[3] Beaufoy was returned as Member of Parliament (MP) for Minehead (1783–1784) and Great Yarmouth from 1784 [4] until his death.
[5] He was a staunch advocate of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which limited the civil rights of non-members of the Church of England.
He expressed his fear that ‘too precipitate a benevolence augmented, while it hoped to have diminished, the sum of human calamity’, claiming that a cessation of the trade must aggravate the plight of the existing slave population of the West Indies, and that if it spelt ruin for the planters, no other country would abolish the trade and thereby destroy its colonies.
[6][7] Biographer William Hague considers the unfinished abolition of the slave trade to be Pitt's greatest failure.
[1] He supported parliamentary reform, religious toleration and was responsible for legislation which rehabilitated the British fishing industry.