BRUCE, Robert (1626-85)

BRUCE, Robert (1626–85)

styled 1633-63 Ld. Bruce; suc. fa. 21 Dec. 1663 as 2nd earl of Elgin [S] and 2nd Bar. BRUCE of Whorlton; cr. 18 Mar. 1665 earl of AILESBURY.

First sat 16 Mar. 1664; last sat 2 July 1685

MP Beds. 1660, 8 May 1661-21 Dec. 1663.

bap. 19 Mar. 1626, o.s. of Thomas Bruce, 3rd Bar. Bruce of Kinloss [S], (later earl of Elgin [S], and Bar. Bruce of Whorlton) and Anne (c.1604-27), da. and h. of Sir Robert Chichester, KB, of Raleigh, Devon. educ. travelled abroad (France, Italy, Switzerland) 1642-6; L. Inn 1672. m. 16 Feb. 1646, Diana (d. 8 Apr. 1689), da. of Henry Grey, earl of Stamford, 8s. (5 d.v.p.), 9da. (3 d.v.p.).1 d. 20 Oct. 1685; will 1 Dec. 1684, pr. 15 Dec. 1685.2

Dep. earl marshal (jt.) 1673-84; PC 18 Oct. 1678-21 Apr. 1679, 26 Jan. 1681-d.;3 ld. of trade and plantations 1678-9, 1681-d.; ld. chamberlain July 1685-d.

Commr. militia and c.-in-c., Beds. Mar. 1660, loyal and indigent officers, Beds., London, Westminster and Yorks. 1662; col. militia horse, Beds. Apr. 1660; ld. lt., Beds. (jt.) 1660-Mar. 1667, (sole) Mar. 1667-d., Hunts. 1681-d., Cambs. Feb. 1685-d.; freeman, Bedford 1661; constable, Tutbury Castle 1663-7; steward, honour of Leicester 1667-d., honour of Ampthill 1671-d., Bedford 1684-d.,4 Kingston-upon-Thames Aug. 1685-d.; recorder, Godmanchester 1679-d.,5 Bedford 1684-d.; custos rot. Beds. 1681-d., Hunts. 1681-d.

FRS 1663, Council 1669, 1670, 1674, 16756; steward, Royal Artillery Co. 1682;7 gov., Charterhouse Sept. 1685-d.8

Associated with: Houghton House, Ampthill, Beds.9 and Elgin/Ailesbury House, St John’s, Clerkenwell, Mdx.10

Likenesses: mezzotint by J. Smith, after Sir P. Lely, 1687, NPG D7181; line engraving by W. Faithorne, c.1664-80, NPG D22626.

A young royalist, 1654-9

Robert Bruce was the only son of the Scots peer Thomas Bruce, 3rd Baron Bruce of Kinloss [S], whose compatriot James I granted him the stewardship of the royal honour of Ampthill in Bedfordshire in 1613. Bruce and his descendants based themselves there from that time.11 In June 1633 Kinloss was elevated in the Scots peerage by Charles I to the earldom of Elgin [S], and from this point his young son Robert, raised in the grand residence of Houghton House near Ampthill, took the courtesy title of Lord Bruce. To confuse matters, in July 1641 Charles I, hoping to shore up his support in the English House of Lords, gave Elgin an additional English title, making him, Baron Bruce of Whorlton. Thus the Baron Bruce in the English House of Lords had a son styled Lord Bruce in the Scots peerage.

Lord Bruce missed most of the fighting of the Civil Wars while on a grand tour.12 His father Elgin had wavered in his adherence to the king and remained in the House of Lords throughout the wars, where he sided, albeit reluctantly, with the Presbyterian peers who sought a negotiated settlement. In 1646 Lord Bruce, having returned from the continent, married Diana, a daughter of the Parliamentarian general Henry Grey, earl of Stamford, sister of the radical army leader and later regicide, Thomas Grey‡, styled Lord Grey of Groby, and sister-in-law to the leader of the Presbyterians fighting for Parliament in Cheshire, Sir George Booth, later Baron Delamer. His father’s compromised loyalty to Charles I, and his new parliamentarian family connections may have raised doubts about Bruce’s loyalty but they did not convert him. Throughout the Interregnum and then the Restoration he distinguished himself by unwavering loyalty to the crown and the principle of the hereditary monarchy, despite the exclusionist sympathies of the various in-laws and nephews gained through his marriage. Yet he always showed a loyalty to these family connections. He worked to further the careers of his Grey brothers-in-law and maintained a friendly correspondence with Delamer, despite the latter’s Presbyterian leanings.13

Throughout his career Bruce remained a strong and dedicated follower of the Church of England. This may reflect the influence of Robert Frampton, later bishop of Gloucester, who served ‘the very religious and noble earl of Elgin’ as chaplain from the late 1640s until 1655, and who appears to have converted Lord Bruce from a hedonistic young man to a pious devotee of Anglicanism.14 An even greater influence in forming Bruce’s loyalty to the monarchy and the established church was his paternal aunt, Christian, dowager countess of Devonshire, the widow of the late William Cavendish†, 2nd earl of Devonshire and mother of William Cavendish, 3rd earl of Devonshire. Bruce maintained a frequent correspondence with both mother and son throughout the 1650s and thereafter.15 From 1646 she lived with her brother Elgin at Ampthill and there encouraged her young nephew in his royalist views and later maintained and strengthened them through letters to him after her move to Roehampton in 1650. Bruce’s involvement in the various schemes to bring back the king is murky, but by the spring of 1659 he was certainly in touch with royalist agents such as his brother-in-law Sir George Booth and John Belasyse, Baron Belasyse (described in one letter as Bruce’s uncle, although it is not clear how) and in May 1659 brokered a donation of £1,000, probably from his aunt the dowager countess of Devonshire, to the exiled Charles II. This donation was intended to assist in the projected uprising of that summer led by Booth, in which Bruce was involved.16 He was arrested before he could raise Bedfordshire for the king as planned and was brought before the council of state’s committee for examinations in August 1659, but revealed nothing under questioning and was granted bail for £20,000.17

The Restoration, 1660-5

Bruce was made commander-in-chief of the Bedfordshire militia, and a colonel of a troop of militia horse, by the reconstituted Long Parliament and Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, aware of Bruce’s services to the exiled king, specifically instructed him to stand for knight of the shire of that county.18 He was returned to the Convention without opposition, where he was one of the 12 members of the Commons deputized to go to the Netherlands to invite Charles II to return. From this point Bruce became the foremost county leader and agent of the crown in Bedfordshire. In the summer of 1660 Bruce, although still only a commoner, was made a joint lord lieutenant of Bedfordshire with the largely ineffectual peer Thomas Wentworth, earl of Cleveland, who was ‘almost doting with age’.19 He became sole lord lieutenant of the county upon Cleveland’s death in late March 1667, by which time he himself was a peer.20 He fulfilled a number of other local administrative roles in the county and the county town of Bedford from this time – principally justice of the peace and commissioner of assessment. In August 1660 his father successfully petitioned to be restored to the office of steward of the royal honour of Ampthill in Bedfordshire, but owing to Elgin’s compromised loyalties during the Civil War it was to Lord Bruce that the crown entrusted the actual management of the honour and its game.21 In June 1670, and after much petitioning and negotiation, Bruce, now earl of Ailesbury, procured the hereditary stewardship of Ampthill, entailed to the heirs male of his family.22

In early 1661 Bruce was returned once again as knight of the shire to the Cavalier Parliament. In the first two sessions of the Parliament he was very busy in committees. He played the predominant role in the campaign to reward and assist old cavaliers and deprive of office those who had fought against the king and was made a commissioner for loyal and indigent officers in Bedfordshire, London, Westminster and Yorkshire (where he also had estates).23 He was also active in committees on religious legislation to enforce conformity to the English church.24

Lord Bruce inherited the Scottish earldom of Elgin and the English barony of Bruce of Whorlton upon his father’s death on 21 Dec. 1663, and he was further raised to an earldom in the English peerage as earl of Ailesbury, on 18 Mar. 1665, one of a series of eight creations or promotions which the king conferred on his closest followers in that month. Ailesbury’s heir Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, later recounted the family story that this honour, as well as a place as gentleman of the bedchamber and the lord lieutenancy of Bedfordshire, had been designed for Lord Bruce from the earliest days of Charles II’s return, but:

my father humbly begged that my grandfather might be [made an earl], (he fearing the consequences) and the King flatly denied him and replied he had reasons; and my father had the same for to beg of the king to suspend it during my grandfather’s life. A main reason for my father’s precaution and what was most solid [was that], my grandfather and the flatterers were bitter enemies to my mother and not much less to my father.

The old earl of Elgin, distrusted by the court and out of favour for his chequered Civil War career, evidently felt resentful towards his favoured son Lord Bruce and could still withhold his maintenance and inheritance. Thus only the joint lord lieutenancy of Bedfordshire with Cleveland materialized as evidence of the king’s favour in 1660 and ‘the place of the bedchamber my father never had, and happy for him, for the Court was not then proper for a sober man’.25 Bruce was wise enough to defer his promotion in the peerage while his envious father was alive, and he was raised to the earldom of Ailesbury less than two years after his death. Ailesbury became one of the most active and engaged members of the House, and always acted to serve the king and the court interest, even through all the shifts of policy. His primary activity was as a chairman of select committees, and one historian has calculated he chaired 57 separate committees during the reign, making him the fifth busiest chairman of select committees during the reign of Charles II.26

Ailesbury was also involved in parliamentary affairs outside of the House, in elections in his county of Bedfordshire and elsewhere. Bruce of Whorlton (as he then was) had supported the candidacy of Sir Henry Chester as his replacement for the county seat upon his inheritance of the title and worked to move the poll for the by-election to Ampthill from Bedford, where it had originally been placed by Bruce’s fellow lord lieutenant, Cleveland, and John Egerton, 2nd earl of Bridgwater, lord lieutenant of the neighbouring county of Buckinghamshire, both of whom supported Chester’s opponent Sir John Napier‡ (who was also Bridgwater’s nephew).27 Two days before Bruce was further raised in the peerage as earl of Ailesbury, a knight of the shire for Derbyshire, Sir John Frescheville, had been created Baron Frescheville. Ailesbury took an interest in the campaign to replace him in the Commons and recommended his brother-in-law Anchitell Grey‡, at that point a deputy lieutenant of the county, to the Derbyshire lord lieutenant, his first cousin Devonshire. Devonshire was more than willing to agree with Ailesbury in this regard, but Grey made clear to Ailesbury and Devonshire that he would rather stand for the borough of Derby, one of whose sitting members, Roger Allestry‡, was on the point of death.28

First steps in the House, 1665-70

It took a little time before Ailesbury became a busy member of the House, though even from the beginning of his parliamentary career, he was a diligent attender, missing only six meetings of the House across his first two sessions, those of spring 1664 and of 1664-5, in which he sat as Bruce of Whorlton. He appears in the official records as a nominee to only 16 select committees, but his correspondence suggests he was active in helping to frame legislation. He was solicited in the spring of 1664 by Delamer to use his influence in the Commons, ‘which they are sure is sufficient’, to delay the passage of the bill to make the Rivers Mersey and Weaver navigable until a delegation of gentry from Cheshire could come up to argue against it.29 On 9 May 1664 the chairman of the committee on the Malvern Chase bill, Richard Sackville, 5th earl of Dorset, received a letter written at Bruce’s instance asking that the committee be adjourned until the following morning, at which time Bruce would be able to attend.30 Bruce chaired his first select committee on 20 Jan. 1665, on the estate bill of Francis Leigh, and in late February he acted as an intermediary with some of the parties at dispute on behalf of the committee for the bill of Sir Robert Carr‡.31 In late February 1665 the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Sir Thomas Ingram‡, treated Bruce as a committee chairman when he wrote to him asking him to convey a copy of the bill which would allow him to take affidavits within duchy territory to the lord chancellor so he could examine it before Bruce reported it.32 In early 1665 the corporation of Bedford saw fit to express to him its thanks for his efforts ‘for promoting the navigation’ of the river Ouse, running through Bedford, through his support for the act ‘for making rivers navigable’, which received the royal assent on 2 Mar. 1665.33 That day also saw the passage of the act for the drainage of Deeping Fen, confirming Bruce’s ownership of land in that reclamation project, which he had probably acquired through his connection with the Grey family. Over successive years he maintained a close watch on his interests in that region.34

Less than two weeks after his creation as earl of Ailesbury on 18 Mar. 1665, he acquired a pass so that he and his household could travel to the continent to take the waters at Spa, and he remained there until early June 1666, thus missing in its entirety the session of October 1665.35 It was not until the second day of the following session, 21 Sept. 1666, that Ailesbury was introduced to the House as a new creation, between his local rival William Russell, 5th earl (later duke) of Bedford and Arthur Capell, earl of Essex, but he then stayed away until mid October and in total came to 85 per cent of the sittings of this session. He was a follower of Clarendon and his circle and appears to have been very close to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, duke of Ormond [I]. He probably befriended Ormond through his cousin Devonshire, as Ormond was father-in-law to Devonshire’s son William Cavendish, styled Lord Cavendish (later duke of Devonshire). In June 1666 both Devonshire and Ailesbury agreed to enter into a bond for a debt owed by Ormond.36 The two earls later hosted him in turn at their houses at Ampthill and Chatsworth in August 1670 as the lord lieutenant made his way to Ireland.37 Clarendon for his part considered Ailesbury a reliable enough supporter of the interests of the crown to name him in late December as one of the six peers to sit on the royal commission for public accounts.38 On 23 Jan. 1667 Ailesbury sought further to promote the royal prerogative by dissenting from the House’s decision not to add a clause to the bill for establishing a judicature for losses caused by the Great Fire of London which would have granted a right of final appeal to the king and the House. On 20 Dec. 1666 he was added to the committee of six peers charged with drawing up reasons why the House could not agree with the Commons’ term ‘nuisance’ in the Irish cattle bill, although he was not named a manager for the ensuing conference. It may have been concern at Ailesbury’s closeness to the court, and particularly to Ormond, that led Delamer to try to persuade him to support the controversial bill, which he insisted ‘concerns the good of England’.39 On 7 Jan. 1667 Ailesbury was also added to the committee for privileges, and only two weeks later he chaired it for the first time.40 Ailesbury was nominated to 16 select committees on legislation and played a prominent role in several. He was chairman on two occasions of the committee, established on 7 Dec. 1666, on the bill that would allow Elizabeth, dowager Baroness Abergavenny, to control the estates of her late husband John Nevill, 10th Baron Abergavenny, and she wrote to Ailesbury desiring his ‘charity in getting the committee to meet’ in the afternoon rather than the morning so that her counsel could be heard. She continued to keep closely in touch with Ailesbury during the committee’s proceedings.41 Lady Cholmley expressed her thanks to Ailesbury for his care of the interests of her husband, Colonel Edward Cooke, one of Ailesbury’s most frequent correspondents, in the proceedings in early February 1667 on the bill to settle the estate of James Bertie, 5th Baron Norreys (later earl of Abingdon), of which estate Cooke was one of the trustees.42 The countess of Rutland praised Ailesbury for his support of her bill to make illegitimate the children recently born to Anne, Lady Roos, the estranged wife of her son John Manners, styled Lord Roos (later duke of Rutland).43

Ailesbury attended the last day of the brief five-day session of July 1667 and came to only 35 of the 51 sitting days of the meetings of autumn 1667 which saw the fall of Clarendon. He was part of the delegation assigned on 11 Oct. to present the king with the thanks of the House for his speech in which he had announced the dismissal of the lord chancellor. Whilst it can be assumed that he opposed the proceedings against Clarendon, there is no record concerning his precise involvement in this matter. After the long Christmas recess, Ailesbury did not appear in the House again until 7 Mar. 1668, a month after the Parliament had reconvened, and he only came to 45 per cent of the sittings before the session was adjourned on 9 May. He was named to nine select committees, and chaired one meeting of the committee on a private bill.44 He may have travelled again to France in the summer of 1669.45 He first sat in the House in the following session of autumn 1669 on 4 Nov. and missed seven of its 36 meetings. He sat in the 1670-71 session from its first day, 14 Feb. 1670, until 24 Mar., and from 16 Mar. held the proxy of his cousin Devonshire. This was vacated on 24 Mar. when Ailesbury registered his own proxy with Essex and was given permission by both the House and the king ‘to go drink the waters of Bourbon for his health’. Ailesbury had returned from the continent by mid July but did not return to the House to vacate his proxy until 10 Nov. 1670. From that time until the prorogation on 22 April 1671 he attended 86 per cent of the sittings.

A busy chairman, 1670-4

It was from about this time, the unsettled and politically shifting period of the early 1670s and government by the so-called Cabal ministry, that Ailesbury became heavily involved in parliamentary and political affairs. His son Thomas Bruce later portrayed his father in his memoirs as:

of a noble spirit, ready to lay down his life for his king, but at the same time a true patriot, and manifested it greatly in Parliament in opposition to pernicious projects of double-dealing ministers, retaining at the same time a most dutiful behaviour towards his sovereign, who highly esteemed him, but was kept back from rewarding him by most false representations, which no ways affected him, having a plentiful fortune and great family, and the pleasures of the country and his studies amusing him much more than a court life could do during the intervals of parliaments; and during the sessions he continually employed himself, and with no small pains, to look over precedents and records for to furnish matter in the debates; and to his eternal honour he was always bent to support the prerogative of the crown, jointly with the good of the country – and the latter was little to the taste of time-serving ministers, who then had the good king’s ear too much.46

The 2nd earl also recounted that the key member of the Cabal, John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale [S], (later earl of Guilford) ‘being asked one day why he hated so much the earl of Ailesbury, replied that he was a friend to the duke of Ormond’.47

In the period of the session from October 1670 to April 1671 Ailesbury was at his busiest to date with committees. He was nominated to 32, and effectively took charge of six, from all of which he eventually reported. Some were easier than others, such as the bills for the underage Charles Talbot, 12th earl (later duke) of Shrewsbury and for the maintenance of ministers in London, which only needed one meeting each before he was able to report them to the House and have them passed.48 By contrast three of the bills which he thought he saw through committee successfully – the private estate bills for the underage Baron Norreys and Sir William Clarke and the bill to take accounts of the money donated to indigent former Cavalier officers – were recommitted by the House upon his first report, though with each he was later able to present a version acceptable to the House.49 Almost all of this busy committee work took place in April 1671, as the session was winding down. At that time he was also placed on a small subcommittee of the select committee on the bill against the growth of popery which was to draw a test oath for Catholics ‘which being taken may obtain a mitigation of the penalties’.50 In other matters on 9 Mar. 1671 he subscribed to the protest against the House’s rejection of the bill for privilege of Parliament.

Ailesbury and his family benefited from one measure passed in this session, the bill to allow Lord Roos to remarry during the lifetime of his, now divorced, wife, whose children had already been declared illegitimate by Act of Parliament. As early as August 1668 Ailesbury had been making overtures for a marriage of his daughter Diana, the widow of the recently deceased Sir Seymour Shirley, to Lord Roos – if the bill permitting his remarriage could get through Parliament. After the bill’s passage on 11 Apr. 1670 Ailesbury embarked on negotiations; on 10 Nov. 1671 the marriage between Lady Diana Bruce and Lord Roos was solemnized.51 It proved to be short-lived as the new Lady Roos died in childbirth on 15 July 1672 and the son born to her did not survive for long either.52

A few months later, on 30 Oct. 1672 (a prorogation day), Ailesbury and Charles Howard, earl of Carlisle, helped to introduce to the House Henry Howard, as the newly promoted earl of Norwich (later 6th duke of Norfolk) and earl marshal of England. Perhaps to return the favour, the Catholic Norwich, falling foul of the Test Act, on 20 June 1673 appointed Ailesbury and Carlisle as two of the seven deputies entrusted to exercise the office of earl marshal in his place. Over the succeeding years Ailesbury emerged as one of the foremost of these deputy earl marshals.53

Ailesbury attended all but three of the sittings of the session of February and March 1673 which saw the passage of the Test Act. He was nominated to 19 select committees and chaired nine of them on a total of 26 occasions. He was most prominent – as he was to be for several successive years – in the committee considering means to encourage the manufacture of textiles in England and he led this committee on eight occasions. On 26 Mar. 1673 he reported the address which requested the king himself and members of his court to confine their apparel to English goods. He was also part of the delegation entrusted the next day with attending the king with this address.54 He was particularly busy in the last days of the session, and between 22 and 29 Mar. 1673 chaired 13 meetings of committees on matters such as the prohibition of new buildings in London and Westminster, the disputes between the Grocers’ Company and the Hamburg Company and their creditors and the address for the wearing of English apparel, and he reported to the House from committee on five occasions.55

He did not attend any of the meetings of the short four-day session of late October 1673 but did come to all of the following session in the first months of 1674, when he held the proxy of Baptist Noel, 3rd Viscount Campden, for the session from 10 Jan. 1674. The Journal records that he was appointed to only eight select committees, but the committee minute book makes clear that he was involved in far more than that, for he led seven different committees – not all of them those to which he was formally nominated in the Journal – on 25 occasions. He was principally involved once more in directing the proceedings for the bill to prohibit foreign imports and to encourage English manufacture and was its committee’s sole chairman on 11, often long, meetings. This committee heard the arguments in favour of the bill from the Weavers’ Company and others and against it from the commissioners of customs who feared the bill would damage the revenue from import duties. It also tried to settle the dispute between the potters and Robert Paston, Viscount (later earl of) Yarmouth, over Yarmouth’s patent to take a portion of the duties on the import of earthenware and stoneware.56 Other matters with which he was concerned were the bill to suppress atheism and swearing, and those for the regulation of servants and for setting the poor to work.57 The only legislation he was able to bring to the House from committee was the private bill for Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, which Ailesbury reported on 20 Jan. 1674.58

Committees and Court politics, 1675-9

Ailesbury was similarly attentive to the session of spring 1675 and came to all but one of its meetings. Although he was later to become a firm supporter of the lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), even Ailesbury could not approve of some of the ramifications of the test bill put forward by Danby in this session. He signed two of the four protests entered during its proceedings – that of 21 Apr., against the provisions of the bill that would deprive peers of their seats in the House, and that of 29 Apr., which objected to the resolution that the protest of 26 Apr. reflected upon the honour of the House, which Ailesbury and his fellow protesters saw as a derogation of the right to enter protests in the House. The Letter from a Person of Quality claims that Ailesbury was among ‘those worthy earls … men of great worth and honour’, who supported the motion ‘that there ought to be an addition of the Oath for preserving the freedom of debates in Parliament’.59

Otherwise Ailesbury was involved in committee work. He was formally nominated, according to the Journal, to 11 committees, and he seems to have managed almost all of these at least once, for he chaired seven different committees for a total of 24 times. He helped to guide the bills against frauds and perjuries in legal trials and for selling the estate of Charles Cotton successfully through committee.60 Once again, he was primarily involved with the committee on the bill against the import of foreign manufactures.61 On 3 June 1675, after seven long meetings, the committee ordered this bill with its amendments ready for the House’s consideration, but it was never reported to the House, presumably lost in the conflict over Sherley v. Fagg. On that day he also chaired the committee for privileges considering the complaint of William Wentworth, 2nd earl of Strafford, against a libellous pamphlet written against him by William Eyres in Ireland. The committee ordered that Ailesbury, with Edward Watson, 2nd Baron Rockingham, and Denzil Holles, Baron Holles, were to try to effect some sort of reconciliation between Strafford and Eyres before a report be made to the House.62

He maintained his almost perfect attendance rate in the session of autumn 1675, again missing only one sitting. Devonshire assigned his proxy to Ailesbury on 14 Oct. 1675 for the entire session. He was named to nine select committees, and chaired seven of these on a total of nine occasions. He chaired the committee on the bill against foreign manufactures, left over from the previous session, twice before he reported it on 17 November. Over the following three days he reported three more bills from committee. Ailesbury played a key role in the dramatic vote for an address to the king advocating the dissolution of Parliament which closed the session on 20 November. Of the peers present, those voting for the motion were in a majority but the not contents held more proxies and, those being added to the total, the division was found to be exactly equal at 48 votes each. At that point Ailesbury suddenly came into the House and, although he had heard nothing of the debate, it was left to him, still holding Devonshire’s proxy, to cast the deciding votes. His adherence to James Stuart, duke of York, who on this occasion was making common cause with the country lords for the motion, might have been expected to tip him in that direction but he used his two votes against it, giving Danby and the court a razor-thin victory.63

Late in 1675 negotiations began in earnest between Ailesbury and his friend Henry Somerset, 3rd marquess of Worcester (later duke of Beaufort), for the marriage of Ailesbury’s heir Thomas Bruce, styled Lord Bruce, to Worcester’s step-daughter Lady Elizabeth Seymour, the daughter and only surviving child of Henry Seymour, styled Lord Beauchamp, who in 1654 had predeceased his father William Seymour, marquess of Hertford (and from 1660 2nd duke of Somerset). Lord Beauchamp’s widow, daughter of the royalist hero Arthur Capell†, Baron Capell of Hadham, had married Worcester in 1657. By a bit of legal legerdemain engineered by Worcester on the will of John Seymour, 4th duke of Somerset, Lady Elizabeth in early 1676 inherited most of the Seymour estate, against the apparent wishes of the late duke of Somerset himself, and to the anger of his two sisters, Frances, dowager countess of Southampton and Jane, Lady Clifford of Lanesborough. Many potential husbands were presented to Lady Elizabeth but she preferred Lord Bruce and negotiations ensued. Worcester, however, thought ‘that match as the fortunes stand cannot be a convenient one’ and wondered ‘whether it be not best handsomely to break off, with her consent’.64 By 9 Feb. 1676 Ailesbury was lamenting to his friend, and now one of Worcester’s servants, Colonel Edward Cooke, that ‘I am sorry you think this affair will require so much time’.65 These marriage negotiations, already difficult, slow and often ill-tempered, were further complicated when the dowager countess of Southampton and Lady Clifford of Lanesborough heard about the terms and sought to preserve their portion of the Seymour inheritance, particularly their annuities which were charged on the estate.66

The lengthy and detailed marriage settlement was ready by 15 Aug. 1676 and a little over a week later the marriage between Lord Bruce and Lady Elizabeth Seymour was solemnized.67 The settlement granted to trustees (Lady Worcester’s brothers, Essex and Henry Capell, later Baron Capell of Tewkesbury) the use of much of Lady Elizabeth’s estate in order to pay the debts and legacies of the late duke of Somerset and to provide for Lady Worcester’s jointure and the annuities to the two Seymour sisters. Lady Elizabeth’s jointure was to be £1,500 p.a. secured on the Ailesbury properties, while Ailesbury himself was to receive the £9,000 portion, in order to help him provide dowries for his own numerous daughters.68 The marriage settlement was, and continued to be, controversial, and relations between the Bruces, both Ailesbury and his son, and the Somersets, particularly the wilful marchioness of Worcester, broke down over the following years as disagreements arose over the constraints imposed on Bruce’s use of the Seymour properties.69

While this family drama was proceeding, on 30 June 1676 Ailesbury was a member of the court of the lord high steward summoned for the trial of Baron Cornwallis for murder. Ailesbury was one of the minority of seven who found him guilty of manslaughter, while the majority found him not guilty.70 Ailesbury missed only two meetings of the long session of 1677-8 and throughout this turbulent session he held the proxy of his absent cousin Devonshire, who had registered his proxy with him on 9 Feb. 1677, shortly before the session had even begun. Devonshire did not appear at all in that session to vacate the proxy, and to this Ailesbury for a time was able to add the proxy of his new kinsman by marriage for on 12 Feb. 1677, at the request of Sir Joseph Williamson‡, Worcester sent to the secretary of state in Westminster a blank proxy with the request that it be registered in the name of Ailesbury.71 This proxy was vacated on 12 Mar. 1677, when Worcester first attended the House in person.

Worcester may have entrusted his proxy to Ailesbury to help facilitate the passage of Ailesbury’s private bill, introduced in the House on 19 Feb. 1677, to vest a portion of his lands in trustees so they could perform some of the conditions of the marriage settlement during the minority of Lord Bruce. The following day this bill was committed to 54 peers, including Ailesbury himself. William Howard, Viscount Stafford, was chairman of the committee’s two recorded meetings, on 22 Feb. and 1 March. On that latter day the committee ordered counsel for Ailesbury and for the dowager countess of Southampton and Lady Clifford of Lanesborough to meet to settle the differences between them.72 There are no further proceedings on this bill recorded either in the committee minutes or in the Journal, but on 3 Mar. Lady Bruce wrote to her mother, the marchioness of Worcester, telling her that her aunts, the two Seymour sisters, ‘are now very busy doing what they can to hinder the passing of the bill in the House of Lords’ and that but for them it would already have passed a week previously. Her uncles Conyers Darcy, the husband of the dowager countess of Southampton, knight of the shire for Yorkshire (and later 2nd earl of Holdernesse) and Charles Boyle, styled Lord Clifford of Lanesborough, Member for Tamworth (and later raised to the House as Baron Clifford of Lanesborough) were threatening to hold the bill up in the House of Commons as well, though Lady Bruce thought that for all of Darcy’s ‘vapouring’, he had insufficient interest there: ‘They say they fancy that this Act of Parliament is to settle some part of my estate that else may come to them’. She hoped that Worcester would be able to come to Westminster soon, as ‘his interest in both houses would do us a great deal of good’, but otherwise she was confident that ‘with your Ladyship’s help and my uncles’ [i.e. Essex and Capell], I intend to defeat them’.73 This opposition from her Seymour aunts and uncles prevented further progress with the bill until the session’s adjournment in mid April. Lord Bruce came of age in September 1677 rendering the bill unnecessary.

Ailesbury very quickly became involved in the larger public controversies of the session. He contributed to the debate on 15 Feb. 1677 surrounding the claim made by George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, that the Parliament was automatically dissolved by the long prorogation of 15 months, but with George Savile, Viscount (later marquess of) Halifax, Henry Pierrepont, marquess of Dorchester and others he took a middle ground. While he ‘argued a good while that the Parliament was not dissolved’ he was also unwilling to go as far as either Baron Frescheville in demanding that Buckingham be called to the bar ‘to be proceeded with as should be thought fit’ or James Cecil, 3rd earl of Salisbury in insisting on an absolute right of free debate in the House.74 It is perhaps for this relative moderation, as well as his previous opposition to the 1675 test bill, that in the spring of 1677 Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, could still consider Ailesbury ‘doubly worthy’, a calculation increasingly at odds with Ailesbury’s support for Danby throughout this session and thereafter. There does appear to have been some mutual regard between the two peers and at one point, perhaps around this period, Shaftesbury still thought he could ‘turn’ Ailesbury. The 2nd earl of Ailesbury later recalled that Shaftesbury, with his father’s fellow deputy earl marshal, the earl of Carlisle, and James Scott, duke of Monmouth, a family friend to the Bruces,

at a distance and by little and little would have brought him into fears and jealousies, and the dangers that might arise from a successor to the king of a contrary religion to what was established … [but], that noble subject, and good patriot besides, told them plainly that he had nothing to say to them on such a subject so odious to him; and he from that day was quit of them, save the duke of Monmouth, who was ever to us both a noble and good friend.75

Ailesbury was most heavily involved as sole chairman of the select committee established on the second day of the session, 16 Feb. 1677, to inquire into the publication of the ‘libels’ produced arguing for the dissolution of Parliament. From 19 Feb. to 9 Apr. Ailesbury chaired the committee for a total of 17 meetings, and he reported from it twice.76 On 1 Mar. 1677 he reported at length on the intensive interrogations by the Privy Council and by the king himself of Dr. Nicolas Cary for his role in trying to have published The Grand Question concerning the Prorogation of this Parliament, and his refusal to name positively Baron Holles as the actual author of the tract.77 Four days later he likewise reported that the committee found the two principal printed works – Some Considerations upon the Question, whether the Parliament is Dissolved and The Long Parliament Dissolved – ‘seditious and scandalous’, with which the House agreed two days after that and ordered the works to be publicly burned by the common hangman. Ailesbury and the committee spent another ten meetings investigating the identity of the authors and publishers of these works. Even as that committee wound down in early April, he renewed his engagement in this same issue by chairing on three occasions the committee on the bill against unlicensed printing.78

The period of February to April 1677 may well have been Ailesbury’s busiest in select committees. He was named to 35 committees in total and, apart from his principal committee examining the ‘scandalous books’, he chaired 11 committees dealing with items of legislation on a total of 22 occasions, and reported from seven with bills fit to pass. In March he reported from committee another bill for the prohibition of foreign manufactures, one for the collection of small tithes, and two private estate bills.79 In late March and early April Ailesbury chaired two meetings of the committee for privileges which considered, in turn, the fees due to Black Rod for taking into custody members of the peerage, the rules of precedence for the eldest sons of the younger sons of peers and the procedures for swearing peers on to juries. Ailesbury’s brother-in-law Delamer was prominent in these hearings, presenting evidence and precedents on these subjects for the committee.80 It was, however, only on the first matter, Black Rod’s fees, that Ailesbury reported to the full House on 3 April. In the first week of April he also reported from the committee on the private bill of Thomas Needham, 6th Viscount Kilmorey [I], and from that for the bill concerning William Richard George Stanley, 9th earl of Derby and the tenants of the manor of West Derby. Four days before the adjournment on 16 Apr. he reported the bill against unlicensed printing and publishing, so closely related to his work against scandalous publications.81

This session also saw Ailesbury’s first involvement as a participant of conferences with the Commons. On 13 and 15 Mar. he was a manager for conferences on the House’s amendments to the Commons’ address against the growing power of Louis XIV and ‘his progress in the Netherlands’. He was one of the five managers for the conference on 4 Apr. in which the House made clear its disagreements to the Commons’ amendments to the bill for naturalizing the children of English subjects born abroad. On 14 Apr. he was placed on the committee to draw up reasons to be presented in a free conference why the Lords adhered to their amendments to the supply bill for building warships. As such he attended the bad-tempered free conferences on 14 and 16 Apr. which closed the session. A contemporary account of the free conference on the morning of 16 Apr. recounts that the lord chancellor Heneage Finch, Baron Finch (later earl of Nottingham) was the primary spokesman for the Lords, who warned of the danger of the bill’s failing because of the Commons’ refusal to accept the Lords’ right to amend money bills. After the lord chancellor had finished, however, ‘several of the other lords the managers’, such as Ailesbury, Halifax, Bridgwater, and Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, ‘argued with great sharpness to show the impossibility that the Lords could at this time comply’ – although in this case it was ultimately the Lords who backed down in order to see the supply bill pass.82

After the long adjournment of the second half of 1677 Ailesbury returned to the House in January 1678 and attended every sitting bar one until the prorogation on 13 May. He was nominated to 20 select committees and chaired eight of them on 13 occasions. No committee occupied his attention above all others as in previous sessions, and he mostly dealt with private bills, three of which he reported after at most two committee meetings each.83 His other committee appointments had wider public import. Ailesbury was a reporter for a conference on 22 Mar. in which the Commons explained their disagreement with the Lords’ amendment to the address calling for an ‘immediate’ declaration of war against France, and he was then placed on the subcommittee of 14 delegated by a committee of the whole considering the conference report to draft an answer to the Commons’ reasons. Ailesbury chaired this committee, and copies of the report he made on 27 Mar. 1678 in which the committee explained its opposition to the word ‘immediate’ by pointing out that treaties of alliance with the United Provinces and Austria were still pending were widely circulated.84 With Baron Belasyse, with whom he had been associated since the royalist plotting of the 1650s, he complained on 28 Mar. to the select committee considering a supplementary act for the draining of Deeping Fen that the commissioners of sewers for that region had, during time of parliament, made decrees which deprived Ailesbury and Belasyse of much of their land in south Lincolnshire.85 At this point he chaired the committee for privileges for two meetings, one on the standing orders regarding peers’ right to grant protections, on which he reported on 8 Feb. 1678, and the other on the procedures to be followed during the trial for murder of Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, delivered to the House on 22 March.86 At that trial on 4 Apr. Ailesbury joined the majority of peers in finding Pembroke guilty of manslaughter.87 He was also a reporter for the conference on 30 Apr. to consider the danger from ‘the growth of popery’. On 11 May he chaired a committee of the whole for the first time, on his perennial interest, the bill to encourage wearing woollen manufactures. Ailesbury came to all but four of the meetings of the following short session of May-July 1678, in which he was named to 20 select committees, chaired five of them on nine occasions, and reported two to the House, on a private bill and on the bill for burying in woollen, on 30 May. The latter bill was recommitted but eventually passed a few days later when reported by Anglesey. Ailesbury was later named one of the managers for the two conferences held on the Common’s amendment to this bill on 11-12 July 1678 after which the House agreed to the Commons’ version. Ailesbury in this session also signed the protest of 5 July 1678 against the decision to provide relief to the petitioner in the case of Marmaduke Darrell v. Sir Paul Whichcot.

On 18 Oct. 1678, just before the session of autumn 1678, Ailesbury was sworn on to the Privy Council, a long-overdue honour for such a steadfast supporter of the court.88 He took his seat on 21 Oct. (the opening day of the session), and the following day received Devonshire’s proxy, which he retained for the remained of the session, having in all attended 57 out of a possible 59 sittings. From this point his activity in select committees declined sharply and he was named to only eight, most of them established to investigate aspects of the Popish Plot, but he neither chaired nor reported from any. At the same time his role representing the House in conferences increased considerably. On 1 Nov. 1678 he was made a reporter for the Commons’ address condemning the ‘damnable and hellish plot’ against the king. On 15 Nov. in the debates on the test Bill he opposed the motion for a clause placing those refusing to make the declaration against transubstantiation under the same penalties as those refusing the oaths, and from 23 to 27 Nov. he was involved in all four of the conferences on the Lords’ amendment which would allow a certain number of Catholic servants in the royal households. He was a reporter on 28 Nov. for another conference at which the Commons, ‘in amazement’ at the testimony of Oates and Bedloe concerning the queen’s alleged involvement in an assassination plot, presented an address calling for her removal from the king’s presence, but he was not involved in the conferences following the House’s rejection of it.

He was also heavily involved in the proceedings on the disbandment bill and the impeachment of Danby which brought the session to a close. He chaired three committees of the whole on the bill over 18-20 Dec. 1678, and on that last day he reported from the committee a long series of amendments, including those which sought to place the money raised for disbandment in the exchequer instead of the chamber of London. On 26 Dec., after the Commons had expressed their opposition to these amendments, Ailesbury joined the majority of the House in voting to adhere to them and was appointed to the committee of 14 entrusted to draw up reasons to be presented at a conference. The following day he also voted against the Commons’ request to commit Danby to the Tower pending his charges of impeachment. As a member of the committee assigned to justify the House’s amendments he helped to manage the two inconclusive conferences on 28 Dec. 1678 which effectively brought the session, and eventually the Cavalier Parliament, to a close.

The Exclusion Parliaments, 1679-81

An exclusionist libel of early 1679 ranged Ailesbury among the duke of York’s ‘twelve disciples’ who ‘sit at the helm of the council to steer as they please’.89 Among such political opponents were his Bedfordshire neighbours, the Russells of Woburn, who spread the allegation among the country gentry that Ailesbury ‘did not give credit’ to the allegations of the Popish Plot and whose long-dormant electoral interest was, by the time of the elections following the dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament, ‘like a spring tide at full moon’. Ailesbury’s candidate for the county, his own son Lord Bruce, was defeated at the poll in February 1679 by the partnership of the future Whig martyr, William Russell‡, styled Lord Russell, son of the earl of Bedford, and Sir Humphrey Monoux‡ – at a cost of £6,000, by only 500 votes and to the great fury of the defeated candidate’s father. The king continued to insist that Ailesbury and Bruce try to make an interest against the Russells in Bedfordshire, but Bruce in the two subsequent elections found a safer and easier seat in the Wiltshire borough of Marlborough, part of his wife’s Seymour inheritance. ‘It was not in my father’s power nor mine to bring it up near a majority of votes’ in Bedfordshire in the Exclusion Parliaments, Bruce later lamented.90

Danby relied on Ailesbury as an ally in his attempts to shore up his position at court and to counteract his enemies.91 Ailesbury did prove to be highly committed to Danby and the court in the Parliament of spring 1679, whose every meeting he attended without fail. In the debate of 21-22 Mar. on whether Danby was to be secured to answer the pending articles of impeachment, Ailesbury took the view of most peers that the vote of 27 Dec. 1678 in the previous Parliament against the commitment of the lord treasurer still stood and did not need to be altered.92 Ailesbury was appointed one of the managers for the conference of 22 Mar. at which the House discussed with the Commons the matter of the lord treasurer, the charges against him, and the measures needed to bring him in from hiding. Ailesbury appears to have been working behind the scenes, with Danby’s own son Edward Osborne‡, styled Viscount Latimer, to collect evidence and testimony for Danby’s defence and a refutation of the charges against him in case the matter came to trial.93 In the House he was one of only three peers who on 26 Mar. signed the protest against the passage of the House’s bill to banish Danby, and he later vigorously opposed the Commons’ much stronger bill calling for the attainder of the lord treasurer if he continued in hiding. Ailesbury began the debate on this bill on 2 Apr. by arguing that the bill of attainder ‘is upon the same articles upon which you thought not fit so much as to commit him’ in December 1678, and that the Lords’ own bill to banish Danby, ‘which you judged adequate to the crime’, had been peremptorily thrown out by the Commons and now ‘you have already given a greater respect to this than they did to yours’.94 He voted and protested against both the passage of the bill in the House on 4 Apr. and then, ten days later, on the motion to agree with the version of the bill brought back from the Commons which set a deadline of 21 Apr. for Danby’s surrender.

Danby surrendered himself before this deadline was reached, and Ailesbury continued to defend him by participating in the campaign to delay his trial, or at least to ensure he was properly defended. On 3 May Ailesbury was a reporter for a conference on the House’s amendments to the Habeas Corpus bill, but a week after that he managed a conference concerning the petition Danby had submitted to the House requesting free access to his counsel. On that day, 10 May, he also voted with the majority against the motion to have a committee of both Houses meet together to consider the method of trial for the impeached peers, and the following day he was one of the 12 managers for two free conferences in which this issue was thrashed out, Ailesbury, Finch and Anglesey being noted as the only three lords who spoke at the conferences. In the end the House decided to concede to the request to form a joint committee to discuss the trials, and despite his evident opposition, Ailesbury was appointed one of the 12 peers chosen to meet with a similar committee from the lower House.95 He took his role seriously enough to take notes at the meetings of the joint committee and on one occasion his record of the precise words said helped exonerate his fellow committee member Shaftesbury from Anglesey’s charge that he had cast aspersions on the king.96 Ailesbury also defended the right of the bishops to sit in judgment in capital cases. Against Shaftesbury’s objections to their presence made in a debate of 6 May, Ailesbury argued, basing himself on John Selden‡, that the presence of bishops was necessary for a trial in the House to be valid.97 His friend Colonel Cooke listed him as one of the foremost and most learned proponents of the right of the bishops to sit at the trial in a debate in the House on 19 May.98 With relations between the Houses breaking down over this and other matters, Ailesbury was appointed on 26 May a reporter for a conference called by the Commons to preserve ‘a good correspondence’ between the houses, at which the lower House made clear its many complaints of the House’s delaying tactics in the matter of the trials. The following day Ailesbury probably voted to adhere to the House’s earlier resolution confirming the right of the bishops to sit in judgment in capital cases. With the two Houses in stalemate, Parliament was prorogued, and later dissolved.99

Ailesbury initially suffered for his commitment to Danby and the court, as he was removed from the Privy Council in April 1679, newly remodelled so as to include more of the king’s critics among the country party.100 Ailesbury’s son over 50 years later recounted that Charles II explained that he had removed Ailesbury from the council for his own good in troubled times:

Oh, I am sure he would die at my feet; I know him so well, Doth he imagine I left him out because I did not love him? He was to be left out because I do love him. God’s fish! they have put a set of men about me; but they shall know nothing.101

There were moves as early as November 1679 to remove many of the mistrusted Whig councillors and to reinstate Ailesbury among other faithful servants.102 In the long period during which the second Exclusion Parliament (to which Lord Russell and Monoux were again returned unopposed for Bedfordshire) was continuously prorogued, Ailesbury wrote to his friend Ormond in April 1680 that ‘I have had no little share of the calumnies that have been laid of late on those who endeavour to keep things in the old frame both as to Church and State’.103

Ailesbury missed only three of the meetings of this Parliament after it finally convened for a working session on 21 Oct. 1680, and he was there on its first day to act as earl marshal at the introduction of George Savile as the newly elevated earl of Halifax. He did not receive his usual proxy from the ever-absent Devonshire, which caused concern ‘when so important affairs are depending’.104 Ailesbury’s opposition to the Exclusion bill was sufficiently well known to lead another court supporter, Norreys, to register his proxy with him on 12 Nov. 1680, only three days before the introduction of the bill in the House. This may have been intended as an insurance measure, in case Norreys found himself for any reason unable to be present for the vote on the bill, as the attendance lists in the Journal show Norreys present, despite his proxy, on 12 Nov. and succeeding days, including the day of the bill’s introduction and rejection. The scrappy notes made by Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon, suggest that Ailesbury spoke at least twice in the debate of 15 Nov., and once at length. He argued that the bill was invalid as it had not been first proposed by the king or his ministers and did not have his approval. Near the end of debate, after one of Halifax’s famous and influential speeches against the bill, Ailesbury again intervened to advocate that the House ‘throw out the bill as unparliamentary’. He argued that the danger of passing a law ‘against the law of God and nature’ was more dangerous than being ruled by a prince of a different religion. Moreover, there were examples throughout Europe of successful and peaceable rule by princes of a different religion from their subjects. There was even the possibility, as there was ‘no defect in his person or understanding’, that York might convert upon coming to the throne, as Henry IV of France had done. Ailesbury repeated Halifax’s central argument by holding out the prospect of ‘more insecurity from wars’ if the bill passed, caused by what would be York’s inevitable attempt to reclaim his rightful throne by force. While thus never denying or even defending York’s religion, Ailesbury concluded, ‘I would not do an illegal thing to preserve my whole estate’ and he voted with the majority to throw out the bill.105 He was later named to the group of five peers appointed on 27 Nov. 1680 to join with a committee of ten from the Commons to discuss the procedures for the trial of Viscount Stafford. Apparently, he was opposed to the notion of a joint committee – as he had been earlier with that for Danby’s trial – but he was absent from the House when it was established and was unwittingly placed on it in the place of Shaftesbury who surprisingly declined the nomination.106 Ailesbury later found Stafford not guilty at his trial on 7 December. In this session Ailesbury also chaired a select committee on the question whether the fines imposed on delinquents, such as the publisher of a libellous tract who had petitioned the House, were excessive – the first time he had chaired a select committee since June 1678.107

After the defeat of the Exclusion Bill, Charles II began to take his revenge, and in December 1680 Essex, Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, and Sir William Temple‡ were all removed from the Privy Council. Their replacements were the former councillors Ailesbury and Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford and the newcomer to the board Philip Stanhope, 2nd earl of Chesterfield, all of whom were sworn on to the Privy Council on 26 Jan. 1681.108 Ailesbury’s duties in governing local counties was also increased. In early March 1681 a commission was drawn up to make Ailesbury acting lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of Huntingdonshire during the absence in France of the long-term convalescent Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Sandwich (himself replacing as lord lieutenant the ousted Whig Robert Montagu, 3rd earl of Manchester ), and in late April 1681 the king removed Oliver St John, 2nd earl of Bolingbroke as custos rotulorum of Bedfordshire and placed Ailesbury in that role as well.109

Ailesbury was present at every meeting of the brief Oxford Parliament of March 1681 and on its first day, 21 Mar., he acted as earl marshal at the introduction of Edward Noel, the new Baron Noel (later earl of Gainsborough). Danby instructed his son Viscount Latimer to apply himself to Ailesbury as one of his leading supporters in Parliament who could be relied on to promote his petition for bail, and Ailesbury was also singled out by Danby as one of the seven peers who would be willing to act as his security for bail.110 On 24 Mar. Danby’s kinsman Norreys first presented the petition, and both Roger Morrice and Latimer, coming from very different viewpoints, concur in listing in particular Ailesbury, Frescheville, George Berkeley, 9th Baron (later earl of) Berkeley, Henry Cavendish, 2nd duke of Newcastle and Richard Arundell, Baron Arundell of Trerice as Danby’s ‘old friends’ who ‘stuck close to him’ and who ‘never [went], off the business without a question’.111 Ailesbury himself reassured Danby that ‘there wanted nothing in my endeavours yesterday [24 Mar.], in your Lordship’s affair’, but that the matter had been put off to the following Monday, before which day the Parliament was suddenly and unexpectedly dissolved.112 On its last day, 26 Mar., Ailesbury was also named a reporter for the conference called by the Commons on the methods of passing bills, and particularly the matter of a bill not being presented for the royal assent during the previous Parliament.

Ailesbury did not abandon the struggle for Danby’s liberty at that point and throughout his incarceration Ailesbury maintained a friendly and supportive correspondence with the former lord treasurer.113 In the weeks following the dissolution of Parliament Ailesbury even delayed his much-anticipated trip to the waters at Spa in order to stay behind in England to pursue, apparently alone, a fruitless campaign before the Privy Council for Danby’s bail, on grounds of his deteriorating health in the Tower.114 He was present at the hearings on Danby’s plea of habeas corpus on both 27 May and 29 June 1682.115 In early January 1683 he was one of the signatories to an address to the king for Danby’s bail.116 He also helped Danby’s dynastic ambitions by supporting the legality of the marriage of his second son Peregrine Osborne, Viscount of Dunblane [S], (later 2nd duke of Leeds) to the heiress Bridget Hyde, in his roles both as a privy councillor and as a member of the court of delegates assigned in 1682 to consider her disputed marriage to John Emerton – although he does appear to have been absent when the delegates gave their sentence on 24 Apr. 1683, a narrow victory for Dunblane.117 When Danby and the remaining Catholic peers were finally bailed in February 1684 Ailesbury stood as one of the sureties for £5,000 for Belasyse, with whom he had long been associated through, among other things, their common interest in Deeping Fen.118

The Tory revenge, 1682-5

Ailesbury was involved in other politically tinged matters during the long period of the early 1680s between Parliaments. In March 1682 he was concerned, largely on behalf of his friend and kinsman Devonshire, with the behaviour of that earl’s heir William, then styled Lord Cavendish (later duke of Devonshire) and particularly the rumours that Cavendish had challenged the count of Königsmark to a duel for his role in the murder of Thomas Thynne‡, husband to Lady Elizabeth Percy, sole heiress to the estates of the Percy earls of Northumberland. As deputy earl marshal Ailesbury was able to extract a promise from Cavendish not to give or receive any challenges to Königsmark; throughout the spring of 1682 Ailesbury and the secretaries of state kept a close eye on Cavendish and this potentially explosive situation.119 Ailesbury became more involved in the turbulent politics of the City of London at this time. On 12 July 1682 he was among the ‘several great lords’, including Ormond, Halifax and Laurence Hyde, Viscount Hyde (later earl of Rochester) who dined with the lord mayor of London, Sir John Moore‡, no doubt to show their solidarity and approbation of his efforts to secure Tory victories in the London shrieval elections of that summer.120 At that time he also appears to have been a member of a Tory political club ‘at the Warder within Ludgate’, of which Lord Bruce was one of the first dozen members, but as he later recorded ‘the Club gathered like a snowball in very few weeks’ and ‘the duke of Ormond, my father, and a great number of the nobility came in to us’.121 In November 1682 Ailesbury joined the duke of York at a dinner at the Royal Artillery Company, where he and his fellow peers Ormond and Sunderland were made stewards of the company.122 From about April to late July 1683 Ailesbury was in France with his wife, two younger sons Robert Bruce‡ and James Bruce‡ and two unmarried daughters, Lady Charlotte and Lady Henrietta, but was back at Ampthill by 1 Aug. to assist the secretaries of state in the investigation of the Rye House conspiracy and organized the loyal address delivered to the king in November.123 In the months following his return, Ailesbury was a recipient of the favour shown to royalists during what has become known as the Tory Reaction. The borough of Bedford, near his house at Ampthill, was under suspicion for not being zealous in its loyalty at the time of the conspiracy. Ailesbury engineered the corporation’s surrender of its charter on 8 Jan. 1684 and replacement by a new one, which gave the king the right to remove any member of the corporation at will and instituted Ailesbury himself as the town’s recorder, displacing the long-standing, but more suspect, Bolingbroke from that office.124 In early 1685 his heir Lord Bruce became a gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles II, which the king claimed, according to Bruce, was an attempt to compensate Ailesbury for the relative neglect and paucity of offices he himself had suffered at court.125 Lord Bruce quickly became a favourite of the king and was present at the first signs of the king’s final illness only two short weeks after his appointment, and the care and solicitude he showed to the stricken king may have further increased his family’s reputation for loyalty to the Stuarts.

In February 1685 a clause was drawn up in the commission constituting the absent earl of Sandwich lord lieutenant of Cambridgeshire empowering Ailesbury ‘to execute the office in the absence of the earl of Sandwich beyond the seas’, and Ailesbury thus governed the three adjoining eastern counties of Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire in time for the elections to James II’s Parliament.126 Aided by his influence, eight court candidates were returned in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, while Ailesbury’s greatest triumph was in his own county of Bedfordshire, where ‘there was opposition, but our interest carried it clear from that of the Russells, so triumphant in the late troublesome times’, as the 2nd earl of Ailesbury later exulted, and the gentry ‘were generally for us’ and ‘chose the two gentlemen we set up’, William Boteler‡ and Sir Villiers Chernock‡, against Monoux and another of Bedford’s sons, Edward Russell‡. ‘And the same for the town of Bedford’, the 2nd earl added as an afterthought.127 Ailesbury also wrote to his former son-in-law the 9th earl of Rutland (the former Lord Roos), lord lieutenant of Leicestershire, asking ‘who you think [are] the most proper persons to serve in Parliament for both the town and country Leicester, that I may join my interest with yours’. Ailesbury strongly recommended Bennet Sherard‡, 2nd Baron Sherard [I], and John Verney‡ for the county, both of whom were ultimately returned. He later advised his former son-in-law to come to Westminster to greet the king, ‘as most persons of your quality have done’.128

He came to every single meeting of the first part of James II’s Parliament, before the adjournment of 2 July 1685, and from 23 June 1685 he also held Rutlands’ proxy. Due to the long period of over four years between Parliaments 20 new or elevated peers had to be introduced on the first day, 19 May 1685, and three of these were introduced to the House by Ailesbury – Edward Henry Lee, earl of Lichfield; Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham; and Thomas Windsor, earl of Plymouth. Ailesbury was a key member of the Tories who now found themselves dominant in Parliament and the country, and he was intensely busy in the first part of James II’s Parliament in his capacity as a committee chairman. He was named to 15 select committees on legislation and chaired four of them on ten occasions and reported from three. On 18-19 June 1685 he reported from committee both the bill for the export of leather and that for the rebuilding of the house of William Herbert, earl (later marquess) of Powis.129 He was also involved in the committees for privileges and for petitions, from which bodies he reported three times over two days, 22 and 23 June, on respectively, a scandalous libel against Danby, the very long history and precedents in the case of the claim to the earldom of Banbury, and the petition in the case of Fountaine and Coke against Guavas.130 Just before the adjournment of 2 July, he chaired the committee on the bill for improvement of tillage, reported it on 30 June only to have it recommitted, but the following day brought back a version which the House was able to pass.131

He briefly reached his apogee of honour in this period of adjournment between sittings when, on 30 July 1685, upon the death of the incumbent Henry Bennet, earl of Arlington, Ailesbury was made lord chamberlain of the household. But he was not to enjoy this honour for very long. Having requested leave from the court ‘for to divert himself at his home in the country’, he died on 20 Oct. ‘of an acute fever’ at Houghton House.132 His son Thomas later eulogized his father in his memoirs as ‘the best subject, patriot, husband, father and master that ever lived’.133 At the time of Ailesbury’s death, the new earl wrote to William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, that his father ‘left this world with the satisfaction of being in the good opinion of your Grace and the whole body of the Church, whose interest he asserted his whole time to the utmost of his power.’134

By his will of December 1684 Ailesbury left generous bequests to the ministers and poor of a wide variety of parishes with which he was associated in Bedfordshire, Yorkshire and London and made his widow executrix to manage the unentailed estates for the benefit of his younger underage sons Robert and James and to raise portions for his three as yet unmarried daughters. He explicitly stated his regret that he could not add any additional estates or provision to his son and heir Thomas Bruce, apart from what had been given to him in the marriage settlement with Lady Elizabeth Seymour. This son, the 2nd earl of Ailesbury, did inherit his father’s local roles as lord lieutenant of Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire and his father’s commitment to the hereditary principle and the Stuart line. The 2nd earl of Ailesbury later purported to recall that his father’s last prophetic words to him from his deathbed, made just before James II’s Parliament reconvened for its second stormy sitting, were ‘Dear son, you will see melancholy days; God be thanked, I shall not’.135

C.G.D.L.

  • 1 Collins, Peerage (1710), 283.
  • 2 TNA, PROB 11/380.
  • 3 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 2, 64.
  • 4 Pearse, Schedule of the Recs. of the Corporation of Bedford, 98.
  • 5 R. Fox, Hist. of Godmanchester, 166-7.
  • 6 M. Hunter, Royal Society, 144-5.
  • 7 Verney ms mic. M636/37, newsletter 30 Nov. 1682.
  • 8 Bodl. Tanner 31, f. 203; Davies, Charterhouse in London, 355.
  • 9 VCH Beds. iii. 290.
  • 10 E. Wood, Hist. Clerkenwell, 224.
  • 11 VCH Beds. iii. 271-2, 290.
  • 12 N. and Q. cc. 193; Evelyn Diary, ii. 449.
  • 13 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/444, 480, 493, 494, 512, 515, 517, 537, 538, 541, 649-654.
  • 14 Seaward, Cavalier Parlt. 63.
  • 15 Ailesbury mss 1300/408-661; HMC 15th Rep. VII, 156-61.
  • 16 CCSP, iv. 203, 250, 369, 399.
  • 17 Ibid. 323, 359; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 77, 98, 102, 112, 150.
  • 18 CCSP, iv. 410, 580, 629, 672.
  • 19 Ailesbury mss 1300/831.
  • 20 CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 41; 1666-7, p. 590.
  • 21 CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 217, 262.
  • 22 CSP Dom. 1667-8, p. 431; 1671, p. 131-2; CTB, 1669-72, p. 50; VCH Beds. iii. 271-2.
  • 23 Seaward, 209-212; Pepys Diary, iv. 136; Ailesbury mss 1300/512.
  • 24 Seaward, 97, 328; Ailesbury mss 1300/650, 653.
  • 25 Ailesbury mss 1300/831.
  • 26 Swatland, 59, 62; Pillar of the Constitution, 75.
  • 27 Ailesbury mss 1300/514; HMC 15th Rep. VII, 172; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 125.
  • 28 Ailesbury mss 1300/537, 538; HMC 15th Rep. VII, 174; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 187, 189.
  • 29 Ailesbury mss 1300/515, 517; HMC 15th Rep. VII, 172.
  • 30 Kent HLC (CKS), U269/O38, N. Strode to Dorset, 9 May 1664.
  • 31 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 27, 59.
  • 32 Ailesbury mss 1300/656.
  • 33 Pearse, pp. 84, 88.
  • 34 CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 509; SR, v. 559-68.
  • 35 CSP Dom. 1664-5, p. 280; Ailesbury mss 1300/543, 544, 545, 556; Bodl. Carte 215, ff. 273-4; Pepys Diary, vii. 142.
  • 36 Bodl. Carte 34, f. 702; Carte 50, f. 46; Carte 145, ff. 289-91; Carte 215, ff. 273-4.
  • 37 Verney ms mic. M636/24, H. Verney and Dr. W. Denton to Sir R. Verney, 18 and 22 Aug. 1670; Bodl. Carte 216, f. 33.
  • 38 TNA, SP 29/173/26; 29/189/94-5; CSP Dom. 1666-7, pp. 305, 365-6.
  • 39 Ailesbury mss 1300/548, 558; HMC 15th Rep. VII, 175.
  • 40 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, p. 23.
  • 41 PA, HL/PO/CO/1//2, pp. 162, 165; Ailesbury mss 1300/553, 559.
  • 42 Ailesbury mss 1300/655. Cooke’s letters are in Ailesbury mss 1300/408-661.
  • 43 Ailesbury mss 1300/552.
  • 44 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 277.
  • 45 CSP Dom. 1668-9, p. 390.
  • 46 Ailesbury Mems. i. 11.
  • 47 Ibid. 14.
  • 48 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 408, 456.
  • 49 Ibid. 372-4, 382-3, 387-8, 443, 445, 449, 452-4.
  • 50 Ibid. 451.
  • 51 HMC Rutland, ii. 11, 24.
  • 52 Eg. 3328, ff. 65-66.
  • 53 CSP Dom. 1673, pp. 413-14; 1678, pp. 227, 259; 1679-80, pp. 390, 410; 1682, pp. 113-14.
  • 54 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 7-9, 13, 24-25, 31-32, 34-35, 41.
  • 55 Ibid. 35-38, 40-42, 44.
  • 56 Ibid. 49-50, 52-56, 58-59, 62-65, 75-77, 81.
  • 57 Ibid. 55, 60-61, 70, 72, 77-81.
  • 58 Ibid. 50-52.
  • 59 Cobbett, Parl. Hist. iv. 60.
  • 60 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 82-4, 87-88, 91-95, 97, 100; LJ¸xii. 686, 696.
  • 61 Ibid. 101, 103-6, 111-12.
  • 62 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, p. 122; HMC 9th Rep. pt. 2, 63-64.
  • 63 CSP Dom. 1675-6, pp. 413-14.
  • 64 Wilts. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Mag. xcvi. 102.
  • 65 Ailesbury mss 9/1/16, Ailesbury to Col. Edward Cooke, 9 Feb. 1676.
  • 66 Ailesbury mss 1300/775, 777.
  • 67 Ibid. 1300/675.
  • 68 Wilts. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Mag. xcvi. 102-3; Bodl. Carte 130, f. 413.
  • 69 Wilts. Arch and Nat. Hist. Mag. xcvi. 98-110.
  • 70 HEHL, EL 8420.
  • 71 CSP Dom. 1676-7, p. 551.
  • 72 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 133-4, 143-4.
  • 73 Ailesbury mss 1300/720.
  • 74 Bodl. Carte 79, ff. 37-38.
  • 75 Ailesbury Mems. i. 21.
  • 76 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 131-2, 134-9, 141-2, 146-50, 154-6, 159, 162, 165-6, 173-6, 179-80, 189, 196-7, 199-200.
  • 77 Ibid. 141-2.
  • 78 Ibid. 201-4.
  • 79 Ibid. 150, 157-9, 162, 173, 182-3, 186.
  • 80 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, pp. 127-31.
  • 81 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 201-4.
  • 82 Add. 29571, f. 388.
  • 83 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 208, 213, 240-1, 246, 275.
  • 84 Ibid. 265; Bodl. Carte 222, f. 223.
  • 85 HMC 9th Rep. pt. 2, 99; PA, HL/PO/JO/CO/1/3, pp. 267-8.
  • 86 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, pp. 134-7, 143-4.
  • 87 PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/19, 4 Apr. 1678.
  • 88 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 2.
  • 89 Eg. 3331, ff. 120-1; CSP Dom. 1679-80, p. 68.
  • 90 Ailesbury Mems. i. 33, 40, 53; Verney ms mic. M636/32, E. to Sir R. Verney, 24 Feb. 1679; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 125-6.
  • 91 Bodl. Carte 130, f. 291; HMC 14th Rep. IX. 405.
  • 92 Add. 28046, f. 50.
  • 93 HMC 14th Rep. IX. 405.
  • 94 Add. 28046, f. 53.
  • 95 HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 97; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 147-8; Bodl. Carte 81, f. 625.
  • 96 HMC Ormonde, n.s. vi. 103.
  • 97 Bodl. Carte 81, f. 561v.
  • 98 HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 108.
  • 99 Browning, Danby, iii. 138.
  • 100 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 136.
  • 101 Ailesbury Mems. i. 35.
  • 102 Verney ms mic. M636/33, Dr. W. Denton and C. Gardiner to Sir R. Verney, 17 and 20 Nov. 1679.
  • 103 HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 313.
  • 104 Chatsworth, Devonshire Collection 2 (General Corresp.), Ailesbury to Devonshire, 6 Nov. 1680.
  • 105 BIHR, xx. 34, 36.
  • 106 HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 506.
  • 107 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, 371-4; HMC Lords, i. 212-13.
  • 108 TNA, PC 2/69, p. 193.
  • 109 CSP Dom, 1680-1, pp. 173, 190, 204, 207, 251; Bodl. Carte 222, f. 264.
  • 110 Add. 28042, f. 83; Browning, ii. 96.
  • 111 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 273; HMC 14th Rep. IX. 423, 426; Bodl. Carte 79, f. 164.
  • 112 Add. 28053, f. 251.
  • 113 Ibid. ff. 207-8; Eg. 3332, ff. 31, 84; 3334, ff. 57-58.
  • 114 Add. 75355, Clifford of Lanesborough to Lady Burlington, 3 May 1681; Add. 28053, ff. 207-8.
  • 115 Eg. 3332, f. 84; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 319-20; HMC Rutland, ii. 74; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 199.
  • 116 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 340.
  • 117 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 205, 233-4; Eg. 3384, ff. 20, 90, 95.
  • 118 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 452; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 301.
  • 119 CSP Dom. 1682, pp. 112, 113-14, 116, 136-8, 170, 171.
  • 120 Ibid. 289.
  • 121 Ailesbury Mems. i. 64.
  • 122 Verney ms mic. M636/37, newsletter 30 Nov. 1682.
  • 123 CSP Dom. Jan.-June 1683, p. 379; July-Sept. 1683, p. 238; 1683-4, p. 183; Bodl. Carte 74, ff. 210, 212, 215, 219.
  • 124 J. Godber, Hist. of Beds. 1066-1888, p. 264; VCH Beds. ii. 57-58; Beds. Hist. Rec. Soc. lxxxv. 8.
  • 125 Ailesbury Mems. i. 23.
  • 126 CSP Dom. 1685, p. 34-35.
  • 127 Ailesbury Mems. i. 53, 100; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 125-6, 146-7, 272-3.
  • 128 HMC Rutland, ii. 85-86, 87; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 295-6.
  • 129 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 384-5, 388, 390-93.
  • 130 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, pp. 174-8.
  • 131 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, pp. 405-7.
  • 132 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iii. 42, 46; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 360; Ailesbury Mems. i. 123-4.
  • 133 Ailesbury Mems. i. 124.
  • 134 Bodl. Tanner 31, f. 222.
  • 135 Ailesbury Mems. i. 124.