English statesman, second son of the Rev. Henry Chaplin, of Blankney, Lincolnshire; educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, and first entered parliament in 1868 as Conservative member for Mid-Lincolnshire. He represented this constituency (which under the Redistribution Act of 1885 became the Sleaford division) till 1906, when he was defeated, but in 1907 returned to the House of Commons as member for Wimbledon at a by-election. In 1876 he married a daughter of the 3rd duke of Sutherland, but lost his wife in 1881. Outside the House of Commons he was a familiar figure on the Turf, winning the Derby with Hermit in 1867; and in politics from the first the “Squire of Blankney” took an active interest in agricultural questions, as a popular and typical representative of the English “country gentleman” class. Having filled the office of chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in Lord Salisbury’s short ministry of 1885–1886, he became president of the new Board of Agriculture in 1889, with a seat in the cabinet, and retained this post till 1892. In the Conservative cabinet of 1895–1900 he was president of the Local Government Board, and was responsible for the Agricultural Rates Act of 1896; but he was not included in the ministry after its reconstruction in 1900. Mr. Chaplin had always been an advocate of protectionism, being in this respect the most prominent inheritor of the views of Lord George Bentinck; and when in 1903 the Tariff Reform movement began under Mr. Chamberlain’s leadership, he gave it his enthusiastic support, becoming a member of the Tariff Commission and one of the most strenuous advocates in the country of the new doctrines in opposition to free trade. He was generally welcomed on his return to the House of Commons in 1907 as a type of parliamentarian fast disappearing. He intervened with effect on questions of land and of social and tariff reform, but otherwise was not so prominent in debate as in past years. As a thoroughgoing Tariff Reformer, he deplored the change of policy with regard to food taxes which was forced on the Unionist leaders in the winter of 1912–3. When the first Coalition Government was formed in May 1915, he was left the solitary conspicuous Unionist on the Opposition front bench; and it was felt to be a fitting close of a distinguished career in the Commons when at the age of seventy-five he was raised on the recommendation of that Government to the peerage in April of the following year.
