Milnes had been called a Liberal-Conservative during the first ten years of his parliamentary life. He now became a Conservative-Liberal; but the transposition of the adjective made little, if any, change in his political conduct. He was as insubordinate in the latter position as he had been in the former. He took Lord Palmerston as his leader and chosen friend; but he did not always side with him. In the debates on the Conspiracy Bill, after the attempt of Orsini to assassinate Napoleon III., Milnes spoke and voted against his chief; and on the measure for abolishing the East India Company he was equally indifferent to the claims of party. As time went on, he drifted out of party politics altogether; and both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, which he entered in 1863, it was to measures of a private character, or to measures of social reform, that he gave his attention. He advocated help to Lady Franklin in her expedition to clear up the mystery of her husband’s fate; he was in favour of female suffrage; of the abolition of public executions; and he led the agitation for legalising marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. At the same time he cordially supported the Liberal party on all great occasions. Speaking of the abortive Reform Bill of 1866, Mr Reid remarks:
‘Houghton held strongly to the Liberal side throughout the movement, and again afforded proof of the fact that his elevation to the House of Lords had strengthened, rather than weakened, his faith in the people and in popular institutions. Early in April he presided at one of the great popular meetings in favour of Reform. The scene of the meeting was the Cloth Hall at Leeds—a spot famous in the political history of the West Riding—and Lord Houghton’s speech was as advanced in tone as the most thoroughgoing Reformer could have wished it to be. He was, indeed, one of the very few peers who took an open and pronounced part in the agitation of the year’ (vol. ii. p. 151).
This is only one instance, out of many that could be adduced. It would be interesting to know what he would have thought of some of the later developments of his party. It is almost needless to say that he never regarded Lord Beaconsfield as a serious politician. On the eve of his return from Berlin in 1878, he writes: ‘I hope to be in my place on Thursday, to see the reception of the Great Adventurer. Whether from knowing him so well, or from the sarcastic temperament of old age, the whole thing looks to me like a comedy, with as much relation to serious politics as Punch to real life.’ At the same time he had not been a thoroughgoing supporter of Mr Gladstone’s agitation against the Turks, and he had warned that statesman so far back as 1871, that ‘a demon, not of demagoguism, but of demophilism, is tempting you sorely.’