Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot FRS (10 May 1803 – 17 January 1890) was a Welsh landowner, industrialist and Liberal politician. He developed his estate at Margam near Swansea as an extensive ironworks, served by railways and a port, which was renamed Port Talbot. He served as a Member of Parliament for Glamorgan constituencies from 1830 until his death in 1890, a sixty-year tenure which made him the second longest serving MP in the nineteenth century. He was Lord Lieutenant of Glamorgan, from 1848 to 1890.
Talbot was descended from the Earls of Shrewsbury, through Hensol Castle, Talbot's Castle and Lacock Abbey. The family had bought Margam Abbey and its extensive 18,725 acres (7,578 ha) parish of Margam during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Having then married with the Mansels of Oxwich and Penrice, the Talbots had become Glamorgan’s largest resident landowners, with estates totalling 34,000 acres (14,000 ha) in that county alone. Their home estate at Margam included ancient metal workings, and extensive mineral rights across Margam, Kenfig and Aberavon. Talbot's father acquired the estate at Penrice, where having rebuilt Penrice Castle by 1820 the annual rent revenues reached £15,000.
Nine members of the Mansel family had sat in Parliament from the early sixteenth century and the family were seen in aristocratic circles as Glamorganshire's natural representatives at Westminster. Talbot's father, however, had shown no interest in becoming an MP but after his death in 1813, the family reasserted its political influences when his mother's second husband, Sir Christopher Cole was elected as county member in 1817. This was commonly regarded as a family arrangement until C.R.M. Talbot was ready to enter political life.
Even in 1817, however, there was some opposition to Cole's election. At the meeting in Bridgend where the new member was returned unopposed, George Tennant, a Swansea industrialist, struck a note of discontent.
Will you not, at some convenient time, avail yourself of those well-known means which are always at hand to enable you to retire from your post, when the infant legislator of the House of Margam shall be ripe for action, and thus surrender back the situation which you hold as a trust for that family by, whose interests you have been principally supported throughout the present election.
As widely expected therefore, Talbot virtually inherited the role of Member of Parliament for Glamorganshire in 1830 upon the retirement of his stepfather. Although nominally considered a Liberal, Talbot exercised considerable independence for most of his long political career, and his freedom to operate outside of party structures only became limited by the parliamentary reforms which occurred in the latter part of his time in the Commons, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Although firmly of the Whig wing of the Liberal Party, Talbot had shown signs of support for more radical policies long before the Gladstonian takeover of the party in the 1860s. In 1853 he voted in favour of the ballot. Two years later he supported the abolition of church rates, and in 1856, voted along with the Swansea member Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn in support of Irish disestablishment.