Richard Watson (politician)

The Honourable Richard Watson (6 January 1800 – 24 July 1852) was a British Whig[1] politician who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Canterbury from 1830 to 1835 and briefly in 1852 for Peterborough.

[2] He first stood for parliament at the 1826 general election in Canterbury, where he was nominated in his absence by the Reformers and polled just 107 votes.

However, at the 1830 general election he topped the poll at Canterbury, with 1,334 votes, was returned unopposed in 1831, and again won a contested election in 1832, when one of the other candidates was the madman John Nichols Thom, calling himself Sir William Courtenay, otherwise 'Tom of Truro', who gained 375 votes.

Watson was so dismayed by the support given to this opponent that he declined to stand again at the 1835 general election.

They had three sons and two daughters, the last of whom was posthumous:[2][4] In 1849, he inherited from his childless brother Henry the remaining Northamptonshire estates of the family, centered on Rockingham Castle, where he had lived since 1836.