styled 1687-1701 Visct. Brackley; suc. fa. 19 Mar. 1701 (a minor) as 4th earl of BRIDGWATER; cr. 18 June 1720 duke of BRIDGWATER
First sat 15 Dec. 1702; last sat 20 Dec. 1744
b. 11 Aug. 1681, 4th but 1st surv. s. of John Egerton, styled Visct. Brackley (later 3rd earl of Bridgwater) being 3rd s. with 2nd w. Jane, da. of Charles Powlett, duke of Bolton; bro. of William‡, Charles‡ and Henry Egerton, bp. of Hereford. educ. travelled abroad (Holland, France, Germany 1699-1702; tutor, Jacob Herald).1 m. (1) 9 Feb. 1703 (with at least £10,000),2 Elizabeth (d.1714), da. of John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, 2s. d.v.p., 1da.; (2) 4 Aug. 1722, Rachel (d. 22 May 1777), da. of Wriothesley Russell, 2nd duke of Bedford, 5s. (3 d.v.p.), 3da.3 d. 11 Jan. 1745; will 5 Feb. 1743, pr. 28 Jan. 1745.4
Page, duke of Gloucester 1698-9;5 gent. of the bedchamber to George, prince of Denmark (and duke of Cumberland) 1703-5, George I 1719-27; master of horse, George, prince of Denmark 1705-8; ld. chamb., princess of Wales 1714-17.
Ld. lt. and custos. rot. Bucks. 1703-12, 1714-28.
Associated with: Ashridge, Herts.; Cleveland House, St James’s, Westminster.6
Likenesses: oil on canvas by Charles Jervas, c.1710, Egerton Collection, Ashridge, Herts.
Scroop Egerton acquired his unusual forename from his great-grandfather, Emmanuel Scrope†, earl of Sunderland. He became heir to his father’s earldom in April 1687 after a disastrous fire at the family’s London home of Bridgwater House in the Barbican killed his two elder brothers; an older half brother had died in infancy. When his grandfather Bolton died in February 1699 he bequeathed close to £40,000 to his daughter Jane and her children, while barely mentioning and making virtually no provision for his heir Charles Powlett, 2nd duke of Bolton.7 The ungenerous terms of this will were later to bring lawsuits and contention between the 2nd duke and his sister, the dowager countess of Bridgwater, and her children.8
It was reported in 1698 that Brackley had been made a page to the duke of Gloucester, but by May 1699 the young man was setting out for a tour of the continent.9 After the death of his father in March 1701, he remained on the continent until he came of age in August 1702, and returned to enjoy favour at court under the reign of the new monarch, Queen Anne. The lord lieutenancy of Buckinghamshire, which had been held by the earls of Bridgwater since 1660, had been put temporarily in other hands during the earl’s minority, first to Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron (later marquess of) Wharton shortly after the 3rd earl’s death, and then in June 1702 to the Tory William Cheyne‡, 2nd Viscount Newhaven [S] (usually known as Lord Cheyne). Bridgwater took over the lieutenancy of the county, with the accompanying role of custos rotulorum, on 14 Jan. 1703, and continued to be an active and diligent lord lieutenant for the next several years.10 The following month he and his family followed that up with a prestigious double wedding. His sister Mary married William Byron, 4th Baron Byron, reputedly with a dowry of £12,000.11 Bridgwater, married Elizabeth, the third daughter of the queen’s favourite John Churchill, duke of Marlborough. The queen herself may have supplied a contribution of £10,000 to the portion.12
Allied to Marlborough 1702-10
This marriage put the young Bridgwater firmly at the centre of the court and government, allied to the most powerful and influential couple in the kingdom, the duke and duchess of Marlborough. Shortly after the marriage both he and his wife gained positions at court – she as a lady of the queen’s bedchamber and he as a gentleman in the bedchamber of the prince consort, George of Denmark.13 Nor was Bridgwater slow to call on the influence this new connection could bring. Only a few months after the marriage Marlborough himself, on campaign at Maastricht, assured Bridgwater that he would help his brother William Egerton in with his rise in the army; by 1705 William had been promoted to lieutenant colonel of the first regiment of foot guards.14 The Bridgwaters expected more, they both complained to the duchess that the duke had not made strenuous enough efforts to persuade Prince George to take on an Egerton kinsman as his vice chamberlain.15 The Marlboroughs sought a suitable position at court for their son-in-law, but initially without success.16 When in late June 1703 there were rumours that Edward Montagu, 3rd earl of Sandwich, master of horse to the prince consort, had died, Anne could assure the duchess of Marlborough that there would be no problem in putting Bridgwater in his place instead, ‘for though he may be no Solomon, he is a man of great quality and young enough to improve’.17 After it transpired that Sandwich was still alive, Bridgwater turned his attention to the lord chamberlaincy, which had become vacant by the dismissal of Edward Villiers, earl of Jersey, but was ultimately filled by Henry Grey, 12th earl (later duke) of Kent instead.18 Bridgwater finally got his promotion at court in early July 1705, when Sandwich was dismissed from his post after a long absence arising from a serious illness and accompanying mental derangement. Bridgwater replaced him as master of horse.19 The marriage alliance with the Churchills gave Bridgwater even wider and more powerful connections. When his first son John, styled Viscount Brackley (d.1719), was born in February 1704, both Queen Anne and Sophia, dowager electress of Hanover, sent congratulations and expensive gifts to the infant and his mother.20 Bridgwater was to forge tight links with the court of Hanover and appears to have played some role in the wedding ceremonies of the future George II in September 1705.21 His name appears in a list of potential regents for the dowager electress of Hanover, drawn up presumably sometime after the passage of the Regency Act in 1706 and before 1709.22
Bridgwater first sat in the House two months into Anne’s first Parliament, on 15 Dec. 1702, and in total came to 35 per cent of the meetings of its first session in 1702-3. In his political views Bridgwater most likely in these early years, and certainly in his later, followed the Whig proclivities of his father, but also like his father he was a loyal servant of the court and ministry. His marriage and the interest at court it brought him tied him strongly to his father-in-law Marlborough and his political trajectory followed his. Thus the Tory leader Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, forecast that in 1702-3 Bridgwater would support the occasional conformity bill. However, although Bridgwater was marked as present on 16 Jan. 1703, when it came to the divisions on the Whig wrecking amendments to the bill, he chose to abstain by absenting himself from the chamber. During the second session of the Parliament in 1703-4 (during which Bridgwater attended 84 per cent of the sittings), Bridgwater’s brother-in-law Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, initially considered him ‘uncertain’ in his attitude to the revived occasional conformity bill, as ‘last year [sic] chose to be absent’. Sunderland later marked him as an opponent of the bill, though doubtful, which suggests that contemporaries were unclear how the competing pulls of his parents’ political heritage and those of the family he had married into would sort themselves out. In this case Bridgwater was a dutiful son-in-law and followed Marlborough’s lead in voting in favour of the bill on 14 Dec. 1703, though he did not join his father-in-law in signing the protests against the denial of the second reading or the eventual rejection of the bill. Later that session he joined the Tories in fighting against the attempt to use the Scotch Plot investigations to bring down the secretary of state Nottingham. On 3 Mar. 1704 he protested against the resolution to make the content of the ciphered ‘gibberish’ letters made known only to the queen and members of the committee investigating the Plot. On 22 Mar. he was named, alongside all those present, to the committee entrusted with drawing up the address encouraging the queen to prosecute the Scottish conspiracy, but presumably he took little or no part in its deliberations because three days later he dissented from the decisions both to put the question on the motion that Nottingham’s failure to commit or prosecute the Scottish conspirator Robert Ferguson ‘is a great encouragement to her Majesty’s enemies’, and from the eventual passage of the resolution. He came to relatively few meetings of the following session of 1704-5, first sitting in the House almost a month after the session had started, on 16 Nov. 1704, and then proceeding to sit in exactly half of the meetings, but apart from his nominations to 29 committees, no other activity of his in the House during this final session of Anne’s first Parliament is recorded.
Outside the House, Bridgwater was keen to exercise electoral influence. Control of his lieutenancy of Buckinghamshire was far from straightforward, as there were many competing interests in the county, the most formidable being that exercised by the active and aggressive Junto peer Wharton, who in 1696 had been described as having ‘the greatest interest of any man in Buckinghamshire’. Against Wharton stood the leader of the Buckinghamshire Tories, Lord Cheyne.
Buckinghamshire was infamous for its party strife and contested elections. Bridgwater, nevertheless, entered the fray and tried to make his own mark on the parliamentary representation of the county shortly after taking up his lieutenancy. In October 1704 one of the sitting Members, Wharton’s younger brother, Goodwin Wharton‡, died and Bridgwater immediately joined with the other sitting member Lord Cheyne to promote the Buckinghamshire landowner Francis Duncombe‡ as the Tory candidate in the resulting by-election. Duncombe was defeated by Sir Richard Temple‡ by over 200 votes.23 At the end of 1704 both Wharton and Bridgwater were already preparing for the general election scheduled for the following summer. Bridgwater put forward his own brother William to stand with the parliamentary veteran Cheyne, but when it was discovered, ‘upon a strict enquiry of his age’ that William ‘wants a few months of 21 years’, Bridgwater decided to give Cheyne his entire interest and Cheyne was forced to ask his ‘friends’ to plump their votes for him. The Whig candidates Temple and Robert Dormer‡ still beat him at the poll.24 In February 1706 Dormer had to resign his seat when made a judge and Bridgwater was successful in soliciting support for his brother William, now properly of age, who was returned for the county at the by-election without opposition.25
When he was not promoting family members as candidates, Bridgwater chose Tories in opposition to Wharton’s Whig nominees. When the antiquarian Browne Willis‡ felt ‘compelled’ by the overwhelming dominance of Wharton in the elections of the borough of Buckingham to make his own foray into politics, it was to Bridgwater he turned for support at a by-election in December 1705; he won at the poll by a deciding vote cast by a member of the corporation who was brought out of prison to declare his choice.26 Bridgwater’s most direct and uncontested influence was in the Northamptonshire borough of Brackley, where he was lord of the manor, and where the Egerton family could rely on controlling at least one of the seats, usually given to a member of the extended family. Yet even here during Anne’s reign the irrepressible Wharton was trying to build an interest and at times could seriously challenge Bridgwater’s dominance over the second seat. At the time of his accession to the earldom, Bridgwater’s Whig uncle, Charles Egerton‡, had been entrenched in one of the seats since 1695 and continued to stay there, with Bridgwater’s full acquiescence, until the dramatic change in Whig fortunes in 1710. In the 1702 elections Bridgwater tried to exert some control over the second seat by supporting the successful candidacy of the newcomer John James‡ against a veteran burgess, Harry Mordaunt‡, a younger brother of Charles Mordaunt, 3rd earl of Peterborough, and a protegé of Wharton. Mordaunt initially bowed out of the running for the 1705 election when it was clear that Bridgwater was set on the return of his cousin, John Sydney, who shortly thereafter succeeded his elder brother as 6th earl of Leicester and never sat in the Commons. The duchess of Marlborough, who was angered by her son-in-law’s Tory proclivities, was able to persuade Bridgwater to support Mordaunt’s return at the ensuing by-election.27 Sunderland was quick to praise the duchess for this intervention, as it would ‘have the good effect of uniting him [Bridgwater] and Lord Wharton which will make things hereafter easy in that country’.28
After 1705 when Marlborough and the government looked increasingly towards the Whigs for support of his continental war aims, Bridgwater followed suit. He came to just over half of the sittings of the first session of Anne’s second Parliament, in 1705-6. On 6 Dec. 1705 he voted in favour of the motion in a committee of the whole that the Church was not in danger under the queen’s administration and was later assigned to draw up the reasons for this vote to be presented to the Commons in conference.29 He was apparently active in this committee, for he was appointed a representative of the House in the ensuing four conferences on this matter from 7 to 17 December. Bridgwater was also nominated as a manager (along with all the other peers present in the House) for two conferences on 11 Mar. 1706 in order to condemn the published letter of Sir Rowland Gwynn‡ to Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford. The letter strongly attacked the recently passed Regency Act and defended the project to invite the dowager electress to England while Anne was still alive. On 6 Feb. 1706 John West, 6th Baron De la Warr, another courtier, registered his proxy with Bridgwater, which he held for the remainder of the session. He attended 72 per cent of the sittings of the final two sessions of the Parliament of England, from 3 Dec. 1706 to 24 April 1707. On 30 Dec. 1706 he helped introduce to the House three of the ten newly created or promoted court peers who first sat in the House that day: John Poulett, Earl Poulett (whom he introduced with his Junto brother-in-law Sunderland); Sidney Godolphin, earl of Godolphin, and Hugh Cholmondeley, earl of Cholmondeley. In the following session of 1707-8, the first to include the Scots, he took his seat on 19 Nov. 1707, almost a month after the session had started, and was then present for 57 per cent of the sittings. On 7 Feb. 1708 he supported Godolphin and the ministry by protesting against the abolition of the Scottish privy council in the act to make ‘the Union of the two kingdoms more entire and complete’. At around this time he was, unsurprisingly, categorized as a court peer in a political analysis of the peerage.
By February 1708, preparations were already underway for the elections of May 1708. Bridgwater had been canvassing for his brother William throughout the summer of 1707 and Cheyne tried to muster Tory support for his candidacy as a way of making ‘him [Egerton] and our lord lieutenant our own’. But in December 1707 Cheyne had to write to his Tory colleagues with the regrettable news that, despite all previous assurances, Bridgwater ‘has laid aside all thoughts of setting up his brother at the next election for the county of Buckinghamshire’. Matters were made worse for the Tories because after the Union, Cheyne’s possession of a Scots peerage made him ineligible to sit in the Commons. ‘Tis a melancholy story, but a true one’, he concluded, ‘that now the Lord Wharton names both the knights of our county: Mr Hampden [Richard Hampden‡] and Sir Edmund Denton‡ will carry their point without any opposition’. The ensuing election on 19 May 1708, proved to be the only uncontested election for the county between 1698 and 1715.30 Bridgwater’s decision to withdraw his brother from standing for the county was a result of the growing partnership in the county between him and Wharton that had been envisaged by Sunderland in 1705 and which was made more necessary for Bridgwater by the government’s increasing reliance on the Whigs. At the 1708 election Wharton provided the Brackley burgess Harry Mordaunt with an unopposed seat in the Yorkshire burgage borough of Richmond, firmly under Wharton’s control, thus allowing Bridgwater to place his brother in the second Brackley seat, where he would face far less of a challenge than if he were to stand for the county.31
Three days before Bridgwater took his place at the first meeting of the new Parliament on 16 Nov. 1708 he had overseen, as master of horse, the procession and ceremonies for the funeral of Prince George of Denmark.32 He received a pension of £1,000 p.a. from 1709 for his past services and retained lodgings at St James’s Palace, although his insistence on also keeping the late prince’s horses as a perquisite of office caused controversy.33 Perhaps as a result his attendance in this Parliament was better than usual, and he attended 78 per cent of the meetings over the two sessions in the period 16 Nov. 1708-5 Apr. 1710. He still supported the Godolphin ministry, as in his vote of 21 Jan. 1709 in favour of the motion that Godolphin’s Scottish ally James Douglas, 2nd duke of Queensberry [S], could take part in the election of Scottish representative peers, despite possessing a British peerage as duke of Dover. One piece of legislation of that session concerned Bridgwater indirectly, the bill to sell part of the estate of his uncle Lord William Powlett‡ in order to fulfil an agreement between Powlett and his sister, the dowager countess of Bridgwater, arising from the first duke of Bolton’s will.34 The bill was brought up from the Commons on 21 Mar. 1709 and committed four days later. After some petitions against it were heard in early April, it was reported back from committee on 11 Apr. and received the royal assent by commission ten days later.35
In January 1710 it was rumoured that Bridgwater would be chosen to replace the deceased Algernon Capell, 2nd earl of Essex, as lord lieutenant of Hertfordshire, but in the prevailing political climate, it may have been thought that he was insufficiently Whiggish, and the post went instead to William Cowper, Baron (later Earl) Cowper.36 Nevertheless, on 20 Mar. 1710 Bridgwater joined Godolphin and the ministry, now firmly allied to the Whigs, in voting Henry Sacheverell guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours, and on 27 Mar. he was named a manager for a conference to present the House’s disagreements with the Commons’ amendment to Edward Southwell’s marriage bill.
In the Buckinghamshire elections for the Parliament in October 1710 Bridgwater reportedly lent his support to the Tory John Verney‡, Viscount Fermanagh [I], whom he may have preferred to Wharton’s candidate, the Junto follower Richard Hampden.37 Fermanagh and the sitting Whig member Sir Edmund Denton‡ barely came top of the poll, just ahead of Hampden and Fermanagh’s partner Sir Henry Seymour‡. In Brackley, the Tories in the corporation made it clear that of the two Egertons representing the borough they preferred Bridgwater’s brother William, who had previously attracted Tory support and who headed the poll by a large margin, rather than his Whiggish uncle Charles, who just squeaked by with one more vote than his Tory opponent John Burgh‡. Burgh petitioned, alleging bribery by Wharton and Bridgwater’s steward for the borough, and not surprisingly the Tory House of Commons found in his favour, unseating Charles Egerton, who had sat for Brackley since the 1695 election, on 27 Jan. 1711.38
The Oxford ministry
In October 1710 Robert Harley, (later earl of Oxford and Mortimer) forecast that Bridgwater would be opposed to the new ministry he was constructing, and Bridgwater’s discernible activities in the new Parliament’s first session in 1710-11, during which he attended 77 per cent of the sittings, bore out this assessment. A follower of Marlborough and the war effort he had led, Bridgwater opposed the attack on the previous ministry and its military aims in Spain. On 11 Jan. 1711 he signed the protests against the rejection of the petitions of the Whig generals Henri de Massue de Ruvigny, earl of Galway [I] and Charles O’Hara, Baron Tyrawley [I] and then from the resolution that it was their advice that led directly to the debacle of the Battle of Alamanza. The following day he also subscribed to the dissent from the resolution criticizing the leaders of the previous ministry for advocating an offensive war in Spain, and 12 days later, on 24 Jan. he was a teller, probably for the Not Contents, in the division on the motion (which was won by a majority of 20) in a committee of the whole to censure Galway for his role in the campaign.39 In the first two weeks of February, he signed seven protests from this debate: two against resolutions which accused the former ministers of ‘a neglect of their service’ in inadequately supplying the troops in Spain with men or supplies (on 3 Feb.); two against presenting the queen with an address on the war in Spain (on 8 Feb.); and three (on 9 Feb.) against the various resolutions which expunged from the Journal the majority of the reasons given in the protest of 3 February. In a sign of his new alliance with the Whigs defending Marlborough and the war, on 7 June 1711 he registered his proxy for the first time of which there is a record (the proxy registers for April 1707 to April 1710 are missing) to his Junto Whig brother-in-law Sunderland, who held it for the remaining five days of the session.
He was even busier in the following session (1711-12), of which he attended three-quarters of the meetings, when the Whigs in the House put up a spirited rearguard action against the peace being negotiated by the ministry of the earl of Oxford (as Harley had become). He was probably among those Whigs who negotiated with Nottingham in early December 1711 to garner his support for the ‘No Peace without Spain’ clause in the address to the queen. Oxford was clearly angered that Bridgwater, a pensioner of the court, would oppose the ministry by supporting the address on 7 December. On 20 Dec. Bridgwater followed this up by voting against the right of James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton [S] to sit in the House using his British title of duke of Brandon.
Bridgwater’s father-in-law Marlborough was stripped of all his offices by the queen on 30 Dec. 1711, and Bridgwater, so clearly opposed to the ministry, fell with him. He had already been punished by Oxford who had ensured that the uncooperative Whig was not paid any of his pension as master of the horse of the late Prince George. In May 1711 Oxford’ colleague Sir Simon Harcourt, later Viscount Harcourt, recommended that Bridgwater be replaced as lord lieutenant and custos rotulotum of Buckinghamshire by the more reliable Cheyne, but it took a year before this change was formally put into effect.40 In early February 1712 the queen ordered Bridgwater to vacate his apartments at St James’s, so that her new favourite Abigail Masham could take up residence there.41
Despite these setbacks, Bridgwater continued to be active in the proxy exchanges that helped to sustain Whig forces in this session. On 30 Dec. Bridgwater received the proxy of his cousin Leicester, who vacated it by his return to the House on 14 Jan. 1712 only to register it again to Bridgwater on 23 Feb. before coming back into the House once more on 4 March. Bridgwater registered his own proxy with Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, on 12 Apr. 1712, who kept it for the two weeks Bridgwater was absent until his return on 28 April. On 13 May Sunderland returned Bridgwater’s earlier favour by registering his own proxy with his brother-in-law, though he returned to the House to vacate it only four days later. On 19 May 1712 Bridgwater told in the division on whether to insert words that would exempt peers in the bill to establish commissioners to investigate the value of the land grants made by William III.42 Nine days later, on 28 May, he voted and protested against the resolution to reject the Whig-inspired address expressing disquiet at the ‘restraining orders’ which prohibited British forces taking offensive military actions against France.43 He further protested on 7 June against the decision not to add a clause in the reply to the queen’s speech which requested her to take measures to join in a ‘mutual guarantee’ with the Allies to ensure the Protestant succession in Britain. In June 1713, during the final session of the Parliament (of which Bridgwater attended two-thirds of the meetings), Oxford predicted that Bridgwater would oppose the ministry once more by voting against the French commercial treaty.
Bridgwater, out of office both at court and in the county, fully joined the Whig effort against his erstwhile ally Cheyne in the Buckinghamshire election in the summer of 1713. Cheyne, now lord lieutenant of the county, was able to convince Fermanagh to stand again, and partnered him with his own nephew, John Fleetwood‡. Against them Bridgwater tried to convince the freemen of the county to vote for the Whig candidates Richard Hampden and the sitting Whig Member Sir Edmund Denton‡.44 He even engaged in some electioneering theatrics, as described by a Tory contemporary; in a reference to the French commercial treaty,
The Whigs … put wool in their hats, saying ’twas all going into France, and they resolved to keep some on’t, before ’twas all gone. Lord Wharton, Lord Bridgwater, Lord Portland [William Henry Bentinck, 2nd earl (later duke) of Portland] and Lord Essex [William Capell, 3rd earl of Essex] were all at the head of them with wool in their hats: and Lady Wharton with her own fair hands made up several cockades for the country fellows. The Tories had oaken boughs in their hats, and these jokes in their mouths against their adversary that their wits were gone a wool gathering, and that they looked very sheepish, and ba’d them out of the field.45
Similarly, in 1713 the Tory members of Brackley corporation fielded two candidates, John Burgh‡ and Henry Watkins‡ against Bridgwater’s and Wharton’s nominees, William Egerton and a rising star in the Whig party, Paul Methuen‡. The latter two were formally returned, but on 3 Mar. 1714, well into the session, Burgh and Watkins petitioned against the result. The elections committee unexpectedly resolved in favour of the sitting Members, but the Tories marshalled their forces and in a contentious vote that went straight down party lines managed to unseat the two Whigs. After this electoral defeat, Bridgwater tightened his grip on his manor, and the Egertons controlled both seats of the corporation for most of the rest of the eighteenth century.
Bridgwater himself came to only 13 meetings of Parliament in February and March 1714. He left the House on 19 Mar. 1714, registering his proxy with his brother-in-law John Montagu, 2nd duke of Montagu, for the remainder of the session. It may have been with this proxy in mind that Nottingham forecast that Bridgwater would oppose the schism bill, against whose passage Montagu did protest on 16 June 1714. Bridgwater’s departure from the House may have been prompted by the illness of his wife, who died of smallpox in early April. To his bereaved mother-in-law, then in self-imposed exile on the continent, he expressed the confident hope that their mutual enemies would ‘so fall out amongst themselves, that we shall have the comfort to have your grace and the duke of Marlborough return more beloved than ever’. It was their daughter’s death which prompted the duke and duchess to hasten their return to England.46 They arrived home on 1 Aug. 1714, the day of the queen’s death, which was also the only day in the brief second session of that Parliament on which Bridgwater attended the House.
Through his Marlborough connections, Bridgwater benefitted from the Hanoverian succession, although the duchess of Marlborough later turned her full anger against her former son-in-law and claimed that ‘he was so little liked and there were so many useful men to be employed that I could only obtain that he should be lord chamberlain to the princess of Wales’. He was appointed to that office in October 1714.47 Contemporaries appear to have been baffled by Bridgwater’s decision to resign this place in February 1717, although perhaps he was prescient of the growing friction between the king and his son.48 Bridgwater escaped the royal ire, and was made a gentleman of the bedchamber to the king in May 1719, a post he retained until that king’s death, after which he was not kept on by George II. In the purge of Tory officers, he was also put back in charge of Buckinghamshire on 8 Dec. 1714, once more replacing Cheyne as lord lieutenant and he kept this post until the accession of George II. On 18 June 1720 he was elevated to the rank of duke of Bridgwater. The duchess of Marlborough calculated, admittedly when she was railing against him in their disputes over money, that at about this time he was worth about £20,000 p.a.49 As befitted his position as a Whig grandee and a courtier, he acted in Parliament as a supporter of the Whig ministries. Oxford was sure that Bridgwater would be against him in the impeachment proceedings of June 1717, but in the event, Bridgwater largely abstained from participation in this matter.50 His activity in the House in the reigns of George I and George II will be detailed in the 1715-90 volumes of this series.
Bridgwater further confirmed his place among the Whigs by his second marriage, in August 1722, to Lady Rachel Russell, a sister of Wriothesley Russell, 3rd duke of Bedford. In 1725 he matched the 3rd duke, still a minor at that point, to his own only surviving child by his first marriage, Lady Anne Egerton. This marriage, coupled with earlier failed marriage negotiations for Lady Anne and disputes over the duke of Marlborough’s will, severely embittered relations between Bridgwater and his former mother-in-law, the duchess of Marlborough, who had been planning to marry her favourite granddaughter, Lady Diana Spencer, to the young duke.51 Bridgwater died on 11 Jan. 1745 and was succeeded in turn by his two surviving sons. His eldest, John Egerton, 2nd duke of Bridgwater, died in February 1748 while still a minor. The Bridgwater estates and title thus devolved to his younger son, only nine years old at the time, Francis Egerton, 3rd duke of Bridgwater, who achieved fame and great fortune as the aristocratic entrepreneur behind the canal systems linking the burgeoning industrial and coastal towns of his Lancashire and Cheshire estates.
C.G.D.L.- 1 CSP Dom. 1699-1700, p. 152; 1702-3, p. 113; HEHL, EL 8626, 9176; Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. 107.
- 2 F. Harris, Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 97.
- 3 HEHL, EL 10060.
- 4 TNA, PROB 11/737.
- 5 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 429.
- 6 Survey of London, xxx. 496; TNA, PROB 11/737.
- 7 HEHL, EL 8977, 8991; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 491; HP Commons, 1690-1715, v. 185-8.
- 8 Add. 70075, newsletter, 18 Nov. 1703; HEHL, EL 8953, 9005-8.
- 9 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 429.
- 10 Add. 70073-4, newsletter 4 June 1702; HEHL, EL 9987-8, 10081-10100.
- 11 Verney ms mic. M636/52, C. Gardiner to Sir J. Verney 28 Jan. 1703; HEHL, EL 9986a.
- 12 HEHL, EL 10061; Add. 61416, ff. 38-39; Harris, 97.
- 13 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 268, 274.
- 14 HEHL, EL 9989; HP Commons, 1690-1715, iii. 961-2.
- 15 HEHL, EL 9990.
- 16 Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. 309.
- 17 Add. 61416, ff. 106-7; Luttrell, v. 312, 315.
- 18 Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. 284; HEHL, EL 9990; HMC Portland, iv. 262.
- 19 HMC Astley, 182; Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 569, 570.
- 20 SCLA, DR98/1649/9; HEHL, EL 9991.
- 21 HEHL, EL 9994-5.
- 22 Add. MS 70278.
- 23 Verney ms mic. M636/52, F. Duncombe to Fermanagh, 28 Oct. 1704; HP Commons 1690-1715, ii. 23-24, 26.
- 24 Verney ms mic. M636/52, N. Merwin to Fermanagh, 25 Dec. 1704, Cheyne to Fermanagh, 16 Jan. 1705; HP Commons 1690-1715, ii. 26.
- 25 Verney ms mic. M636/53, Bridgwater to Fermanagh, 14 Feb. 1706, Fermanagh to J. Lovett, 24 Feb. 1706; HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 24, 26.
- 26 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 36-37; HEHL, EL 9992-3.
- 27 Add. 61364, ff. 70-71; Add. 61474, f. 144; HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 434-5.
- 28 Add. 61443, ff. 5-6.
- 29 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 3790/1/1, p. 60.
- 30 Bodl. Ballard 10, f. 155; HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 26.
- 31 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 434-6, 743-4.
- 32 HEHL, EL 10101-10108.
- 33 CTB, xxiii. 222, 298; Add. 61451, ff. 131-6; Eg. 3809, f. 114; Add. 61457, ff. 3-4; Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. 1174.
- 34 HEHL, EL 8953, 9000-1.
- 35 HMC Lords, n.s. viii. 301.
- 36 Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 46 ff. 215-16.
- 37 Bodl. Ballard 21, f. 123.
- 38 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 26-27, 435-6.
- 39 HMC Lords, n.s. ix. 80.
- 40 HMC Portland, iv. 693-4.
- 41 Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 722; Add. 61416, ff. 106-7.
- 42 HMC Lords, n.s. ix. 243.
- 43 PH, xxvi. 180.
- 44 HEHL, EL 10114.
- 45 Wentworth Pprs. 351.
- 46 Add. 61449, f. 10.
- 47 Add. 61451, f. 131.
- 48 Verney ms mic. M636/56, J. Baker to Fermanagh, 21, 27 Feb. 1717.
- 49 Add. 61451, f. 131.
- 50 BIHR, lv. 81.
- 51 Add. 61440, ff. 69-71; 61451, ff. 131-6.