On the retirement of Mr. Pitt, Abbot became a member of the new administration, with the offices of chief secretary for Ireland, and keeper of the Irish privy seal. Upon receiving these appointments, and being made a privy councillor, he resigned his place of clerk of the rules in the Court of King's Bench. It seems to have been about this time also that he was chosen recorder of Oxford. His official life lasted scarcely a twelvemonth. On the appointment of Mr. 3litford (afterwards Lord Redesdale), who had succeeded Addington As speaker, to the place of lord chancellor of Ireland, Abbot was, on the 10th of February 1802, elected to the vacant chair of the House of Commons. He continued to serve as speaker throughout the next three parlia ments, and the greater part of the succeeding one; having been returned to that which met iu November, 1802, both for Woodstock and Heytesbury, when he chose to represent the former place, and for the University of Oxford in 1806, again in 1807, and a third time in 1812.
He filled the office of speaker to the satisfaction both of the House and of the public ; and, although his demeanour is perhaps rather to be described as correct and graceful than as imposing or dignified, his qualifications for the place were on the whole of a very superior order, and in the performance of some of its duties he acquitted himself in a highly distinguished manner. His addresses in communicating the thanks of the House to the various naval and military officers who received that honour in the course of the war with France, afford many happy examples of rhetorical talent. These speeches were delivered on thirteen different occasions; and they commemorate all the principal victories of the war from Itoleia and Vimiera to Waterloo and the capture of Paris : that in which he communicated the thanks of the House, on the great day of the let of July 1814 to the Duke of Wellington, was particularly felicitous.
It ought also to be noted to the honour of Abbot, that however strong and steady were his party prejudices and attachments, he did not hesitate to make them give way, when upon any occasion they came into competition either with the rights and privileges of the House, or with what he conceived to be his duty as its speaker. A memorable example of this was the course be took on the 8th of April 1805, when the House having divided on Mr. Whitbread's motion for the impeachment of Lord Melville, and the numbers having been found equal (216 on each side), he gave his casting vote for the impeachment, on the principle that, whatever he might think of the charges, be was not entitled, in a case such as this, in which there was evidently a contest between the popular feeling and the influence of the govern ment, to give his aid to the latter, or to make use of his official privilege to prevent a case from being sent to trial upon which the real judgment of the House had been so distinctly pronounced.
The principal subject as to which Abbot took any prominent part in the debates of the House after his elevation to the chair, was the question of the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, to which he continued to offer a 'steady opposition.
Abbot, as speaker, distinguished himself by tho attention, correctness, and efficiency with which he performed all the routine duties of the chair, and the House and the public are indebted to him for some Important improvements io the conduct of the business of parliament. In particular be gave • new and much more useful form to the printed Totes of the House; and it was upon his recommendation, and upon a plan of his suggesting, that the Private Bill Office was established, In ISII.
lie continued speaker till the 30th of May 1817, when a severe attack of erysipelas compelled him to resign the chair. On this the House Immediately asides-wed the crown to bestow on him some mark of favour; and on the Std of Jane he was elevated to the peerage, as Baron Colchester. Parliament voted a pension of 40001. a year to himself, and of 30001. • year to his next successor in the title. The next three years he spent abroad, principally in France and Italy. After be returned home, it was only on rare oocasioua, as formerly in the Commons, that he took any pert in the debates of the upper Ileum of Parliament; but it has been stated that the Lords owe to him the daily'publication and distribution of their proceedings, and the establishment of a library on the same plan as that of the Commons. Lord Colchester's last act of a public character was his sending to the prose, in November 1828, his collected (six) 'Speeches upon the Roman Catholic Claims, delivered in the House of Commons and In the House of Peers; with Preliminary Observations,' on the state of the question of Emancipation as it then stood. Ile just lived to see or hear of the end of the controversy, and the defeat of his own side, by the peering of the Relief Bill brought in by Mr. Secretary Peel. He died at his house in Spring Gardens, of another attack of erysipelas, on the 8th of May 1829. Lord Colchester married on the 9th of December 1796 Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Sir Philip Gibbee, Bart, by whom he left two cone.
(Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.)