William Duncombe, 2nd Baron Feversham (14 January 1798 – 11 February 1867), was a British peer with a large estate in the North Riding of Yorkshire. He was prominent in the affairs of the Royal Agricultural Society and owner of a prize-winning herd of short-horn cattle. He served as a Tory Member of Parliament (MP) for the Riding from 1832 to 1841, after which he sat in the House of Lords, having succeeded to the title on the death of his father. From 1826 to 1831 he had sat as an Ultra-Tory MP. He was the first MP to support Richard Oastler's campaign for Factory Reform, and gave it unwavering support for the rest of his life; in 1847 he seconded the Second Reading in the Lords of the Factory Act of that year (the 'Ten-Hour Act'). Background Feversham was the eldest son of Charles Duncombe (subsequently (1826) created Baron Feversham), and Lady Charlotte, daughter of William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth. He was born at the family's town house in London (their country seat was at Duncombe Park, just outside Helmsley in the North Riding). He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1820, he was commissioned as a cornet in the Helmsley Yeomanry Cavalry; in 1821 he qualified as a Justice of the peace for the North Riding; by 1826, however, he was living near Doncaster. His younger brothers included the Hon. Arthur Duncombe and the Hon. Octavius Duncombe. Public life When the colourful Radical MP Thomas Slingsby Duncombe died in 1861, it was noted in a piece appearing in a number of newspapers that The most comical contrast to Tom Duncombe was his cousin, the present Lord Feversham, a heavy, solid, goodnatured man, whose speeches are of the most ponderous and soporific character - "a man whose talk is of bullocks" and whose opinions were of the extreme Conservative and Protectionist colour. Agriculturalist When Faversham talked of bullocks, he did so as one of the leading breeders and exhibitors of short-horn cattle; animals from the Duncombe Park herd won prizes at Smithfield, at the Royal Agricultural Show, and at the Paris International Exposition of 1855, although he came to deplore the prevalence of judging criteria which led to prizes going to animals which had been over-fattened, to the detriment of their health and that of the breed. He was deeply involved with the Royal Agricultural