and John Hampden), who signed the warrant for the
execution of Charles I. At the University College, London, he carried
off first prize in rhetoric and logic, afterwards was called to the bar,
for some years went the Oxford Circuit and acted as Assistant Tithe
Commissioner, and Examiner of Private Bills for Parliament. He lived at
Plas Madoc, Ruabon, was a deputy lieutenant for Denbighshire and a
magistrate for that county, Montgomeryshire and Merionethshire. In 1853
he acted as High Sheriff of Carnarvonshire, and at the time of the
Crimean War he volunteered the services of the troop of Denbighshire
Yeomanry Cavalry of which he was Captain and received the thanks of the
War Office. Some years earlier, during the Irish famine, he established
fisheries on the west coast of Ireland, and, in his own yacht, explored
and ascertained the position of the fishing banks. The electors of
Leominster declined to return him to Parliament in 1845, as did also the
Montgomery Boroughs in 1852; but later that year he was elected for
Peterborough, unseated on petition, re-elected the next year and again
unseated. He unsuccessfully contested the same constituency in 1857, but
was elected in May 1859 and sat till his death in 1878, during his
Parliamentary career devoting a good deal of attention to the reform of
private bill procedure on which he carried a not unimportant measure.
But he was no mere meticulous lawyer. His frantic espousal of the
Protestant cause, supposed by the timid in the middle of last century to
be in some danger in England, earned him a good deal of notoriety and a
popular name. Hardly more eccentric was the warm support he gave to the
cause of Arthur Orton in his claim to the title and estate of Sir Roger
Tichborne. On one of the last visits he paid to Oswestry he called to
see a friend. As he was leaving his friend's office he suddenly turned
round and asked "Do you believe in the Claimant?" The reply was an
emphatic negative. "Ah," exclaimed the departing visitor, "you will come
to!"

But if Mr. Whalley was a bad prophet in this respect, his instinct did
not always mislead him. He believed in himself, which was not only a
more substantial faith, but more to the point in this narrative, for it
enabled him, by dint of self-assurance, largely to dominate, and
occasionally to domineer, the railway world of Montgomeryshire and the
adjacent counties and to contribute in no small measure to the successful
a