styled 1628-31 Ld. Tufton; suc. fa. 1 July 1631 as 2nd earl of THANET
First sat 13 Apr. 1640; first sat after 1660, 7 Aug. 1660; last sat 27 July 1663
b. 15 Dec. 1608, 2nd but 1st surv. s. of Nicholas Tufton†, 2nd bt. (later earl of Thanet), and Frances (d.1653), da. of Thomas Cecil†, earl of Exeter. educ. unknown. m. 21 Apr. 1629, Margaret (1614–76), da and coh. of Richard Sackville†, 3rd earl of Dorset, 6s. 6da. (1 d.v.p.). kntd. 5 Dec. 1627. d. 7 May 1664; will 26 June 1662–23 Apr. 1664, pr. 18 May 1664.1
Warden, Hove Court, Suss. 1639–42;2 sheriff, Kent 1654–5.
Associated with: Hothfield House, Kent; Thanet House, Aldersgate Street, London.
Likenesses: oils on canvas, William Dobson, Lakeland Arts Trust (AH 2321/81).
John Tufton was the first surviving son of Nicholas Tufton, a wealthy official and landowner with property in both Kent and Sussex who purchased his way into the peerage as Baron Tufton in 1626 and, two years later, bought the earldom of Thanet. In 1629 Lord Tufton, as John Tufton was styled from the time of his father’s earldom, married Margaret, the elder daughter of the late Kentish magnate Richard Sackville†, 3rd earl of Dorset, and Anne Clifford, suo jure Baroness Clifford. As heiress to her father, Margaret brought with her lands worth £5,000 p.a. in Kent and Sussex, including Bolebroke House in Sussex.3
On 1 July 1631 Tufton, barely past his majority, succeeded to the earldom of his father, becoming one of the richest peers in Kent – the committee for compounding estimated his income as £10,000 p.a. ‘at the least’ in 1644 – although much of his property was in Sussex and his influence in Kent tended to be limited to the area between Ashford and Maidstone.4 He first sat in the House at the convening of the Short Parliament in April 1640, though he did not attend that or the subsequent Long Parliament frequently. He joined the king in 1642 and may have fought at Edgehill and other engagements, but by 1643 his health had failed and he was given permission to go abroad to take the waters at Spa. His lands were sequestrated in his absence but in 1645 he was able to reduce his composition fine from £20,000, which he claimed was based on an inflated estimate of his worth, to £9,000 and was eventually discharged from his sequestration. He kept a low profile thereafter, but the Protectorate government insisted on placing him in minor local offices, ‘though he willingly would have avoided it’, and in 1655, perhaps in an effort to bind him more strongly to the regime, appointed him sheriff of Kent.5 His family always remained under suspicion, and his eldest son, Nicholas Tufton, styled Lord Tufton until he succeeded as 3rd earl of Thanet in 1664, was imprisoned twice during the 1650s for his involvement in Penruddock’s rising and other royalist plots.6 Thanet was seen as an old royalist at the Restoration, and Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, considered him as one of the ‘Lords with the King’ in his forecast of the potential membership of the Convention House of Lords.
Thanet continued his disengagement from politics into the Restoration, hindered by old age and illness. At a call of the House on 31 July 1660 he was marked as sick and did not appear in the Convention until 7 August. Thereafter he only came to 15 further meetings of the House during the remainder of the year, and was named to no select committees considering legislation, although on 13 Aug. he was appointed one of the peers assigned to negotiate with City merchants for an immediate loan of £100,000. He was at only a third of the sittings of the first session (1661–2) of the Cavalier Parliament, and was named to five select committees, mostly on private legislation. He did, however, appear on 22 May 1661 to complain of a breach of his privilege in the case of the arrest of one of his servants, which matter was resolved at Thanet’s request on 30 May.7
At a call of the House on 25 Nov. 1661, illness again excused his absence from the first few days of the reconvened House. He was in the House on 3 Dec. and made an intervention on 7 Feb. 1662 when he petitioned against the private bill, introduced on 7 Jan., which would allow William Milward to sell part of his estate to settle his debts. Thanet’s sister Christian was Milward’s wife and he argued that the land in question had been settled on her as part of the original marriage settlement, without which agreement the marriage would not have taken place. Furthermore, he was eager to point out, Milward had not run into such serious debt ‘by the honourable account stated in the bill’, that is, service to the king in the late wars, but instead by ‘bad husbandry’. Perhaps it was Thanet’s petition which delayed the bill’s second reading until 19 February. His opposition to it continued in committee, for he objected to the manner in which his title was expressed in the bill. On 19 Mar. Richard Sackville, 5th earl of Dorset, reported to the House (from which Thanet was absent for all of March) that the title of Thanet in the bill ‘is found to be according to his patent’. 8 Despite Thanet’s efforts the bill passed both Houses and received the royal assent on 19 May 1662.
Thanet was even more neglectful of the second session of the Cavalier Parliament in 1663, coming to only 14 of its 86 sittings and being named to no committees. Wharton could not even guess which side Thanet would take in the dispute between George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, and Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, in July 1663, although that month was one of the few when he was regularly attending the House. On 18 July 1663 he was appointed a commissioner to assess his fellow peers for the subsidy. On 30 May Thanet had brought before the House the petition of his mother-in-law, Lady Anne Clifford, dowager countess of Dorset and Pembroke, who claimed the ancient barony of Clifford, a barony by writ, as heir general of her father. In this she was opposed by her cousin Elizabeth Clifford, who also claimed the Clifford barony, and by Elizabeth’s husband, Richard Boyle, 2nd earl of Cork [I] (later earl of Burlington), who had been created Baron Clifford of Lanesborough in 1644 on account of this marriage.9
The last few months of Thanet’s life were marked by a temporary disgrace arising from the long-running dispute surrounding Sackville College in Sussex, an almshouse founded by Robert Sackville†, 2nd earl of Dorset, which was to be maintained by the income from his estates. His son the 3rd earl had sold much of this land and, although he tried to make alternative provision for the almshouse, died so heavily in debt that the income from the remaining estate could not satisfy both his creditors and the needs of the college. As many of the lands charged with supporting the almshouse were part of the portion which the countess of Thanet had brought with her to the marriage, Thanet was considered one of those responsible for raising the necessary funds and among all those with an interest in this matter he bore the heaviest brunt of the anger over the failure to provide for the college. In 1648 he had successfully fended off a petition by the almspeople to have chancery decrees against him enforced, but during much of the 1650s he and his fellow Dorset son-in-law James Compton, 3rd earl of Northampton, were engaged in further legal battles against their Sackville kinsman the 5th earl of Dorset. Chancery eventually decreed against them in February 1660. From 21 Dec. 1663 to 21 Jan. 1664 Thanet was imprisoned over his refusal to provide the funds for Sackville College.10 Perhaps this latest ignominy of a month spent in the Fleet in the dead of winter hastened his demise, for he died on 7 May 1664 at his London residence, Thanet House.11
C.G.D.L.- 1 TNA, PROB 11/313, 314.
- 2 CSP Dom. 1639–40, p. 66.
- 3 R.T. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 90.
- 4 A. Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 35; A Seventeenth Century Miscellany (Kent Recs. xvii), 39.
- 5 Seventeenth Century Miscellany, 35–45; HMC 15th Rep. VII, 158; HMC 5th Rep. 47, 95–96; HMC 6th Rep. 11, 16, 38, 75.
- 6 Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford ed. D.J.H. Clifford, 125, 130, 137.
- 7 HMC 7th Rep. 143.
- 8 Ibid. 153.
- 9 Chatsworth, Cork mss 33/62.
- 10 Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 231; HMC 7th Rep. 44; Diaries of Lady Ann Clifford, 168.
- 11 Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, 171.