styled 1685-1712 Ld. Bruce; accel. 29 Dec. 1711 Bar. BRUCE of Whorlton; suc. fa. 16 Dec. 1741 as 3rd earl of AILESBURY and 4th earl of Elgin [S]; cr. 17 Apr. 1746 Bar. BRUCE of Tottenham
First sat 2 Jan. 1712; last sat 1 Aug. 1746
MP Great Bedwyn 7 Dec. 1705, 1708; Marlborough 1710–29 Dec. 1711.
b. 29 May 1682, 2nd but o. surv. s. of Thomas Bruce, styled Ld. Bruce (later 2nd earl of Ailesbury), and Elizabeth (1655–97), da. of Henry Seymour (1626–54), styled Ld. Beauchamp. educ. privately; academy at Brussels, 1698. m. (1) 7 Feb. 1706 (with approx. £45,000), Anne (d. 18 July 1717), da. and coh. of William Savile, 2nd mq. of Halifax, 2s. d.v.p. 2da. (1 d.v.p.); (2) 2 Feb. 1720 (with £10,000),1 Juliana (d. 1739), da. of Charles Boyle, 2nd earl of Burlington and 3rd earl of Cork [I], s.p.; (3) 18 June 1739, Caroline (d. 17 Jan. 1803), da. of John Campbell†, later 4th duke of Argyll [S], 1da. d. 10 Feb. 1747; will 15 May 1746, pr. 15 Apr. 1747.2
Burgess, Bedford 1711; recorder, Bedford 1711–d.
Associated with: Houghton House, Ampthill, Beds. (to 1707); Henley Park, Guilford, Surr. (1707–17);3 Poland Street, Westminster (1710–14); 4Tottenham Park, Savernake, Wilts. (from 1717).
Likenesses: oil on canvas, attrib. Sir G. Kneller, c.1720, sold at Sotheby’s, 14 Apr. 2011.
Charles Bruce, styled Lord Bruce, had great responsibility thrust on him at a young age after his father fled to the continent in February 1698 to escape prosecution as a Jacobite. Lord Bruce and his younger sister, Lady Elizabeth Bruce, joined their father in Brussels, Ailesbury’s adopted city, in August 1698, and Bruce ‘rode’ at the Academy there for some months. After about a year Ailesbury sent him back to England to head the family’s interest there. Thus while still underage Lord Bruce was charged with managing the family’s far-flung estates in Yorkshire, Bedfordshire and Wiltshire, ably assisted by his uncle, Ailesbury’s younger brother, Robert Bruce‡.5
Lord Bruce assumed full responsibility for his family’s affairs when he came of age in 1703. He provided for his father out of the income of the Bedfordshire and Yorkshire estates, while the Wiltshire estates centred around Savernake Forest were made over to Bruce so that he could dispose of them for his own maintenance. From 1705 Bruce and his uncle Robert were deep in negotiations with Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, for a marriage with Lady Anne Savile, which promised to bring to the Bruce family a portion of potentially £45,000 from the wills of the bride’s two grandfathers.6
Bruce and his uncles saw the marriage as an opportunity to re-establish the Bruces as a leading family among the English peerage. To further cement their position Bruce felt that it was necessary for his sister (who had remained with her father on the Continent) to come back to England, so that she could be properly married and rescued from the Catholic influences prevailing in Brussels, ‘being so young and having for so long a time neither had a governess of her religion nor a chaplain in the family’. Lady Elizabeth returned to England in June 1705, but a year later definitively told Bruce that she was a Roman Catholic. Bruce enlisted William Wake, bishop of Lincoln (later archbishop of Canterbury), to try to convert her back to the national church, and he embarked on this seemingly futile task throughout the winter of 1706–7. An apparent resolution was reached in the spring of 1707 when Elizabeth was matched with George Brudenell, 3rd earl of Cardigan. Cardigan came from an old Catholic family, but Bruce nevertheless considered him ‘universally esteemed here and very well known in the best company’, and approved of the marriage. As part of the marriage settlement Cardigan formally agreed with Bruce and his uncles that he and his wife would adhere to the national Protestant church. Wake still strenuously objected to the marriage, but this did not prevent him from maintaining friendly social relations, and frequent visits, with Bruce well into the reign of George I.7
At around the same time in 1707, Bruce abandoned the family’s traditional residence of Houghton House in Ampthill, telling his father that, although he had tried to ‘bring my affairs to such a compass that I might have been able to have continued in this place [Ampthill] … I find it impossible to support my manner of living here … all this will force me to leave a place I very much love’.8 Bruce left the costly ancestral home and retired to a less grand house slightly closer to the capital, Henley Park, near Guildford, which he rented from Sir Richard Child‡, before, ten years later, settling at Tottenham Park in Savernake in Wiltshire, part of the lands inherited by the family in 1676 through his mother, Lady Elizabeth Seymour.
There was a concomitant geographical move in the concentration of the Bruces’ political and electoral influence. Bruce’s father and his grandfather (Robert Bruce, earl of Ailesbury) had served as lord lieutenants of Bedfordshire, although both had had difficulties in exerting their influence in an infamously Whiggish county, where Russell influence was strong. By the time of the 1705 elections Bruce declined to stand as knight of the shire for Bedfordshire and instead he and his uncles increasingly looked to the Seymour lands in Wiltshire as the most fertile ground for exercising electoral influence. With the inheritance of the Tottenham and Savernake estates in the east of the county, the Bruces had also acquired the lordship of the nearby manors of Marlborough and West Bedwyn, which gave them a predominant interest in the parliamentary boroughs of Marlborough, Great Bedwyn and, to a lesser extent, Ludgershall.
In the vacuum left by Ailesbury’s flight in 1698 the Bruce electoral interest came under considerable pressure from Charles Seymour, 6th duke of Somerset, but the family had ensured that its client Charles Davenant‡ was elected for Great Bedwyn in 1698 and January 1701; Bruce’s uncles, Robert and James‡, were returned for Marlborough and Great Bedwyn respectively at the 1702 election. Bruce’s effective and energetic electoral agent, Charles Becher, was, however, forced to report to Bruce before the elections of 1705 that the voters in Marlborough were ‘very mercenary’ and had ‘resolved to serve the highest bidder, for they had no sort of honour and conscience, being now grown as corrupt as any other borough’. Sure enough, Somerset’s bribes coupled with Tory disarray in the corporation ensured the return of Somerset’s client, the Whig Edward Ashe‡, against Robert Bruce. Lord Bruce himself and his uncle James stood at Great Bedwyn but were defeated by ‘interlopers’ from outside the borough, Nicholas Pollexfen‡ and Admiral Sir George Byng†.9
The bribery and corruption in this election had been so blatant that from the autumn of 1705 Becher was assiduous in collecting evidence and witnesses (two of them ‘very rogues who must be carefully managed’) for the petition which was brought before the committee for elections. As a result of an agreement probably hammered out in order to avoid further embarrassing scrutiny, Byng opted in November to sit for Plymouth, another seat for which he had been returned. Bruce withdrew his petition and was returned at the ensuing by-election without opposition. At the election of 1708 Bruce was returned again at Great Bedwyn by a crushing majority at the poll, while he placed James Bruce burgess for Marlborough (not without opposition from Somerset and a very close poll), and Robert was returned for Ludgershall. Two years later Bruce was elected at both Marlborough and Great Bedwyn, but eventually chose to sit with his uncle Robert for Marlborough, while his candidate, Thomas Millington‡, was returned at the ensuing Great Bedwyn by-election in 1711.10
All three Bruces inclined to the moderate wing of the Tory party and Lord Bruce in particular was anxious to stay in the court’s favour as he continued to work for the return of his father from exile. When there was a hope that Ailesbury could return under the terms of the queen’s Act of General and Free Pardon in April 1709, Bruce intended to make doubly sure by addressing a petition to the queen asking for the grant of a special licence for his father’s return.11 The petition was granted and a licence issued on Lord Bruce’s birthday of 29 May, but Ailesbury, through illness and then the sudden death of his second wife, did not take advantage of it and instead remained on the Continent until his death in 1741.12 In the Commons, Bruce and his uncle opposed the prosecution of Dr Sacheverell, who had been born and bred in Marlborough.13 At the beginning of the 1710 Parliament Bruce was classed as a Tory in the ‘Hanover list’ and later among the ‘worthy patriots’ who in the first session had detected the mismanagements of the previous ministry and had helped to buttress the ministry of Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford, over the terms of the peace preliminaries with France.14 There was consequently recognition of his importance to the new ministry: after Bruce was passed over as lord lieutenant of Bedfordshire in May 1711, he was at least appointed recorder of the borough of Bedford a few months later in the place of Paulet St John, 3rd earl of Bolingbroke, who himself had taken over the office from Ailesbury at the Revolution.15
Most prominently, Bruce was one of the first of the 12 Tory peers put into the House by Harley, now earl of Oxford, to shore up his ministry. Oxford noted him as a ‘loyal’ member who should be gratified for his vote against the ‘No Peace without Spain’ motion in the House on 10 Dec. 1711, despite the fact that Bruce was still sitting in the Commons at the time. It was principally Bruce’s brother-in-law Cardigan and his uncle Robert who acted as the middlemen and facilitators of this acceleration. On 27 Dec. 1711 Robert wrote to Bruce at Henley Park informing him that he, Cardigan and an unnamed person – probably either Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, or William Legge, earl of Dartmouth – had met at White’s Coffee House, where Cardigan had asked Robert ‘whether it would be agreeable to [Bruce] to be called to the House of Lords’, promising him that if Bruce so agreed, it ‘might immediately be done’. The mysterious unnamed other person also encouraged Bruce to take up the honour. The queen signed the warrant for Bruce’s writ of acceleration on 28 Dec. but he was not the first of ‘Oxford’s dozen’. The writ of acceleration of another heir of a peer, James Compton, later 5th earl of Northampton, summoning him as Baron Compton was issued on 28 Dec.; Bruce’s writ had to wait until the next morning, possibly because Dartmouth had had to take time to ascertain the proper title of the English barony in the Bruce family.16
Ailesbury later claimed in his memoirs that as early as 1705 he had suggested to John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, then visiting the earl in his exile in the Netherlands while on campaign, that the queen could enjoy a more compliant House of Lords through a mass creation of cooperative peers. He included his own son in his list of candidates for this honour, but warned Marlborough that Bruce would at heart always prefer to sit in the Commons, ‘so very good a school’, and would only accept the new honour ‘by obedience’.17 Whatever Bruce’s true feelings about his elevation, he proved a dutiful and conscientious member of the House for the ministry. The first task for the 12 peers was to appear in the House on 2 Jan. 1712 and vote for an adjournment until mid-January, which would give Oxford and the ministry time to regroup before pushing through measures for the peace. It appears from the correspondence of ministers of state about the new peerages in late December 1711 that one of the principal virtues of choosing Bruce was that he was near at hand, in Henley Park in Surrey, and could be expected to arrive in time to be in the House only a few days after receiving his summons. Dartmouth and Robert Bruce both emphasized to Bruce in letters of Friday, 28 Dec., and even more urgently on Sunday, 30 Dec. that Bruce needed to be in Westminster on Monday night or Tuesday at the latest in order to kiss the queen’s hand in time to sit in the House on 2 January. Bruce fulfilled this duty and was present in the House on the stated day, when he and the other 11 new peers voted through the adjournment.18
Bruce sat in the House for most of the rest of January, but left on 15 Feb. 1712, after having registered his proxy with Richard Savage, 4th Earl Rivers, on the 7th (Rivers appears to have been a close personal friend).19 Bruce returned on 28 Apr. and in May voted against the Whig motion for an address against the ‘restraining orders’ issued to James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond.20 He came to just over two-thirds of the meetings of the session of spring 1713, and Oxford included him among those who would have voted for the French commercial treaty if it had been sent up to the House. Bruce also joined Nottingham in petitioning on 21 Apr. 1713 to bring in a bill to enable trustees to sell Halifax’s estate for the payment of debts. The bill did not have its first reading until 8 May but received the royal assent on 6 July. Bruce came to 59 per cent of the meetings of the spring of 1714 and whenever he was absent from the House registered his proxy with either his brother-in-law Cardigan (9–17 Mar., 10–13 and 24–29 Apr.) or Compton (6–26 May and 21–30 June). Nottingham forecast that Bruce would vote for the Schism bill, and its vote did take place during one of the periods he was in the House. Bruce came to only four of the meetings of the session held after the death of Anne, and on 5 Aug. assigned his proxy to Simon Harcourt, Baron (later Viscount) Harcourt, for the remainder of the session.
Bruce was undoubtedly most useful to the Oxford ministry for his electoral influence. On 18 July 1713 he wrote to Oxford to reassure him that he was about to go to Bedfordshire ‘to take care of the elections there’. He promised the lord treasurer ‘two good members’ both for the county and for the borough (although he was not quite so positive about the latter), and also promised him the election in Wiltshire of four loyal members ‘upon my own interest’.21 His confident prediction of the numbers of the voting ‘bloc’ he could bring to the service of Oxford were well founded: the Tory candidates John Harvey‡ and Sir Pynsent Chernock‡ were returned for the county of Bedford, while in the borough the one Tory candidate, Samuel Rolt‡, stood against two Whigs and won the second seat. Bruce’s candidate Henry Skyllyng‡ did not prevail in Ludgershall, but the electors of Great Bedwyn returned the sitting members, and those of Marlborough elected Robert Bruce and the other Bruce nominee, Gabriel Roberts‡.22
The Marlborough election came in the middle of a sharply partisan crisis in the government of the borough that closely involved both Bruce and his rival, Somerset. The borough was bitterly divided between an oligarchic Whig council, in the pay of and supporting the Somerset interest, and the majority of the burgesses, who increasingly showed Tory, or at least anti-Somerset, leanings. In 1711 the outgoing Whig mayor, Roger Williams, stacked the corporation’s council with his political followers and then, following an Elizabethan by-law of the corporation charter, proposed three of these Whig councillors as candidates for mayor. When the burgesses overwhelmingly voted for the solitary Tory councillor, Abraham Kimber, Williams rejected the choice on the grounds that Kimber was not a qualified candidate and installed his preferred candidate, John Horner, as mayor instead. This high-handed action helped to ensure the defeat of Somerset’s candidate in the by-election to find a replacement for Bruce in January 1712.
Somerset redoubled his efforts for the mayoral elections of August, which were to be even more controversial because Kimber and the Tory burgesses had been able to force through the repeal of the by-law which restricted the nomination of mayoral candidates to the three councillors set forth by the incumbent. Thanks to the determined counter-bribing of Bruce’s electoral agent, Kimber beat his nearest Whig rival for the nomination. In response, Williams and the other Whig councillors withdrew themselves from corporation business, even taking one of the town seals with them, but did set up another candidate in the mayoral election on 14 Aug. 1713, only 12 days before the parliamentary elections. Bruce’s task was made simpler in the latter by the self-destruction of the Marlborough Whigs at the mayoral election, when a minority of 14 councillors and burgesses walked out to elect their own mayor, while Kimber and 17 burgesses stayed behind in the corporation hall and voted ‘Wat’ Shropshire in as mayor.
The Whigs were in such disarray, having lost the election both numerically and morally, that Somerset did not even propose a candidate for the ensuing national election. Robert Bruce and Gabriel Roberts were both returned unopposed. The split within the Marlborough corporation, with separate mayors and councils each claiming legitimacy, continued into 1714, when there was another divided election which the Bruce candidate John Fowler won and which the Whig ‘mayor’, and Somerset ally, Roger Williams refused to recognize. In December Somerset threatened quo warranto proceedings against the current and previous Tory mayors, arguing that the old by-law which had been at the centre of the first contested mayoral election had not been properly repealed.23
Bruce vigorously pursued his competition with the Seymours over control of Marlborough well into the reigns of the first two Georges, particularly after Somerset consigned the Marlborough interest to his heir Algernon Seymour†, styled earl of Hertford (later 7th duke of Somerset), in March 1715. By 1736 Somerset could write of his rival that ‘Lord Bruce hath established his interest very effectually … in Marlborough upon so firm a foundation that it is not to be shaken’.24 Bruce remained an active Tory partisan after the Hanoverian Succession and, despite his frequent periods of absence from the House, he was at the heart of the Tory organization to sway crucial votes and to exchange proxies. Sometime in 1715–16 he corresponded with John Leveson Gower, 2nd Baron (later Earl) Gower, to work with him on corralling as many of ‘their friends’ – 17 lay lords and 4 bishops – for the ‘next meeting’ as possible.25
Baron Compton was Bruce’s most frequent proxy recipient in the period 1715–20, holding it for five different periods in 1715–16, but Bruce also exchanged proxies several times with his brother-in-law Cardigan, as well as with a number of other Tory peers. Bruce also came to the House for important votes and debates and was often on hand to subscribe to Tory-driven protests. Not only did he vote and protest against the Septennial Bill and the bill to forfeit the estates of Jacobite ‘traitors’ in the wake of the 1715 uprising, but he also compiled lists of the different sides in divisions on these bills, on 14 Apr. and 22 June 1716 respectively.26 He signed a series of three protests against the articles of impeachment against his old patron Oxford and worked to ensure a strong Tory presence at Westminster at the time of Oxford’s trial in June 1717.27
At about that time, Bruce’s first wife, Lady Anne Savile, died and from the time of his remarriage, in February 1720, to his second cousin Lady Juliana Boyle, his closest political and social connections were oriented to the extended Boyle family. He frequently used his wife’s uncle Henry Boyle, Baron Carleton, and particularly his new brother-in-law and second cousin, Richard Boyle, 3rd earl of Burlington, as his proxies. A more detailed discussion of his activities in the House and as election manager for the Wiltshire boroughs after 1715 will appear in the subsequent volumes of this work.
In December 1741 Bruce inherited his father’s titles upon the aged 2nd earl’s death but, with only two surviving daughters, he was faced with the possibility that the earldom of Ailesbury would become extinct upon his own death. In April 1746 he was further created Baron Bruce of Tottenham, with a special remainder in the patent bequeathing the title to his nephew, Thomas Brudenell†, the youngest son of his deceased sister the countess of Cardigan. He also intended to make Brudenell heir to his lands. Less than a year later, in February 1747, he died at Tottenham Park. After providing for a substantial dowry for his young daughter and for other bequests, his will placed the residue of the estate in the hands of trustees to guard it for his heir, who added the surname Bruce to his own to signify his inheritance. The Scottish barony of Bruce of Kinloss and the earldom of Elgin went to a distant kinsman, Charles Bruce, 9th earl of Kincardine [S], and the Scottish barony of Kinloss lay dormant for several decades, but the English barony of Bruce of Whorlton and the earldom of Ailesbury were extinguished until Thomas Brudenell Bruce†, 2nd Baron Bruce of Tottenham, was created earl of Ailesbury in 1776.
C.G.D.L.- 1 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/1268.
- 2 TNA, PROB 11/753.
- 3 HMC 15th Rep. VII, 200, 203, 206, 219, 220, 222.
- 4 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/1281–92, 1144.
- 5 Ailesbury Mems. ii. 456, 473–5, 480, 489.
- 6 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 9/1/17; 1300/988–1002, 1007–9, 1046, 1168, 1174, 1226.
- 7 Ailesbury mss 1300/1000–4, 1010–17, 1177, 1178; LPL, ms 1770, ff. 32–36, 104v, 168r, 170v; Christ Church, Oxford, Wake mss 17, f. 162; Wake mss 1, f. 63.
- 8 Ailesbury mss 1300/1006, 1015, 1018, 1019.
- 9 HP Commons, 1690–1715, ii. 669–70; WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/1310–15, 1326.
- 10 HP Commons, 1690–1715, ii. 668–72, 678, 685–7; WHSC, Ailesbury mss 1300/1300–15, 1324–32, 1337–49; Ailesbury mss 9/19/882.
- 11 Add. 61617, f. 100.
- 12 C.S.C. Brudenell-Bruce, Life and Loyalties of Thomas Bruce, 256–9.
- 13 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/1301, 1306, 1433, 1436.
- 14 HP Commons, 1690–1715, iii. 367–8.
- 15 Bath mss at Longleat, Thynne pprs. 47, f. 340.
- 16 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/1078 (pts 1 and 2), 1160–2; Partisan Politics, Principle and Reform in Parliament and the Constituencies, ed. C. Jones et al. 21–25.
- 17 Ailesbury Mems. ii. 562.
- 18 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/1078 (pt 2), 1160–2.
- 19 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/1078 (pt 2).
- 20 PH, xxvi. 160–283.
- 21 Add. 70282, Bruce to Oxford, 18 July 1713.
- 22 HP Commons, 1690–1715, ii. 8, 11, 672, 679.
- 23 HP Commons, 1690–1715, ii. 687–9; HMC 15th Rep. VII, 206–13, 216–22; WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/1184, 1419–30, 1695.
- 24 Add. 61436, ff. 46, 60; Add. 61457, f. 129; Add. 61684, f. 25.
- 25 HMC 5th Rep. 189.
- 26 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 3790/1/1, pp. 102, 106–7; PH, xxxii(1), 153–273.
- 27 Beds. Archives, SJ 2296; Add. 70282, Bruce to Oxford, 12 Aug. 1717.