obvious source of support for disabled Members (alongside the Members’ Services). On the other hand, parliamentarians may be reluctant to mention their physical or mental health conditions to them and risk affecting career progression and ministerial promotion prospects. That said, there is a sense of the House starting to ‘open up’ to issues around disability, and Members (especially in safer seats, or who plan to stand down) starting to talk publicly about their mental health, neurodivergence, life-changing illnesses, and their personal experiences more broadly (e.g., Sir Charles Walker MP, Emma Lewell-Buck MP, Amy Callaghan MP, Olivia Blake MP).

This greatly depends on a Member’s willingness to come forward and self-identify as disabled, even if they have a visible, medically diagnosed impairment, as the threshold for doing so is high in the context of the House of Commons and British electoral politics. In addition to the practical concerns mentioned above, disabled parliamentarians have different relationships with and understanding of their health conditions. For example, while some of them such as Robert Halfon MP dislike ‘the tag’ and prefer ‘differently-abled’, others such as Marsha de Cordova MP self-identify as disabled. There is similar variation in self-identification between Members with less visible impairments (e.g., dyslexia, dyspraxia, obsessive compulsive disorder), with some of them describing themselves as disabled (e.g., Emma Lewell-Buck MP) and some talking about management of mental health conditions in a social context without referring to a disability (e.g., Sir Charles Walker MP). Indeed, such conditions may or may not be disabling. Depending on their experiences and perception of their health conditions, parliamentarians may not consider it relevant or necessary to declare themselves disabled, with this data being private, special category data as recognised under the General Data Protection Regulation.

While there are good practical reasons and public benefit to increasing the number of disabled parliamentarians in the House of Commons – and encouraging Members to be more open about disabilities, equally, there are obstacles that discourage them. These stem from Members’ desire to protect their private lives, especially in the context of practical concerns as to how this may affect their career progression, and how their voters, the media and the wider public will respond.

Dr Ekaterina (Katya) Kolpinskaya

Parliamentary Academic Fellow, the House of Commons Centre of Excellence for Procedural Practice Lecturer in British Politics, University of Exeter.

Many of the issues discussed in this blog on the experience of MPs and why many may be unwilling or unable to be more open about their disabilities are also found in the History of Parliament’s oral history interviews with past MPs.

You can find the Victorian Commons’ blog on Henry Fawcett, the first completely blind MP, here: https://victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2018/07/19/mp-of-the-month-henry-fawcett-1833-84/

In his interview for the History of Parliament oral history project, Sir John Hannam (MP for Exeter 1970-97) referred in detail to his extensive activities campaigning for disability rights, especially in his role as an officer of the All Party Disablement Group (APDG) (now known as the All-Party Group Parliamentary Group for Disability).

Alf Morris (MP for Manchester Wythenshawe 1964-97) and Jack Ashley (MP for Stoke-on-Trent South 1966-1992) were instrumental in setting up the APDG in 1969. Two years earlier Ashley had suffered the total loss of his hearing: “I was plunged into a new, blank world … whenever I walked into the Chamber I was struck by the absolute silence of the greatest debating forum in the land.” When Morris won first place the Private Member’s Bill ballot in 1969, Morris consulted Ashley about tabling a Bill concerned with disability rights. In 1970  the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act entered the statute book, and in 1974 Morris became the first Minister for the Disabled in the world.

Hannam described the APDG as “the strongest backbench lobby group [Parliament] had ever had.” The records of the APDG testify to the range of issues the group tackled and also serve as a record of the many individuals and organisations from outside Parliament whose expertise and commitment to the rights of the disabled helped the APDG to drive legislation forward.

This is where I first came across the name of Dr Margaret Agerholm when she is listed among the attendees of the 1984 meeting to discuss the Oglesby report. She was there in her capacity as chair of a working party at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. The minutes of the meeting indicate she was a long-standing actor in this parliamentary sphere, referring to her earlier association with Sir Hugh Rossi (MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, 1966-83) during Rossi’s time as Minister for Social Security during the early 1980s. The minutes also give a sense of Agerholm’s forthright criticism of any inadequacies she identified in public policy for the disabled, contradicting Rossi over what she considered the “poor quality of the review and its report.”

This was someone who was evidently recognised as an expert in her field and confident about the contribution she brought to discussions about advancing disability rights, yet I was surprised to find very little information about her online. What follows shows how the History of Parliament’s collection of interviews with former MPs can kick-start research into many aspects of twentieth-century parliamentary history. Who exactly was Margaret Agerholm and where does she fit into our understanding of British disability history?

I began with a search of Google Scholar. From early work with Professor Josep Trueta into the epidemiology and prevention of polio she developed into a leading and practical authority on the rehabilitation of disabled people. In a 1964 talk she explained that with polio “we were faced with an appalling accumulation of severely disabled, but still alert and enterprising, people, for whose problems standard rehabilitation practice was not always adequate.”

The title of that talk, ‘Helping the Disabled to Live to Capacity’, sums up what I went on to discover about Agerholm’s working life and personal ethos. Thanks to one of those enterprising people I found another reference to her online. Geoff Webb had contracted polio in 1959 and made a recording about adjusting to life as a disabled person which is part of the British Library’s Disability Voices collection. “The Nuffield was a very different kettle of fish to the acute ward I had been in. It was human and everybody was so kind and understanding. Dr Margaret Agerholm was in charge of polio patients and her one mission in life was to get people like me back into society. Within a few weeks she had me getting in and out of bed using hydraulic power instead of a troop of nurses. She lost no time in making me work out plans to set up home on my own.”

I made further headway when I found a brief mention of Agerholm in the philosopher Mary Midgley’s memoir, since Midgley and Agerholm were both students at Somerville College, Oxford University in the late 1930s.

However it was a few random messages to Twitter users called Agerholm where I struck lucky, connecting with Agerholm’s daughter who was delighted to show me boxes of her mother’s papers. From those papers and her daughter’s stories a clear picture of this impressive medical woman has emerged: intelligent, compassionate, determined – an independent thinker whose work transformed the lives of many disabled people.  

Margaret Agerholm (née Myers), born 1917, was known as Greta to her family and friends. At Somerville they included Midgley, Mary Pickard (née Cozens-Hardy), Pamela Schiele and Anne Cobbe (Cobbe later became godmother to one of Agerholm’s sons). Agerholm, Midgley, Cozens-Hardy and Cobbe had all been schoolgirls at Downe House where they were taught History by an old Somervillian, Jean Rowntree. Pickard remembered that “at that time it was considered the natural thing for anyone with sufficient academic gifts to take Somerville entrance in History”, the subject in which Agerholm began her undergraduate studies in 1936. However within a year she had decided she didn’t agree with the way History was being taught and switched to medicine, despite her limited science education. According to her daughter, “she had to teach herself science” and did it so successfully that in 1942 she won the John Radcliffe Clinical Prize.

Letters of recommendation during Agerholm’s early career describe her as an outstanding student, highly intelligent and industrious with a quiet and amusing sense of humour: “she is a woman of strong character, and clear ideas which she has no hesitation in expressing.” One of her first roles was as a graduate assistant in the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and it was there that she met her husband John Agerholm, a Danish orthopaedic surgeon, whom she married in 1945. They had three children before the marriage ended in divorce in the mid-1950s.

By then Agerholm was working as a lecturer at the Nuffield. She continued collaborating with Trueta and led on the design, establishment and running of Mary Marlborough Lodge, a dedicated disabled living research unit which opened in 1960. Her patients included around 70 children referred to the unit who had been severely affected by thalidomide.

It was during this time that she worked with Elizabeth Hollings, the Nuffield’s head occupational therapist, and Wanda Williams, warden of the Mary Marlborough Lodge, to produce Equipment for the Disabled: An Index of Aids and Ideas. The index was designed to allow patients and their families to choose for themselves the options which might be the most helpful.

In 1965 Agerholm moved from Oxford to Surrey, taking up consultant positions at Banstead Place Rehabilitation Centre and with the Inner London Education Authority. In the latter part of her career she worked at Henan House, a residential rehabilitation centre attached to St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney.

As her experience broadened, Agerholm became convinced of the need to develop a classification and nomenclature of handicap. She saw a universal language as essential in breaking down barriers of communication between medical and social service professionals while enabling disabled people to access the benefits and services to which they were entitled. She also saw it as an important element in the drafting of effective insurance and legal documentation.

Agerholm promoted her publications across her network of professionals, practitioners and policy-makers, notifying MPs such as Alf Morris and arguing her case in the journals of the Medico-Legal Society, the Royal Society of Health and at seminars such as one hosted by the Department for Health and Social Security. Her papers contain correspondence with a wide range of MPs (many of whom belonged to the APDG), civil servants in Whitehall and campaigning organisations, and annotated copies of Hansard debates demonstrate the attention she paid to every change in the relevant legislation.

She understood where influence lay, communicating vigorously with those who could potentially effect positive change for the disabled – her neighbours remembered “the strangely comforting clatter of her typewriter next door, at all hours of the day and night!” Her story illuminates the vast network of experts that support and inform the work of parliamentarians in developing and changing public policy. As her friend Pickard wrote, she was “candid in her criticisms.” Letters published in peer-reviewed journals demonstrate how her detailed knowledge of the provision of services for the disabled enabled her to point out where government decisions were failing rather than improving her patients’ situations.  

Agerholm also had aspirations to shape politics from the inside. She was a long-standing member of the Liberal Party, and ran as a Liberal candidate in her local elections in 1976. Yet she did not need political office to transform the lives of those she cared for. Tributes received on her death in 1986 indicate the extent of her dedication and influence. “Her professional expertise, courage, forthrightness, dislike of petty officialdom and the warmth of her personality made her an unforgettable person.” “A Herculian authority in this field of rehabilitation and her pioneer work helped to establish it as a reputable and scientifically based speciality.” “A tireless campaigner, never afraid to offend those in authority by her plain speaking and totally without any sort of personal ambition.”

Dr Margaret Agerholm, b. 27 November 1917, d. 25 December 1986.

With many thanks to Margaret Agerholm’s family and the archivists at Somerville College and Oxfordshire Health Archives for their assistance.

Further reading

Margaret Agerholm, ‘Helping the Disabled to Live to Capacity’, British Council for Rehabilitation of the Disabled (1964).

Margaret Agerholm, ‘The Changing Character of Disability, 1972’, Physiotherapy, 58(9) (1972).

Jack Ashley, Journey into Silence (1973).

‘Trueta: Surgeon in War and Peace’: the memoirs of Josep Trueta, MD, FRCS, DSc, tr. Meli and Michael Strubell (1980).

Writing in the late 1590s to his sister-in-law, the dowager Lady Stourton, Secretary of State Sir Robert Cecil observed that it was ‘the fashion of the court and London … to laugh at all deformities’. Cecil’s young daughter, Frances, had inherited from her father a twisted spine, a condition known as scoliosis. Cecil’s back was slightly hunched and consequently his stature was shortened. (It was probably his right side that was affected, as most portraits depict him tilted slightly to his left.) Having no wish for Frances to be subjected to ridicule, Cecil paid £100 to a physician to remedy her condition.

Cecil was one of the leading political figures of his day. Following the death of his father Lord Burghley in 1598, he became Elizabeth I’s chief minister, a position he continued to hold under Elizabeth’s successor, James I. Nevertheless, his scoliosis made him an easy target for his political enemies, chief among them the supporters of his main rival, Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex. In the late 1590s Antonio Pérez, a Spanish exile who formed part of Essex’s circle, derided Cecil as ‘microgibbus’, meaning small, rounded hump. At around the same time another of the earl’s supporters was reported to have said that it was ‘an unwholesome thing to meet a man in the morning that hath … a crooked back’. Cecil’s deformity continued to excite distaste even after his death in 1612, when he was likened by some critics to the murderous king, Richard III, whose famous hunchback was inextricably linked to his crimes in the public mind (‘… two Crookbacks of late ruled England’s helm / The one spilt the Royal blood, the other Spoiled the Realm’). One of the few men to question the spite directed at Cecil for his bodily affliction was Cecil’s cousin, Sir Francis Bacon. In an essay published shortly after Cecil’s death, Bacon argued that those who mocked the physically disabled did so at their peril. In part this was because those subjected to such ridicule had a strong motive to uncover and expose their tormentors’ weaknesses. However, it was also because those afflicted with a physical disability might easily steal a march on their able-bodied rivals, who all too often failed to take them seriously. Indeed, Bacon concluded that ‘deformity is an advantage to rising’.

The derision directed at Cecil was not confined to the secretary’s political enemies. Even Elizabeth I joined in the fun, terming Cecil her ‘pygmy’ and ‘dwarf’. Outwardly at least, Cecil claimed not to mind being thus described by the queen, but significantly he never used either term when referring to himself. By comparison, Cecil warmly embraced the epithet ‘little beagle’ conferred upon him by Elizabeth’s successor, James I. (In one letter Cecil described his fireplace as ‘a proper place for beagles’. In another, he referred to ‘honest servants and poor beagles’.) The reason for this is understandable. Beagles were associated with James’s favourite pastime, hunting, and ‘beagle’ carried none of the pejorative associations of ‘pygmy’ and ‘dwarf’. On the contrary, the word implied both energy and tenacity.

If James’s nickname for Cecil was devoid of cruelty, it is probably because James himself knew from personal experience just how hurtful ridicule based on physical disability could be. James had long suffered from extremely weak legs. He did not learn to walk until he was five, and at the age of eighteen he was still unsteady on his feet (‘his gait is bad, composed of erratic steps’). By the time he ascended the English throne he often leaned on the man next to him. James’s legs may have been weakened in infancy by rickets. Alternatively, Frederick Holmes, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Kansas, has proposed that James suffered from an hereditary neuro-muscular disorder. Either way, the king was often happiest when he was in the saddle rather than on foot.

Their shared experience of physical disability made Cecil and James kindred spirits, and this shared experience extended to their children. While Cecil tried to shield his daughter Frances from the malice of others, James similarly sought to protect his youngest son, Prince Charles (later Charles I), who was reportedly unable to walk unaided until his seventh year, having inherited his father’s weak legs and ankles. In about 1605, when Charles was still an infant, James accused one of his leading ministers, Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, of having often made ‘cruel and malicious speeches against Baby Charles and his honest father’.

Like Cecil, who turned to the physician Hugh Baylie to help his daughter, James enlisted the services of a specialist. Despite the protests of his governess Lady Carey, a pair of reinforced boots was made for Charles by the London bone-setter, Edward Stuteville. This apparently worked wonders as, according to Sir Anthony Weldon, Charles owed his ability to walk to Stuteville, ‘an excellent artist for strengthening limbs and straightening crooked bodies’. Further improvement followed the death of Charles’s older brother, Prince Henry, in 1612. Acutely aware that he was now the heir-apparent, Charles strained every muscle during his early teenage years to improve his physical strength. As a result of strenuous daily exercise, which included running around the grounds of St James’s Palace with a dozen or so of his servants and regular horse-riding (at which, like his late brother Prince Henry, he excelled), he transformed his physical health.

Charles also adapted to overcome, at least in part, another physical impediment that he had inherited from his father, whose tongue was too large for his mouth, a condition known as macroglossia. According to Weldon, James’s over-large tongue ‘ever made him speak full in the mouth, and made him drink very uncomely’. (Weldon, of course, was a hostile witness, but other contemporaries also remarked upon James’s habit of slobbering.) Evidence that Charles shared the same condition is suggested by the fact that he did not begin to speak until he was two-and-a-half. Moreover, in 1622 the Venetian ambassador remarked that the prince had ‘some impediment through the size and length of his tongue which prevents him from expressing himself freely’. This affliction explains both Charles’s well-known inclination towards brevity and his notorious speech impediment, which many historians have described, incorrectly, as a stammer. Nevertheless, as king, Charles became a lucid speaker even if he never fully overcame his dysfluency. Whether Frances Cecil, Robert Cecil’s daughter, also achieved in adulthood a similar degree of success in overcoming her physical difficulties is unclear. However, her scoliosis proved no impediment to marriage. In 1610 she wed Henry, Lord Clifford, later 5th earl of Cumberland. She subsequently gave birth to no fewer than five children.

A T

Further reading:

F. Holmes, The Sickly Stuarts: The Medical Downfall of a Dynasty (Sutton Publishing, 2003)

Over the centuries, military veterans will have been a familiar sight at Westminster, especially in the aftermath of international campaigns or civil wars.  In the mid seventeenth century, for instance, maimed and disbanded soldiers or their widows and dependents lobbied Parliament for arrears of pay and for compensation.  Former officers sat in the House.  So too did serving officers, despite the so-called Self Denying Ordinance (April 1645), which attempted for political reasons to exclude them.

In the autumn of 1645, by-elections were held to fill vacancies caused by death or by the expulsion of MPs who had supported King Charles I from the outbreak of war in 1642.  Among parliamentarian loyalists ‘recruited’ to Westminster was Colonel George Thomson.  This new Member for Southwark was something of a celebrity owing to the way in which he had dealt with a disabling wound sustained in combat.  A story circulated in London that when his leg was shot off at the battle of Cheriton (29 March 1644), ‘so far from being discouraged … he said he had another leg to lose for Jesus Christ’ (The Journal of Thomas Juxon, ed. D. Lindley and D. Scott, Camden Society, 5th series, xiii. 49–50).  Fitted with a wooden prosthesis, Thomson lived for another 45 years, during which he put in some dedicated public service.

Even before 1644, Thomson had had an extraordinarily varied and productive life.  In 1623, at 16, this Hertfordshire gentleman’s son went with his siblings to join their eldest brother, Maurice, in Virginia.  At 21 he was a lieutenant in the militia in Elizabeth County and at 22 a member of the Virginian House of Burgesses.  Returning to England around 1630, the brothers developed far-flung business interests extending from Chesapeake Bay to the Caribbean and India, and in commodities including tobacco and silver wire; Maurice, in particular, became extremely wealthy.  Following the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland in 1641, they became procurers of supplies for the troops sent to quell it, and they continued to provide stores to the military through the British civil wars, as well as joining the militia or the army themselves.

George Thomson devoted no less energy to being an MP.  At first one preoccupation was to obtain his arrears of army pay, in what was probably a test case before the House.  He also sat on committees evaluating the claims of other veterans.  However, despite continuing commercial commitments (including beer-trading in Southwark), he soon threw himself into raising money and troops for the war effort.  When in 1647 the Presbyterians and the City of London tried to negotiate peace with the king on their terms, without reference to the New Model Army and the Independents, Thomson and his fellow Southwark MP, distiller George Snelling, mobilised their local militia and opened London Bridge to let the army cross the Thames and seize control of Parliament.  Under the commonwealth (1649–1653) Thomson was an indefatigable member of the navy and the excise commissions, attending day in and day out, reporting detailed budgets to the House and contributing to the reorganisation of the navy that allowed it to win a notable victory against trade rivals the Dutch.

Thomson’s opposition to the setting-up of the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell resulted in the termination of his commissions.  For the next five years he lived in retirement, although the wealth and connections of the Thomson brothers made their expertise and resources valuable to the regime; Robert continued to hold government office and Maurice became governor of the powerful East India Company.  In 1659 George and his youngest brother William Thomson, a London alderman, both sat in the Commons.  Pragmatists, they anticipated the return of the monarchy; the brothers assisted former navy colleague George Monck to bring about the Restoration, helping to ensure the fleet would be loyal to Charles II.

Despite this, for a few years after 1660, the brothers were under suspicion – George, William (still an MP) and Robert because of their real or supposed religious opinions; Maurice because he allegedly supplied naval intelligence to the Dutch.  Samuel Pepys was thus surprised when in 1667 he heard that ‘Thomson with the wooden leg’ was a prospective commissioner of naval accounts (Pepys’s Diary, viii. 569–71).  Within a few weeks George Thomson was in post.  Soon Pepys acknowledged that Thomson was not only ‘mighty kind’ to himself, but also ‘likely to mind our business more than any’ (Pepys’s Diary, ix. 68).  He later found him – apparently characteristically – discovering errors in ships’ logs which other inspectors had missed.  Rehabilitated, the brothers served in the admiralty or in Parliament into old age.

VL