The motion was supported by Robert Cecil, the future Prime Minister, and Knatchbull-Hugessen concluded the proposition arguments on 28 February 1850, declaring that: 'From one end of the country to the other, Protection is becoming the glorious watchword of thousands of true Englishmen.

To check the tide of revolutionary agitation – to prefer your own countrymen to foreigners – to ameliorate, to vindicate – is not this a high, a national cause?'

[6] Shortly after becoming a peer he joined the Conservative party, citing his opposition to the interventionist policies of Radicals like Joseph Chamberlain.

[9] Though forgotten and unread today, Knatchbull-Hugessen wrote many well-known short stories of fantasy and faery.

Far from being the blandly moralistic fare of the later Victorian period, The Times newspaper noted that his stories... "are of a very high order; light and brilliant narrative flow from his pen, and is fed by an invention as graceful as it is inexhaustible."

He was widely likened by the reviewers to masters of the fairy-tale such as Grimm and Andersen, and his prolific output of the tales even led a critic at The British Quarterly Review to question his dedication to his job at the Colonial Office... "We should like to know whether Mr. Knatchbull-Hugessen maintains his intercourse with the fairies of the Colonial Office.

If so, what department of office duty is specially favourable to them; whether, too, they come when Parliament breaks up, or whether their visits are intermittent all the year round.