Admiral Charles Middleton, 1st Baron Barham, PC (14 October 1726 – 17 June 1813[1]) was a Royal Navy officer and politician.

[5] In 1761, while in command of HMS Emerald, he distinguished himself in the West Indies, taking sixteen French ships and several privateers, and received the gratitude of the merchants in the British colony of Barbados.

[5] In 1763, after service aboard the Adventure, Charles moved to join Margaret Gambier, whom he had married in December 1761, at Teston, and for the next twelve years, he farmed the land belonging to Mrs Bouverie, taking on the role of a country gentleman.

In 1784, Sir Charles Middleton was elected Tory Member of Parliament (MP) for Rochester, a seat he held for six years, and on 24 September 1787 he was promoted rear admiral.

In 1786 he prepared a letter to the First Lord of the Admiralty indicating he would "contend no more for the public," and urging the appointment of a successor who could "have more weight than I have had, and influence ministers to correct these evils.

[13] In addition to his service in the Royal Navy, Middleton played a crucial role in the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire.

In 1777, exhausted by the continuing conflict with influential planters and businessmen, Ramsay returned to Britain and briefly lived with Sir Charles and Lady Middleton at Teston.

[15] Ramsay's pamphlet Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, published in 1784, especially affected Lady Middleton.

In 1787 Wilberforce was introduced to James Ramsay and Thomas Clarkson at Teston, as well as meeting the Testonites, a growing group of supporters of abolition which also included Edward Eliot, Hannah More, the evangelical writer and philanthropist, and Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London.

[16] Clarkson had first made public his desire to spend his life fighting for emancipation at Middleton's home, Barham Court, overlooking the River Medway at Teston, Kent.

As Comptroller of the Navy, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Commissioner, his success in handling the problems of supply, construction, inefficiency, and insubordination made a critical contribution to Britain's naval victories in the Napoleonic wars, according to Bernard Pool.

[21] He is also portrayed by the simple moniker of Admiral Barham in Naomi Novik's alternative history fiction series, Temeraire, in the second novel, Throne of Jade, (published with Del Rey in 2006) in which he is depicted as arbitrating a dispute between the Chinese delegation and the British government over the possible return of Captain William Laurence's dragon Temeraire to China.