Baron Mount Temple
The titles of Viscount Palmerston and Baron Temple of Mount Temple were created in the Peerage of Ireland 12 March 1723 for Henry Temple, of East Sheen, eldest son of Sir John Temple, former Attorney General for Ireland.
His great-grandson, the 3rd Viscount, was a famous Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. He no children and thus when he died on 18 October 1865 both titles became extinct. His wife Emily who he married in 1839 was the widow of the 5th Earl Cowper and sister of 2nd Viscount Melbourne. She died 11 September 1869, leaving her second husband's estates to her second son the Hon. William Francis Cowper, who thereupon adopted the surname Cowper-Temple. He served in various positions in the Liberal governments of the mid-nineteenth century, and on his retirement from the House of Commons was created Baron Mount Temple, of Mount Temple in the County of Sligo, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom on 25 May 1880. He died without issue on 16 October 1888 when this peerage also became extinct. However, it was later recreated for his great-nephew, the son of the Right Hon. Evelyn Ashley, private secretary to and biographer of 3rd Viscount Palmerston. Evelyn Ashley was the second son of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury who had married Lord Mount Temple's sister Lady Emily Cowper.
Wilfrid William Ashley served as Conservative Minister of Transport in the 1920s, and was created Baron Mount Temple, of Lee in the County of Southampton, again in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, on 13 January 1932. Lord Mount Temple was chairman of the Anglo-German Fellowship but resigned in November 1938 because of the treatment of the German Jews by the National Socialists.[1]. He died 3 July 1939, when the peerage became extinct. He had been married in 1901 to "Maudie" Cassel, only daughter of the Edwardian financier Sir Ernest Cassel, and their elder daughter Edwina, a considerable heiress, was married in 1922 to Lord Louis Mountbatten, later the last Viceroy of India.
Barons Temple of Mount Temple (1723)
- see under Viscount Palmerston
Barons Mount Temple (1880)
Barons Mount Temple (1932)
- Wilfrid William Ashley, 1st Baron Mount Temple (1867–1939)