Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen Brabourne

Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen, 1st Baron Brabourne (29 April 1829 – 6 February 1893), known as E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen, was a British Liberal and later Conservative politician. He served as Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department under Lord Russell in 1866 and under William Ewart Gladstone from 1868 to 1871 and was also Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies under Gladstone from 1871 to 1874. In 1880 he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Brabourne.

Background and education

Born Edward Hugessen Knatchbull, he was the younger son of Sir Edward Knatchbull, 9th Baronet, who twice served as Paymaster General, and his second wife Fanny Catherine Knight, who was a niece of author Jane Austen. In 1849 he assumed by Royal licence the additional surname of Hugessen, which was the maiden surname of his father's mother. Knatchbull-Hugessen was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was President of the Oxford Union. During his Oxford days, he was a strong proponent of agricultural protection, and as President of the Oxford Union in 1850 he helped to instigate the famous three-night-long debate on the motion: ‘That the state of the nation imperatively requires a return to Protection’. The motion was supported by Robert Cecil, the future Prime Minister, and Knatchbull-Hugessen concluded the proposition arguments on 28 February 1850, declaring that:

'From one end of the country to the other, Protection is becoming the glorious watchword of thousands of true Englishmen. To check the tide of revolutionary agitation – to prefer your own countrymen to foreigners – to ameliorate, to vindicate – is not this a high, a national cause?'