styled 1628-43 Visct. Newark; accel. 11 Jan. 1641 Bar. PIERREPONT; suc. fa. 30 July 1643 as 2nd earl of KINGSTON-UPON-HULL; cr. 25 Mar. 1645 mq. of DORCHESTER
First sat 13 Jan. 1641; first sat after 1660, 1 June 1660; last sat 3 Dec. 1678
MP Nottingham 1628
b. Mar. 1607, 1st s. of Robert Pierrepont† (later earl of Kingston-upon-Hull) of Holme Pierrepont, Notts., and Gertrude (d.1649), da. and coh. of Hon. Henry Talbot‡ of Burton Abbey, Yorks.; bro. of Hon. Francis‡ and Hon. William Pierrepont‡. educ. Emmanuel, Camb. 1624; MA, Oxf. 1642; G. Inn 1651, called 1652, bencher 1658. m. (1) by 1630 Cecilia (d. 19 Sept. 1639), da. of Paul Bayning†, Visct. Bayning, 2s. d.v.p., 4da. (2 d.v.p.); (2) Sept. 1652 Katherine (d. c.14 Jan. 1679), da. of James Stanley†, 7th earl of Derby, 1s. d.v.p., 1da. d.v.p. d. 8 Dec. 1680; will 22 Mar. 1680, pr. 1 Feb. 1681.1
Mbr. council of war (roy.) 1642-6; commr. (roy.) treaty of Uxbridge 1645, defence of Oxford 1645-6; PC 1 Mar. 1645-by 5 May 1646, 27 Aug. 1660-21 Apr. 1679; commr. coronation claims 1661, earl marshal 1662, 1673. 2
Commr. array, Notts. and Nottingham 1642; recorder, Nottingham 1666-d.3
Bencher, G. Inn 1658.
Fell. R. Coll. Physicians 1658; FRS 1663.
Associated with: Holme Pierrepont, Notts.; Dorchester House, Highgate, Mdx. (from c.1650);4 townhouse, Charterhouse Yard, Mdx. (owned by 1676).5
Likenesses: oil on canvas by unknown artist, 1691, R. Coll. Physicians.
Pierrepont’s father achieved prominence during the reign of Charles I through his canny purchases of land in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire.6 With the wealth he built up he was able to purchase first a barony (Pierrepont) and then a viscountcy (Newark) in 1627. His eldest son and heir Henry was elected for the borough of Nottingham, close to the family’s principal manor of Holme Pierrepont, in the election of 1628. After its first session he became known as Viscount Newark following his father’s promotion to the earldom. Newark was later summoned to the House of Lords by a writ of acceleration as Baron Pierrepont and quickly established himself as a supporter of the rights of both the king and the bishops in the Long Parliament. At the same time his younger brother William sat in the Commons for the borough of Much Wenlock and became one of the leaders of the Parliamentarian party, earning for himself the sobriquet ‘the Wise’. Newark joined the king at Oxford where he was a member of Charles I’s council of war from late January 1643 (with admittedly intermittent attendance) and sat in the upper House in the Parliament convened there.7 Following Kingston’s death on 30 July 1643, killed by fellow royalist troops while being transported as a prisoner of war, Newark succeeded to the earldom, but to only part of his father’s estates. He inherited the ancestral family properties of Holme Pierrepont in Nottinghamshire and Orton Longueville in Huntingdonshire; most of the land purchased by the first earl, such as Thoresby in Nottinghamshire, was settled on his second son William.
For his services on the council of war and at the Uxbridge treaty negotiations in February 1645, Kingston was placed on the king’s Privy Council in Oxford and was raised in the peerage as marquess of Dorchester.8 After the surrender of Oxford, where he remained until the bitter end, Dorchester was charged £7,647 to release his estates from sequestration, but his brother William rescued him and the estate by agreeing to accept Dorchester’s composition fine as recompense for his own financial losses during the war.9 In September 1652 Dorchester made himself even more suspect in the eyes of the government by marrying as his second wife (his first wife having died in childbirth in 1639) Katherine, a daughter of the royalist martyr the 7th earl of Derby.10 Dorchester and his wife were shielded from the unwanted attentions of the Protectorate government by the growing influence and prestige of William Pierrepont, a valued adviser to Oliver Cromwell‡ as Lord Protector.
Dorchester had always been scholarly, a trait emphasized by a near-contemporary biographer, Charles Goodall, M.D., president of the Royal College of Physicians in the early eighteenth century:
From his youth he was always much addicted to books; and when he came from Cambridge, where he was some time of Emmanuel College, for many years he seldom studied less than ten or twelve hours every day; so that he had early passed through all manner of learning, both divine and human – as the fathers, councils, schoolmen, casuists, the civil law, canon law, and was remarkably well-versed in common law.11
Dorchester entered Gray’s Inn in 1651 and was called to the bar the following year, all which led Sir Edward Nicholas‡ to comment, ‘I see abundance of wealth doth not satisfy all men’s minds’.12 On 22 July 1658 he was made a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. His copious notebooks of medical receipts and experiments still exist in Hans Sloane’s collection of manuscripts.13 Dorchester was also infamous for his propensity to anger: he ‘was for his temper the obligingest friend and severest enemy that ever met in one man… where he had an enmity, it stuck close upon him, and… he seldom relinquished it’.14 The marriage on 13 July 1658 of Dorchester’s elder daughter Anne to her second cousin John Manners, styled Lord Roos, later duke of Rutland, with a dowry of £10,000, unfortunately supplied him with ample opportunity to indulge this trait. The marriage quickly broke down, and the years 1658-61 were filled with constant arguments between Lady Roos and her imperious mother-in-law the countess of Rutland; mutual recriminations between the young couple of drunkenness, sexual incompetence and adultery; and several separations and desertions.15 The worst of these, in Dorchester’s eyes, was in January 1660 when Roos deserted his wife ‘very naked and unhandsomely… with only her own chamber furniture, not a salt spoon, her £300 a year not paid’. The following month Dorchester published an invective-filled open letter to Roos challenging him to a duel for his mistreatment of his daughter.16 Roos’s printed response of 19 Mar., the composition of which has been attributed to Samuel Butler, suggests the anomalous figure the scholarly, and irascible, nobleman-turned-professional made in contemporary society, and how he thus opened himself up to ridicule:
you are terrible only in your medicines: if you had told us how many you killed that way, and how many you have cut in pieces, besides calves and dogs, a right valiant man that hath any wit would tremble to come near you: and if by your threatening to ram your sword down my throat, you do not mean your pills, which are a more dangerous weapon, the worst is past, and I am safe enough… Is it not enough that you are already as many things as any of your own receipts, that you are a doctor of the civil law, and a barrister at the common, a bencher of Gray’s Inn, a professor of physic and a fellow of the college, a mathematician, a Chaldean, a schoolman and a piece of grammarian (as your last work can show were it construed), a philosopher, poet, translator, antisocordist, solicitor, broker and usurer, besides a marquess, earl, viscount and baron, but you must profess quarrelling too, and publishing yourself an Hector? 17
At the same time as these insults were being thrown, the actions that resulted in the Restoration were being played out. Dorchester was in residence at Highgate at the beginning of 1660 but it was not until 29 Apr., after the Convention had started, that he wrote to the king in exile, reminding him of his service to Charles I. He insisted that he had since been faithful to the new king, though ‘like Nicodemus’ he had been ‘forced’ to act in secret in the intervening years ‘and durst not give the full scope to my ardent zeal’. The king’s encouraging answer was dated 13 May.18 Dorchester was one of those peers, created by Charles I at Oxford between 1642-6, who insisted on their rights to sit in the Convention House of Lords, despite the opposition of those who maintained that only those lords who had remained in Westminster in the 1640s should be admitted. Richard Boyle, Baron Clifford of Lanesborough, the future earl of Burlington, recorded in his diary that on 4 May he, with Dorchester, John Belasyse, Baron Belasyse, William Widdrington, 2nd Baron Widdrington, and Edward Watson, 2nd Baron Rockingham, all of them either Oxford peers or their heirs, ‘did attend and by the Lord Dorchester did demand leave of the General [George Monck, later duke of Albemarle] to take our places in Parliament to the which he gave us a civil answer declaring that he would not interpose in the privileges of Parliament but let us to our own.’ However, by the following day Monck informed the Oxford lords, through Belasyse, to desist from their demands, ‘as our desire had raised much noise’.19
It was not only the ‘Presbyterian Knot’ who wished to deny Dorchester and some of the other Oxford peers entry into the House. In a letter of 7 May Alan Brodrick, secretary of the royalist group the Sealed Knot, wrote to Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, with the suggestion of annulling all grants of peerage made since 1642 as many were given to those of little merit, ‘such as the marquess of Dorchester, who is not fit to be groom to an honest man’.20 A ‘Mr Probe’ later echoed this view when he said that Dorchester ‘is no more to be regarded than that dog that lay by him’, for which he was fined 1,000 marks in an action of scandalum magnatum Dorchester brought against him in early 1664.21 More seriously, in January 1662 Benjamin Denham, who appears to have been a former chaplain or servant of Dorchester and was then serving as chaplain to England’s ambassador to the Porte, Heneage Finch, 3rd earl of Winchilsea, wrote a long letter to the secretary of state. In this he set out to expose Dorchester’s true religious loyalties and to reveal him as close to a papist:
When I heard my lord marquess of Dorchester was made a member of his majesty’s Privy Council [in August 1660], I not only thought it incredible but impossible considering he is a person so firm to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of Rome, that he is even in the highest degree Jesuited, so that the many and subtlest papists have not only by way of civility a free admittance to his table, but to him they come, as a wise and close favourite for advice in their cause… in civil affairs perchance he may be trusted, but in ecclesiastical transactions not the least secrecy is to be expected from him… his counsel, his abetting shall ever be assistant not only from the love of the opinion and government of the Church of Rome, but from a perfect malice and diametrical hatred to all Protestants, miscalling them by horrid and disgraceful names.
Denham even cast doubt on Dorchester’s seemingly unblemished royalist reputation during the Civil War. He suggested that his speeches in Parliament defending the right of the bishops to sit and vote ‘were only made in opposition to Presbyterians and other sectaries, not out of love to our episcopacy’; and that at the death of Charles I he had ‘triumphantly demanded, where was the head of the Church?’22 Denham concluded by warning the king that ‘whatsoever is treated in the Privy Council concerning the Roman Catholics’ would be quickly revealed by Dorchester to those arch-Catholics Thomas Brudenell, earl of Cardigan, and Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore [I].23
Although it is impossible to gauge the accuracy of these detailed allegations, Dorchester was always closely connected with the senior branch of the Catholic Howards, and especially with Henry Frederick Howard†, from 1646 the 22nd (or 15th) earl of Arundel, a fellow royalist councillor at Oxford. For some years after the fall of Oxford Dorchester lived in Worksop Manor in Nottinghamshire, which had been lent to him by Arundel, ‘his great and most intimate friend and relation’.24 Both Dorchester’s and Arundel’s mothers were members of the Catholic Talbot family, and Denham put the blame for Dorchester’s Romanist sympathies squarely on his mother’s influence. In any case, Denham’s accusations, whether believed or not, must have fallen on deaf ears when they reached London from Constantinople in April 1662, as no action against Dorchester was ever taken.
If these suspicions were current in the spring of 1660, Charles II and his leading ministers were either unaware of them, or placed more value on Dorchester’s evident loyalty to the late king and his legal knowledge. On 27 Aug. he was sworn of the Privy Council, where he proved himself a frequent, almost constant, member throughout the early 1660s.25 He was sufficiently prominent in the council to be placed on its sub-committee of six members charged with handling Irish affairs.26 During the summer recess of 1661 he was said to have played a controversial role as one of the councillors, along with Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley, later earl of Shaftesbury, involved in an abortive project to break off the intended match with Portugal.27
Having taken his seat with the other ‘Oxford peers’ on 1 June, he sat in 57 per cent of the sittings of the Convention: slightly more diligent in his attendance in the first part before the recess than later. He was most active in the committee for petitions, and reported from there on four different occasions (the 7th, 13th, 19th and 23rd) in July. He chaired the meeting of the committee for privileges considering the case of Warwick Mohun, 2nd Baron Mohun, and on 7 Aug. reported to the House the committee’s conclusion that Mohun had, during the Interregnum, been sued as a commoner by common process, which was contrary to the privilege of peerage.28 On 14 Aug. he was appointed to replace the indisposed Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland, as part of the delegation from Parliament to the city of London to request a loan of £100,000 to the king. The following day, it was Dorchester who reported the city fathers’ hesitation to lay out such a large amount without better security. During this first part of the Convention he was named to ten committees on legislation. He introduced Clifford of Lanesborough’s bill for reparation of property seized during the late wars, and on 28 Aug. reported from committee with an amended version of this bill.29 On 23 Aug. alone he reported from three committees, including that considering the claims that Edward Somerset, 2nd marquess of Worcester, had a patent from Charles I to be made duke of Somerset, and that for the bill to restore Wentworth Dillon, 4th earl of Roscommon [I], to all his titles and estates. The latter was recommitted upon his report and, four days later, Dorchester returned to communicate a bill more acceptable to the House. On 31 Aug. he was formally given leave of the House to be absent for a time. He returned after the summer recess on 6 Nov. for the second part of the Convention. He was nominated to only four committees, but on 20 Dec. he reported from the one considering the bill for confirmation of marriages entered into during the Interregnum. Another one of these appointments was personally significant, the committee for the bill to restore the dukedom of Norfolk to Thomas Howard, 23rd (or 16th) earl of Arundel, eldest son of Dorchester’s friend and Talbot kinsman. On 13 Nov. Dorchester reported to the House that witnesses had attested to the committee that Arundel was ‘a perfect lunatic’ and that he was effectively confined to his residence, ‘the best house in Padua’. The bill was recommitted and on 19 Nov. Dorchester was able to report again with a revised bill which was accepted. This paved the way for Arundel to be made 5th duke of Norfolk, even though he was judged too mentally fragile to return to England to enjoy his new title.
For each of the first three sessions of the Cavalier Parliament, from May 1661 to May 1664, Dorchester maintained a steady attendance level of about 48 per cent. In the 1661-2 session he was named to 17 committees on legislation, but in the following two sessions his rate of nominations to committees dropped steeply. He remained, however, active in the committee for privileges. On 3 Dec. 1661 he reported to the House the conclusions of the committee meeting of the previous day concerning peers’ abuse of ‘protections, while on 1 Mar. 1662 the committee named him to a sub-committee charged with drawing up arguments supporting a declaration against the precedence claims of ‘foreign’ (i.e. Scottish and Irish) nobility. On 2 Apr. 1663 he chaired the committee in a busy meeting when it heard evidence about a forged ‘protection’. It also considered complaints about the disorderliness in the lobby and ‘little committee chamber’ and about people eavesdropping on debates at the door of the House’s chamber.30
In his assessment of 13 July Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, predicted that Dorchester would support the attempt of George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, to impeach Clarendon. This is certainly plausible as Bristol had been the leader of the party against the Portuguese match, which Dorchester too had opposed. Bristol was also one of the leading Catholics in the House and that too may have appealed to Dorchester, if Denham’s letter concerning his religious views is accurate. Certainly in December Dorchester found himself in opposition to the lord chancellor, as he joined with Henry Jermyn, earl of St Albans, Henry Bennet, later earl of Arlington, and others in opposing in the Privy Council Irish business supported by Clarendon, Anglesey and James Butler, duke of Ormond [I], earl of Brecknock in the English peerage.31
Dorchester attended 54 per cent of the sittings in the session of 1664-5. On 21 Dec. 1664, Robert Sutton, Baron Lexinton, registered his proxy with Dorchester for the remainder of the session. Lexinton was a fellow Nottinghamshire royalist who had been married to Dorchester’s cousin, and also appears to have been acting as an intermediary between Dorchester and the countess of Rutland over their children’s troubled marriage.32 Dorchester had the king’s specific leave to be absent from the following session, held at Oxford in October 1665, and registered his proxy with Lexinton on 12 October. In April 1666 Dorchester was initially one of the peers chosen to sit in the court of the lord high steward to act as judge in the trial of Thomas Parker, 15th Baron Morley, but after requesting the king’s leave to be absent, he excused himself from proceedings.33
The session of 1666-7 saw Dorchester attending the House more frequently than usual, with an attendance level of 59 per cent. This increased attendance may have been owing to the family interest in the bill to make illegitimate all of Lady Roos’s children—his grandchildren, including his only surviving male descendant—which made its way through Parliament that session. Dorchester had been present on 19 Apr. 1662 for the first reading of an earlier bill brought in by the Manners family to declare illegitimate Lady Roos’s son born the previous September and baptized tellingly ‘Ignotus’ (i.e. unknown).34 He had then been present again a few days later when his daughter’s petition, in which she detailed the sufferings she had undergone at the hands of Roos, was presented to the House.35 The second reading of this bill was delayed pending her counsel being heard and it was ultimately lost, ‘in regard of the great and public affairs of the kingdom’ then being considered, at the prorogation of that session on 19 May. When Anne gave birth once more in April 1663, during a period when Lord Roos had been on the continent for several months, her adultery was so clear that even her father had to acknowledge it. With this irrefutable evidence Lord Roos was able to obtain a legal separation ‘from bed and board’ in the court of arches, after his return from his travels.36 Armed with this decree, Roos had a bill to make both children born to Lady Roos since 1660 declared illegitimate introduced in the House on 22 Oct. 1666. For several days, witnesses were heard before the bar with scurrilous evidence of Lady Roos’s adulterous liaisons. Roos himself was impelled to swear before the assembled House that he had not had carnal knowledge of his wife since 4 Mar. 1660. Clifford of Lanesborough, by this time earl of Burlington, described it as a bill ‘to make a bastard of his son Ignoties [sic] and a whore of his wife’.37 Dorchester was marked as present in the House on 12 Jan. 1667 when the House passed the bill nemine contradicente, suggesting that he did not put up any strenuous opposition to its passage, having already been forced to accept the humiliating facts of his daughter’s promiscuity. The bill received the royal assent on the day of prorogation, 8 Feb., depriving Dorchester of legitimate grandchildren and heirs.38
Perhaps it was the frustration of seeing his daughter paraded as a ‘whore’ before all his peers, which led to the most famous outburst of Dorchester’s notorious temper. At a conference on the Canary Company held in the Painted Chamber on 19 Dec. 1666 Dorchester and George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, found themselves seated next to each other. Clarendon commented that already ‘there was no good correspondence’ between these two peers and ‘their mutual undervaluing each other always disposed them to affect any opportunity to manifest it’. A jostling for elbow space on their neighbouring chairs soon led to an exchange of insults and then proceeded to an unseemly fistfight:
in which the marquess, who was the lower of the two in stature, and was less active in his limbs, lost his periwig, and received some rudeness, which nobody imputed to his want of courage, which was ever less questioned than that of the other… The marquess had much of the duke’s hair in his hands to recompense for his pulling of his periwig, which he could not reach high enough to do to the other.
The House, outraged at this ‘misdemeanour, greater than had ever happened, in that place and upon such an occasion’, which they considered a ‘great offence to the king himself, and an affront to the House, bringing a reproach upon their lordships in the face of the kingdom’, committed both peers to the Tower. On 22 Dec. the House ordered Dorchester’s nephew-by-marriage Gilbert Holles, 3rd earl of Clare, to fetch Dorchester from the Tower so he could receive the House’s orders to keep the peace, to which Dorchester readily submitted. He did not resume his seat until a week later, 29 Dec., when he thanked the House for their favour in releasing him from his restraint and allowing him to sit again.39
Dorchester’s name was included in a list sent by Anglesey to Ormond on 10 Nov. of councillors who were believed to support the Irish cattle bill, contrary to the wishes of the king and lord chancellor.40 On that same day, Lexinton registered his proxy with Dorchester for the remainder of the session, perhaps with a view to proceedings on the Irish cattle bill. On 4 Feb. 1667 Dorchester was one of only three peers to signify their protest against the resolution to grant the Commons a conference about the procedures for the impeachment of John Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt, arguing that doing so was a derogation of the House’s privileges in matters of judicature.
Dorchester was absent from the House from 29 July 1667 (he attended two sittings of the abortive session of that month) to 24 Oct. 1670. His absence was excused by the House as he consistently registered his proxy: with Lexinton on 28 Sept. 1667 for the session of 1667-8 and, after Lexinton’s death on 13 Oct. 1668, with his nephew Clare on 21 Oct. 1669 for the session of autumn 1669. He registered the proxy with Clare again on 15 Feb. 1670 for the first part of the following session of 1670-1. Dorchester did appear on one single day during this long period on 26 Feb. 1668, thereby presumably vacating his proxy. This lone appearance in the House may have been sparked by the submission four days previously of a petition from Lady Roos in which she begged for some sort of maintenance. She detailed the cruel treatment she had suffered from her husband and her present straitened circumstances, having fled to Ireland to escape her creditors. Dorchester entirely missed the proceedings and passage of the divorce bill which gave Lord Roos permission to remarry even though his wife was still living. This bill was introduced in the House on 5 Mar. 1670. In spite of the controversy surrounding the measure, it received the royal assent on 11 April.
Dorchester was ready to come to the House once the humiliation of the Roos divorce bill was past. He appeared again when the House reconvened on 24 Oct., vacating his proxy with Clare, and proceeded to sit on 84 per cent of the sitting days before the prorogation on 22 Apr. 1671. Winchilsea entrusted him with his proxy on 20 Mar. and Dorchester held it until the end of the session. This may have been about the time that he was negotiating with Winchilsea for the purchase of the latter’s house in Charterhouse Yard near the City of London. Certainly by the time Ogilby and Morgan drew up their map of rebuilt London in 1676 part of the Finch property on the east side of the square was labelled ‘Marquess of Dorchester’.41 Dorchester maintained a similar level of attendance for the following session of early 1673, at 80 per cent, but was absent from the House (except for one day, 17 Jan. 1674) from 29 Mar. 1673 until 13 Apr. 1675. Again he covered his absence by giving his proxies to fellow peers, leading representatives of the ‘court’ interest: to Arlington on 24 Oct. 1673 for the short four-day session that month, and to James Stuart, duke of York, on 16 Feb. 1674 for the session in the first two months of that year.
Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, later duke of Leeds, predicted that the marquess would support the ‘non-resisting’ test bill introduced in the session of spring 1675, where Dorchester sat in 78 per cent of the sittings. Earlier, in mid-February, when Danby had presented to the Privy Council the new measures decided upon with the bishops at the Lambeth Palace conference, Dorchester, surprisingly, sided with opposition peers such as Denzil Holles, Baron Holles, in asking for more time to examine the proposed laws so that they ‘might not be disadvantageously enforced’.42 Danby, though, was probably correct in his assessment of Dorchester’s views on his test bill. It matched Dorchester’s recent pattern of proxy donation and the fact that his name does not appear in any of the protests against the measure, or among the list of opponents to the bill in A Letter from a Person of Quality.
Dorchester was also a named party in a petition submitted to the House by Elizabeth, Edward and Bernard Howard, Norfolk’s younger siblings against the duke (still absent in Padua) and Henry Howard, earl of Norwich, later 6th earl of Norfolk, the effective head of the family. Dorchester’s strong links with this branch of the Howards had continued well into the 1670s. Having been involved in the passage of the bill for securing the restoration of the dukedom in 1660, two years later he was made a commissioner to execute the office of earl marshal, a hereditary office long held by the dukes of Norfolk. In 1672, with Norfolk still incapable of exercising the place, Norwich was appointed earl marshal but his effective tenure of this office was short-lived, being barred under the terms of the 1673 Test Act. Thus, while he formally maintained the title of earl marshal, the duties were again exercised by deputies, principally his Protestant kinsman Carlisle and the family’s long-term ally Dorchester.43 It was in this context that Dorchester faced the petition of the two peers’s younger siblings. In 1652, at the death of the 22nd (or 15th) earl of Arundel, Dorchester and Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, had been appointed trustees of his northern lands, which they were to manage to make sufficient provision for his younger children. These children had previously sought to take the trustees to law for malfeasance in their duties, but when they had brought a bill against them the trustees had claimed privilege of Parliament. The younger Howards now sought the House’s permission to have their case against the trustees and their elder brother Norwich heard in chancery without being impeded by claims of privilege. On hearing Norwich’s arguments, the House dismissed the petition out of hand, without even recording it in the Journal for that day.44 Over the next two years, Edward, Bernard and Elizabeth Howard continued to submit petitions against Norwich and the trustees.45
Dorchester registered his proxy with Anglesey on 18 Oct. 1675 for the entirety of the autumn session. The proxy was employed on 20 Nov. in favour of an address to the king calling for the dissolution of Parliament, which was won by those against the address by a majority of two and only after proxies were counted.46 In the long period before the next session Dorchester was, on 30 June 1676, one of the peers in the court of the Lord High Steward at the trial of Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, whom he, with the majority of the court, found not guilty of murder.47 Dorchester came to only 29 per cent of the sittings in the session of 1677-8 when Parliament reconvened after a prorogation of 15 months. On the opening day, 15 Feb. 1677, he ‘argued long’ against the motion put forward by his old enemy Buckingham that Parliament was automatically dissolved by the long prorogation, but he may have been among those peers who took a more moderate stance, by arguing that those peers who insisted that it was dissolved had freedom to express their views and should not be committed to the Tower.48 Dorchester was nevertheless by this time among the court’s supporters, as his recent proxies and his protest on 15 Mar. against the passage of the bill to compel the protestant education of the royal children, clearly suggested. Shaftesbury in the spring of 1677 considered him ‘triply vile’. On 21 July Dorchester registered his proxy with Heneage Finch, Baron Finch, later earl of Nottingham, yet another leading figure of the court interest. During this session the dispute within the Howard family also came to a head. On 20 Mar. the younger Howards once again presented a petition asking to take Norwich, Dorchester and Peterborough to court for neglect of their trust. On 8 Feb. 1678 they tried again in changed circumstances, following the death of their eldest brother (the 5th duke) and succession to the dukedom by Norwich, the principal target of their complaints. Both petitions failed in the face of the new duke’s opposition. Throughout these proceedings Dorchester, who was in attendance at the first petition but not at the second, continued to rely on his privilege to avoid legal proceedings.49
Dorchester’s only known intervention in the session of spring 1678 (of whose meetings he attended just under one third) was his signature to the protest on 5 July against the decision to determine the relief of the petitioner in the cause Darrell v. Whichcot, without dividing on the question of whether to hear the details of the case. He attended sittings of the House regularly throughout late October and November 1678, as the Test Act was being debated in Parliament. On 2 Dec. he was among the first group of peers to take the new oaths and declaration, but some other members of the House noted that he did not say all the words required of him and he was ordered to swear again the following day. He did so to the House’s satisfaction, but left the chamber for good after that sitting on 3 Dec., never to sit again.50 This reluctance to take the oaths and, apparently, to sit in the House after they were demanded of its members adds further weight to the allegations that he had Catholic sympathies. A few weeks after leaving the House he registered his proxy on 26 Dec. with his brother-in-law William Wentworth, 2nd earl of Strafford, husband of another of the 7th earl of Derby’s daughters. Dorchester’s own wife, Katherine, died of smallpox sometime in early January 1679, which may have been the cause for his departure from the House and no doubt abetted his retirement from public life.51
Dorchester was absent throughout the first Exclusion Parliament. On 18 Mar. and 21 Apr. 1679 his servants William Colgrave and Charles Pelham swore at the bar that the marquess was so ill that he could not attend the House without endangering his life. His absence may have helped in the decision to remove him from the Privy Council when it was reorganized in April to take in more members of the country opposition.52 He was still too ill (and perhaps too Catholic) to attend the second Exclusion Parliament, where another younger brother of the 6th duke of Norfolk, Charles Howard, emerged to annoy him. In his petition of 15 Nov. 1680 Howard wished the House to compel Dorchester to waive his privilege so that he could be taken to law for his collaboration with Norfolk concerning the disposition of the barony of Greystoke in Cumberland, part of the lands entrusted to the marquess by the 22nd (or 15th) earl of Arundel for the benefit of his younger children. Dorchester’s servants appeared once again before the House on 20 Nov. to swear to their master’s debilitating illness and inability to answer the petition in person, but his written answers were submitted.53 The House was too busy with the exclusion bill and other controversial matters to pay much attention. The petition progressed no further before Dorchester’s death, but it did ultimately result in the landmark ruling on perpetuities.
Charles Goodall described fittingly in great medical detail the onset and progress of the gangrene of the leg which led to Dorchester’s death on 8 December. Goodall had good reason to lavish praise on Dorchester in his biographical sketch, for the marquess had long been a benefactor of Goodall’s cherished Royal College of Physicians and in his will bequeathed it ‘perhaps the best library for physics, mathematics, civil law, and philology in any private hand in this nation, for a choice collection of books, to the value of above £4,000’.54 The marquess died with only two surviving daughters, one in disgrace with illegitimate children and the other unmarried. The latter, Grace, was bequeathed his personal estate in his will of 22 Mar. 1680, while Anne, Lady Roos, who survived until 1697, was not even mentioned. Dorchester left numerous individual bequests, totalling around £900, to his many servants and various nephews and nieces, the children of his brother William, who were the main beneficiaries of the marquess’s death. Without a legitimate male heir, Dorchester’s marquessate became extinct while the earldom of Kingston passed to his great-nephew Robert Pierrepont, grandson of William Pierrepont, who had died on 17 July 1678. Pierrepont became 3rd earl of Kingston and re-united the large Pierrepont estate which had been split between Henry and William at their father’s death.
C.G.D.L.- 1 TNA, PROB 11/365.
- 2 CSP Dom. 1673, pp. 413-14.
- 3 Nottingham Bor. Recs. v. 435, 438.
- 4 LCC Survey of London, xvii. 86-89.
- 5 LCC Survey of London, xlvi. 250, 254.
- 6 Much of this biography is based on Munck, Roll of the Royal College of Physicians, i. 281-92.
- 7 Clarendon, Rebellion, ii. 185-86, 327; Add. 6851, ff. 104, 110, 115.
- 8 Clarendon, Rebellion, iii. 469.
- 9 CCC, 1472-73; HMC 6th Rep. 165.
- 10 HMC 5th Rep. 145.
- 11 Munck, Roll, i. 282, 289.
- 12 Nicholas Pprs. i. 306-7.
- 13 Sloane 1417-22, 2118-19, 2346, 3575-76.
- 14 Munck, Roll, 288.
- 15 Belvoir, Rutland mss, Add. 91, nos.1-30; L. Stone, Road to Divorce, 309-10.
- 16 Belvoir, Rutland mss, vol. xviii, f. 58.
- 17 The Lord Marquesse of Dorchester’s Letter to the Lord Roos, with the Lord Roos’s Answer thereunto, (1660).
- 18 Chatsworth, Cork mss misc. box 1, Burlington diary, 18 Jan. 1660; Bodl. Clarendon 72, ff. 89, 376; CCSP, iv. 686.
- 19 Burlington Diary, 4, 5 May 1660; HMC 5th Rep. 149.
- 20 CCSP, v. 21.
- 21 HMC Heathcote, 145; Bodl. Carte 222, ff. 54-55.
- 22 Munck, Roll, i. 285.
- 23 TNA, SP 29/49/97.
- 24 Munck, Roll, i. 284.
- 25 TNA, PC 2/55.
- 26 Carte, Life of Ormonde, ii. 227.
- 27 CCSP, v. 117; TNA, PRO 31/3/109, pp. 170-6, 192-93.
- 28 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, pp. 49-51.
- 29 Burlington Diary, 10 Aug. 1660.
- 30 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, pp. 70, 76, 85.
- 31 HMC Ormonde, n.s. iii. 113.
- 32 Belvoir, Rutland mss, vol. xviii, f. 58.
- 33 HEHL, EL 8398.
- 34 Belvoir, Rutland mss, Add. 91, nos. 30-35.
- 35 HMC 7th Rep. 166; Notes which passed, 66.
- 36 Stone, Road to divorce, 310-11.
- 37 Burlington Diary, 24 Oct., 14 Nov. 1666.
- 38 HMC Rutland, ii. 8.
- 39 Clarendon, Life, iii. 153-54; Pepys Diary, vii. 414-15; Carte 46, f. 428; HMC 8th Rep. pt. 1, 106.
- 40 Seaward, Cavalier Parlt. 268-9.
- 41 Survey of London, xlvi. 250, 254.
- 42 CSP Ven. 1674-5, p. 357.
- 43 Williamson Letters, i. 54.
- 44 HMC 9th Rep. pt. 2, 60.
- 45 CSP Dom. 1675-6, p. 587; 1676-7, pp. 392-3; Eg. 3348, f. 77.
- 46 HEHL, EL 8418.
- 47 State Trials, vii. 157-8; HEHL, EL 8419.
- 48 Carte 79, ff. 37-38; Browning, Danby, i. 215.
- 49 HMC 9th Rep. pt. 2, 86.
- 50 Carte 81, f. 388.
- 51 Chatsworth, Devonshire Coll. Group 1/F, newsletter to Devonshire, 14 Jan. 1679; Verney ms mic M636/31, newsletter, 19 Jan. 1679.
- 52 HMC Var. ii. 394.
- 53 HMC Lords, i. 195.
- 54 Munck, Roll, i. 282-3, 290-2.