BOOTH, George (1675-1758)

BOOTH, George (1675–1758)

styled 1690-94 Lord Delamer; suc. fa. 2 Jan. 1694 (a minor) as 2nd earl of WARRINGTON.

First sat 26 Oct. 1696; last sat 15 Nov. 1754

b. 2 May 1675, 2nd but 1st surv. s. of Henry Booth, Bar. Delamer (later earl of Warrington) and Mary (d. 23 Mar. 1691), da. of Sir James Langham‡, 2nd bt.; bro. of Hon. Langham Booth‡. educ. private (tutor, Mr. Delaheuze).1 m. 9 Apr. 1702 (with £24,000),2 Mary (d. 3 Apr. 1740), da. of John Oldbury of London, 1da. d. 2 Aug. 1758;3 will 22 July 1754-8 Sept. 1757, pr. 17 Aug. 1758.4

Commr. sewers, Lancs. and Cheshire 1706.5

Dep. lt., Lancs. 1714-?6

Freeman, Chester 1689-d.7

Associated with: Dunham Massey, Cheshire; Suffolk Street, Mdx. (to1717?)8 and Poland/ Great Marlborough Street, Mdx. (from 1717).9

Likenesses: oil on canvas, attrib. Godfrey Kneller, 1700-10, National Trust, Lanhydrock, Cornwall; oil on canvas by Michael Dahl, 1720-30, National Trust, Dunham Massey, Cheshire; oil on canvas by Michael Dahl, 1727, National Trust, Tatton Park, Cheshire.

A troubled inheritance

When the nineteen-year-old Hon. George Booth, styled Lord Delamer, inherited the Warrington title and estate on 2 Jan. 1694 it was in a dire condition.10 His father had been notorious as one of the most extreme Whigs of the revolutionary period of 1685-90, a violent opponent of James II who had led a small personal army from Cheshire to London in support of William of Orange’s invasion in November 1688. In the last weeks of October 1688, aware of the danger of the expedition on which he was about to embark, he drew up his will and with it some notes concerning his debts, as they stood at that time. He calculated that the costs of his political activities (and the incarcerations he had three times suffered on account of them), the portions and legacies to his younger siblings laid on him as executor of his own father’s will and other expenses had indebted him to the tune of £24,315. More recent historians have calculated his debts in 1688 to have reached as much as £50,000. He was further encumbered by an additional £1,183 he had to provide in annuities. Hardly offsetting this was his personal estate, which he calculated at £5,000, debts owed to him of £1,287 and an estate which barely earned £2,000 p.a.11 He made his son George sole executor of this own will of October 1688 which only added more charges to the troubled and indebted estate, assigning his heir to provide for numerous small legacies, portions of £5,000 apiece to his two sisters Lady Elizabeth and Lady Mary and annuities of £200 to his two younger brothers Langham and Henry – all of which were to be raised out of those few lands not already mortgaged.12

When drawing up his will the first earl was clearly counting on promises made by Sarah, dowager duchess of Somerset (widow of John Seymour, 4th duke of Somerset), maternal aunt of his wife Mary Langham, that she would leave substantial legacies for his daughters’ portions and the maintenance of his younger sons. He was bitterly disappointed when, after the duchess’s death in 1692, it transpired that her provisions for her great-nieces and -nephews were not as extensive as she had assured him they would be.13 He also factored into his calculations the second instalment of £10,000 of his wife’s portion, which was to be paid after the death of his father-in-law Sir James Langham. The 2nd earl later had to engage in a legal struggle, which eventually came before the House of Lords, to receive this payment, and even then only a part of the principal was paid, 14 years after Langham’s death in 1699, and none of the accruing interest, by which Warrington calculated that he had lost in total £10,950.14

When the first earl’s extravagant will was discovered three weeks after his death in a box of scrap paper tucked away in a corner of a room at Dunham Massey in Cheshire, the new earl of Warrington took steps to conceal its existence from his siblings. It certainly put him at a disadvantage with its generous bequests, without adequate provisions, and he expressed doubts, based on the location in which it was found (among scrap paper) and its date (October 1688, more than five years before the first earl’s death) as to whether it was indeed the final will of his father. The first earl would not have been so foolish (or so the new earl of Warrington claimed) as to have so heavily charged an estate whose dire condition he himself knew only too well. For the following several years Warrington’s sister Elizabeth and uncle Cecil Booth (who was given a small annuity by the will’s terms) challenged him, sometimes in the courts, to produce the will and when, in July 1698, the prerogative court of Canterbury found the October 1688 will valid, Warrington reluctantly, but obediently, tried to execute its conditions.15

This troubled financial legacy haunted Warrington from the moment of his inheritance and he devoted the rest of his long life – he died in 1758 aged 83 – to putting the Booth estate back in order. This goal affected all his activities and influenced his political outlook, for he was convinced that his forebears’ involvement in national and local politics had caused them to neglect the estate and to run up excessive expenses. Warrington was determined not to fall into that trap, despite the urgings of his younger brother Henry that he should live more extravagantly to make himself ‘popular’ in the county. In two letters of 1715 and 1722 Warrington recounted to Henry in detail the privations he had undergone as a young boy growing up in the financially strapped household of the great Whig leader Henry, 2nd Baron Delamer. Warrington remembered how ‘I have seen my father several times the year before the Revolution fall aweeping at the greatness of his debts’ and recalled in horror the dingy outmoded furniture in the family house of Dunham Massey, all very much in contrast to his father’s public image. The first earl’s situation was so dire that after 1691 he ceased keeping open house for his tenants and would go to the nearest taverns to meet his followers, rather than endure the expense of hosting them in his own house. Warrington was determined not to repeat this humiliation and avoided embroiling himself in the expense of keeping up a high local profile.

He was evidently considered the natural choice to replace his father as lord lieutenant of Cheshire in 1694 and the appointment of Richard Savage, 4th Earl Rivers in that role in May 1695 was initially seen as a stopgap measure until Warrington reached his majority.16 Rivers, though, continued in that office after Warrington came of age and although Warrington was again considered a candidate for the county leadership when Rivers was removed from his post in 1703, the young earl was passed over, either at his own request or because of the court’s distrust of his family’s long-standing Whiggery, in favour of Hugh Cholmondeley, Baron (later earl of) Cholmondeley.17 This position allowed Cholmondeley to become an increasingly dangerous local rival to the Booths and by the Hanoverian period they were the dominant force in Cheshire politics. Warrington, on the other hand, held no local positions of any great importance, although he did receive a commission as a deputy lieutenant, under Cholmondeley, at the time of the Hanoverian succession.18 Nor did Warrington seek national or court office. In March 1703 Narcissus Luttrell‡ reported that the young man had been made a gentleman of the bedchamber of Prince George, of Denmark, but there is no corroborating evidence for this assertion.19 Warrington never felt the need to ingratiate himself at an ungrateful court for, as he asked his importunate brother, how long did either their grandfather (George Booth, Baron Delamer) or father, each of whom had raised troops in Cheshire for the Restoration and Revolution respectively, ‘continue in favour when they would not be servile courtiers?’20

Despite his constant complaints of poverty Warrington still had enough resources, both financial and in local influence and prestige, to act independently of partisan affiliations, and if a label must be attached to his political views and activities, it would be as a country Whig, reflecting a distance from, and disenchantment with, the goals and agenda of the central government and its ‘servile courtiers’.

Under William III, 1696-1702

In the early days of his earldom Warrington was not as divorced from politics and its ancillary socializing as he was later to claim. The diary of James Brydges, later duke of Chandos, which does not commence until 1 Jan. 1697, reveals that in the last years of the seventeenth century the young Warrington was a man about town in London, or at least was very much in Brydges’s wide social circle (they were also kinsmen through the Langhams, Brydges being married to a granddaughter of Sir James Langham).21 Warrington, having reached his majority, first sat in the House on 26 Oct. 1696 and proceeded to attend 84 per cent of the meetings of the 1696-7 session. At this stage, Warrington followed in his father’s footsteps by supporting the vigorous prosecution of those suspected of involvement in Jacobite plotting. In February 1696 the lord great chamberlain, Robert Bertie, 3rd earl of Lindsey, approached Warrington to solicit the young earl’s support for his kinsman Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, who was heavily implicated in the recent revelations of Jacobite plotting against the king. Warrington frostily replied that ‘I shall be very glad to serve my cousin when it relates not to the king’s service’, to which the angered Lindsey reportedly shot back ‘My Lord, this is the first time I ever spoke to you, and, by God, it shall be the last’.22 Warrington voted for the attainder of Sir John Fenwick‡ on 23 Dec. 1696 and then, with his kinsman Henry Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, his Lancashire neighbour Charles Gerard, 2nd earl of Macclesfield and ten or so other Whigs led by Charles Powlett, duke of Bolton, fought against the House’s order for the commitment of Charles Mordaunt, earl of Monmouth (later 3rd earl of Peterborough) for his attempted manipulation of Fenwick’s testimony before the House.23 On 19 Mar. 1697 Warrington entered his protest, with Stamford and two other Whig peers, against the Lords’ insistence upon their amendments to the bill prohibiting wrought silks and calicos. Ten days later the petition of Susannah Harrington requesting to be able to sue her husband John, despite a protection from Warrington as his solicitor, was rejected by the House.24 This was followed the next day, 30 Mar., by the petition of Cecil Booth praying that the House require his nephew Warrington to waive his privilege so that Booth could pursue him in law for his suspect dealings involving the first earl’s will. Warrington submitted his answer to the petition on 7 Apr. but the cause between Booth and Warrington was still unresolved when it was lost at the prorogation of Parliament nine days later.25 Warrington came to just less than half of the sittings of the 1697-8 session. On 15 Mar. 1698 he opposed the commitment of the bill to punish the exchequer official Charles Duncombe‡. He registered his proxy with Macclesfield on 20 Apr., but this was vacated upon Warrington’s return to the House on 3 May.

The following session of 1698-9, the first of the 1698 Parliament, was Warrington’s busiest ever, with an attendance rate of 88 per cent (his highest) and 25 nominations to select committees. Here he began increasingly to show his country attitude and exhibited a divergence from the court Whigs and especially from the Junto. On 8 Feb. 1699 he protested against the House’s offer to William III to retain his Dutch guards. He also signed the protest of 27 Apr. 1699 against the passage of a supply bill which established commissioners to investigate William III’s grants of forfeited Irish lands through an objectionable ‘tacked’ amendment. Warrington himself submitted an appeal, read before the House on 8 Mar. 1699, against the dismissal of his chancery bill suing for an advance from his grandfather Sir James Langham of the remaining £10,000 of the marriage portion of Warrington’s mother, which Warrington feared Langham would repudiate as he had recently remarried and acquired a new family. Counsel for each side was not heard until 1 Apr. and the lord chief justice was ordered to report, but the hearing of his report was successively postponed on three occasions throughout the month. The manuscript minutes for 1 May 1699 note that Warrington and Langham had come to a settlement outside of the judicature of Parliament. Warrington, however, never did receive the full £10,000 due to him.26 In other matters, Warrington on 31 Mar. 1699 reported from the select committee considering the bill for augmenting the livings on certain vicarages and on 29 Apr. managed a conference on amendments to a naturalization bill.

His attendance was low in the following session of 1699-1700, down to 37 per cent. In late February 1700 he opposed the Tory attempts to maintain the ‘old’ East India Company as a corporation. Following the breakdown of relations between the Houses in April 1700 surrounding the bill for the resumption of the royal grants of forfeited Irish lands, William III dissolved the Parliament and sought to form a new ministry in time for the ensuing Parliament that would be less dependent on the Junto. A contemporary list and forecast placed Warrington among those Whig lords who would probably support the new ministry and were not loyal to the Junto. Warrington came to just over three-quarters of the meetings of the new Parliament of early 1701. He chaired and reported from the select committees on the naturalization bill of Adrian Lofland (7 Apr.) and on the estate bill of Peter Trevisa (11 June).27 He told twice, on divisions concerning an amendment to Box’s divorce bill (10 Apr.) and an address requesting a commission of review in the case of the suspected bigamist Charles Howard, 4th Baron Howard of Escrick (21 June). As predicted, he showed a hostility to the Junto by vigorously opposing the acquittal of John Somers, Baron Somers, on 17 June 1701. Warrington was diligent in his attendance at the Parliament of early 1702, and came to 87 per cent of the sittings. On 21 Feb. 1702 he was a teller in two divisions concerning the instructions which were to be given to the committee of the whole considering the oath of abjuration. Three days later he subscribed, alongside a large group of Tories, to the protest against the passage of the bill ‘for the succession of the Crown’ which enjoined this new oath.28 Yet despite his protest, on 11 Mar. 1702, three days after the death of William III and Warrington’s own involvement in a conference on the accession of Anne, Warrington took the new oath of abjuration. In March 1702 he also took the chair of select committees on 12 separate occasions and reported seven bills to the House, most of them in the last ten days of the month.29 A week before the prorogation, on 18 May, he told in a division regarding the commitment of Elizabeth Wandesford’s bill.

Under Anne, 1702-10

In the early years of Anne’s reign John Macky wrote of Warrington that ‘this gentleman makes no great figure in his country, Parliament, or person’.30 Granted that in his character sketch Macky was explicitly comparing Warrington to the more famous exploits of his notorious father, this dismissive assessment is still largely accurate regarding Warrington’s activities during the reign of Anne. On the local level he had been trying to exert some electoral influence but it was more often than not ineffectual. His independent political attitude was evident in the ambivalent and hesitant support he gave in the elections of December 1701 and August 1702 to the Whig candidates, and particularly to Sir Robert Cotton‡, whom he suspected of growing too close to the court after his appointment as custos rotulorum of Denbighshire in 1699. For a time in late 1701 Warrington was suspected of having abandoned the Whig candidates Cotton and Sir John Mainwaring‡ altogether, but Warrington dismissed this rumour with a public letter clarifying his endorsement of them.31 In 1702 his growing opposition to Cotton, and his inability to guarantee his tenants’ presence at the poll or to guarantee their votes for the other Whig candidate Sir Willoughby Aston, hampered the Whig interest and the Tories Sir George Warburton‡ and Sir Roger Mostyn‡ topped the poll. Three years later Warrington more successfully united with the other Whig leaders in the county to ensure the return of his own brother Langham Booth‡ and John Crewe Offley‡ as Whig knights of the shire; they were also returned, unopposed, in 1708. Warrington, though, was a secondary figure in Cheshire politics, particularly after 1703 when the lord lieutenancy of the county went to Cholmondeley who, despite the court Whiggery he displayed at Westminster, consistently supported the Tories in Cheshire against the slowly waning Booth interest.

For much of Anne’s reign Warrington may have been preoccupied with his unceasing efforts to resurrect the estate and with the troubles caused by his infelicitous marriage. Warrington had been linked with various heiresses since 1694 at least, but in April 1702 a settlement was finally hammered out by Warrington’s uncle George Booth for the marriage of the earl to Mary, the daughter and coheir of the London merchant John Oldbury, who was said to have given his daughter a portion of £40,000 (although it was more likely around £24,000).32 She assigned over her portion to him for the payment of his debts, but this welcome infusion of funds was offset by the bad relations between the couple, and after the birth of their only daughter Mary in 1704 they lived virtually separate lives albeit in the same house. This eventually led Warrington in 1739 to pen a tract in support of divorce on account of incompatibility of temper.33

Warrington’s attendance in the House was generally lower in the Parliaments of Anne’s reign than they had been during William’s, though he still managed to come to half of the sittings of the opening session, in 1702-3, of Anne’s first Parliament. In January and February 1703 he chaired committees and reported to the House on three private estate bills (on 22 Jan. and 4 Feb.).34 He was a teller on two occasions, on 13 Jan. in a division on the second reading of the bill for the navigation of the River Derwent and on 22 Feb. regarding the commitment of the bill to set out the requirements for land-holding on potential Members of the Commons. That same day he subscribed to the protest against the decision not to commit the bill.

Surprisingly, he voted against the Whig amendments to the first occasional conformity bill on 16 Jan. 1703, an inexplicable choice, as he otherwise appears to have taken the Presbyterian and nonconformist religious upbringing of his family to heart.35 Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland thought that Warrington would support the same bill when it came up again in December, but Warrington, whose attendance stood at only 38 per cent in the 1703-4 session, was not present, perhaps purposely, for the vote on 14 December. He was present on 18 Mar. 1704 to chair and report from the committee of the whole on the bill for accountants to be charged with the interest money received by them and on 21 Mar. he dissented from both the decision not to give a second reading to a rider to the recruitment bill and the passage of the bill itself. He came to only 21 per cent of the meetings of 1704-5. He assigned his proxy to his fellow Cheshireman the Earl Rivers on 28 Nov. 1704, but this was vacated on 9 Dec. when Warrington appeared in the House. He was in the House on 15 Dec. when he opened the debate on the occasional conformity bill, at its third appearance in the House, giving his reasons, ‘weak enough’ according to William Nicolson, bishop of Carlisle, for his new-found opposition to the bill, ‘though the last session he had been for it’.36 After this he proceeded to sit in only a further 19 meetings before leaving the House for that session on 22 Jan. 1705, registering his proxy with Howard of Escrick on 3 February. Five days before his departure, on 17 Jan., Warrington protested against the resolution to give the estate bill of William Henry Granville, 3rd earl of Bath, a second reading despite the objections of John Granville, Baron Granville of Potheridge.

In the short period when he returned to the House from 21 Jan. to 26 Feb. 1706 in the 1705-6 session, the first of the new Parliament elected in the summer of 1705, Warrington on 20 Feb. reported from the select committee, one of the 20 to which he was nominated, considering the private bill of John Ballet. He came to only 14 of the sittings in 1706-7, in February and March 1707, but his attendance was more frequent thereafter and in the session of 1707-8 he told once, on 3 Mar. 1708, and resumed his activity in select committees, chairing and reporting from four – on two private estate bills (10 and 12 Mar. 1708), one highway bill (23 Feb.) and a bill to make the French privateer Ambuscade a free ship (2 March). He came to 35 per cent of the sittings of the first session of the 1708 Parliament, in 1708-9. On 28 Mar. 1709 he signed the protest against the decision not to give a second reading to a rider to the bill to improve the Union that would require that those accused of treason be given a copy of their indictment before trial. His attendance in the following session of 1709-10 was slightly better, as he came to 44 per cent of the meetings and reported on 13 Mar. 1710 from the select committee dealing with the sale of the tenements of his kinsman and friend James Brydges. He also was a teller in a question concerning James Greenshield’s petition on 16 Feb. and on 25 Mar. was placed on the committee to draw up objections against the Commons’ amendments to Edward Southwell’s marriage bill and two days later was a manager for the conference where these reasons were presented. Warrington was in attendance for most of the trial of Dr. Henry Sacheverell and during it frequently dined with Charles Bennet, 2nd Baron Ossulston (later earl of Tankerville), Thomas Fane, 6th earl of Westmorland, and William Ferdinand Carey, 8th Baron Hunsdon; all of these peers, along with Warrington, voted Sacheverell guilty. Westmorland became one of Warrington’s principal proxy partners after 1715.37

The Oxford Ministry, 1710-14

In the autumn of 1710 Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford and Mortimer, rightly saw Warrington as an opponent of his new ministry. Perhaps disheartened by his brother Langham’s coming bottom of the poll in the Tory sweep in the Cheshire elections of October, Warrington was aware that Whig power in Parliament was diluted and assured his uncle George Booth that, though he doubted that ‘the Whigs may be so strong as that one vote would be of service to them’, he would still make sure to send his proxy to Westminster by the time the new Parliament convened.38 Warrington’s proxy registrations in favour of Whigs, even former Junto Whigs, are his only discernible involvement in the House in the first two sessions of the 1710 Parliament, when he attended only 60 meetings between November 1710 and June 1712. He may have been equally conscientious in assigning his proxy in the previous sessions between April 1707 and April 1710 (as well as between December 1698 and June 1701), but the proxy registers for those sessions do not survive. Warrington was in the House when the Parliament first met on 25 Nov. 1710, but he only stayed until 14 Dec. and four days later registered his proxy with his cousin Stamford, who held it until Warrington’s return on 15 Feb. 1711; thereafter Warrington was in the House for most of February and March before he left on 27 Mar. 1711. Three days later he once again entrusted his proxy to Stamford for the remainder of the session. In total he was present at only 29 per cent of the meetings of 1710-11. He showed the same concern with his ‘one vote’ in service of the Whigs in the following session of 1711-12 when he attended just under a quarter of the sittings and gave his proxy twice to Charles Montagu, Baron (later earl of) Halifax, first between 9 Dec. 1711 and 14 Feb. 1712, on which day Warrington sat first in the House for that session, and then again after his leaving the House from 7 Apr. 1712 to the end of the session.

By that time, in April 1712, the earl of Oxford, as Harley had become, was anxious to bring the independent-minded Warrington over to his side in order to shore up his faltering support in the House.39 Warrington’s name appears frequently in the many scrappy memoranda and working lists that Oxford drew up in 1713-14. Just before the crucial session on the peace starting on 9 Apr. 1713 Oxford was successfully able to make approaches to Warrington through the intermediary of the earl’s brother-in-law Russell Robartes‡, younger brother of Charles Bodvile Robartes, 2nd earl of Radnor.40 Robartes was a Whig but, like Warrington, constantly in financial difficulties (partly because Warrington himself had never paid in full the portion of £12,000 promised to Robartes on his marriage to the earl’s sister) and he had gone over to the ministry’s side when it helped him to succeed to his uncle’s lucrative office of teller of the exchequer in October 1710. Perhaps through Robartes’s exertions, Warrington was present in the House for the first week or so of the session of spring 1713. At the end of April he had to leave the House to go into the country and from Dunham Massey on 11 May he wrote to Oxford apologizing that he had left his proxy ‘not to your liking, which if I had apprehended I would have been very cautious of, for it has always been my desire as I know it is my duty to do whatever were in my way as I thought for her majesty’s service, and have never tied myself to any sort of persons, but considered things to the best of my small reason’.41 As the proxy records for this session are unfortunately missing we cannot tell who the undesirable recipient of this proxy was – most likely either of Warrington’s previous proxy partners, Stamford or Halifax, or another Whig. Warrington’s claims of political independence notwithstanding, he was now clearly currying favour with Oxford in the expectation of some benefit. Warrington returned to the House on 5 June and on that same day he met with Oxford when the lord treasurer assured him that the queen intended to pay Warrington the arrears of his father’s pension of £2,000 p.a., which had been granted in 1690 but which had only been paid up to Michaelmas of that year. Despite Warrington’s own solicitations to William III, this pension had not been renewed after his father’s death in January 1694, but Warrington calculated that there was still three and a quarter years of arrears, amounting to £6,500, owing to him in the name of his father.42 To Warrington this amount was only what was due him and he insisted then, and later, that he had not seen Oxford’s offer as a bribe to bind him permanently to the ministry. The lord treasurer, though, was not in the habit of giving away money for no political benefit and he exacted from Warrington a promise that in exchange for the arrears he would support the ministry in the forthcoming controversial vote on the Malt Tax, opposition to which threatened to undermine the ministry’s plans and even dissolve the Union. Warrington was good for his word and the vote on the Malt Tax scraped by in favour of the government 76 to 74 on 8 June, only three days after Warrington’s return to the House and his meeting with Oxford. Warrington’s vote was crucial – if the votes had been equal the bill would have been lost – and he was later singled out as one of three who had surprisingly ‘come into the bill on the Malt’.43

Warrington remained a consistent attender of the House for the remainder of the session and Oxford appears to have thought that he had Warrington’s vote for any future divisions. He predicted that Warrington would support the ministry in the vote on the eighth and ninth articles of the French commercial treaty in June, although the bill never made it past the lower House. In the weeks that followed Oxford was either unable or more likely unwilling to provide Warrington with the promised arrears. As Oxford was in the habit of holding back pensions and other grants from necessitous peers in order to make them more dependent on the ministry, it is likely that he was employing this tactic with the proudly independent Warrington. Warrington was anxious to return to Cheshire and in the latter days of the session in July 1713 emphasized to Oxford that he was only reluctantly staying in Westminster to have an opportunity to wait on the lord treasurer to receive the money promised him. He made it clear that in his view his vote on the Malt Tax was a special, unique favour to the government for the arrears of a pension which was in any case morally and legally owing to him. He insisted that he did not ask for this ‘favour’ but was in fact approached first by Oxford and that he had performed the requested task, ‘which I did very heartily … and hope I did a service as that matter stood, and in which I met with some very pressing endeavours to have drawn me off’.44

In the winter of 1713, when Warrington was back in the capital ‘to fix the matter’, and attended the prorogation of 10 Dec., Oxford tried to placate him with a payment of £1,000 and the promise of the remainder in two more instalments after Christmas. Warrington’s patience was growing thin, and Robartes himself warned Oxford that unless Warrington was quickly satisfied, all of his endeavours ‘to continue him still firm to the present administration’ would be for nought.45 Warrington continued to address letters reminding Oxford of his obligation throughout the first months of 1714, even in desperation reducing his demands to a one-off payment of £4,000 if delivered immediately, and still, perhaps naively, continued to appeal to Oxford’s sense ‘of conscience and honour’, feeling that ‘it’s impossible it could enter your breast to make me that promise only to gain my vote in a matter where you wanted it’.46 By the spring of 1714, as Oxford now tried to avoid payment by claiming that more of the arrears had been previously paid than Warrington had first admitted to, Warrington became more forthright in expressing his disgust at Oxford’s naked political manipulation, as it was clear to him that the lord treasurer had not made his offer in order to fulfil a debt from the late king, but in order to ‘encourage me in serving [the queen], particularly on that present occasion … And I believe your lordship would gladly that morning have given double that sum and paid it down to have been sure of carrying that bill at that time’.47 He had heard that Oxford had been saying he was withholding payment because Warrington had not fulfilled his further obligations to the government. Warrington made it clear that that had never been part of the deal, as Oxford had never explicitly requested any further ‘particular’ favours from the earl and Warrington had interpreted Oxford’s refusal to pay the arrears as a sign that the lord treasurer no longer needed his services. He ended with a warning that Oxford should not so thoroughly alienate a potential vote, particularly in such a troubled time for the ministry and his own career: ‘My Lord, my poor service was once wanted, and may be so again, neither your Lordship nor I know the future’.48 In June 1714 Warrington had learned to his great shock that the queen herself knew nothing of the promises long made to him in her name and that month he ended his long correspondence with Oxford on this matter with a statement which summed up his mixed feelings of destitution and independence and the anger he felt at his (relative) poverty being so cynically used: ‘I did not ask it [the arrears], of your Lordship, nor do I want it to buy my bread. Your Lordship promising it was a great surprise to me, and the conclusion is no less so, for I can’t guess why you are pleased to treat me thus, or of what use it can be to yourself’.49

Perhaps because of his attempts to resolve this issue as well as the problems caused by his uncle George Booth, Warrington was more than usually attentive during the session of spring 1714, the first of the new Parliament, and was present at just less than two-thirds of its sittings.50 On 2 Apr. 1714 George Booth presented to the House his petition for the reversal of decrees made against him in a suit brought by Warrington before chancery in 1711 which accused Booth of fraud in his dealings as Warrington’s agent in the marriage negotiations with John Oldbury in 1701. After some delay, as Booth claimed on 20 Apr. that he could not prepare his case in time, counsel for both sides was heard before the House on 28 April. The following day the judges reassured the peers that Warrington’s bill had been properly brought before chancery in 1711, despite the long period of time which had elapsed since the actual cause of fraud, in 1701-2, and that the Statute of Limitations did not pertain in this case. Booth’s petition was dismissed on 29 Apr. and he was still required to repay Warrington the money he had defrauded him of, with interest.51

Warrington reported on 16 Apr. from a select committee on a private estate bill and on 11 May from a committee of the whole considering the Dunstable Road Bill.52 Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham considered him a certain opponent of the schism bill, but Warrington left the House on 10 June 1714, before the vote, entrusting his proxy the following day with Charles Cornwallis, 4th Baron Cornwallis, who was one of the signatories to the protest against the passage of the bill on 15 June.

The Hanoverian Succession, 1715-53

By the time of the accession of George I Warrington had been able to repay £55,548 worth of mortgages and debts, both principal and interest, on the estate. He looked on this achievement with pride, emphasizing to his brother Henry, anxious that the Booths reassert their local position by extravagant display, that ‘it must be believed that such a debt could not be paid without a great deal of care and pains’. He had a rental income of £2,769 and £1,419 from fines for renewing leases but subtracting the remaining charges on his estate and his other expenses left him with a balance in his favour of only around £600 p.a. at most, which was supposed to be sufficient for the necessary repairs to Dunham Massey and its outbuildings. Thus he continued to lament to his brother the ‘great straights and difficulties’ he found himself in, owing to the disgraceful selfishness and improvidence of their father, but most especially of their grandfather, the first Baron Delamer, whose behaviour Warrington censured in strong terms.53

Yet despite all these querulous arguments for the need to refrain from politics and ‘popularity’, Warrington came back to Westminster, with its expense of lodging and housekeeping, in March 1715 more engaged in Parliament than ever. Some of the highest attendance rates of his career were attained in the sessions of George I’s first Parliament. From 1715 to 1729 he largely supported the Whig government and was in frequent contact with the secretary of state, Sunderland, regarding his proxy. He limited his circle of proxy partners to three peers who supported the government – Stamford (until his death in 1720), Westmorland and Maurice Thompson, 2nd Baron Haversham. He also corresponded with him about the fate of the Whigs (represented by his brother Langham Booth‡) in Cheshire elections.54 He began to receive a government pension of his own of £1,000 p.a. from March 1715, later raised in 1717 to £1,500 p.a.55 Payment of this pension very quickly fell into arrears as well and his anger at the government’s effective termination of it in May 1729 led him into opposition to the ministry of Robert Walpole† (later earl of Orford).56 Throughout he continued his busy work in the day-to day-business of the House.

From the 1730s Warrington was principally engaged in renovating and rebuilding Dunham Massey and arranging the portion of his only daughter Mary, who in 1736 married her kinsman Harry Grey†, 4th earl of Stamford.57 Warrington died on 2 Aug. 1758 at the age of 83 as a relatively wealthy man, with assets, other than land, totalling £25,580, which was sufficient to pay for the many legacies in his will of 22 July 1754.58 At his death the estate passed to his daughter, Mary, and through her to his son-in-law the 4th earl of Stamford. The titles held by the Booths went separate ways, the barony of Delamer going to the next surviving male descendant of the first Baron Delamer, Warrington’s first cousin Nathaniel Booth, 4th Baron Delamer, while as the first earl of Warrington had no surviving male heirs that title became extinct, although it was revived in 1796 when the second earl’s grandson George Harry Grey†, 5th earl of Stamford, was created earl of Warrington.

C.G.D.L.

  • 1 JRL, EGR 3/6/2/2/5.
  • 2 BJRL, lxv. 22 n38.
  • 3 Ormerod, Cheshire, i. 534, 525-6.
  • 4 TNA, PROB 11/840.
  • 5 JRL, EGR 3/6/1/2.
  • 6 Ibid. 3/6/1/1.
  • 7 Bodl. ms Eng. Hist. c.711 for 9 Jan. 1689 (Roger Whitley diary, British History Online).
  • 8 JRL, EGR 3/6/2/1/11; Verney ms mic. M636/54, G. Merry to Fermanagh, 11 Apr. 1717.
  • 9 BJRL, lxv. 23 n41.
  • 10 This biography is based on J.V. Beckett and C. Jones, ‘Financial Improvidence and Political Independence in the Early Eighteenth Century: George Booth, 2nd earl of Warrington’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, lxv. 8-35.
  • 11 JRL, EGR 3/6/2/1/1, 14; Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, lxv. 15-16.
  • 12 TNA, PROB 11/446.
  • 13 JRL, EGR 3/6/2/1/3, 6.
  • 14 Ibid. 3/6/2/1/1.
  • 15 Ibid. 3/6/2/1/3-13.
  • 16 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 250, 251.
  • 17 Ibid. v. 279.
  • 18 JRL, EGR 3/6/1/1.
  • 19 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 274.
  • 20 JRL, EGR 3/6/2/2/1, 2; 3/6/3/2; 3/7/3/2.
  • 21 HEHL, Stowe (Chandos) ms 26, vol. 1.
  • 22 Ailesbury Mems. 385.
  • 23 HMC Buccleuch, ii. 439-40; Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, i. 168-76.
  • 24 HMC Lords, n. s. ii. 541-2.
  • 25 Ibid. ii. 542-5.
  • 26 Ibid. iii. 364-5; JRL, EGR 3/6/2/1/1.
  • 27 PA, HL/PO/JO/CO/1/6, p. 162.
  • 28 HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 478-9.
  • 29 PA, HL/PO/JO/CO/1/6, pp. 202, 204, 209, 211, 212, 224, 225, 226; HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 481; n.s. v. 16-20.
  • 30 Macky, Mems. 110.
  • 31 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 60; Liverpool RO, 920/MD/173-5, 6 Dec. 1701.
  • 32 Verney ms mic. M636/47, J. to Sir R. Verney 29 and 30 Aug. 1694; CSP Dom. 1695, p. 276; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 222, 251, 570-1; v. 162; Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, lxv. 22 nn38, 39.
  • 33 Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, lxv. 21-22; JRL, EGR 3/6/2/2/1, 2.
  • 34 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/6, pp. 262, 271, 272.
  • 35 JRL, EGR 3/6/2/6/1.
  • 36 Nicolson London Diaries, 253.
  • 37 TNA, C104/113, pt 2 Ossulston diary, for 27 Feb. and 16 Mar. 1710.
  • 38 Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, lxv. 12 n.12.
  • 39 Add. 70279, R. Booth to R. Harley, 19 Apr. 1712.
  • 40 Add. 70255, R. Robartes to Oxford, 6 Apr. 1713.
  • 41 Add. 70212, Warrington to Oxford, 18 Apr., 11 May 1713.
  • 42 Ibid. 5 June 1713, 10 Apr. 1714.
  • 43 Bodl. Ballard 38, f. 194.
  • 44 Add 70212, Warrington to Oxford, 24 June, 11 and 23 July 1713, 14 Aug. 1713.
  • 45 Ibid. 10 Nov., 4 and 8 Dec. 1713, 10 Apr. 1714; Add. 70255, R. Robartes to Oxford, 20 Dec. 1713.
  • 46 Add. 70212, Warrington to Oxford, 25 Jan., 18 and 26 Mar., 10 Apr. 1714.
  • 47 Ibid. 16 and 24 Apr. 1714.
  • 48 Ibid. 10 and 13 May 1714.
  • 49 Ibid. 10 June 1714.
  • 50 Ibid. 28 Feb., 18 and 26 Mar., 24 Apr., 10 May 1714.
  • 51 HMC Lords, n.s. x. 270-1.
  • 52 Ibid. 239.
  • 53 JRL, EGR 3/6/2/2/1, 2.
  • 54 Add. 61496, ff. 20, 66, 134-5, 158.
  • 55 Add. 61604, ff. 1-2, 5-10.
  • 56 CUL, Ch(H) Corr. 768, 770, 1716, 1721.
  • 57 Trans. Lancs. and Cheshire Antiq. Soc. xlii. 53-79, esp. 60-79.
  • 58 TNA, PROB 11/840; JRL, EGR 1/8/11, 1/8/10/4a, 3/6/2/1/15; BJRL, lxv. 29.