styled 1602-32 Ld. Percy; accel. 28 Mar. 1626 Bar. PERCY; suc. fa. 5 Nov. 1632 as 4th earl of NORTHUMBERLAND
First sat 28 Mar. 1626; first sat after 1660, 25 Apr. 1660; last sat 29 Nov. 1667
MP Sussex 1624; Chichester, 1625, 6 Feb.-28 Mar. 1626
b. 29 Sept. 1602, 3rd but 1st surv. s. of Henry Percy†, 3rd earl of Northumberland and Dorothy (d. Aug. 1619), da. of Walter Devereux†, earl of Essex and wid. of Sir Thomas Perrott‡ of Haroldston, Pemb.; bro. of Henry Percy‡. educ. privately (tutor, William Nicholson) 1608-15; St John’s, Camb. (tutor, Edward Dowse) 1615, MA 1616; M. Temple 1615; Christ Church, Oxf. 1617, travelled abroad (Low Countries, Italy, France), 1618-24, Padua 1621. m. (1) 1629 (with £11,000),1 Anne (d. 6 Dec. 1637), da. of William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, 5da. (4 d.v.p.); (2) 1 Oct. 1642 Elizabeth (d. 11 Mar. 1705), da. of Theophilus Howard†, 2nd earl of Suffolk, 1s. 1da. d.v.p.; KB 1616; KG 1635. d. 13 Oct. 1668; will 10 Apr. 1667-30 Mar. 1668, pr. 30 Nov. 1668.2
Master of horse, queen Henrietta Maria 1626-8; PC 5 Nov. 1636-at least 1641, 31 May 1660-d; mbr., Council of War 1637, pres. by 1640; ld. adm., 1638-42; commr, Admlty 1642-3, 1645-8, assembly of divines 1643, preservation of records 1643, cts. martial 1644, treaty of Uxbridge 1645, provision for New Model Army 1645, excise 1645, Westminster collegiate church and sch. 1645, abuses in heraldry 1645, plantations 1646, exclusion from sacrament 1646, sale of bishops’ lands 1646, appeals at Oxford Univ. 1647, indemnity 1647, managing assessment 1647, navy and customs 1647, scandalous offences 1648, obstructions to sale of bishops' lands 1648, treaty of Newport 1648, earl marshalship 1662; mbr., cttee. of Both Kingdoms, 1644-8; ld high constable, coronation of Charles II, 18-23 Apr. 1661.
Ld. lt. Cumb., Northumb. and Westmld. (jt.) 1626-39; Northumb. (sole) 1639-at least 1642, (jt.) 1660-d., Suss. (jt.) 1635- Mar. 1642, (sole) Mar. 1642-5, 1660-d., Anglesey, Pemb. and Surr.. 1642-5; mbr., council of the north 1633-6; kpr. Nonsuch Palace, Surr. 1639; custos rot. Suss. by 1644-50, 1660-d., Northumb. by 1650-60; commr. defence, Wilts. 1644, Surr. 1645, Northern Assoc., Cumb., Northumb., Yorks. 1645, militia, Cumb and Northumb. 1648, 1660, Suss. 1660.
Adm. of the Fleet 1636-7; gen. forces south of Trent 1639-40; capt.-gen. 1640-1; capt. Tynemouth, Northumb. 1660-d.
Gov., Charterhouse 1660-d.3
Associated with: Petworth House, Suss.; Syon House, Mdx.; Northumberland House, Westminster.
Likenesses: oil on canvas by Anthony van Dyck, c.1636-8, NPG 287.
Parliamentary leader
The Percy family enjoyed a long and celebrated history as defenders of the marches of England against the Scots. They had acquired estates in Yorkshire following the Conquest, and extended their influence by purchasing Alnwick Castle in Northumberland in 1309. The family at various times held other property in several parts of England, in particular the Petworth estate in Sussex from the twelfth century, and Syon in Middlesex from the late sixteenth, where they had major residences. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries several members of the family had made disastrous political decisions to which their adherence to Catholicism contributed. On the sixth earl’s death in 1537 his heir was his nephew Thomas Percy†, who was unable to inherit as he was the son of an attainted brother who had been executed for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. The earldom was restored to Thomas in 1557 as a new creation. After the family’s disastrous involvement in the northern revolt of 1569, the Percys were forced to reside in their southern estates and to stay away from the north, although they continued to maintain territorial influence there.
Although Algernon was the tenth Percy to hold the title of earl of Northumberland—and thus is most often referred to as the tenth earl—he was only the fourth earl of the 1557 creation and is so referred to here. Algernon’s father Henry Percy, 3rd earl of Northumberland, was suspected of involvement in the Gunpowder Plot because of his connection to his kinsman, Thomas Percy, and was kept in the Tower from 1605 to 1621, from where he corresponded on scientific topics and still managed to keep a tight rein and a disapproving eye on the education of his son and heir, for whom he did not hold high hopes. One important result of this education was that Algernon, unlike many of his predecessors, was a committed Protestant.
The young Algernon, styled Lord Percy, was quickly favoured by the new king, Charles I, who was barely two years his senior. From 1625 Lord Percy garnered a number of important local positions in the counties where his family had substantial landholdings—Sussex, Middlesex, Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire. He was summoned to the House of Lords by a writ of acceleration on 28 Mar. 1626 in his father’s barony as Baron Percy, and in November was made joint lord lieutenant of Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland. He succeeded to the earldom itself in 1632 and quickly rose further in Charles I’s favour. He held a series of important military offices, culminating in being appointed in 1638-9 lord high admiral and commander-in-chief of the English forces against the Scots for the second Bishops’ War of 1640.
Northumberland alienated himself from the king by expressing very strong misgivings about the likely success of the campaign and by vigorously opposing the dissolution of the Short Parliament of April 1640 which had been summoned to provide funding for the war. By the time Parliament met in November 1640 Northumberland was an opponent of royal policy and he became the highest ranking member of Charles I’s government and the most eminent peer to side with Parliament in 1640-42.4 In early 1643 he was a leader of the group strongly advocating a negotiated settlement between Parliament and the king, but after the rebuff of these peace initiatives, he, according to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, ‘was willing to see the king’s power and authority so much restrained that he might not be able to do him any harm’.5 In late 1644 Northumberland resumed his attendance in the House and, closely associated with William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele and Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, threw himself wholeheartedly into the prosecution of the Civil War and the formation of the New Model Army. On 19 Mar. 1645 he was entrusted by Parliament with the guardianship of the king’s younger children, Princess Elizabeth, Henry Stuart, duke of Gloucester and, from July 1646, James Stuart, duke of York. His respectful treatment of these royal wards helped in later years to mitigate royal animosity towards him. Northumberland opposed the hardening of the Army’s position against Charles I after the second civil war, and was one of the 15 parliamentary commissioners who dealt with the king over the Newport treaty in the autumn of 1648, staying with Charles longer than almost any other in an attempt to make a peace. He was one of the few peers to appear in the House to vote against the ordinance for the king’s trial, and retired from public life during the 1650s. 6 During that decade he attended to estate and family matters, overseeing the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to Arthur Capell, 2nd Baron Capell of Hadham (later earl of Essex), who resided with him for several years at Petworth.
Northumberland returned to politics with the crisis of early 1660. In early March 1660 he corresponded with his old Parliamentarian colleague Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, suggesting that, despite the recent readmission of the secluded members to the Commons, it was still premature to advocate the restoration of the House of Lords, ‘especially seeing no part of the nation but ourselves have as yet expressed any desire that we should return to the exercise of our duties in Parliament and all in power or authority have either openly or impliedly declared against it’.7 Yet in the weeks before the Convention he and Manchester formed around them a group of former presbyterians, which John Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt, reported included 19 peers, including Wharton, as well as a number of commoners, such as Denzil Holles, later Baron Holles. They sought to limit membership in the restored House of Lords to those who had sat in the House in 1648 and to impose on Charles II the conditions they had negotiated with his father at Newport. It may well have been for this group that Wharton drew up his list assessing the allegiances and actions of members of the peerage in the previous 20 years, and Northumberland heads Wharton’s list of those ‘lords who sat’ in the House after 1642 (and probably meaning those who were there in 1648), thus signifying his prominent place in their projected Convention House of Lords. This group met in Northumberland’s London residence, Suffolk House (thereafter known as Northumberland House), which he had acquired as part of the settlement of his marriage in October 1642 to Elizabeth Howard, daughter of Theophilus Howard, 2nd earl of Suffolk, and for this reason Mordaunt referred to this group as ‘the cabal of Suffolk House’.8 This second marriage had also provided Northumberland with a male heir, Josceline Percy, styled Lord Percy, later 5th earl of Northumberland, and further family connections. Elizabeth Howard’s sister Margaret was married to Roger Boyle‡, Baron Broghill [I] (later earl of Orrery [I]): Northumberland used his local interest to promote his brother-in-law’s election for the Convention—first unsuccessfully for the borough of Cockermouth in Cumberland, and then successfully for Arundel, near Petworth in Sussex.9
The Restoration
Northumberland made his own views on the restoration of the king clear in a letter of 13 Apr. 1660 to his good friend and brother-in-law Robert Sydney, 2nd earl of Leicester, whose wife Dorothy Percy, Northumberland’s sister, had died just the previous year. In London he found ‘Some there are that would have [the king] restored to all, without any condition, … but the soberer people will I believe expect terms of more security for themselves and advantage for the nation’. Northumberland was one of the small group of nine peers to attend the House on its very first meeting in the morning of 25 Apr., and was made part of the delegation to visit George Monck, later duke of Albemarle, to thank him for his services in restoring the House of Lords. He was also one of the four peers, along with Saye and Sele and Wharton, assigned to address summonses to other peers deemed suitable to sit in the House. Northumberland wrote personally to Leicester begging him to come up to Westminster, for ‘our House stands in great need of some wise men to guide it’.10 On 27 Apr. he was appointed to committees to draw up an ordinance to constitute a bicameral Committee of Safety and to draw up heads for the conference scheduled for 1 May ‘to consider ways and means to make up the breaches and distractions of the kingdom’. At this point he may have still envisaged a conditional restoration of the king with terms dictated by the Convention, and on 28 Apr. his agent in London could confidently write, ‘I have cause to believe that we shall soon have the court our neighbours and that upon honourable terms’.11
Northumberland, though, would have been made anxious by the admission to the House of the ‘young lords’ on 27 Apr. and later of those lords created by Charles I at Oxford. Reputedly he encouraged the admission of his prospective kinsman Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton, with whom he was negotiating a match for Lord Percy, in order to moderate the zeal of the ardent royalists now in the House.12 Any plans for a conditional restoration rapidly evaporated after the Declaration of Breda was read to the House on 1 May, and Northumberland was even placed on the large committee of 25 peers assigned to draft the House’s response. That afternoon he fulfilled his role as a manager of the conference on settling the ‘distractions’ of the kingdom, at which the principal manager Manchester proclaimed on behalf of the Lords that ‘the Government is, and ought to be, by king, Lords and Commons’. From that point Northumberland was involved in committees to smooth the way for the restoration of Charles II. The following day, 2 May, he was placed on the committee of eight peers to meet with a similar committee from the Commons to prepare an answer to the Declaration and to expedite the points agreed upon in the conference of the previous afternoon. He was also placed on the committees to consider the ordinance to make Monck captain-general and to consider ways of settling the militia in the kingdom. On 7 May he was appointed one of only four peers who were to meet with a similarly-sized committee from the Commons to arrange the ‘manner, time and form’ of the proclamation declaring Charles II king. From 9 May he was also a member of the committees entrusted with preparing for the reception of the king and for enquiring into the whereabouts of the late king’s goods confiscated during the previous 20 years.13 In the midst of this busy activity, Northumberland absented himself from the House for about a week in mid-May, and when he returned on 18 May he declared to the House that he ‘conceived’ that he might have some statues and pictures that were formerly Charles I’s in his possession, which he would willingly keep safe for the new king and present to him upon his arrival. On 21 May he was one of 13 peers placed on the committee to consider the ordinance for a monthly assessment to raise revenue for the returning king and two days later he was added to the committee considering a response to the Commons’ complaint that the House had issued a declaration concerning the late king’s judges without its concurrence. He became especially prominent in the days surrounding the king’s actual arrival in England. On 24 May he was one of only three peers—with Southampton and John Robartes, 2nd Baron Robartes (later earl of Radnor)—who quickly considered and amended a declaration of the Commons to quicken the payment of customs and excise for the returning king. On the same day he apparently chaired the small group of six peers assigned to write a letter congratulating the king on his safe arrival in England, for he reported the letter to the House the following day, after which it was quickly dispatched to Charles II travelling up from Kent. On 26 May he also chaired and reported from a drafting committee of ten peers for a proclamation to be issued in the king’s name against the rebels in Ireland. Later that day he was placed on the committee to ensure the safety of the king by placing proper servants around his person at Whitehall. On 28 May, with the king returned to his capital, he was placed on another committee to establish the king in his rule, that to consider the bill to confirm the earlier ordinance for a monthly assessment
Northumberland was initially granted respect and honours from the crown in recognition of his ancient title and substantial local influence, and perhaps in a bid to placate the ‘presbyterian party’, of which he was still seen as a leader. On 30 May he reported to the House from a delegation of six peers he had led to the king to discuss the procedural problem of the proper seating in the House of the royal dukes, York and Gloucester, who had been Northumberland’s wards for a time during the civil wars. The following day he and Leicester were summoned to the king where, to their apparent surprise, they were both sworn privy councillors.14 In August he was appointed lord lieutenant of Sussex; in September, jointly with his son and heir Lord Percy, he was appointed lord lieutenant of Northumberland. He was made lord high constable specifically for the few short days of the coronation in April 1661, and in May 1662 was one of the commissioners appointed to execute the office of earl marshal 15 Yet as early as the opening of the Convention, when Northumberland was being entrusted with important duties for the Restoration, Mordaunt could inform Sir Edward Hyde that both Northumberland and Manchester ‘have now no great interest’ and the French ambassador wrote to his masters on 27 May 1660 that Northumberland was ‘much demeaned’.16 He would only have sunk lower in the government’s estimation when, in arguing that no persons should be excepted from the bill of indemnity (on a committee for which he was placed on 25 Aug.), he suggested that the example of the late king’s death ‘might be more useful to posterity and profitable to future kings, by deterring them from the like exorbitances’.17 Consequently from early June, when the House became flooded with the king’s followers returning from exile, Northumberland’s business in the House, as represented by committee appointments, dropped substantially. From 1 June to the summer adjournment he was named to only ten further committees. He appears to have chaired the committee on the bill for draining the Great Level of the fens, for he reported the bill to the House on 31 Aug., one day after the committee had been established. He was also one of the eight peers appointed on 13 Aug. to go to the City of London to discuss a loan of £100,000, but the following day he excused himself from the task. On 10 Aug. the House also considered his claim of a breach of privilege, when it heard that Northumberland had been distrained of his estate of Kildare (Kielder) in Tynedale in Northumberland by the sheriff there, of whose ‘feigned’ legal actions against him Northumberland had been given no notice. The House duly ordered the restoration of the estates to the earl and the attachment of the sheriff. Perhaps because of this pending privilege case, and a concern to maintain his interest at the Restoration, Northumberland’s attention was heavily focussed on the meetings of April-September 1660, and he was present at three-quarters of its sitting days.
By contrast Northumberland did not appear in the House when the Convention reconvened on 6 November. He had written to Leicester on 2 Nov. from Petworth about his plans shortly to be in the capital, ‘where I believe I shall not be very diligent in attending either the Parliament House, or the council table, finding myself grown too old for the gallantries of a young court’. After having been in London for a few days he described himself in another letter to Leicester as ‘so much a stranger at court’. Some of his frustration and disillusionment is shown in his comment that the only activity of those at Westminster was the pursuit of money and that ‘many sober men’ were wishing ‘that some years may pass before another Parliament is called’.18 He first sat in the House again on 3 Dec. 1660 and was an infrequent member of the House during that month, coming to only 14 sitting days (31 per cent) and being named to three committees. He remained concerned with the status and privilege of the peerage, and was still sufficiently regarded to be appointed on 22 Dec. 1660 one of the select group of three peers—along with Wharton and Robartes—who were to consider how the privilege and profits of the peerage were affected by the bill abolishing the Court of Wards.
The Cavalier Parliament, 1660-67
From this point he devoted most of his energies to governing Sussex, where he resided when not in London, and was an active lord lieutenant there, as revealed by his correspondence with secretary of state Sir Edward Nicholas‡.19 In that county he was able to arrange for the election in early 1661 of his brother-in-law Roger Boyle, now earl of Orrery [I], and another Irish peer, Francis Aungier‡, Baron Aungier [I], for the borough of Arundel. As lord of the manor of Cockermouth in Cumberland he equally ensured that his agent in the north, Hugh Potter‡, was elected to the Commons for that borough, and was replaced, after Potter’s death in 1662, by Northumberland’s trusted agent, Robert Scawen‡.20 Northumberland himself came to 55 per cent of the sitting days during the first meeting of the Cavalier Parliament in May-July 1661 and was named to only two committees. On his third day in the House, 11 May, he helped to introduce Edward Hyde as earl of Clarendon, Arthur Capell (his son-in-law) as earl of Essex and Arthur Annesley, now earl of Anglesey. A month later, on 11 June, the House ordered the suspension during time of Parliament of proceedings in the court of delegates in the cause brought by Frances, dowager duchess of Somerset, against Northumberland and Manchester, the two principal executors of the will of Robert Devereux†, 3rd earl of Essex. When the dowager duchess renewed her petition on 19 June, and even produced Northumberland’s signed waiver of his privilege dating from 1647, she was still rebuffed.21
After the summer adjournment Northumberland was marked as ‘sick’ in a call of the House on 25 Nov. 1661, but three days later he wrote to Leicester from Westminster to assure him that he would convey Leicester’s apologies for his absence to the House and thanked him for entrusting him with his proxy, ‘though I think there will not be much use made of proxies in the House, for all things are likely to pass there unanimously’. There is no record of this proxy in the incomplete register of 1661-2, but Northumberland does appear to have watched over Leicester’s interests at court and council throughout early 1662. The letter also informed Leicester of the most recent episcopalian pretensions: ‘The bishops are not contented to be restored unto all they formerly enjoyed, but now they pretend to be peers likewise, and that point is at present under consideration before the committee for privileges’.22 Northumberland sat in the House again on 3 Dec., after which he sat in 42 per cent of the meetings until the prorogation of 19 May 1662. On 14 Dec. 1661 he was named one of the nine reporters for a conference on the House’s amendments to the bill confirming certain private acts. In total he was named to seven select committees during the winter of 1661-2, including on 24 Jan. 1662 the drafting committee for the proposed bill to repeal all the acts and ordinances of the Long Parliament, a matter with implied reflections on his previous political career.
On 25 Jan. 1662, Northumberland became the centre of an incident in the House which further brought his old political attitudes into the open. At a debate on the second reading of the bill for the re-establishment of the council of the North at York, Northumberland complained that the measure was only being promoted by certain judges in the county out of their own selfish interests. George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, the lord lieutenant of the West Riding who was then the leading candidate for the presidency of the council, responded that he found all groups in Yorkshire in support of the measure, except those who had formerly been against the king. Northumberland sensed that this comment was an attack on himself and launched into a justification of his past conduct. The House ordered them both to let the matter drop, but shortly afterwards Buckingham rose to go over to Northumberland and continue the altercation. Both were ordered to withdraw from the chamber entirely and in their absence it was decided that Buckingham, but not Northumberland, was in need of reprehension for infringing the House’s original order. As the French ambassador commented:
In this debate everyone took sides, some for the duke and others for the earl, and as the latter is one of the leading presbyterians, he attracted all those of this party, and the other all the royalists, and in a moment it moved from being a private difference to a general matter which could have caused great disorder if the King of England had not that evening intervened and made the two of them embrace.23
Northumberland’s fight against the bill for the council for the North continued. On 10 Feb. 1662 he acted as a spokesmen for a delegation of 16 members of Parliament with northern interests who visited the lord chancellor, the earl of Clarendon, to express their opposition to the bill.24 Four days previously Northumberland had been one of the many peers who protested against the passage of the bill restoring to Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby, the lands he had conveyed, through proper legal instruments, during the Interregnum. In March Northumberland caused a stir in the House with his insistence during the debates on the revisions to the prayer book that the House should instead accept the pre-1642 prayer book and oath of allegiance without any alterations. Clarendon accounted for this move by explaining that Northumberland was ‘known to be of the presbyterian party’ and recounted that the earl was given a stinging rebuke by the House, which resolved ‘that there might not be such an affront put upon the Convocation and upon the king himself’ by this frivolous suggestion.25 Perhaps feeling rebuffed by these setbacks after 17 Apr. Northumberland stopped attending the House for the remainder of the session, though there appears to have been an expectation that he would return, for two days later Manchester also left the House for the session, but registered his proxy with Northumberland on 20 April. Northumberland kept himself cognizant of events in the House during his absence. In early May 1662 he kept his first wife’s father, William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, informed of the discussions on the impending adjournment or prorogation of Parliament and on the failure of the bill to declare illegitimate a male child born to the wife of John Manners, styled Lord Roos (later duke of Rutland), a measure which both Northumberland and Salisbury supported for kinship reasons.26 He also pursued another case of breach of his privilege: on 15 May the House ordered the discharge of a Mr Middleton, at the request of the absent Northumberland. Middleton had been attached by order of the House, presumably at Northumberland’s behest.
For the session of 1663 Northumberland held the proxy of Basil Fielding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, from 16 Mar. 1663, but he himself was hardly in the House to use it. He was present 11 times during that session, and was named to only two committees. He was present on 23 Mar. when he was named to a committee to prepare a petition to the king for the expulsion of Jesuits and Catholic priests from the kingdom, and between 26 and 30 Mar. he represented the House in three conferences in which the wording of this petition was thrashed out between the two Houses. On 9 Apr., however, the House formally ‘dispensed’ with his absence, three days after he had last sat in the House for that session.
Northumberland was present on 18 sitting days in spring 1664, exactly half of the meetings of that short session, and he was named to only one select committee. He was present on 28 Mar. 1664 when the House made an order restoring to Northumberland’s control rectory and glebe lands in Carmarthenshire which had been illegally seized by their ‘pretended vicar’ in breach of Northumberland’s privilege. Denbigh again registered his proxy with Northumberland on 6 May 1664, but Northumberland only held it for the eight days he was in the House before the session was prorogued on 17 May. In that brief period Northumberland was on 13 May added to the body of managers for a free conference on the disagreements over the House’s alterations to the conventicle bill. He attended only five sittings in late February 1665 during the session of 1664-5, missed the next two sessions of October 1665 and of 1666-7 entirely and did not return to the House until 29 July 1667, the first day of the abortive session of that summer.
Return to politics and death, 1667-8
The disasters and expense of the second Dutch War evidently spurred Northumberland to return to politics.27 Northumberland himself feared that the war was being used as a means for the king to arrogate more power to himself independent of Parliament and to build up a standing army. Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, later wrote that when others said that the king’s mistress and the money lavished on her would be the ruin of the nation, Northumberland replied that on the contrary she would be its saviour, for ‘while we had a House of Commons that gave all the money that was asked, it was better to have the money squandered away in luxury and prodigality, than to have it saved for worse purposes’.28 York placed Northumberland, with his associates Leicester and Holles, firmly in ‘the presbyterian and commonwealth gang, who never neglected any opportunity of being troublesome to the monarchy’, and who saw the impeachment of Clarendon as a means to foment a breach between the king and his brother. Just before the meeting of Parliament in the autumn of 1667, Northumberland told York, and later the king, that ‘the nation’ would not be satisfied merely with the impeachment of the lord chancellor, ‘for they also expected the disbanding of the Guards and the redress of several other grievances’.29 Northumberland came to the first day of the session on 10 Oct. but by the first week of November left the House and on 14 Nov. registered his proxy with his son-in-law Essex. He returned on 26 Nov. to engage in the proceedings against Clarendon, and it was at about this time that the French ambassador reported that Anglesey and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley (later earl of Shaftesbury) were trying to form a third party in Parliament (as against those supporting either Clarendon or Buckingham), ‘which will be called the party of the moderates, of which they would like to make the earl of Northumberland the leader, who is a great lord in this kingdom’.30 Earlier the ambassador, anxious of Northumberland’s influence and anti-French attitudes, had described him as ‘the most respected person in England for his property and his conduct’.31 Despite these political projects reportedly swirling around him at this time, Northumberland’s left the House again on 29 Nov., after having almost certainly voted in favour of the commitment of Clarendon.
For his part Clarendon made clear his own views on Northumberland’s character, based largely on his actions in the 1640s:
Though his notions were not large or deep, yet his temper, and reservedness in discourse, and his unrashness in speaking, got him the reputation of an able and wise man; which he made evident in the excellent government of his family, where no man was more absolutely obeyed; and no man had ever fewer idle words to answer for; and in debates of importance he always expressed himself very pertinently. If he had thought the King as much above him as he thought himself above other considerable men, he would have been a good subject; but the extreme undervaluing those, and not enough valuing the king, made him liable to the impressions which they who approached him by those addresses of reverence and esteem which usually insinuate themselves into such natures made in him.
He also wrote more starkly that Northumberland was ‘the proudest man alive’, and later saw Northumberland’s insistence on his own son’s precedence over the heir of James Butler, duke of Ormond [I], at the coronation (on the grounds that Ormond only was present at the coronation under his English title, earl of Brecknock) as a typical example of Northumberland’s ‘undervaluing and contemning his equals, without paying much regard to his superiors’ which caused an unfortunate ‘jealousy and ill understanding between the two families’.32
On 17 Dec. 1667 it was reported that Northumberland was lying dangerously ill at Northumberland House. He never returned to the Lords, although it was almost a year later, on 3 Oct. 1668, that he finally succumbed to his illness at Petworth. The executors and beneficiaries in his will reveal his connections to both past Parliamentarians and the future country opposition. Apart from his son and heir Josceline, his executors—the earl of Manchester and ‘Wise’ William Pierrepont‡¾were colleagues in the Parliamentarian cause in the 1640s. Northumberland made complicated arrangements to entail a part of his estate, first to his heir, but in the case of the failure of his line, to his daughter the countess of Essex, and then to his nephews by his late sister the countess of Leicester—Philip Sydney, styled Viscount Lisle (later 3rd earl of Leicester), Algernon Sydney‡ and Henry Sydney, later earl of Romney. He appears to have had a particular esteem for Algernon and in his final codicil before his death bequeathed to him an annuity of £100.33 He died one of the five wealthiest peers in England, with a revenue from rents exceeding £15,000 p.a. In the mid-1640s he had petitioned Parliament for over £35,000 in lost rents due to the ravages of the war, particularly in the north. In 1662 he assessed himself as worth £4,360 p.a. from his lands in Yorkshire, Dorset and Cumberland—and these were hardly his principal estates.34 In 1670 it was calculated that his heir Josceline Percy was worth £41, 982 at the time of his death, a fortune the young man had only been able to enjoy for a brief period of time since becoming 5th earl of Northumberland.35
C.G.D.L.- 1 E.B. de Fonblanque, Annals of the House of Percy, ii. 370.
- 2 TNA, PROB 11/328.
- 3 Davies, Charterhouse in London, app. D.
- 4 J.S.A. Adamson, The Noble Revolt; Clarendon, Rebellion, ii. 537.
- 5 Clarendon, Rebellion, iii. 495.
- 6 J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics, 1645-9’ (Cambridge Ph.D., 1986), esp. Apps A-D.
- 7 Manchester, Court and Soc. i. 395; PA, MAN/52, 53.
- 8 CCSP, iv. 665-6; Bodl. Clarendon 71, ff. 305-6.
- 9 HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 701-2.
- 10 Letters and Mems. of State ed. A. Collins, ii. 685-6.
- 11 Alnwick, Alnwick mss xviii, ff. 87-89.
- 12 Bodl. Carte 30, f. 582.
- 13 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, p. 3.
- 14 HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 622.
- 15 CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 570; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 567.
- 16 CCSP, iv. 674-5; TNA, PRO 31/3/107, f. 66v.
- 17 Ludlow, Mems, ii. 267-8.
- 18 Letters and Mems. of State, ii. 700-1.
- 19 Eg. 2537, ff. 184, 270; Eg. 2538, ff. 168-9, 184.
- 20 HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 185, 418.
- 21 HMC 7th Rep. 145-6.
- 22 Letters and Mems. of State, ii. 722-4; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 517.
- 23 PRO 31/3/110, ff. 53-58; Chatsworth, Cork mss, misc. box 1, Burlington diary, 25 Jan. 1662.
- 24 Burlington diary, 15 Feb. 1662.
- 25 Clarendon, Life, ii. 128-9.
- 26 HMC Hatfield, xxii. 444-5.
- 27 Bodl. North mss c.4, ff. 164-5.
- 28 Burnet, i. 442.
- 29 Life of James II, i. 426-7.
- 30 PRO 31/3/117, pp. 39-41.
- 31 PRO 31/3/116, pp. 95-97.
- 32 Clarendon, Rebellion, ii. 538; iii. 495; Clarendon, Life, ii. 13.
- 33 PROB 11/328; Fonblanque, Annals of Percy, ii. 639-41 (App. 28).
- 34 Fonblanque, Annals of Percy, ii. 457, 636-7; HMC Var. ii. 119; HMC Le Fleming, 30.
- 35 HMC 3rd Rep. 109-10.