Charles Nicholas Pallmer

Jamaican 'West India interest' MP, the husband of Maria Frances Pallmer (née Dennis) (q.v.) and brother of Eliza Peters Washington Parker (q.v.) and who fell into financial difficulty in the 1830s. He was awarded compensation as trustee of his nephew Thomas J. Parker in Manchester and as mortgagee of an estate in St Andrew, both in Jamaica.  Member of the West India Committee and the 'Committee of April 25, 1823' formed to press the government for ameliorationist measures for the Crown colonies and to resist moves towards emancipation.

1. Born in St Dorothy, Jamaica: his parents were Charles Pallmer of Cold Harbour, Jamaica and Jane Peters, daughter of Nicholas Bourke of Clarendon, Jamaica. The family were well connected planters. His wife, Maria Francis Dennis was the daughter and heir of Francis Dennis, whose widow Mary bought the Norbiton estate in 1797. Maria Francis was the widow of Hugh Ingoldsby Massy. Champion of planters' interests: see Political legacies for more details. Died in debt in Boulogne, 1848.

2. Prominent figure in the West India Planters and Merchants’ standing committee, which he chaired from 1818-20; served thereafter as deputy to his cousin Charles Rose Ellis, later Lord Seaford. The two of them invariably featured in the deputations sent to ministers to argue the West Indian case. April 1829: Pallmer (and Ellis, Lord Seaford), resigned their official positions on the West India committee after an organizational coup at a general meeting. The committee wanted a more militant pro-slavery stand.

3. Administration of will (dated 26/01/1837) Charles Nicholas Pallmer of St Dorothy Jamaica 10/12/1850. The will described him as lately of Norbiton in the county of Surrey but now of the parish of St Dorothy in the Island of Jamaica. With the concurrence of his wife Pallmer left his estate to 'my dearly beloved sister Eliza Peters Washington Parker of Albany Terrace' widow.

4. The Times reported his 'financial difficulties', i.e. bankruptcy, in 1831:

'the flight, as a defaulter, of the ex-MP for Surrey. Charles N. Pallmer is there declared bankrupt, as a ship-owner, and called on to surrender to his creditors. Ten or twelve years ago this person launched forth in the world with the reputation of possessing a large income from West India property in right of his wife. Whatever that income might have been in former times, it soon sunk in the same proportion as that of other proprietors; and Mr Pallmer’s pride proving greater than his integrity, he continued spending some £8,000 or £10,000 a year long after his estate was wholly unproductive.'

For a portrait of Pallmer by Samuel William Reynolds (the Younger) (1827) see Parliament: works of art.

T71/860 Manchester claim nos. 351 & 352; T71/1608 24/12/1835 letter to the Commissioners from Meredith & Reeve re St Andrew claim no. 387.

1. Entries by R. G. Thorne in R. G. Thorne (ed.), The House of Commons, 1790-1820 (1986) and by Howard Spencer in D. R. Fisher (ed.), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832 (2009); Alexandra Franklin, Enterprise and advantage: The West India interest in Britain, 1774-1840 (University of Pennsylvania, Unpub. PhD, 1992), p. 214 citing West India Committee Minute Books, 25 April 1823.

2. Howard Spencer in D. R. Fisher (ed.), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832 (2009); Franklin, Enterprise and advantage, p. 200.

3. PROB 11/2124.

4. The Times, 2 May 1831 quoted in Franklin, Enterprise and advantage, p. 106 the same passage appeared in The Observer: see Spencer entry in The History of Parliament.