cr. 8 Nov. 1645 Bar. GERARD of Brandon; cr. 21 July 1679 earl of MACCLESFIELD
First sat 15 June 1660; last sat 5 Jan. 1694
b. c.1618, 1st s. of Sir Charles Gerard of Halsall, Lancs. and Penelope, da. of Sir Edward Fitton, Bt, of Gawsworth, Cheshire.1 educ. Leiden Univ. 1634,2 G. Inn 1672. m. bef. 1 Dec. 1656 Jeanne (d. 28 Sept. 1671), da. of Pierre de Civelle, equerry to Queen Henrietta Maria, 2s., 3da.3 d. 7 Jan. 1694; admon. 26 Apr. 1694 to heir Charles Gerard, 2nd earl of Macclesfield; 2 Dec. 1701 to Fitton Gerard, 3rd earl of Macclesfield; 5 Jan. 1703 to Charlotte Orby, w. of Thomas Orby, da. of Charles, 2nd earl of Macclesfield.4
Gent. of bedchamber 1649-81;5 PC 14 Feb. 1689-d.; commr., disorders in fleet July 1690.6
Commr. array Lancs. 1642; kpr. Enfield Chase, Mdx. 1661-d.;7 freeman, Preston by 1682;8; ld. pres., Council of Wales Mar.-July 1689;9 ld. lt., N. Wales, S. Wales, Glos., Herefs., Mon., Bristol 1689-d.; cust. rot., Herefs., Mon., Brec. 1689-d.
Col., regt. of ft (roy.) 1642-5,10 c.-in-c., S. Wales and Mon. (roy.) 1644-5,11 lt-gen., horse (roy.) 1645;12 vice-adm., fleet (roy.) 1648-9; capt., 1st tp. of Life Gds. 1657-68;13 c.-in-c., Portsmouth. and I.o.W., Jan.-Aug. 1667; capt., tp. of horse May-Aug. 1667; col., regt. of horse Feb. 1678-Jan. 1679; lt.-gen., English army May 1678-Oct. 1679.14
Associated with: Halsall House, Lancs.,15 Gawsworth Hall, Gawsworth Cheshire; Chiswick House, Acton, Mdx (from 1668);16 Gerard (Macclesfield) House, Gerrard St., Westminster (from 1682).17
Likenesses: oil on canvas by P. Lely (studio of), c.1645, National Galleries of Scotland, PG 1108; oil on canvas by W. Dobson, c.1645, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, NZ; miniature, oil on copper, National Trust, Calke Abbey, Derbys.
Cavalier general, 1642-67
Charles Gerard was a great-grandson of Elizabeth I’s attorney-general Sir Gilbert Gerard‡, who established the family seat at Gerard’s Bromley in Staffordshire. The main branch of the family was represented by the Barons Gerard of Gerard’s Bromley; Charles was of a cadet branch which had been established in Halsall in Lancashire since his father bought the estate in 1625. He raised a foot regiment for the king at the commencement of the Civil Wars and was quickly in the thick of the fighting. He caught the eye of Charles I’s nephew and leading commander, Prince Rupert, later duke of Cumberland, who made him commander-in-chief of the royalist forces in the six counties of south Wales. During his campaign there of 1644-45 Gerard became renowned both for his effective military tactics and for his brutality. In the face of complaints from the local population of Gerard’s excessive exactions, Charles I, taking refuge in Wales after the defeat at Naseby, was forced to dismiss him from this post. He compensated him by putting him in charge, as lieutenant-general, of all the cavalry remaining in the royalist army and by creating him on 8 Nov. 1645 Baron Gerard of Brandon, Suffolk. He had no known connection with Suffolk, and Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, who is hostile to Gerard throughout his history of the civil wars, claimed that he chose that title after reasoning that ‘because there was once an eminent person called Charles Brandon, who was afterwards made a duke, he would be created baron of Brandon, that there might be another Charles Brandon who had no less aspiring thoughts than the other’.18 Gerard remained principally loyal to his patron and commanding officer Rupert, sharing his temporary disgrace in late 1645 and later joining him in exile after the fall of Oxford the following year.
In late 1648 he was appointed vice-admiral, under Rupert, of the royalist navy at Helvoetsluys. He did not sail with the fleet in January 1649, though, and remained at The Hague where shortly after the execution of Charles I he was made a gentleman of the bedchamber to the new king.19 Gerard spent much of the 1650s either in the service of the French army or wandering between the courts and capitals of northwest Europe. It was during this period that he married the Frenchwoman Jeanne de Civelle, daughter of an equerry to the queen mother Henrietta Maria. By 1657 he was back at the court of the exiled Charles II, when he was commissioned to raise a troop of horse to serve as life guards to the king. 20 As captain of this body Gerard led his troops into London at the restored king’s triumphal entry into the capital on 29 May 1660. His positions as captain of what was now considered the first troop of the Life Guards and as gentleman of the bedchamber in the restored regime were confirmed shortly afterwards. He soon received other marks of royal favour. On 29 July he was granted the reversion of the office of remembrancer of first fruits and tenths and on 15 May 1661 he was made keeper of Enfield Chase, although this latter post was to engage him for many years in suits with William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, who also had claims to the office. He received a pension of £100 charged on the customs receipts from 1662 and at the end of that year briefly served as an envoy-extraordinary to the court of France. His French wife was made a lady-in-waiting to the queen, Catherine of Braganza, although she was to lose this position in March 1663 for the folly of telling the queen details of the king’s affair with Lady Castlemaine. 21
Gerard of Brandon first sat in the Convention on 15 June 1660, where he immediately set to work reclaiming and augmenting his estate with the same determination which he had shown during the wars. Three days after his first appearance the House ordered his estate to be discharged from sequestration. He then moved to have a bill passed confirming to him the restoration of all his estates held as of 23 Oct. 1641. His request was exempted from the restrictions of the pending indemnity bill. It was first introduced on 8 Aug. and committed five days later. It was delayed while the committee tried to set a date from which his ownership of the properties would be reckoned. This was eventually determined to be 20 May 1642, and the revised bill was passed by the House on 27 August. It was returned unamended from the Commons on 5 Sept. and received the royal assent eight days later.22 The success of his bill is in contrast to the similar bill of Gerard’s Lancashire neighbour and local rival Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby, which sought the forcible restitution of his lands sold under duress during the Interregnum. The principal difference between the bills, and the reason why Gerard’s quickly succeeded whereas Derby’s, after many twists and turns and attempts, ultimately failed, was that Gerard’s did not seek to reclaim lands which he had legally granted or sold during the 1650s. It sought only to reclaim those that had been illegally seized and confiscated by the ‘usurping’ authorities. Seeing this bill through appears to have been Gerard’s principal concern in the Convention. Otherwise, he does not appear to have been particularly active.
Gerard attended 43 per cent of the sitting days of the first session of the new Parliament elected in 1661. His position as an ex-cavalier keen to reward his old colleagues and punish his former enemies is suggested by his nomination to consider the bills to determine the pains and penalties for those excepted from the Act of Indemnity, to distribute the £60,000 raised for ‘loyal and indigent’ officers of the late war, and to repeal the acts of the Long Parliament. Identification of Gerard of Brandon’s activities in the House until the end of 1667 is slightly complicated by the intermittent presence there of his distant cousin Charles Gerard, 4th Baron Gerard of Bromley, but Gerard of Bromley sat infrequently and was not a major figure in the House. He missed some sessions altogether. Gerard of Brandon even held his cousin’s proxy from 13 June 1661 for the remainder of the 1661-62 session.23
During these early years of the Restoration Gerard of Brandon tried to augment his fortunes by acquiring the Gawsworth estate in Cheshire, lands that were to embroil him and his descendants in protracted, bitter and controversial litigation for almost a century. In 1643 Gerard’s maternal uncle, Sir Edward Fitton‡, 2nd bt., who owned the lucrative estate of Gawsworth, had died childless. In his will of 1641 Sir Edward had left the estate to a distant Irish cousin, William Fitton, in order to keep the family name attached to the property. Gerard pushed for his own right to the property through his mother, Fitton’s sister, but war and exile impeded his ability to do so and in the 1650s William Fitton’s son and heir, Alexander, who had sided with Parliament to secure possession, took over the property. When Gerard returned, high in the king’s favour, he worked to reverse this situation, with little regard to the legality of his means. In Cheshire itself he produced forged documents casting doubts on Fitton’s legal tenure of the estate.24 In May 1661 he brought in a bill in chancery against William and Alexander Fitton claiming that Sir Edward on his death bed had invalidated his 1641 will assigning the estate to the Fittons and in a later will of 1643 (only recently ‘discovered’) had bequeathed the property to Gerard. Lord Chancellor Clarendon (as Hyde had become) decreed in June 1662 that the validity of the first will had to be tried in king’s bench, and for this trial Gerard and his associates threatened and cajoled a notorious forger, Abraham Granger, to testify that he had forged the 1641 will on Alexander Fitton’s orders. Granger played his part well, the jury found in Gerard’s favour and chancery awarded the property to Gerard.25 Fitton decided to strike back and in 1663 arranged for the unlicensed publication of a short work, A True narrative of the Proceedings … between Charles Lord Gerard of Brandon and Alexander Fitton, esq, which took the form of Granger’s confession of his perjured testimony and of Gerard’s tactics to acquire it. 26 Gerard was incensed and took the matter to his peers in the House. After being almost entirely absent for the months of March to May in the session of 1663, Gerard began to attend assiduously from 12 June and on 20 June petitioned the House to take action against this libellous pamphlet against one of their own. Three days later, Granger’s writing having been submitted to the House, the matter was referred to the committee for privileges. On 26 June the Committee heard copious testimony (comprising seven folio sides in the committee minute book) from the parties involved in the publication of this work. All insisted it was an open and unsolicited confession of Granger, afflicted by a heavy conscience for what he had done to Fitton. Following the report the next day, the House resolved that Gerard was ‘free from any scandal mentioned in the said narration’ which was judged ‘to be a mere scandal, and a conspiracy and confederacy contrived by wicked persons, against the honour of his lordship, and false in every part’. When counsel for both Fitton and Gerard were heard at the bar on 2 July, the House further branded the publication ‘false, odious and infamous’, and declared that Gerard deserved reparations for the damage done to his reputation. A week later, after further argument from both counsel, the House passed down its heavy punishment on Fitton. He was to be fined £500, imprisoned in king’s bench until he could produce the elusive Granger for questioning and find sufficient sureties for his good behaviour. He also faced the additional threat of further legal action from Gerard, who was declared ‘clear and free’ of all the allegations in the libel. On 11 July the House further ordered that copies of the pamphlet were to be burned at both New Palace Yard in Westminster and in the market place in Chester, and that the content of the libel was not to be entered in the Journal 27 Fitton was unable to find the money or sureties to stand for him. He was imprisoned for his debt, where he remained for the next 20 years.
At the same time in July 1663 as Gerard’s proceedings against Fitton were occupying the House, George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, brought articles of impeachment against his old enemy, Clarendon. Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, forecast that Gerard of Brandon would oppose Bristol’s attempt against Clarendon, while a contemporary newsletter writer, Thomas Salusbury, placed Gerard among Bristol’s supporters. Both these conflicting reports are plausible. Bristol had been one of Prince Rupert’s foremost antagonists in the royalist camp during the Civil Wars and Gerard would have had little reason to countenance Bristol’s Catholicism or calls for religious toleration. A few days after the affair of the impeachment, Gerard of Brandon joined with other zealous Anglicans in signing, on 25 July, the protest against a measure that would allow those subscribing to the Act of Uniformity to limit their agreement with its terms only to outward practice and obedience.28 Yet there are other indications that Gerard’s dislike of Clarendon was longer-lasting and stronger. They had quarrelled during the years of exile and Samuel Pepys‡ later heard of an incident from the early days of the Restoration when Gerard reported to the king some unwise comments the lord chancellor had made about him.29 Thomas Salusbury, placed Gerard among Bristol’s supporters drawn from ‘the nobility, disobliged (not to say abused) by the chancellor’, who were discontented with the scant reward they had received at the Restoration.30
After the prorogation of 27 July Alexander Fitton’s three accomplices in the publication of the libel against Gerard – Edward Lloyd, John Cade and John Wright – were also arrested. Upon their pardon and release by order of the king in August they adamantly refused to pay the serjeant-at-arms and other of the House’s officials the accustomed fees, ‘accompanied with high and threatening language’. During the following session, on 9 May 1664, the House heard the petition of its officials against this treatment and ordered that these three were to pay the officers the fees owing them or risk being recommitted.31 He came to just under half of the sittings of the following session of 1664-65 and to only five of the sitting days of the session of October 1665. He was present in Westminster Hall on 30 Apr. 1666 when he was part of the court of the lord high steward to judge in the trial of Thomas Parker, 15th Baron Morley, whom he found not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter.32
Gerard once again attended just under half of the sittings in 1666-67. On 30 Oct. 1666 he was assigned to be part of the delegation from the House to present the king with the address requesting the prohibition of French imports and the following day he joined John Belasyse, Baron Belasyse, in introducing Richard Arundell, to the House as Baron Arundell of Trerice. During this session his opposition to Clarendon was revealed once again. On 10 Nov. 1666 Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, included Gerard in a list of royal servants acting against the wishes of the lord chancellor and the court by aggressively supporting the Irish cattle bill.33 On 27 Nov. he registered his proxy with George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, the leading advocate of the bill and one of Clarendon’s particular adversaries in the House. This proxy was vacated by Gerard’s return to the House on 5 December. On 20 Dec. he was added to the existing committee assigned to draw up reasons for insisting on the House’s rejection of the word ‘nuisance’ in the Irish cattle bill. On 3 Jan. 1667 Gerard, recently commissioned general of the militia entrusted to defend Hampshire and the Isle of Wight from a Dutch invasion, was granted leave to be absent for a time. That same day Gerard gave his proxy to his new military commander-in-chief, Prince James, duke of York, but it was not entered in the proxy register until 8 January.34 On 7 Feb. York presented Gerard’s complaint that two of his menial servants had been assaulted in March 1665, during time of privilege of Parliament.35 The matter, though, was quickly dropped by the prorogation the following day. Following the peace with the United Provinces during the summer, Gerard came to 82 per cent of the meetings in the winter of 1667, which saw the impeachment of Clarendon by the Commons. Gerard joined in the attack and signed the protest of 20 Nov. against the decision not to commit Clarendon without specific articles of treason laid against him. On 7 Dec. he was placed on the large committee to consider the bill for banishing and disabling the former lord treasurer.
The William Carr affair, 1667-71
By that time Gerard himself was mired in controversy and distrust and had himself become a target of the Commons. As early as 1663 the king himself began to have suspicions that Gerard was using his company of the Life Guards and the pay allotted to them for his own profit. In October 1663 Pepys recorded that when Charles II decided to muster his own Guards himself ‘he found reason to dislike their condition to my Lord Gerard, finding so many absent men or dead pays’. On 9 Dec. 1667 the stationer John Cade, who had already been punished for his involvement in the publication of Fitton’s libel in 1663, told Pepys ‘my Lord Gerard is troubled for several things in the House of Commons’, which prompted Pepys to comment that ‘it seems this lord is a very proud and wicked man’. 36 Cade knew of the petition that William Carr, former clerk of Gerard’s company of Guards, had tried to submit to the House of Commons that day. Carr alleged that for at least the past six years he had been advancing Gerard for his own use large sums of money, at least £2,000 p.a., from the pay intended for the Guards, and that Gerard had been selling offices in the Guards for a healthy profit. When he had recently confronted Gerard to settle his account, the baron had threatened ‘that if he [Carr] ever spoke or revealed the advantage of the profits of the troop, and would not comply with his lordship’s desires, he [Gerard] would rip up his guts, and could now hang him, for that he was now a general, and could hang and draw, and none could question him’. Carr alleged that Gerard had sent troops to his house to terrorize his family and to seize incriminating papers. Carr had fled abroad, which gave Gerard the opportunity to accuse him of desertion, but had recently returned under the protection of George Monck, duke of Albemarle. When Carr had first tried to present his petition before the Commons, some of Gerard’s thugs waylaid him en route to St Stephen’s Chapel, wounded him and seized his petition in the precincts of Westminster Abbey.37 Carr had his petition printed and distributed to members of the Commons before trying again on 16 Dec. and Pepys reported from Westminster on that day that the Commons were ‘very hot’ about the charges levelled in Carr’s printed petition. Unfortunately for Carr he had had his printed charges publicly distributed before first having presented them to the Commons. On that basis, on 17 Dec., the lower house decided not to commit the petition for further consideration.38
Gerard informed the House on 16 Dec. 1667 both of the paper’s derogation of a peer and of Carr’s insulting solicitation to the Commons alone. The petitioner saw the lower House as ‘the only hopes and protectors of England’, as his case could ‘be that of any commoner under the tyranny of a great lord’. Carr and his accomplices were interrogated before the committee for privileges on 17 Dec. and the day afterwards, following the report from committee, Carr was heard at the bar before the whole House. The lords sentenced him to be fined £1,000, while copies of the offending paper were to be publicly burned. Carr was sentenced to be placed in the pillory for three consecutive days at central locations in the metropolis, with a notice over his head detailing his offence: ‘For publishing several scandalous and libellous papers against the Lord Gerard of Brandon, a peer of this realm, and reflecting upon the honour and justice of His Majesty and the House of Peers.’39 Judging by Pepys’s reaction, the politically engaged public sided with Carr against the House’s draconian punishment. At Westminster on 19 Dec. Pepys heard ‘how the House of Lords with great severity, if not tyranny, ordered poor Carr (who only erred in the manner of the presenting his petition against my Lord Gerard, it being first printed before it was presented …) to stand in the pillory two or three times … and be imprisoned I know not how long’. He even reported the false rumour that the House had ordered Carr’s ears to be cut off. Pepys later saw Carr standing in the pillory at the Exchange, ‘the Lords having ordered this with great injustice, as all people think’.40 Carr did not accept his punishment quietly and sometime in very late 1667 or early 1668 publicized his allegations against Gerard and his mistreatment by the House in a work, An occasional dialogue at a coffee-house, between Philanax Britannicus, and Calophilus Anglus, two loyal English gentlemen, in which he adopted the authorial name ‘Coffo-Philo’.
Determined to rid himself of the troublesome Carr once and for all on 6 Feb. 1668 Gerard started proceedings against Carr in king’s bench under three indictments: felony (for desertion of his military service, even though Carr was never a soldier) and two of forgery.41 ‘All do say’, Pepys reported, ‘that my Lord Gerard, though he designs the ruin of this man, will not get anything by it’ and on 8 Feb. the diarist was able to record that ‘the great talk is of Carr’s coming off in all his trials, to the disgrace of my Lord Gerard to that degree, and the ripping up so many notorious rogueries and cheats of my Lord’s that my Lord it is thought will be ruined’. Pepys saw the whole Carr episode as emblematic of
the madness of the House of Commons … and much more, the base proceedings (just the epitome of all our public managements in this age) of the House of Lords, that ordered him to stand in the pillory for those very things, without hearing and examining, which he hath now, by the seeking of my Lord Gerard himself, cleared himself of in open court, to the gaining himself the pity of all the world, and shame for ever to my Lord Gerard.42
Previously the stationer John Cade had also told Pepys on 20 Jan. 1668, before Parliament resumed from its winter recess, ‘how my Lord Gerard is likely to meet with trouble the next sitting of Parliament, about Carr being set in the pillory, and I am glad of it’. 43 Gerard first sat in the reconvened session on 10 Feb. and came to 69 per cent of the sittings until the adjournment of 9 May. He was named to only two committees on legislation, and undoubtedly his principal concern during this time was the continuing turbulence over his and the House’s treatment of Carr. The Commons did harry him after his defeat in king’s bench and on 21 Feb. referred to its committee of grievances Carr’s new petition against the peer and revived consideration of a petition from Alexander Fitton first submitted on 12 Dec. 1667, which had not been dealt with at the time because of the press of Clarendon’s impeachment.44 Fitton’s petition questioned the House’s jurisdiction over him in 1663, while the allegations in Carr’s petition, concerning his knowledge of Gerard’s coercion of Granger to testify falsely in the Fitton case, were made publicly available, and Pepys thought that the petition ‘will, all do believe, ruin him [Gerard] – and I shall be glad of it’.45 The petition languished in committee for some time but was revived in early April, so that on 23 Apr. Gerard, informing the House that ‘scandalous informations against him [had been] exhibited to the House of Commons’, requested the leave of the House in order to defend himself before the Commons. Again, the petition probably became lost in the press of other business, but Carr took his battle with Gerard into other arenas and, perhaps with the assistance of Alexander Fitton, tried to lampoon Gerard and his blustering greed in an overdrawn farce, Pluto furens & vinctus, or, The raging devil bound, published in 1669 but perhaps performed as early February 1668.46 In 1670 an unlicensed and clandestine publication appeared (with a suspicious Amsterdam imprint), Carr’s Case, being a brief relation of the cause and sufferings of Mr William Carr. This was again submitted to the House of Commons, ‘who are the representatives of all the commons of England’, and included ‘a plea against the pretended jurisdictions and singular proceedings of the House of Lords, in which may be seen the just rights of every commoner and free-born subject of England’. It rehearsed Carr’s account of Gerard’s underhand dealings as captain of the Guards, and delighted in detailing his intemperate and violent actions, including the abusive language he directed towards his general, Albermarle, behind his back. The bulk of it was taken up with a detailed treatise, complete with references to legal precedents and extracts from Coke’s Institutes, taking issue with the House’s claims for original jurisdiction and denying its right to try commoners at all. Undoubtedly this was written with the ongoing fight between the two houses over Skinner v. East India Company in mind and in the arguments and petitions of 1668-71 what started out as a personal feud between Gerard and those he had wronged, such as Fitton and Carr, quickly took on larger constitutional issues because of Gerard’s reliance on his peers to punish those who dared to confront him on his corrupt practices.
By September 1668 the numerous allegations against Gerard had become too much even for his patron the king. Gerard agreed to sell his commission as captain of the first troop of Life Guards to the king’s natural son James Scott, duke of Monmouth, for £8,000 and to purchase Monmouth’s residence of Chiswick House in Acton.47 Furthermore, in September 1668 he was granted by John Cosin, bishop of Durham, the manor of Northallerton in Yorkshire.48 He had an existing interest there through his extended family, as his first cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard‡, bt, who had been a lieutenant in the Life Guards until dismissed with his captain in 1668, was married to one of Cosin’s daughters as well as being member for Northallerton in all of Charles II’s parliaments. He remained a close associate of Sir Gilbert Gerard throughout the subsequent years. Gerard of Brandon retained his position in the bedchamber, where he maintained his reputation for harshness and vindictiveness. In November 1668 he saw in the queen’s privy chamber a ‘Mr Cornewall’, who had testified against him before a parliamentary committee in the William Carr matter, and he ‘came across the room to him and swore desperately at him threatening him that his footmen or porters should slit his nose, etc.’ Cornewall took the matter to king’s bench with the result that ‘even soldiers and those of my lord’s own kindred very much blame my lord, and so hath his Majesty’. Years later the earl of Anglesey, coming into the king’s bedchamber for business on 5 Jan. 1674, was ‘saucily used by my Lord Gerard’ and reported this behaviour to the king once summoned to his presence.49
Court supporter, 1669-79
Gerard came to 57 per cent of the sitting days of both the sessions of 1669 and of 1670-71. He was most active in the latter session when he was named to 24 committees on legislation and two for investigation, including the large committee assigned in the first days of the session to investigate the fall of rents and decay of trade. On 13 Jan. 1671 he chaired the committee on the bill to allow the underage Edward Clinton, 5th earl of Lincoln, to settle a jointure of certain Lincolnshire manors on his prospective bride Dorothy, daughter of John Ferrers‡. He reported the bill as fit to pass the following day, but it soon became a moot point as the marriage failed to go through. 50 From the time of the turbulent session beginning 4 Feb. 1673 his attendance in the House increased substantially. He attended all but two of the meetings of the two sessions of 1673, when he was placed on four committees on legislation. He also held the proxy of Lionel Cranfield, 3rd earl of Middlesex, from 1 Mar. 1673 until vacated upon the earl’s return on 17 March. On 5 Mar. he was also placed on the large committee assigned to prepare an address of advice to the king regarding his referral of the controverted matter of the Declaration of Indulgence to ‘a parliamentary way by bill’. In the following session of early 1674 Gerard came to 86 per cent of the sittings and was named to three committees. At this time he was still a follower, or at least friend, of Buckingham, who had held his proxy back in December 1667. On 14 Jan. 1674 it was Gerard who presented to the House the duke’s answer to the petition of the trustees of the young Charles Talbot, 12th earl (later duke) of Shrewsbury, requesting the House to take action against Buckingham for the murder of Shrewsbury’s father and his continuing cohabitation with his mother.51 He was later, on 6 Feb., placed on the committee of 12 members assigned to determine the conditions of the security of £10,000 Buckingham and the dowager countess of Shrewsbury were to enter into to prevent them from cohabiting.
He attended 95 per cent of the sittings in spring 1675, with six committee nominations, including that for the bill to confirm letters patent for his colleague Prince Rupert. He held the proxy of Robert Montagu, 3rd earl of Manchester, from 28 May for the remainder of the session. He came to 80 per cent of the sittings in the session of autumn 1675, with only two committee nominations. The lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later marquess of Carmarthen and duke of Leeds), considered Gerard an important part of the ‘court and church’ party he was trying to construct. Something of Gerard’s importance to Danby may be suggested by his presence in a list of ciphered names in the lord treasurer’s correspondence, among such other important figures as the king, the duchess of Portsmouth and Roger Boyle‡, earl of Orrery [I].52 In the spring of 1675 Danby considered him as a court supporter of his controversial test bill, which aimed to further discriminate against those refusing to conform to the Church of England. He may even have intended Gerard to speak in the House for the bill. Certainly Gerard did not sign any of the protests against the measure, and he even requested from the clerk of the parliaments, John Walker, senior, a copy of the protest of 21 Apr. and its signatories, perhaps to know the bill’s enemies.53 Similarly Gerard in the following session voted against the motion of 20 Nov. for an address to the crown requesting the dissolution of Parliament.54 In the spring of 1677 Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, labelled the loyal courtier Gerard ‘vile’ in his political analysis of the House.
Shaftesbury drew up this list while imprisoned for making the claim when Parliament reassembled on 15 Feb. 1677 that the long prorogation of 15 months automatically led to a dissolution. Gerard himself was present for 87 per cent of the meetings of this session of 1677-78. He missed only one day of proceedings in the sittings of spring 1677, when he was named to 29 committees on legislation, as well as to the committee established on the second day of the session to investigate the circumstances of the publication of the libels arguing that Parliament was dissolved. He also held the proxy of John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, from 20 Feb. to 3 Mar. 1677. He was undoubtedly a prime mover in the bill to naturalize his children born in France during his exile, Charles Gerard, later 2nd earl of Macclesfield, and Elizabeth. In September 1678 the latter married Gerard’s distant cousin, the dissolute Digby Gerard, 5th Baron Gerard of Bromley, who, fortunately for the purposes of distinguishing Gerard of Brandon’s activities in Parliament, never sat in the House from the time of his succession in December 1667, as he only came of age in 1683 and died the following year in a drinking match. The bill for the Gerard children, first introduced on 21 Feb. 1677, was eventually replaced and superseded by a more general bill for the ‘naturalizing of children of his Majesty’s subjects born in foreign countries’, which was first read on 2 Mar. and reported from committee as fit to pass 11 days later. The Commons’ proviso to the bill was rejected when it was brought up to the House on 3 Apr. by Gerard’s cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard, but after a few conferences the Commons relented and Sir Gilbert was able to deliver another version of the bill on 9 Apr. of which the House approved. It received the royal assent on 16 Apr., the day of adjournment.55 On 13 Apr. Gerard was appointed to the committee to draw up heads for a free conference at which the House was to insist on its amendments to the bill to raise money for warships. He does not appear to have taken part in the ensuing conferences which saw the House, with great reluctance, recede from its amendments in order to ensure the passage of this supply bill in time for the adjournment. The session reconvened for business on 28 Jan. 1678. Gerard was present from the second day and proceeded to sit for 80 per cent of the sittings and was named to five committees. He again held Rochester’s proxy, from 31 Jan. to the peer’s return to the House on 25 February. Gerard, with the majority of the House, found Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, guilty of manslaughter in his trial in Westminster Hall on 4 April.56
On 23 Mar. he was placed on the committee to draw up reasons to be presented in conference why the House could not agree to the word ‘immediately’ in the Commons’ address to the king urging him to declare war on France. This is an indication that from this time Gerard’s contemporaries looked to him once more for his military expertise and experience. He was commissioned a colonel of his own regiment of horse for the threatened war with France on 15 Feb. 1678 and in May was made lieutenant general of all the English forces, perhaps on Monmouth’s recommendation. 57 It may have been because of this important military appointment that on 7 May 1678 Gerard took the oaths and subscribed to the declaration against transubstantiation required by the 1673 Test Act publicly in the House. He attended just over three-quarters of the sittings of May-July 1678, being appointed to 11 committees on legislation, and 80 per cent of the following session of the autumn of 1678, during which he was named to five committees on legislation. He was involved in the investigations into the Popish Plot. He and fellow military officer Thomas Butler, earl of Ossory [I] (Baron Butler of Moore Park), were assigned by the House on 8 Nov. to search the queen’s residence at Somerset House for arms, papers and Catholic servants of the queen. The following day they reported to the House that the only suspicious item they could find there was a box of cartridges in the rooms of one of the queen’s retainers, who claimed they were only to be used for fireworks. Gerard was later, on 11 Nov., placed on the committee to inspect the circumstances of these cartridges more fully. Fuelled by his dislike of Catholicism he went against the court temporarily by voting on 15 Nov. in favour of placing the declaration against transubstantiation under the same penalties as the oath of allegiance in the test bill. He himself took the necessary oaths and declarations according to the Test Act on 2 December. Otherwise he still acted as a follower of the court. On 26 Dec. he voted to insist on the House’s amendment to the disbandment bill, which would place the funds raised in the exchequer rather than the chamber of the City of London, and the following day he voted against Danby’s commitment.
Danby continued to consider the baron an ally in the House during the first Exclusion Parliament, and appears to have assigned him to be managed by his own son Peregrine Osborne, Viscount Osborne of Dunblane [S] (later 2nd duke of Leeds). Initially Gerard did not disappoint Danby’s expectations, as he was a diligent attender. He came to five of the six days of the brief and abortive session from 6 to 13 Mar. 1679 and then to 93 per cent of the session which eventually met for business on 15 Mar., during which time he was placed on five committees on legislation as well as the large committee to receive information regarding the Plot. Perhaps it was in his role as a member of this committee and a military commander that on 27 Mar. Gerard was delegated by the House to request the king to dismiss Humphrey Weld, suspected to be a Papist, from his command of Portland Castle. In the first weeks of the Parliament Gerard opposed the Commons’ attempt to commit and then, following Danby’s going into hiding, attaint the former lord treasurer. Gerard had little time for the Commons’ demand on 21 Mar. that Danby be committed immediately pending his impeachment proceedings. This would have forced the House to rescind its previous vote of 27 Dec. 1678 and the period of time they had set within which Danby was to remain at liberty to respond to the articles of impeachment. In a speech redolent of his brusque, abusive manner, and his bitter memories of the 1640s, Gerard argued:
All that I find to make any change in this matter is that the House of Commons comes now to prosecute the impeachment of my lord treasurer upon that which you have voted to be no treason. In ’41 the attorney general impeached the five members and he was clapped by the heels for doing it. We should have some regard therefore to ourselves. The other House as they called it, though they were cobblers and tinkers, they were concerned for one another. Let this noble lord have fair play for his life. Will you blow him away with noise and then say he is guilty? You have given [him] time for his answer, and we are now engaged by our word for seven days.58
In the first two weeks of April he consistently voted against the Commons’ bill threatening the former lord treasurer with attainder if he did not surrender himself once he had gone into hiding, as well as the House’s eventual and reluctant decision to agree with the attainder. Following Danby’s turning himself in Gerard took part in the debates throughout late April and May about the procedures to be followed in the trials of Danby and the five Catholic peers. On 24 Apr. he was placed on the committee to consider the response to the Commons’ objections to the answers submitted by these peers. Later, in a debate of 7 May 1679, he defended the right of the bishops to sit and vote in the House during trials which involved capital punishment, arguing that ‘when they are quiet the government [is] quiet. They have kept faithful to it’.59 He voted on 10 May with the majority against the motion to appoint a joint committee of both Houses to consider the methods of trying the impeached lords, and the following day acted as a manager at two free conferences which further discussed this matter. At the end of the second conference of the day, the House relented and agreed to a joint committee, to which Gerard was not appointed. On the day of prorogation, 27 May, he probably once again voted to affirm the right of the bishops to hear capital cases tried by the House.
Exclusionist and earl, 1679-89
Following the prorogation, and eventual dissolution, of Parliament, Gerard significantly altered his political allegiances. During the summer of 1679 he turned decisively against the Catholic duke of York, and began to espouse the cause of his friend and military colleague, the Protestant pretender Monmouth. There had long been signs of Gerard’s attachment to Monmouth and dislike of York such as when, in September 1678, he had refused to serve under York’s favourite, Louis de Duras, 2nd earl of Feversham, who was acting as Monmouth’s second in command.60 Gerard’s was one of the first regiments targeted for disbandment in January 1679, ‘by which you may see whose regiments they [the government] have least confidence of’.61 In June, when Monmouth was given command of the army to suppress the Scottish covenanters, he turned to Gerard and another rebel of September 1678, Christopher Monck, 2nd duke of Albemarle, to raise forces and serve under him.62 By the summer of 1679 Gerard was clearly a follower of Monmouth and his pretensions to the succession.
Seeing Gerard going over to Monmouth’s camp, Charles II tried to bind him more tightly to the court by raising him in the peerage. On 21 July 1679 Gerard of Brandon became earl of Macclesfield by letters patent. The title had been entered in the docket book originally as earl of Newberry but this was subsequently crossed out and replaced by Macclesfield.63 Gerard probably decided on the Macclesfield title, apparently at the last moment, as a way of reinforcing his claim to Gawsworth by linking him to the royal forest in Cheshire near that estate. Despite the honour, Macclesfield continued his close association with the duke and in September it was noted that he was the only person of Monmouth’s quality who attended him on board the ship that was to take him to his exile. It was further conjectured that Macclesfield, and not York, would replace Monmouth as general of all the forces, but this plan was quickly foiled when the privy council passed an order in October that disabled Macclesfield from ever acting as the duke’s deputy.64
In the second Exclusion Parliament the new earl of Macclesfield, introduced under that title on 21 Oct. 1680 between Charles Sackville, 6th earl of Dorset, and John Granville, earl of Bath, defended Monmouth’s pretensions and voted consistently for exclusion and other measures against Catholics in general and the duke of York in particular. He came to 86 per cent of the sittings of this session, was appointed to four committees on legislation. He was most noticeable on 15 Nov. when he took part in the debate on the exclusion bill brought up from the Commons. According to the rough jottings on the debate made by Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon, Macclesfield’s arguments all had a military and martial context, both in the concerns he expressed and the precedents and metaphors he used. ‘This bill may be good; with a bent sword one may hit an enemy’ was his first contribution to debate. He later raised the topic of the safety of the present king and those assigned to guard him, citing the precedent of the murder of Henri III of France by a ‘papist priest’. He both voted and protested against the motions leading to the rejection of the bill at its first reading that day. 65 A week later, on 23 Nov. he entered his protest against rejecting the establishment of a joint committee of both Houses to consider the state of the kingdom. On that same day he was added to the committee to draw up a Protestant Association against Catholic plotting. He voted the Catholic peer William Howard, Viscount Stafford, guilty of treason on 7 December. He also signed the protests of 7 Jan. 1681 against the attempts to save the lord chief justice, William Scroggs, from commitment and suspension from his office pending his impeachment.66 Macclesfield continued siding with the exclusionists in the third Exclusion Parliament, of which he attended all but one sitting. On 26 Mar. he was made a reporter for a conference discussing the suspect manner in which some bills had not received the royal assent in the previous session and he also protested against the decision to proceed against Edward Fitzharris by common law and not by impeachment. He was later one of the many spectators to attend the proceedings against Fitzharris in king’s bench on 7 May.67
In early 1681 it had been rumoured that the earl would be removed from all his offices at court. He temporarily ‘made his peace’ with the king, but at the end of August Macclesfield was dismissed as a gentleman of the bedchamber, as ‘the king is resolved thoroughly to purge his family from disaffected persons’.68 This only strengthened his commitment to the cause of Monmouth and the Whigs. He and his sons Charles Gerard, styled Viscount Brandon since his father’s elevation in the peerage (later 2nd earl of Macclesfield), and Fitton Gerard, later 3rd earl of Macclesfield, led Cheshire in giving Monmouth a rapturous reception during his visit to Chester in September 1682. 69 This trip was also potentially treasonous, in that it was in part a cover for Monmouth to consult with Macclesfield and his sons, as well as other Whig peers in Cheshire such as George Booth, Baron Delamer, about the plans being discussed for a joint rising in London and the west. According to the later testimony of the Whig turncoat Ford Grey, 3rd Baron Grey of Warke (later earl of Tankerville), Macclesfield was a prominent actor in the plans for a rising and was even given a prominent military command: it was intended that he should fall upon the rear of the king’s forces with his troops after a march through the capital. At one point he even, as Grey of Warke alleged, advocated York’s murder as a means to frighten the king. This suggestion apparently so horrified Monmouth, that he claimed that he ‘should never have any esteem for my Lord Macclesfield while he lived’.70 Nevertheless Monmouth was still dining in the company of Macclesfield and other Whigs (as recorded by Anglesey) in late May 1683. Following the discovery of the Rye House Plot, Macclesfield was anxious to kiss the king’s hand as an act of loyalty.71 Nevertheless the grand jury at the Cheshire assizes on 17 Sept. 1683 presented him, his son Brandon and about 30 other Whigs for disaffection to the government and for promoting sedition. George Jeffreys, later Baron Jeffreys, subsequently bound them over. Macclesfield, as usual, counter-attacked through litigation. In February 1684 he had the foreman of the jury, Sir Thomas Grosvenor‡, 3rd bt, and another of its members, John Starkey, arrested on charges of scandalum magnatum, seeking £10,000 in damages. The case was not heard before the Exchequer until April and was finally settled in November, when the court judged against Macclesfield, deciding that the grand jury was immune from such legal proceedings as ‘no action lies against an officer doing his duty’.72
In order to further its campaign against Macclesfield the government released Alexander Fitton from prison, where he had been languishing for over 20 years. Fitton presented a bill of review to chancery in late 1684 resuscitating the old dispute over the Gawsworth estate. Surprisingly, considering the political mood of the time, the lord keeper, Francis North, Baron Guilford, dismissed the bill on the basis that Fitton had waited too long to submit it for review. Fitton took advantage of the new Parliament of James II to appeal and brought in his petition for a reversal of chancery’s decree on 23 May 1685. It was referred to the committee for petitions which reported back on 27 May that the case should be heard before the whole House and that Macclesfield should submit his answer. On 1 June the House granted Macclesfield permission to print the statement of his case and his answer was read before the House two days later. After counsel for both sides had been heard before the bar on 5 June the House also decided against Fitton and dismissed his petition.73
Macclesfield was otherwise largely inactive in James II’s Parliament, although he came to 64 per cent of the sittings, and was named to eight committees, in what he must have perceived as a hostile environment. He does not appear to have been actively involved or implicated in Monmouth’s Rebellion. The duke’s agent Robert Cragg would later testify in December 1689 that when he was in the Netherlands in the spring discussing with Monmouth potential supporters in England, the duke expressed doubts as to whether Macclesfield would be willing to take up arms for his rebellion, ‘for he was old, and his blood was cool’.74 After Sedgemoor the government arrested Macclesfield’s son Brandon and confined him to the Tower for his suspected role in the uprising. Macclesfield appears to have initially been left at liberty, but his period of grace did not last long and by late August 1685, on the information of Grey of Warke, he was summoned to court for early September to answer for his previous involvement in Whig conspiracies.75 He was nowhere to be found and when he was absent at a call of the House on 16 Nov. the House passed an order demanding his presence by 7 Dec. ‘as he will answer the contrary to this House, at his uttermost Peril’. He was certainly out of the country by this point, finding a home at the court of William of Orange. In his absence, and unable to answer the charges against him, a sentence of outlawry was passed against him. Brandon had been condemned to death in November 1685 for his shadowy involvement in the rebellion but, after a long series of reprieves of execution, the king pardoned him in August 1687, largely in an attempt to enlist him as a dependent in his attempt to push through his religious policies in Lancashire. To bind Brandon to him more tightly, in January 1688 James granted him his father’s estate, which had been forfeited to the crown.76
Reprising his old role, Macclesfield became captain of William’s bodyguard in exile and during the descent on England entered Exeter with the prince and his other English followers ‘with all the grandeur and solemnity they could’.77 He led William’s bodyguard in the prince’s triumphant entry into the capital, just as he had done previously for Charles II, and continued in his position as one of William’s closest advisers, associates and dining companions.78 He was one of the 11 peers chosen by William to discuss what should be done with James after his return from Faversham following his abortive attempt at flight and at the meeting at Windsor Castle on 17 Dec. 1688 Macclesfield joined with other Whigs such as Henry Booth, 2nd Baron Delamer (later earl of Warrington), and Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, in insisting that the king should be placed in the Tower, for his attempt at flight amounted to a ‘dissolution of the government’ and an abdication of his kingship.79 George Savile, marquess of Halifax, noted that Macclesfield spoke in the debate on 24 Dec. on the whereabouts of the king, which led to the address of the lords to the Prince of Orange requesting him to take on the administration of public affairs and to summon a Convention. Halifax though did not record the content of Macclesfield’s intervention.80 Macclesfield’s own, perhaps ambivalent, attitude towards his part in the Revolution is revealed in an anecdote recounted later by Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, in his memoirs. Macclesfield (‘of a haughty spirit’) was furious in the early days of 1689 when John Churchill, Baron Churchill (later duke of Marlborough), dared to disband the regiment of horse commanded by Macclesfield’s son Brandon, which had been conferred on him by James II after his pardon. Ailesbury himself admitted that Brandon ‘never swerved from his duty, not even at the Prince of Orange’s landing, although his father came over with the prince, and in the Army with him’. For this reason Marlborough felt able to disband the regiment of a commander who showed insufficient ‘zeal’ for the prince and did not defect with his troops. ‘My Lord’, Ailesbury records Macclesfield expostulating to Churchill, ‘if my son had done such a base action, after having had his life given him so graciously, I would have been the first that would have shot him in the head. Hark you, my Lord, I have been a rebel for so acting against the king, but, by God, my Lord, I never was a traitor’.81
Convention, 1689
The Convention was by far the busiest period of Macclesfield’s long parliamentary career. He came to 88 per cent of the sittings, when already at the age of 70, and from the start was at the forefront of all affairs before the House. From January 1689 until his death five years later he was named to just about every committee established by the House on days when he was present. His increased activity was largely owing to his concern to ensure the establishment of the new Williamite regime, and to have his revenge on the Tories of the 1680s who had persecuted him. On the very first day of the Convention he was named to the committee of 14 assigned to draw up an address of thanks for William of Orange’s letter to the assembled members. Throughout late January and early February Macclesfield worked to ensure that William and Mary became king and queen. In the debate on the regency on 29 Jan. it was noted that ‘the Lords were very warm in their disputes’ and that Macclesfield contributed to the ‘several sharp speeches … some of which made the bishops a little uneasy’ made that day.82 On 31 Jan. he voted in the committee of the whole House in favour of the motion to insert in the resolution brought up from the Commons words declaring the prince and princess of Orange king and queen and, after the House had been resumed, signed the dissent from its rejection of the words ‘vacant’ and ‘that the throne is thereby vacant’. He continued to vote in favour of these words until they were eventually accepted by the House on 6 February. Two days later he was appointed a manager for the conference to draft the Declaration of Rights as well as the oaths which were to be sworn to the new king and queen. On 12 Feb. Macclesfield was again made a manager for a conference at which the House was to present to the Commons its draft of the proclamation declaring the new king and queen. The following day, William and Mary were offered the crown. On 1 Mar. he was placed on the committee of seven members assigned to draw up an answer to the king’s notification to the House that he had deemed it a necessity to detain more suspected enemies of the new regime. He was a manager for a conference on the Commons’ address to the king expressing their commitment to the king’s cause and their willingness to expend their lives and fortune to assist him, and was assigned on 8 Mar. to help compose and present to the king the House’s thanks to William’s response to this address.
For his support more rewards came his way. His outlawry was quickly reversed and he was sworn to the Privy Council on 14 February. He was made lord lieutenant of all the counties of Wales, both north and south, as well as of the border counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. In addition he briefly, and controversially, served as lord president of the council of Wales from 21 Mar. until its abolition in July. To these offices he added in October that of custos rotulorum of Herefordshire, Monmouthshire and Breconshire. His son Brandon was given the post of lord lieutenant of Lancashire so that, between them, father and son were entrusted with defending most of the long and vulnerable west coast of the country from invasion from Ireland. Both were energetic in their pursuit of Catholics and Jacobites in these areas and in promoting the selection of Whigs for local offices and for parliamentary seats, especially in bitterly divided boroughs such as Bristol, where Macclesfield took an especial interest. The copious correspondence of the Harley family, whose members were prominent in the administration of the Marcher counties, is peppered with references to Macclesfield and his activities there.83
Macclesfield also had his own concerns in the House. He was exercised over the derogation of the peerage and on 28 Jan., early on in the Convention, he complained to the committee for privileges that members of the Commons were daring to keep their hats on in the presence of peers. While he was certain of the inferior place of the commoners, he thought that the peers and the king were at the same level and that new year’s presents should be given reciprocally between members of the nobility and the king. He later asserted to the committee that the peers had long enjoyed the privilege of keeping their hats on in the presence of the king in the playhouse or the king’s chapel if he himself were covered. He continued to press for the rights of the peers to keep their heads covered in the presence of the monarch during further discussion of the matter in the committee of the whole House and in the committee for privileges. He was backed up by George Howard, 4th earl of Suffolk, and Peter Mews, bishop of Winchester, who could rely on their own memory of customs and procedures in Charles II’s court. This was enough for the committee for privileges and on 16 Apr. it was ordered to report to the House that ‘by the information of persons of great honour and credit that when the king was present at plays and put on his hat, the peers of the realm there present did so likewise, and also at such times when the king used to walk abroad covered, they did likewise cover’. However, no such official report appears in the Journal.84
Macclesfield, with his heightened sense of the peerage’s privilege, was even more concerned with what he saw as the inferior courts’ breach of privilege in their proceedings against the nobility (and himself in particular). On 28 Jan. in the committee for privileges he complained ‘that the peerage is invaded in their trials’, ‘that a peer hath not so fair a trial as a commoner’ and that the peers ought to be tried only in Parliament. Furthermore he pointed out that in times past a delegation from the House – two earls, one prelate and two barons – would attend the courts in Westminster Hall ‘to see wherein was any failure in justice’. These complaints, made in the first week of the Convention, may have been what helped to spur the House to consider the many bills of 1689-90 dealing with the regulation of trials and justice, both among the peerage and in the courts of Westminster Hall.85 Macclesfield himself was named to the select committee to consider the bill for regulating the trial of peers on 27 Feb. and in the committee of the whole House on 4 Mar. he was a teller for the division on the motion whether an amendment, concerning the minimum number of lords necessary to try a peer outside time of Parliament, should be maintained. His opposite teller was Stamford, another Whig.86 Macclesfield pursued his complaints against his treatment before the privy council and the court of king’s bench in the committee for privileges. On 22 Apr., he reported that he had been part of the delegation from the lords, first mentioned in his intervention on 28 Jan., to inspect the courts in Westminster Hall. That same day he produced a legal opinion regarding the illegality of the sentence of outlawry that was decreed against him in 1685, which the committee returned to him, ‘until he thinks fit to bring his own case (which he now takes notice of) in writing before the committee’. Shortly afterwards Macclesfield employed his friend from their Exclusionist days, Sir William Williams‡, bt, as his counsel to help him reverse the various judgments found against him in the period of the Tory reaction. Williams appears to have used Macclesfield as a witness in his own attempt to reverse the charge of scandalum magnatum laid against him in 1686.87 As other peers such as William Cavendish, 4th earl (later duke) of Devonshire, began to come forward with their stories of mistreatment by the courts under James II, Macclesfield and his grievances appear to have dropped from the forefront of the committee for privilege’s attention. 88 However, all these proceedings, and particularly Macclesfield’s initial examination of ‘the delays and grievances’ of the Westminster courts led eventually to the framing of the bill to redress irregularities in the courts, and Macclesfield maintained his interest in this issue during the long gestation of this and other acts concerning the reform of the legal system. On 17 Jan. 1690 he offered to the select committee considering the bill for irregularities in the Westminster courts a bill ‘for regulating the law’. Another bill introduced to the committee that day, perhaps by Macclesfield as well, was for the regulation of the courts of justice, and this was probably the genesis of the later ‘Act for the benefit of the subject regulating the practice and execution of the law’, to whose select committee Macclesfield was named on 5 Apr. 1690.89 His animus towards the courts, and the administration of justice in recent years, was clear. In late March 1690 Macclesfield suggested that ‘the twelve judges’ were obvious candidates for exemption from the indemnity bill.90
Macclesfield had other reasons to be aggrieved against his treatment in the courts during his exile under James II. In 1683 he had applied to chancery to redeem part of the Gawsworth estate which had been mortgaged in 1640 and which had been, for a consideration of £2,400, assigned to Alexander Fitton’s father-in-law William Joliffe as a trustee for Fitton and his wife, Joliffe’s daughter. Macclesfield tried to fight back after chancery decreed that he would have to pay this initial consideration of £2,400, with interest for all the ensuing years, as part of his redemption, but he could not pursue his defence after his flight. During this time Lord Chancellor Jeffreys voided the earl’s injunctions against Fitton’s proceedings and stopped the hearing of the master in chancery’s report on the case because of Macclesfield’s outlawry. Now Macclesfield took advantage of the more sympathetic political environment and on 15 Mar. 1689 submitted his appeal that these decrees against him be overturned. Fitton could not submit his answer because he was in Ireland in arms against the new regime, but the House decided on 20 Apr. to continue with consideration of the appeal in any case. Counsel was heard on 2 May and the following day the House ordered that the case be referred back to the commissioners of the Great Seal to rehear the case in chancery, as it transpired that no official decree had ever been enrolled by Jeffreys and the case involved the technicalities of chancery’s proceedings.91 Macclesfield was later at the receiving end of a petition as his estranged daughter-in-law Anne Mason, now separated from Brandon, submitted a petition on 13 July complaining that Macclesfield had never fulfilled his part of the original marriage settlement in suffering recoveries of various of his Cheshire lands for her jointure. She requested that Macclesfield be forced to waive his privilege in any impending legal action, but the House decided to leave the matter wholly in the hands of Macclesfield himself.92
Macclesfield was involved in a number of other pieces of legislation that came before the House. He was a teller on 25 Mar. 1689 for a division at the report stage of the bill to establish commissioners for the Great Seal and on 10 June he told in the division whether counsel should be called in as the House considered the case of Barnardiston v. Soames. In this latter case he also signed the protest of 25 June against the decision to uphold the Exchequer’s reversal of the original judgment. On 15 Mar. he was named to the committee to draft a clause for the bill for abrogating oaths which would remove the requirement of the sacramental test for holding office. On 20 Mar., when this clause was reported to the House from committee, he was a teller, Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, telling on the opposing side, in the division on whether to leave this clause unchanged. One month later, on 20 Apr., he and Charles Mordaunt, earl of Monmouth (later 3rd earl of Peterborough), were the only two peers to dissent from the House’s insistence on an amendment that would give the king the power to dispense incumbents in clerical livings from taking the oaths to the new regime. He was later appointed a manager for a free conference on this bill on 24 April.93 On 14 Mar. he was named to the select committee for the toleration bill and was a manager for a conference on the House’s amendments to this bill on 22 May. He was also a manager for conferences on the amendments to the bill for an additional poll held on 27 and 31 May. On 13 July he was placed on the committee to draw up reasons for the House’s insistence on its amendments to the Bill of Rights concerning the succession of the crown in the House of Hanover and three days later he helped to manage the conference where these reasons were presented. He was one of the signatories of a petition presented on 23 July to the Commons from Charles II’s former gentlemen of the bedchamber requesting that the grants and pensions bestowed on them in their letters patent not be infringed by the bill for settling the revenue by new impositions on sugar, tobacco, coffee and tea. He was sufficiently concerned by this bill that he reported to the House himself the results of a conference on 25 July at which the Commons explained in detail their opposition to the House’s amendments to the bill. He was later that day placed on the committee to draw up reasons for insisting on the amendments. He again served as representative of the House in a conference on the bill to attaint their majesties’ enemies held on 2 and 5 August. He and Stamford were delegated on 3 Aug. to attend the king to present him with an address requesting that a formal proclamation be issued demanding that Edward Griffin, Baron Griffin, surrender himself to the House. On 19 Aug. he was a teller, Nottingham again telling for the other side, in a division at the report stage of the bill to prohibit trade with France on the question whether to agree to a clause setting the price of French wines.94
The cause that seemed to exercise him most, though, was the attempt by the House to reject or place stringent conditions on the reversal of the two punitive judgments against Titus Oates of 1684 and 1685. When the case first came up in late May 1689 Macclesfield acted as one of Oates’s foremost defenders. On 25 May he protested against the resolution that Oates’s printed apologia, ‘The Case of Titus Oates’ was a breach of the privilege of the House and on 31 May he voted to reverse the two judgments and subscribed to the lengthy protest when this motion was rejected. He was appointed on 6 June to a committee of six members assigned with drafting an address requesting the king to grant a pardon to Oates, on the basis that he had already suffered sufficient punishment. The bill to reverse the judgments came up from the Commons in July and quickly became a point of contention in the House again. On 10 July Macclesfield was one of the 16 peers who dissented to all the decisions made that day in the debate on amendments to the bill. Two days later he subscribed to both parts of the lengthy and strongly-worded protest against the House’s amendments, which the protesters felt were too weak in their condemnation of the judgments, and the proviso which forbade him from ever testifying in a court of law again. The Commons also disagreed with the proviso and a series of conferences were held to discuss them. On 27 July the Commons requested another free conference on this matter for that day, but this request was rebuffed by the House, a decision which was greeted by another dissent signed by Macclesfield and a small band of five other determined Whig peers. The free conference was held instead on 29 July and upon its report the following day Macclesfield voted against insisting on the proviso. He entered his protest when the House decided instead to adhere to it.
Macclesfield continued his busy career in the House in the second session of the Convention, where he came to all but three of the meetings. In a list compiled by the marquess of Carmarthen (as Danby had become) between October 1689 and February 1690, he was reckoned to be an opponent of the court. In a debate on the Bill of Rights on 23 Nov., he was one of 12 who protested against the rejection of a proviso that would invalidate all royal pardons upon impeachments of the House of Commons which did not have the concurrence of both houses of Parliament. On 13 Dec. he was a teller, Monmouth telling for the opposing side, in the division in the committee of the whole House considering the bill for a land tax on the question whether to add a clause. On 11 Jan. he once again told, this time on the question whether to refer the debt at issue in the cause of Fountaine v. Coke to a trial at law.95 He was most concerned with the proceedings of the committee for inspections, established on 2 Nov. 1689 to search into the misdeeds of the Tory reaction and the reign of James II – the judicial ‘murders’ of leading Whigs, the quo warranto proceedings against corporations, and other such matters. Macclesfield was among the large group of peers nominated to attend this committee and in the House on 13 Nov. he was a teller in a division on the proposal to summon the infamous John Wildman‡ from the Commons to attend the committee in its enquiries. Grey of Warke (whose testimony in 1685 had earlier prompted Macclesfield’s flight to the Netherlands) told for the other side in this division.96 He was personally affected by the proceedings of the committee, especially when a sub-committee was established on 7 Dec. to hear the evidence of Robert Cragg, one of Monmouth’s agents in the spring of 1685, about the attempts of James II’s government to ‘suborn’ him after his arrest into testifying against Macclesfield, Delamer, Stamford and other associates of Monmouth. It appeared from Cragg’s testimony submitted to the committee and reported to the House on 11 Dec. that he knew nothing of any involvement of Macclesfield in the planned uprising and that the late government had not had the earl principally in its sights, concentrating its ire on Delamer.97 In this mood of invoking past injustices, Macclesfield on 23 Dec. insisted that the trial and judicial ‘murder’ of Stephen College should be examined by the House as well, after James Bertie, earl of Abingdon, had insisted that anybody who said that College’s trial had not been fair was a liar.98 On 23 Jan. 1690 Macclesfield also dissented from the decision to remove from a clause in the bill to restore corporations the statement that the surrendering of charters to Charles II and James II had been illegal, for ‘the putting out those words seems to be the justifying of the most horrid action that king James was guilty of during his reign’.
William III’s Parliament, 1690-94
Macclesfield, lord lieutenant of all of Wales and the marcher counties, tried to exercise a political interest for Whig candidates during the elections to William III’s first Parliament in the spring of 1690. However, he often found himself up against long-entrenched local and regional interests with which he, as an interloper, could not successfully compete. His greatest interest may well have been in the Shropshire borough of Ludlow, where he had been based as lord president of the council of Wales before its abolition in July 1689. Here he was able to see through the election of the Whig, and former Exclusionist, Silius Titus‡, in a by-election in January 1691, after the first election which had seen the return of two Tories (and the defeat of his younger son Fitton) had been declared void.99
Macclesfield himself missed only one sitting throughout the brief session of spring 1690 and on 5 Apr. registered his protest against the House’s decision to amend wording in the bill for making the Convention a full Parliament. He also dissented from the decision of 13 May not to allow counsel for the City of London more time to prepare and present their case regarding James II’s quo warranto proceedings against the corporation. Much of his attention in this session was taken up with his further litigation against his political enemies from the previous reign. On 7 Dec. 1689 Macclesfield had brought in a writ of error against the judgment found against him in Exchequer in 1684 concerning his bill of scandalum magnatum against the members of the Cheshire grand jury. He named one of these jurymen, John Starkey, as the defendant in his writ. Starkey did not submit his answer quickly and the hearing of the case was constantly postponed. Even when counsel were to be heard before the bar on 11 Apr. 1690, only one representative for Starkey appeared and quickly admitted that he was insufficiently instructed in the case and requested another postponement.100 Counsel was finally heard at the bar on 15 April. In the hearings between 15 and 25 Apr. before the House and in the select committee appointed to consider the matter, the question quickly went beyond the actual merits of Macclesfield’s writ of error and to larger constitutional issues concerning the House’s original jurisdiction, Macclesfield having submitted his writ to the House before lodging an appeal in exchequer or any other inferior court. The question the House put to the committee considering the matter upon its report of 21 Apr. was ‘whether the Lords may proceed to correct errors before they have been brought before the treasurer and chancellor in the Exchequer chamber’. The House eventually agreed with the opinion of the lord chief justice, Sir John Holt, that the writ ‘does not lie in Parliament till a judgment be given in the exchequer chamber’. On 25 Apr. it was ordered that Macclesfield’s writ should be withdrawn and returned to the exchequer, to follow the ordinary course of law.101
The period between sessions saw the disastrous Allied defeat at the naval battle of Beachy Head on 30 June 1690. The investigation into the debacle was assigned to a committee consisting of Macclesfield, Thomas Herbert, 8th earl of Pembroke, Sir Robert Howard‡, Sir Henry Goodricke‡ and Sir Thomas Lee‡, which on 19 July reported that the English admiral, Arthur Herbert, earl of Torrington, alone had been responsible for the defeat.102 Macclesfield’s attendance declined slightly in the 1690-91 session of Parliament beginning on 2 Oct. 1690, as he came to only 78 per cent of the meetings. On 6 Oct. he voted against the discharge of James Cecil, 4th earl of Salisbury, and Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, from their imprisonment in the Tower. Carmarthen commented that he was ‘easy for the reasons of the earl of Bath’, that is ‘ made [to] follow the king's mind by what he holds under him’.103 On 30 Oct. he signed the protest against the passage of the bill to clarify the powers of the Admiralty commissioners to conduct Torrington’s court martial with the same powers as a single lord high admiral. Despite his part in the damning report of Torrington’s conduct, Macclesfield appears to have been concerned by the retroactive justice inherent in the bill, by which Torrington would be tried by an authority which had not existed at the time he had committed the offences with which he was charged. He may also have been concerned at Torrington’s loss of privilege of peerage, as he could now be court martialled, and perhaps even executed, by a collection of commoners.104 On that same day, 30 Oct., Macclesfield also dissented from the decision to discharge Salisbury and Peterborough from their bail. On 18 Dec. he was made a manager for a conference on the bill to prevent Salisbury from cutting off his entail. He also continued his long-held interest in the reform of the courts and legal system. On the last day of October he was added to the committee considering a bill for the regulation of the court of Chancery and on 29 Nov. he was named to another committee assigned after debate in a committee of the whole House to consider the bill as it then stood in order to determine whether it should be amended or an entirely new bill introduced.
His attendance dropped off significantly in the 1691-92 session, down to 40 per cent. This was most likely because he was ‘sick’, the reason given for his absence at a call of the House on 2 Nov. 1691. He assigned his proxy on 28 Nov. to John Vaughan, 2nd Baron Vaughan (3rd earl of Carbery [I]), who like Macclesfield had an interest in the government of Wales. It was vacated on 29 Dec. on Macclesfield’s return to the House. He was back to his usual level of attendance in 1692-93, when he came to 87 per cent of the sittings. During this session he was involved in the investigation into the state of the armed forces that followed William III’s request in his speech to both houses for ‘advice’ in the further conduct of the war, as the Allies had suffered a series of disasters and disappointments in both land and sea campaigns the previous summer. The Prussian envoy reported to his masters that in the last days of November 1692 Macclesfield, ‘a great Whig and not at all a Jacobite’, told the committee of the whole House that although he had previously been a general, his great age now gave him the liberty to say whatever he liked without being suspected of any interest. He then launched into an attack on the predominance of the Dutch: ‘it was true that they placed Dutchmen everywhere, and that he did not despair of seeing a Dutchman as secretary of state, nor even to see others as bishops’. These ‘sarcasms’, as Bonet termed them, contributed to the ‘advice’ of the House requesting the king to limit the appointment of general officers in the army to those born in England.105 On 7 Dec., Macclesfield joined the protest against the decision not to establish a joint committee with the Commons to examine the papers on the conduct of the summer’s naval campaign submitted by Secretary of State Nottingham. Three days later he was placed on the House’s own committee to study the papers. On 20-21 Dec. he participated in conferences with the Commons dealing with these papers and the committee’s findings, and in the second conference the Commons took the unusual step of announcing its vote praising the admiral of the previous summer’s campaign, Edward Russell, later earl of Orford. This was seen as unprecedented as the Commons’ vote had been unsolicited and was not the ostensible subject for which the conference had been convened. On 22 Dec. Macclesfield was a member of the large committee assigned to search for precedents for such behaviour in conferences and a week later, after the committee’s report, he was again placed on the committee to consider whether the Commons had acted ‘according to usual proceedings’. The committee reported the following day and a conference on this matter, for which Macclesfield was a manager, was held on 4 Jan. 1693.
By this time other matters were preoccupying Macclesfield and the House. Macclesfield voted to commit the controversial place bill on the last day of December 1692, but when the vote for its passage came on 3 Jan. 1693 he was, according to Ailesbury, one of those ‘lords that went away and for the bill’. This view is corroborated by Bonet, who claimed that Macclesfield, ‘although a great Whig, wished to please the court and absented himself’ from the vote.106 The previous day he had voted against giving a reading to the divorce bill of Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk. On 19 Jan. he joined over 20 other peers in objecting to the House’s abandonment of its amendments to the land tax bill. He subscribed to the dissents from the resolution to recede from them without even referring them to consideration by the committee for privileges. In February Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, who in 1691 had married, and then quickly separated from, Macclesfield’s grand-daughter Charlotte Orby, appeared before the House accused of the murder of William Mountfort. Whatever Macclesfield may have felt about Mohun’s abandonment of his grand-daughter, he acquitted the young man of murder.107 On 6 Mar. the earl was one of nine peers dissenting from the decision not to communicate to the Commons the informations about the deplorable state of government and the military in Ireland heard at the bar four days previously. He further subscribed his name to the protest of 8 Mar. against rejecting provisos to the bill for reviving the Licensing Act which would allow printers to publish books without a license from the Stationers’ Company, providing that the author’s and printer’s name were printed in the book. In the very last days of the session he was involved in conferences. On 10 Mar. he was appointed a reporter for the discussions on the House’s amendments to the duchy of Cornwall bill and after the report of the conference he was placed on the committee to draw up reasons why the House insisted on its amendment. Four days later he was again a reporter, this time for the conference on the amendments to the bill to prohibit trade with France and to encourage privateers, after which the House agreed with the lower house’s changes so the bill could pass before the prorogation of that day.
When Parliament resumed on 7 Nov. Macclesfield was as active as usual. His involvement was cut short by his death two months later, having attended 35 sittings. During those final two months he chaired a meeting of the committee for privileges on 20 Nov. which heard the petition for breach of privilege of Piers Mauduit, Windsor Herald at Arms. It was probably Macclesfield who reported to the House the next day the committee’s decision that Mauduit should receive privilege of Parliament. This matter may have been the source of the debate two days later, on 23 Nov., on the rights of the king’s servants, when Macclesfield protested against the House’s resolution that it would not receive any further petitions for protection from the king and queen’s servants. On 13 Dec. he was one of only seven who dissented from the House’s affirmation of the court of king’s bench’s judgment in favour of Simon Harcourt‡ in the case of Fox v Harcourt.108 His suspicion of the inferior courts of Westminster Hall may again be evident in his protest of 22 Dec. against the resolution to allow Isabella, dowager duchess of Grafton, and her trustee William Bridgeman, to withdraw their petition in the cause Bridgeman v Holt. He and his fellow protesters thought an order should have been given to investigate further the previous proceedings in this cause in king’s bench so that a criminal prosecution could be brought against that court’s judges. In the first week of 1694 he was still busy in the House. On 3 Jan. he was a manager for the conference concerning the Smyrna fleet disaster the previous summer and two days later, his last in the House, he was again a manager for a conference on the amendments to the place bill, after which the House agreed with the clause proposed by the Commons.
On that same day, Friday 5 Jan., he enjoyed a dinner with the king and the visiting dignitary Prince Louis of Baden, but shortly after he was overtaken with a fit of vomiting. He died during the night of Sunday 7 Jan., ‘not having been sick two hours’. He was 75 years old, and a correspondent of Sir Ralph Verney‡ marvelled that ‘my lord Macclesfield has lived as fast as any man, therefore I wonder he attained to old age’.109 He died intestate but his eldest son and heir apparent Viscount Brandon was entrusted with the administration of the estate.110 The new earl of Macclesfield inherited the estates and houses in Lancashire, Cheshire and Gerard Street in Westminster. He also inherited his father’s ruthless and determined character, which had served Macclesfield well on the battlefield, but often to less advantage in the courts of Westminster Hall and in the House of Lords.
C.G.D.L.- 1 Baines, Lancashire, ed. Croston, iv. 376-77.
- 2 Peacock, English-speaking students at Leyden University, 40.
- 3 Baines, Lancashire, ed. Croston, iv. 376-7.
- 4 TNA, PROB 6/70, f. 55, PROB 6/77, f. 118, PROB 6/79, f. 7v.
- 5 A. Keay, The Magnificent Monarch, 223; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 240; 1680-81, p. 185; Bodl. Tanner 36, f. 106; Castle Ashby mss, 1092, newsletter, 28 July 1681.
- 6 CSP Dom. 1690, p. 62.
- 7 CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 237, 588.
- 8 Preston Burgesses (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. ix), 180.
- 9 HMC Lords, iii. 371; ii. 109.
- 10 TNA, SP 29/159/45; Warburton, Rupert and Cavaliers, ii. 237.
- 11 Warburton, Rupert and Cavaliers, iii. 119-20.
- 12 Newman, Roy. Officers, 151; Symonds's Marches of Royal Army (Cam. Soc. lxxiv), 225, 242, 249.
- 13 CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 240; 1667-8, p. 560.
- 14 HMC Lindsey, 33.
- 15 VCH Lancs. ii. 195-6.
- 16 VCH Mdx, vii. 74.
- 17 LCC Survey of London, xxxiv. 380-84, 396-97.
- 18 Clarendon, Rebellion, iv. 71-72, 76-77.
- 19 Keay, Magnificent Monarch, 223.
- 20 Nicholas Pprs. i. 195; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 3, 240.
- 21 HMC 5th Rep. 184; CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 135, 187, 237, 588; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 461; British Diplomats, ed. Bell, 116; CSP Ven. 1661-4, p. 219; Pepys Diary, iv. 68.
- 22 PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/297, 298.
- 23 PH, xxxii. 249.
- 24 HMC 7th Rep. 133.
- 25 HMC Lords, i. 282-4; PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/318; Stater, High Life, Low Morals, 65-78.
- 26 A True Narrative of the Proceedings … between Charles Lord Gerard and Alexander Fitton (1663).
- 27 PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/318, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, 96-102; Bodl. Carte 222, ff. 24-25.
- 28 Seaward, Cavalier Parlt, 97; Swatland, 155, 176.
- 29 Nicholas Pprs. ii. 35-40; Clarendon Rebellion, v. 326-28; Pepys Diary, viii. 525.
- 30 Bodl. Carte 77, f. 524; Seaward, Cavalier Parlt, 229-30; Swatland, 206.
- 31 PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/320.
- 32 HEHL, EL 8398, 8399.
- 33 Bodl. Carte 217, f. 353.
- 34 Verney ms mic. M636/21, Sir R. Verney to E. Verney, 3 Jan. 1667; PH, xxviii. 439.
- 35 PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/327/84; HMC 8th Rep. pt 1 (1881), 111.
- 36 Pepys Diary, iv. 334; viii. 573-4.
- 37 PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/329/119; HL/PO/JO/5/1/15 for 16, 17 Dec. 1667; An Occasional Dialogue at a Coffee-House (1667).
- 38 Pepys Diary, viii. 581.
- 39 HMC 8th Rep. pt. 1 (1881), 115.
- 40 Pepys Diary, viii. 583, 587.
- 41 HMC Kenyon, 81.
- 42 Pepys Diary, ix. 55, 57; Bodl. Carte 36, f. 149; Verney ms mic. M636/22, M. Elmes to Sir R. Verney, 20 Feb. 1668.
- 43 Pepys Diary, viii. 583, 587; ix. 31-2.
- 44 Verney ms mic. M636/22, Sir R. Verney to E. Verney, 12 Dec. 1667; HMC Kenyon, 82.
- 45 Pepys Diary, ix. 83-4; Verney ms mic. M636/22, M. Elmes to Sir R. Verney, 27 Feb. 1668.
- 46 Modern Language Notes, xlv. 507-10; HMC Kenyon, 82.
- 47 CSP Dom. 1667-8, pp. 544, 553, 560, 586; Pepys Diary, ix. 308; HMC Le Fleming, 58.
- 48 Durham UL (Palace Green), Cosin letter book 5a, 18.
- 49 Verney ms mic. M636/22, Dr W. Denton to Sir R. Verney, 19, 25 Nov. 1668; Add. 40860, f. 63, for 5 Jan. 1674.
- 50 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 402; HL/PO/JO/10/1/343/345.
- 51 HMC 9th Rep. pt 2, 36.
- 52 Beinecke Lib. OSB mss 6, box 1, folder 2, Orrery to Danby, 25 July 1674.
- 53 PH, xxxii. 119.
- 54 Bodl. Carte 72, f. 293; HEHL, EL 8418.
- 55 HMC 9th Rep.pt 2, 80, 83-4.
- 56 PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/19, for 4 Apr. 1678.
- 57 Dalton, Army Lists, i. 203, 235, 262.
- 58 Add. 28046, f. 49.
- 59 Bodl. Carte 81, f. 563.
- 60 Bodl. Carte 103, f. 225.
- 61 Verney ms mic. M636/32, Sir R. Verney to E. Verney, 2, 6 Jan. 1679.
- 62 Add 28049, ff. 60-61; Verney ms mic. M636/32, J. Verney to Sir R. Verney 12 June 1679.
- 63 TNA, C231/8, p. 12; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 18.
- 64 Bodl. Carte 232, f. 60; Carte 228, f. 105; Verney mss mic. M636/33 J. Verney to Sir R. Verney, 2 Oct. 1679; HMC Lindsey, 33.
- 65 BIHR, xx. 32-3, 37.
- 66 Bodl. Carte 81, ff. 656-7.
- 67 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 80; Beinecke Lib. OSB mss 6, box 2, folder 41, endorsed ‘The proceedings upon Mr Fitsharris May: 1681’.
- 68 HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 566; vi. 98; CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 185; Bodl. Carte 222, ff. 264, 290; Eg. 3350, ff.7-8; Bodl. Tanner, 36, f. 106.
- 69 CSP Dom. 1682, pp. 383, 387, 390; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 216, 219.
- 70 Ford Grey, 3rd Baron Grey of Warke, The Secret History of the Rye House Plot (1754), 34, 53, 59, 61-62, 65-6; Bodl. Clarendon 88, ff. 137-39; HMC 7th Rep. 533.
- 71 Add. 18730, ff. 101, 102, 104; HMC Buccleuch, ii. 24.
- 72 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 451-54, 467, 512; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 305; CSP Dom. 1683-4, p. 391; HMC Portland, ii. 156.
- 73 HMC Lords, i. 282-84; Eg. 3357, ff. 84-85.
- 74 HMC Lords, ii. 395.
- 75 Verney ms mic. M636/40, J. Stewkeley to Sir R. Verney, 27 Aug. 1685, Dr W. Denton to Sir R. Verney, 2 Sept. 1685.
- 76 Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 42, ff. 113-14; 43, ff. 21-22, 164; CSP Dom. 1685, pp. 399, 400; 1686-7, pp. 341, 342; 1687-9, pp. 43, 47, 105, 122.
- 77 Morrice, iv. 336; Add 28053, ff. 378-79; CSP Dom. 1687-9, pp. 282, 293, 377.
- 78 Morrice, iv. 401.
- 79 Add. 75366, notes of George Savile, marquess of Halifax ‘concerning the message to the King’, 17 Dec. 1688; Kingdom without a King, 56-57.
- 80 Kingdom without a King, 124, 153, 158, 165, 168; Add. 75366, Halifax’s notes on debate of 24 Dec. 1688.
- 81 Ailesbury Mems. 132-3.
- 82 Bodl. Rawl. D 1079, f. 4.
- 83 HMC Portland iii. 433-81; Add. 70014, ff. 178, 194, 207-8, 233, 254, 256-393; Add. 70015, ff. 92-240.
- 84 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/3, pp. 1, 5, 9, 11; HL/PO/JO/5/1/24, 8 Feb. 1689; HMC Lords, ii. 86.
- 85 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/3, pp. 1, 2; HMC Lords, ii. 86.
- 86 HMC Lords, ii. 31; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/24, 4 Mar. 1689.
- 87 NLW, Wynnstay family mss, C42, C36; CJ, x. 236; Verney ms mic. M636/43, J. Verney to Sir R. Verney, 13 Dec. 1688.
- 88 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/3, 3-9, 11-12; HMC Lords, ii. 87-9; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/24, 6 May 1689.
- 89 HMC Lords, ii. 315.
- 90 Verney ms mic. M636/44, A. Nicholas to J. Verney, 25 Mar. 1690.
- 91 HMC Lords, ii. 57-9; PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/404/34.
- 92 HMC Lords, ii. 206; PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/411/119.
- 93 PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/24, 20, 25 Mar., 10 June 1689; HMC Lords, ii.54, 68.
- 94 HMC Lords, ii. 227, 316; CJ, x. 233; Eg. 3346, ff. 78-9; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/25, 19 Aug. 1689.
- 95 PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/25, 13 Dec. 1689, 11 Jan. 1690; HMC Lords, i. 115.
- 96 PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/25, 13 Nov. 1689.
- 97 HMC Lords, ii. 392-408.
- 98 Bodl. Ballard 27, f. 88.
- 99 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 501-2.
- 100 HMC Lords, iii. 29; PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/422/252.
- 101 HMC Lords, iii. 29-32; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/26, 15, 21 and 25 Apr. 1690.
- 102 HMC Finch, ii. 353; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 78.
- 103 Browning, Danby, iii. 180.
- 104 Ehrman, Navy in the War of William III, 363-5.
- 105 Ranke, Hist. of England, vi. 187-90.
- 106 Ibid. 198-200.
- 107 State Trials, xii. 1048-49.
- 108 HMC Lords, n.s. i. 8, 10.
- 109 Add. 17677 OO, ff. 144-8; Verney ms mic. M636/47, C. Gardiner to Sir R. Verney. 9 Jan. 1694.
- 110 TNA, PROB 6/70, ff. 71.