William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland

Background and education

A member of the influential Eden family, Auckland was a younger son of Sir Robert Eden, 3rd Baronet, of Windlestone Hall, County Durham, and Mary, daughter of William Davison. His brothers included Sir Robert Eden, 1st Baronet, of Maryland, Governor of Maryland, and Morton Eden, 1st Baron Henley. He was educated at Durham School, Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and was called to the bar, Middle Temple, in 1768.

Political career

In 1771 Auckland published Principles of Penal Law, and soon became a recognized authority on commercial and economic questions. In 1772 he took up an appointment as Under-Secretary of State for the North, a post he held until 1778. He was Member of Parliament for Woodstock from 1774 to 1784 and served as a Lord of Trade from 1776 to 1782. In 1778 he carried an Act for the improvement of the treatment of prisoners, and accompanied the Earl of Carlisle as a commissioner to North America on an unsuccessful mission to bring an end to the American War of Independence. During the War, he was head of the British spies in Europe, his budget reaching £200,000 by 1778. He probably oversaw a small group of intelligence collectors for Lord Suffolk. On his return in 1779 he published his widely read Four Letters to the Earl of Carlisle. In 1780 Auckland became Chief Secretary for Ireland, which he remained until 1782, and was admitted to the Irish Privy Council in 1780. He represented Dungannon in the Irish House of Commons between 1781 and 1783 and was Joint Vice-Treasurer of Ireland between 1783 and 1784. While in Ireland he established the National Bank.

Between 1784 and 1793 Auckland was Member of Parliament for Heytesbury. He was sworn of the British Privy Council in 1784 and served as Envoy to France from 1785 to 1787 (on a mission dealing with commerce); he was Ambassador to Spain between 1787 and 1789 and Ambassador to the Netherlands between 1789 and 1793. In 1789 he was raised to the Peerage of Ireland as Baron Auckland and in 1793 he retired from public service, receiving a pension of £2300, and was further honoured when he was made Baron Auckland, of West Auckland in the County of Durham, in the Peerage of Great Britain.

During his retirement in the country at Beckenham, he continued his intimacy with William Pitt the Younger, his nearest neighbour at Holwood House, who at one time had thoughts of marrying his daughter (see below). With Pitt’s sanction he published his Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in 1795, to prepare public opinion for a peace.

He was later included in Pitt's government as Joint Postmaster General in 1798. He severely criticized Pitt’s resignation in 1801, from which he had endeavoured to dissuade him, and retained office under Henry Addington. This terminated his friendship with Pitt, who excluded him from his administration in 1804 though he increased his pension, but he later and served under Lord Grenville as President of the Board of Trade in the Ministry of All the Talents between 1806 and 1807.

His Journal and Correspondence, published in 1861–1862, throws much light on the political history of the time.

Family

Lord Auckland married Eleanor, daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, 3rd Baronet, and sister of Gilbert Eliott, 1st Earl of Minto, in 1776. They had six sons and eight daughters.

Their eldest son, the Hon. William Eden, was Member of Parliament for Woodstock but committed suicide in 1810. Lord Auckland's daughter Elizabeth Charlotte Eden married Francis Osborne, 1st Baron Godolphin. She was known in the Eden family as "Charlotte." In one of her younger sister Emily Eden's letters she writes of Lady Osborne: "Sister and I . . . went [last Monday] to [Francis Osborne's seat in Cambridgeshire] Gog Magog [House]. I invited myself of course, but [Lady] Charlotte bore it very well. I was there fifteen years ago in the capacity of a child: I therefore did not see much of her, or know anything of her and except that, have not seen her but for two or three morning visits per annum; so it was a voyage of discovery, in the style of a North Pole expedition. The Frost intense--and a good deal of hummocky ice to sail through. However, I really liked it better than expected. Lord Francis [Osborne] is particularly pleasant in his own house, and young Charlotte very civil and good-natured. (Emily Eden. "Miss Eden's Letters." Violet Dickinson, ed. London: Macmillan, 1919, p. 93). Elizabeth Charlotte Eden's son was the famous London "Times" correspondent "S.G.O." who wrote numerous letters-to-the-editor under that initialism. He also wrote about the workhouses in Ireland during the Great Famine and was with Florence Nightingale in Scutari during the Crimean War. Elizabeth Charlotte Eden's eldest son George Godolphin Osborne became the 8th Duke of Leeds in 1859.

Eleanor Agnes, the eldest daughter, became the subject of intense public interest in 1797 when it was rumoured that she was about to marry William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister; when the matter became public, however, Pitt denied absolutely that he had proposed to Eleanor, much to her father's fury. In 1799 she married Robert Hobart, 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire. Pitt never married.

The fifth daughter, Mary Louisa, married Andrew Colville, who was instrumental in opening up the Red River Colony (i.e. parts of Manitoba, Canada) to poor Scottish emigrants.

The seventh daughter, Emily Eden, was a successful poet and novelist.

Lord Auckland died in May 1814 and was succeeded by his second but eldest surviving son, George, who was created Earl of Auckland in 1839. Lady Auckland died in May 1818.