He made himself responsible for the enforcement of the standing order for the exclusion of strangers. The consequence of his unpopular action was that John Gale Jones [q. v.], president of the British Forum Debating Society, placarded London with handbills announcing the decision of the society that Yorke's action was an insidious attack upon the liberty of the press, and proposing, as a subject for future discussion, the question ‘which was the greater outrage upon public feeling, Mr. Yorke's enforcement of the standing order or Mr. Windham's recent attack upon the liberty of the press.’ Yorke complained of this in the commons on 19 Feb. 1810 as a gross violation of the privilege of the house. On 21 Feb. Gale Jones was committed to Newgate, and this led to Burdett's questioning the legality of the proceeding, the commitment of Sir Francis himself to the Tower, and the riots of 6 April, in which Yorke's windows were the first to be smashed. In the same month, negotiations with Lord Gambier and with Dundas having fallen through, Perceval asked Yorke to come into the ministry as first lord of the admiralty. His acceptance of the tellership and his attitude over the Walcheren debate had made him enemies, but these difficulties were quickly surmounted (see Hansard, xv. 330). He held the post, however, for barely eighteen months, resigning in the autumn of 1811. In a long letter to Perceval he hints pretty clearly that, apart from considerations of health, and the ‘increasing wear and tear of business in the House of Commons’ (his ostensible motive for resigning), he was actuated by a profound distrust of the prince regent. He made a long speech in the House of Commons on 25 Feb. 1813 against Grattan's motion on the catholic claims (printed with notes in 1813 by J. J. Stockdale). In the following April he opposed Romilly's bill to ‘take away corruption of blood’ (in cases of felony and treason), his action being dictated, it was believed, by filial piety, his father having upheld the doctrine in his ‘Law of Forfeitures.’ In April 1814 he continued his opposition almost alone; he also resisted the entire abolition of mutilation after execution for high treason, proposing an amendment, which was eventually adopted, to the effect that the bodies should be decapitated after death (the modus operandi followed in the case of the Cato Street conspirators, 1820).
Yorke retired from public life in 1818. He had been elected F.R.S. on 12 Nov. 1801 (Thomson, Royal Society, App. lxv.); he was also F.S.A. and a vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature. He died, aged 70, in Bruton Street, Berkeley Square, close to the house where Canning lived in 1809, on 13 March 1834. He married, on 1 July 1790, Harriott, daughter of Charles Manningham of Thorpe in Surrey, and sister of Major-general Manningham. He left no issue, and the earldom of Hardwicke, to which he was heir-presumptive, devolved upon Charles Philip Yorke [q. v.], the son of his younger brother, Sir Joseph. His motions to clear the galleries in the House of Commons and to stifle the Walcheren inquiry had gained a long-lived notoriety among the reporters, and after his death the family had to insert an advertisement in the ‘Times’ newspaper correcting hostile misstatements on the part of the press.
[Graduati Cantabr.; Gent. Mag. 1834, i. 652; Times, 19 March 1834; Pantheon of the Age, 1825, iii. 641; Debrett's Peerage, 1834, s.v. ‘Hardwicke;’ Cornwallis Corresp. 1859, ii. 499; Walpole's Life of Spencer Perceval, 1874, vol. ii. chap. iii. and vii.; Courtney's Parliamentary Rep. of Cornwall; Dalling's Life of Palmerston; Pellew's Life of Addington; Lord Colchester's Diary, 1861, i. 141–52, 229, 272–5, 372, ii. 49, 100, 137, 150, 172, 180; Romilly Memoirs, 1840, ii. 311, iii. 39, 98, 100, 132–4; Craik and Macfarlane's Hist. of George III, 1844, iv. 398; Erskine May's Constit. Hist. ii. 52; Martineau's Hist. of England, 1800–15, pp. 103, 112, 153, 357; Addit. MSS. 32166 f. 63, 33109 f. 109, 33110 f. 110, 33107 f. 98; note kindly supplied by R. F. Scott, esq., fellow of St. John's, Cambridge.]
YORKE, CHARLES PHILIP, fourth Earl of Hardwicke (1799–1873), admiral, eldest son, by his first wife, of Sir Joseph Sydney Yorke [q. v.], was born at Sydney Lodge, Southampton, on 2 April 1799. After three years at Harrow, he entered the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth in February 1813, and, having passed with credit through the course, was in May 1815 appointed as a midshipman to the Prince flagship at Spithead. From her he was shortly moved to the Leviathan, and thence to the Queen Charlotte, in which he was present at the bombardment of Algiers [see Pellew, Edward, Viscount Exmouth]. He was then sent to the Leander, flagship of Sir David Milne [q. v.], on the North American station, and on 14 Aug. 1819 was promoted to be lieutenant of the Phaëton. On 18 May 1822 he was made commander, and in August 1823 was appointed to the Alacrity, which he took out to the Mediterranean, where he was actively engaged in the suppression of piracy. On 6 June 1825 he was
