styled 1623-49 Visct. Brackley; suc. fa. 4 Dec. 1649 as 2nd earl of BRIDGWATER
First sat 27 Apr. 1660; last sat 10 May 1686
b. 29 May 1623,1 3rd but 1st surv. s. of John Egerton†, earl of Bridgwater, and Frances (1583-1636), da. and coh. of Ferdinando Stanley†, 5th earl of Derby. educ. G. Inn 1633, MA, Oxf. 1663. m. 22 July 1641, Elizabeth (1626-63), da. of William Cavendish, mq. (later duke) of Newcastle, 6s. (3 d.v.p.), 2da. (1 d.v.p.).2 d. 26 Oct. 1686; will 2 Apr. 1685, pr. 28 May 1687. 3
Commr., loyal and indigent officers 1662, 1671,4 public accounts 1667, retrenchment of public finances 1667,5 trade, 1668-72, Tangier 1673-84;6 to treat with Emperor and king of Spain 1678, to treat with French ambassador 1679;7 PC 13 Feb. 1667-d., ld. of trade and plantations 12 Mar. 1675-d.
Ld. lt., Bucks. 1660-d., Cheshire and Lancs. 1673-76, Herts. 1681-d.;8 custos rot., Salop. 22 May-13 Aug. 1660;9 Bucks. 1660-d.; Herts. 1681-d.; warden of game, Ashridge and ten-mile area, Herts. 1660-d.;10 high steward, Oxford Univ. 1663-d, Tring, Bucks. 1670-d.;11 Chipping Wycombe, Bucks. 1672-d.12
Gov., Charterhouse 1670.13
Associated with: Ashridge, Herts.; Bridgwater House, Barbican, Mdx.14
Likenesses: oil on canvas by Sir P. Lely (school of), n.d., Egerton Collection, Ashridge, Herts.; oil on canvas by W. W. Claret, c.1660-80, National Trust, Tatton Park, Cheshire.
Interregnum and Restoration, 1649-61
John Egerton’s grandfather was the celebrated Thomas Egerton†, James I’s lord chancellor, who had been created Viscount Brackley in the year of his death, 1617. Brackley’s heir was created earl of Bridgwater shortly after his father’s death, and ruled Wales and the English marcher counties during the reign of Charles I both as lord lieutenant and lord president of the council of Wales. Increasingly disenchanted with the policies of Charles I, Bridgwater resigned all these local posts at the outbreak of Civil War and retired to his house at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, where he and his growing family of two sons and eight daughters by his wife (and step-sister) Lady Frances Stanley, lasted out the conflict relatively unscathed.
In 1641 John, then styled Lord Brackley, married Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of the royalist marquess of Newcastle. It was perhaps because of this connection that, after he succeeded to his father’s peerage in December 1649, the new earl of Bridgwater came under the suspicion of the Commonwealth government. In April 1651 he was arrested, imprisoned and examined along with his Cavendish brothers-in-law Charles Cavendish, Viscount Mansfield, and Henry Cavendish, later 2nd duke of Newcastle, but was released on bail on a bond of £10,000.15 The lord protector (Oliver Cromwell‡) treated this young peer with respect and forbearance, as in 1654 when he allowed Bridgwater to present Dr Nicholas Bernard, a protégé and eventual biographer of James Ussher, to the living of Whitchurch-cum-Marbury in Shropshire in preference to Cromwell’s own candidate, Thomas Porter. Two years later, the committee of sequestration for Lancashire ordered Bridgwater to appear before them so that his estate could be assessed, but following Bridgwater’s direct petition to Cromwell for leniency, the lord protector ordered the committee to withdraw its prosecution.16
Hanging over Bridgwater throughout his life were the prodigious debts and obligations accumulated by his father and his brother-in-law, the failed merchant William Courteen. In his correspondence with Cromwell over the presentation to Whitchurch, Bridgwater apologized for the necessity of informing him of his choice of Bernard by letter, as ‘through the multitude of engagements my father stood bond in, not for himself, but for his son-in-law, my brother Courteen, who is now beyond the seas, I cannot in any safety appear in public’.17 It has been estimated that at his death in 1649 the first earl bequeathed to his heir debts on bonds of £26,950, debts of £51,700 incurred from the ventures of William Courteen, and payments due on annuities of £1,654; but the 2nd earl and his agents themselves estimated shortly after his father’s death that there were claims exceeding £200,000 against the estate.18 In 1662, after several years of trying to sort out his finances, he calculated that he still had at least £40,000 in debts, as well as £581 in annuities to honour, to pay which he only received between £4,000 and £6,000 p.a. net from his estates.19 Bridgwater only added to his debts with his own extravagances, which he was at pains to justify. In 1668 he drew up a long memorandum explaining to his family the reasons for his continuing indebtedness. After detailing expenses laid out on new buildings and improvements at Ashridge – a new kitchen, riding house, bowling green, and improved garden – and the great charge incurred in making his sons knights of the Bath at the Restoration and by attending Charles II at his coronation, and further admitting that he had spent £10,258 in acquiring new land for the estate, he noted that since the death of his father he had paid £54,169 to satisfy the debts to which he was liable. Six years later he added a note that in the intervening time he had paid off further debts, making his outlay for this purpose a total of £71,616.20 Trying to settle his estate from the wreckage of his father’s inheritance remained a constant theme and aggravation throughout Bridgwater’s life, both before and after the Restoration.21
At the time of the Convention Bridgwater was one of the ‘young peers’ who had succeeded to their title during the Interregnum, who were persuaded by the royalist agent John Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt, to assert their right to sit despite the attempts of the peers who had been sitting in 1648 to restrict membership of the reconvened House to themselves alone. On 27 Apr. 1660, Bridgwater and 18 other such ‘young peers’ were able to take their seats in the House, with the connivance of George Monck, later duke of Albemarle.22
Bridgwater attended all but 11 of the 163 sittings of the Convention. On his very first day in the House he was named to a select committee appointed to draw up heads for a conference to find ways ‘to make up the breaches and distractions of this kingdom’ and probably attended that conference when it was held on 1 May. On that day he was also placed on the committee to draw up a letter of thanks for the Declaration of Breda, and on 5 May he was added to the committee to prepare an ordinance to establish a committee of safety. Between14 May and the return of the king he was nominated to a further four committees and on 24 May was placed on the small group of six assigned to draft a letter to the king congratulating him on his return.
From this point Bridgwater, despite being one of the new members, with no previous experience of parliamentary procedure, increasingly marked himself out as one of the leading members of the House. From June he was named to 27 select committees on legislation and on 10 Aug. he received the proxy of his nephew John Cecil, 4th earl of Exeter, which he held for the remainder of the session. Between 4 Sept. and 28 Dec. Bridgwater reported to the House from five committees, including that on the bill to give the county palatinate of Durham parliamentary representation (4 September). Otherwise the bills he dealt with were largely on private and personal matters, including the estate bill, which he reported on 29 Nov., of Richard Sackville, 5th earl of Dorset, who was quickly establishing himself as Bridgwater’s only rival in the frequency and number of committee chairmanships.23
Bridgwater marked himself out from the start as an effective chairman of committees, which became his speciality. Between 1660 and 1685 he chaired select committees on 119 separate pieces of legislation, second only to Dorset with 170. He led committees of the whole House on 37 different bills, the highest number of committees of the whole chaired by any single peer by quite a margin. He was also one of the most frequently-chosen delegates to manage or report conferences with the Commons (on 117 occasions), exceeded in this only by Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey.24 Bridgwater became a protégé of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, and became one of the leading managers for the government in the House under the lord chancellor. His relative youth and continuing presence in the House may have been of great benefit to Clarendon as he and many of his other associates were affected by illness, or died, as the 1660s wore on. 25 Bridgwater was particularly important in seeing through both select committees and committees of the whole House the legislation of the first years of Charles II’s reign which established the religious monopoly of the Church of England. Throughout his career Bridgwater specialized in religious legislation protecting Anglican Protestantism in England – although by the later 1670s he would take some stances which were quite at odds with those of the early 1660s.
On 17 Nov. 1660 Bridgwater was added to the sub-committee for the Journal, and thus began his work preparing the record of the Lords Journal, with which he was to have a long association. His signature indicating his review and approval of the record of the House’s proceedings appears in the manuscript Journals more often than that of any other peer, usually at the head of the other signatures. This might suggest that he was the chairman of the sub-committee and its chief examiner. In addition, papers among his private manuscripts show him marking up draft manuscript copies of Journal entries as if in preparation for a copyist or scribe, suggesting that he may also have been the dominant figure (or at least the most diligent) in the sub-committee responsible for the layout and appearance of the manuscript Journal.26
The Egerton family’s focus for local power had shifted during the 1650s from the Welsh marches to the Hertfordshire-Buckinghamshire area in which was located the principal residence of Ashridge, and in July 1660 Charles II constituted Bridgwater both lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of Buckinghamshire. The following month he was made warden of game within ten miles of his seat. At this time he also defeated the claims of Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby, to the manor of Great Gaddesden in Hertfordshire, part of a tangled inheritance dispute between William Stanley†, 6th earl of Derby, and the 6th earl’s sister-in-law, Alice Spencer, dowager countess of Derby, third wife of Bridgwater’s grandfather.27 Over the following years Bridgwater embarked on a sustained project to expand and improve his house and park at Ashridge, aided by a succession of royal patents allowing him to impark over 500 acres. By 1682 a traveller took pains to describe ‘this ancient house, grown more famous in the country by the present lord’s great house-keeping’.28 Nevertheless, his electoral interest in Buckinghamshire, despite being lord lieutenant, compared unfavourably with that of Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, and of his even more aggressively political son Thomas Wharton, later marquess of Wharton, both at the election of the Cavalier Parliament and all future elections. He had more influence in the Northamptonshire borough of Brackley, where he was lord of the manor, but even here his wishes had been disregarded in the elections to the Convention and in 1661 only one of his nominees, Robert Spencer‡ of the prominent Northamptonshire royalist family, was returned.29
First sessions of the Cavalier Parliament, 1661-4
Bridgwater attended every single meeting of the session from May 1661 to May 1662 – all 193 sittings in what was a very busy and intense session. In the brief period of May-July 1661 before the summer recess he was named to 29 select committees, chaired nine meetings of these concerning eight different pieces of legislation, while also chairing the committee for privileges once. He reported to the House from committees on five occasions: from those concerning the bills to make the river Stour navigable (17 June 1661), to manage payment of the debts of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Cleveland, for Sir Edward Moseley (both on 15 July), to vest the king’s money in the hands of treasurers (20 July), and to provide carriages for the king’s processions (20 July).
In November 1661 he informed his solicitor John Halsey that he would be coming to town soon to see to business, ‘for Parliament draws me, at which to attend, I must needs say, doth agree so much with my nature and disposition that I cannot find in my heart to forbear it’.30 When the House reconvened on 20 Nov. Bridgwater was even busier. He chaired the committee for privileges on the matter of the fines of Edward Powell, and was also one of five peers making up a sub-committee of that assigned on 7 Dec. to draw up reasons in defence of the House’s stance regarding foreign peers.31 Most importantly, he was again one of the principal chairmen of select committees on legislation. In this part of the session he was nominated to 67 select committees, chaired these committees on 84 separate occasions on 26 different bills and reported to the House from committees 25 times between 14 Dec. and 16 May 1662, most frequently in March and April 1662 as the session drew to a close.32 So prominent was he becoming by this latter part of the session that a number of peers looked to him to hold their proxies. Theophilus Clinton, 4th earl of Lincoln, absented himself from the House for a long period from 11 Dec. 1661. Bridgwater apparently held his proxy for a period during this absence, as the proxy was marked as vacated by Lincoln’s renewed presence in the House on 6 Feb. 1662. He then held the proxy of Charles Dormer, 2nd earl of Carnarvon, from 7 Mar. to 15 Apr. 1662, and that of James, duke of York, from 8 May to the end of the session eleven days later.33
There were a number of bills, particularly dealing with religion, on which he took a leading role. On 26 Nov. 1661 he was named to the large select committee for the bill to punish Quakers, ‘and others’ as it was originally framed, for refusing to swear oaths. From the time of the bill’s first recommitment on 29 Nov. Bridgwater appears to have effectively taken over the chair of its select committee. The bill’s progress was tortuous, for on each occasion over the next few weeks when he reported the committee’s version of the bill, it was again recommitted. After the Commons had objected to the fourth version of the bill - reported by Bridgwater and passed by the House on 28 Jan. 1662 - because it did not extend the penalties in the bill to all nonconformists who refused to swear oaths, the House re-committed the bill once again to the same select committee on 21 February. Bridgwater reported another version of the bill on 27 Feb. and this one was eventually passed by both houses. From mid-February 1662 he was also involved in the tithes bill.34 The uniformity bill received most of his attention, and he was described as ‘being as zealous in it [the bill] as any in the House’.35 He first chaired a select committee on the bill on 25 Feb., the same day on which the king presented to the House the new version of the Book of Common Prayer, and over the next several days Bridgwater chaired five more meetings of the committee, before reporting to the House on 13 Feb. various alterations to the bill based on the revised liturgy. He continued to chair committee meetings, some attended by as many as 18 or 21 peers, over the next few weeks.36 On 4 Apr. he reported the bill with a proviso whose wording was rejected by the House. On 10 Apr. he, Clarendon and Gilbert Sheldon, bishop of London (later archbishop of Canterbury), were the three managers of the conference where the new version of the prayer book and the bill based on it were to be delivered to the Commons, as well as the controversial amendment allowing the king to dispense by prerogative with some provisions of the act for loyal Presbyterians. The Commons objected to this. Bridgwater took part in the continuing discussion between the Houses, and was one of the five peers appointed to report another conference with the Commons on 30 April.
By far his most intensive work was with the bill for the relief of the poor, on which he chaired 15 committee meetings from 25 Feb. 1662 and reported on 26 Apr., and the bill to regulate printing, on which he chaired 12 committee meetings from 15 Feb., reported on 22 Apr. and then managed a conference on the Commons’ objections on the last day of the session. Other less well-known bills which he reported from committee in the final weeks of the session were those for his fellow peers Heneage Finch, 3rd earl of Winchilsea, and George Booth, Baron Delamer, which were reported on 7 Apr.; for pilchard fishing (18 Apr.); to naturalize Anna Ferrers (29 Apr.); to repair Bengworth Bridge (3 May); and against the export of wool (16 May).37 Bridgwater also joined in the protest of 6 Feb. 1662 against the passage of the 8th earl of Derby’s bill to reclaim land that he had knowingly leased or sold to supporters of the Interregnum government during the 1650s. The militia bill particularly occupied him in the final days of the session. On 17 Apr. he reported from the committee of the whole House the controversial amendments to the bill by which the peers insisted that their own houses could not be searched and that they could be assessed for their contribution to the militia only by their peers. The Commons rejected or watered down these and several other amendments and when the bill was returned, Bridgwater participated in four conferences during 10-17 May settling these differences, in which the lords ultimately abandoned their claims to privilege.38 Having helped to frame the bill in these terms, he was assessed for his contribution in those counties where he had a landed stake, such as Northamptonshire (£840), Cheshire (£529), Shropshire (which assessment by the lord lieutenant Mountjoy Blount, earl of Newport, he disputed), and his own county of Buckinghamshire (where he assessed himself for £1,100).39
The lord chancellor saw Bridgwater as a worthy recipient of proxies for the government’s interest and encouraged James Butler, duke of Ormond [I] (earl of Brecknock in the English peerage), to register his proxy for the 1663 session with Bridgwater, ‘a right working person’, following the death of Ormond’s usual proxy recipient Jerome Weston, earl of Portland.40 Bridgwater was present in the House for 86 per cent of sitting days during the session. He also maintained his busy schedule in committees. He was named to 38 select committees, chaired them on 61 occasions on 22 different matters, and reported to the House with legislation six times between 11 May and 3 June.41 He also chaired the committee for privileges on four occasions, three of them dealing with the case in early April of a forged ‘protection’ given out in the name of John Carey, 5th Baron Hunsdon (styled Viscount Rochford, later 2nd earl of Dover).42 He was the principal actor in trying to steer through the House the Heralds’ bill, to which committee he was named on 12 Mar., first chaired six days later and from which he first reported on 19 March. Thereafter he continued to chair another ten meetings on the Heralds’ bill until he reported the committee’s version of the bill on 12 May, only to have it recommitted. He chaired the revived committee a further four times.43 He was also heavily involved as chairman of the committees assigned to the bills to prevent blockages in the streets around Westminster Hall, to make rivers navigable, and to prevent the illegal chopping of wood (which he reported to the House on 11 May). He led the committee which considered over several meetings the bill to settle the debts of Richard Byron, 2nd Baron Byron, which Bridgwater reported as fit to pass on 3 June, only to have the bill recommitted (apparently a common occurrence) when the petition of Daniel Harvey against it was submitted that day.44.
His work on Byron’s bill, the Heralds’ bill and his other committees came to an abrupt halt in June when Bridgwater was for a time put under house arrest and ultimately censured by the Lords. Two months earlier, Lady Elizabeth Cranfield, the 14-year-old only surviving child and heir of James Cranfield†, 2nd earl of Middlesex, and niece of Lionel Cranfield, 3rd earl of Middlesex, had run away from her uncle’s residence to Bridgwater whom she persuaded, without much difficulty, to act as her guardian. As he wrote to her stepfather Sir Chichester Wrey‡, 3rd bt., ‘she was now in such a distressed condition that if I did not assist her she was utterly undone’. Wrey’s suspicions about this arrangement can be seen by Bridgwater’s half-hearted assurances that:
though there is not a person in the world whom I should more desire to match with my son than her ladyship, yet I never did intend, or do intend to do anything of that kind without first treating with her relations, of whom Lord Middlesex is one of the nearest.
Those assurances were little believed by Middlesex, who was enraged by his niece’s absconding and her choice of guardian and defender. Lady Elizabeth was due by the terms of her father’s will to receive a large marriage portion when she reached 16 years and was already receiving a maintenance of £200 a year. 45 Middlesex was understandably infuriated that such a valuable item on the aristocratic marriage market was no longer in his control and such an easy prey for Bridgwater, with an unmarried heir, John Egerton, styled Viscount Brackley (later 3rd earl of Bridgwater), almost exactly Lady Elizabeth’s age. He addressed an intemperate challenge to Bridgwater, ‘in the Billingsgate dialect’, as Bridgwater endorsed the letter:
My Lord, I must forget your quality, since you have only a title, and no honour, therefore I must let you know, that you are the basest, and the most unworthiest person that ever owned himself a gentleman, and as for the injury that you have done me, know that there is nothing but your sword shall ever give me a satisfaction for it, which if suddenly you refuse to give me, expect in print, on every post in the town to find yourself an infamous coward.46
The king got wind of this challenge and sent the serjeant-at-arms to apprehend the two peers. He found Bridgwater alone waiting on the spot arranged for the duel. Charles tried his hand at mediation, but this having proved fruitless, he referred the matter to the House, and the dispute was first presented on 12 June 1663. Bridgwater and Middlesex had to withdraw themselves while the Lords considered the matter and the appropriate punishment for this breach of the public peace. Middlesex was sent to the Tower, while Bridgwater was committed to the lodgings of Black Rod.
Here what he considered the greatest tragedy of his life occurred. His wife, heavily pregnant with their ninth child, came to visit him, but on 14 June died in childbirth at Black Rod’s residence. This was an extreme blow to Bridgwater. He never remarried and the inscription for his own memorial, whose wording he specified himself in his will of 1685, dwells exclusively on the virtue and goodness of his wife. He portrayed his marriage of 22 years as the greatest achievement of his life, as he enjoyed ‘all the happiness that a man could receive in the sweet society of the best of wives till it pleased God in the 41st year of his age to change his great felicity into a great misery’. When the anniversary of his wedding, 22 July, came around in 1664, he found himself so distracted by grief and memories – ‘once a day of the greatest joy and comfort to me, now (by the remembrance of past felicity, which never can return) a day of sorrow, of sadness’ – that he had to break off writing a business letter to his solicitor John Halsey, ‘my thoughts already so far strayed from what was the subject of the beginning of this letter’.47
The day following her death, 15 June, the House, being informed that Bridgwater ‘desired their Lordships’ compassion upon him in this sad condition, his Lady dying in the same house where now his Lordship is confined’, ordered that Bridgwater could be removed from Black Rod’s house to stay under confinement at his London residence in the Barbican. On 25 June Middlesex petitioned for readmission to the House, acknowledging and regretting his actions, and the following day, the House judged that both Middlesex and Bridgwater should stand at the bar and receive the reprehension of the House. After this, both, standing in their own places in the House, were to make their submissions while Middlesex was to make his own acknowledgment and apology to Bridgwater. The two peers came before the House on 2 July to hear the reprehension and make their submissions to be readmitted to the House. Afterwards they went to the king to submit to him as well.48
Despite his claim made in August 1663 to his trusted Buckinghamshire deputy lieutenant Sir Ralph Verney‡, bt, that ‘by reason of the great loss with which it hath pleased God lately to afflict me ... all manner of business is yet troublesome to me’, Bridgwater resumed his usual busy activity as a chairman and reporter from as early as 10 July, chairing committees on ten occasions concerning seven bills from that time.49 He was especially involved in the bill to settle the profits of the wine licences and the post office on the duke of York, and he chaired this committee three times before reporting the bill on 15 July. He almost certainly would have supported Clarendon against the impeachment articles submitted by George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, despite the ambiguous analysis of Bridgwater’s position provided by Wharton (who listed him on both sides for this matter). From 17 July Bridgwater held the proxy of John Lovelace, 2nd Baron Lovelace, for the final week of the session, and on 25 July he chaired a committee on the bill to extend the deadline for subscription to the Act of Uniformity for those who had mitigating reasons for not taking the oaths previously. The majority of the 12 attending the committee voted through an additional proviso that the declaration of assent and consent to the act ‘shall be understood only as to the practice and obedience to the said act’. Bridgwater himself was required to report this new clause to the House that day, but he was clearly opposed to it and its inherent dilution of the force of the original Act of Uniformity for, after the House had divided to accept the clause, Bridgwater and 13 other peers entered their protest against it as ‘destructive to the Church of England as now established’. The clause was later rejected on a division in a thin Commons.50 Later that same day, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley (later earl of Shaftesbury), reported the hearth tax bill, but the House not being satisfied, they delegated Bridgwater and the lord treasurer, Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton, to withdraw to make an addition to the bill. When Bridgwater returned to report the desired addition, the bill was passed and sent to the Commons.
The following year witnessed further manoeuvrings over the disputed guardianship of Lady Elizabeth Cranfield. In January 1664 Middlesex resorted to chancery to attempt to attach some of Bridgwater’s property.51 Bridgwater could have claimed privilege of Parliament to avoid legal proceedings when the session began in March, but had strong views on the matter. This perhaps reflected his respect for the institution of Parliament and his unwillingness to use it solely for his own personal benefit. As early as November 1662 he had told his solicitor Halsey, regarding another cause, ‘There is in my judgment a vast difference between privilege of Parliament and privilege of peerage, the one I never yet did insist upon, the other I never will desert while I live’. By February 1664, though, he was wavering and assured Halsey that if Middlesex ‘fly to privilege, I shall then make mine as well worth the maintaining as his, and shall willingly engage in the defence of it against him, but by no means make use, neither of it, nor of anything else, as a shelter from him’.52
There is no indication that Bridgwater did invoke privilege of Parliament to evade legal proceedings during the parliamentary session which began on 16 March. He attended every one of the 36 sittings of this brief session, during which he was nominated to 11 select committees. He chaired these on seven occasions, dealing with four separate matters, and reported from committees two times. He was involved in directing the bill for the transportation of felons through committee, before it was recommitted by the House upon his report on 2 April. He also led the committee established on 21 Apr. to examine the ‘noisome’ open ditch next to the part of the Tower of London where the records of the House were kept, from which he reported to the House on 5 May.53 All his other work, though, was quickly subsumed from early May by his overriding concern to see the conventicle bill passed, and from 6 May, the date of the first of the many committees of the whole House on this bill, until the end of the session, his only recorded activity in the House centred around it. He chaired four committees of the whole on the bill between 6 and 11 May, and at the end reported the amendments and provisos added to the bill.54 He and Warwick Mohun, 2nd Baron Mohun, were delegated to present the bill and its amendments to the Commons on 12 May, and over the next four working days Bridgwater, Mohun and Anglesey alone represented the House in the seven conferences the two houses held to thrash out their differences over amendments. The House was so concerned by these differences that on Saturday, 14 May it asked the king to delay proroguing the session until the bill had been settled. The following Monday the bill was almost derailed again when the Commons complained that the Lords’ additions to a proviso concerning the Quakers had not been delivered to them for their consideration. The House quickly dispatched Bridgwater and the conference managers to draw up another version of the proviso. Bridgwater then managed two more conferences to press on the Commons the necessity of passing this bill, which eventually passed both houses on 17 May. It received the royal assent the same day, before Parliament was prorogued.
The next several months before the next session were taken up with further proceedings with Middlesex, which became more rancorous as at the same time Bridgwater was preparing for Brackley’s marriage to Lady Elizabeth Cranfield. The marriage was celebrated on 17 Nov., only a few days after Middlesex had arranged to have a subpoena served on the prospective bride. Despite the imminence of another parliamentary session, Bridgwater still categorically refused to invoke privilege of Parliament to escape the legal proceedings.55
When Parliament reconvened one week after the wedding, Bridgwater attended all but two of its 53 sittings. On the very first day of the session, 24 Nov., he was assigned with five others to present the thanks of the House to the king for his speech describing the depredations of the Dutch and setting out the justifications for war. The same delegation was sent into the City to thank the corporation for the money they had given the king for the war effort. On that same day Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, registered his proxy with Bridgwater; two days later Bridgwater also received that of Edward Montagu, earl of Sandwich. On 30 Dec., during the Christmas recess, Henry Carey, earl of Dover, also registered his proxy with Bridgwater. Most likely Bridgwater arranged to receive Dover’s proxy in the knowledge that Peterborough would return to the House to vacate his proxy once the session resumed on 12 Jan. 1665 – otherwise Bridgwater would have held more than the permitted number of two proxies (Sandwich’s was not vacated until 27 Feb. 1665). During the session Bridgwater was again mainly concerned with committee work. He was nominated to 25 committees, chaired 12 of these on 23 occasions and reported to the House from them eight times, with the bills (among others) to make rivers in Hampshire navigable (reported 20 Jan. 1665), to repair highways in London and Westminster (3 and 11 Feb.) and Hertfordshire (17 Feb.), to regulate the measurement of coal (2 Mar.) and to provide for the settlement of the younger siblings of Nicholas Tufton, 3rd earl of Thanet (11 February).56
Dutch War and fall of Clarendon, 1665-7
Throughout the spring and summer of 1665, and in the many following months, Bridgwater was busy in mustering and managing Buckinghamshire’s militia for the defence of the county in the Dutch War, aided by his deputy lieutenant Sir Ralph Verney.57 At the same time, Bridgwater’s attention returned to the affairs of his heir Brackley and Brackley’s new bride. He was intent that the portion due to her by her father’s deed of settlement was paid and tried to enlist the assistance of the late earl’s trustees, Basil Fielding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, and William Russell, 5th earl (later duke) of Bedford, to counter Middlesex’s continuing claims. The two trustees were not immediately forthcoming, but Bridgwater was eventually able to extract a promise of co-operation from Denbigh when the latter finally arrived at the session held in Oxford in late October 1665. He was frustrated, though, to learn that Bedford did not intend to come to the session at all.58
Bridgwater, for his part, was present at all but three of the meetings in Oxford, during which he chaired select committees on 11 occasions dealing with six separate bills, four of which he reported to the House. As usual, he was highly involved in legislation affecting the Church of England, and chaired and reported on 16 Oct. from the committee on the bill to unite churches in cities and corporate towns. He also led the busy and well-attended (at least 15 being present for three divisions) committee meeting on 21 Oct. on what would become the Five Mile Act. Bridgwater’s report on 30 Oct. of the bill with the stringent oath imposed on nonconforming ministers aroused passionate debate. Those peers who had long advocated a more comprehensive Church urged the recommitment of the bill to reconsider the oath imposed on ministers. These propositions were rebuffed by the bishops and Bridgwater, who ‘desired that it might be understood that those who were for the recommitment were against the bill and those who were against the recommitment were for the bill’. The bill was passed by the House without being recommitted. He was also heavily involved in framing and passing the bill for further regulations against the plague, chairing the committee three times and reporting the bill to the House on 30 October. He also reported on 21 Oct. from the committee on the bill for removing damage cleer.59
In the months following the prorogation, Bridgwater continued to delay his proceedings against Middlesex for Lady Brackley’s property and by the end of March 1666 was highly defensive against his solicitor’s accusation that he had neglected her interest. On one point he was adamant, he would not take possession of the disputed properties before the suit began: ‘I do absolutely dislike that and will by no means begin the suit, by such an action, as may, by the end of the suit, prove to be the greatest injustice imaginable’. On 30 Apr. 1666 Bridgwater joined the majority of his peers in finding Thomas Parker, 15th Baron Morley, tried for murder in the court of the lord high steward, guilty only of manslaughter. He revealed his sympathies in the increasing rivalries at court in late May when he complained to his solicitor that, regarding the expectation that he and other peers would advance money to the king for the war, he had had some ‘usage’ from the secretary of state Henry Bennet, Baron (later earl of) Arlington, ‘which is not very fair’ and ‘which I must represent to my lord chancellor before I can begin to endeavour to do his Majesty any service in it’.60
Bridgwater attended all but three of the sittings of the session which began in September 1666. From 25 Sept. he held the proxy of Christopher Hatton, Baron Hatton. In this busy session he was nominated to 36 select committees and chaired 14 of them on a total of 33 occasions. In the first weeks of the session he was busy completing a bill which he had first worked on in the previous session before it was lost at the prorogation, that for sowing hemp and flax, and throughout October he chaired five meetings of the committee before reporting the bill on 22 October. On 12 Oct. he was placed on the committee to draft points for a conference with the Commons concerning their vote and proposed address for a complete ban on the import of French goods and between 17 and 30 Oct. he was one of the delegates of the House for four conferences on this matter. He was busy again in committees from December and between 10 Dec. and 8 Feb. 1667 he reported from 11 of them, including the bills for the encouragement of the coinage (reported 10 and 11 Dec.), to unite churches in Southampton (18 Dec.), for burying in woollen (17 Jan. 1667), to make provisions for those infected with the plague (23 Jan.), to establish a judicature to settle differences arising from the Great Fire (23 Jan.), to prevent the disturbances of seamen (5 Feb.), for rebuilding the City of London (7 Feb.), and for settling the taxes on the Adventurers’ lands in the Bedford Level (8 February).61 On 19 Dec. he was also one of four reporters for a conference concerning the Commons’ accusations of Clarendon’s malfeasance in the matter of the Canary Company.
Like most peers in the House, he was most preoccupied from December 1666 with the controversy between the houses over the Irish cattle bill. He was chosen one of four reporters for the conference with the lower House on 14 Dec. in which the Commons insisted on their use of the controversial word ‘nuisance’ in the bill. Upon the report on the conference three days later he was further named to a committee of seven to draft the House’s resolution that they would not admit the word ‘nuisance’ and that they hoped to alleviate the Commons’ fears by proposing an address to the king requesting him not to grant any dispensations or licenses which would circumvent the intent of the act. Three more peers were added to this committee on 20 December. Bridgwater chaired its well-attended meeting the following day; eight peers were involved in each of the nine divisions Bridgwater oversaw which rejected five of the reasons proposed to be offered to the Commons and accepted four.62
It was not until 29 Dec., after the Christmas recess, that Bridgwater reported from this committee with the petition to the king and with a number of points to be made against the use of the word ‘nuisance’. He was named as one of eight peers to manage the free conference on this matter to be held the following day. On that same day (29 Dec.) the king’s answer to the House’s petition to establish a royal commission to examine the public accounts was read and Bridgwater was among the six peers who, with 12 members of the House of Commons, were nominated to the new body.63 The petition had been Clarendon’s response to, and attempt to forestall, the bill brought up from the Commons which would have established a statutory commission of accounts. Bridgwater was named a manager for the conference to be held that day in which the House was to inform the Commons of their decision to petition the king without the concurrence of the lower chamber. He was also assigned on 29 Dec.to manage a conference on the Lords’ objections to the Commons’ poll bill. On 2 Jan. 1667 he duly attended conferences on the houses’ disputes over the commission for public accounts, the Irish Cattle Bill, and the poll bill, and over the following ten days he attended a further conference on each of these three matters. On 14 Jan. he joined seven other peers in entering his protest against the resolution of the House to accept the Commons’ description of the import of Irish cattle as a ‘nuisance’. Bridgwater chaired the committee of the whole House on 19 Jan. in which the House reluctantly accepted the public accounts bill framed by the Commons, and five days later he chaired another committee of the whole which drew up a list of 24 peers who were to serve on the commission which it established, including Bridgwater himself. He was then named a manager for the conference in which the House was to return to the Commons the amended bill and its list of commissioners.64 He chaired and reported on 26 Jan. from the committee of the whole House considering the supply bill to grant the king £1,256,347 for the war. The previous day the House had heard the testimony of several merchants trading to France, who were suspected of infringing the king’s proclamation prohibiting the import of French goods, but who complained that their goods had been wrongly seized. On 28 Jan. Bridgwater was one of the six peers delegated to address the king pleading for these merchants’ innocence.
The final days of the session were taken up with the impeachment proceedings against Mordaunt. Bridgwater had already attended a conference on the matter on 29 Dec. 1666 and had chaired a meeting of the committee for privileges entrusted on 17 Jan. 1667 with determining precedents on how Mordaunt’s answers to the articles of impeachment should be transmitted to the lower House. On 28 Jan. he reported from another meeting of the committee for privileges with precedents the committee had found to answer the Commons’ objections to the ‘demeanour’ of Mordaunt in the House during his defence and the behaviour of his counsel.65 On 4 Feb. he was one of three peers who dissented from the resolution to grant the Commons’ request for a conference on Mordaunt because he felt that conferring with the lower House on a matter touching the House’s judicature was derogatory to its privilege. Despite his opposition, he was still named one of the seven peers chosen to report this conference. After the report of this conference the House resolved to adhere to its earlier decision regarding its procedure for the trial of Mordaunt, and Bridgwater helped to manage two more conferences on 4 and 7 February. On that latter day he was the only peer to enter his dissent from the resolution to concede another free conference with the Commons – for which he was then once again named a manager. The following day, 8 Feb., Bridgwater reported from a select committee for the bill for taxing the adventurers in Bedford Level, but the resolution of that and all other matters, including the dispute over the trial of Mordaunt and the bill for the commission of public accounts, still being debated in the Commons, were lost by the prorogation of Parliament that day.
On 13 Feb., only five days after the prorogation, Bridgwater was sworn to the Privy Council, a belated recognition of his many years of close attention to the court’s interests in the House, and particularly of his intensely busy activity in the most recent turbulent session.66 He quickly became one of the council’s more diligent members and a principal candidate for the numerous sub-committees established to concentrate on specific issues. On 22 Mar. Bridgwater was included in the royal commission to examine public accounts, established in the wake of the failure of the public accounts bill the previous session.67 But this commission was troubled almost from the start, as many of the Commons’ Members of it disputed its legitimacy and authority and it fell to Bridgwater, perhaps as chairman or the principal peer of the commission, to convey to the king their many scruples. When the brief session of Parliament hurriedly convened to discuss the peace was prorogued on 29 July Bridgwater was placed on a sub-committee of the council, which also included the treasury commissioners and the secretaries of state, entrusted with retrenching expenses after the costly Dutch war. The committee quickly became unpopular with the courtiers closely attached to the king.68
When Clarendon, in another example of his ‘extraordinary preference’ for Bridgwater, nominated his protégé to replace Southampton as lord treasurer upon the latter’s death in June 1667, his suggestion was overruled and instead a treasury commission was established consisting of many of the lord chancellor’s fiercest enemies. 69 Bridgwater never did hold one of the great offices of state or indeed any position at court. His realm of activity always remained Parliament, the Privy Council, and the management of county society in Buckinghamshire and later other counties. He was always an efficient and active ‘man of business’ for the government, but without office or pension and with a local powerbase in the counties, it became easier for him in later years to adopt the attitudes of a country peer. This was especially so after his last strong link to the government, Clarendon, was removed from the scene.
He spent much of the autumn of 1667 defending Clarendon and his associates, both in the Privy Council and in Parliament.70 He attended every single meeting of the House in the winter of 1667, and on the second day of the session, 11 Oct., was delegated to present the House’s thanks to the king for his speech. Yet he could not agree with the Commons’ address thanking the king for his dismissal of the lord chancellor, and on 15 Oct. he, with fellow Clarendonians York, Peterborough and Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington, left the chamber rather than vote on the motion for this address of thanks.71 Within the first four days of the session, he received the proxies of both his father-in-law Newcastle and his cousin Thomas Leigh, Baron Leigh, probably for the sake of using them for Clarendon’s defence.
His first opportunity to register his dissatisfaction with the Commons’ prosecution of Clarendon came on 21 Nov. when the Commons did not immediately respond to a request from the Lords for a conference but instead later sent their own messenger to request a conference, without giving its subject matter. This was seen as a breach of parliamentary procedure and after the peers had agreed to accept the Commons’ request for a conference, Bridgwater, Anglesey and William Brydges, 7th Baron Chandos, were the only peers to protest. They argued that the Commons should have answered the Lords’ request first and should not have made their own request without finding out what the subject of the Lords’ conference was to have been. Upon the report of this conference the following day, Bridgwater was appointed to a committee of seven peers to draw up the reasons for the House’s censure of the Commons’ actions, which was subsequently presented by Bridgwater and other members of the drafting committee to the lower House at a conference. On 25 Nov. he was again named a manager for a conference to explain the House’s reasons for refusing to commit Clarendon without charge. Two days later he was again appointed a manager for a free conference to be held the following day on the growing disputes between the two houses. The situation was soon transformed by Clarendon’s flight and the subsequent bill for his banishment. In other matters of this stage of the session, Bridgwater was appointed one of eight reporters who attended the conference on 10 Dec. at which the lower House presented two resolutions concerning their freedom of speech in Parliament, with which the House agreed the following day. Just before Parliament was adjourned he reported two bills from committees he had chaired: that against atheism (18 Dec.) and for making prize ships free for trade (19 December).72
After Clarendon, 1668-71
In the recess before Parliament reassembled in February 1668 it was widely expected that Bridgwater would be one of the Clarendonians who would be removed from the Privy Council but, perhaps owing to the influence of the duke of York, this cull did not happen.73 When Parliament resumed in February, Bridgwater was still on the council and continued to attend every single sitting of the House until Parliament was again adjourned in May. He continued his usual busy activity and was named to 17 select committees, but his involvement declined somewhat from previous sessions and he only chaired four of them on a total of seven occasions.74
He was opposed to the petition and appeal of Cuthbert Morley and Bernard Grenville to have a chancery decree against them reversed and he signed the three protests of 9, 16 and 31 Mar. against the House’s resolutions in favour of these petitioners. In April and May he continued to be engaged in committees. He reported from two select committees—on the bills to regulate the accounts of administrators (3 Apr.) and against the abuses of drovers (1 May)—and one committee of the whole House, on the bill against duelling, for which he was subsequently named to the drafting sub-committee (24 April.). Among those matters in which he took a special interest was the bill against atheism and prophaneness, whose consideration had been postponed until after the recess when he had reported it from committee on 18 Dec. 1667.75 On 13 Apr. he also introduced in the House the bill to build a canal which would make the Severn navigable to London. He was a reporter for the conference on 24 Apr. concerning the Commons’ impeachment of Sir William Penn‡, and he chaired the committee for privileges on the same matter. In the last days of the session he was involved in the controversy over Skinner v East India Company. He chaired the committee for privileges considering the East India Company’s petition to the Commons on 29 Apr., 2 and 6 May and was named a delegate of the House for two conferences held on 5 and 8 May. 76 This last was a bad-tempered affair, during which in ‘a severe and high sense’ the Lords insisted that the East India Company’s petition was a breach of privilege and that it was within their judicial rights to hear Skinner’s original petition. Contemporaries singled out Bridgwater as one of the principal members of the House’s delegation which presented their arguments in a conference which lasted close to five hours.77 With relations between the houses having collapsed, on 9 May the king adjourned the stalled Parliament.
During the long series of adjournments which kept Parliament officially in session during 1668-69 Bridgwater was named a commissioner on the council of trade when its commission was renewed on 20 Oct. 1668.78 He was also one of the nine commissioners of prorogation when the session of Parliament was finally prorogued on 1 Mar. 1669. Throughout 1668-69 Bridgwater took an active part in the suppression of Dissenters and nonconformists in Buckinghamshire and at council he appears to have been concerned by the limited reach and lax enforcement of the 1664 Conventicle Act as it neared its expiry in 1669.79
Four days before the new session of Parliament convened on 19 Oct. 1669, the duke of Newcastle, absent from the House since 1660, once again registered his proxy with Bridgwater for the entire forthcoming session. Bridgwater himself attended all but one of the sittings of this brief session of winter 1669 but was not greatly involved in committees, only chairing the committee on the bill for preventing fraud in the export of wool, from which he reported on 26 October.80 On 29 Nov. he protested against the House’s favourable reception of the petition and appeal of Bernard Grenvile in the case of Morley and Grenville v. Elwes, in which cause Bridgwater had already made his views known through his many protests in March 1668. Another holdover from the previous session in which he became involved was the resurgence of the dispute over Skinner v East India Company and the House’s assertion of its right to hear causes in the first instance. On 11 Nov. Bridgwater was named to a sub-committee of the committee for privileges assigned to draw up a bill that would assert the House’s place as the supreme court of judicature and its right to judge cases which were not relievable in lower courts.81 On 3 Dec. the House heard of a breach of privilege committed by Thomas Langresh, who had had Lady Audley, wife of James Tuchet, 13th Baron Audley (3rd earl of Castlehaven [I]), arrested by the bailiff Thomas Turnball. In his appearance before the House on 7 Dec., Turnball testified that, in order to gain access to Lady Audley’s chambers in Covent Garden, he had followed Langresh’s advice and pretended that he had a letter to deliver to Lady Audley from her cousin Bridgwater. Both Turnball and Langresh submitted themselves to the House, to Bridgwater and to Lady Audley and were discharged on 9 December.82 Two days after that Bridgwater was one of the nine commissioners who announced the prorogation of Parliament until 14 Feb. 1670.
Once again, before that session even started Bridgwater had his full complement of two proxies from his ever-absent father-in-law Newcastle and cousin Leigh. He thus could not comply with the request of his brother-in-law Richard Vaughan, Baron Vaughan (2nd earl of Carbery [I]), to take over his proxy in late March 1671, after Vaughan’s original proxy recipient, John Granville, earl of Bath, himself had left the House.83
Bridgwater was his usual assiduous self and missed only one sitting throughout this long session of 165 days from February 1670 to April 1671. That one day was in the shorter period of February to April 1670 when Bridgwater distinguished himself by his guidance of the second conventicle bill, with which he had been so concerned the previous summer, through the House in March. From the time it was first considered in a committee of the whole House on its second reading on 14 Mar. to its final passage on 26 Mar., Bridgwater was the sole chairman of the committee of the whole House on the bill on ten occasions, many of them attended, somewhat controversially, by the king himself.84 The bill passed upon Bridgwater’s report on 26 Mar. but still incurred a protest from 17 peers. He was also a central figure in the series of four conferences held between the Houses on amendments to the bill from 30 Mar. to 6 Apr., which was only settled after the House reluctantly agreed to the Commons’ amendment allowing the searching of peers’ houses for illegal conventicles. At the same time he was also a delegate of the House in the three conferences held on 2 and 6 Apr. on the Lords’ amendments to the bill for repairing highways and bridges. It was Bridgwater too who reported on 6 Apr. the Commons’ reasons for insisting that the number of horses available to go at length in a team be limited to five, an amendment which the House eventually accepted. He was named to 32 select committees, but he chaired only three of these.85 He reported from committee the bill to prevent the delivering up of merchant ships and on that same day, 9 Apr., he was also named one of the managers for a conference on this bill. On this day he also reported a personal bill from committee and on 11 Apr. he presented the bill concerning jurors for the House’s approval before the long summer adjournment started. Reflecting some of his other important roles in Parliament, from mid-March he was involved in meetings of the committee for privileges, and on 29 Mar. no doubt in a reflection of his many years’ work on the committee for the Journal, he was appointed to a sub-committee to oversee the erasure and ‘vacating’ of all records in the Journal concerning the attainder of Thomas Wentworth†, earl of Strafford.86
Parliament reconvened from its summer adjournment on 24 October. Bridgwater came to all of the ensuing 124 sittings of the House until the prorogation of 22 Apr. 1671 and was named to 55 select committees. Of these he chaired 12 on a total of 22 occasions and reported from six.87 He was unusually inactive during the winter months of 1670-71. Between 23 Nov. and 6 Dec. he chaired eight meetings of the committee on the bill to prevent fraud in exporting wool, but he reported from select committees only twice in this period, on 25 Nov. and 17 Dec., both times on personal bills. This session was in effect Bridgwater’s last moment as a leading chairman of select committees. After its close his involvement dropped remarkably, although his role as the leading chairman of the committee of the whole House only grew over the succeeding years. In other matters, on 2 Dec. he was one of only four peers to enter a dissent against the Act for a General Naturalization.
It was only from March 1671 that Bridgwater became his usual busy self again. On 6 Mar. he chaired the committee of the whole on the bill for an additional excise upon beer and ale. On that same day he was named a reporter for a conference in which the Commons objected to the amendments the House had made, which they subsequently agreed to omit. A week later he was a reporter for two other conferences. On 15-16 Mar. he joined in two protests against the House’s decision to suspend the judgments found against the petitioner John Cusack. On 11 Apr. he also reported from a committee of the whole House with the bill for impositions on legal proceedings ready to be passed without any amendments. Within the first two weeks of April alone he reported four bills from select committee, including those to explain a proviso in the bill settling the Post Office revenue on the duke of York (3 Apr.), to settle the land taken for the fortifications of Portsmouth (11 Apr.), and to prevent abuses in the Smithfield cattle trade (13 April).
On 18 and 20 Apr. he also served as a delegate of the House in a series of three conferences on the dispute between the houses over the amendment to this latter bill. He was also involved in the numerous conferences in which were aired the disagreements over the House’s claimed right to amend the bill to raise supply through impositions on foreign goods such as West Indian sugar. He was initially on 10 Apr. named a manager for a conference on the bill and for a proposed address to the king, but this conference fell through when the lower house responded the following day concerning the conference on the bill but not on the address, an answer which the Lords conceived to be ‘unparliamentary’. Bridgwater was assigned to be one of the managers to represent the House in the two conferences on 11 and 12 Apr. to discuss this breakdown in communication. He was a reporter of the two ensuing conferences on 12 and 15 Apr. discussing the bill for impositions, and on 17 Apr. was placed on the committee to draw up reasons justifying the House’s right to make amendments to the rates of imposition in a money bill. Three increasingly bad-tempered conferences were held on 20 and 22 April. After the last, Bridgwater was again placed on a committee to prepare answers to the Commons and to show their dislike of ‘the unusual expressions of the Commons’ to be presented in a free conference. But the committee stopped its work when it learned that the king, annoyed at the breakdown of all manner of business between the houses over this matter, was going to prorogue Parliament that afternoon. Bridgwater’s active involvement in this matter is suggested by the survival among his manuscripts of a large bundle of papers (26 leaves) written in his own hand and entitled ‘Observations concerning a dispute between the Lords and the Commons about the granting of impositions’, a fair copy of the reasons that were to be presented to the Commons at the abortive conference.88
Defender of Protestantism, 1672-4
Shortly after the prorogation, the lord chamberlain Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, died of a ‘griping of the guts’, and Bridgwater was one of those put forward as a possible replacement, although the post eventually went to Henry Jermyn, earl of St Albans.89 Over the succeeding long months of the prorogation, as England, allied with France, entered into war against the United Provinces and the king issued his Declaration of Indulgence, Bridgwater attended the prorogations of 16 Apr. and 30 Oct. 1672. On the latter of these days he introduced into the House his nephew Lord Ashley, newly raised in the peerage as earl of Shaftesbury. Bridgwater’s connection with Shaftesbury went back to the 1650s, when the latter had married Bridgwater’s niece Lady Frances Cecil, which gave Bridgwater cause in 1654 to use Ashley Cooper (as he then was) as an intermediary in his negotiations with Cromwell. This formed a personal connection that appears to have outlasted Lady Frances’s early death and may have brought about the political connection which grew between Bridgwater and Shaftesbury from about the time of his succession. Ashley had also served as a negotiator and a trustee for the marriage settlement of Lord Brackley and Lady Elizabeth Cranfield in 1664.90
In March 1670 Lady Brackley died in childbirth. In late 1672 and early 1673 Bridgwater was busy trying to finalize the settlement for a marriage between his heir and Lady Jane, daughter of Charles Powlett, styled Lord St John (later 6th marquess of Winchester, ultimately duke of Bolton). Despite the fact that Bridgwater calculated that there remained £21,050 worth of debt encumbering the estates he intended to settle on Brackley, St John was pleased to proceed, and even to give his daughter a portion of £12,000 upon the marriage, which was celebrated in April 1673. His other children also occupied Bridgwater in the long months without Parliament. In May 1672 his daughter Lady Elizabeth Egerton married Robert Sidney, later 4th earl of Leicester, with a portion of £10,000.91 In late 1672 Bridgwater took up the offer, originally extended to him in 1668, of being high steward of the Buckinghamshire borough of Chipping Wycombe, when the death of the borough’s sitting Member, Sir John Borlase‡, bt, opened up a parliamentary seat in which Bridgwater wished to place his younger son Sir William Egerton‡, who had barely reached his majority. A more distant family connection led to Bridgwater’s appointment as lord lieutenant of Lancashire and Cheshire at the turn of 1673. He held this in trust until his second cousin, William Richard George Stanley, 9th earl of Derby, who had succeeded his father on 21 Dec. 1672 at the age of only 17, could come of age and take up his family’s leadership of those counties.92
On 30 Dec. 1672, well before the long-anticipated reconvening of Parliament was to take place in early February, Bridgwater received the proxy of his nephew Edward Herbert, 3rd Baron Herbert of Chirbury. To this he added Newcastle’s proxy, also registered in anticipation of the session. Bridgwater took his place on 4 Feb., the opening day. He missed only three meetings of this session, and on 1 Mar. he was named to a small committee of eight peers assigned to draw an address of thanks to the king for communicating to the House the matter of the exchange of addresses he had been conducting with the Commons regarding the Declaration of Indulgence. Four days later he was named to a much larger committee which was to prepare heads for a bill, suggested by the king himself, to set out by statute the scope of the king’s dispensing power. That Bridgwater was one of the more active members of the drafting committee for this bill is suggested by the survival among his papers of a draft, which never got out of committee.93 On 6 Mar., Bridgwater chaired the meeting of the committee for privileges which determined that the Commons had acted in an unparliamentary manner by sending their remonstrative address to the king without the concurrence of the House; but these disputes ended when the king announced that he had cancelled the Declaration. 94
Bridgwater was central to the important religious legislation discussed in that session. From 15 to 19 Mar. 1673 he acted as the sole chairman of the four committees of the whole House that rushed through and eventually passed the Commons’ test bill that would exclude Catholics from holding office. He was a reporter for the conference held on 24 Mar. concerning the Commons’ disagreements with the bill, which the House accepted with surprising readiness in order to get the measure passed so that the much-needed supply bill could be passed in time for the prorogation. Bridgwater was also the sole chairman of the six meetings of the committee of the whole between 22 and 27 Mar. which considered the Commons’ bill for the ease of Protestant dissenters. During these debates a clause was added granting the king power to issue proclamations on religious matters when Parliament was in recess. On 29 Mar., Bridgwater was named a reporter of the conference to hear the lower house’s objections to this amendment, which seemed like a confirmation of the dispensing power against which they had just fought. This time the Lords did not accept the Commons’ arguments, and Bridgwater was assigned to manage another conference later that afternoon at which the House made the reason for its adherence to the clauses clear. The matter was still in dispute when the king prorogued the session that afternoon, upon which the bill was lost, to the dismay of many nonconformists.
From this session of 1673 a change in Bridgwater’s attitude and activity in the House can be discerned. Bridgwater, so long a pillar of the Anglican Church and a leading enemy of Dissent, now probably began to believe, like so many other staunch Anglicans, that the greatest threat to the Church of England came not from nonconformity in the country but from Catholicism at court. Over the following years, Bridgwater increasingly took a role in guiding through the committee of the whole House, for which he became the principal chairman, the country religious legislation which sought to halt the growth of popery, place limitations on the power wielded by a Catholic monarch, and provide protection to Protestant dissenters. He did so even though it placed him in some distinctly uncomfortable positions regarding his previous attitudes towards dissent.
It would be difficult, though, to categorize Bridgwater in the later 1670s solely as a country peer, or even more so as a Whig, as some have done.95 His main concern was the defence of Anglican Protestantism in England and of the privileges of the House, and that brought him often to side with his nephew and friend Shaftesbury and his circle, particularly in 1674-79. Although on some matters he opposed the court, many of the measures he managed through the committee, such as the propositions for placing limitations on the power wielded by York or any other Catholic successor, had the tacit approval of the government as a means of placating the more radical voices in Parliament. He did not agree with some of the more extreme views to which the government was strictly opposed, such as on the succession or the role of the bishops in the House. Throughout the later years of the reign he was still considered a moderate fundamentally loyal to the crown, its legal succession and the Church of England.
In the turbulent session of January-February 1674, for which he once again held Newcastle’s proxy for the entire session, he remained busy as chairman of the committee of the whole House concerning controversial religious legislation. He was the only chairman of the four committees of the whole which from 10 to 21 Feb. considered the ‘heads of advice’ for securing the Protestant religion ‘as it is established in the Church of England’. Over these days the committee discussed proposals to ensure that royal children be educated as Protestants, to prohibit the marriage of a member of the royal family to a Catholic except by parliamentary approval, to disarm Catholic recusants and to remove the queen’s English Catholic servants from Whitehall. The exclusion of a Catholic monarch unwilling to take the Test was even discussed in the committee. Contemporaries attributed such proposals to ‘some hotspurs’ in the Lords, in particular Shaftesbury, George Savile, Viscount (later marquess of) Halifax, and James Cecil, 3rd earl of Salisbury, who made up the core of a sub-committee appointed by the committee of the whole on 14 Feb. to draw up these proposals into a bill. It was Shaftesbury who presented the bill for the better securing the Protestant religion to the committee of the whole chaired by Bridgwater on 21 February.96 However, the bill for securing the Protestant religion was only read once that day before the king, having ratified the Treaty of Westminster with the United Provinces and disturbed by the hostile motions in both houses, prorogued Parliament on 24 Feb. until 10 November. Bridgwater served as commissioner when it was prorogued again to 13 Apr. 1675.97
Rumours circulated again shortly after the prorogation that Bridgwater was to be removed from the Privy Council, but not only did he remain on the council, he was even appointed in March 1675 one of the councillors on the newly formed committee for trade and plantations.98 He was one of the nine members of the council, along with Anglesey, Halifax, Charles Howard, earl of Carlisle, and Thomas Belasyse, 2nd Viscount (later earl of) Fauconberg, and others, ‘to have immediate care and intendency’ of the business of the council, and he appears to have devoted a good deal of attention to the committee’s business.99
Danby, court and country, 1675-8
Bridgwater’s shifting political stance did confuse people. Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), considered the privy councillor and high Anglican Bridgwater a natural supporter of the ‘non-resisting’ test bill that he was intending to introduce into the House, with the support of the bishops, during the session of spring 1675. On the other hand, Shaftesbury’s A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country listed Bridgwater as second in its list of 24 peers who managed the opposition to the bill in the House. It even singled out Bridgwater for praise as ‘the never-to-be-forgotten earl of Bridgwater, who gave reputation and strength to this cause of England’ and pointed out that Bridgwater urged in debate on the bill the inclusion of a mandatory oath ‘for preserving the freedom of debates in Parliament’.100 Bridgwater’s activities in the House in this session bear out the assessment in A Letter from a Person of Quality and show how Danby was mistaken in his assumptions. Bridgwater was his usual diligent self, and once again attended every single sitting (mornings and afternoons) of the session that opened on 13 April. He chaired the committee on highways four times (two of those merely adjourning them without discussion) but did not report from it, and on 19 Apr. chaired one committee of the whole House on the bill for the trial of peers.101 But as the Letter suggests, he primarily made his mark by his role in the concerted opposition to Danby’s bill. He signed three of the four protests - on 21 and 29 Apr. and 4 May (missing that of 26 Apr.) - against the perceived breach of the privilege of peerage, and the incursion into the House’s right to discuss legislation freely, inherent in the non-resisting test bill. He was equally concerned with the House’s judicial rights, and joined the ‘country’ group in strongly pressing the right of the Lords to hear appeal cases involving members of the Commons. On 6 May he and eight other peers protested against the resolution to reassure the Commons that the House would be solicitous of the lower House’s privilege when considering the case of Sherley v. Fagg. The protesters thought the message this sent too concessive in tone to the Commons. A week later he, Anglesey and Shaftesbury were first assigned to draft a letter to the Commons complaining of its arrest of Sherley. This group, later joined by Denzil Holles, Baron Holles, appears to have become the principal drafting committee for the House’s responses, some of them phrased in very strong language, to the Commons’ actions and objections.102 Then between 17 May and 3 June he was one of the small group of peers who represented the House in a series of six conferences (ultimately inconclusive) in which the issue of the judicial privileges of each House was debated with increasing bad temper. On 4 June it was Bridgwater who moved, as the first item of business that day, that the House should consider the ‘great breach of privilege’ committed in Westminster Hall when the Commons’ Serjeant-at-Arms seized the counsel for Nicholas Crispe, the plaintiff in Crispe v Delmahoy, at the bar of the court of chancery, completely ignoring the formal protections they produced from the House of Lords.103 This marked the final break-down of the working relationship between the Houses. When on 9 June he prorogued Parliament to 13 October and the king blamed ‘ill-designed men’ for stirring up this conflict to procure a dissolution of Parliament. Bridgwater’s nephew Herbert of Chirbury again registered his proxy with him on 29 May, at the height of the debate.
Bridgwater attended all of the sittings of the following short session of the autumn of 1675. On 10 Nov. he was a manager for a conference on the Commons’ address to recall Englishmen fighting in Louis XIV’s service. Two days later he chaired a committee of the whole House on the bill for the trial of peers and was placed on the sub-committee of seven peers established to frame amendments.104 He also reported on 20 Nov. from a select committee on a private bill.105 On 13 Nov. he chaired the first committee of the whole which discussed the heads ‘agreed on last session’ – actually the session of February 1674 – for securing the Protestant religion. These included ensuring the Protestant education of children of the royal family; disarming Catholic recusants; limiting the number of the queen’s Catholic servants (and outright forbidding any Jesuits); and providing for the Protestant religion of children with Catholic parents.106 These concerns were once again pushed to the side as Shaftesbury stoked up the conflict over Sherley v. Fagg again by insisting that the House consider Sherley’s appeal. Bridgwater was one of the ten reporters assigned for the conference on 19 Nov. when the Commons made clear its displeasure that the House was going to reopen this case. On the following day, Bridgwater joined members of the country group in voting in favour of an address for the dissolution of Parliament, one of the few privy councillors to vote against the government on this motion. A contemporary division list, a copy of which survives among Bridgwater’s papers, notes that for this vote he held Herbert of Chirbury’s proxy, who had registered it with his uncle on 4 Oct., a week before the commencement of the session. Proxies turned out to be the key to this close vote, for while the majority of those present in the House on the day voted in favour of the motion, it was defeated by two votes through the larger number of proxies held by those against the address. The proxy which Robert Bruce, earl of Ailesbury, brought in at the last minute finally tipped the balance against the motion. Bridgwater might have been able to narrow the result still further had not his kinsman, Thomas Leigh, 2nd Baron Leigh, unexpectedly turned up on 20 November. His return vacated a second proxy in Bridgwater’s keeping and effectively wasted the vote as Leigh does not appear in the division lists.107 Bridgwater signed the protest against the defeat of this motion, and two days later, on 22 Nov., Charles II prorogued this increasingly uncooperative Parliament until February 1677.
In May 1676, Bridgwater stepped down as lord lieutenant of Lancashire and Cheshire, when Derby came of age and could take over the role himself. At the end of the following month he was one of the 35 peers who sat in the court of the lord high steward to try Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, for murder. Bridgwater joined with the majority of peers in finding Cornwallis not guilty.108
Five days before Parliament reconvened on 15 Feb. 1677, Bridgwater, no longer needed to hold the proxy of his late father-in-law Newcastle, who had died on Christmas Day 1676, instead received that of his nephew John Cecil, 4th earl of Exeter, who had not sat in the House since 5 Apr. 1670. Bridgwater held this proxy until Exeter’s death on 1 Feb. 1678. Bridgwater maintained his consistent attendance rate of 100 per cent throughout this long session, which was not prorogued until 13 May 1678. In the records of this first period of the session before the adjournment of 16 Apr. 1677 Bridgwater appears most frequently by his signature next to the many deletions from the Journal’s official record of the proceedings against Shaftesbury, Wharton, Salisbury and George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, for claiming at the commencement of the session that Parliament was automatically dissolved by its 15-month prorogation. By a later order of 13 Nov. 1680, based on a report from Bridgwater from the committee for the Journal delivered the previous day, all records of these proceedings were to be excised. Bridgwater, usually the first name among the signatories, seems to have managed the effort to go back through the Journal’s records from 15 Feb. 1677 to 26 Feb. 1678 in order to implement this order.
He was named to 42 select committees but only chaired two and reported from one, on 1 Mar. 1677, and devoted most of his attention, as usual, to leading committees of the whole House in the important religious legislation of the session. In the first two weeks Bridgwater chaired a number of meetings of the committee of the whole House which once again considered many of the measures proposed for securing the Protestant religion put forward in February 1674 and November 1675. At the first committee on 21 Feb. 1677 the heads from November 1675 concerning the Protestant education of the royal children, the disarming of Papists and the queen’s Catholic servants were read and agreed upon, while some other new points were raised. The following day, Bridgwater reported from the committee of the whole with points for other bills: one for mitigating the penalties for Catholics who voluntarily placed themselves on a register of recusants, the other to limit a Catholic monarch’s control over the nomination of Anglican bishops.109 From 5 to 9 Mar. 1677 he chaired three sittings of the committee of the whole on a bill to require any English monarch upon succession to swear an oath against transubstantiation, failing which both the education of that monarch’s children and the power to make appointments in the English Church would be handed over to a panel of Anglican bishops. He had to delay his report on this bill by a day because he had so many papers to go through. Then for two intense weeks from 16 to 30 Mar. he was the sole chairman of 11 sittings of the committee of the whole House considering another bill ‘for the more effectual conviction and prosecution of Popish recusants’, providing for the registration of all recusants and limiting the trades which they could practice.110 Both of these bills were in effect government bills representing how far the king, and perhaps York as well, were willing to go to placate Parliament’s anti-Catholic obsessions. But even through both were ultimately passed by Bridgwater’s committee of the whole and by the House, they were rejected when sent down to the Commons for being insufficiently rigorous against Catholic recusants and for giving too much power to the bishops.
On 4 Apr. Bridgwater was a manager for a conference on the Commons’ amendments to the bill for the naturalization of children born abroad of English parents. The following day he chaired the committee of the whole on the bill for securing the liberty of the subject. On 10 Apr. he chaired another sitting of the committee of the whole on the supply bill for building warships, and over the following days he was one of the group of peers assigned to manage a series of conferences in which the House defended its amendments against the Commons’ complaint that the House could not change money bills. At the free conference held on 14 Apr. it was noted that Bridgwater was one of the conference managers, along with Anglesey and Halifax, who ‘argued with great sharpness to show the impossibility that the Lords could at this time comply’ with the Commons’ request to recede from their amendments. After the report of the next free conference which Bridgwater managed, on 16 Apr., the House resolved that because of the urgent need for supply, they would reluctantly recede from their amendment. Bridgwater, true to form, dissented with seven other peers from this desertion of the principles which he had expressed vehemently in conference.111
With the supply bill passed, the king adjourned the bad-tempered Houses for a few weeks until a very brief meeting of five days, all of which Bridgwater attended, was held in late May 1677. Parliament was then further adjourned. During these spring months Bridgwater was noted ‘worthy’ by the imprisoned Shaftesbury. He confirmed Shaftesbury’s estimate when the session resumed on 15 Jan. 1678, from which day he attended all the meetings until the prorogation of 13 May. On 1 and 7 Feb. he chaired and reported from two committees of the whole House discussing the bill for punishing atheism and blasphemy. From 23 Feb. Bridgwater held the proxy of his great-nephew John Cecil, 5th earl of Exeter, and he had his full complement of two proxies for the remainder of the session from 11 Mar. when Leigh also registered his proxy with him. On 6-7 Mar. he chaired both a meeting of the committee for privileges and two select committees, while he represented the House in two conferences on 9 and 19 Mar. on the bill to regulate fishing. On 27 Mar. he reported from committee two bills, a private bill and the bill for burying in woollen.112 He was also a reporter for the conference on 22 Mar. regarding the Commons’ address to the king requesting an ‘immediate’ war with France. This was quite pertinent for on that same day, he was appointed a commissioner empowered to treat with the ministers and ambassadors of the emperor, the king of Spain and the States General about an alliance against France.113 On 4 Apr. he voted Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, guilty of manslaughter. On 30 Apr. he was made a reporter for the conference on the danger to the kingdom caused by the growth of popery, and a week later, on 8 May, he chaired the committee of the whole considering the bill for suppressing the growth of popery, but this bill was lost when the king prorogued Parliament on 13 May.
Bridgwater again attended all of the sittings of the session which began only ten days later, and lasted until 15 July, during which he briefly resumed his past activity as a leader in select committees. He was named to 28 committees, chairing six of them on 12 occasions. He also chaired the committee for privileges once.114 On 26 June he reported two bills from committee, a private bill for Thomas Plater and, after having chaired the select committee on four occasions that month, the bill for registering certificates in the Heralds’ Office, a matter with which he had first concerned himself in 1661-2.115
He was engaged in two particular issues during this session. The first was Robert Villiers’s claim to the viscountcy of Purbeck, which Bridgwater strenuously opposed to the point of protesting against motions even to consider the matter. He was named on 20 June to the committee assigned to draft a petition asking the king to grant permission that a bill be brought in to disable the petitioner from ever claiming the title. Bridgwater himself reported from this committee six days later. The petition was approved and presented to the king on 9 July. He was also at the heart of the debate between the Houses on the supply bill for disbanding the forces raised for the war with France. He chaired the first committee of the whole House on the bill on 19 June and managed the conference the following day at which the king’s message emphasizing the necessity of maintaining the army in Flanders in order to force France to the negotiating table was conveyed to the Commons. On the following day, 21 June, he served once more as chairman of the committee of the whole for the bill and reported the House’s amendment to extend the deadline for the disbandment from the end of June to the end of July. On 25 June Bridgwater was named one of the seven reporters for the conference at which the Commons explained their objections to the House’s amending a money bill and during which they submitted a proviso which they hoped would satisfy the Lords’ intentions. Bridgwater was placed on the committee to draw up reasons why the House could not accept the proviso which he helped to present to the Commons in another conference on 26 June. Between 28 June and 2 July Bridgwater represented the House in three increasingly bad-tempered conferences in which the House’s right to amend money bills was debated. At the last conference, on 2 July, the Commons effectively placed the blame for the bill’s failure to pass on the Lords. The House’s representatives, including Bridgwater, emphatically rejected this, and ‘their Lordships left the bill still with them [the Commons]’. To solve the impasse the Commons brought up new bills over the following days – a bill to lay an additional duty on wines and a new supply bill for £619,388, with a provision to disband the army conveniently ‘tacked’ on. Over 11-12 July Bridgwater chaired the committees of the whole which dealt with these bills in turn and, probably with the imminent prorogation and the need to pass a supply bill in mind, he reported both bills fit to pass without amendment.
These last days before the prorogation on 15 July were very busy for Bridgwater as the House frantically tried to wrap up overdue legislation. Bridgwater held the proxy of John Lovelace, 3rd Baron Lovelace, which was registered with him on 4 July, for the remainder of the session. On 5 July he dissented from the decision not even to put the question whether the petition in Darrell v. Whichcot should be dismissed first before the House went ahead to ascertain the relief which should be granted to the petitioner. In the last week of the session he reported three bills from select committee, including those for the enlarging of common highways (11 July) and for a general naturalization of Protestant strangers (12 July). The most troublesome was the bill for the relief of poor prisoners, which was recommitted to his committee after his first report on 10 July, and did not satisfy the House until two days later.116 On 11-12 July he attended two conferences on the dispute between the Houses on amendments to the bill for burying in woollen, and on 13 July he was in turn a reporter for the Commons’ conference on the House’s amendments to the bill for measuring ships carrying coal. He was also a manager for the House’s conference on their dissatisfaction with the Commons’ irregular way of returning bills. Two days after those conferences the House was prorogued.
Popish Plot and Exclusion, 1678-9
Bridgwater served as a commissioner at all three of the prorogations in August and October 1678. He attended the first day of the new session on 21 Oct., convened in response to the allegations of the Popish Plot, and missed only four of its sittings. Within two days of the first sitting Bridgwater was named to both the large committee entrusted to examine the papers transmitted from the council regarding the Plot and the smaller committee of five assigned to draw up an address requesting the king to banish papists from London and Westminster. The following day he was placed on the committee to examine whether any of the constables or other officers in London and Middlesex were papists. On 26 Oct. he reported from the committee of the whole House with advice to be given to the king ‘for the better preservation of his person’ and he was named to the ensuing sub-committee to draft the resulting address. He attended on 1 Nov. two conferences in which the houses agreed that there was a ‘hellish’ Popish plot to assassinate the king and that effective steps for the preservation of his person and the Protestant religion should be taken. On 9 Nov. he was placed on the committee to examine the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and he was also a reporter for two conferences held on 11 Nov. at which the houses discussed the Commons’ complaint that the lord chancellor (Heneage Finch, Baron Finch, later earl of Nottingham), was being unduly slow in issuing out commissions for justices of the peace to tender the oaths to suspected papists.
Exeter registered his proxy with Bridgwater again on 30 Oct. 1678, for the entire session. Charles Dormer, 2nd earl of Carnarvon, also registered his proxy on 7 Nov., but this was vacated on his return on 19 December. While holding these proxies Bridgwater was at the heart of the procedures surrounding the test bill aimed to bar Catholics from sitting in Parliament. Bridgwater chaired a committee of the whole considering proposals for the ‘further preservation’ of the king’s person on 4 Nov. and then from 7 to 19 Nov. he acted as sole chairman of all eight intense committees of the whole House, which worked out the details of the test bill, and which he reported to the House the morning of 20 November. Throughout this two-week process, the Commons sent numerous messages urging, in ever more panicked tones, the House to hurry up with this bill which had first been brought up to the Lords on 28 October. The House was not to be rushed, though. Many peers were directly touched by the terms of the bill and argued vigorously against it. Bridgwater himself voted on 15 Nov. in favour of an amendment that would bar from the House peers who refused to make the declaration against transubstantiation, but this motion was defeated in committee by five votes, largely from Catholic peers and the bishops present. However, when Bridgwater gave his final long report on the many amendments to the bill on 20 Nov., the full House reversed this earlier decision and voted the amendment through, while at the same time voting in favour of a proviso which excepted York alone from the bill’s provisions.117 Only two days after seeing the test bill through the House, Bridgwater was back at the helm of the committee of the whole House as it considered additional heads for bills for securing the Protestant religion. After another committee of the whole on 23 Nov., he reported that the judges were to draw up a bill for the more speedy conviction of recusants by ensuring that the refusal to make the declaration against transubstantiation would result in conviction. Between 23 and 27 Nov. Bridgwater represented the Lords in four conferences on the disagreement between the houses over the Lords’ lenient amendments concerning the Catholic servants of the queen and the duchess of York in the test bill. The House eventually acceded to the Commons’ objections. On 28 Nov. he was also delegated to act as reporter for the conference at which the Commons presented the Lords with an address for the king expressing their amazement and horror at the danger then threatening him. The Test Act received the royal assent on 30 Nov. and the same day Bridgwater himself took the requisite oaths and declaration to continue sitting in the House.
Apart from his work on these committees, he was also involved in Privy Council sub-committees examining the Plot and its ramifications.118 On 25 Nov. he and Thomas Butler, earl of Ossory [I] (Baron Butler of Moore Park in the English peerage), were chosen by the council to go with Titus Oates to Somerset House to corroborate his account that he had overheard the queen and her servants plotting the king’s death. Their report, first read in council on 26 Nov., made clear that Oates’s knowledge of the layout of Somerset House was very sketchy, even nonexistent. This potentially damning report was laid before the House for its consideration three days later and may have helped the House reject the Commons’ motion that the queen and her household be removed from Whitehall.119 In early December he was named to a large Privy Council sub-committee entrusted to investigate all aspects of the Plot.120
Throughout early December Bridgwater picked up where he and the committee of the whole had left off before the Test Act was pushed through, and from 4 to 13 Dec. he chaired five committees of the whole House in consideration of further heads of bills for preserving the king’s person and securing the Protestant religion. Among the recommendations that were to be shaped into bills was one that children of English subjects were to be prohibited from attending foreign seminaries and another that recent converts from Catholicism to Protestantism were to be free from the penalties of the penal laws but were still to be barred from holding civil or military office for a further two years.121 On 26 Dec. he was a reporter for the conference in which the Commons expressed their opposition to the House’s amendment to the disbandment bill whereby the money raised would be placed in the exchequer instead of the chamber of London. When the House divided on whether to adhere to this amendment, Bridgwater voted as, according to Danby, an ‘Opposition Lord’, against adhering to the amendment, though he did not sign the ensuing protest against the decision to stand by it. The following day Bridgwater also voted in favour of the commitment of Danby himself but again did not sign the protest when this motion was rejected. Bridgwater missed another conference on the amendment to the disbandment bill on 28 Dec. because he and Arthur Capell, earl of Essex, had been assigned by the House to go to the Tower to examine William Howard, Viscount Stafford, about the allegations against him. They returned in the afternoon, when Bridgwater reported the result of the examination. Bridgwater and Essex remained closely associated with investigations into the Plot, for on 31 Dec., the day following the prorogation, Essex, Bridgwater and Anglesey were named the three principal members of a sub-committee of the Privy Council which was to sit daily to investigate the Plot further. Bridgwater remained central to the council’s examination of the Plot in the weeks following.122
Bridgwater had little success in bringing his sons into Parliament in the elections of spring 1679. Within three days of the dissolution of Parliament on 24 Jan. 1679 both Wharton and Richard Hampden‡ had assured Bridgwater of their interest for his eldest son Brackley for one of the Buckinghamshire county seats. Bridgwater in turn had to tell them that Brackley declined to stand. Instead, he offered his interest, or at least his neutrality, to Wharton’s and Hampden’s sons, respectively Thomas Wharton and John Hampden‡, after his three preferred candidates, William Cheyne,‡ Sir Ralph Verney, and Sir Anthony Chester‡, all stood down close to the time of the election.123 Wharton and Hampden, both exclusionists, were selected for the county without opposition, as they were again in the summer of 1679. Bridgwater tried to arrange the election of his second son, Sir William Egerton, for the town of Brackley. But even with the predominant Egerton interest in the borough two country candidates were returned instead, though Egerton was returned for a borough seat in the ensuing elections of summer 1679.124
Bridgwater attended all six meetings of the short session which began on 6 Mar. 1679, but which, owing to disputes between the Commons and the king over the choice of Speaker, had to be prorogued prematurely on 13 March. When Parliament reconvened two days later he was there and proceeded to miss only one of the 61 days of the first Exclusion Parliament. From the first day he held Exeter’s proxy, which he retained for the entire session. Danby forecast that Bridgwater would act against him in the matter of his impeachment and his calculations were by and large correct. On 22 Mar. Bridgwater was placed on the committee of 13 peers, almost all of them members of the country opposition, assigned to draw up the bill suggested by Shaftesbury to disqualify the lord treasurer from ever coming into the king’s presence again and banning him from all employments. Four days later Bridgwater chaired two committees of the whole House considering the bill for disabling Danby and, following the news that the lord treasurer had gone into hiding, he reported to the House that the Committee had turned the bill into one for Danby’s banishment if he did not surrender himself by 1 May. Bridgwater chaired a committee of the whole on 3 Apr. on the Commons’ alternative bill to attaint Danby in case he continued to remain in hiding. He reported the changes in the bill which sought to revive the terms of the Lords’ original measure by threatening the lord treasurer with the lesser penalty of banishment. On the next day he was a manager for the conference in which the altered bill was returned to the Commons and between 8 and 14 Apr. he represented the House in a series of six conferences where the houses argued over the evasive lord treasurer’s punishment. He himself eventually voted in favour of the bill of attainder, and was a manager for the conference on 14 Apr. where the Commons were informed that the House now agreed with its original bill. He was also part of the delegation to the king that same day requesting him to give the bill a speedy royal assent. The bill had its desired effect even without the king’s immediate approval, as Danby voluntarily gave himself up to Black Rod two days after its passage, but before the deadline for his surrender it had set.
On 24 Mar. 1679 Bridgwater was delegated, with Essex and Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, to go to the Tower to examine Danby’s fellow prisoners, the imprisoned Catholic peers, about allegations raised in a French pamphlet that they had employed an agent in Flanders to find evidence to counter the charges against them. Bridgwater reported the result of the interviews to the House the following day and on 27 Mar. conveyed to the House the request of two of the prisoners for liberty to receive visitors during their incarceration. On 20 May, though, Bridgwater was part of a deputation sent by the House to the king to request him to ensure that the gates of the Tower were securely locked at ten o’clock at night, so that sympathizers of these imprisoned peers could not have access to them after that time.
He was involved in a number of committees of the whole House as well. In late March he chaired two on the bill for the better discovery and speedy conviction of recusants (20 and 25 Mar.), one on framing a bill to clear London and Westminster of papists (28 Mar.), and a further two to consider ways of excluding Catholics from the Inns of Court and Chancery (28 and 29 Mar.). On 31 Mar and 1 Apr. he chaired committees of the whole considering measures to counteract the danger of the Plot and of Catholicism in Ireland. He took up this matter again in another Committee on 15 April.
On 21 Apr. 1679 Bridgwater was sworn to the newly constituted Privy Council, remodelled in the wake of the exclusionist agitation, and the following day he was again placed on the sub-committee for trade and plantations.125 His place in the councils of the king was secure, and throughout April and May he was frequently called upon to act as a delegate of the House to make its representations to Charles II.126 On 24 Apr. he was a reporter for a conference on the impeached lords’ answers to their charges, while five days later he chaired a committee of the whole on the amendments to the bill for clearing the capital of Catholics. In May he was involved in conferences concerning the Commons’ proposal that there be a joint committee of both houses to discuss the methods to try the impeached peers. He helped to manage the conference on 9 May in which the House made clear that they did not agree with the Commons’ proposal, and the following day he was a reporter for the conference where the Commons complained of the Lords’ refusal. Bridgwater himself agreed with the House’s policy, for he voted against the motion to establish a joint committee. However, the following day, 11 May, when managers were chosen for yet another conference, Bridgwater was not appointed and apparently had no involvement in future conferences on this matter or in the joint committee that was eventually established. In the debates surrounding the trials, he supported the right of the bishops to remain in court during the hearing of capital cases and on the last day of the session (27 May) voted to adhere to the House’s motion in favour of the bishops.
His principal activity from late April was shaping the habeas corpus bill and seeing it through both houses. On 17 Apr. he was placed on a sub-committee assigned by a committee of the whole House, chaired by John Robartes, 2nd Baron Robartes (later earl of Radnor), to clarify sections of the bill. After over a week of deliberations the sub-committee’s amendments to the bill were considered in two committees of the whole, both chaired by Bridgwater, on 28 and 30 April. The bill was passed and sent to the Commons on 2 May. Bridgwater was appointed a reporter for the conference on 3 May in which the Commons set out their objections to the Lords’ amendments and, after the House resolved to adhere to many of these, he attended another conference on 9 May to deliver the House’s reasons for its intransigence. There the matter stood for two weeks, but as the day of prorogation rapidly advanced, the Commons decided to give a last effort to settle the differences over the bill. They requested another conference on 22 May, which Bridgwater was delegated to manage, where the Commons acceded to all but four of the House’s amendments. In turn, Bridgwater and his fellow managers of the free conference on 26 May offered to rescind these amendments if the Commons would insert an even more offensive proviso in their place. At a free conference on 27 May, where Bridgwater was again manager, the Commons thwarted the Lords’ attempt to wreck the bill through its amendments by reluctantly agreeing to accept all of the House’s amendments it had previously rejected rather than include the new proviso. The bill, having just barely passed both houses, was ready to present to the king for his assent when he came to prorogue Parliament that same afternoon.
Tory reaction, 1680-5
Parliament was dissolved on 12 July and Bridgwater served as a commissioner at the seven prorogations of the House as Charles II continuously put off convening his new Parliament for over a year. Over these long months, he continued his activities with the Privy Council in investigating the Plot in both England and Ireland, and he appears to have been fully convinced of its reality and danger.127 He was also heavily involved in the committee of Tangiers, and was a principal contact for the acting governor, Sir Palmes Fairborne, who sent Bridgwater numerous dispatches concerning the siege of Tangiers in the summer of 1680.128
The new Parliament finally convened on 21 Oct. 1680. Bridgwater was there on its first day and proceeded to attend all but eight of its sittings. He chaired a committee of the whole House on the bill for ‘freeing’ London and Westminster from papists on 29 Oct and chaired another one on the same subject on 8 Nov., on which day he was also manager for a conference in which the House handed over to the representatives of the Commons transcripts of the papers from the Privy Council regarding the Plot in Ireland. As Bridgwater had been placed on the council’s sub-committee investigating the Irish situation earlier that summer he may have had a special interest and involvement in this conference.129 In the House he was placed on the committee for examinations for investigating the Plot as well and appears to have been a diligent attender, although he only chaired the committee once. He was also placed on the sub-committee of seven peers formed by a committee of the whole House on 16 Nov. to draw up a bill for a Protestant Association, to be based on that of a similar statute of Elizabeth I.130
Although Bridgwater had previously joined the country group in many measures to secure Protestantism in England, he did not join with Shaftesbury and his followers in supporting York’s exclusion. On 15 Nov. he voted to reject the exclusion bill and voted against the motion to form a joint committee with the Commons to consider measures for the safety of the kingdom. He did, however, vote Viscount Stafford guilty on 7 December. Bridgwater quickly returned to his role of managing religious legislation in the committee of the whole House and between 13 and 21 Dec. he chaired committees of the whole seven times on some very closely related bills, those for ‘securing the Protestant religion’ (13 Dec.), to repeal the statute of 35 Elizabeth I against Protestant Dissenters (15 Dec.) and to distinguish Protestant Dissenters from popish recusants. This latter he chaired five times that week in committee before it was passed after the Christmas recess on 3 Jan. 1681.
On 7 Jan. he most likely voted for the motion to put the question whether Lord Chief Justice Scroggs should be committed while the impeachment charges against him were considered. At least, Bridgwater’s name appears on a list drawn up by Wharton of the protesters against the decision not to put the question. However, Bridgwater is one of the seven peers who appear on Wharton’s list but who are not among the protesters found in the Journal. Wharton may well have merged together those who merely voted in favour of the previous question with those who actually protested against its rejection. It is likely that Bridgwater also voted for the succeeding motion to put the question whether to suspend Scroggs from his duties pending his impeachment hearings. Here too, though, Bridgwater was unwilling to sign the protest when the motion was rejected.
Shortly after the dissolution, a cull of the king’s perceived enemies occurred in which Essex, who had voted for exclusion, was deprived of his lord lieutenancy of Hertfordshire. He was replaced by Bridgwater who, although he had worked closely with Essex in investigating the Plot and promoting legislation to protect the Protestant interest, was probably still seen by the court as a moderate, and a safe pair of hands for the elections of early February.131 But Bridgwater, despite his opposition to exclusion, was by this point hardly the most vigorous agent for the court interest and he appears to have played little role in the elections in Hertfordshire. In Buckinghamshire, he seems to have made no effort to stop the return of the Whigs Thomas Wharton and Richard Hampden, father of the sitting member. Nor was Bridgwater able to oversee the return of any of his sons or clients for his proprietary borough of Brackley.132
In the weeks preceding the Parliament called for Oxford, Danby considered Bridgwater one of the ‘enemy Lords’ whose support he felt he could solicit for his application for bail from the Tower.133 On 17 Mar. 1681, as the peers were gathering in Oxford for the impending session, Danby instructed his son Edward Osborne‡, styled Viscount Latimer, to present Bridgwater and other hostile peers with his letters.134 In the letter written in his own hand to Bridgwater, Danby acknowledged Bridgwater’s long-standing personal hostility towards him, which may have been born from his role in the prosecution of Clarendon in 1667. Nevertheless, the lord treasurer hoped their mutual concern for the privilege of the peerage would prevail over their many disagreements over Church and State:
Although I know not any one action of my life wherein I have not paid your Lordship all the respect which is due both to your worth and quality, yet I know not how fortunate I may be to stand well or not in your Lordship’s opinion. I thank God I know not a thought in my heart that is not suitable to what I take your Lordship’s judgment to be both as to Church and State, and therefore I am the more desirous to preserve the good opinion of all such: but however your Lordship may judge of my person, I am assured your Lordship is a great assertor of the rights of the Peers, which I think has been so deeply wounded in the never before known procedures about me, that unless some care be taken for preventing the like for the future, I am sure the condition of a Peer must speedily become both the most unsafe and most contemptible in this nation.135
Bridgwater was a suitable target for Danby, as he was in the House from the very first day of the Parliament, 21 Mar., attended all seven of its meetings, and showed himself typically engaged in the business of the House from the start. On the first day of the Parliament he administered oaths and declaration to the members of the Commons gathering in the History School. On 23 Mar. he chaired the committee of the whole House considering the failure of the clerk of the Parliaments to present the bill passed by both houses at the end of the previous Parliament for the repeal of the Elizabethan statute against Dissenters to the king for his royal assent. Bridgwater was assigned to present the report of the committee in six days’ time, but in the meantime he was on 26 Mar. a reporter for a conference concerning this matter. Danby’s petition for bail was presented on 24 Mar., but his earlier solicitations had apparently had no effect on Bridgwater. Latimer wrote to his father that day that his advocates had presented the lord treasurer’s petition to the House, but that it had been strongly opposed by peers such as Shaftesbury, Halifax, Salisbury, Essex and Bridgwater – who, Latimer parenthetically noted, ‘was not so fierce as the rest’.136 In the last few days of the session there were moves, by the Commons in particular, to draft a commission enabling Bridgwater to act as lord chancellor during the indisposition of the incumbent (Finch).137 All these matters fell quickly by the wayside and became inoperative at the unexpected dissolution on 28 March.
Bridgwater spent the years following the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament largely on Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire lieutenancy duties. He engineered a loyal address to be presented to the king from those counties in January 1682 and assured the government of his diligence in tracking down those suspected of involvement in the Rye House Plot.138 He did not agree fully with the government’s actions in the aftermath of the plot as they threatened to cause a breach in county society. Bridgwater dutifully complied in helping the royal agent Samuel Starkey‡ find Simon Mayne, ‘son of a regicide’, but when Starkey also seized arms across the county, including those of Whig gentry such as Thomas Wharton, Bridgwater complained to the secretary of state Leoline Jenkins‡ that Starkey had ‘not well demeaned himself in what he was employed in’. Bridgwater later had to apologize to Wharton for having overseen the seizure of his arms.139
James II and final year, 1685-6
At the accession of James II Bridgwater was confirmed in his places as a privy councillor and as lord lieutenant of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire.140 His commission for the lord lieutenancy was signed on 4 Mar. 1685, probably with a view to the elections almost immediately following. For the county of Buckinghamshire, James II’s advisers chose Bridgwater’s heir Brackley as the court candidate and Bridgwater, despite his earlier doubts about James II, was still sufficiently dutiful to the government to force his son to stand for the county. ‘I am forced to be a Parliament man for the county of Buckinghamshire much against my will, but with my father’s command’, Brackley lamented to his cousin Henry Herbert 4th Baron Herbert of Chirbury.141 Despite the government’s best efforts, Wharton was returned and advised his supporters to cast their second votes for Brackley. Bridgwater was also able to place his second son, Sir William Egerton, at Aylesbury, for which he stood as a representative of the ‘loyal interest’ against the two incumbent country members.142
Bridgwater resumed his 100 per cent attendance level in James II’s sole Parliament. He even slightly resumed some of his former involvement in select committees, as in the sittings of May-July he chaired three on a total of five occasions, and reported from one, a naturalization bill, on 10 June.143 Most of all he resumed his busy activity as a chairman of the committee of the whole House, and in these months, his last in Parliament, he dealt with a larger variety of matters than his usual speciality of religious legislation. Between 27 May and 25 June he chaired 11 committees of the whole on a wide variety of bills - such as those to settle a permanent revenue on the new king (27 May), to grant him the duties from impositions on wine, vinegar, tobacco and sugar (4 and 16 June), to allow him to grant and lease land in the duchy of Cornwall (17 June), and bills dealing with the ongoing projects to drain the Fens (6 and 20 June). He also chaired committees on bills dealing with attainders, both the one to reverse Stafford’s (2 June 1685) and that to attaint James Scott, duke of Monmouth (15 June).
Bridgwater may have served James II in the elections and in the management of the House, but his religious views were strong and well enough known that it was clear he would refuse to support the king’s proposal to repeal the Test Acts—which he had done so much to frame in the first place—when Parliament reconvened in November. Halifax, trying to convince his friend Philip Stanhope, 2nd earl of Chesterfield, that he would not be alone if he came down to Westminster to vote for the defeat of the attempted repeal used Bridgwater as an example of a ‘court lord’ (mentioned in the company of, surprisingly, Danby, Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, and the bishops) who was intending to vote against repeal.144 There were reports in the days before Parliament reconvened that Bridgwater was going to be dismissed from the king’s council, along with Fauconberg and Henry Compton, bishop of London, the latter of whom also appears in Halifax’s letter to Chesterfield as a leading opponent of repeal. It was later discovered that this report of Bridgwater’s dismissal was started at a ‘fanatic’ coffee house. The government moved to stifle this false rumour that might suggest there was opposition to royal policy within the council itself.145 Nevertheless, Bridgwater was apparently seen as a prominent figure in the campaign to defeat the repeal of the Test Acts and shortly after the session was reconvened on 9 Nov. he already had his full allotment of two proxies. John Manners, 9th earl (later duke) of Rutland, registered his with Bridgwater on 12 Nov. while William Pierrepoint, 4th earl of Kingston, perhaps at the urging of his paternal uncle Halifax, did likewise two days later. Bridgwater held both for the remainder of the short-lived session, which was quickly prorogued on 20 Nov. as James faced violent opposition to his plans for repeal
Shortly after the prorogation, Bridgwater was one of the peers summoned to try Henry Booth, 2nd Baron Delamer (later earl of Warrington), for conspiracy during the time of Monmouth’s Rebellion. Bridgwater already had, on 10 Nov., acted as a teller in a division over whether to adjourn a debate on this trial. On 14 Jan. 1686 he joined his fellow peers in unanimously finding Delamer not guilty.146 He served as a commissioner of prorogation for two successive days on 10 Feb. and 10 May, on the latter of which Parliament was prorogued for several months until 22 November.
Bridgwater died on 26 Oct. at his London residence at the Barbican, at 63 years of age. 147 His short will is extraordinary in that it was almost entirely concerned with the details of his monument to be set up in the Egertons’ church at Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire, where he was to be buried. He gave to his heir Lord Brackley, now 3rd earl of Bridgwater, his personal estate, including his collection of coins and large library, which was admired by so discerning a bibliophile as Anglesey who described it as ‘being above 6,000 volumes in great order in wainscot presses’. He also bequeathed to Brackley his creation and parliament robes and footcloth, for the new earl’s coming role in the House.148 It was quickly rumoured among the Buckinghamshire gentry that ‘Lord Bridgwater died much in debt’, which was a surprise to some, for ‘ I thought he had been a great husband ... neither did I ever hear he had any ways of spending. But the misfortunes of some are unaccountable’.149
These gentlemen of Buckinghamshire were clearly upset by Bridgwater’s death. He was dubbed ‘a true friend both to his king and country’ and ‘a man of a quiet spirit and well beloved’. They were anxious that the new earl of Bridgwater immediately step in to take his father’s role.150 It was said that ‘no son does bear the image of his father more exactly than his that now succeeds’. The 3rd earl of Bridgwater was commissioned lord lieutenant of Buckinghamshire exactly a month after his father’s death and later went on almost to rival his father in his level of engagement in the House as a dedicated servant and official of William III. 151
C.G.D.L.- 1 HEHL, EL 6846.
- 2 HEHL, EL 8221, 8222, 8344, 8347, 8358, 8373.
- 3 TNA, PROB 11/389; HEHL, EL 8163-4.
- 4 Bodl. Carte 32, f. 255; CSP Dom. 1671, p. 255.
- 5 TNA, PC 2/59, pp. 352, 515; CSP Dom. 1667-7, pp. 526, 676; CSP Dom. 1667, p. 338.
- 6 HEHL, EL 8456, 8467-8507; CTB 1681-5, pp. 1252-3.
- 7 HEHL, EL 8464, 8468; HMC Ormonde, n.s. iv. 418; CSP Dom. 1679-80, p. 194.
- 8 HEHL, EL 8082, 8524, 8528-32.
- 9 LJ, xi. 38.
- 10 HEHL, EL 8084-5, 8118.
- 11 CSP Dom. 1668-9, p. 565; CSP Dom. 1660-85 Addenda, p. 303; CTB 1669-72, p. 165, 171.
- 12 HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 143.
- 13 Davies, Charterhouse in London, App. D.
- 14 TNA, PROB 11/389; VCH Herts. ii. 210-11; Wheatley, London Past and Present, i. 106.
- 15 CSP Dom. 1651, p. 162.
- 16 HEHL, EL 8179-86.
- 17 HEHL, EL 8045.
- 18 HLQ, xlii. 217; HEHL, EL 8275.
- 19 Herts. ALS, AH 1065, 1066.
- 20 HEHL, EL 8117, 8131; Herts. ALS, AH 1075.
- 21 HLQ, xlii, 217-29.
- 22 Bodl. Clarendon 71, ff. 305-6; Eg. 2618, f. 70; Add. 32455, ff. 9-10.
- 23 Swatland, 56 n.24; HLQ, xlv. 32.
- 24 Swatland, 59, 62; C. Jones, Pillar of the Constitution, 76.
- 25 Bodl. Carte 35, ff. 465-66; Carte 47, f. 89.
- 26 HEHL, EL 8410, 8417, 8421.
- 27 Herts. ALS, AH 1057, 1058; HEHL, EL 8084; PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/28, mins. for 4, 5 Sept. 1660.
- 28 HEHL, EL 8094, 8117; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 578; CSP Dom. 1664-5, p. 47; CSP Dom. 1672-3, p. 476; CSP Dom. 1673, p. 219; HMC Portland, ii. 306-7.
- 29 HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 135, 336-7.
- 30 Herts. ALS, AH 1064.
- 31 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 18-19, 22, 38, 55-56, 57; PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, ff. 60, 71, 76.
- 32 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 76, 84-88, 91 , 95, 97-98, 102-3, 106-8, 137, 142-50, 152-54, 157-70, 175-76, 184-86, 191-93, 197, 207-8, 211-16, 220-22, 227-36, 241, 244, 252, 255-60, 274, 291; LJ, xi. 350, 353, 365, 368, 369, 371, 372, 391, 395, 400, 403-4, 405, 406, 408, 412, 421, 423, 431, 432, 435, 438, 441, 444, 463.
- 33 PH xxxii. 251.
- 34 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 84-88, 91, 95, 98, 103, 137, 142, 146-47, 148.
- 35 Bodl. ms Eng.lett. c.210, f. 69.
- 36 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 149, 152-53, 157-58, 163-65, 169-70, 176, 207-8, 211, 216.
- 37 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 55-56, 137, 143, 145, 147, 149, 150, 160, 167, 175, 184, 191-93, 213-14, 220, 221, 222, 227, 229, 231, 232, 234-35, 236, 241, 244, 252, 255, 257, 258, 260, 274, 291.
- 38 Seaward, Cavalier Parlt. 148-49.
- 39 Add. 34222, f. 38; HMC 10th Rep. IV, 372; Herts. ALS, AH 1068, 1069; HEHL, EL 8521.
- 40 CCSP, v. 303; Bodl. Carte 47, f. 89.
- 41 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 296-98, 303, 306-7, 314-16, 320-21, 324, 326-27, 330-32, 334, 337-43, 349-50, 355, 346, 358-67, 370-75, 377-83, 421, 422, 424-26, 435-36.
- 42 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, ff. 85, 87-89, 94.
- 43 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 296-98, 306-7, 320, 321, 324, 331, 334, 339, 340, 342, 349-50, 366, 372, 375, 377, 382.
- 44 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 314, 315-16, 326, 332, 334, 337-38, 355, 356, 360-65, 370, 374, 378, 379-80, 380, 381, 383.
- 45 HEHL, EL 8093; Herts. ALS, AH 1070; HMC 7th Rep. 173.
- 46 HEHL, EL 8092.
- 47 TNA, PROB 11/389; Herts. ALS, AH 1075, 1086.
- 48 HEHL, EL 809; HMC Denbigh, v. 81; Bodl. Carte 222, ff. 21-22.
- 49 Verney ms mic. M636/60, Bridgwater to Sir R. Verney, 20 Aug. 1663.
- 50 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 421, 422, 424-26, 435-36; Seaward, Cavalier Parlt. 189, 229; HLQ, xlv. 23-25.
- 51 HEHL, EL 8327-41.
- 52 Herts. ALS, AH 1069, 1076, 1077, 1078, 1079; HEHL, EL 8096.
- 53 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 439-41, 450-51; Verney ms mic. M636/19, Sir N. Hobart to Sir R. Verney, 3 Apr. 1664.
- 54 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 455, 456, 457.
- 55 Herts. ALS, AH 1089.
- 56 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 3, 8-9, 10, 12, 21, 29-30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 40, 44, 46, 49, 50, 67, 68, 79, 80.
- 57 Verney ms mic. M636/60, Bridgwater to Sir R. Verney, 11 May, 15 June, 26 Aug., 21 Sept., 30 Oct. 1665.
- 58 HEHL, EL 8106; Herts. ALS, AH 1090, 1093, 1094.
- 59 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 81-82, 84-86, 88, 89, 92, 93; BIHR, xxi. 221-24.
- 60 Herts. ALS, AH 1097, 1101; HEHL, EL 8398-9.
- 61 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 94-96, 101-2, 106, 120-27, 130-32, 134, 151, 156, 161, 163-65, 177, 181; LJ, xii. 43, 44, 51, 57, 79, 86, 89, 91, 102, 105, 109.
- 62 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 134; Trans. Am. Phil. Soc. lx, pt. 2, 31-33.
- 63 CSP Dom. 1666-7, p. 365-66; Bodl. Carte 222, ff. 138-39.
- 64 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 159.
- 65 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, ff. 22, 23.
- 66 TNA, PC 2/59, p. 307; Pepys Diary, viii. 278.
- 67 TNA, PC 2/59, p. 352; CSP Dom. 1667-7, pp. 526, 676.
- 68 Pepys Diary, viii. 193-94, 367-68; CSP Dom. 1666-7, p. 305 (incorrectly dated); CSP Dom. 1667, pp. 77, 338; TNA, PC 2/59, pp. 376, 407, 515; Seaward, Cavalier Parlt. 302, 318.
- 69 Bodl. Carte 35, ff. 465-66.
- 70 Bodl. Carte 220, ff. 296-98.
- 71 Chatsworth, Cork mss, Misc. box 1, Burlington diary, 15 Oct. 1667.
- 72 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 231, 233.
- 73 Pepys Diary, viii. 596, 600.
- 74 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2. pp. 259, 261, 264, 270, 278, 279, 283.
- 75 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 259, 261, 264.
- 76 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, ff. 43, 48, 52-3, 55; HMC 8th Rep., pt 1 (1881), 167, 178; Stowe 303, f. 22.
- 77 Marvell, Poems, ii. 74; Alnwick mss, xix, ff. 131-3.
- 78 HEHL, EL 8509.
- 79 Verney ms mic. M636/60, Bridgwater to Sir R. Verney, 2 Oct. and 10 Dec. 1668; Add. 36916, f. 139.
- 80 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 285-88, 291.
- 81 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, ff. 56-57.
- 82 HMC 8th Rep. pt 1 (1881), 137.
- 83 HEHL, EL 8123.
- 84 Harris, Sandwich, ii. 324-25.
- 85 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 314, 331.
- 86 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, ff.68-70.
- 87 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 355, 357, 358, 361, 362, 364-66, 368-70, 380, 381, 428, 441, 442, 449-51.
- 88 HEHL, EL 8510.
- 89 Add. 36916, f. 222.
- 90 HEHL, EL 8046, 8106, 8357; Herts. ALS, AH 1086, 1088-9.
- 91 HEHL, EL 8126-7, 8130-38; Verney ms mic. M636/25, Sir R. Verney to E. Verney, 2 May 1672, 6 Feb. 1673.
- 92 HP Commons. 1660-90, i. 142-3; HMC Le Fleming, 98; CSP Dom. 1672-3, pp. 317, 330, 405, 576-77.
- 93 HEHL, EL 8409.
- 94 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, ff. 93, 94-95.
- 95 Swatland, 266.
- 96 CSP Dom. 1674, pp. 151, 155; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 70-73; HL/PO/JO/5/1/19, ms minutes for 21 Feb. 1674.
- 97 HEHL, EL 8410.
- 98 Bodl. Tanner 42, f. 81; Verney ms mic. 636/27, Sir R. Verney to E. Verney, 26 Feb. 1674.
- 99 TNA, PC 2/65, pp. 270-77, 302-21.
- 100 Timberland, i. 153.
- 101 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 101-103.
- 102 HMC 9th Rep. pt 2, 57; Haley, Shaftesbury, 384.
- 103 HMC 9th Rep. pt 2, 54.
- 104 HMC 9th Rep. pt 2, 66.
- 105 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 128, 129.
- 106 PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/19, mins. for 13 Nov. 1675.
- 107 HEHL, EL 8418.
- 108 HEHL, EL 8419-20.
- 109 PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/19, mins. for 21 and 22 Feb. 1677.
- 110 CSP Dom. 1677-8, pp. 24, 57.
- 111 Add. 29571, f. 388.
- 112 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, f. 140; HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 249-51, 265.
- 113 CSP Dom. 1678, p. 61; HEHL, EL 8464-6; HMC Ormonde, n.s. iv. 418.
- 114 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 287-89, 298-305, 332, 334-36; HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, p. 147.
- 115 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 298-302, 304.
- 116 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 332, 334-36.
- 117 PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/20, mins. for 15 and 20 Nov. 1678.
- 118 TNA, PC 2/66, p. 439.
- 119 HMC Ormonde, n.s. iv. 255, 268; Life of James II, i. 259.
- 120 Kenyon, Popish Plot, 148.
- 121 HMC Lords, i. 74.
- 122 HMC Lords, i. 25; HMC Ormonde, n.s. iv. 494; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 90; CSP Dom. 1678, p. 594; 1679-80, p. 13.
- 123 HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 135-7.
- 124 Ibid. 336-7.
- 125 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 131.
- 126 LJ, xiii. 528, 534, 581, 583.
- 127 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 199; HMC Ormonde, n.s. iv. 553, 555; R. Hutton, Charles II, 392.
- 128 HEHL, EL 8471-8507; CSP Dom. 1679-80, pp. 513, 519, 522, 540, 542, 563, 578; CSP Dom. 1680-1, pp. 16, 34.
- 129 R. Hutton, Charles II, 392.
- 130 HMC Lords, i. 144, 211.
- 131 HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 566; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 267.
- 132 HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 135-37. 268-69, 336-37.
- 133 Add. 28042, f. 83.
- 134 Browning, Danby, ii. 96; Add. 28043, f. 27.
- 135 HEHL, EL 8431.
- 136 HMC Lords, i. 269; HMC 14th Rep. IX, 425, 426.
- 137 CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 225; HEHL, EL 8433.
- 138 CSP Dom. 1682, p. 6; CSP Dom. Jan-June 1683, p. 361; HEHL, EL 8529.
- 139 CSP Dom. July-Sept. 1683, pp. 86, 116, 308; Bodl. Carte 81, f. 727.
- 140 HEHL, EL 8532; CSP Dom. 1685, p. 19.
- 141 TNA, PRO 30/53/8/9.
- 142 HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 135-37, 138-39; PH, xii. 68-72.
- 143 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 384, 385, 388-90.
- 144 Halifax Letters, i. 455; Letters of Chesterfield, 295-96.
- 145 CSP Dom. 1685, pp. 376, 385.
- 146 HMC Lords, i. 321; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iii. 279.
- 147 Verney ms mic. M636/41, J. Stewkeley to Sir R. Verney, 27 Oct. 1686.
- 148 Add. 18730, f. 43; TNA, PROB 11/389.
- 149 Verney ms mic. M636/42, Dr W. Denton to Sir R. Verney, 17 Nov. 1686; M636/41, C. Gardiner to Sir R. Verney, 24 Nov. 1686.
- 150 Verney ms mic. M636/41, Sir R. Verney to J. Verney, 31 Oct. 1686; C. Gardiner to Sir R. Verney, 3 Nov. 1686.
- 151 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iii. 279, 338.