cr. 10 May 1695 earl of ROCHFORD.
First sat 20 Feb. 1696; last sat 21 Jan. 1706
bap. 7 Oct. 1649, 1st s. of Frederik van Nassau van Zuylestein, heer van Zuylestein en Leersum, and Mary, da. of Sir William Killegrew‡. educ. unknown. m. 28 Jan. 1681, Jane (d. 1703), da. of Sir Henry Wroth (Wrath), of Enfield, Mdx. 4s. 4da. (1 d.v.p.).1 suc. fa. 12 Oct. 1672 as heer van Zuylestein en Leersum. d. 2 July 1708; will 10 Oct. 1699–6 Feb. 1705, pr. 14 Nov. 1709.2
Master of robes 1690–5.
Capt. tp. of horse [Army of the States-General] 1672–9, coy. of Life Guards [Army of the States-General], 1674–9; col. regt. of horse [Army of the States-General], 1679–d.; major-gen.? (‘adjudant-generaal’) [Army of the States-General], 1682–1702;3 maj.-gen. of horse [English Army], 1691–5; lt. gen. 1695–d.;4 col. regt. of Dutch Guards [Army of the States-General], 1700–2.5
Envoy extraordinary, England [from States-General] 1687, 1688.
Associated with: Zuylestein, Utrecht; ‘The White House’, Easton, Suffolk; Waayestein, Utrecht.6
Likeness: oil on canvas, Godfrey Kneller, c.1695, National Trust for Scotland, Brodick Castle, Arran.
Willem van Nassau van Zuylestein was the son of Frederik, lord of Zuylestein and Leersum, an illegitimate child of Frederik Hendrik, prince of Orange, and thus the uncle of William of Orange, later William III of England. Frederik’s wife was Mary Killigrew, a maid of honour to Mary Stuart, and the princess of Orange chose him to act as guardian and tutor to the young and fatherless prince of Orange from 1659. Frederik’s son Willem was only one year older than his cousin the prince and quickly became one of his close hunting and military companions. He apparently had a propensity for idleness, at least according to one hostile observer: ‘Nobody could have shone better than him’, a fellow courtier wrote in his memoirs, ‘if only he had wished to make the effort.’ He was good-looking, witty, gallant and had ‘the air of a man of quality’, but, this commentator continues, ‘an enemy of work and discipline’.7 Nevertheless, from the time that Willem inherited his father’s lordships of Zuylestein, Leersum and Ginckel in October 1672, he rose steadily within the army of the States-General and in the prince’s favour. His affair with one of Princess Mary’s maids of honour, Jane Wroth, resulted in a precipitous marriage in 1681, much to William’s chagrin, who had destined him for a more illustrious match.
William entrusted him with an embassy to England in 1687, whose covert purpose was to gauge the extent of the opposition to James II. In June 1688 he led another embassy to congratulate James II on the birth of his son, but on the side he was reforging his links with the English opposition, thrown in turmoil by the birth of this prince, and probably had a hand in encouraging the ‘Immortal Seven’ to address their invitation to William of Orange.8 He provided the prince with valuable intelligence on English developments in the weeks and days preceding the invasion of the autumn and was a principal military leader during November and December 1688.9 He was closely involved in James II’s last days in England. It was he who on behalf of William visited James in Whitehall upon his return from Faversham and brusquely rebuffed the king’s offers for a meeting with the prince, advising the king to retire from the capital.10
Nassau van Zuylestein, usually referred to merely as Zuylestein, was part of William’s new ‘Dutch’ regime in England and was one of the king’s favourites after the Revolution. But he and some of William’s other close Dutch companions, such as Hendrik van Nassau-Ouwerkerk, made it clear to William’s secretary, Constantijn Huygens the younger, that they did not wish to become involved in English politics, knowing that ‘in England the manner was that the favourites and counsellors were accused and punished when the kings had done some wrong’. Nor did he wish – at that point at least – to be made a peer of the realm by the king, for then he would have to serve in Parliament.11 Zuylestein’s fears were initially justified by the animosity directed towards the only one of William’s close Dutch followers to be promoted to the peerage in 1689 – Hans Willem Bentinck, earl of Portland. He was, however, rewarded in other ways by the new king. A bill for his English naturalization was given the royal assent on 11 May 1689, and he was appointed master of the robes in March 1690. His services to William were principally military, and in March 1691 he was made a major-general in the English army to add to his posts in the Dutch military. He regularly fought in William’s summer campaigns in Flanders and he conducted himself with distinction at the battle of Landen in 1693, where he was taken prisoner twice, but was later exchanged for French prisoners in the Allies’ custody.12
Eventually Zuylestein’s resistance to a title seems to have relented and on 10 May 1695 he was created Baron Enfield (after the birthplace of his wife), Viscount Tunbridge and earl of Rochford. He was the second of William’s original Dutch followers, after Portland, to receive an English peerage. At the same time his duties as master of the robes were conveyed to William III’s new favourite, Arnold Joost van Keppel, earl of Albemarle, in 1697. Indeed, Rochford’s creation may have been in part a way of ‘kicking him upstairs’ in order to bestow the court position close to the person of the king on Keppel, who was climbing rapidly in the king’s favour and was already a fierce rival of Portland. In June 1695 William also promoted Rochford to be a lieutenant-general in the Allied army. Finally, in December Rochford was provided with an annual pension of £1,000, out of the receipts of the post office, to better support his new English dignity.13
Rochford did not take his seat in the House until 20 Feb. 1696, well into the 1695–6 session of the new Parliament, and in total he only attended 29 per cent of its sittings. On his first day he was introduced between Algernon Capell, 2nd earl of Essex, and Charles Mordaunt, earl of Monmouth (later 3rd earl of Peterborough). He next sat on 24 Feb., when William III addressed both Houses with information about the assassination plot against him. Perhaps Rochford, in the inner circles of William’s court, knew the details in advance and decided to start attending the House at this period of crisis for the regime. Certainly he was quick to sign the Association when it was ready for subscription on 27 February. He may also have made a special effort to be in the House to see through a bill for the English naturalization of his seven eldest children, who were all under 16 years old at the time.14 The bill was first read in the House on 5 Mar. and committed on 7 March. It was passed by the House only three days after that and received the royal assent on 10 April. Rochford was also a manager for a conference on the privateers bill on 6 April and was named to three select committees on legislation in this session.
His attendance was better in the following session of 1696–7, at 54 per cent, the highest rate of attendance of his parliamentary career, and he was named to 12 committees. He was absent in the middle of December during the hearings on the attainder bill against Sir John Fenwick‡, and at the calls of the House on 15 and 16 Dec. his absence was excused because he was ‘indisposed’. He thus missed the vote on the second reading of the bill but, a loyal supporter of the king and his ministry, arrived back in the House on 22 Dec. to vote in favour of the attainder the following day. He was present at 39 per cent of the meetings of the 1697–8 session, when he was named to 11 committees, voted for the committal of the bill to punish Charles Duncombe‡ on 15 Mar. 1698 and protested when the bill was rejected. On 30 June Rochford left the House and registered his proxy in favour of Richard Lumley, earl of Scarbrough, for the remaining five days of the session and of that Parliament.
Rochford was principally occupied in this session with a controversial matter involving his estate and his position in England. At the time of creating him earl in May 1695, the king had taken steps to grant to both Rochford and Portland the forfeited estate of the outlawed Jacobite exile William Herbert, marquess of Powis. The estate was estimated to be worth £10,000 p.a., with property principally in Middlesex, Northamptonshire and Montgomeryshire.15 Rochford was to receive the major part of the estate, including the Herbert ancestral home of Powis Castle (the ‘Red Castle’) in Montgomeryshire. His grant of this estate was not made formal and sealed until April 1696, however, and the delay may have been owing to a number of legal challenges from Powis’s heir, William Herbert, who succeeded (in his own opinion) his father as 2nd marquess of Powis in June 1696, shortly after the formal grant.16 Owing to his father’s outlawry and his own for Jacobite plotting, William Herbert was officially a commoner and was generally known at this time merely by his courtesy title of Viscount Montgomery. He refused to accept this dispersal of his ancestral land to a usurping foreigner without a fight and largely through proxies and agents he was involved in legal wrangles with Rochford concerning the estate for most of 1696. By the end of that year, however, Rochford’s claim to the majority of the property had been made good.17
In April 1697, as he was about to embark for Flanders for another summer’s campaigning, Rochford formally invoked his privilege of peerage to forestall a number of actions of ejectment that were then in the law courts against his tenants on the former Herbert lands. On 17 Mar. 1698 he submitted to the House a petition against the contravention of his privilege which had occurred in the preceding year and which had resulted in the ejection of some of his tenants and loss of much of these properties. Counsel for both sides were heard, and debate on the petition held, during the last week of March. Rochford found himself opposed by the trustees of the late marquess of Powis, the prominent English peers Thomas Herbert, 8th earl of Pembroke, and Henry Somerset, duke of Beaufort. Perhaps seeing that the House’s mood was against him, Rochford agreed on 31 Mar. 1698 to waive his privilege and withdraw his petition so that the legal hearings could proceed.18 Montgomery was always under government suspicion but in 1701 he was allowed to return to England to raise money on his estate, which suggests that his legal actions against Rochford were in part successful.19 Perhaps in recompense for this legal setback, on 8 July 1698 William III granted to Rochford a total of 39,871 acres of forfeited Irish lands, ‘in consideration of his many good and acceptable services’.20
Rochford maintained a low attendance of only 19 per cent (17 sittings in all) in the 1698–9 session, and he was named to no committees. He may have been discouraged by his troubles with Montgomery, as well as by the attacks in Parliament on the army, and especially on the Dutch troops, of which he was such a prominent representative. He came to 40 per cent of the meetings of the session of 1699–1700, when again he was not named to a single committee, but did on 23 Feb. 1700 sign the protest against the passage of the bill to continue the old East India Company as a corporation. He clearly had a personal stake in the bill for the resumption of William’s grants of forfeited Irish lands, but he did not sign the protest of 10 Apr. 1700 against the House’s decision not to insist on their own wrecking amendment to the bill, probably because by that time William III had ordered his followers to desist from opposing the bill so that he could receive badly needed supply. Interestingly, contemporaries writing about the tumult surrounding this measure did not generally make a point of commenting on Rochford’s large holdings of forfeited Irish lands, while they took delight in noting the discomfiture that the measure caused to other favoured grantees such as Portland, Albemarle and Edward Villiers, earl of Jersey.
In the wake of the humiliation caused by this bill, William dissolved the uncooperative Parliament, dismissed many of his Junto ministers and set about forming a new mixed ministry. Rochford attended just less than a third of the meetings of this Parliament of 1701, where he was nominated to four committees. He was involved in the impeachment proceedings of the former Junto ministers and on 15 May helped the new ministry successfully carry two divisions aimed to shut down discussion of motions critical of the king’s decision of the previous summer to follow the advice of his ministers and to prorogue and ultimately dissolve Parliament. The attack on the Junto ministers then facing impeachment was, according to one commentator, defeated ‘by the help of some unusual friends’, including Rochford, Albemarle and Jersey.21 Rochford was later present on 17 and 23 June to vote for the acquittal of John Somers, Baron Somers, and Edward Russell, earl of Orford.
Badly afflicted by gout, Rochford was increasingly withdrawing from life at Westminster, or indeed even Kensington. At the turn of the century he bought from the Wingfield family an English residence, ‘the White House’, at Easton in Suffolk, and he also frequently travelled back to his Dutch properties at Zuylestein, near Utrecht.22 At a call of the House on 5 Jan. 1702, in the early days of the new Parliament, he was marked as absent because of being ‘abroad’, and he only showed up to the House for three meetings of that Parliament, all in the second half of March 1702, probably to be present at the funeral of his old friend William III.
With the death of William III and the accession of Anne, Rochford abandoned an England whose ruler he did not know and who showed no favour towards him. His absence was largely accepted as a given among the English political class. Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, continued to include him in his calculations of Whig strength in the divisions on the Occasional Conformity bill in 1703, but noted next to his name that it was ‘uncertain whether he will come over but if he does certainly good [for the Whigs]’. An English commentator still marked him as a Whig in his analysis of the partisan composition of the House preceding the first meeting of the first Parliament of Great Britain in 1708. But Rochford only attended one meeting of any of Anne’s Parliaments, during a brief visit that he made to England in January 1706 in the company of Sunderland, John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, and Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, in which they presented the captured standards of the French forces defeated during the previous summer’s campaign.23 While in England he came into the House for one sitting, on 21 Jan. 1706, and then a week later registered his proxy in favour of Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron (later marquess of) Wharton.
Rochford spent the years of Anne’s reign on his estates in Zuylestein, where he developed the house’s gardens and assiduously promoted the military careers of his first three sons with his colleagues Marlborough and James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond.24 He died there on 2 July 1708, and his English and Dutch titles and a large part of his estate, including lands in Suffolk, Montgomeryshire and Utrecht, were passed on to his heir, William Henry van Nassau, 2nd earl of Rochford, with an injunction to him that the remainder of the estate was to be divided equally among his six younger siblings.
C.G.D.L.- 1 Van Ditzhuyzen, Oranje-Nassau, endpapers (genealogical table C).
- 2 TNA, PROB 11/511.
- 3 F.J.G. Ten Raa and F. de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, v. 432; vi. 126–7, 177, 191, 196; vii. 238, 259; viii (1), 704, 734, 739, 757; viii (2), 734.
- 4 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 199, 318, 481; iii. 146; Het Staatsche Leger, vii. 238, 259; viii (3), 422; HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 131.
- 5 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 686.
- 6 TNA, PROB 11/511; Reinidis van Ditzhuyzen, Oranje-Nassau: een biografisch woordenboek, 115–16, 247–9.
- 7 Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, xix. 95–96.
- 8 Burnet, iii. 259; Clarendon Corresp. ii. 178–82.
- 9 Journaal van Constantijn Huygens den zoon, ser. 1, i. 6–47.
- 10 Clarendon Corresp. ii. 226–9; Kingdom without a King, 51–53; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 488.
- 11 Huygens, Journaal, ser. 1, i. 70–71.
- 12 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 230, 369; iii. 146, 151, 157, 225; HMC Downshire, i. 423.
- 13 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 467, 481; Add. 61292, ff. 112, 114; HMC Ormonde, n.s. viii. 315.
- 14 Huguenot Soc. Quarto Ser. xviii. 241.
- 15 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 470, 472; CTB, 1693–6, pp. 1043–59.
- 16 Correspondentie, ed. Japikse ser. 1, ii. 59–60.
- 17 The Case of the Earl of Rochford (1698); Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 148.
- 18 Case of the Earl of Rochford; HMC Lords, n.s. iii. 145; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 358, 362.
- 19 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 6.
- 20 HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 35, 46.
- 21 Bodl. Ballard 36, f. 6.
- 22 HMC Buccleuch, i. 637, 641, 646; Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, xix. 96; van Ditzhuyzen, Oranje-Nassau, 115–16.
- 23 Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 1.
- 24 Add. 61292, ff. 104–9; HMC Ormonde, n.s. viii. 111.