Robert Plumer Ward - Life

Life

He was born in Mount Street, Mayfair, London, on 19 March 1765, the son of John Ward by his wife Rebecca Raphael. His father was a merchant in Gibraltar, also for many years was chief clerk to the civil department of the ordnance in the garrison there. Robert Ward was educated first at Mr. Macfarlane's private school at Walthamstow, and then at Westminster School. He entered Christ Church, Oxford, matriculating on 12 February 1783. In 1785 he became a student of the Inner Temple.

Ward then passed some years abroad, and travelled in France during the early part of the revolutionary period. He was called to the bar on 17 June 1790, and soon after went the western circuit. In London in 1794, a chance conversation in Bell Yard near Fleet Street put him in possession of information about subversion, and Ward took it to Richard Ford who was a police magistrate. Ford took Ward directly to William Pitt the Prime Minister, and the law officers Archibald Macdonald and John Scott. This fortuitous discovery gave Ward his political and legal contacts.

Ward now switched from the western to the northern circuit, to take advantage of his new connections. He had also a small common-law practice in London and before the privy council. He wrote another legal work to order, for the government. A reward in the shape of a judgeship in Nova Scotia was offered Ward; then in June 1802 he received from Pitt an offer of a safe seat in the House of Commons. Ward was Member of Parliament (MP) for Cockermouth from 1802 to 1806, after Pitt had recommended him to Lord Lowther for the seat. He was returned on 8 July 1802, but did not speak in the house till 13 December, when, somewhat to the annoyance of his friends, he supported Henry Addington.

Pitt returned to power in summer 1804. Lord Mulgrave succeeded Lord Harrowby at the Foreign Office at the beginning of 1805, and gave Ward (a family connection through their wives) the post of under-secretary, Ward resigning a sinecure post he held as Welsh judge. Charles James Fox took over from Mulgrave in 1806, and Ward lost the post, taken up by George Hammond. On the formation of the Duke of Portland's ministry of 1807, with the appointment of Mulgrave as First Lord of the Admiralty, Ward was given a seat on the Admiralty board.

Ward was MP for Haslemere from 1807 to 1823. Turning down an offer of a Treasury lordship, Ward remained at the Admiralty till June 1811, when he was appointed Clerk of the Ordnance. He served in this office under Mulgrave, who was head of the department, till 1823. He made a lengthy report on the state of the ordnance department in Ireland, which was published on 9 November 1816. The following year he made a survey of the eastern and southern coast of England for the same purpose, and in 1819 for the north of England. Retiring from the Commons after the session of 1823, he was appointed auditor of the Civil List.

Ward took up residence at Gilston, Hertfordshire; in 1832 he was appointed High Sheriff. His office as auditor of the Civil List was incorporated into the treasury in January 1831, and he spent time abroad. Early in 1846 he moved with his wife to the official residence of her father, Sir George Anson, the governor of Chelsea Hospital, and there he died on 13 August the same year. There is a portrait of Ward by Henry Perronet Briggs, an engraving of which by Charles Turner is prefixed to his Memoirs.