Henry Chaplin, 1st Viscount Chaplin

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Henry Chaplin in a cartoon accompanying a satirical article on his receiving a deputation on the subject of the swine fever.
Cartoon from Punch magazine Vol. 102, February 13, 1892.

Henry Chaplin, 1st Viscount Chaplin (22 December 1840 – 29 May 1923) was a British Conservative Party politician and sportsman.

The second son of the Rev. Henry Chaplin, of Blankney, Lincolnshire, he was educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, and first entered parliament at the 1868 general election as Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid-Lincolnshire. He represented this constituency until its dissolution for the 1885 general election (under the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885), when he was returned to Parliament for the new Sleaford division. He held this seat until he was defeated at the 1906 general election, but in 1907 returned to the House of Commons at a by-election as member for Wimbledon.

In 1876 he married a daughter of the 3rd Duke of Sutherland, but lost his wife in 1881. Outside the House of Commons he was a familiar figure on the Turf, winning the Derby with Hermit in 1867; and in politics from the first the "Squire of Blankney" took an active interest in agricultural questions, as a popular and typical representative of the English "country gentleman" class.

Having filled the office of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Lord Salisbury's short ministry of 1885-1886, he became the first President of the Board of Agriculture in 1889, with a seat in the cabinet, and retained this post till 1892. In the Conservative cabinet of 1895-1900 he was President of the Local Government Board, and was responsible for the Agricultural Rates Act 1896; but he was not included in the ministry after its reconstruction in 1900. Chaplin had always been an advocate of protectionism, being in this respect the most prominent inheritor of the views of Lord George Bentinck; and when in 1903 the tariff reform movement began under Chamberlain's leadership, he gave it his enthusiastic support, becoming a member of the Tariff Commission and one of the most strenuous advocates in the country of the new doctrines in opposition to free trade.

He was made Viscount Chaplin in 1916. Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry was his daughter.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.