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Ralph Osborne

1808? - 1882, Bestwood Lodge, Arnold, Nottinghamshire

BiographyOsborne, Ralph Bernal (1808?–1882), politician, the eldest son of Ralph Bernal (1783–1854) and his first wife, Anne Elizabeth, née White (d. 1823), added Osborne to his name by royal licence in 1844 when he married (on 20 August) Catherine Isabella (d. 1880), only daughter of Sir Thomas Osborne, ninth baronet, and heir to his estates in counties Wicklow and Tipperary. He was vague about his early life. At his funeral his birth date was given as 26 March 1808. He was at Charterhouse School from 1819 to 1826. According to the admissions register of Trinity College, Cambridge, he was admitted on 17 February 1826 ‘at the age of twenty’. He signed the university matriculation register for 3 November 1827. At Cambridge he claimed to have received not education but ‘instruction in all the vices for which the place was notorious’. He was a contemporary of Arthur Hallam, Alfred Tennyson, Richard Monckton Milnes, and Alexander William Kinglake, the last of whom became a close friend. In 1830 Bernal's father (having remarried and thus reduced the young man's financial prospects) obtained for him a commission in the 71st regiment of foot. Transferring into the 7th in 1833, he served in Ireland, becoming an additional aide-de-camp to the whig earl of Mulgrave, who was created marquess of Normanby in 1838 and was viceroy from 1835 to 1839.

In 1841 Bernal won a seat at High Wycombe as an advanced Liberal, against the national trend and in opposition to the hitherto dominant Carrington interest. He remained an MP with short breaks until 1874, sitting for Middlesex (1847–57), Dover (1857–9), Liskeard (1859–65), Nottingham (1866–8), and Waterford City (1870–74). He called himself a Liberal but in the 1840s and 1850s was ranked as a radical. He worked with Joseph Hume and J. A. Roebuck, denouncing jobbery and government expenditure, declaring that ‘the influence of the aristocracy has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’, supporting free trade, the secret ballot, triennial parliaments and further franchise extension, voluntaryism in education, and the abolition of flogging in the army. His experience at Dublin Castle and as an active Irish landlord led him to advocate, in and out of season, a wide range of Irish reforms. He defended the union but argued for the suppression of the viceroyalty, for state provision to Maynooth College (thus attracting the hostility of the ‘protestant’ party), and for the drastic reform of both Irish land law and the Church of Ireland.

Osborne was one of those radicals who, having previously denounced Palmerston's assertive foreign policy, backed him strongly in the Don Pacifico affair of 1850. He afterwards presided at a dinner in the foreign secretary's honour at the Reform Club and became identified as a Palmerstonian. He refused Russell's offer of minor office in 1851. With Derby and Disraeli in power he was in his element. The Times wrote on 22 July 1852: ‘To no man more than to Mr. Osborne do we owe it that the middle and lower classes of this country have clearly understood and justly appreciated the shabby manoeuvring and hollow casuistry of the Derby Government’.

When the Aberdeen coalition was formed at the end of 1852 Osborne became secretary of the Admiralty, a post he held until 1858. Office muzzled him, but in January 1855 he made a slashing contribution to the debate on Roebuck's motion censuring the government's conduct of the war. He castigated the entire military system as archaic and corrupt, while refusing to accept that this was the fault of the government: parliament and aristocratic society bore the responsibility because they refused to allow the army to be reformed. After 1858 he never held office, partly because of the offence he had given to so many, including the queen. But he played an important role in the Commons at certain junctures, making a notable speech in the debate on the Danish question in 1864 and assisting Disraeli in carrying parliamentary reform in 1867. In his last entry in Dod's Parliamentary Companion, after the passage of the Ballot Act in 1872, he specified no reforms which he wished to promote.

Osborne's reputation rested on his wit and force as a speaker. His friend Sir John Trelawny called him ‘the House's jester’; Disraeli, another friend, described him as ‘the chartered libertine of debate’; White as ‘the rollicking merryman of the House’. He had a ‘strong-built frame’, ‘smooth, sallow face’, ‘falcon eye’, and ‘powerful voice’. ‘His manner was that of a consummate comic actor’, and he peppered his speeches with picturesque, if often crude, ridicule of other speakers. He said of Henry Goulburn that, whenever Peel changed his party, ‘there was that miserable old tin kettle fastened to his tail’. The killjoy Lord Robert Montagu and Cobden allied together were like ‘Righteousness and peace kissing each other’. During other members' speeches he kept up a running fire of invariably audible asides, ‘more diverting than Senatorial’.

Osborne was one of the most conspicuous of the self-consciously independent MPs who flourished during the period of weak party alignment in the mid-nineteenth century. But even then, as he himself put it, voters did not relish disloyalty to party—hence his numerous enforced changes of constituency. He was a welcome figure in the Commons and in the clubs, and on the country-house circuit, in the hunting-field, and at the races both in England and Ireland; but he became so much the jester of politics that he ceased to be taken seriously. John Bright said after dining with him: ‘Osborne prefers jokes and ridicule and nonsense to any useful and agreeable conversation’. If he was warm towards friends, he was often overbearing and had a violent temper. He was a good singer and actor, and a prolific writer of political and social doggerel.

Osborne's wife predeceased him, and at his death his two daughters shared his estate which included more than 13,000 acres around his house at Newtown Anner, Clonmel, co. Tipperary, that brought in more than £5000 per annum. He died of cancer on 4 January 1882 at Bestwood Lodge, Arnold, Nottinghamshire, the house of the duke of St Albans, husband of his younger daughter, and was buried at Bestwood.

Derek Beales
Sources

P. H. Bagenal, The life of Ralph Bernal Osborne, MP (1884) · DNB · The parliamentary diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858–1865, ed. T. A. Jenkins, CS, 4th ser., 40 (1990) · The Times (5 Jan 1882) · The Times (11 Jan 1882) · Parliamentary Pocket Companion (1841–74) · W. White, The inner life of the House of Commons, ed. J. McCarthy [ another edn], 2 vols. (1915) · Trinity College, Cambridge, Admissions register (1800–50) [consulted by Dr D. J. McKitterick] · University of Cambridge, matriculation register [consulted by Dr E. S. Leedham-Green] · R. L. Arrowsmith, ed., Charterhouse register, 1769–1872 (1974) · J. Bateman, The great landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, 4th edn (1883) · W. Fraser, Disraeli and his day (1891) · The diaries of John Bright, ed. R. A. J. Walling [1930] · The Guardian (11 Jan 1882), 47 · Army List
Archives

BL, letters to Sir C. Napier, Add. MSS 40024, 40032

Likenesses

Count D'Orsay, engraving, 1846, NPG [see illus.] · ??? [A. Thompson], caricature, chromolithograph, NPG; repro. in VF (28 May 1870) · Count D'Orsay, lithograph, BM · C. Pellegrini, portrait, Reform Club, London
Wealth at death

£37,861 5s. 6d.: probate, 30 Nov 1882, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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Derek Beales, ‘Osborne, Ralph Bernal (1808?–1882)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2234, accessed 6 Aug 2013]

Ralph Bernal Osborne (1808?–1882): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/2234

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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