joined the railway conference on freight rates, the Liverpool Mail thought it 'notorious that the exorbitant rates for railway and water carriage between Liverpool and Manchester are kept up by means of powerful combinations between the Railway interest and the Bridgewater Canal interest' Hence, although Egerton offered on succeeding to the Bridgewater estate to pay for a large statue of the Duke of Bridgewater in Manchester if the town authorities would identify a suitable site for it the offer was never taken up. The Right Honourable Lord Francis Egerton, MP The Bridgewater estate was commercially important in South Lancashire; its landholdings and associated tenant farmers also made it a major power in South Lancashire parliamentary elections and Egerton's succession of his Whig father as beneficiary changed the political arithmetic of the constituency. At the 1835 general election, he and another Conservative candidate defeated the two sitting pro-Reform MPs; Egerton topped the poll. At the 1837 election, the Manchester Guardian pointed out that Egerton had voted in only twenty-seven of the 171 divisions in the preceding session of the Commons: nonetheless, Egerton again headed the poll, with his Conservative colleague second. In 1841, his election address claimed he was guided by the interests of manufacturing rather than agriculture: "I presume that the man who is in the centre of a strictly rural population will look to its wishes and apparent interests. I shall do likewise: and if he looks to his ricks I shall look to my chimnies and those of my neighbours" He opposed repeal of the Corn Laws but thought it time for a 'full careful and dispassionate' revision of the current 'sliding scale'. He was returned unopposed and his victory speech put less stress on the need for revision, but deprecated cries of 'No surrender' on the Corn Law question; it was not a constitutional issue. Egerton was Major commanding the Duke of Lancaster's Yeomanry, who were called out to support the civil power during the Plug Plot riots of 1842; Egerton and a troop of yeomanry served in Preston in the aftermath of the riot and fatal shootings there. He later intervened in a Commons debate to defend the conduct of the Preston magistrates and of the military whilst noting that Preston was an exceptional case: in the Lancashire disturbances there had been a "general absence of a sanguinary disposition, or a spirit of wanton violence" In