Lancelot Allgood (11 February 1711 - 26 April 1782) was a British landowner and politician who served as High Sheriff of Northumberland in 1746, and as member of parliament for Northumberland in the 10th Parliament of Great Britain between February 1748 and 1754. He also served as a deputy Lord Lieutenant of Northumberland.
Allgood is remembered as the sponsor of the corn road from Hexham to Alnmouth, and of the military road from Carlisle to Newcastle, both of which were established under Turnpike Acts during his short tenure as MP.
He is also remembered as a protagonist in a feud with Ann Cook and her husband, innkeepers, which played out in cookery books Cook authored, attacking Allgood, his half-sister Hannah Glasse, who was herself a cookery book writer, and his aunt Margaret Widdrington.
Allgood is implicated as one of the authorities commanding a militia which, in a 1761 riot in Hexham, killed 45 people. More generally, Allgood was a member of a family against whom many in Hexham held a grudge arising out of their failure to follow the Jacobinism of the Earl of Derwentwater.
Biography
Lancelot Allgood was born 11 February 1711 the son of Isaac Allgood, of Brandon White House, Hedgeley, Northumberland, and grandson of the Rev. Major Allgood, Rector of Simonburn. Isaac Allgood died in 1725, and Lancelot inherited his estate aged 14.
Allgood studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, matriculating 20 November 1730, and was admitted to Gray's Inn on 6 January 1731.
He took a Grand Tour in the later 1830s, and is recorded to have met and travelled for some time with Thomas Forster of Adderstone, a great friend of Allgood's father, but since 1716 a Jacobite exile in Europe after playing a leading part in the north of England in the Jacobite rising of 1715.
Allgood married his relative, Jane (born 1721), daughter and heir of Robert Allgood, of Nunwick, near Simonburn, Northumberland on 22nd February, 1739. Robert Allgood had purchased Nunwick from the Herons of Chipchase, and when he died it came to Lancelot by virtue of his marriage. Allgood commissioned the erection of Nunwick Hall at the junction of Simon Burn and the River North Tyne.
Lancelot Allgood was Sheriff of Northumberland in 1746, the year in which Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite rising of 1745 was put down by the Duke of Cumberland. Allgood was present at the reception of the Duke of Cumberland in Newcastle in January 1746, and witnessed the ceremony of presenting him with the freedom of the town on his return from the victory of Culloden in April 1746.
A vacancy occurred in the Parliamentary representation of Northumberland by the death of John Fenwick on 19 December 1747, and Allgood became a candidate for the seat. The old member was a Tory; his colleague, Sir William Middleton, 3rd Baronet, was a Whig. Parties were so evenly balanced in the county that the Whigs were encouraged to try for both seats. Allgood being a Tory, the Whigs put forward Lord Ossulston, son and heir of Charles Bennet, 2nd Earl of Tankerville, to oppose him. The election took place at Alnwick in February, 1748, commencing on the 18th of that month and lasting six days. At the declaration of the poll there was a squabble with the sheriff, Nicholas Brown of Bolton, and for a time it was uncertain which of the candidates had been elected. Allgood polled 982 votes, Ossulston 971; but the sheriff rejected 27 of the Tory votes, and declared Lord Ossulston elected by a majority of 16. Thereupon Mr. Allgood presented a petition to Parliament, complaining of an undue return. Both parties were ordered to attend at the bar of the House, but the matter was postponed, and the House rose without deciding the question. Allgood renewed his application in November 1748, and the 14th February 1749 was fixed for the hearing, on which occasion Mr. Fox told the House that Lord Ossulston would give no further trouble in the affair, and Mr. Allgood was declared duly elected.
The fact of the 1745 Rebellion, the relationship between Tories and Jacobites, and Allgood's supposed Jacobite sympathies all were of moment in the election. However Henry Carr, a Whig elector, commented in a letter that "considering Mr. Allgood’s good character and his zealous behaviour in the late rebellion, I cannot bring myself to vote against him." (Carr also drew adverse implications from the absence from Northumberland of Lord Ossulston's father, the then Lord Lieutenant of Northumberland, during the rising, and analysed the state of the Tory & Jacobite alliance.)