suc. mother 11 Aug. 1706 (a minor) as 9th Bar. CLIFTON of LEIGHTON BROMSWOLD; styled 1709-13 Visct. Cornbury
First sat 13 Jan. 1713; last sat 3 Feb. 1713
bap. 6 Oct. 1691, o.s. of Edward Hyde, 3rd earl of Clarendon, and Katherine O’Brien, suo jure Baroness Clifton. educ. Christ Church, Oxf. 1707; travelled abroad (Low Countries) 1712.1 unm. d. 12 Feb. 1713; will 25 May 1710, pr. 17 June 1713-8 Feb. 1723.2
Associated with: Cornbury Park, Oxon.
Clifton succeeded to the barony underage, presumably while living in New York where his father was governor. He had returned to England by 1707, when he was entered at Christ Church and where he seems to have suffered from the family’s habitual impecuniousness.3 From 1709 with his father’s inheritance of the earldom of Clarendon, he was usually styled Viscount Cornbury. A record, in which he is listed as ‘Clifeton’, including him among the peers who found Dr. Sacheverell not guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours in March 1710, must be erroneous (and is certainly at odds with other printed records of the Sacheverell vote), though it perhaps reflects his likely sympathies.4
Cornbury travelled abroad in 1712, where he was watched over by his father’s friend, Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. He returned in time to take his seat in the House on 13 Jan. 1713 as Baron Clifton but sat just once more before succumbing to a fever brought on by ‘a surfeit of drinking’ in which he ‘drank as many quarts of uskquebath [whisky] as is usual to be drank of wine’.5
Unsurprisingly, Cornbury’s loss affected his family severely. His father described his premature demise as ‘a load of grief too heavy for man to bear’.6 The queen was said to have taken a close interest in the young man and had intended to offer him the command of a regiment. He died ‘much lamented’ and was buried in Westminster Abbey at the queen’s expense.7 At his death the barony of Clifton passed to his sister, Lady Theodosia Hyde, who was also the principal beneficiary of his will. Through her the barony was eventually inherited by the Bligh earls of Darnley [I].
R.D.E.E.