Dudley Long North

Dudley Long North (14 March 1748 – 21 February 1829) was an English Whig politician.

Baptised Dudley Long at Saxmundham, Suffolk, he was the younger of two sons of Charles Long (1705–1778), landowner, of Hurts Hall, Suffolk, and his wife, Mary, daughter and coheir of Dudley North of Little Glemham, Suffolk, and granddaughter of Sir Dudley North. On 2 May 1789 he changed his surname to North to inherit Little Glemham from his aunt Anne Herbert.

He was educated at Bury St Edmunds grammar school from about 1758 and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from 1766, from where he graduated BA in 1771 and MA in 1774. In 1769 he entered Lincoln's Inn, but was not called to the bar. Of ample fortune, his father having left him £25,000 and a joint interest in his Jamaican plantations, he entered parliament in 1780 at Lord Rockingham's instigation, as MP for St Germans on the Eliot interest. His kinsman Lord North was then still Prime Minister, but due to a speech impediment, Long was discouraged from speaking in the House of Commons. His shyness, despite inheriting the family's corrosive wit, led Dr Johnson, when they were introduced in 1781, to dismiss him as a man 'of genteel appearance, and that is all'. Nevertheless, Long silently supported the Prime Minister, and in 1783 was mentioned as a possible secretary of embassy at Paris.

Long switched to Great Grimsby at the general election in 1784, a more expensive constituency under the patronage of his father-in-law Charles Anderson Pelham. He was in opposition together with Lord North, and aligned himself with North's ally Charles James Fox. Already a member of Brooks's, Long joined the Whig Club in 1785, and Fox relied on him as a dinner host to strengthen party unity, and for political counsel. He was instrumental in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings. On 11 February 1793, the contested Grimsby election of 1790 was eventually voided, and he secured re-election on 17 April. He had briefly joined the Friends of the People Society before seceding on 4 June 1792, but maintained his loyalty to Fox, who was deserted by conservative Whigs, and in 1793 backed the subscription to pay Fox's debts. His success at Grimsby in 1796 was thought unlikely, and he found another seat, for Banbury, on the North family interest, which he held unopposed until 1806. A supporter of parliamentary reform in 1793 and 1797, he disagreed with the decision of Fox to secede from the house in the latter year; he returned to oppose Pitt's taxes and Irish policy, and regularly attended the House of Commons from 1800 onwards. On the peace of Amiens and the war in Ceylon, he voted with the government, but otherwise opposed Addington, and Pitt in his second term of office.

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