Houghton, RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES, LORD, was born of a good old Yorkshire family at Fryston Hall, Pontefract, 19th June 1809. His father, 'single-speech Milnes' (1784-1858), of Fryston, Bawtry, and Great Houghton, declined the chancellorship of the exchequer and a peerage; his mother was a daughter of the fourth Lord Galway. Educated by private tutors at home and in Italy, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.A. in 1831, and where he was a leader in the Union (then 'cavernous, tavernous'), and one of the famous band of 'Apostles.' From 1837 till 1863 he represented Pontefract, first as a Conservative, but latterly as an independent Liberal; and then he was called by Lord Palmerston to the Upper House, of which for a score of years he was 'the only poet.' In 1851 he married a daughter of the second Lord Crewe. She died in 1874; and he himself, having three years before had a passing attack of paralysis, died suddenly at Vichy, 11th August 1885. A Mæcenas of poets (and of poetasters), he got Lord Tennyson the laureateship, soothed the dying hours of poor David Gray, and was one of the first to recognise Mr Swinburne's genius. His own poetry is always respectable, and some of the shorter pieces were in their day exceedingly popular—'Strangers Yet,' for example, and the pretty lyric whose refrain is 'The beating of my own heart Was the only sound I heard.' Besides this, Lord Houghton—the 'Mr Vavasour' of Beaconsfield's Tancered—was a traveller, a philanthropist, an unrivalled after-dinner speaker, and Rogers' successor in the art of breakfast-giving. He went up in a balloon, and down in a diving-bell; he was the first publishing Englishman who gained access to the harems of the East; he championed oppressed nationalities, liberty of conscience, fugitive slaves, and the rights of women; he carried a bill for establishing reformatories (1846); and he counted among his friends Hallam, Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, Carlyle, Sydney Smith, Landor, Cardinal Wiseman, Heine, Thirlwall, and a host of others.
Lord Houghton's works include Memorials of a Tour in Greece (1833); Poems of many Years (1838); Memorials of a Residence on the Continent (1838); Poetry for the People (1840); Memorials of many Scenes (1843); Palm Leaves (1844); Life, Letters, and Remains of Keats (2 vols. 1848); Good Night and Good Morning (1859); Monographs, Personal and Social (1873); and Collected Poetical Works (2 vols. 1876). See an article by T. H. S. Escott in the Fortnightly for September 1885, and the Life by Wemyss-Reid (2 vols. 1890).