William James MP

Profile & Legacies Summary

1791 - 1861

Claimant or beneficiary

Biography

Baptized in Liverpool (Paradise Street Unitarian Chapel, although he later practised as an Anglican): his paternal grandfather, William (1735-1798) had made a fortune as a 'West India merchant' [and slave-owner].

Under his grandfather's will (1798), written after the death of his father (1795), he inherited the Jamaican estate [and the enslaved people upon it] and a mercantile fortune (though in trust to his maternal grandfather and uncles until he was 26, i.e. 1817).

His mother, inheritor of the Warburton Estate of Hefferton Grange, re-married (1801) to the Liverpool radical, Lt.-Col. George Williams.

1813: he purchased Barrock Lodge, near Carlisle (which had been built by James Graham, an East India Co. nabob painted by Zoffany).

Married Frances, daughter of William Calton Rutson, cotton broker of Liverpool, 26 February 1816. (Rutson was the sometime partner of William Ewart in Liverpool and Arthur Clegg, Manchester.)

Sources

T71/867 St Thomas-in-the-East claim no. 278 (Clifton Hill).

For more, see political legacies.

D. R. Fisher (ed.), The House of Commons 1820-1832 (7 vols., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press for the History of Parliament Trust, 2009), Vol. 5, pp. 839-44.

Further Information

Absentee?

British/Irish

Name in compensation records

William James

Spouse

Frances Rutson (m. 26 Feb., 1816)

Children

10 sons (6 d.v.p), 3 daughters (1 d.v.p)

School

Eton [1808 ]

University

Jesus College, then Trinity College, Cambridge [1808- ]

Religion

Anglican

Associated Claims (1)

Associated Estates (1)

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