Open Spaces Society also campaigned for the creation of the National Trust. Its founders and early members included John Stuart Mill, Lord Eversley, William Morris, Sir Robert Hunter, and Octavia Hill. The last two founded the National Trust in 1895 along with Canon Rawnsley. Lord Eversley, as George Lefevre, was a Liberal MP and became a junior minister at the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s government. He held a variety of posts including Commissioner of Works. He opened Hampton Court Park, Kew Gardens and Regent’s Park to the public. Over the last century and a half the Society has preserved commons for the
Hardwicke Rawnsley theme, and, as the "Dictionary of National Biography" put it, "as a minor lake poet, a vast output of verse." His memoir of Ruskin, described by "The New York Times" as "in many ways the best volume [of] his series of books upon some of the literary aspects of the Lake Country", was published in 1901. After 34 years at Crosthwaite he retired to Grasmere, where, in 1915, he had bought Allan Bank, the house in which William Wordsworth had lived between 1808 and 1811. Edith Rawnsley died in 1916, and two years later, Rawnsley married Eleanor "Nellie" Foster Simpson,