styled Visct. TUNBRIDGE 1695-1708; suc. fa. 2 July 1708 as 2nd earl of ROCHFORD
First sat 16 Nov. 1708; last sat 16 Feb. 1710
MP Kilkenny [I] 1705-10, Steyning 3 May-2 July 1708.
b. 1682, 1st s. of Willem Nassau, heer van Zuylestein, Leersum, and Ginckel (later earl of Rochford), and Jane, da. of Sir Henry Wroth of Enfield, Mdx.; bro. of Frederick Nassau van Zuylestein, 3rd earl of Rochford. educ. unknown. Unm. suc. fa. 2 July 1708 as heer van Zuylestein, Leersum, and Ginckel. d. 16 July 1710;1 will 23 June 1709, pr. 25 Apr. 1711.2
Brevet col. regt. of ft. [I] 1704–5; aide-de-camp to John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, 1704; lt. col. regt. of ft. gds. 1704–6;3 col. regt. of ft. 1706–7, regt. of drag. 1707–d.; brig. gen. 1 Jan. 1710–d.
Associated with: Zuylestein, Utrecht, Netherlands; ‘The White House’, Easton, Suff.
In April 1696 the Dutch-born William Henry Nassau van Zuylestein, along with six of his siblings, was naturalized by act of Parliament.4 In the subsequent years he embodied the alliance of England and the Netherlands and threw himself fully into the Anglo-Dutch war effort against France that had been forged by his father and his father’s friend and patron, William of Orange. While his father effectively abandoned England and retired back to Zuylestein at the accession of Anne, the son, styled Viscount Tunbridge from 1695, remained active in English and Irish affairs. He was spared by his early death in battle in 1710 from witnessing the calumnies heaped on the Dutch alliance by the incoming Tory ministry.
Tunbridge’s father pushed him and all his younger brothers into the military life. He started his career when barely 21 years old, serving as a volunteer in the Cadiz expedition led by James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond, who remained his principal patron throughout his career. Ormond later gave Tunbridge a brevet as colonel on the Irish establishment in 1704 but that spring Tunbridge was fighting in Flanders. He wrote to Ormond to apologize for his absence, explaining that his father had ‘hurried me into the field as soon as I came over’ and insisting that he had abandoned his responsibilities in Ireland ‘with no other design than to render myself capable to be fit for the post your grace has been pleased to give me’. Prophetically, he wrote in May 1704 from Flanders, just before the Danube campaign, that ‘one thing I see plainly, that we shall have a great many marches’.5 He carried the official dispatches of victory at Blenheim back to England in August 1704 and received a gift of £1,000 for bringing the good news.6
For most of the remainder of 1704 and all of 1705 Tunbridge was either in London or Zuylestein and seldom appeared in Ireland. Nevertheless, Ormond was able to gratify his, and his father’s, requests for preferment. In 1705 he was elected for Ormond’s borough of Kilkenny in the Irish Parliament. Although classified as a Tory in 1707, he seldom attended the chamber in Dublin, owing to his military commitments abroad and political responsibilities in London.7 In May 1708 he was returned for Steyning in Sussex but his father’s death in early July and his accession to the peerage meant that he was unable to take his seat in the Commons. He solicited both Marlborough and Ormond that they would ensure that the pension of £1,000 granted to his father to support his title would be transferred to him. Both promised their support but the pension was never forthcoming.8
Rochford attended the House from the first day of the new Parliament and was an assiduous attendee of its first session of 1708–9, coming to 84 per cent of its meetings. He was most active in the first months of 1709. On 21 Jan. he voted with the government in supporting the motion that a Scots peer who possessed a British title could vote in the election of Scottish representative peers. On 25 Jan. he chaired and reported from a committee of the whole house discussing the bill for the recruitment of land forces. On 21 Mar. he reported from the committee on the bill for Morison’s Haven, also known as Hadingtoun, in East Lothian; and on the last day of the session, 21 Apr. 1709, he was a manager in a conference to discuss the continuation of acts to prevent counterfeit coining.
By contrast Rochford came to only one meeting of Parliament (on 16 Feb. 1710) in all of the following (1709–10) session of Parliament. This was probably because of his increased military responsibilities. At the time of the vote on Dr. Sacheverell’s case in March 1710 he was marked as ‘employed abroad’ to explain his absence from the House. His military colleague James Stanhope† [1242], (later Earl Stanhope), considered Rochford a reliable Whig vote when he wrote to Robert Walpole† (later earl of Orford) in June 1710 that ‘my Lord Rochford, I believe, I need not recommend, when you remember that he has a voice in the House of Lords which I venture to promise will be as you and I think right’.9 These hopes were dashed shortly thereafter when Rochford was killed leading his dragoons at the battle of Almenara in Spain in July 1710. In his will of June 1709, written just before he embarked for Spain, the unmarried and childless Rochford took great pains to ensure that his own estate of which he had disposition was distributed among his many younger siblings, especially to his second brother, Maurice, and to his youngest brother, Henry. His next brother, Frederick, who had already inherited their father’s lordship of Waayestein in Utrecht (purchased in 1696), came into all the remaining English and Dutch titles and lands and went on to have a long career in the House of Lords.
C.G.D.L.- 1 HMC Townshend, 71.
- 2 TNA, PROB 11/520.
- 3 HMC Ormonde, n.s. viii. 134.
- 4 Huguenot Soc. Quarto Ser. xviii, 241.
- 5 HMC Ormonde, n.s. viii. 44, 74.
- 6 Add. 61292, ff. 104–8; Marlborough–Godolphin Corresp. 361; Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 455, 457.
- 7 HIP, vi. 574.
- 8 Add. 61292, ff. 112–14; Add. 61366, f. 62; HMC, n.s. viii. 315.
- 9 CUL, Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss 615, James Stanhope to Robert Walpole, 22 June 1710.