Charles Sibthorp

Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp (14 February 1783 – 14 December 1855), popularly known as Colonel Sibthorp, was a widely caricatured British Ultra-Tory politician in the early 19th century. He sat as a Member of Parliament for Lincoln from 1826 to 1832 and from 1835 until 1855.

Sibthorp was born into a Lincoln gentry family, the son of Colonel Humphrey Waldo Sibthorp, of Canwick Hall, by his wife Susannah, daughter of Richard Ellison, of Sudbrooke Holme, Lincolnshire. Charles's brother, Richard Waldo Sibthorp (1792-1879), was an Anglican priest who gained notoriety for his 1841 conversion to Roman Catholicism (and who subsequently returned to the Anglican Church). He was commissioned into the Scots Greys in 1803, promoted Lieutenant in 1806, and later transferred to the 4th Dragoon Guards, in which he reached the rank of Captain. He did not serve abroad and continued in the service until 1822, when he succeeded to the family estates and also succeeded his brother as Lieutenant-Colonel of the Royal South Lincolnshire Militia. In 1812, he married Maria, daughter and co-heiress of Ponsonby Tottenham, M.P. for Fethard, County Wexford; they had four children.