He was Liberal Member of Parliament for Grantham from 1880 to 1886 and for Sowerby, Yorkshire from 1892 until 1904, when he retired from Parliament. In Parliament, he was Chairman of Ways and Means & Deputy Speaker to Arthur Wellesley Peel from 1893 to 1895, and was a member of the Royal Commissions on Tweed and Solway Fisheries in 1896, on the Water Supply to London in 1897, and of the Committees of Royal Commission Patriotic Fund in 1898. A passionate Protestant he attended and spoke at the United Protestant Demonstration in London on 29 January 1900 which resolved ) "to uphold and maintain the Protestantism of the nation and to demand the suppression of the Mass and the Confessional in the Established Church."[3]