suc. bro. 29 Aug. 1683 as 8th earl of PEMBROKE and 5th earl of Montgomery
First sat 19 May 1685; last sat 25 May 1732
MP Wilton 1679 (Mar.), 1679 (Oct.), 1681
b. c.1656, 3rd s. of Philip Herbert, 5th earl of Pembroke, being 2nd s. by 2nd w. Katherine (d.1678), da. of Sir William Villiers, bt. of Brooksby, Leics.; half-bro. of William Herbert, 6th earl of Pembroke and 3rd earl of Montgomery and bro. of Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke and 4th earl of Montgomery. educ. Christ Church, Oxf. matric. 18 Mar. 1673, aged 16; travelled abroad (France, Italy) 1676-9. m. (1) 26 July 1684, Margaret (d. 17 Nov. 1706), da. and h. of Sir Robert Sawyer‡ of Highclere, Hants, 7s. (2 d.v.p.) 5da. (1 d.v.p.); (2) 21 Sept. 1708, Barbara (d. 1 Aug. 1721), da. of Sir Thomas Slingsby‡, 2nd bt. [S] of Scriven, Yorks., wid. of John Arundell, 2nd Bar. Arundell of Trerice and previously of Sir Richard Mauleverer, 4th bt. of Allerton Mauleverer, Yorks., 1da.; (3) 14 June 1725, Mary, da. of Scrope Howe‡, Visct. Howe [I] s.p.1 KG 14 May 1700. d. 22 Jan. 1733; will 22 Dec. 1732, pr. 5 Feb. 1733.2
PC 14 Oct. 1689-d., ld. pres. 1699-Jan. 1702, July 1702-8; first ld. Admiralty 1690-2; queen’s regency council 1690-4;3 commr. inspection of hospitals 1691,4 appeals in prizes 1694, 1695, 1697,5 Greenwich Hosp. 1694, relief of Vaudois 1699,6 union with Scotland 1706-7; ld. Privy Seal 1692-9; ld. justice 1695-1701, 1714; ld. high adm. 1702, 1708-9; ld. lt. [I] 1707-8.
Ld. lt., Wilts. 1683-8 (sole), Mar. 1688-May 1689 (jt.), 1689-d. (sole), S. Wales and Mon. 1694-1715; custos rot., Glam. 1683-1728, Pemb. 1683-1715; high steward, Salisbury 1683-d.,7 Wilton 1685-d.
Capt. ind. tp. of horse, June-Aug. 1685; col. regt. of ft. (Dutch establishment) 1685-8, 2nd Marine Regt. 1690-1.
Amb. extraordinary, States General 1689; first plenip. Congress of Ryswick 1697.
Freeman, E.I. Co. 1678; FRS 1685, pres. 1689-90; elder bro. Trinity House 1691-1707, master 1692-4; pres. Royal Lustring Co. 1692;8 gov. Charterhouse 1697.9
Associated with: Wilton House, Wilts. and no. 12 St James’s Square, Westminster.10
Likenesses: oil on canvas by J. Greenhill, c.1676, NPG 5237; oil on canvas by W. Wissing, c.1685, Wilton House, Wilts.
Born into an infamous family
In stark contrast to his infamous elder brother Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, Thomas Herbert led an exemplary youth in the 1670s which was ultimately to lead to his being one of the most respected and revered men of his age. John Macky in around 1703 claimed that in his youth Pembroke had ‘applied himself to the law and knowledge of the constitution of his country’ and had become ‘a good judge in all the several sciences; … a great encourager of learning and learned men’, while Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury described him as ‘a man of eminent virtue, and of great and profound learning, particularly in the mathematics’.11 He was a close friend and patron of John Locke from the time they met in France during the young Thomas Herbert’s travels there in 1676, and Locke later dedicated his Essay concerning Human Understanding to him.12 Pembroke later established himself as one of the foremost virtuosos and collectors of his day. He was briefly a president of the Royal Society and frequently conversed with William Nicolson, bishop of Carlisle, on antiquarian interests.13 The famous collection of paintings and classical sculptures, busts and coins at Wilton House is principally his work, acquired over several years as he grew evermore wealthy from his estates and the succession of high-ranking offices he held.14
Burnet was later to claim (in relation to Pembroke’s role as plenipotentiary at the Rijswick negotiations) that, ‘There was somewhat in his person and manner that created him an universal respect, for we had no other man among us whom all sides loved and honoured so much as they did him’, while John Macky told his Hanoverian patrons that Pembroke was ‘a lover of the constitution of his country, without being of a party and yet esteemed by all parties’.15 Even a more critical commentator such as Arthur Onslow‡, writing after Pembroke’s death, had to concede that ‘he was very firm to the government and constitution, but had no particular attachment to ministers or parties, and in that he preserved the dignity of his rank’.16 Throughout his long political career – he was not once out of high office between 1689 and 1709 – he served an important role as the exemplary court Tory whose moderation and efficiency in office could offend neither party.17 More often than not, and certainly in early 1702 and then again in 1708, he was put in office as a moderate place-holder until a more controversial and partisan appointment could be effected. Yet even his closest adherents cast occasional doubts on Pembroke’s ability; even Burnet qualified his praise by commenting that Pembroke’s knowledge of mathematics ‘made him a little too speculative and abstracted in his notions. He had great application, but he lived a little too much out of the world, though in a public station; a little more practice among men would give him the last finishing.’18 Harsher commentators such as Onslow and Thomas Hearne cast doubt on the depth of Pembroke’s widely lauded learning and intelligence and claimed to be able to see traces of the Herbert family’s infamous propensity for quarrelsomeness and insanity in his behaviour, especially as he grew older and more eccentric.19
As Member for the Wiltshire borough of Wilton, near the family’s famous residence of Wilton House, Thomas Herbert left little trace of his parliamentary activities. He is not known to have served on any committees or to have made any speeches, and he was conspicuously absent when the crucial division on the exclusion bill took place. He succeeded to the earldoms of Pembroke and Montgomery upon his elder brother’s death without male heirs on 29 Aug. 1683. A number of other Wiltshire peers stood ready to take over the lieutenancy of the county from the late unstable peer, but by early October it was confirmed that the young 8th earl would take up his late brother’s role governing Wiltshire. His local rival Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth, however, was made custos rotulorum.20 Pembroke was to remain lord lieutenant of Wiltshire for the next 50 years until his death in 1733. He was also appointed custos rotulorum of the Herbert family’s ancient Welsh bases in Glamorgan and Pembrokeshire. On 26 July 1684 he married Margaret, the sole daughter and heir of the attorney general Sir Robert Sawyer‡ who was at that time spearheading the quo warranto campaign against corporations.
Reign of James II, 1685-8
Pembroke sat in the House on the first day of James II’s Parliament on 19 May 1685 and a week later he introduced his own estate bill. The 7th earl of Pembroke had died intestate and had left behind him £20,000 worth of debt and a seven-year-old daughter, Charlotte, as heir-general. She had settled in France and was being raised as a Catholic by her French mother, Henriette Mauricette, the sister of Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth. The dowager countess of Pembroke had taken out letters of administration on the late earl’s estate, which consisted of lands in Wiltshire, Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, and disputes between her and the new earl had begun almost immediately. The bill would have given the earl control of all these lands, provided he raise £10,000 for his niece Charlotte’s portion, maintain the dowager countess’s jointure of £1,500 p.a. and supply portions and maintenance for his two sisters.21
The bill was dropped after Pembroke left the House on 13 June to raise the Wiltshire militia against the invasion of James Scott, duke of Monmouth; these troops joined the royal forces in the latter stages of the battle of Sedgemoor.22 James II followed this in September 1685 by urging on William of Orange the appointment of Pembroke as general of the English regiments serving the United Provinces, but this was not effected, apparently because of Pembroke’s military inexperience.23 Pembroke was still in the House for five days in November 1685, before the prorogation, and served as one of the peers chosen to try Henry Booth, 2nd Baron Delamer (later earl of Warrington) in January 1686.24
Pembroke may have initially received personal tokens of the king’s favour, but progress in his career was blocked by his growing opposition to James II’s policies.25 In early 1687 it was widely rumoured that the king would give the colonelcy recently surrendered by Richard Lumley, Baron Lumley (later earl of Scarbrough) to Pembroke, provided he convert to Catholicism, but despite being aggressively ‘closeted’ by the king, Pembroke declined the honour as ‘he then should be thought obliged to vote in Parliament as he was directed, when he would preserve a liberty to himself of giving his vote there according to his judgment and conscience.’26 From that point Pembroke was consistently listed among those peers who opposed the king’s policies to repeal the Test Acts and Penal Laws.
That the young earl already acted, and was seen, as a moderate, fundamentally loyal to the crown is suggested by the fact that Pembroke was one of the few lords lieutenant critical of the king’s policies who retained his position throughout 1685-8. In March 1688 he was merely ‘joined’ in his administration of Wiltshire by James II’s follower William Paston, 2nd earl of Yarmouth, a Norfolk peer, who was sent to monitor Pembroke’s actions in the county without actually ousting him. Pembroke may well have been one of the few among the king’s critics who was allowed to debate with the king. As late as November 1687 Pembroke ‘has been several times in the closet with his Majesty and has at large very rationally debated the matter [the imposition of the Three Questions] with the king and tells [him] he is very confident it will not succeed, but he will propose his Majesty’s pleasure with all the advantage he can.’27 In early October 1688 he formally offered his service to the king in case of William of Orange’s invasion, and he refused to subscribe to the petition of 16 Nov. calling on James to summon a ‘free Parliament’.28
At the time of the king’s first flight on 11 Dec. Pembroke signed the Guildhall Declaration and, with his Wiltshire rival Weymouth, as well as Thomas Colepeper, 2nd Baron Colepeper, and Francis Turner, bishop of Ely, was delegated to present the Declaration to William of Orange at his camp at Henley.29 Pembroke played a prominent role in the debate on 24 Dec. 1688 following the king’s permanent flight. Here he and his close colleague Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, ‘spoke with great moderation and tenderness towards the king’ and Pembroke argued that the king’s flight could not be considered an abdication and that the rights of the prince of Wales should be considered. Upon the proposal that Mary be declared queen in order to summons a formal Parliament, Pembroke made the suggestion, apparently the first to do so, ‘that this cannot be better done than by a Convention’, summoned without royal writs following the precedent of 1660.30
The Convention, 1689
According to Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, Pembroke was convinced that ‘all endeavours must be used in the Convention ... to provide for the safety of the government with regard to the king’s interest.’31 In the debate of 29 Jan. 1689 he supported a regency, arguing that by his flight the king had not necessarily ‘thrown away the government’ and compared his leaving the kingdom to ‘a man’s running out of his house when on fire, or a seaman’s throwing his goods overboard in a storm, to save his life, which could never be understood as a renunciation of his house or goods.’32 The following day Pembroke voted against the motion in a committee of the whole to declare William and Mary king and queen immediately and the day after did not join in the protest against the House’s rejection of the Commons’ claim that the ‘throne is vacant’. On 4 Feb. he was one of the 17 members of the House appointed to manage the conference at which the Commons put forward their objections to the Lords’ alternate wording to the declaration, and he voted with the majority against the motion to agree with the Commons in the words ‘abdicated’ and ‘vacant’ and was appointed to the large committee assigned to draw up the House’s reasons. On 5 and 6 Feb. Pembroke served as part of the House’s delegation who presented and then debated these reasons in conference, and on the latter day he took a major part in that part of the conference in which the Commons’ managers challenged the lords to name who filled the throne if it was not ‘vacant’, as the House alleged. Pembroke insisted that it was filled by James’s legitimate heir, although he and the other Lords’ managers were coy about explicitly naming which of James II’s children they had in mind as the occupant of the throne.33 Pembroke voted not content in the ensuing question in the House whether to agree to the Commons’ words and subscribed to the protest against the passage of this motion, effected by an unexpected influx of Williamites.
Yet despite his manifest opposition, once this important vote had passed, Pembroke quickly reconciled himself to the new situation and regime. Like his loyalist colleague Nottingham, who had led the House’s managers in the conferences, his constitutionalist scruples were satisfied by the Convention’s vote and resolution of 6 Feb., and three days later he and Nottingham were the only two supporters of a regency, among a host of ardent Williamites, named to the committee assigned to draw up reasons justifying the House’s amendments to the Declaration of Right, among which was one which stated that William and Mary had the ‘sole and full exercise of the regal power’. When Clarendon tried to convince these two former loyalists to enter a protest against the amendment of 9 Feb. giving William and Mary full regal powers or, failing that, to boycott attendance of the House in protest, Pembroke and Nottingham both declined, Pembroke explaining that ‘it would be of ill consequence; the Government must be supported, or else we should all be ruined’, while Nottingham told Clarendon ‘we must support the Government as well as we can, and the Lords can never answer it, if they leave the House’.34 One of James’s most faithful loyalists, Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, who never fully reconciled himself to the new regime, later wrote in his memoirs that Pembroke ‘had a behaviour like a great and generous nobleman … and when he accepted of an employment afterwards, he gave me this reason, that our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ answered when they came to tempt him, “Render unto Caesar”.’35
Pembroke quickly showed as much loyalty, and application, to the new regime as he had previously shown for James II. His loyalties appear not to have been to individual monarchs but to the crown and government in place itself, as is suggested by his responses to Clarendon and Ailesbury and by a comment attributed to him by Roger Morrice. This may have arisen from Pembroke’s role in the committee appointed on 1 May to draft an address on the king’s desire to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, ‘that their Lordships might put what clauses they thought fit into acts of Parliament touching the prerogative, but the branches and roots of the prerogative were unalienable and inseparable from the crown, and such acts [i.e. the Habeas Corpus Act], did not bind the crown’.36
On the same day he took the oaths to the new monarchs, 2 Mar. 1689, Pembroke chaired a meeting of the select committee considering the bill for the trial of peers and he took a major role in guiding this bill through its tortured proceedings, although he was not satisfied with its final outcome. The committee, following an order made in the previous meeting of 28 Feb., also chaired by Pembroke, considered and approved an amended clause of the bill which lowered the number of lords required to try a peer outside time of Parliament. Pembroke reported this amendment to the bill on 4 Mar., and then chaired the committee of the whole which considered and ultimately rejected them. Upon Pembroke’s report, the House divided, with Pembroke acting as teller for the minority contents (which side lost by one vote), on whether to put the question whether the new clause should stand. The following day, after further debate, the House rejected the committee of the whole’s amendments requiring the entire House to be summoned and passed the version of the bill with the reduced criteria. On 6 Mar. Pembroke entered his protest against this version of the bill.37 He acted as a teller on 14 Mar. for the question whether to commit the comprehension bill to a committee of the whole and he was later named to the select committee on the bill. When on the following day, 15 Mar., the committee of the whole considering the bill to abrogate the oaths appointed a select committee to draw up a clause to dispense candidates for office from the requirement of taking the sacrament, Pembroke was again selected. From 28 Mar. he was involved in the dispute between the Houses on the Commons’ amendments to the bill for removing papists from London which was particularly aimed at the English Catholics in the household of the queen dowager, Catherine of Braganza. He reported from the small committee of nine peers who drafted the reasons for the House’s objections on 28 Mar. and was named as part of the House’s delegation to conferences on that day and on 8 April. He was that latter day named to the committee to draw up reasons justifying the House’s objections and took part in the three successive conferences on this matter on 16-18 Apr. On 18 Apr. the House sent down to the Commons its amended version of the bill for the abrogation of oaths, and Pembroke was one of the peers chosen to manage the ensuing conference on 22 Apr., although he had not been involved in the preceding conference on this matter. From 16 Apr. Pembroke also held the proxy of the Tory Thomas Tufton, 6th earl of Thanet, which he held for the remainder of the session.
Pembroke showed his attachment to the regime in other ways and acted as the bearer of the third sword at the coronation of William and Mary on 11 April.38 In May he was reinstated as sole lord lieutenant of Wiltshire, although Yarmouth had ceased to have any influence in the county since the Revolution. In April William III appointed him English ambassador to the States-General, where Pembroke was to formalize the military alliance between the two countries against France.39 Pembroke set off for his new posting on 8 June, which allowed him time on the last day of May 1689 to vote against the motion to reverse the punitive judgments against Titus Oates, and on the day following, 1 June, to introduce (with Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford) his distant kinsman, Arthur Herbert, into the House as earl of Torrington. On 3 June Pembroke registered his proxy with his colleague Nottingham, who was later able to use it on 31 July to cast two votes to adhere to the Lords’ amendments which would prohibit Titus Oates from ever testifying in court again.
First Lord of the Admiralty, 1690-2
Pembroke returned from his successful embassy in early October and was almost immediately rewarded for his efforts by being sworn on to the Privy Council on 14 Oct. 1689. Carmarthen classed him as among the supporters of the court in a list of October 1689 to February 1690. A new session of the Convention began on 23 Oct. and Pembroke was present on that day and for a total of 79 per cent of the ensuing sittings, but other than being named to various select committees with the other peers present he was not heavily involved in the affairs of the House throughout most of the winter of 1689. That winter saw his first entry into ministerial office – a position which he was to retain, though in different guises, for the following 20 years. Sometime around the turn of 1690 Pembroke and his kinsman Torrington were each commissioned to raise and command a regiment of marines.40 There was also at this time intense manoeuvring about who would replace the disgruntled Torrington as first lord of the commission managing the Admiralty. Originally William had wanted to appoint the Tory admiral Sir Richard Haddock‡, but the Whigs, already restless by William’s preference for Tories in his ministry, made it clear they would not accept him.41 When the commission constituting the newly modelled Admiralty Board was issued on 20 Jan. 1690 Pembroke, not strongly associated with either party, was placed at the head of it, despite his lack of naval experience. After George Savile, marquess of Halifax, was removed as lord privy seal shortly after the dissolution of the Convention on 6 Feb. 1690, Pembroke stood out in popular rumour as one of the leading candidates to replace him, although at that point the king put the custodianship of the Privy Seal in the hands of a commission; Pembroke would have to wait two more years before he attained that office.42 The king also appointed Pembroke as one of the councillors who was to assist Queen Mary in the government of the country during his absence in Ireland that summer.43
For the elections to the new Parliament, and indeed for all the elections of this period, Pembroke, despite his growing prominence in Whitehall, did not exercise a predominant influence in the county of Wiltshire and even in his own borough of Wilton he was rarely able to return both members to the Commons. In March 1690 his client, the clerk of the Privy Council Sir John Nicholas‡, of a family long associated with the Herberts, was defeated by a local Whig candidate, Sir Richard Grobham Howe‡.44 Pembroke himself attended 91 per cent of the sittings of the first session of the Parliament in spring 1690 – his highest level of attendance of any parliamentary session – and, as befitted a new privy councillor and minister, was prominent in the debates on the bill to recognize the Convention as a Parliament, and William and Mary as king and queen. The wording over the status of the measures taken in the Convention was debated in a committee of the whole House on 28 Mar., where the Whigs wished to have them ‘declared’ legal, while the Tories wished to have them merely ‘confirmed’ as such. The committee of the whole was inconclusive. Both wordings were reported to the House on 5 Apr., and Pembroke joined the Tory ministers Nottingham and Thomas Osborne, marquess of Carmarthen (later duke of Leeds) in rejecting the Whig wording ‘declaring’ the acts of the Convention legal. However, he did not support Nottingham in his condemnation of the compromise wording developed by Carmarthen that stated that the measures taken ‘were and are good laws to all intents and purposes whatsoever’ and did not sign the protests of 8 and 10 Apr. against the passage of the bill with this wording. In a four-hour debate at the second reading of the abjuration bill on 2 May, Pembroke joined Nottingham, Carmarthen and Halifax in arguing against both the terms of the oath and its imposition upon all subjects, as ‘the oath of obedience [is] sufficient’ and there was a ‘danger to press things too far’. Though he was against a republic he would have no new oath, he concluded, and argued, ultimately fruitlessly, to reject the bill.45
As trailed earlier in the spring, Pembroke was one of the ‘Council of Nine’ assigned to advise Mary during her tenure as regent while William was campaigning in Ireland from June 1690.46 After working with him, Mary felt that Pembroke was ‘as mad as most of his family though very good natured, and a man of honour, but not very steady’.47 A contemporary satirical poem ‘The Nine’, also played on the unfortunate reputation of the Herbert earls of Pembroke for bouts of madness and extreme and uncontrollable rages:
A Grave Eye, and an Overthinking Face
Seems to distinguish him from all his Race.
But Nature’s proud and leaving all Restraint
By sudden start shows there’s a Mortal taint:
Which to a good Observer, makes it plain,
His frenzy will ere long break out again.
But after all to do him right it’s sad,
The best of all the Race should be stark Mad.48
Suspicions that he took after the more infamous members of his family dogged Pembroke throughout his career, but the only times he did appear to give vent to his family’s penchant for rages was when he was in his cups – as William III was happy to witness, for it reassured him that Pembroke was not, as commonly rumoured, ‘faultless’.49
As first lord of the Admiralty, Pembroke was heavily involved in the major crisis of the summer of 1690 – the defeat of the Anglo-Dutch fleet off Beachy Head. He co-signed, with Nottingham, the positive orders to the admiral of the fleet, Pembroke’s kinsman Torrington, to engage the numerically superior French fleet in battle.50 Torrington’s failure to lead his squadron into battle on 30 June 1690, while leaving the Dutch portions of the fleet to suffer a mauling at the hands of the French, was instantly condemned and provoked calls, especially from the Dutch allies, for Torrington’s swift and speedy punishment. On 3 July the queen sent Pembroke and William Cavendish, 4th earl (later duke) of Devonshire, to the fleet which had limped home from the battle to examine what had happened and to exact a promise from Torrington to come up to Westminster to account for himself before the council.51 After Torrington was committed to the Tower on 10 July for high crimes and misdemeanours by a warrant from the Privy Council, Pembroke was also placed on a commission with Charles Gerard, earl of Macclesfield, Sir Robert Howard‡, Sir Henry Goodricke‡, and Sir Thomas Lee‡ (the only one of this commission, apart from Pembroke, to sit on the Admiralty Board), ‘to examine the whole behaviour of the admiral and every captain’. 52 On 19 July this commission reported that in their opinion Torrington alone had been responsible for the defeat.53
The question of who should replace Torrington in command of the fleet, with a threatening French fleet still in the Channel, quickly engulfed and divided the Council of Nine. Within only a few days of the battle it was decided to entrust command of the fleet to two experienced naval commanders headed by a figurehead ‘man of quality’. At first the obvious candidate was Pembroke himself, and Mary seemed to have preferred him to some of the other more ambitious peers who were pushing themselves forward, such as Carmarthen, Devonshire or especially the wayward peer Charles Mordaunt, earl of Monmouth (later 3rd earl of Peterborough). By 22 July, though, Pembroke had made clear that he was not willing to take the responsibility, and even ‘disapproved having a man of quality to go, saying it was only to send him to be knocked on the head, without the hopes of having any credit of what was well done.’ Instead the queen chose two experienced captains Sir Richard Haddock and Sir John Ashby and left it to the king to choose the third. Pembroke was then confronted with ruling over a divided Admiralty Board as three of the seven commissioners, led by the Whig Sir Thomas Lee‡, refused to countenance these royal choices and strongly asserted the Board’s right to have a consultative, and even deciding, role in the appointment of naval officers. A number of stormy interviews took place between the queen and the commissioners in late July and early August 1690, in which Pembroke stood in the difficult position of trying to be both the spokesman for the recalcitrant Board, ‘for form’s sake’, and a loyal servant to the monarchs. It was to Pembroke that the queen sent ‘positive orders’ on 5 Aug. that the commission for the Tory Sir Richard Haddock, the chief target of Lee’s partisan enmity, was to be signed and shortly afterwards a bare majority of four Admiralty commissioners, led by the first lord, Pembroke himself, signed the commission for the new royal appointees as co-admirals, while ‘the other three continue obstinate’.54
At the same time the Admiralty commissioners, presided over by Pembroke, refused to sign a commission establishing a court martial for Torrington, arguing that by statute such a court martial could only be established by a single lord high admiral and not a commission. Despite the exasperation of the queen and her ministers, the Admiralty commissioners continued to delay and the matter of the method and timing of Torrington’s trial dragged on throughout September.55 The Torrington matter thus continued to involve Pembroke when Parliament resumed for the winter session starting 2 Oct. 1690, of whose sittings Pembroke attended 64 per cent. On 6 Oct. Torrington petitioned the House complaining that he had been committed to the Tower by the Privy Council for misdemeanour only, and not treason, and thus in breach of his privilege. The House, or certainly the enemies to the Tory ministers Nottingham and Carmarthen, looked sympathetically on this petition. The ministry, fearing that Torrington would have to be released so he could be tried by his sympathetic peers, thus renewed and increased its pressure on the reluctant Admiralty to issue a commission for a court martial. Thus on 13 Oct. Pembroke, as first lord, laid before the House copies of the Admiralty’s original commission to Torrington as admiral of the fleet as well as a draft of the warrant for his commitment to the marshal of the Court of Admiralty pending a court martial. The House resolved that the Admiralty had the right to try Torrington under the terms of its commission to him, and that the warrant for his commitment to the earl marshal of the Admiralty was legal, but it withheld judgment on the question whether his original commitment to the Tower by the Privy Council was a breach of privilege. On 20 Oct. Pembroke was placed on the committee assigned to draft a resolution regarding the Privy Council’s commitment, and the committee’s decision that the council’s warrant was a breach of privilege was eventually passed by the House the following day after long debate. Torrington was on 10 Dec. acquitted by the court martial established by the Admiralty to try him, much to William III’s anger. Pembroke’s precise role or activity in the increasingly partisan debates on Torrington’s case cannot be determined nor can his position on the ensuing bill to clarify the powers of the Admiralty commissioners, put forward by Nottingham and Carmarthen to expedite the court martial of Torrington.56 But that he was probably sympathetic to his kinsman Torrington, against the attacks of the king’s leading ministers, is suggested by the Admiralty’s reluctance to issue a court martial and particularly by Queen Mary’s comment that it was ‘in the business of Lord Torrington’ that Pembroke showed himself ‘not very steady’.57 On the same day as Torrington’s petition had been heard, 6 Oct., Pembroke had voted for the discharge of James Cecil, 4th earl of Salisbury, and Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, from their imprisonment in the Tower.
On 2 Jan. 1691 Pembroke reported from a committee of the whole with amendments and a proviso to the bill to suspend those parts of the navigation acts which prohibited the employment of foreign sailors on English ships during the war with France. Three days later, as the Houses were trying to wrap things up before the prorogation scheduled for that day, Pembroke acted as manager or reporter for a total of four conferences on the Commons’ disagreement with one of the provisos. It was only at the third conference that one of the parties budged, when, as Pembroke reported to the House, the Commons accepted one of the House’s amendments but wished to make the penalty against those infringing the act a term in gaol rather than a fine. The House still refused to accept this and Pembroke was one of five peers assigned to draw up reasons to adhere to their original amendment when the matter was lost by the prorogation of Parliament.58
Pembroke’s marine regiment, of which he had been colonel since January 1690, was given instead to the admiral Henry Killigrew‡ shortly after the prorogation, perhaps owing to Pembroke’s association with the disgraced Torrington, who similarly had all his commands removed.59 That was the only immediate penalty suffered for his association with Torrington, the Admiralty and the disgrace of Beachy Head. After the prorogation Pembroke was once again entrusted to help Mary govern the realm during William’s absence in January 1691 for the congress of the allies at The Hague, as indeed Pembroke continued to do for every other period of regency until Mary’s death.60 In William’s absence, Pembroke acted as a commissioner for the five prorogations between 31 Mar. and 5 Oct. 1691, and on three occasions (30 June, 3 Aug., 5 Oct.) was one of the five peers standing between the throne and the woolsack who summoned the lower House to hear the prorogation.
Pembroke attended three-fifths of the meetings of the 1691-2 session when Parliament resumed in October 1691, but apart from being named to the majority of select committees established, including the two small drafting committees assigned on 22 and 27 Oct. to formulate addresses of thanks to the king and queen each, Pembroke’s only notable intervention in the House in this session came on 9 Feb. 1692 when he acted as a teller at the report from a free conference on the question whether to agree with the Commons in their objections to the House’s amendments to the public accounts bill.61
Lord Privy Seal, 1692-9
Pembroke was apparently more active in the Admiralty and in the council than he was in the House and his reputation for knowledge, loyalty and moderation, ensured that he would remain at the heart of William’s continuing efforts to put together a ‘mixed ministry’. Earlier, in February 1691, Carmarthen had put Pembroke’s name forward to William as a suitable lord lieutenant of Ireland.62 That was not effected but in early March 1692 Pembroke was moved from the Admiralty Board, where he was replaced as first lord by Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, to the higher office of lord privy seal, in which position he remained until 1699.63 That he survived at the heart of government far longer than his erstwhile companions among William’s early Tory ministry and that he remained in his office at the time of severe partisan wrangling and Whig dominance, attests to his quiet unassuming administrative ability and his lack of partisan zeal, which meant that he was unlikely to threaten either party.64 In this new role Pembroke acted as commissioner for the six prorogations of Parliament between 12 Apr. and 26 Sept. 1692, and on four of these occasions (12 Apr., 24 May, 11 July, 22 Aug.) he formed part of the body of commissioners seated between the throne and woolsack, and on 12 Apr. and 22 Aug. it was he who formally announced the prorogation to the assembled parliament.65 In early August he was part of the commission of the council sent to examine admiral Edward Russell, later earl of Orford, recently returned to Portsmouth, concerning the reasons he did not sufficiently follow up his victory against the French at La Hogue, and he also participated in the debates in the cabinet council in mid August over the policies to be presented to Parliament in the forthcoming session, siding with Nottingham and Carmarthen against the insistence of Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester, that the land troops in Flanders be scaled back.66
Pembroke, as lord privy seal, first attended the 1692-3 session on 10 Nov. 1692, a week after it had commenced, and a week after his arrival was named to the group of 16 peers assigned to draft the House’s response to the king’s speech and to thank the queen for her management of the government. In total he came to three-fifths of the sittings of this session. His attitude towards the contentious place bill at the turn of 1692-3 is ambiguous and difficult to disentangle. Ailesbury originally listed Pembroke under the ‘not contents’ in his division list on the question whether to commit the bill on 31 Dec. 1692 but then subsequently crossed the name through, either because Pembroke was not present at the vote – his name does not appear in the attendance list of the day – or because Ailesbury was mistaken in his assessment of Pembroke as an opponent of the bill. The Prussian ambassador, Bonet, for his part regarded Pembroke as the bill’s ‘great protector’, which would have made Pembroke unusual as one of the only, if not the only, Tory government ministers and office-holders who supported the bill. For 3 Jan. 1693, the day of the final vote on the bill, Ailesbury marked Pembroke as one of seven peers ‘that went away and for the bill’, that is, he abstained from the vote despite his support, perhaps because the court Whig Scarbrough (as Viscount Lumley had become at the Revolution), took Pembroke out to dinner that day to keep him away from the vote. Pembroke agreed to this invitation thinking that thereby both sides in the division would lose one vote but, according to Bonnet, Scarbrough managed to get back in time to cast his vote against the bill and even brought another court Whig with him. If Pembroke, as seems likely, had indeed been in favour of the bill, he did not publicly show it, as he did not subscribe to the protest against its narrow rejection that day.67 At the same time Pembroke voted against the second reading of the bill for the divorce of Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk on 2 Jan. 1693.
He was assigned by the committee of the whole House on 16 Jan. 1693 to draw up a clause for the Triennial Act, and two days later he reported from conference the Commons’ objection to the House’s amendment to the land tax bill. The House reluctantly agreed to recede from its amendment the following day, assigning Pembroke and a number of other peers to draw up a statement expressing the House’s dislike of the Commons’ bill but its willingness to concede for the sake of granting the king necessary supply. On that same day, 19 Jan., Pembroke introduced in the House a private bill which reflected the increasingly complicated and controversial disposition of the Herbert estate. In July 1688, the 7th earl of Pembroke’s only daughter and heir Charlotte, barely 13 years old but reputedly a heiress worth £70,000, had married the son and heir of James II’s lord chancellor, George Jeffreys, Baron Jeffreys.68 The lord chancellor had been quick to confirm Charlotte’s inheritance of the Welsh lands, said to be worth £4,000 p.a. at the Glamorgan Sessions, but he did this, so Pembroke claimed at the time and again alleged in this bill, by having the terms of various documents and writs involved in the fines and recoveries of the Welsh lands retrospectively altered and amended. Pembroke raised the issue again at this point as Charlotte’s husband John Jeffreys, 2nd Baron Jeffreys, was about to reach his majority. The matter was delayed for several weeks and the bill did not receive its second reading until 21 Feb. 1693 and was passed three days later, after counsel, witnesses and the judges had been heard, and the committee of the whole had considered it. The bill fared less well in the Commons, where the motion to commit was rejected on 6 March.69 Pembroke was present for all four days of the trial of Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, and on the first day, 31 Jan. 1693, he joined in the protest against the resolution not to proceed immediately with the trial, and four days later he joined the majority in voting Mohun not guilty. On 11 Feb. Pembroke was placed on a committee to draw up an address to the king with the House’s advice that he temper his reliance on foreign officers in the army and ordnance, and on 10 Mar. he was again called on to be part of the drafting committee to develop reasons why the House insisted on its amendments concerning officers’ fees in the duchy of Cornwall bill.
Pembroke’s star continued to rise and by late March 1693 it was widely rumoured that he would be appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in the place of Henry Sydney, Viscount Sydney (later earl of Romney).70 He did not receive that post at this time, but he continued in his role on Queen Mary’s cabinet council during William’s summer absence, and was named a commissioner of prorogation on four occasions that summer, even though he was only actually present in the House as a commissioner sitting on the form between the throne and the woolsack on 3 Oct. 1693. In early May he acted as a commissioner to inspect the fleet and to attend a council of war of flag officers before the embarkation of the convoy under Sir George Rooke‡ assigned to accompany the Turkey Company merchant fleet to Smyrna.71 After that expedition ended with the ignominious loss of the majority of the Smryna fleet to the French, it was further predicted that Pembroke would be appointed lord high admiral, in a single capacity, to replace the disgraced Admiralty commissioners whose miscommunication had led to the disaster.72
Pembroke attended just less than half of the meetings of 1693-4 and on 11 Dec. 1693 the court Whig Charles Howard, 3rd earl of Carlisle, registered his proxy with him for the remainder of the session. On 5 Jan. 1694, upon Pembroke’s report from conference, the House agreed to recede from its amendment to the place bill by which it sought to remove the Commons’ exemption of its speaker from the bill’s provisions. William, nevertheless, promptly vetoed this bill so offensive to him.73 Pembroke later, on 17 Feb. 1694, voted against the proposed reversal of chancery’s dismissal of the petition of Ralph Montagu, earl (later duke) of Montagu in the long-running cause of Montagu v. Bath.
Once again after the prorogation, Pembroke was appointed to the council assigned to advise Mary during William’s absence – except this summer the council was notably slimmed down by William and reduced to five members. Although contemporaries gave varying accounts of the numbers and members of this new council, it had at its core the lord president of the council Carmarthen, now raised in the peerage to be duke of Leeds, the lord privy seal Pembroke, the lord keeper John Somers, Baron Somers, and the secretaries of state Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury and John Trenchard‡ – an indication of Pembroke’s continuing place at the heart of William and Mary’s government, despite the increasing turn to the Whigs in 1693-4.74 In early May 1694, upon the death of the lord lieutenant of Wales, the earl of Macclesfield, Pembroke was made lord lieutenant of south Wales and Monmouthshire.75 It was at this point that his legal battle with his niece, Charlotte, and Baron Jeffreys came to an end, as the court of exchequer to which he had resorted after the loss of his bill in Parliament found against him in late June and the family’s ancestral Welsh lands became permanently separated from the Herbert earls of Pembroke.76
Pembroke was a commissioner for the three prorogations between 18 Sept. and 6 Nov. 1694, but it was only on the last of these that he was actually present to officiate. When Parliament reassembled on 12 Nov. Pembroke attended and proceeded to sit in over two-thirds of the meetings of this session (69 per cent). L’Hermitage reported to the States General that on 18 Dec., in the debates in the committee of the whole considering the triennial bill, Pembroke ‘harangued’ lengthily, insisting that the Parliament should be dissolved immediately after the end of the current session, regardless of the terms of the bill which allowed it to remain in being until November 1696.77 Despite these views Pembroke did not put his name to the protest against the bill which passed without this amendment, and which was the version to which William III finally gave his assent on 22 Dec. In a debate on 25 Jan. 1695 on the state of the nation he successfully warned Rochester off from raising the ‘dangerous question’ of the legitimacy of the Parliament after the death of the queen in whose name it had been summoned.78
The lord privy seal was most prominent in the proceedings at the end of the session. On 11 Apr. 1695 he was added to the group of delegates dealing with the Commons in conference on the Houses’ disagreements over the trials for treason bill and he attended conferences on 15 and 20 April. On 18 Apr. he was also named a reporter for the conference on the bill to continue various laws, including the law on press censorship. He was named on 16 Apr. to the committee entrusted with drawing up a bill to indemnify Sir Thomas Cooke‡ for any evidence he provided about bribery and corruption in the affairs of the East India Company and on 22 Apr. was chosen by ballot as one of the 13 members of the House committee which, joined with a committee of the Commons, took Cooke’s testimony. He reported the result of these examinations to the House on the following two days and on 24 Apr. acted as principal spokesman for the House in a conference on this matter, upon which report he was further named to the committee which was to examine those implicated by Cooke’s testimony such as Sir Basil Firebrace‡. He reported from another conference the agreement that the joint committee which had investigated Cooke would do the same for the others implicated, and on 27 Apr. he delivered to the House the results of the joint committee’s examination of Firebrace and his accomplices.79 As a result of these investigations into bribery and corruption the Commons soon brought in articles of impeachment against the duke of Leeds, and Pembroke reported from the conference on 3 May at which the Houses discussed the impeachment, but the widening investigation into corruption was stopped by William III’s prorogation of Parliament on the same day.
Pembroke had served on Queen Mary’s cabinet council during William’s absence for every summer since 1690. After the queen’s death in December 1694, Pembroke continued in this role as caretaker of the kingdom in the king’s absence, and was appointed one of the lords justices from May to October 1695.80 He had the rare distinction of being one of only three ministers – the others being Devonshire and Thomas Tenison, archbishop of Canterbury – to serve as lord justice in each and every one of William III’s annual absences until the king’s death, just as he had done previously during the queen’s lifetime.81 Upon the king’s return Parliament was dissolved on 11 Oct. 1695, and in the elections Pembroke was able to ensure the return of only one of the burgesses for Wilton, the Tory John Gauntlett‡, a protegé of Sir John Nicholas and a clerk of the privy council and under-keeper of its records.82 Gauntlett was to be returned on Pembroke’s interest in every subsequent election in William III’s reign until defeated, temporarily, in the controversial election to Anne’s Parliament in 1702.
Pembroke attended the first day of the new Parliament on 22 Nov. 1695 and continued to sit in 69 per cent of the meetings of its first session. In early December he took an active part in debates in the committee of the whole, at least according to the notes taken by the chairman of the committee, Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon. On 4 Dec. 1695 he supported Torrington in his argument, in the committee of the whole dealing with the state of the coin, that an address should be made to the king to prohibit the import of debased English coin. Pembroke also suggested the coins of smaller value, such as half-crowns, should be called in first to be made into smaller pieces first, to limit the loss in value in the recoinage. He also felt that an address had to be made to call in coins, and he was placed on the committee of 17 assigned by the committee of the whole to draft an address calling for a royal proclamation that no clipped money be accepted as valid currency and to present this address to the Commons in a conference.83 On 13 Dec. he was named to the committees charged with inspecting papers from the East India Company regarding its merchants’ losses at sea and with making additions to the address against the Scottish East India Company. On 23 Dec. he also took part in debates in the committee of the whole House discussing the trials for treason bill, where he agreed with the motion that there should be a provision that a copy of the indictment be made available to the accused at least five days before the trial.84 On the penultimate day of 1695 he was placed on a select committee, also arising from debates in a committee of the whole, entrusted with drafting an amendment for the bill to regulate the coinage and was appointed a manager to defend the House’s amendments in a series of conferences on 3, 7 and 11 Jan. 1696. These debates and conferences were interrupted by the furore surrounding the revelations of the assassination plot against William III, and the drafting of the Association. Pembroke, a loyal court servant, signed the Association on the first day he could, 27 Feb., in stark contrast to his former Tory colleague Nottingham who was struck off the council on 12 March.85 He soon resumed his usual activity in conferences and on 6 Apr. reported from conference the lower House’s objections to the amendments made to the bill for the encouragement of privateers.86
Pembroke first sat in the House on 2 Nov. 1696 when Parliament resumed and continued to sit for a total of 64 per cent of the meetings of the session. Vernon listed him, among a host of Whig managers such as Gilbert Burnet, the bishop of Salisbury, Ford Grey, earl of Tankerville, and the earl of Monmouth, as one of the managers of the debate on the second reading of the bill to attaint Sir John Fenwick‡ on 18 December. With many other court supporters he voted for the attainder bill’s second reading, though he stated in the debate that this was only done in order to encourage Fenwick to make a more full confession, and that he had still not decided how he would vote in the final stages of the bill. At the bill’s third reading on 23 Dec. 1696, he and several other ministers and court followers including the lord steward Devonshire, the lord chamberlain Charles Sackville, 6th earl of Dorset, James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond, and Charles Seymour, 6th duke of Somerset, went against their previous stance and voted against the bill, though they did not subscribe to the subsequent protest against its passage. This unexpected reversal of so many courtiers and ministers led Vernon to comment to Shrewsbury that he was surprised the bill passed at all ‘when one considers who they were that voted against it, particularly all the lords justices who had voices, except the archbishop of Canterbury’.87 The king still chose him as one of the four peers commissioned to pass the act of attainder in his absence, along with its other opponents Devonshire and Dorset and Sidney Godolphin, Baron (later earl of) Godolphin; Pembroke was further named to the small committees which on 17 and 22 Jan. 1697 were assigned to compose addresses asking for a week’s reprieve for the attainted Fenwick and condemning Monmouth for his role in tampering with Fenwick’s evidence.88
On 10 Mar. 1697 John Lowther, Viscount Lonsdale, registered his proxy with Pembroke, who was able to use it until his own departure from the House that session, intended for a more important duty, on 7 April. In late 1696 Pembroke had been appointed chief plenipotentiary for William III at the peace negotiations at Ryswick and on 11 Apr. 1697, five days before Parliament’s prorogation, he formally took leave of the king to travel to the United Provinces. He returned to the king’s presence, with the Treaty of Ryswick successfully concluded, on 26 December.89 Parliament had already been in session for three weeks by the time of his return to the king’s presence and consequently he attended less than half (46 per cent) of the meetings of 1697-8. On 15 Mar. 1698 he joined the Whigs in voting in favour of committing the bill to punish the exchequer official Charles Duncombe‡.
Another matter took up his attention in late March 1698. Pembroke and Henry Somerset, duke of Beaufort had been made trustees of the estate of the Jacobite William Herbert, marquess of Powis, shortly after his flight to France in 1689. In May 1695 William III had granted much of the forfeited Welsh land of the outlawed and exiled Powis to his close companion William Nassau van Zuylestein, earl of Rochford. On 17 Mar. 1698 Rochford, with Powis’s son and heir William Herbert, styled Viscount Montgomery in exile and deprived by outlawry of his title as 2nd marquess of Powis, submitted to the House a petition against the legal actions which Montgomery’s lawyers and agents had brought against many of Rochford’s tenants on the former Herbert lands in Wales. Exactly two weeks later, facing stiff opposition in the House from Powis’s trustee Pembroke, and perhaps sensing the general anti-Dutch mood in Parliament and the country, Rochford desisted and agreed not to insist upon his privilege in this matter.90 On 15 Apr. Pembroke received the proxy of Robert Shirley, 8th Baron (later Earl) Ferrers, which he held for the remainder of the session.
Unruly Parliaments and ministerial reshuffles, 1699-1702
Pembroke was present when the new Parliament commenced on 6 Dec. 1698, but attended only just over half of the meetings of the first session. This may have been because of illness, as on 28 Mar. 1699 his absence from the trial of Edward Rich [1553], 6th earl of Warwick, was excused for this reason, or perhaps out of distress at the lack of co-operation with the king shown by the Commons in the wake of the Treaty of Ryswick. This first session was prorogued on 4 May 1699 and two weeks later Pembroke was replaced in his position as lord privy seal by Lonsdale, and was made lord president of the Privy Council, in which he succeeded the dismissed duke of Leeds. This was part of William III’s major reshuffling of offices in his attempt to bring in moderate court Tories into a mixed ministry to counterbalance the increasingly unmanageable and ineffective Junto Whigs, who had let William down by their inability to prevent the country members in the Commons from passing the act disbanding the army. That Pembroke still ranked high in the estimation of all parties concerned during this highly partisan time is suggested by the anecdote that the political fixer Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, on hearing that William was planning to abandon England altogether upon the passage of the Disbandment Act, commented, ‘Does he so? There is Tom of Pembroke, who is as good a block of wood as a king can be cut out of. We will send for him, and make him our king.’91 This sentiment, that the tall, stooping ‘Long Tom’ Pembroke was suitable material to make an ideal English king was later repeated some time in Anne’s reign by Devonshire, who ‘was infinitely averse to the settling of the crown of England on the Hanover family’ and ‘pressed the finding out of an Englishman to give it to, and maintained that it was more eligible to set it on long Tom’s head.’92
Pembroke was present for less than half (44 per cent) of the meetings of the session beginning on 16 Nov. 1699. In the first week of the new year he was named to drafting committees to compose addresses on the dispute between William King, bishop of Derry [I], and the Irish Society of London (10 Jan. 1700) and on the House’s resolution against the Darien colony of the Scottish East India Company (8 Feb. 1700). On 23 Feb. 1700 he voted against the motion to adjourn into a committee of the whole to discuss amendments to the bill to continue the East India Company as a corporation, a vote for the court which once again placed him alongside many Whigs. He came to the fore in the House as a prominent actor in the last days of the session as both Houses argued over the Irish forfeiture and land tax bill. The Commons had loaded the bill with amendments which appeared to many lords to be ‘tacks’ on a money bill. On 6 Apr. 1700 Pembroke voted to delete from the bill the ‘place clause’ which sought to exclude excise officials from sitting in the Commons, a move which set up the confrontation between the two Houses. Three days later he reported to the House from conference that the Commons did not agree with the lords’ amendments as they argued that the upper House did not have the right to amend money bills, and Pembroke chaired the committee subsequently assigned to draw up the House’s reasons for insisting on its amendments. Vernon explained to Shrewsbury that the lord privy seal Lonsdale and Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron (later marquess of) Wharton ‘have been the great instruments in stirring up the lords to make the amendments in the bill’, and that it was through their exertions that Thomas Tenison, archbishop of Canterbury, and Pembroke, also members of William’s cabinet council, ‘came blindly into it, as supposing the king had some scheme in reserve for carrying on the public business’ in case the measure was lost. But William did not have such a scheme in reserve and as the dispute between the Houses reached an impasse, he instructed his followers in the House to switch position and recede from the amendments. This message either did not get through to Pembroke, or he ignored it, and on 10 Apr. he continued to lead the opposition against the Commons’ bill and their ‘tacks’. He reported from the two conferences that day in which the Houses, with increasing bad temper, debated the right of the upper House to amend money bills, and upon his second report a sufficient number of peers heeded the king’s desire to let the bill pass and voted to recede from their amendment – but not Pembroke, who voted in favour of continuing to adhere and then subscribed to the protest against the amendment’s abandonment. With the bill passed and relations between the Houses tense, the king prorogued Parliament the following day.93
Despite this brief bout of disobedience, Pembroke was honoured shortly after the prorogation by being made a knight of the garter, alongside William III’s favourite Arnold Joost van Keppel, earl of Albemarle. The formal installation at Windsor took place on 5 June 1700 and shortly afterwards it was rumoured, once again incorrectly, that Pembroke was to be further honoured with the lord lieutenancy of Ireland.94 On 19 Dec., after months of discussion and indecision, the unco-operative Parliament which had been prorogued on 11 Apr. was dissolved and new elections called, in which an election fight developed in Wilton for the first time since 1690, but Gauntlett was still able to see off his opponents. Pembroke himself came to surprisingly little of the meetings of the Parliament of early 1701, attending less than a quarter of the sittings. He may have wished to avoid the controversy relating to the second Partition Treaty. The House had taken up the matter on 14 Mar. 1701 and the Tories there condemned both the terms of the treaty and the manner in which it had been negotiated, signed and ratified over the winter of 1699-1700, principally putting the blame at the door of the king’s closest minister and ‘favourite’, Hans Willem Bentinck, earl of Portland. On 15 Mar. Portland was at pains to point out that he had convened a meeting of a number of leading English ministers, including the lord president Pembroke, at his house in February 1700 to consider the terms of the treaty.95 On 17 Mar. 1701 Pembroke, having been named by Portland, defended himself before the House on his role in these consultations on the Partition Treaty, presented to him as a fait accompli, saying that ‘he had offered the king those advices, that he thought were most for his service and for the good of the nation, but that he did not think himself bound to give an account of that to any other persons’. As Burnet concludes, Pembroke ‘was not the man struck at, so there was nothing said’.96 The lords that were ‘struck at’ were the Whig ministers Somers, Orford and Portland, but Pembroke was absent from the House for most of the impeachment proceedings against them, including their acquittal. Following the death of John Egerton, 3rd earl of Bridgwater on 19 Mar., there was another reshuffle of ministerial offices, and on 4 Apr. Pembroke was formally appointed to replace Bridgwater as first lord of the Admiralty, in addition to his post as lord president.97
On 11 Nov. 1701 William took the controversial decision to dissolve Parliament again, overriding the objections of Pembroke and some of his other moderate councillors. With a new Parliament William embarked on another reshuffling of his ministry, this time favouring the Whigs. In the last days of January 1702 William replaced Pembroke as lord president of the council with Somerset, but at the same time he took the Admiralty affairs out of commission and appointed Pembroke sole lord high admiral of the realm, a move widely thought to be merely a stop-gap until a more thorough-going Whig could be placed there.98 By all accounts Pembroke was reluctant to take up the post, as ‘he saw it would draw a heavy load on him, and he was sensible that by his ignorance of sea affairs, he might commit errors’. To counteract such charges he resolved to go to sea himself, for the first time in his disjointed career with the Admiralty.99 Pembroke would appear to have been primarily preoccupied with these new duties, as he barely attended any of the meetings of the Parliament of early 1702 at all, coming to only six of its sittings, and he did not attend the House at all between 9 Jan. and 16 Mar. 1702, although he was constituted one of the commissioners for passing bills on 2 and 7 Mar. 1702, during William III’s final illness.
Anne’s Lord President of the Council, 1702-8
Pembroke continued in his role as lord high admiral following the death of William III, and throughout April and May preparations continued for his first venture to sea. In the council Pembroke was a strong advocate, with John Churchill, earl (later duke) of Marlborough, of war with France, refuting Rochester’s insistence that England act only as an auxiliary force.100 The only occasion during this period when he attended the House was on 11 May, when he presented evidence to the committee of the whole considering the bill for the encouragement of privateers.101 After Pembroke had spent £5,000 in preparation for his summer’s naval expedition, the queen made it known that she wished to make her husband, the prince consort George of Denmark, duke of Cumberland, lord high admiral in his place.102 Prince George’s patent for this office was passed on 20 May 1702, and Pembroke soon retired from court to his country house at Wilton, ‘being now out of all employments’.103 He did not remain in that position for long, for the ‘duumvirs’ Marlborough and Godolphin, looking to counterbalance the preponderance of high Tories in Anne’s first ministry, soon turned to Pembroke again and reinstated him as lord president of the council on 9 July 1702, one week after the dissolution of William III’s last Parliament.
Pembroke’s borough of Wilton took on a new significance in the election of July 1702. It had long been a centre of Dissent and after the election of November 1701 the Whig mayor of the corporation had made at least 19 new freemen, all of them Nonconformists. In the election of July they returned two Whig members against the sitting members. The Tory-dominated Commons’ committee for elections seated Pembroke’s client John Gauntlett on petition instead, and although not the sole cause for the introduction of the occasional conformity bill, the evidence heard in the committee in November 1702 about the Wilton corporation’s manipulation and evasion of the Corporation Act only further heightened the temperature surrounding this issue in Parliament.104
Pembroke’s role in the controversy surrounding this election is not clear, but he may have been moved by it and by his role as a government minister to support the occasional conformity bill throughout the three sessions of Anne’s first Parliament (Oct. 1702-Apr. 1705). He attended slightly more than half of the meetings of each of these sessions, and in the first two he voted to pass the occasional conformity bill. In November 1704 it was at least predicted that he would support the Commons’ tack, although he probably ultimately sided with the court position against it. He did not subscribe to either of the protests of 14 Dec. 1703 or 15 Dec. 1704 against the rejections of the bill. In other matters of the 1702 Parliament, Pembroke intervened in the debate on the bill to settle a £100,000 p.a. jointure on prince George by arguing that the controversial clause maintaining the prince in his place in the House and the Privy Council after the queen’s death was not a ‘tack’, as the Whigs insisted, but was a necessary provision for the effectiveness of the bill. He was not concerned with the consequences of the clause for the position in the House of the other peers of foreign descent, whom, he thought, ‘were already safe as to their peerage’.105 He was also appointed a manager, among 16 other peers, for conferences held on 28 Feb. and 7 and 9 Mar. 1705 on the dispute between the Houses on the Aylesbury men.
In late August 1705, following the recent disagreements between Marlborough and the States General over the conduct of the war, it was proposed to send Pembroke to the United Provinces to ‘endeavour to unite them to us, in a more vigorous prosecution of the war’. It was felt that Pembroke’s ‘gentle temper would make that apparent that the queen’s intention was to heal and not to exasperate’, but Marlborough advised against this potentially inflammatory diplomatic mission and it was cancelled at the last minute.106 Pembroke did not attend the first session of the new Parliament, of 1705-6, until 30 Nov. 1705, although his absence was excused by the House on 12 Nov., and he maintained his attendance rate of just over half of its sittings. On 6 Dec. he voted as a minister in favour of the motion that the Church was not in danger under the current administration.107 William Nicolson, bishop of Carlisle, noted that on 23 Jan. 1706 Pembroke presented to the House a petition, ‘at the request of Lord Nottingham’, for a bill that would allow the executors of the estate of the late William Savile, 2nd marquess of Halifax, headed by Nottingham himself, to sell some of the Savile lands to provide for the portions and annuities settled in his will. Halifax’s only sister Elizabeth, wife of Philip Stanhope, styled Lord Stanhope (later 3rd earl of Chesterfield), who had a reversionary interest in the estate, refused her permission and blocked further progress on this bill.108 On 9 Mar. 1706 Pembroke was named to the small committee of nine assigned to draw an address to the queen regarding the Houses’ condemnation of the libellous letter of Sir Rowland Gwynne‡ to Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford. After the prorogation ten days later, Pembroke was made one of the few Tory commissioners to negotiate the union with Scotland.109 He appears to have attended meetings of the commissioners, and the Scots commissioner John Clerk‡ noted him as being the first English lord in a meeting of 12 June 1706 to reply to the argument for an increased Scots representation in the Westminster Parliament.110 Pembroke attended only 40 per cent of the meetings of the subsequent session of 1706-7, and after his first sitting on 27 Jan. 1707 was there fairly steadily for the debates on the union, although apart from nominations to select committees, his only activity recorded in the Journal was his appointment on 8 Apr. as a manager for a conference on the House’s amendment to the bill for the continuance of laws for the punishment of vagrants.
On 30 Apr. 1707 Pembroke was, after a number of previous false rumours, made lord lieutenant of Ireland as a compromise candidate in the place of the Tory duke of Ormond. This change took place in the midst of the constant demands for office by the Junto Whigs. The Junto hoped that the lord lieutenancy of Ireland would go to Wharton and Pembroke’s lord presidency to Somers. Both men were so strongly disliked by Anne that she stymied these plans, at least temporarily, by giving the lord lieutenancy to Pembroke at the end of April while still maintaining him as lord president, arguing that he was only going over to Ireland to oversee and manage that kingdom’s Parliament meeting that summer and would be back in September.111 Pembroke arrived in Dublin on 30 June 1707 and the Irish Parliament commenced a week later.112 Godolphin had little confidence in Pembroke’s ability to manage such a notoriously troublesome assembly, confiding in Marlborough that ‘our friend’, that is, Pembroke, was ‘not very good at easing of difficulties, though he is more dexterous than he appears to be at keeping them from himself’.113 That old Irish hand Thomas Coningsby‡, earl of Coningsby [I], who was in Dublin for the Parliament, informed secretary of state Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, of Pembroke’s difficulties with the members of the Irish Parliament:
The principles upon which the generality of the people of the country act are so strange to the honesty and integrity of my lord lieutenant that it has been none of the least difficulties with those that knew them better that twas possible for my Lord to do, to prevail with him to guard himself against them. And the intrigues of one who expected to fill his place [Wharton], carried on by some of his emissaries sent over for that purpose, has been like to make this parliament very uneasy. But we have overcome both, and the vote for the support of the government was carried by so great a majority, and without a division, that I can’t but conclude from it that all here will end entirely to the satisfaction of her majesty.114
By early August the Irish Parliament had voted supply for the queen, but Pembroke was not able to finish his business there and embark for England until 28 November.115 Consequently he did not first sit in the 1707-8 session, the first of the new Parliament of Great Britain, until 7 Jan. 1708, although he did manage to attend just less than half of the meetings of this session in total. On 7 Feb. he joined Godolphin and other members of the ministry in subscribing to the protest against the Whigs’ ‘bill to make the Union more perfect’, which to the despair of the ministry, legislated for the immediate abolition of the Scottish privy council, the body through which the court at Westminster could make its will known in Scotland. He supported the government of the ‘duumvirs’ the following day when at a meeting of the cabinet council he, in his usual moderate and placatory way, assisted Somerset in foiling the plan of the secretary of state Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford, to have Godolphin dismissed as lord treasurer; instead it was Harley who was forced to resign.116 On 13 Feb., Pembroke was made a commissioner to pass a number of bills in Parliament in the queen’s absence.
Last office, 1708-14
During the winter of 1707-8 the House engaged in a thorough and, under the leadership of the Whigs, highly critical investigation of the administration of the Admiralty under the governance of George of Denmark and his council led by George Churchill‡. There were calls for the prince’s resignation and the Junto suggested that Pembroke, at that time still inoffensive to them, should return to his former post of lord high admiral in his place, in which case Somers would be able to take over as lord president and Wharton as lord lieutenant of Ireland.117 Pembroke’s resumption of the admiralcy to make way for Somers in the presidency had been mooted as early as December 1704.118 Arthur Maynwaring‡, the secretary and confidant of the Whig duchess of Marlborough, was certainly making such plans in April 1708: ‘I should think it might be possible, considering the vast advantages that the President enjoys under the government to make himself desire to resign his place in the council, since it is so much for her majesty’s service’.119 By late April the queen was besieged. Not only Whigs such as John Holles, duke of Newcastle, and William Cavendish, 2nd duke of Devonshire, were pressing the queen to move Pembroke to the Admiralty and appoint Somers lord president, but they were supported by her chief minister Godolphin who saw an alliance with that party as a necessity for the survival of his ministry in the wake of Whig victories in the election to the new Parliament.120 Pembroke could see the signs clearly himself, for in Wilton the two sitting members, both of them his candidates, were defeated at the poll by Whig candidates from outside the borough, who had co-operated with the borough’s corporation to ensure their victory.121
The queen refused to acquiesce to Junto demands and refused to remove either her husband or Pembroke from their posts. This stalemate continued for the next few months, during which time Pembroke, whose first wife had died in November 1706, entered into a strange courtship with Lady Barbara Slingsby. Having already been twice widowed, most recently by the death of John Arundell, 2nd Baron Arundell of Trerice, and with many of her own children to provide for, the dowager baroness was wary of attaching herself to another widower with nine children of his own and known for his eccentricities. She admitted she considered marriage with Pembroke only out of ‘mercenary’ concern for the interest of her children. The summer months of 1708 were spent in protracted marriage negotiations, which the dowager baroness recounted in detail to her friend the duchess of Marlborough, over her insistence on keeping her own fortune from her previous marriages while having a jointure of £4,000 settled on her. After Pembroke had eventually conceded to these demands, the couple were married on 21 Sept. 1708, prompting a number of caustic comments among observers. 122
On 22 Oct. 1708 Godolphin was able to alert Marlborough that the queen had been worn down sufficiently and that she was willing to persuade Pembroke to move aside so that Somers and Wharton could be placed in his two offices.123 Then an avenue was unexpectedly opened to allow the queen to keep Pembroke in office when George of Denmark died less than a week later. Pembroke was offered the admiralcy, but he was reluctant to take up the post, well aware that in reality the Junto merely saw him as a stop-gap appointment before they could place their own candidate, Orford, there. Pembroke laid down conditions for his acceptance: a pension of £2,000 p.a. and the reversion of a tellership of the exchequer for his son. Arthur Maynwaring had initially recommended that his fellow Whigs be patient in accepting Pembroke at the Admiralty while the queen was ‘softened up’ for the appointment of the hated Orford.124 By November 1708, however, as Pembroke’s negotiations dragged on, Maynwaring could not help but express the growing Whig anger at the Tory Pembroke’s high demands and his seemingly endless and tenacious hold on office:
I am sure there is no longer occasion for the service of the earl of Pembroke. When it is necessary to look out for the fittest man for every place, ’tis high time to drop one who is fit for none at all... Having had so much more than his share of favour and advantage, he ought to have been contented to let others have their turns: especially since that party prevails in this Parliament which he was so far from being a friend so that he opposed it with all the little interest he has anywhere. ... But if the queen will have other measures kept with this strange man, yet I can’t help thinking that what he demands is monstrous and not fit to be granted. Must he have a pension of £2,000 per annum given him to accept a place of eight? ... But the teller’s place for his son is the best jest of all. It looks as if he meant to entail incapacity upon all the offices in the kingdom, and that no useful man should have an employment as long as any Herbert was alive. Those are almost the only places that any very considerable man in the House of Commons can be gratified with. ... Yet after all, if even this reversion and the pension will satisfy him, without the office, for so great a good I think it should be complied with, but if he has the office, I am sure the least consideration more cannot be added to it without enraging all the world.125
Pembroke’s conditions were met, but the queen and the ministry refused to acquiesce to the Whig demands for a public statement that this was only a temporary appointment, which Whigs such as Maynwaring saw as a sign of the weakness of the declining Godolphin ministry:
Your Grace [the duchess of Marlborough] judges right that there is nothing intended in the business of Lord Pembroke. For when Lord Wharton spoke about it, the answer [by Godolphin] was very snappish, these words, ‘Lord! what would people have me do? It is impossible he [Pembroke], should hold it three months, but if such a declaration be made nobody will obey three days’. Lord Wharton asked me if he should mention it more. I told him I thought not, for that it was plain it must be the work of time, and I saw no use of angering people to no purpose. And having had some conversation with Mr Peyton [Craven Peyton‡], (who is of the mind of our Governors in the House of Commons) he thanked God that Lord Pembroke had accepted and that the [Whig], Lords had not carried their Admiral [Orford], too; for then Lord Treasurer could not have stood three months, so that it is plain this matter is laid deep, and that Lord Treasurer’s flatterers advise him to it as a necessary means of his own preservation. ... I have heard since, that Lord Somers is not dissatisfied about Lord Pembroke, but that rather, from the extreme niceness of his temper, he is pleased with the other’s being Admiral some time, that it may not be thought he turned him out.126
Pembroke was made lord high admiral on 29 Nov. 1708, a post which, according to Burnet, ‘he entered on with great uneasiness’.127
Pembroke only attended one-fifth of the meetings of the 1708-9 session of the new Parliament beginning on 16 Nov. 1708, and on 21 Jan. 1709 he supported Godolphin and the ministry against a Whig attack by voting in favour of the motion that Godolphin’s ally James Douglas, 2nd duke of Queensberry [S], who sat in the House as duke of Dover, could vote in the election of the representative Scots peers. In this session Pembroke was also consistently named a commissioner for passing legislation (on 23 Dec. 1708, 26 Jan., 24 Feb., 23 Mar. and 21 Apr. 1709) and he was a commissioner for prorogation in the period between sessions. But he was primarily preoccupied for most of 1709 with his attempts to reform the Admiralty and with fending off Whig calls for him to be replaced by Orford. One historian has claimed that ‘throughout the year 1709 the question of the Admiralty was the most critical political problem with which Godolphin and Marlborough had to contend’.128 With Somers threatening to resign over the issue and further obstruction of the Whigs in Parliament, the beleaguered lord treasurer wrote to Pembroke in late September urging him to resign.129 By this point Pembroke was only too happy to oblige and to leave such an onerous and contested appointment, and Godolphin, relieved, told Maynwaring that Pembroke himself had thankfully provided him with the best argument he could use with the queen for Orford’s appointment.130 Pembroke was rewarded with a pension of £3,000 for his long years of service, and formally stepped down from the Admiralty on 8 Nov. 1709, one week before the next session of Parliament began.131
Pembroke, now out of office for the first time in his career since 1689, came to barely over a third of the meetings of the controversial session of 1709-10. On 20 Mar. 1710 he voted that Henry Sacheverell was not guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours, a vote which greatly surprised Marlborough on the continent.132 As the Sacheverell crisis had led to the downfall of the uneasy Junto-Godolphin alliance which had forced Pembroke out of office, Robert Harley fully expected the moderate Tory Pembroke to support his new ministry. Indeed, Pembroke was once again foremost in Harley’s thoughts as he tried to form that ministry, and during the summer of 1710 it was rumoured that Pembroke was in line to be made either secretary of state or lord steward.133 Later, at the time of Rochester’s death in May 1711, there was again speculation, indeed encouragement, that the earl of Oxford (as Harley became at about this time), would place Pembroke in the vacated office of lord president of the council in which he had already served for so many years.134 If there were these approaches to Pembroke, he rebuffed them all and indeed attended few of the sittings of Parliament in 1710-13 – only 39 per cent of meetings in the 1710-11 and 26 per cent in that of 1711-12. Pembroke had been an advocate for the Hanoverian succession since at least 1705, and soon proved to be an opponent of the Oxford ministry and its plans for a separate peace with France. In January 1711 he defended the Whig generals who were under attack for the disastrous campaign in Spain.135 He joined that other renegade Tory Nottingham on 7 Dec. 1711 in supporting the motion that there should be ‘No Peace without Spain’.136 Two weeks later he also opposed the ministry by voting that James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton [S], did not have the right to sit in the House under his British title as duke of Brandon, although he had tried to moderate the House’s decision by suggesting that Hamilton’s patent be limited for his life only.137 Again on 28 May 1712 he acted against the ministry when he voted in favour of the address complaining of the ‘Restraining Orders’ that commanded the British army to desist from engaging in offensive actions against the French.138 Similarly, in the following session of spring 1713, Oxford predicted that Pembroke (who only attended 15 sittings of that session) would oppose the ministry by voting against the French commercial treaty, while in the following Parliament beginning in February 1714 (just over half of whose sittings Pembroke attended), Nottingham forecast that Pembroke would be opposed to the schism bill. After attending three of the meetings of Parliament following Anne’s death in August 1714, he acted as one of the lords justices appointed by the elector of Hanover to govern the kingdom while he made his way to England to assume rule as George I.
The Hanoverian Succession, 1715-33
Despite this prominent role, and his previous support for the Hanoverian succession, Pembroke did not take in active part in the government or Parliament in the new regime and seldom attended the House in the reigns of the first two Georges. A full discussion of his activities in Parliament and in public life during these sparse years of attendance will appear in the next volumes in this series.
Pembroke died in his London townhouse at 12 St James’s Square on 22 Jan. 1733. He left behind him a wealthy estate, owing to his careful management of his Wiltshire lands and the proceeds of his numerous offices, and one of the most famous collections of antiquities, consisting of statues, busts and reliefs in England at his house at Wilton.139 He was survived by a large brood of children – five sons and five daughters, all but one by his first wife Lady Margaret Sawyer (despite marrying a much younger wife in June 1725, his third marriage). His heir Henry Herbert, 9th earl of Pembroke, was a leading courtier of George II and is famous as the ‘architect earl’ who followed in his father’s footsteps as an artistic patron and collector and helped to promote the Palladian style of architecture in England.
C.G.D.L.- 1 Collins, Peerage (1812), iii. 141-3.
- 2 TNA, PROB 11/657.
- 3 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 51; iii. 97, 299.
- 4 CSP Dom. 1690-1, pp. 240-1, 473-4.
- 5 Ibid. 1694-5, pp. 61, 204; 1695, pp. 111-12; 1697, p. 510-11.
- 6 Ibid. 1699-1700, p. 93.
- 7 WSHC, 2057/F2/8, 16.
- 8 CSP Dom. 1691-2, p. 387.
- 9 Davies, Charterhouse in London, App. D.
- 10 Dasent, Hist. of St James’s Sq. App. A.
- 11 Macky Mems. 21; Burnet, iv. 361-2.
- 12 Corresp. of Locke ed. E.S. de Beer i. 668-70, 690-1; ii. 657-8, 661-6, 728-9; iii. 306, 672.
- 13 Hunter, Royal Society, 30, 212; Nicolson London Diaries, 21-22.
- 14 J. Kennedy, Description of the Antiquities and Curiosities in Wilton House (1769).
- 15 Burnet, iv. 361-2; Macky Mems. 21-22.
- 16 Burnet, iv. 362, note d.
- 17 Pols. in Age of Anne, 253-4.
- 18 Burnet, iv. 361-2.
- 19 Ibid. 362, note d.
- 20 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 382.
- 21 HMC Lords, i. 287-8.
- 22 CSP Dom. 1685, pp. 212-13; HMC Portland, ii. 158.
- 23 J. Dalrymple, Mems. of Great Britain and Ireland (1790), ii. 28-29; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 357; Dalton, Army Lists, ii. 16, 230.
- 24 Bodl. Carte 81, f. 773.
- 25 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 384; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, iii. 223, 243.
- 26 Add. 34510, ff. 12, 13; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, iii. 355.
- 27 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, iv. 181.
- 28 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 467; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, iv. 322.
- 29 Kingdom without a King, 71-72, 107; Clarendon Corresp. ii. 224.
- 30 Add. 75366, ‘Notes of the Debate in the Assembly of the Lords’, 24 Dec. 1688; Kingdom without a King, 160; Clarendon Corresp. ii. 234-5.
- 31 Clarendon Corresp. ii. 238.
- 32 BIHR, xlvii. 51; Burnet, iii. 385-6 note b.
- 33 Debate at Large between the Lords and Commons ... relating to the Word Abdicated and the Vacancy of the Throne (2nd edn. 1710), 34-35, 45-46, 51-52.
- 34 D.L. Jones, Parliamentary History of the Glorious Revolution, 87.
- 35 Ailesbury Mems. 232-3.
- 36 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, v. 355.
- 37 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/4, pp. 28, 30; HMC Lords, ii. 31-34.
- 38 Account of the Ceremonial at the Coronation of ... King William and Queen Mary (1689), 2.
- 39 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 523, 555, 565; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, vi. 100.
- 40 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 1, 153; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, v. 354.
- 41 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 620; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, v. 348, 354, 369.
- 42 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, v. 399, 400.
- 43 Ibid. 402; Add 17677KK, ff. 407-12.
- 44 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 648, 696-7.
- 45 Eg. 3347, ff. 4-5; Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 56.
- 46 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 51; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, v. 456, 465.
- 47 Mems. of Mary Queen of England, 30.
- 48 POAS, v. 197-8.
- 49 Dalrymple, iii. 182 (pt. III, bk. vii).
- 50 Eg. 2621, f. 91.
- 51 Dalrymple, iii. 85-86 (pt. II, bk. v, app.).
- 52 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 68, 74; CSP Dom. 1690-1, pp. 46, 51, 53, 62; HMC Finch, ii. 353.
- 53 J. Ehrman, Navy in the War of William III, 354; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 78; Add. 29593, ff. 3-8.
- 54 Dalrymple, iii. 90-91, 97, 101-2, 103-12, 114-16, 122-4, 130-1 (pt. II, bk. v, app.); CSP Dom. 1690-1, p. 53.
- 55 Dalrymple, iii. 115, 116, 119 (bk. II, pt. v, app.); CSP Dom . 1690-1, p. 95; HMC Finch, ii. 385, 405; Ehrman, 361-2.
- 56 HMC Lords, iii. 93, 96.
- 57 Mems. Mary Queen of England, 30.
- 58 HMC Lords, iii. 249.
- 59 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 157.
- 60 HMC Le Fleming, 310.
- 61 HMC Lords, iv. 51.
- 62 Browning, Danby, ii. 195-6.
- 63 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 372.
- 64 Pols. in Age of Anne, 253-4.
- 65 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 547..
- 66 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 528; CSP Dom. 1691-2, pp. 410-12.
- 67 BIHR, liii. 70-71, 78; Ranke, vi. 198-200.
- 68 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 451; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, iv. 299.
- 69 HMC Lords, iv. 307-12.
- 70 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 60; Add. 61415, f. 43.
- 71 CSP Dom. 1693, p. 134; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 97.
- 72 HEHL, HM 30659 (31), newsletter, 24 Aug. 1693.
- 73 HMC Lords, n.s. i. 331.
- 74 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 299; Shrewsbury Corresp. 38-9; Horwitz. 132-3.
- 75 CSP Dom. 1694-5, p. 122.
- 76 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 334.
- 77 Add. 17677 PP, ff. 101-3.
- 78 Add. 46527, f. 48; Add. 17677 PP, ff. 136-40.
- 79 CSP Dom. 1695, p. 322.
- 80 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 467; CSP Dom. 1695, p. 329.
- 81 CP, iv. 342-3 note c.
- 82 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 696-7; iv. 7-8.
- 83 HMC Hastings, iv. 310-12.
- 84 Ibid. 318-19.
- 85 Browning, iii. 188.
- 86 HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 152.
- 87 WSHC, ms 2667/25/7; Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters. i. 133-4, 139-40; Burnet, iv. 352 note b, 403-4, note g.
- 88 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 167.
- 89 CSP Dom. 1697, p. 242; 1698, p. 146; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 153, 207, 208, 213, 215, 219, 282.
- 90 HMC Lords, n.s. iii. 145; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 358, 362.
- 91 Dalrymple, iii. 182 (pt. III, bk. vii).
- 92 Bodl. Carte 237, f. 1a.
- 93 Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, iii. 9-10; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/6, p. 145.
- 94 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 645, 648, 653, 657.
- 95 Japikse, Correspondentie van Hans Willem Bentinck, I. ii. 689-90 (no. 612).
- 96 HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 221; Burnet, iv. 481-2.
- 97 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 332.
- 98 Burnet, iv. 362 note d, 544.
- 99 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 129, 130; Burnet, v. 9-10.
- 100 Add. 70073-4, newsletters of 9, 23 Apr. 1702; Brit. Pols. 73n.
- 101 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 171, 173.
- 102 Ibid. 172; Add. 70073-4, newsletters, 5, 7, 14 May 1702.
- 103 Add. 70073-4, newsletters, 19, 21 May 1702; Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 175.
- 104 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 697-8; Brit. Pols. 100-1.
- 105 Nicolson, London Diaries, 165.
- 106 Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. 482, 488, 490-1, 495-7; Add. 61124, ff. 21, 25, 37, 39, 42.
- 107 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 3790/1/1, p. 60.
- 108 Nicolson, London Diaries, 360-61; HMC Lords, n.s. vi. 380-1.
- 109 CSP Dom. 1705-6, p. 110.
- 110 NAS, GD18/3132, p. 77.
- 111 Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 159, 187; Add. 40776, f. 59.
- 112 Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 177, 187, 242; Add. 61633, f. 3.
- 113 Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. 781.
- 114 Add. 61365, ff. 151-2.
- 115 Add. 61633, ff. 7, 24-27; Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 242.
- 116 G. Holmes, Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679-1742, p. 80.
- 117 Vernon-Shrewsbury Corresp. iii. 358.
- 118 Nicolson, London Diaries, 248.
- 119 Add. 61459, ff. 20-26.
- 120 Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. 958-9.
- 121 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 698.
- 122 Add. 61456, ff. 132-43; Add. 61458, ff. 85-86; Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. 1111.
- 123 Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. 1137.
- 124 HLQ, xxxv. 327.
- 125 HLQ, xxxv. 328; Add. 61459, ff. 144-6.
- 126 HLQ, xxxv. 328-9; Add. 61459, ff. 147-52.
- 127 Vernon-Shrewsbury Corresp. iii. 369-70; Burnet, v. 392-3.
- 128 HLQ, xxxv. 329-32.
- 129 Ibid. 332-3.
- 130 Add. 61460, ff. 95-98.
- 131 Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 497, 498.
- 132 Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. iii. 1445-6.
- 133 Levens Hall, Bagot mss, W. Bromley to J. Grahme, 28 June 1710; NLS, Yester pprs. ms 7021, ff. 235-6.
- 134 HMC Portland, iv. 690-93.
- 135 Clavering Corresp. ed. H.T. Dickinson (Surtees Soc. clxxviii), 108.
- 136 Pols. in Age of Anne, 78n, 254n, 431.
- 137 Wentworth Pprs. 229.
- 138 PH, xxvi. 177-81.
- 139 Kennedy, Description of the Antiquities and Curiosities in Wilton House (1769).