Milnes entered Parliament in 1837 as Conservative member for Pontefract. His friends were rather surprised at his selection of a party, for even then his views on most subjects were decidedly Liberal. Thirlwall, for instance, wrote:
‘I can hardly bring myself now to consider you a Tory, or indeed as belonging to a party at all; and although I am aware how difficult, and even dangerous, it is for a public man to keep aloof from all parties, still my first hope as well as expectation as to your political career is that it may be distinguished by some degree of originality’ (vol. i. p. 199).
These hopes were realized to an extent that none of Milnes’s friends would have expected or perhaps desired. From the outset he maintained an independence of thought and action which did him the utmost credit as a man of honour, but which ruined his chances of obtaining that success which is measured by the attainment of official dignity. And yet, as Mr Reid tells us, he was more ambitious of political than of literary distinction. But the fates were against him. In the first place, his oratorical style did not suit the House, though as an after-dinner speaker he was conspicuously successful. He ‘had modelled himself on the old style of political oratory, and gave his hearers an impression of affectation.’ Then he would not vote straight with his party. He took a line of his own about Canada and the Ballot; he voted on the opposite side to Peel on the question of a large remission of capital punishments; and he wrote _One Tract More_, ‘an eloquent and earnest plea for toleration for the Anglo-Catholic enthusiasm,’ which shocked the Protestants in general, and the electors of Pontefract in particular. Perhaps he was too much in earnest; perhaps he was not a sufficiently important person to be silenced by office; perhaps, as Mr Reid says, ‘public opinion in England always insists upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the man of letters and the man of affairs;’ but, whatever might be the reason, Sir Robert Peel passed him over when forming his Administration in 1841—nay, rather, appears never to have turned his thoughts in his direction. Milnes was grievously disappointed, but with characteristic lightheartedness set at once to work to make himself more thoroughly fit for the post he specially coveted, the Under-Secretaryship of Foreign Affairs. He went to Paris, got intimate with Guizot, De Tocqueville, Montalembert—‘that English aristocrat foisted into the middle of French democracy’—and other leading statesmen. Through them, and by help of his natural gift of knowing everybody he wished to know, he managed to include Louis Philippe among those by whom he was accepted as a sort of unaccredited English envoy. He kept Peel informed of the views of Guizot and the King, and Peel replied with a message to the former in a letter which shows that he was quite ready to make use of Milnes, though not to reward him. On his return he gave Peel a general support on the Corn Laws, while regretting that his ‘measures were not of a more liberal character;’ he interested himself in the passing of the Copyright Bill, a measure in respect of which he was accepted as the representative of men of letters; and he travelled in the East, no doubt to study Oriental politics on the spot. A letter he wrote to Peel from Smyrna is full of shrewd observation and far-reaching insight into the Eastern Question; but, on his return, he published a volume of poems called _Palm Leaves_. Now Peel, like a certain Hanoverian monarch who hated ‘boetry and bainters,’ hated literature; and, as Milnes’s father told him, ‘every book he wrote was a nail in his political coffin.’ Again, Milnes was in favour of the endowment of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, and had written a pamphlet called _The Real Union of England and Ireland_, on which, we may note, in passing, Mr Gladstone’s remark, that he had ‘some opinions on Irish matters that are not fit for practice.’ With these views he supported Peel’s grant to Maynooth, a step which brought him into such disgrace at Pontefract that he thought seriously of giving up parliamentary life altogether. In fact he applied for a diplomatic post, but without success. Before long we find him again running counter to his chief’s policy, supporting Lord Ashley against the Government, and seconding a motion of Charles Buller’s against Lord Stanley. After this it cannot excite surprise that Peel passed him over when he rearranged his Administration in 1845. With his second disappointment Milnes’s career as a professional politician came to an end. Ten years later Palmerston offered him a lordship of the Treasury, but he declined it. As he said himself in a letter written shortly afterwards: