GORING, Charles (1624-71)

GORING, Charles (1624–71)

styled 1657-63 Ld. Goring; suc. fa. 6 Jan. 1663 as 2nd earl of NORWICH

First sat 18 Feb. 1663; last sat 11 Feb. 1671

bap. 23 Oct. 1624,1 2nd but o. surv. s. of George Goring, earl of Norwich and Mary (d.1648), da. of Edward Nevill† 8th Bar. Abergavenny; bro. of George Goring‡. educ. Jesus, Camb. 1637. m. bef. 7 Jan. 1659, Alice (bur. 23 July 1680), da. of Robert Leman, of Brightwell Hall, Suff., wid. of Thomas Baker of Fressingfield, Suff. s.p. d. 3 Mar. 1671; will 2 Mar., pr. 15 Mar. 1671.2

Clerk, Council of Wales 1661-3; sec., Council of Wales 1663-d.; steward, honour of Peverell, Notts. 1664-d.3

Col., Ld. Goring’s Regt. of Horse 1645-6.

Associated with: Forest House, Leyton, Essex; Queen Street, Westminster.4

Like his father and elder brother Colonel George Goring‡, styled Lord Goring, Charles Goring fought for the royalists during the Civil War, serving under his brother at Marston Moor, the second battle of Newbury, Naseby and Langport. He also had a field command during the second Civil War but appears to have escaped to the Netherlands after that campaign’s failure and was in Antwerp in early 1652, when he, his father and brother were all specifically exempted from the benefits of the Act of General Pardon and Oblivion.5 He returned to England that spring to manage the affairs of his family’s estate in England, including the sale of Danny and other of the family’s estates in Sussex, and appears to have remained in the country thereafter, despite occasional harassment from the government.6

From late 1657, when Colonel Goring died in Madrid, Charles adopted the courtesy title of Lord Goring and became heir to his father’s earldom of Norwich. Sometime in late 1658 the new Lord Goring contracted a lucrative marriage with Alice Baker, a widow who brought with her from her previous marriage a personal estate of £10,000 and jointure lands of £1,000 p.a., including the richly furnished Forest House in Leyton, Middlesex.7

On 7 Jan. 1663, having just learned of his father’s death, he wrote to his former comrade in the royalist western campaign, Thomas Wentworth, Baron Wentworth, predicting ‘nothing but ruin’ unless the king took compassion for ‘a family of loyalty and passionate affection for him’. He claimed that, under the pressure of providing for his creditors, his father had been reduced to an estate of £450 p.a. by the time of his death.8 Charles II did make some gestures to help him in his dire financial straits and Norwich was able to take over his father’s previous sinecure as secretary of the Council of Wales (where he had held the position of clerk under his father since 1661) and in 1664 the Crown bestowed on him the stewardship of the honour of Peverell in Nottinghamshire, an office which had also been held by his father during the reign of Charles I.9 Norwich also insistently claimed the residue of the pension of £14,000 (to be paid in instalments of £2,000 a year for seven years) that had been given to his father on surrendering the captaincy of the yeomen of the guard to George Villiers, 4th Viscount Grandison of Limerick [I] in 1661.10

Norwich first sat in the House on 18 Feb. 1663, and proceeded to attend 72 per cent of the meetings of the session of spring 1663, where he was named to ten select committees, mostly on private bills, but including those on bills to prevent gaming and to prevent duels. Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, forecast that Norwich would support the attempt in July 1663 of George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, to impeach Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. Norwich had good reason to dislike Clarendon. The first earl of Norwich had blamed Clarendon directly for his failure to be appointed farmer of the customs in late 1662, and the second earl came close to holding the lord chancellor responsible for his father’s death, as he suggested that being passed over as customs farmer broke his father’s heart.11 Norwich would already have witnessed the intense animosity between his brother, Lord Goring, and Sir Edward Hyde (as he then was) during the western campaign of 1644-5 and probably blamed Clarendon for the failure of many of his own petitions, such as his attempt to claim the Mulberry Garden in St. James Park, a plot of valuable land which had originally been promised to his father but whose grant had been aborted by the events of 1642.12 He was connected with other opponents of the lord chancellor. He appears to have had some relationship, although it is difficult to determine what the exact connection was, with Clarendon’s rival Henry Bennet, Baron (later earl of) Arlington. Norwich referred to Arlington in 1663 as his ‘cousin’ who would be able to attest reliably to the meagre state of his inheritance.13

Norwich was also connected to many prominent members of the English Catholic community and, if not a Catholic himself, he apparently had a good deal of sympathy for them and their religion. This too may have encouraged him to side with the Catholic Bristol against the religiously discriminatory measures associated with the lord chancellor. Goring considered himself enough of a member of the Church of England to have his burial in the Anglican parish church of Leyton.14 But his wife may have been a Catholic, for it was the abbess of the Benedictine convent at Ghent who was able to reassure the first earl of Norwich in 1659 that his new daughter-in-law was ‘a virtuous, rich and wise young lady’.15 The first earl had long served the Catholic household of Henrietta Maria; Colonel George Goring had formally converted to Catholicism before his death in 1657 and was buried in St. George’s Chapel of the English Jesuits in Madrid. Most tellingly, Norwich’s mother was of the Catholic Nevill family and his maternal cousin, the Catholic George Nevill, 11th Baron Abergavenny, was on Wharton’s list of Clarendon’s opponents, as was the Catholic peer Christopher Roper, 4th Baron Teynham, who on 14 July 1663 registered his proxy with Norwich to represent him during the proceedings on the impeachment. This proxy was vacated three days later at Teynham’s reappearance in the House.

Teynham gave Norwich his proxy again for the entirety of the session of spring 1664, during which Norwich came to all but five of the sittings and was named to five committees. He improved his level of attendance and activity at the next session, in 1664-5, when he came to 45 of the 53 meetings. He was nominated to 21 committees in all, almost all on private bills, and on 24 Jan. 1665 chaired a meeting on Francis Leigh’s estate bill which was adjourned with no discussion.16 He came to 75 per cent of the session of 1666-7 and on 22 Dec. 1666 was delegated to bring George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, from the Tower of London, where he had been incarcerated for an unseemly tussle with Henry Pierrepont, marquess of Dorchester, to the bar of the House to make his submission and bind himself not to provoke Dorchester again. As Dorchester was brought before the bar at the same time by his nephew Gilbert Holles, 3rd earl of Clare, this duty given to Norwich suggests that he may have been considered an associate of Buckingham. Their fathers had indeed been close companions at the courts of James I and Charles I, but they may also have been united in their dislike of Clarendon and their wish to see his fall. To exacerbate matters during 1666-7 Norwich was involved in a long dispute with the treasury about privy seals granted to a number of his father’s creditors and legatees which diverted to them first call on the pension money which Norwich claimed.17

It is not surprising then that in the session of 1667-8 Norwich supported the measures taken against Clarendon and attended the proceedings faithfully, coming to over three-quarters of the meetings of the autumn. He protested on 20 Nov. 1667 against the House’s decision to reject the Commons’ request that Clarendon be committed without a specific charge of treason and on 7 Dec. he was named to the committee to consider the bill for banishing the lord chancellor. He was named to a further nine committees in late 1667, but over the following two years his attendance and committee nominations slackened slightly. He did come to 80 per cent of the meetings of spring 1670 and was named to committees considering the decay of trade and for the bill against the fraudulent export of wool, among others. On 8 Mar. 1670 he chaired the committee considering the estate bill of Philip Smythe‡, 2nd Viscount Strangford [I].18 That same day he stepped forward in the House to represent the interests of George Nevill, 12th Baron Abergavenny, his five-year-old first cousin once removed, against the claims of Benjamin Mildmay, 17th Baron Fitzwalter, to precedence over all the barons of England, and particularly of Abergavenny. Norwich opposed the bill for the divorce of John Manners, styled Lord Roos (later duke of Rutland) and dissented both from its second reading on 17 Mar. 1670 and from its eventual passage 11 days later. After the summer adjournment, Norwich held Teynham’s proxy from 1 Nov. 1670, although he himself did not sit in the House until 4 Nov. and left it permanently on 11 Feb. 1671, probably owing to illness. He hurriedly composed his will on 2 Mar. 1671 in which, being childless, he left everything to his wife, acknowledging that almost all he possessed, apart from a few leaseholds in Yorkshire and Essex, came from her and the lucrative jointure she had brought with her. Without any male heirs, the earldom of Norwich became extinct. As early as April 1671 it was rumoured that the title would be conferred on Henry Bennet, Baron Arlington, but instead it, along with Norwich’s stewardship of the honour of Peverell, was bestowed on Henry Howard, Baron Howard of Castle Rising (and later 6th duke of Norfolk) on 19 October 1672.19

C.G.D.L.

  • 1 Mems. of St. Margaret’s Church ed. A.M. Burke, 117.
  • 2 TNA, PROB 11/335.
  • 3 CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 158; 1663-4, p. 513; 1670, pp. 340, 367.
  • 4 TNA, PROB 11/335; Lyson, Environs of London, iv. 164.
  • 5 CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 108.
  • 6 CCC, i. 598; E. Suss. RO, DAN/311-35; VCH Suss. vii. 172, 175-6; CSP Ven. 1653-4, pp. 139-40; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 167; 1659-60, p. 105.
  • 7 CCSP, iv. 130; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 253; Evelyn Diary, iii. 538; iv. 306; PROB 11/335.
  • 8 CSP Dom., 1663-4, pp. 5-6.
  • 9 Ibid. 1661-2, p. 158; 1663-4, p. 513; 1670, pp. 340, 367.
  • 10 Ibid. 1663-4, pp. 17, 147; 1666-7, pp. 472, 595.
  • 11 CCSP, v. 291; CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 5-6.
  • 12 CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 138, 168.
  • 13 Ibid. 5-6.
  • 14 Lyson, iv. 167, 179.
  • 15 CSP Dom. 1658-9, pp. 253, 256.
  • 16 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 31.
  • 17 CSP Dom. 1666-7, pp. 256, 472, 595; 1667-8, pp. 114, 365, 374; 1668-9, pp. 460-1; CTB, ii. 531; iii. 392, 552, 773.
  • 18 HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 297.
  • 19 Add. 36916, ff. 219, 221.