suc. fa. 3 Mar. 1654 as 8th Bar. DARCY and 5th Bar. CONYERS; cr. 5 Dec. 1682 earl of HOLDERNESSE
First sat 30 May 1660; last sat 8 June 1661
bap. 24 Jan. 1599, 1st s. of Conyers Darcy†, 7th Bar. Darcy of Knaith and 4th Bar. Conyers and Dorothy, da. of Sir Henry Belasyse, bt.; bro. of Hon. James Darcy‡ and Hon. Marmaduke Darcy‡. educ. unknown. m. 14 Oct. 1616, Grace, da. of Thomas Rokeby of Skiers, Yorks., 6s. (5 d.v.p.), 7da. (3 d.v.p.).1 d. 14 June 1689.
Constable, Middleham Castle 1660-71; bailiff and steward, liberty of Richmond, Yorks. (N. Riding) 1660-71; kpr., Richmond Forest, Yorks. (N. Riding) 1660-71.2
Col. regt. of ft 1642-3;3 capt. tp. of ind. horse 13 June-16 Aug. 1667.4
Associated with: Hornby Castle, Hornby, Yorks. (N. Riding); Aston Hall, Aston, Yorks. (W. Riding).
Likenesses: oils on canvas by E. Mascall, 1640s, York Museums Trust; oil on canvas, aft. Robert Walker, 1650s, sold by Bonhams 15 Jan. 2008.
Conyers Darcy’s father, also named Conyers Darcy, had become 7th Baron Darcy and 4th Baron Conyers in 1641 after petitioning Charles I to bring both baronies out of abeyance. It has been estimated that, through inheritances and advantageous marriages, the Darcy family had acquired an estate worth between £4,000 and £5,000 p.a. by the time of the Interregnum.5 Their estates were based in the North Riding of Yorkshire, with the principal residence at Hornby Castle near Richmond. In 1663 Thomas Belasyse, 2nd Viscount Fauconberg, lord lieutenant of the North Riding, calculated for the privy council that the Darcy estates were worth at least £1,600 p.a., the fourth highest in the riding.6
Conyers Darcy initially served as a colonel in the royalist army in the Civil War and was seriously wounded at the storming of Burton-upon-Trent in 1643. He retired from fighting from that point, leaving the command of the regiment to his younger brother Marmaduke, who became one of Charles II’s staunchest companions.7
Another brother, Henry, also fought for the king, and between them these brothers established the reputation of their family as leading royalists. In 1654 Conyers succeeded to his father’s two baronies. He was, and is, often referred to as Baron Conyers and Darcy, a misnomer as the barony of Darcy was the senior of the two. Other sources termed him merely, and correctly, Baron Darcy and so he shall be referred to in this biography.
At the Restoration Darcy’s local influence in the North Riding was confirmed when he was appointed constable of Middleham Castle, steward and bailiff of the liberty of Richmond, and keeper of that liberty’s forest, although he resigned these posts to his son Conyers Darcy, later 2nd earl of Holdernesse, in 1671. He confined his activities to the north, perhaps prevented from travelling to Westminster by the war wound which had rendered him lame (and of which he had complained in 1647 when summoned to attend the committee for compounding in London).8 He attended the House for only about 18 days in each of the years 1660 and 1661, and when he was in attendance he did not take an active part and was appointed to no committees.
In early 1660 Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton considered Darcy one of the ‘lords with the king’ in his list analyzing the potential composition of the Convention House of Lords, and throughout his career Darcy did consistently support the court. He may have been largely absent but he was regular in assigning proxies, and these were usually given to lords who would vote with the government. Throughout the 1660s he gave his proxy to Thomas Howard, earl of Berkshire, a privy councillor and gentleman of the bed chamber, and the father-in-law of his son and namesake Conyers. Darcy first gave him his proxy when he left the Convention after only 17 sittings on 22 June 1660, after he was given leave by the House to go into the country. His proxy with Berkshire was formally registered on 23 July for the remainder of the Convention. Darcy spent an almost equally brief time in the Cavalier Parliament, in which he sat from its first day for all of 20 sittings until he was given leave of the House on 6 June 1661 to be absent. He last sat in the House two days later, 8 June 1661, and registered his proxy with Berkshire two days after that for the remainder of the session. He continued to entrust his proxy to Berkshire for most of the remaining sessions of the Cavalier Parliament until Berkshire’s death on 16 July 1669: from 25 Nov. 1664 to 2 Mar. 1665; from 21 Sept. 1666 to 8 Feb. 1667; and from 12 Oct. 1667 to 1 Mar. 1669.
On 20 Oct. 1666 it was to Berkshire’s son, Charles Howard, summoned to the House in his father’s lifetime as Howard of Charlton but more usually styled Viscount Andover (later 2nd earl of Berkshire), that Darcy complained about an issue of precedence. The Irish peer George Saunders‡, Viscount Castleton [I], had insisted on taking precedence over Darcy and other English peers during the visit of James, duke of York, to his namesake city in 1665. Darcy wanted the matter of the precedence of foreign nobility in England to be settled, and his letter was quickly brought to the attention of the committee for privileges by John Carey, 2nd earl of Dover, in October 1666.9 On 14 Nov. 1666 Robert Bertie, 3rd earl of Lindsey, the lord great chamberlain, reported the committee’s view that a bill be brought into the House ‘asserting the right of precedency of the English peerage before all foreign nobility whatsoever’. The House, having heard the contents of Darcy’s letter to Andover, decided instead that the committee should draw up an address to the king, ‘he being the fountain of all honour’. Darcy’s fellow Yorkshire peer, Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington, who was also prominent as the earl of Cork [I] and a major landowner in Ireland, may well have listened to these proceedings with some trepidation, but could take some comfort that ‘their anger extends most to such of England as have purchased titles in Ireland and Scotland where they have no estates but get those honours for precedency’.10 Proceedings on the address in the committee were long running and it had to be reminded again on 22 Oct. 1667 to report. Eventually an address condemning the pretensions of foreign peers in England was reported and, ‘after a serious debate’, agreed upon by the House on 4 Mar. 1668.11 Darcy, however, was absent from the House throughout these proceedings despite having instigated them.
From 1669, the year of Berkshire’s death, to 1677 Darcy assigned his proxy consistently to the duke of York: from 20 Oct. to 11 Dec. 1669; from 3 Feb. 1670 to 22 Apr. 1671; and from 1 Feb. to 29 Mar. 1673. This last was a session when York was apparently in high demand as a proxy holder, and Darcy was lucky to get his registration in early before the session began.12 York held Darcy’s proxy again for the two sessions of 1675, from 1 Apr. to 9 June 1675 and again from 1 Oct. to 22 Nov. 1675, during the latter of which York was able to use it to vote, ultimately unsuccessfully, for the address calling for the dissolution of Parliament. The last period when York held his proxy was from 2 Feb. 1677 to 13 May 1678. Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, not surprisingly considering this record of proxy donation, categorized Darcy as ‘vile’ in his list of lay peers in spring 1677. Darcy did not assign any proxies in the remaining sessions of 1678 and Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), marked him as absent and of uncertain views in his calculations of potential supporters and opponents for his impeachment proceedings in spring 1679. Darcy did not assign his proxy to any peer during the Exclusion Parliaments or during James II’s Parliament.
On 5 Dec. 1682 Darcy was created earl of Holdernesse, although the previous holder of that title, Prince Rupert, duke of Cumberland, had not yet been buried. This may have been a reward not only for his own loyal role in northern affairs but to the much more visible royalism of other members of his family. His younger brothers James‡ and Marmaduke Darcy‡ both had positions at court, and both had served the court interest in Parliament as Members for Richmond, James during the Convention and Marmaduke in the Cavalier Parliament. Most important was Darcy’s son and heir Conyers, who was active in northern commissions and affairs and sat as Member for the county of Yorkshire in the Cavalier Parliament. In 1680 he was summoned to the House in his father’s barony of Conyers. This acceleration was unprecedented in that the unwritten rules indicated that only a son of a peer at the level of earl or above could assume one of his father’s subsidiary baronies during his lifetime. It is likely that Baron Darcy’s promotion to an earldom was essentially intended to make the acceleration of his son two years previously more regular. It was also probably a preparation for making his heir, a loyal court supporter, an earl upon his father’s seemingly imminent death (he was 83 when raised to the earldom). Yet his son still had to wait another seven years, until 14 June 1689, before his father died and he could claim the earldom and the Yorkshire estates for himself. By the time of his death, the aged Holdernesse had well and truly earned a reputation as a recluse in his northern fastness. His fellow Yorkshire peer Thomas Wentworth, 2nd earl of Strafford, threatened the king in a letter of 23 Mar. 1689 that unless the arrears of his pension were paid he would be compelled ‘to shut up his house, as Lord Darcy [sic] has done, and live like a poor gentleman’.13
C.G.D.L.- 1 Clay, Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 81.
- 2 Eg. 3402, ff. 54v-55; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 213; CSP Dom. 1671, p. 158.
- 3 Newman, Royalist Officers, 103.
- 4 CSP Dom. 1667, pp. 182, 393.
- 5 J.T. Cliffe, The Yorks. Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War, 99-100.
- 6 HMC Var. ii. 118-9.
- 7 Newman, 103-4; Eg. 3402, ff. 54v-55.
- 8 Eg. 3402, ff. 54v-55; CCC, 1002-3.
- 9 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, pp. 16-19.
- 10 Chatsworth, Cork mss Burlington diary, 14 Nov. 1666.
- 11 HMC 8th Rep. pt. 1, p. 118.
- 12 Bodl. Carte 77, ff. 536-7.
- 13 CSP Dom. 1689-90, p. 38.