styled 1626-77 Visct. Lisle (L’Isle); suc. fa. 2 Nov. 1677 as 3rd earl of LEICESTER.
First sat 2 May 1678; last sat 4 Mar. 1689
MP Yarmouth I.o.W. 1640 (Apr., Nov.); co. Louth [I], 1642-4; Kent 1653; nominated to Cromwell’s Other House 1657.
b. 10 Jan. 1619, 1st s. of Robert Sydney, 2nd earl of Leicester and Dorothy, da. of Henry Percy†, 3rd earl of Northumberland; bro. of Algernon Sydney‡ and Henry Sydney, later earl of Romney; bro.-in-law of Henry Spencer†, earl of Sunderland. educ. G. Inn 1633; Christ Church, Oxf. 1634; travelled abroad (Denmark, Holstein) 1632, (France) 1636-41. m. 19 May 1645 (with £6,000), Catherine (d.1652), 3rd da. of William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, and Catherine, da. of Thomas Howard†, earl of Suffolk, 3s. (2 d.v.p.), 1da (d.v.p.);1 1da. illegit. with Grace Saunders formerly Pensac (Pensacke); 1s., 2da. illegit. with Jane Highems formerly Pensac (Pensacke). d. 6 Mar. 1698; will 6 Mar 1685-2 Mar. 1698, pr. 26 Mar. 1698.2
Capt. tp. of horse, 1640-2, col. (parl.) regt. of horse in Ireland, 1641-3; lt. gen. Irish army, c. Sept. 1642-Aug. 1643; col. of horse and ?ft. (parl. army in Ireland) 1646-7.
Commr. prevention of abuses in heraldry 1646; ld. lt. (parl.) [I], 1646-7; cllr. of state 14 Feb. 1649, 1650, 1653; cttee. preservation of goods from sale of late king’s goods 1650; pres. of the council, 23 Feb.-23 Mar. 1652; cllr. to Oliver Cromwell‡, 1653.
Custos. rot. Kent 1656.3
Associated with: Penshurst, Kent; Sheen, Surr. and Leicester House, Westminster.
Likenesses: oil on canvas, attrib. to G. Honthorst, Viscount de Lisle; group portrait, oil on canvas, by Sir A. Van Dyck, Penshurst Place, Kent.
Eschewing his father’s equivocation, Lisle was a committed supporter first of Parliament and then of the Cromwellian republic. His political principles were not sufficiently extreme to allow him to preside over the trial of Charles I, however, and although nominated as one of the judges, he declined to act. Although he had been well thought of by Oliver Cromwell, Lisle did not become a target of royalist resentment and was able to obtain a pardon at the Restoration. Following the king’s return he concentrated on developing his already well-established reputation as a patron of the arts. Further evidence of his relative security under the new regime is indicated by his success in obtaining a sixty-year lease on the former monastic lands at Sheen in Surrey, which he had acquired in the 1650s (and where he had commenced construction of a new seat) along with the rights to operate the ferry on the Thames there.4
If he met with little hostility from the new regime, Lisle’s family relations were more fractious. He was on poor terms with his father, who preferred his more able younger brother, Algernon, and who insisted on providing generously for Lisle’s younger siblings. His relations with Algernon were also, unsurprisingly, poor. The 2nd earl’s dislike of his heir appears to have been set early on in his life, while the hostility between Lisle and Algernon Sydney appears to have stemmed more from political disagreements in the aftermath of the Civil War.5 One result was a long-running dispute with Leicester over his marriage settlement. His wife’s portion went unpaid and this in turn affected settlement of her jointure. According to his father, suitable alternative arrangements were made, but Lisle disagreed. In 1652 Lisle and Leicester came to blows following the latter’s decision to cut Lisle’s allowance after he had lost his wife in childbirth. Matters had not improved a dozen years later. In 1664 he gave vent to his resentments, telling his father that ‘for the greatest part of my life, and my children for their whole lives, [he had] been excluded from any benefit or help from your Lordship or your estate’.6
When Lisle succeeded to the earldom in November 1677 he discovered that shortly before his death his father had altered his will (already heavily weighted against Lisle) and settled additional sums on his favoured younger children. The intricacies of the settlement meant that Leicester was left with unpalatable choices bound up with the development of Leicester Fields in metropolitan Middlesex and with the payment of rents and annuities but which in either case obliged him to surrender almost £30,000 to his brothers, Algernon and Henry, who were also named as executors. He attempted to buy them off with a promise of a mere £4,000 and when this was rejected opted to challenge his father’s will. A series of expensive and bitter law suits ensued. Leicester lost, leaving him, according to his father’s former steward Gilbert Spencer, practically apoplectic with rage. In a letter to Henry Sydney, Spencer reported ‘you need not now be afraid of that cruel tyrant, who may show his teeth but can never bite, I hear he storms and swears like mad calls me 100 rogues’.7 Despite his anger at losing the case, Leicester’s possession of the estate provided him with a valuable bargaining tool. He was eventually able to settle with the more tractable Henry but had less success with Algernon, who insisted on continuing the dispute. Algernon’s arrest and subsequent execution for his part in the Rye House Plot relieved Leicester of the necessity of coming to terms with him. As something of a compromise Leicester sent him £1,000 during his imprisonment ‘because he could no longer hold up the cudgels.’8
Although little is known of his politics between the Restoration and his succession to the earldom, it is just possible, although perhaps unlikely, that it was the 3rd earl when still Viscount Lisle rather than his by then elderly father who was described by James, II as having caballed with Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland, and other supporters of the ‘Isle of Wight conditions’ to obtain concessions from Charles II following the dismissal of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, in the autumn of 1667.9 Otherwise he seems to have maintained a low profile. His relative inactivity was of a piece with his earlier disinclination to involve himself with the councils and committees of the Interregnum. The most significant business with which he was involved in relation to Parliament prior to his succession to the peerage was over a large collection of ‘the late king’s goods’, which he had acquired during the Interregnum (making the most of his position as a member of the committee overseeing the sale) and which he informed the House on 19 May 1660 that he believed might have belonged to the late king. His admission came the day after two other peers (his kinsman, Northumberland, and Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough) had made similar discoveries, though their collections were nowhere near as large. When he eventually surrendered the pieces in September, comprising both pictures and marble statues, it was estimated that their value was in the region of £3,000.10
Leicester took his seat in the House on 2 May 1678, some six months after his succession to the earldom and around five months after receiving his writ of summons (which was issued on 29 Nov. 1677).11 He had been excused at a call of the House on 16 Feb. 1678. He was present on just two of the remaining nine days of the session, although he is known to have been in London because he was seen at an auction of pictures with his nephew Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, whom he was later to describe as ‘my special friend and relation.’12 Leicester returned to the House for the subsequent session on 5 June 1678, but his attendance remained low and he was present for just six of its 43 days during which he was named to one committee, that considering Sir John Weld’s bill. During the October-December session of 1678 when allegations about a popish plot were at the forefront of business, his attendance rose to half of all sitting days, although he was again named to only one committee (considering the bill for raising the militia). On 15 Nov. he voted in favour of making the declaration against transubstantiation part of the test bill. He took the oaths on 2 Dec. but was accused (along with Henry Jermyn, earl of St Albans) of having missed some words out. Both peers had to satisfy the House by taking them a second time. On 20 Dec. he entered a protest against accepting the amendments made by the committee to the bill for disbanding forces from abroad and on 26 Dec. voted against insisting on the Lords’ amendments to the bill for disbanding the army relating to the payment of money into the exchequer. On 23 Dec. he entered a protest against the failure of the House to require Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), to withdraw and on 27 Dec. he voted in favour of Danby’s committal.
Leicester attended one day of the abortive session of 6-13 Mar. 1679. He then took his seat once more five days into the new Parliament on 20 Mar. after which he was present on 44 per cent of all sitting days. He was named to the committees for privileges and petitions. During March Danby assessed Leicester as an opponent but also categorized him as both absent and unreliable. Leicester’s attendances in April and May were closely correlated to debates over Danby’s impeachment. He voted consistently in its favour and also supported the creation of a joint committee of both Houses to consider the method of proceeding against Danby and the other impeached lords. He was not present on 13 May when the House resolved that the bishops had a right to be present in court in capital cases until the time of sentence but entered a dissent on 27 May when the House insisted on maintaining the bishops’ rights in the face of opposition from the Commons.
Leicester took his seat at the opening of the second Exclusion Parliament on 21 Oct. 1680 and attended just under 44 per cent of sitting days. Perhaps not surprisingly, all the surviving parliamentary lists indicate that he favoured excluding James*, duke of York from the succession and that he voted against the rejection of the exclusion bill on 15 November. On 7 Dec. he found William Howard, Viscount Stafford, guilty of treason.13 His friendship with William Jephson‡, whom he named as one of his executors, suggests there may have been a political link to Thomas Wharton, (later marquess of Wharton).
Danby’s pre-sessional forecast compiled in the spring of 1681 again listed Leicester as one of his opponents, but in the event Leicester did not attend the Oxford Parliament at all.14 He attended the opening of James II’s Parliament on 19 May 1685 but was present on only five of the 42 possible sitting days. Various canvassing lists agree that he opposed James II’s policies and supported the retention of the Test, yet in November 1688 he was listed as having refused to sign the petition for a free Parliament.15
In spite of his opposition to James, Leicester seems not to have exerted himself on behalf of the new order. He failed to attend the opening of the Convention in January 1689 and was excused later that month on grounds of sickness. His final attendance came on 4 Mar. 1689 when he took the oaths to the new regime. On 29 Apr. he registered a proxy in favour of his younger brother, Henry, newly ennobled as Viscount Sydney. He did not register a proxy for either the 1689-90 session or the first session of the 1690 Parliament but from 1690 to 1693 his proxy was registered annually and alternately at the beginning of each session in favour either of Charles Talbot, 12th earl (later duke) of Shrewsbury or of Sydney. His last proxy was registered in January 1695 in favour of Sydney, now promoted earl of Romney. It is perhaps significant that he never registered a proxy in favour of his son and heir, Robert* [1317], styled Viscount Lisle, the future 4th earl of Leicester, who was summoned to Parliament by a writ of acceleration as Baron Sydney in July 1689. Lord Sydney was reported to have suffered ‘unkind usage’ at his father’s hands, which probably refers to Leicester’s failure to pay adequate maintenance to his son and daughter-in-law – a failure that in turn reflected the non-payment of Lady Sydney’s marriage portion.16
Leicester’s failure to attend Parliament for most of the final decade of his life was probably largely to do with ill health. Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, described him as ‘a most infirm man’ and noted how Leicester was frequently to be seen taking the air in his carriage in the hopes of improving his condition. There is no reason to suspect that he was inimical to the new regime, even though he seems to have enjoyed entertaining men at his London residence who were politically suspect, such as Ailesbury, John Dryden and William Wycherley. Association with men like Dryden and Wycherley probably reflected Leicester’s interest in literary patronage more than his political preferences. Non-attendance of Parliament did not prevent him from continuing to develop Leicester Fields, and in the 1690s he overturned his father’s policy (based on the original licence to develop) of concentrating on residential buildings and encouraged the erection of commercial booths in the area.17
Leicester died of a combination of ‘a strangury’ and old age on 6 Mar. 1698. He was said to have provided liberally for the poor in his lifetime.18 In his will, which he embellished with a number of codicils, he provided exceptionally generously for his four illegitimate children and their mothers. He also left substantial bequests to his servants. He named his nephew Thomas Pelham*, later Baron Pelham of Laughton, his illegitimate daughter Philadelphia Saunders, and Martin Folkes (in place of William Jephson, deceased) as his executors. His personal fortune included various sums lent on mortgage as well as £2,000 invested in the East India Company.19 For all this, he died some £5,000 in debt and his debts and legacies exceeded his ‘vast’ personal estate by over £7,000. The resulting action in chancery appears to have been a collusive action brought by his executors against the new earl, Robert, and a number of other members of the family in order to secure settlement of the estate.20
R.P./R.D.E.E.- 1 HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 466, 560, 596, 613; TNA, C10/251/64.
- 2 TNA, PROB 11/444.
- 3 HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 499.
- 4 Jnl. of the Hist. of Collections, xi. 6; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 208.
- 5 J. Scott, English Republic, 60.
- 6 HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 448, 614, 523-4.
- 7 Survey of London, xxxiv. 419.
- 8 Scott, Restoration Crisis, 90-93, 94-99; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 418.
- 9 Life of James II, i. 426-7.
- 10 Jnl. of the Hist. of Collections, xi. 1-2.
- 11 PA, HL/PO/JO/19/1/127.
- 12 Verney ms mic. M636/31, W. Fall to Sir R. Verney, 12 May 1678; TNA, PROB 11/444.
- 13 Bodl. Rawl. A. 183, f. 62, Carte 80, f. 823.
- 14 Beinecke Lib. Osborne mss, Danby pprs. box 2 (copy kindly supplied by Dr. Stephen Taylor).
- 15 Add. 75366, Names of the Lords who subscribed the petition.
- 16 Verney ms mic. M636/52, C. Gardiner to Sir J. Verney, 24 Nov. 1702; TNA, C10/251/64.
- 17 Survey of London, xxxiv. 428, 446.
- 18 Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 44, ff. 57-58.
- 19 TNA, C10/251/64; Add. 22185, ff. 12-13; BL, OIOC, HOME MISC/1, pp. 91-119, 121-49, MISC/2, pp. 27, 73, 122, 171, OIR/B/37, pp. 196, 214.
- 20 TNA, C10/251/64; Kent HLC (CKS), U908/L8.