Thomas Slingsby Duncombe

Thomas Slingsby Duncombe (1796 – 13 November 1861) was a Radical politician, who was a member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for Hertford from 1826 to 1832 and for Finsbury from 1834 until his death.

Duncombe was elected and then returned to his seat seven times by the shopkeepers, artisans and laborers, the Nonconformists, Catholics, and Jews of Finsbury, making him the longest-sitting representative of a metropolitan borough in his day.

A man of ruined fortune and doubtful character, whose life has been spent on the race-course, at the gaming-table, and in the green-room, of limited capacity, exceedingly ignorant, and without any stock but his impudence to trade on, only speaking to serve an electioneering purpose, and crammed by another with every thought and every word that he uttered.

He made more of an impression in society where he built a reputation as a dandy, a rake, a theatre supporter, and one of the best gentleman horseriders in England.

Lady Blessington used him as a model for the hero of one of her novels and the novelist-cum-Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, recalled that his friend Duncombe was later to be his resource on Chartism for Sybil: or The Two Nations.

In his acceptance speech he laid out his increasingly independent and Radical politics: promising to fight for religious liberty and an end to church rates and sinecures, reform of taxation and modernizing the economy, and the ballot, the franchise and triennial parliamentary terms; the core principles of what would become the People's Charter of Chartism four years later.

The enigmatic radical was also equally at home in the green rooms of theatres and the gambling halls of exclusive clubs like Crockford's and Almack's where he ran up debts to the astounding amount of £120,000 – £140,000 (in excess of £8 million in 2006 pounds) [1].

Indeed, his critics accused Duncombe of using an earlier trip to Canada to support his friend and political patron Lord Durham as a ruse to escape his debts.

Exhibiting a new style of politics, Duncombe performed not only for the politicians assembled in the House but for "the people out of doors," as the public were then called.

His open embrace of pleasure, his sartorial style and the perceived and real excesses of his personal life, far from being the distraction from politics as his critics frequently commented, may actually have been an integral asset to his popularity.

But when he could he did, and gaunt and emaciated, this dandified child of privilege continued to stand up in the House for the rights of the less visible and less fortunate, and chair the long and arduous meetings of trade unionists.

In 1856, already ill, he championed the case of the Hungarian revolutionary exile István Türr, arrested by the Austrian authorities and in concrete danger of being executed, and helped push the British government to intervene and get him freed.