Robert Williams (23 April 1735 – 17 January 1814) was one of the oldest MPs in the

Parliament of the United Kingdom The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster, London. It alone possesses legislative suprema ...

, elected at 71 in the 1807 general election. Williams was member of a

Dorset Dorset ( ; archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the unitary authority areas of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole and Dorset (unitary authority), Dors ...

family who had had a business career in London, where at age 14 he was apprenticed as a cabinet maker, branching out to fitting out

East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southea ...

ship's cabins, then graduating to ship building. He owned 14

East Indiamen East Indiaman was a general name for any sailing ship operating under charter or licence to any of the East India trading companies of the major European trading powers of the 17th through the 19th centuries. The term is used to refer to vesse ...

ships at the time of his death. He was also senior partner in a London bank and became a director of the East India Company. He was MP for Dorchester, which he had previously contested unsuccessfully as an independent candidate in 1806, from 1807 to 1812. He died in January 1814 aged 78, leaving a fortune of half-a-million pounds.

References

1735 births 1814 deaths Members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for English constituencies People from Dorchester, Dorset UK MPs 1807–1812 {{England-UK-MP-stub