MONTAGU, Edward (1625-72)

MONTAGU, Edward (1625–72)

cr. 12 July 1660 earl of SANDWICH

First sat 26 July 1660; last sat 22 Apr. 1671

MP Hunts. by 13 Oct. 1645, 1653, 1654, 1656-10 Dec. 1657; Dover 23 Apr.-12 July 1660

b. 27 July 1625, 2nd and o. surv. s. of Sir Sidney Montagu‡, of Hinchingbrooke, Hunts. and Paulina (d. 17 Sept. 1638), da. of John Pepys of Cottenham, Cambs. educ. Huntingdon g.s., M. Temple 1635. m. 7 Nov. 1642 Jemima (1625-74), da. of John Crew, later Bar. Crew, of Steane, Northants., 6s., 4da. (1 d.v.p.). suc. fa. 25 Sept. 1644; KG 1660. d. 28 May 1672; will 21 Nov. 1669, pr. 7 Sept. 1672.1

Mbr., army cttee. 1645; treasurer-at-war 1646, 1647; cllr. of state 1653-9, Feb.-May 1660,2 pres. Nov.-Dec. 1653; commr. customs 1653,3 foreign affairs 1653,4 treasury 1654-9, June-Sept. 1660, trade 1655-7, 1660-68, 1669-d., Admiralty 1655-9, Mar.-July 1660, sale of Dunkirk 1662,5 Tangier 1662,6 appeals for prizes 1666;7 co-patentee of ballastage 1657-8; PC 14 June 1660-d.; master, Great Wardrobe 1660- 70, king’s swans 1661-d.; clerk, privy seal 1660-d.; register, ct. of requests 1660-d.;8 pres., Council of Plantations 1670-d.

Commr. eastern assoc. 1643; New Model ordinance, Hunts. 1645, militia, Hunts. Mar. 1660, swans, Beds., Hunts. and Cambs. 1661;9 dep. lt., Hunts. 1643-60; custos rot., Hunts. 1653-9, 1660-d.; freeman, Dover 1660, Portsmouth 1661; ld. lt., Hunts. (jt.) 1660-71, (sole) 1671-d.; bailiff, Whittlesea Mere 1661;10 recorder, Huntingdon 1663-d.

Col., regt. of ft. (Parl.) 1643-5, of horse Sept. 1658-Aug. 1659; Apr.-Nov. 1660;11 gov. Henley-on-Thames, Jan.-Mar. 1645; general-at-sea (jt.) 1656-9, (sole) Feb.-May 1660; lt.-adm. and capt.-gen. of the Narrow Seas 1660-d.; adm. 1661-d., c.-in-c. of fleet July-Sept. 1665.

Plenip. The Sound, Denmark Mar.-Sept. 1659; amb. extraordinary Portugal June 1661-May 1662, Apr.-May 1666, Jan.-Mar. 1668, Spain 1666-8.

Elder bro., Trinity House 1660-d., warden Nov. 1660-61, master, 1661-2; mbr., R. Adventurers into Africa 1660, asst. 1664-6, 1669-71, R. Fishing Co. 1664; FRS 1661, council 1668.

Associated with: Hinchingbrooke, Hunts.; ‘the porch’, Lincolns Inn Fields, Mdx.12

Likenesses: oil on canvas by Sir P. Lely, c.1655-9, NPG 5488; oil on canvas by Sir P. Lely, c.1666, NMM BHC3007; oil on canvas aft. Sir P. Lely, 1668, Govt. Art Collection; oil on canvas by Sir P. Lely, c.1670, Yale Univ. Cent. for Brit. Art.

Long Parliament and Protectorate, 1645-59

Edward Montagu’s father, a younger brother of Edward Montagu†, Baron Montagu of Boughton, and Henry Montagu†, earl of Manchester, served as a master of requests and a groom of the bedchamber to James I, and in 1627 purchased the former nunnery of Hinchingbrooke outside the town of Huntingdon.13 During the first Civil War, Edward turned against his father’s royalist inclinations and joined with his father-in-law, John Crew, his brother-in-law Sir Gilbert Pickering‡, his first cousin Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, and most notably his Huntingdonshire neighbour Oliver Cromwell‡, in supporting Parliament. From as early as June 1643 he was made a deputy-lieutenant of the county and once he had passed his eighteenth birthday that year he was made a colonel of his own regiment of foot in the army of the Eastern Association commanded by Manchester. He and his regiment saw action at Marston Moor, the second battle of Newbury and Naseby. In the conflict between Manchester and Cromwell, Montagu firmly sided with Cromwell, which may help explain the favour he received from that quarter in later years. Montagu retired from military service when he was returned to Parliament for his late father’s seat of Huntingdonshire in 1645. He was at the heart of Parliament’s government of that county, both militarily and administratively, throughout the Civil War. Although he was not secluded at Pride’s Purge, he retired from national politics, but returned to public life when his friend Cromwell appointed him to the Huntingdonshire seat in the Nominated Parliament of 1653.

He quickly became one of the pillars of the Protectoral regime of Oliver and his son Richard Cromwell‡, serving on the council of state and in a number of influential roles, both nationally and locally.14 He sat in all the Protectorate Parliaments, and was summoned to Cromwell’s ‘Other House’ in December 1657 as Baron Montagu. In 1656 he was first appointed joint general-at-sea with Robert Blake‡ and then, having distinguished himself in his naval responsibilities, was in early 1659 sent to negotiate a peace between Sweden and Denmark. After the deposition of Richard Cromwell, he found himself at odds with the restored Rump government, which sent two commissioners to Montagu’s fleet stationed in the Baltic. This was ostensibly to help the admiral in his negotiations, but in reality to keep an eye on him, as he was suspected (most likely accurately) of being in touch with royalist agents. Montagu was deprived of all his posts and military commands when he prematurely brought the fleet back to England in late August 1659, suspiciously coinciding with the outbreak of the royalist rising of that summer.

Restoration, 1660

He did not re-emerge from his enforced retirement until the Members secluded at Pride’s Purge were readmitted and the Long Parliament reconvened. Samuel Pepys‡ welcomed this development, as now his master, employer and cousin Montagu (whose mother was a Pepys) and Montagu’s father-in-law John Crew ‘are likely to be great men’.15 On 21 Feb. Montagu was elected a member of the newly-established council of state and on 2 Mar. was made a commissioner of the Admiralty and general-at-sea, in which he was joined by George Monck, later duke of Albemarle.16 On that same day he attended a dinner at his cousin Manchester’s house, accompanied by another Montagu kinsman, Sir Dudley North, later 4th Baron North, and others, where plans for a conditional restoration of the king may have been made.17 From this time at least Montagu was in regular but secret communication with the exiled royalist court, and on almost familiar epistolary terms with both Charles II and James, duke of York. Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, in particular recognized Montagu’s importance for any future restoration of the Stuarts and encouraged this contact.18 Montagu later told Pepys that he had converted to the cause of bringing back the king during the time of his mission to the Sound when, with his every move being watched ‘he found what usage he was likely to have from a Commonwealth’, but he also attributed his change of heart to a sense of gratitude to the Stuarts for the favour James I had shown his father.19 Montagu was deputized by the council of state (and perhaps informally by Hyde) to oversee the elections to the Convention in the Cinque Ports, where he pushed forward the candidacy, first at Hastings and then at Sandwich, of his cousin Edward Montagu‡, the intermediary in his correspondence with the exiled court. Montagu himself was returned for both Dover and Weymouth, choosing to sit for the former (where he was also made a freeman).20 He was, however, hardly in the Commons at all, as from late April he was readying the fleet to sail to the Netherlands to fetch Charles II back to England. Even on board ship, though, he kept his eye on politics in London. In a discussion with Pepys on 29 Apr. he showed that he was distancing himself from the Presbyterian party to which he had formerly been so attached. He told Pepys that:

the Presbyterians are quite mastered by the Cavaliers and he did fear Mr Crew did go a little too far the other day in keeping out the young Lords from sitting [in the House of Lords]. That he doth expect that the King should be brought over suddenly, without staying to make any terms at all, saying that the Presbyters did intend to have brought him in with such conditions as if he had been in chains. But he shook his shoulders when he told me how [George] Monck had betrayed them [Montagu and Crew], for it was he that did put them upon standing to keep out the Lords and the other Members [of the Commons] that came not within the Qualifications - which he did not like; but however, he hath done his business, though it be with some kind of baseness.21

Montagu acted as a protector for his father-in-law Crew, and did procure a favourable letter from the king, ‘but my Lord tells me that he is afeared that [Crew] hath too much concerned himself with the Presbyterians against the House of Lords – which will do him a great discourtesy’. Montagu was also willing ‘to do all the honour in the world to Monck and to let him have all the honour’ of the restoration of the king, ‘though he will many times express his thoughts of him to be but a thick-skulled fellow’.22

Montagu returned from the Netherlands with the restored king on 25 May 1660 and was promptly showered with honours. The following day he was made a knight of the garter; he also received a letter from Hyde informing him that he was to be raised to the peerage and enquiring by what title he wished to be known.23 The patent creating him Viscount Hinchingbrooke and earl of Sandwich was formally sealed on 12 July, with an additional grant of £4,000 p.a., paid to him by fee farm rents, to maintain the dignity of his title. He had already been given other positions of responsibility and potential wealth throughout June, being made a privy councillor, a commissioner of the treasury and master of the great wardrobe, which latter role provided him with an office and accommodation in the capital (though destroyed in the Fire of 1666).24 Sandwich was also appointed a commissioner on the council of trade and master of the king’s swans. Other honours were bestowed on him over the next few years. Locally, he was in the autumn of 1660 made custos rotulorum and joint lord lieutenant, with his cousin Manchester, of Huntingdonshire, and he continued to hold other offices and commissions in Huntingdonshire and East Anglia in general. Most importantly, he remained an officer in the navy, and as such was occupied throughout much of 1660-1 with conveying members of the extended royal family back and forth between England and the continent. In March 1661, in recognition of these duties, he was commissioned, under the new lord high admiral the duke of York, lieutenant-admiral and captain-general of the Narrow Seas. From June 1661 to May 1662 he served as ambassador extraordinary to Portugal, entrusted with seeing through the final stages of the treaty with Portugal, formally taking possession of England’s new north African base of Tangier, and escorting the new queen, Catherine of Braganza, to England.25

First years of Charles II, 1660-65

Owing to these duties he only sat in the House for a total of 26 sitting days in the Convention from the time of his introduction there on 26 July. He sat for only 15 meetings prior to the September adjournment and was not nominated to a single select committee. On 14 Aug. he was granted permission to leave the House and registered his proxy with Charles Stuart, 3rd duke of Richmond, who held it until the last day of the month when Sandwich returned for two days prior to the adjournment on 13 September. In early October Sandwich sat as a commissioner of oyer and terminer at the trials of the regicides at the Old Bailey alongside the lord mayor, Albemarle (as Monck had become) and ‘such a bench of noblemen as hath not been ever seen in England’.26 The earl then attended 11 sittings in November and December, where he was nominated to a committee on a private bill, his only committee nomination in the Lords throughout the Convention.

He came to only 15 sittings at the very beginning of the first session of the Cavalier Parliament in May 1661 and left the House on 11 June, when he was given leave by the House to be absent, ‘he being to go to sea upon his Majesty’s service’. He registered his proxy with Albemarle.27 From that time he was abroad on ambassadorial duties in Portugal. On his return from his mission, Sandwich attended 39 per cent of the meetings of the 1663 session, largely from May, and was named to eight select committees. On 18 May he was added to the committee for the bill for the highways in Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire and, with his local knowledge, quickly took over the chairmanship of the committee, as he reported the amended bill from committee two days later. He was also appointed to the committees considering, among other matters, the bills to grant the post office and wine licenses revenues to the duke of York (9 July), to clarify the bill to provide money for former royalist officers (18 July), for settling the militia (18 July), and to amend the Act of Uniformity to provide relief for those ministers who had not taken the oaths in time (24 July). On 24 July he reported from the committee he had chaired earlier that day on the bill for regulating the herring and other fisheries, whose title the House saw fit to enlarge before passing.28 He attended all but one of the sittings of the 1664 session, which saw the highest attendance level of his career. He was named to seven committees considering such legislation as the bills to transport felons (29 Mar.), to preserve naval stores (18 Apr.), to prevent gaming (21 Apr.) and for regulating the press (10 May), and on 10 May he also reported from the committee on the bill to prevent the delivering up of merchant ships.

Sandwich’s views on most of the pressing issues in Parliament of the time are hard to determine. On 16 May 1662 he wrote to Clarendon from Portsmouth, where he had just returned from his Portuguese embassy, informing him that with ‘una voce’ the commanders and sailors under his command, whom he sought to represent, were upset by a measure recently passed in Parliament which he claimed took away the benefits of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion from those in naval service, while those in the land forces remained secure.29 Sandwich appears to have seen religious uniformity as a necessary condition for social order. As early as 15 May 1660 Pepys discoursed with his master about religion and found him ‘wholly sceptical ... saying that indeed the Protestants as to the Church of Rome are wholly fanatics. He likes uniformity and form of prayer’. In subsequent discussions in October 1660, Pepys found Sandwich ‘grown a man very indifferent in all matters of Religion’ and ‘a perfect sceptic’, who ‘said that all things would not be well while there was so much preaching, and that it would be better if nothing but Homilies were to be read in churches’. The admiral in general appears to have removed himself from dealing with the religious issues which convulsed Parliament but in August 1662, after the Act of Uniformity had been passed, he and Pepys agreed that ‘the discontents of the times … would not come to anything of difference, though the presbyters would be glad enough of it; but we do not think Religion will so soon cause another war’.30

On military and diplomatic matters he was more active and his views more clear. Sandwich was sent to Portugal in 1661 because he had long, from the time of his first cruise with Blake in 1656, advocated the necessity of a permanent English base in the Mediterranean and he thus supported the treaty with Portugal and England’s possession of Tangier. From October 1662 he was one of the original members of the Tangiers committee and for the next several years he continued to receive regular dispatches from the African port informing him of the condition of the garrison there and the efforts to build the mole to harbour English ships.31 In these concerns his views matched those of Clarendon. The two men were very close and acted as political allies, despite their vastly different experiences of the Civil War. Sandwich also supported the lord chancellor in his controversial decision to sell Dunkirk and in October 1662 Sandwich was, at Clarendon’s request, made one of the commissioners to negotiate with the French for the sale of the garrison.32 He made clear to Pepys his own views on the matter, opining that ‘he wonders any wise people should be so troubled thereat, and scorns all their talk against it, for that he says it was not Dunkirk, but the other places, that did and would annoy us, though we had that, as much as if we had it not’.33

As early as June 1662 Sandwich was becoming enmeshed in the rivalries and factions then emerging at court. He felt that York, the lord high admiral, sought to keep him out of naval command and that he was aided in this by his secretary Sir William Coventry‡, whom Sandwich considered ‘his greatest obstacle’ Sandwich’s rivalry with both York and Coventry was to becoming a recurring theme in his conversations with Pepys, which put the latter in a difficult situation as he was at the same time becoming closer to the duke and his secretary, which may have led to the slow but steady cooling of relations between Pepys and his cousin Sandwich. In a conversation with Pepys of 27 Oct. 1662, Sandwich also first ‘took notice of’ the new secretary of state, Sir Henry Bennet, later earl of Arlington, and by April 1663 Sandwich felt that his patron the lord chancellor was ‘irrecoverably lost’ under the constant attacks of his enemies, such as Bennet and Coventry. He emphasized to Pepys that ‘he will not actually join in anything against the chancellor, whom he doth own to be his most sure friend and to have been his greatest, and therefore will not openly act in either, but passively carry himself even’.34 Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, not surprisingly forecast that Sandwich would oppose the attempt of George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, to impeach Clarendon in the House on 10 July. Sandwich’s later actions bore out this assessment. As Sandwich pointed out to Pepys in November 1663, since the time the impeachment articles had been brought up, he was

the only man that hath several times dined with him [Clarendon] when no soul hath come to him, and went with him that very day home when the earl impeached him in the Parliament House, and hath refused ever to pay a visit to my Lord of Bristol, not so much as in return to a visit of his. So that the Chancellor and my Lord are well known and trusted one by another.35

This relationship, though, was increasingly complicated by Sandwich’s growing friendship with Bennet. In April 1663, at the same time he was lamenting the growing attacks against the lord chancellor, Sandwich was making approaches to the increasingly influential secretary of state, even presenting him with a gold cup worth £100 (which Bennet refused). In July 1664 he told Pepys that he considered Bennet a good friend and patron, and that ‘though they were always kind, yet now it is become to an acquaintance and familiarity above ordinary; that for these months he [Bennet] hath done no business but with my Lord’s [Sandwich’s] advice in his chamber; and promises all faithful love to him, and service upon all occasions’. Sandwich was tentative in knowing how to act with both Bennet and Clarendon:

in case there doth lie anything under the embers about my Lord Bristol, which nobody can tell. For then…I must appear for one or the other, and I will lose all I have in the world rather than desert my lord chancellor, so that I know not for my life what to do in that case.36

Clarendon for his part later gave Sandwich a glowing profile in the ‘Continuation’ of his autobiography:

He was a gentleman of so excellent a temper and behaviour that he could make himself no enemies; of so many good qualities and so easy to live with, that he marvellously reconciled the minds of all men to him, who had not intimacy enough with him to admire his other parts ... They who had constantly followed the King while he as constantly adhered to Cromwell, and knew not how early he had entertained repentance, and with what hazards and dangers he had manifested it, did believe the King had been too prodigal in heaping so many honours upon him. And they who had been familiar with him and of the same party, and thought they had been as active as he in contributing to the revolution, considered him with some anger, as one who had better luck than they without merit, and who had made early conditions. When in truth no man in the Kingdom had been less guilty of that address; nor did he ever contribute to any advancement to which he arrived, by the least intimation or insinuation that he wished it, or that it would be acceptable to him.37

The Anglo-Dutch War, 1665-8

This character sketch was written during Clarendon’s exile after 1668 and was framed principally to defend Sandwich from the many attacks upon his character that arose from his actions in the first summer of fighting in the Anglo-Dutch War. The conflict and its preparations brought many of Sandwich’s simmering rivalries at court into the open. Initially York, as lord high admiral, did not want Sandwich involved in naval command at all, fearing the rivalry of the more experienced seaman, and convoluted negotiations had to be undertaken between Sandwich’s and York’s private secretaries, Pepys and Coventry respectively, to finalize Sandwich’s agreement to serve under York as admiral of the Blue Squadron.38 For the parliamentary session of 1664-5, Sandwich assigned his proxy on 26 Nov. 1664 to another of Clarendon’s followers, John Egerton, 2nd earl of Bridgwater, and came to a total of four meetings at the turn of March 1665. Shortly thereafter he rejoined the fleet and distinguished himself for his bravery and skill at the battle of Lowestoft on 3 June when his ship broke through the Dutch line. His good friend John Evelyn remembered later, ‘his own ship was pierced like a collander’. However the official account of the battle compiled by Coventry barely mentioned Sandwich’s role and instead heaped all the praise on York and Prince Rupert, duke of Cumberland, a matter which further alienated Sandwich from Coventry.39 In early July, however, Sandwich was placed in overall command of the fleet after the king had removed York from his post out of fears for the safety of the royal succession. The glory of Lowestoft was quickly obscured by the humiliation of the attack on Bergen, when a portion of Sandwich’s fleet tried unsuccessfully to capture a fleet of Dutch merchantmen sheltering in the Norwegian harbour. Sandwich himself was not in command of the squadron engaged in this action, but he was nevertheless blamed for its failure.

Returning from the Baltic in early September Sandwich was able to capture in the North Sea a number of Dutch men-of-war and merchant vessels separated from their convoy by a storm, including two richly-laded East India merchantmen. Early reports of the action considered it an auspicious omen for the Parliament shortly to meet at Oxford. Such optimism, though, quickly gave way to controversy upon his arrival ashore when it transpired that Sandwich and several of his fellow officers had embezzled a large proportion of the cargo of these merchant ships, prize goods which should have been apportioned by the parliamentary committee set up for that purpose. Sandwich was later able to procure royal warrants after the fact allowing this division of the goods among the flag officers.40 At the time, though, Parliament and the public were shocked by this example of embezzlement among officers who had signally failed to make great gains against the enemy during that summer’s campaign. Pepys had to admit to Sandwich that ‘nothing in all my life ever went so near my heart, as the apprehensions of the dishonour threatened to your Lordship by several that I have understood are concerned in the inquisitions now on foot’.41 To salvage his reputation at court, where Clarendon’s enemies in particular were speaking out against him, Sandwich left the fleet and arrived at Oxford on 7 Oct., in time to attend the House for seven of the meetings of the session of October 1665, where he was named to three select committees – on the bills for uniting churches in cities (11 Oct.), for speedier proceedings in cases of distresses for rent (13 Oct.), and to take away damage clear (17 October). His arrival at Oxford only further exacerbated his troubles, as he was now accused of abandoning the fleet and his responsibilities there, although Clarendon’s speech on 11 Oct. the first day of the session, tried to counter this impression by arguing that Sandwich ‘by Tempest, and other Reasons, which no Wisdom of his could prevent, [was] obliged to put into our own Harbours’. Nevertheless, Sandwich later still considered Clarendon’s speech oddly cold and unsupportive.42 During the session the Commons brought in a bill which would have made it a felony to ‘break bulk’ on a prize ship, which Pepys deemed ‘a foolish act and will do no great matter – only, is calculated to my Lord Sandwich’s case’. According to Pepys, some members aimed to insult the admiral further by awarding him a mere half a crown for his services in the summer, contrasted to the £10,000 to be given to Rupert. Hearing that the Dutch were threatening to block the Channel, Sandwich rushed back to the fleet on 23 October.43

Before embarking Sandwich had a meeting with Pepys in which he set out his views on the factional politics of the time and his place in them. He claimed that the court was divided between ‘the king’s party’ and that of the duke of York, and that the king favoured Sandwich to keep him on his side against York’s faction. Sandwich again named Coventry foremost among his enemies, despite Pepys’s protestations. Among his supporters and allies, he now included Rupert (‘in appearance kind’ according to Pepys) and Bennet, now Baron (later earl of) Arlington, ‘his fast friend’ by Sandwich’s reckoning and ‘firm to my Lord’ in Pepys’s view. His growing closeness with Arlington Sandwich feared was alienating him from Clarendon, who he thought was growing cold to him, though Pepys thought the lord chancellor was also still ‘firm’ to the earl.44

In December 1665, to remove him from the line of fire, Sandwich was appointed ambassador extraordinary to Madrid, ‘to go with all speed away’. Pepys was in no doubt as to the politics behind this move – ‘his enemies have done him as much good as he could wish’. In preparation for his absence, in January 1666 Sandwich felt it necessary to request a royal pardon for all offences for which he and his officers could be charged by the court of exchequer or the commissioners of prizes. The pardon was still going through the necessary channels in October of that year, despite its active promotion by both Clarendon and Arlington.45 Shortly before his departure in late February Sandwich had a final meeting with Pepys in which he once again laid out his position in the factional politics of the period, with a view that Pepys would maintain his interest during his absence. He left, he told Pepys, ‘fully assured of the king’s favour’ and listed his ‘friends’ whom Pepys could ‘trust to’ and that ‘he may rely on’ in his absence. Among the Members of the Commons were Roger Boyle‡, earl of Orrery [I] (‘his father almost in affection’); Hon. William Montagu‡, a kinsman and attorney-general for the queen consort; Thomas Clifford, later Baron Clifford and lord treasurer; and Sir George Carteret‡, bt., vice-chamberlain of the household, treasurer of the Navy and father-in-law of Pepys’s daughter Paulina. Among his peers in the House Sandwich listed Arlington; James Howard, 3rd earl of Suffolk; Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton, the lord treasurer; and Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury. Sandwich told Pepys that Clarendon still

seems his very good friend, but doubts that he may not think him as much a servant to the duke of York’s as he would have him; and indeed my Lord tells me he hath lately made it his business to be seen studious of the King’s favour, and not of the duke’s, and by the King will stand or fall – for factions there are, as he tells me, and God know how high they may come.

As for York himself, Sandwich expressed a concern that he was assuming too much power to himself, especially in the military, at the expense of Albemarle. In this complicated and shifting political state, Sandwich left England, telling Pepys with foresight that ‘he fears there will be some very great revolutions before his coming back again’46

Over the next two and half years until his return to the king on 11 Oct. 1668 Sandwich was absent in Spain, where he negotiated a commercial treaty, mediated a peace between the warring neighbours Portugal and Spain, and examined the fortifications of Tangier in order to make a report on its condition to the king. Throughout this long absence dispatches, sent at least weekly from Arlington, and less frequently from Carteret and even Coventry, kept him abreast of events in England, such as the naval campaigns of the summer of 1666, the Great Fire, the calamitous reverses of 1667 in the war, and the impeachment and eventual exile of his old friend Clarendon.47 Throughout 1667 his connection with Clarendon was only strengthened by the lord chancellor’s role, in tandem with Carteret, in the negotiations for the marriage of Sandwich’s son and heir Edward Montagu, styled Lord Hinchingbrooke, later 2nd earl of Sandwich, to Lady Anne Boyle, a daughter of Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington (and 2nd earl of Cork [I]), who was already strongly allied both politically and by marriage to Clarendon and was also brother to Sandwich’s ‘friend’ Orrery.48 The marriage was celebrated in Sandwich’s absence in January 1668, shortly after Clarendon had fled the country in the face of the impeachment against him. One of the articles of impeachment against the lord treasurer concerned the sale of Dunkirk, in which Sandwich had been so closely involved, although the charge did not specifically name or target him.

Nevertheless, even while far away in Spain, Sandwich fell afoul of the general campaign against Clarendon’s followers conducted by George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, in the months after the lord chancellor’s fall and he continued to be the target of parliamentary attacks. In the days before Parliament resumed in February 1668 Sandwich’s cousin Hon. George Montagu‡ warned him not to think of returning, for his own safety, and three days after Parliament was prorogued on 9 May, Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, informed Sandwich that his name had been ‘much upon the carpet’ in the Commons.49 Sandwich’s involvement in the prize goods affair was raised frequently throughout 1668, and after many weeks of debate on 24 Apr. the Commons presented articles of impeachment against Sir William Penn‡, one of the vice-admirals whom Sandwich had reputedly authorized to break into the bulks of the East India merchant ships. Sandwich’s friends in Westminster, such as Thomas Clifford in the Commons, Peterborough in the Lords, and Sandwich’s own servant John Creed, saw clearly that this was an indirect attack on Sandwich – some of the Members of the Commons were calling for the ambassador’s recall – and hastened to reassure Sandwich in Spain that his friends, and the king in particular, were standing firm to him. Sandwich’s involvement in the prize goods affair was also considered by the commissioners of accounts established in 1668 and meeting at Brooke House, a body which Sandwich later considered a tool of his enemy Buckingham, ‘wherewith he hoped to crush all that join not with him’.50 There had long been bad feeling between Sandwich and Buckingham, dating back to March 1661 when Sandwich had come close to challenging him to a duel after Buckingham had cheated him in a game of cards, and perhaps exacerbated by Buckingham’s failure to call on Sandwich while staying in Huntingdon en route to York.51 After Sandwich returned from Spain in late 1668 the commissioners of Brooke House directed their attention to him and hounded him for the copies of the warrants he was supposed to have given to his officers. From June 1669 he made careful records in his journal of his correspondence with the commissioners, and the many excuses he used to avoid sending them copies of these controversial documents.52

Last (active) years, 1669-72

To this point Sandwich had not been a prominent figure in the House, even when not otherwise occupied with naval or ambassadorial affairs. Pepys’s description of Sandwich’s presentation before the Tangier committee on 9 Nov. 1668, that ‘ he did it with a mine [i.e. mien] so low and mean, and delivered in so poor a manner, that it appeared nothing at all, nor anybody seemed to value it’, may suggest why Sandwich maintained a low profile in the House, preferring to be at sea rather than in the debating chamber.53 Yet from the time of his return from the Spanish embassy, Sandwich began to attend the House more assiduously and took a greater role in its business, perhaps to defend his reputation. He came to three-quarters of the sittings in the session of winter 1669 and came to almost as high a percentage in the following session of 1670-1. For both these sessions he kept a journal detailing the significant debates and other proceedings he witnessed in the House. 

At this time Sandwich was also becoming more involved and interested in issues surrounding trade, the national economy and the American colonies. He had been appointed to the council of trade from its establishment in November 1660, but was briefly excluded for a few months in 1668-9 when he was out of political favour before being re-appointed to the enlarged council established in April 1669. His journal entries reveal him recording ideas on issues of trade well before his official appointments and his notes for the winter session of 1669 show that he was making careful observation on the proceedings of the committee on the decay of trade, to which he had been appointed on 25 October. He reproduced at length in his journal a detailed analysis of interest rates heard by the committee on 11 November.54 He also transcribed into his journal the report submitted on 26 Oct. to the House by the Brooke House commissioners on their findings in the affair of the prize goods, which, luckily for him, were largely inconclusive and merely stated that the commissioners had had difficulty getting to the bottom of the matter and requested more time.55 On 6 Nov. he was assigned, along with most of the rest of the House, to the committee to consider this report: his only committee assignment of the session. Sandwich noted that the Commons’ anger in this report was directed principally against Sir George Carteret and that they used him with ‘exceeding great fury and severity’. On the other hand the Lords treated the Navy treasurer ‘very fairly and civilly’ and that among both the lords and the people Carteret ‘gained much ground and the commissioners an ill opinion of having proceeded with cruelty and injustice’. This, in Sandwich’s analysis, was just one example of the growing conflicts between Lords and Commons that winter, the most signal being the dispute over privilege in the case of Skinner v. East India Company. Sandwich recorded a detailed account of a debate in the House on the Commons’ bill to limit the Lords’ right to hear causes in the first instance.56

In his entry on the prorogation of Parliament on 11 Dec. 1669, Sandwich supplied his own analysis of the opposing factions in Parliament, which had brought the session to deadlock. One group were followers of Buckingham, which:

is found not so strong in the House of Commons as was supposed, and only is strong when in point of liberty of conscience, or trade, when the Country gentlemen or the Presbyterians join with them, but they dare not undertake anything alone. His interest in the house of peers I take not to be great. How it is with the king his master, God knows.

In his list of ‘Buckingham’s party that appeared in this session’, Sandwich listed eight Members of the Commons, but only four peers: Bristol, Charles Howard, 2nd earl of Berkshire; John Carey, 2nd earl of Dover, and William Widdrington, 2nd Baron Widdrington. Against that was the faction centred around James Butler, duke of Ormond [I] (who sat in the House as earl of Brecknock), which ‘consists of the duke of York’s friends, the Church, the old Cavaliers, and the Clarendonians’. ‘These two parties have levelled one at the other all this while’, and Buckingham in particular used his ‘great engine’ of the Brooke House Commission, ‘wherewith he hoped to crush all that join not with him and to weaken the other party’, including Sandwich himself. Sandwich thought that after this tumultuous session Ormond’s faction had five goals: ‘to stick unto the present Church government’; ‘to uphold the Cavalier party’; ‘to frame a test without which none should be eligible to Parliament or any place of trust’; ‘to adhere to the duke of Ormond against all opposition’; and ‘to prosecute Lord Orrery as an enemy to the principles aforesaid’.57

Sandwich continued his high attendance in the following session of 1670-1, coming to 72 per cent of its sitting days and being named to 20 select committees, from two of which he reported with finished legislation: Hammond’s Bill (on 5 Dec.) and the bill against stealing and transporting children (on 18 Mar. 1671). One bill whose committee he was not initially named to, but in which he evidently took a keen interest, was the measure promoted by York ‘for declaring and ascertaining’ the jurisdiction of the Court of Admiralty’, for Sandwich took detailed notes of the testimony heard before the committee on 28 Mar. 1670.58 In his notebook he also recorded the proceedings of the opening day of the session, including the principal heads of the king’s speech and the proceedings on the petition of Benjamin Mildmay, to be recognized as 17th Baron FitzWalter, a matter which seems to have greatly exercised Sandwich and appears frequently in his journal. He also provided a record of the proceedings surrounding the king’s order of 22 Feb. 1670 that all records of the dispute of Skinner v East India Company were to be erased from the Journals of both houses, a decision the Commons were happy to comply with but the Lords, ‘at their return [from the king at Whitehall] showed more discontent in their faces than has ordinarily been seen’. Nevertheless, the House also reluctantly voted to erase the proceedings from their Journal.59 Many pages of his journal are taken up with a detailed account of the proceedings in March 1670 on the controversial bill to allow John Manners, styled Lord Roos, later duke of Rutland, to remarry after his divorce from Lady Anne Pierrepont. Sandwich was particularly concerned by this matter as Roos’s mother, and the real force in the Manners family pushing forward the bill, was his cousin Frances, countess of Rutland, a daughter of Baron Montagu of Boughton. He took careful notes of the arguments and speakers in the debates on the bill, and the signatories of the protests against it, and after it passed successfully he wrote to his cousin assuring her that he had done everything he could to promote it. Another Montagu cousin also assured the countess that Sandwich had been ‘most active to assist the bill’. 60 Sandwich made it clear in his journal that he knew full well the real context and import of this bill:

Divers discourse that the king espoused this case of my Lord Roos not only for the justice thereof, but because it was in his intention to put away the Queen for which occasion this would be a profitable precedent. And on the contrary the Queen and Duke [of York] opposed it to the highest as tending to the separation of the one and the cutting off the succession of the other. The Duke therefore by all manner of vigour in the House of Peers, speaking against it, browbeating the favourers of it and almost violently haling out Lords upon the division of the House of Peers, brought it to have one voice more of the Lords present against it (though the proxies over balanced and carried it) and afterward the Duke himself and all the party protested against it; so that the King to save the house from the impetuousness of his brother and to secure the business he wished might succeed and justly ought to do so, renewed the ancient practice of the king’s being present at debates.61

Sandwich was so intrigued by this recent development – the king’s attendance at the House’s debates – that on 27 Oct. 1670, the second day of business after the session reconvened after the summer recess, he noted that the king ‘came into the House and sat upon the throne for half an hour and retired again’. Sandwich had his opinions of this: ‘I suppose [it was] not for anything his Majesty then designed to transact with his house, but to continue a practice he began last session in my Lord Roos his cause, that it might not seem to have been taken up out of partiality.’ In the last weeks of 1670 he recorded in his journal accounts of the debates on Fitzwalter’s continuing petitions regarding precedence and on the cause of Fry v. Porter, in which Sandwich voted with the minority in favour of the plaintiff.62

In late July Sandwich had been sworn in as president of the newly-constituted council of plantations, with a salary of £700 p.a., and his journal shows that he took to his new post with energy, interest, and intelligence, as he interviewed a number of officials on the state of the colonies and their trade with England.63 He thus took a particular interest in the controversial bill for impositions on foreign produce, and especially the matter of the prohibitive duty the Commons wished to place on refined sugar shipped from the colonies. When the Lords moved to reduce the imposition on this one product, the Commons objected that the Lords were infringing the Commons’ privilege to formulate supply bills, and the bill quickly became another arena for an argument between the two houses over their privileges. Sandwich was named to the committee considering the bill on 29 Mar. 1671 and his lengthy account of its proceedings in his journal makes it clear that his primary concern was colonial and trade policy and that his principal quarrel with the Commons was over their refusal to abate the imposition on refined sugar, rather than constitutional or privilege issues. Before embarking on his campaign for lowering the impost he checked with the king whether he had permission to interfere in a matter which could potentially affect the royal revenue. Charles allowed him to do what he thought best with the bill. Sandwich became the chief spokesman of the Lords in defence of their reduction of the duty, ‘though’, he added in his notes, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley (later earl of Shaftesbury), who chaired most of the meetings of the Lords’ select committee on this bill, ‘also was fully of the same mind and did a good part therein’. On 10 Apr. Sandwich was first named one of ten managers for the conference proposed for the following day to discuss both the House’s amendment reducing the imposition and its proposed address to the king on trade. That conference was postponed because of a procedural dispute between the Houses, and it was only on 12 Apr. that Sandwich presented to the House a long set of detailed economic and mercantile arguments defending the Lords’ abatement of the imposition. These reasons were presented to the Commons in conference on that day and Sandwich acted as a manager or reporter for the four increasingly bad-tempered conferences dealing with the bill, and the constitutional and privilege issues surrounding the amendment, which took place between 12 and 22 April. His copy of the arguments presented on 12 Apr. were inserted in his journal, and he also saw fit to keep copies of the Commons’ answer to these from the conference on 15 April. His copious notes on this issue go into great detail about the economic arguments against the duty, and he included in his journal a copy of the West Indian planters’ long set of arguments against the impositions, which he noted were ‘good for information more full, but were too large and not thought apposite enough to oppose to the reasons of the house of Commons’ on the day (22 Apr.) on which Parliament was suddenly prorogued by the king.64

With the coming of the third Anglo-Dutch War, Sandwich’s naval skills were called on again and he was made admiral of the Blue Squadron once more. By this time he was excluded from government policy-making. Even though he had commanded the fleet that brought Charles II’s sister ‘Minette’ to Dover in 1670 and fully took part in the festivities surrounding her visit, he appears to have had no suspicions about the true purpose of her visit and the signing of the Treaty of Dover which led to the renewed conflict with the Dutch. Indeed in March 1672 he recorded a conversation with Sir Henry Blount espousing a mercantile union with the States General.65 He reluctantly took his command, knowing the war to be a mistake, but as he told his good friend John Evelyn, he felt he had to save his reputation after the mauling it had undergone over the prize goods and the aspersions that had been cast on his courage by rivals such as Albemarle. This he did gloriously. He was in the thick of the fighting at Sole (Southwold) Bay on 28 May and was the last on board his flagship the Royal James after it had been set on fire. His body, recognizable from the sash of the Order of the Garter which it still wore, was recovered from the sea days after the battle.

Sandwich was given a hero’s funeral at Westminster Abbey and the public and his friends quickly lined up to sing his praises. Evelyn depicted him as a Renaissance man: ‘He was learned in the mathematics, in music, in sea affairs, in political; had been in divers embassies, was of a sweet obliging temper, sober, chaste, infinitely ingenious and a true nobleman, an ornament to the Court and his Prince’.66 By his will of November 1669 he left £3,000 to each of his three surviving daughters and £2,000 to each of his six sons. He divided his landed estate between his widow, who survived him by only two years, and his first two sons. The title and principal estate of Hinchingbrooke descended to his eldest son, Edward, who was already a widower by the time of his father’s death. He did not approach his father in energy or ability and, after a very brief attempt at public life, retired to France to nurse his fragile health. Sandwich himself had placed his hopes on his second son Sidney Montagu‡, to whom he bequeathed his estates at Lyvenden and Oundle, and who was later the father-in-law of the traveller Mary Wortley Montagu. It was not until the succession of the first earl’s great-great-grandson John Montagu, 4th earl of Sandwich, that another descendant matched him in his vigour and devotion to the British navy.

C.G.D.L.

  • 1 TNA, PROB 11/340.
  • 2 A. and O. ii. 1418.
  • 3 CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 122.
  • 4 CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 206, 237.
  • 5 CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 475.
  • 6 Pepys Diary, iii. 238.
  • 7 Bodl. Carte 73, ff. 386, 397.
  • 8 Pepys Diary, i. 128, 206.
  • 9 TNA, C 181/7, p. 117.
  • 10 CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 586, 603.
  • 11 Pepys Diary, i. 294.
  • 12 Harris, Sandwich, i. 80, 108, 167, 241, 243; ii. 49, 187; Evelyn Diary, iii. 617.
  • 13 This biography is based on Francis Harris, The Life of Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich (1912) and Richard Ollard, Cromwell’s Earl (1994).
  • 14 Unpublished article on Edward Montagu for 1640-60 section of the History of Parliament by Andrew Barclay.
  • 15 Pepys Diary, i. 60, 62.
  • 16 Pepys Diary, i. 65-6, 75.
  • 17 Pepys Diary, i. 75.
  • 18 Pepys Diary, i. 124-5; Clarendon State Papers, iii. 701, 703.
  • 19 Pepys Diary, i. 141, 285.
  • 20 HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 222-23, 491, 494, 496.
  • 21 Pepys Diary, i. 118-19.
  • 22 Pepys Diary, i. 125.
  • 23 Bodl. Carte 223, f. 210.
  • 24 Pepys Diary, i. 180 and n.; ii. 97.
  • 25 Harris, Sandwich, i. 191-95; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 685.
  • 26 Pepys Diary, i. 263.
  • 27 PH xxxii. 249.
  • 28 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, 19 May, 24 July 1663.
  • 29 Bodl. Clarendon 76, ff. 273-74.
  • 30 Pepys Diary, i. 141, 261, 271; iii. 176.
  • 31 Pepys Diary, iii. 238; Bodl. Carte 73.
  • 32 CSP Dom.1661-2, p. 475.
  • 33 Pepys Diary, iii. 237.
  • 34 Pepys Diary, iii. 121-22, 237; iv. 115, 123; v. 162-63, 192.
  • 35 Pepys Diary, iv. 367.
  • 36 Pepys Diary, iv. 115; v. 208.
  • 37 Clarendon Life, ii. 467-68.
  • 38 Pepys Diary, v. 160-63.
  • 39 Evelyn Diary, iii. 617-18; Pepys Diary, vi. 135-36.
  • 40 Bodl. Carte 215, f. 211, Carte 233, f. 291; NMM, SAN/A/1, ff. 67-72.
  • 41 NMM, SAN/A/1, ff. 59-60, 63-64.
  • 42 Pepys Diary, vi. 276-77.
  • 43 CJ, viii. 615 et seq.; Pepys Diary, vi. 274, 275 291; Bodl. Carte 46, f. 217.
  • 44 Pepys Diary, vi. 276-77, 291-92, 301-2.
  • 45 Pepys Diary, vi. 321; vii. 260; CSP Dom. 1665-6, p. 218; Bodl. Carte 75, f. 475.
  • 46 Pepys Diary, vii. 55-56.
  • 47 Bodl. Carte 75, ff. 425 et seq.; NMM, SAN/A/1, ff. 119-220; SAN/A/2, ff. 1-145; SAN/A/5, ff. 5-84.
  • 48 Pepys Diary, viii. 190-91, 216, 498; ix. 28; Add. 75354, Lady Ranelagh to earl of Burlington, 1 June, 9 July 1667.
  • 49 NMM, SAN/A/2, ff. 11, 94-95.
  • 50 Grey, i. 133-39; NNM, SAN/A/2, ff. 81-111; Harris, Sandwich, ii. 315.
  • 51 Pepys Diary, ii. 32-33; NMM, SAN/A/1, f. 29.
  • 52 Mapperton, Sandwich Journal, ix. 230-32, 236, 246-47; x. 22-32, 38-56; NMM, SAN/A/2, ff. 162-68.
  • 53 Pepys Diary, ix. 355-6.
  • 54 Mapperton, Sandwich Journal, ix (unpaginated), 15, 20 Jan., 27 May, 10, 12 June 1669; x. 70-2, 77-80, 104-34; Harris, Sandwich, ii. 309-10.
  • 55 Mapperton, Sandwich Journal, x. 64-68.
  • 56 Harris, Sandwich, ii. 307-9, 313; Mapperton, Sandwich Journal, x. 73-78.
  • 57 Harris, Sandwich, ii. 311-12, 315-17; Mapperton, Sandwich Journal, x. 92-97.
  • 58 Mapperton, Sandwich Journal, x. 260-64.
  • 59 Mapperton, Sandwich Journal, x. 135-8, 170-72, 196-204, 295-96; Harris, Sandwich, ii. 202-4.
  • 60 Harris, Sandwich, ii 318-24; Mapperton, Sandwich Journal, x.213-28; Belvoir, Rutland mss, Add. 91, f. 130, letters 128, 129.
  • 61 Harris, Sandwich, 324-33; Mapperton, Sandwich Journal, x. 235-58.
  • 62 Mapperton, Sandwich Journal, x. 290, 295-96, 302-20.
  • 63 Harris, Sandwich, 306-7, 337-41; Mapperton, Sandwich Journal x. 286, 344-46, 381-93, 406-8, 419-22, 430-38; CSP Dom. 1670, pp. 538-39.
  • 64 Harris, Sandwich, ii. 333-7; Mapperton, Sandwich Journal x. 352-80.
  • 65 Mapperton, Sandwich Journal x. 266-68, 270-82.
  • 66 Evelyn Diary, iii. 617-19.