Henry Yorke

Henry Galgacus Redhead Yorke (9 December 1802 – 12 May 1848) was a British Whig politician.

Early life He was the son of Henry Redhead Yorke and Jane William Andrews, whose father was Keeper of Dorchester Castle, where the elder Henry had been jailed. His father was a West Indian creole of African/British descent; his mother, Sarah Bullock, was a manumitted slave from Barbuda and his father was an Antiguan plantation owner and manager. The younger Henry was baptised in Farnham, Surrey in 1805, with the middle name of an ancient British leader, Galgacus. His father died when he was 10 and his three sisters all died in childhood, with only Henry and his brother George reaching adulthood.

Yorke was educated at Charterhouse (1811), then Eton. He was admitted as a pensioner to Christ's College, Cambridge in 1825, where he stayed seven terms. Her parents' marriage was notoriously unhappy, and resulted in scandal when her father publicly accused her mother of adultery with a Cabinet Minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, although the adultery was never proved. They had a daughter and two sons, Louisa, Henry Francis, and George Galgacus Aylmer, the first two born at Syston Park, Lincolnshire. While an MP, regarding himself as a reformer, he lived on Eaton Square and joined the Reform Club. He is the third MP identified by the History of Parliament’s House of Commons 1832-68 project as of mixed ethnicity.