styled 1641-84 Ld. Cavendish; suc. fa. 23 Nov. 1684 as 4th earl of DEVONSHIRE; cr. 12 May 1694 duke of DEVONSHIRE
First sat 19 May 1685; last sat 24 Apr. 1707
MP Derbyshire 1661, 1679 (Mar.), 1679 (Oct.), 1681
b. 25 Jan. 1641, 1st and o. surv. s. of William Cavendish, 3rd earl of Devonshire and Elizabeth (1620-89), da. of William Cecil†, 2nd earl of Salisbury; educ. privately (tutors, Dr Henry Killigrew, Henry Oldenburg, Francois du Prat),1 travelled abroad (France, Italy) 1657-60,2 MA, Oxford 28 Sept. 1663, LLD, Cambridge 16 Apr. 1705; m. 26 Oct. 1662 (with £6,000)3 Mary (1646-1710), da. of James Butler, duke of Ormond [I], 4s. (2 d.v.p.), 1da.;4 5ch. (of which 2da. surv.) illegit. with Mary Heneage; ?ch. (of which 1da. surv.) illegit. with Katharine Jones; 1da. illegit. with Mary Anne Campion;5 KG 3 Apr. 1689; d. 18 Aug. 1707; will 15-17 Aug. 1707, pr. 28 Oct. 1707.6
PC 22 Apr. 1679-31 Jan. 1680, 14 Feb. 1689-d.; ld. steward 1689-d.; commr. reforming abuses in the army 1689,7 inspection of hospitals 1691,8 appeals in prizes 1694, 1695, 1697,9 relief of Vaudois 1699,10 union with Scotland 1706;11 ld. justice 1690-1701.
Steward, honour of High Peak ?1685-d, Tutbury (Needwood Forest) 1692-d.12 Kingston-upon-Thames 1689-d.;13 ld. lt. Derbys. 1689-d., Som. (jt.) 1690-91, Notts. 1692-94; custos rot. Derbys. 1689-d.; c.j. in eyre (north of Trent) 1690-d.; recorder, Nottingham 1690-d.14
Col. regt. of horse (later 7th Drag. Gds.) 1688-90 15
FRS ?1660-85.16
Associated with: Chatsworth, Derbys; 3 St James’s Square, Westminster (from 1676); Devonshire House, Piccadilly, Westminster (from 1696).
Likenesses: oil on canvas by John Michael Wright, 1660s, National Trust, Hardwick Hall, Derbys.; oil on canvas by Godfrey Kneller, 1690s, National Trust, Hardwick Hall, Derbys.; oil on canvas by John Closterman, 1697, National Trust, Hardwick Hall, Derbys.
‘The most dissolute man in London’, 1661-88
One of the ‘Immortal Seven’ of Whig hagiography, Devonshire cut quite a figure in late Stuart England. John Macky informed his Hanoverian contacts in 1702-3 that he:
Was always a firm assertor of the liberties of his country, and the protestant religion, for which he met with several hardships in King James’s reign. … He hath been the finest and handsomest gentleman of his time; loves the ladies and plays; keeps a noble house and equipage; is tall, well made, and of a princely behaviour. Of nice honour in everything but the paying of his tradesmen.17
In most aspects of his life he was as flamboyant, ‘princely’ and indeed as baroque as the great palace of Chatsworth whose rebuilding he oversaw in the wilds of the Peak District. A renowned duellist, womanizer, gambler, and leader of society in London, Derbyshire and Newmarket, he was also an active politician. As one of the key figures in the opposition to James Stuart, both as duke of York and as James II, and a principal follower of William of Orange, he founded one of the great Whig aristocratic dynasties of Britain. He has been venerated by subsequent Whig historians but to many of his contemporaries, at least to the scurrilous poets of Grub Street, Devonshire was seen primarily as a courtier, a sycophantic lord steward to both William III and Anne, and a willing participant, if not a leader, in the ostentatious sexual debauchery of court life. Even one of his more recent biographers sees him, in the period after the Revolution, as primarily an idle courtier, arguing that the lord stewardship was ‘a ministerial position of no great administrative importance but one which provided good opportunities for profit and political patronage’. He concludes that ‘the trappings of power and position aside, Devonshire does not emerge as a major player in the politics of the later Stuart era’.18 A closer examination of Devonshire’s activity in the House of Lords in particular, where he was at the forefront in a number of campaigns, even in the last years of his life, reveals that this is an oversimplified judgment. Whilst never a member of the Whig Junto, who were so eager for office and power, he remained active at the heart of politics, at court and in office, throughout his long and eventful career.
As the eldest son and heir of the 3rd earl of Devonshire, he was styled Lord Cavendish from the time of his birth in 1641. His father took advice from his own former tutor and retainer Thomas Hobbes on his son’s education. Cavendish was well educated and enjoyed an extended continental tour 1657-60, during which he developed tastes in art and architecture which were later expressed in his rebuilding of the family seat of Chatsworth. After his return Cavendish was married to Lady Mary Butler, who brought with her a portion of £6,000. His father ensured the young man’s return, while still underage, to the Cavalier Parliament as knight of the shire for Derbyshire. Cavendish did exercise some local influence despite his increasing time spent in the capital. Throughout his career in the Commons he was consistently placed on the commissions established by Parliament to collect the assessment in Derbyshire and in 1662 he was also put on the commission to relieve the royalist ‘loyal and indigent officers’ in the county.19 Cavendish himself may have initially envisaged a military career – he was said to have displayed great courage when he joined the fleet as a volunteer under the duke of York in the second Dutch War.20 However his ambitions were thwarted when in 1672 he was passed over for military preferment. Commentators such as Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, later claimed that the sense of personal grievance over this initial disappointment contributed to his opposition to the court.21 By 1677 Cavendish had reputedly become ‘the most dissolute man in London’, conducting an extra-marital liaison with the actress Mary Heneage, frequently duelling, and racking up further large debts in the capital.22 He had also emerged as one of the foremost members of the ‘country’ faction in the Commons, taking strong positions against the French-influenced court, the Catholic duke of York and the lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby ‘by which’, as his first biographer affirmed, ‘he exasperated a court party to the last degree’.23 The court initially attempted to co-opt him by placing him on the remodelled Privy Council in April 1679 and its sub-committee dealing with trade and plantations. Nevertheless, he continued to support country positions throughout the Exclusion Parliaments, and even voted for exclusion in November 1680. Perhaps pressure from his father-in-law Ormond, who took it upon himself to pay off Cavendish’s large debts, had an effect, for in early October 1681 Cavendish formally reconciled himself to the king and there is no evidence that he had any role in the Whig plots against the Stuart brothers of the early 1680s.24
Behind this superficial reconciliation, Cavendish never did fully submit to any of his paternal figures – father, father-in-law or king – before the death of the 3rd earl in 1684. Now earl of Devonshire, he inherited the entailed estates which the 3rd earl had protected, consolidated and expanded so effectively during his life.25 He arranged for his father to be buried in a ceremony appropriate for a duke, as a rebuke to Charles II that he had not adequately rewarded this faithful servant.26 The king withheld from him the Cavendish family’s principal local office of lord lieutenant of Derbyshire, conferring it instead on Robert Leke, 3rd earl of Scarsdale.27 Devonshire attended every single day of James II’s Parliament in 1685. On the second day of business he was one of only six peers to vote in favour of continuing the impeachment charges against Danby and the Catholic peers, although he did not sign the protest against the rejection of this motion. On 17 June the old Presbyterian peer Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, registered his proxy with Devonshire, which the earl retained for the remainder of the Parliament.
When the House reconvened on 9 Nov. 1685, Devonshire laid before the House the petition of Henry Booth, 2nd Baron Delamer for his release from the Tower. In the ‘considerable’ debate that followed, Devonshire, aided by Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, argued that the Lords themselves should answer the petition without consulting the king, and was ‘very hot’ against George Savile, marquess of Halifax, who thought that the king should be informed.28 It was Devonshire who first moved on 19 Nov. that the king’s speech advocating the dispensation of Catholic army officers from the Test Acts be considered by the House, sarcastically noting that ‘thanks were due to the king, for discovering his intentions so plainly’ (although this remark has also been attributed to Halifax).29 The motion was ‘vehemently seconded’ by Halifax and Anglesey but opposed by John Dolben, archbishop of York and Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, on the grounds that it was not the scheduled order of business for the day.30 Opposition to the king’s measures became so clear during the ensuing debate that James II had little choice but to prorogue Parliament the following day.
During the long prorogation Devonshire remained a highly visible and flamboyant figure, involved in some notable, if not notorious, events of James II’s reign. In early January 1686 he held a sumptuous ball at Montagu House, which he was then renting from Ralph Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu. A few days later Montagu House was burned to the ground. Montagu launched a legal action against Devonshire in an attempt to recoup £30,000 in compensation but voluntarily withdrew his suit on 21 Apr. 1687 when Devonshire’s witnesses established that Montagu’s own servants had been responsible for the fire.31
More serious problems arose for Devonshire from his dispute with Thomas Colepeper, an army officer and engineer who had eloped in 1662 with a daughter and co-heir of Devonshire’s neighbour John Frescheville, Baron Frescheville. Colepeper always maintained that the Derbyshire estate of Staveley, which Frescheville had sold to Devonshire in 1680, should have gone to his wife as Frescheville’s heir.32 The two men were involved in a brawl in July 1685 within the precincts of the palace of Whitehall. Under the statute of 33 Hen. VIII, c.12, an assault occasioning bloodshed in any royal palace was an aggravated offence with severe penalties. Colepeper was sentenced to the loss of his right hand and life imprisonment.33 He was pardoned in December 1685. The two met again at Whitehall in April 1687 but this time Devonshire proved the more violent. He struck Colepeper with his cane when the ‘colonel’ did not appear sufficiently contrite for his earlier assault. As this attack was also in the confines of the palace and actually took place in the royal presence, Devonshire was committed to the Tower. On 27 Apr. he was bailed for £10,000 to appear in king’s bench. When he appeared there on 6 May, his claim for privilege of Parliament was overruled by the judges. On the first day of the new term, 27 May, he pleaded not guilty, which surprised some observers as he had all but admitted the assault in his many petitions to the king. However, he objected to the terms of the information against him, which suggested he had assaulted Colepeper ‘maliciously and seditiously’ as an ‘affront designed to his Majesty’. He surprised contemporaries even more when at his next appearance on 7 June he unexpectedly announced that he would plead guilty, not wishing to ‘dispute with the king’. A week later a swingeing fine of £30,000 was imposed and he was confined to the king’s bench prison until it was paid. This exorbitant amount was seen as an act of revenge by the king against one of his opponents. Numerous ‘persons of quality’ sympathetic to his political views visited the incarcerated Devonshire in a show of support for him and even the queen dowager continued to intercede for him.34
Devonshire refused to pay his fine or even to remain incarcerated and in a show of defiance managed to leave the prison to return to Derbyshire for the summer. In a provocative letter sent to the secretary of state Charles Middleton‡, 2nd earl of Middleton [S], he insisted that he was not ‘escaping’ prison, as he was still paying for his lodging there, and insisted strongly on the right of the peerage not to be imprisoned for debt.35 In Derbyshire he embarked on the renovation of the family mansion of Chatsworth, tearing down and reconstructing the south front of the old mansion, a defiant gesture ‘as if his mind rose upon the depression of his fortunes’. Rebuilding Chatsworth was to occupy Devonshire for most of the remainder of his life and the house remains a lasting monument to his regional and national power. It was lovingly described by his later eulogist White Kennett†, the future bishop of Peterborough in 1708: ‘the glorious house seems to be art insulting nature’.36 Efforts by the marshal of the prison to recapture the earl proved futile; Devonshire remained free in Derbyshire and had returned voluntarily to the capital by the autumn. Although he continued to insist that a peer could not be imprisoned for debt, through the intercession of Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, and the queen dowager he was allowed to enter into a bond for the £30,000 for his freedom and was formally reconciled to the king.37 Roger Morrice interpreted this, and the submission of the fellows of Magdalen College, as ‘two very significant occurrences’ in the growing power of Catholicism and arbitrary rule in England. He doubted that Devonshire, ‘the only man that had reputation enough to have been a back to the peers in [the House of Lords]’ would have agreed to the bond if he did not wish to comply with James’s policies.38 The French ambassador Bonrepaus may have had the same opinion when he listed Devonshire in late 1687 among ‘those who have not yet declared’ their stance on the king’s policies – the only one among the five such lists drawn up in James II’s reign that considers Devonshire as anything other than a foe of the king.
Revolutionary leader, 1688-9
Both Morrice and Bonrepaus were wrong, for the heavy bond of £30,000 hanging over him only strengthened Devonshire’s opposition to the king and increased his communications with William of Orange’s agent Dijkvelt and eventually with the prince himself.39 At the trial of the Seven Bishops in June 1688 he was considered as a potential surety for the bail of Jonathan Trelawny, bishop of Bristol, but he was not chosen because of the fine hanging over him.40 In mid-June Devonshire finalized the marriage of his heir William Cavendish, the future 2nd duke of Devonshire, styled Lord Cavendish, to Rachel Russell, one of the three surviving children of Devonshire’s great friend in the Commons, William Russell‡ styled Lord Russell, who had died a martyr’s death in the Whig cause in 1683. Kennett in his funeral sermon recounted an apocryphal story, since repeated many times, that Cavendish as he then was, had devised an elaborate scheme to effect Russell’s escape on the eve of his execution.41 Apart from a dowry of £25,000, the marriage was a very public signal of the Cavendish family’s political allegiances at this time of crisis.42 Devonshire then took the momentous step on the last day of June of signing the letter ‘inviting’ William of Orange to come to England with an armed force to ensure the calling of a ‘free Parliament’ and to protect the people’s ‘religion, liberties and properties’.43
Devonshire spent much of the autumn in Derbyshire consulting and preparing for the intended invasion. Under the encouragement of one of his co-signers of the invitation, Henry Compton, bishop of London, Devonshire had a series of meetings with his old adversary Danby (another signatory) in October 1688. Together they plotted to co-ordinate risings for William in the north. After William’s landing in Devon on 5 Nov., Devonshire entered Derby with a troop of about 200 horse, then moved on to Nottingham on 20 Nov., where he met the Leicestershire peer Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, and two days later was joined by Delamer. A split between Delamer and Devonshire quickly appeared, as the firebrand Cheshire peer was dissatisfied with Devonshire’s caution and secrecy, ‘for the earl minded his pleasures too much, and had kept his purposes for the prince within himself, and had not communicated them to such noblemen and gentlemen before he came thither… nor did he suddenly publish them after he came thither’. Delamer and Stamford quickly marched with their troops to join William’s army, leaving Devonshire in control of Nottingham. Over the following days Devonshire’s ‘army’ swelled to about a thousand as other local peers and gentry brought into Nottingham their own followers, but the most significant, and unexpected, arrival in the town was James II’s daughter, Princess Anne. Devonshire now had to turn his attention to protecting the princess. The situation was complicated by the arrival of the prickly loyalist Philip Stanhope, 2nd earl of Chesterfield, who came with the express purpose of protecting Anne, but showed little enthusiasm for the larger project of rebellion. All the peers present in the town agreed to accompany Anne to the safe haven of Oxford but tensions quickly erupted between Chesterfield and Devonshire. After reaching Oxford, Devonshire and his entourage almost immediately turned to march to London, upon learning of William’s arrival on the outskirts of the capital.44
Devonshire arrived in London with the princess on or about 19 Dec. 1689 and immediately joined William’s coterie in the delicate negotiations of that period.45 Having been one of those summoned to attend by William, at the meeting of the peers in the queen’s presence chamber on 21 Dec. Devonshire seconded Wharton’s motion to thank William of Orange for pursuing the aims and goals set out in his Declaration. He further confirmed his allegiance to William by signing the Association – although he had probably already signed it in Nottingham.46 By Christmas Eve, when the peers met to discuss how a Parliament could be summoned to settle the country, James had fled the country and the terms of the discourse were radically changed. Devonshire was active in debate, starting that day’s proceedings by moving that the aged Catholic John Belasyse, Baron Belasyse, be excused from the order made to expel Catholics from the capital. Devonshire’s first biographer, Kennett, later claimed that Devonshire had always shown indulgence towards individual peaceable Catholics. He recounted that late in 1688 or early in 1689, Devonshire felt the need to remind William that he had originally said he had come to England to defend the Protestants, and not to persecute Catholics. Kennett asserted that ‘those Roman Catholic gentlemen who lived near him in the country peaceably and quietly, he treated as neighbours and friends, and they bore a great respect to him’.47
During the long debate on 24 Dec. 1688 on whether the assembly of peers could be allowed to see the letter James had written to his secretary of state Middleton before his flight, Devonshire cast doubt on its usefulness, as it was intended as a private letter. He suggested instead that the peers ask James’s gentleman of the bedchamber (and Devonshire’s second cousin) Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, what he knew of the king’s departure. In the discussions on how to summon a Parliament or convention in the absence of the king, Devonshire frequently repeated the central question of the Williamites’ argument: ‘whether the king’s withdrawing and absenting himself from the government, and leaving all things in this confusion, be a demise in law?’ Clarendon, in his account of these deliberations, placed Devonshire at the head of ‘those who were most bitter and fierce’ against James, along with Montagu, Delamer and Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis. When it was finally decided that the Prince of Orange would be addressed to summon a convention by means of circular letters to be directed to the counties and boroughs and to take on the ‘administration’ of the realm in the interim, Devonshire further moved that only Protestant peers should be admitted to the proposed convention and that the king be requested to take over the administration of both England and Ireland, as well as of the public revenue. The address was accepted by William the following day.48
Devonshire was present on the first day of the Convention, on 22 Jan. 1689, when he was appointed to a committee of 14 assigned to draw up an address of thanks to William for his message of that day. He became a key figure and manager in the protracted debates which led to the passage of the resolution of the crisis and the crowning of William and Mary. It was Devonshire who on 25 Jan. skilfully engineered a delay in the debate on the state of the nation and the disposition of the crown, arguing that the House should wait until the Commons had first deliberated. It was he who devised the resolution of 28 Jan. that ensured the House would not take up the matter until the following day. In this he was supported by Halifax and Charles Powlett, 6th marquess of Winchester, but opposed ‘with great warmth’ by Clarendon, Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester and others ‘with great reflections upon Devonshire’s motion, as if the Lords were only to take aim from the gentlemen below’.49
The delay allowed the Williamites to take the initiative. In the four crucial divisions in the committee of the whole House over 29-31 Jan. 1689, Devonshire told on behalf of William’s supporters in opposition to Clarendon. Thus, on the 29th he voted and told against the regency; on the 30th he told for the majority in favour of retaining the words ‘that the throne is thereby vacant’ in the motion; on the following day he voted and told for the losing side in favour of inserting the words declaring William and Mary to be king and queen, and told in favour of agreeing with the Commons’ words declaring the throne ‘vacant’. Devonshire additionally signed the protest against the defeat of the latter motion. On 4 Feb. he told for the minority in favour of agreeing with the Commons’ use of the word ‘abdicated’ and he later subscribed to the protest against the rejection of the word ‘vacant’ as well. Ironically, he was subsequently added to the committee assigned to draw up reasons for the House’s rejection of the Commons’ wording to be presented at a conference on 6 February. On that day he voted with the majority that James had abdicated and that the throne was vacant. He was one of those who seconded Winchester’s motion that the prince and princess of Orange be declared king and queen of England.50 He was named as a reporter for the conference on 8 Feb. about the Commons’ subsequent declaration for the prince and princess of Orange to be king and queen and the new oaths. The following day Devonshire told, against Nottingham, for the minority against the insertion of the words ‘and quartering soldiers contrary to law’ in the article in the Declaration of Rights concerning James’s military rule, and he was appointed to the ensuing committee to draft reasons justifying the House’s amendments.51
While involved in ensuring William and Mary’s accession to the throne Devonshire was involved in another project to discredit the rule of the Stuart brothers. On 23 Jan. 1689, the second day of the Convention’s business, he was named to a committee of ten to examine and report on the alleged murder of Arthur Capell, earl of Essex, in 1683. He quickly became its leading member and between 23 Jan. and 4 Feb. he chaired three meetings of this committee in which extensive evidence was heard implicating Sunderland in Essex’s death. On 5 Feb. Devonshire moved that a smaller group of the original committee be appointed to continue examining the case. Devonshire, not surprisingly, was one of this ‘close committee’, along with his fellow Williamites Delamer, Charles Mordaunt, 2nd Viscount Mordaunt and William Russell, 5th earl of Bedford, his son’s father-in-law. This committee continued to meet and gather evidence throughout the first weeks of the Convention.52
Courtier and parliamentary manager, 1689
Devonshire was quickly rewarded for his exertions to secure the throne for the new monarchs. On 14 Feb. 1689 he was sworn to William’s Privy Council, where he quickly took a place in the council’s sub-committees on Ireland and on trade and plantations.53 At about the same time he was made lord steward of the household. Through this office he became a member of the inner, or ‘cabinet’, council that developed as a ministerial institution under William III. More immediately, he acted as lord high steward for William and Mary’s coronation on 11 April.54 In the House he acted in the interest of the court he now served. On 7 Mar. 1689 he reported from a committee of the whole that the bill to suspend habeas corpus was fit to pass. Later that month he supported his fellow ministers Nottingham and Danby in the effort to retain the sacramental test in the bill for the new oaths and even insisted that recipients kneel at the sacrament.55 On 28 Mar. he helped to draft the reasons for the House’s objections to the Commons’ provisos to the bill for removing papists from London and was a manager for the ensuing conference, while on 8 May he reported from a conference on the House’s amendments to the bill for convicting and disarming Catholics. As lord steward he played an important role as a messenger and intermediary between the House and the court. On 7 May he was part of a delegation of three to attend the king to express the House’s support for the declaration of war against France, and three days later he reported to the House news of James Cecil, 4th earl of Salisbury, whose brothers had been sent to France to be raised as Catholics.56
Devonshire also used the House for his own advantage. In April the committee for privileges took into consideration ‘the great injury done to the privileges of the peers’ by the judgment for £30,000 levelled against him in the previous reign. On 22 Apr. the committee’s resolution that the proceedings against Devonshire had been ‘a violation of the privileges of peers’ was reported to the House. The judges of king’s bench involved in the case came before the House on 6 May, when the House further resolved that the court, in overruling Devonshire’s initial plea of privilege, ‘did thereby commit a manifest breach of the privilege of Parliament’, and that the fine of £30,000 was ‘excessive and exorbitant, against Magna Charta, the common right of the subject, and the law of the land, and that no peer of this realm at any time ought to be committed for the non-payment of a fine to the king’.57
Devonshire was soon further rewarded with posts of responsibility. He was, perhaps belatedly, made lord lieutenant of Derbyshire, in the place of James’s man, Scarsdale. He was also appointed one of the commissioners assigned to inspect the state of the army in their quarters before the campaigns that summer.58 In preparation for his departure on this mission, Devonshire on 22 May reported to the House the examinations that had been compiled over several weeks concerning Essex’s death. The same day he and his fellow army commissioners Delamer and the earl of Monmouth (as Mordaunt had become), who were also the principal members of the Essex committee, were formally excused from attendance on the House. Devonshire registered his proxy with Bedford, the fourth member of the committee, on that day, while Delamer had already registered his own proxy with Devonshire on 10 May. Although Devonshire was closely linked at this time with both Delamer and Monmouth, Burnet drew an important distinction between them. Whilst Delamer and Monmouth ‘were infusing jealousies of the king into their party, with the same industry that the earl of Nottingham was, at the same time, instilling into the king jealousies of them’, Devonshire instead endeavoured ‘to stop the progress and effects of those suspicions, with which the Whigs were possessed.’59
Devonshire returned to the House on 9 July 1689. On 15 July he added to Delamer’s proxy (vacated on 20 July) that of William Richard George Stanley, 9th earl of Derby, which was vacated on 2 August. On 12 July he was first appointed a reporter for a conference on the Bill of Rights, as it came to be known, and consequently took part in two more, on 20 and 31 July. In the first week of the following month he was a manager for two conferences on the bill for attainting people deemed to be in rebellion. The bill for the reversal of the judgments against Titus Oates took up much of his attention. On 11 July he was placed on a sub-committee to devise the controversial amendment to the bill which aimed to ensure that Oates could never testify in court again.60 Two weeks later he was placed on another committee to draft reasons why the House insisted on this amendment and was a manager for the conferences of 26 and 29 July on this disagreement. On 13 Aug. he was placed on another committee to seek precedents for the House’s granting a conference to the Commons after it had already delivered its reasons for adhering to the amendment in a previous one. The following day he was placed on a drafting committee for an address to the king concerning the rights of former servants of Charles II, who felt threatened by the passage of the act for repaying the States General for William’s expedition (much of the money for this purpose was to come from farms and revenues previously granted as acts of favour by Charles II to his courtiers). Devonshire attended the House until the adjournment on 20 Aug. 1689. He spent much of the remainder of the summer on the more social life of a courtier. An aficionado of horse-racing, he entertained the king and many of his fellow peers at the races at Newmarket.61 His long absences from the House through his role as a courtier and official meant that Devonshire came to only 54 per cent of the sittings of the first session of the Convention, and was named to only eight select committees on legislation. He had nevertheless already marked himself out as a key political figure in the new regime.
Devonshire missed the first few days of the session which began on 23 Oct. 1689, first attending on the last day of October. He sat for just under three-quarters of it and was named to eight select committees. Carmarthen (as Danby had become) classed him as among the supporters of the court in a list of October 1689 to February 1690. In late November Devonshire was instrumental in introducing a rider, ultimately defeated, to the Bill of Rights which would have prevented the monarch granting pardons to those under impeachment.62 The investigation into the death of Essex was continued under the terms of reference given to the large ‘committee for inspections’ formed with Devonshire as a member on 2 Nov. widened to include the executions of Lord Russell and Algernon Sydney‡, and other dubious legal measures of the Stuart brothers. Devonshire did not chair this committee but as lord steward on 9 Nov. he reported the king’s positive response to the committee’s request of three days previously for further documents. On 7 Dec. the committee established a sub-committee (of which Devonshire was not a member) to hear in more detail the evidence of Robert Cragg, an agent of James Scott, duke of Monmouth in the spring of 1685. Cragg had testified the previous day about the attempts of Sunderland, Rochester and George Jeffreys, Baron Jeffreys, to suborn him into testifying against Devonshire and others for their reputed connections with Monmouth (with whom Devonshire had actually never been associated).63 While it was busy hearing Cragg’s testimony on 9 Dec. Devonshire was placed on another committee to draw up an address to the king to put the laws against Catholics into execution. On 2 Jan. 1690 the House resolved that the testimony collected by the committee for inspections should be presented to the Commons at a conference; Devonshire was placed on a committee to inspect the Journal for precedents regarding information taken by the House and communicated to the Commons. He attended the last day of the session, when Parliament was prorogued on 27 Jan. 1690.
On the Council of Nine, 1690
In the elections following the dissolution of 6 Feb. 1690, Devonshire does not appear to have been very active, possibly because his sons were as yet too young to participate. He was present on the first day of the new Parliament on 20 Mar 1690 and proceeded to sit in all but five of the first session’s 54 sittings, during which he was named to eight select committees. On 26 Mar. he joined other ministers, such as Halifax, Nottingham, Carmarthen and Charles Talbot, 12th earl of Shrewsbury, in arguing against the bill brought in by the duke of Bolton (as Winchester had become) that recognized William and Mary as ‘rightful and lawful’ king and queen. Such a formulation was bound to upset the delicate alliance with the Tories that William had been at pains to establish.64 On 24 Apr. the House ordered Devonshire as lord steward to move the king to negotiate for a prisoner exchange with France, so that the Protestant Irish military commander William Steward, Viscount Mountjoy [I], could be released. Two days later Devonshire brought into the House the bill that would vest the government of the realm in the queen and her council during the king’s absence in Ireland.65 On 2 May he argued for the commitment of the bill ‘for securing their majesties against the late King James’, which imposed an oath of abjuration so that the adherents of King James might be identified.66 Devonshire’s sudden departure with Shrewsbury for Newmarket in May led to rumours that they were about to resign because of their discontent with the king’s reliance on the Tories. On 5 May they both entered proxies in favour of Monmouth. Devonshire returned to the House on 8 May and five days later he subscribed to the protest against the decision of the House not to give the corporation of London more time to present its case against the quo warranto proceedings of the previous reign
Following the adjournment of 23 May 1690, Devonshire was appointed one of the council of nine who were to assist the queen in governing the realm during the king’s absence on campaign.67 William had long trailed the idea (now backed by statute) of entrusting the government of the country to the queen, advised by a council of nine. In its earliest formulation drawn up in February, it included Lord Steward Devonshire, who it was reported at this time would be one of the three lieutenant-generals entrusted with the command of the army left in England.68 So prominent had Devonshire become in the monarchs’ inner circle that he was entrusted with the lieutenancy of Somerset from 24 June, which he held jointly with Carmarthen and Charles Sackville, 6th earl of Dorset, until the single command of the county was entrusted to Devonshire’s nephew, James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormonde, on 3 Feb. 1691.69 Devonshire was present in the House for the prorogation of Parliament on 7 July 1690 and on 12 Sept. he ordered Black Rod to summon the Commons to the House to be informed of the prorogation to 2 Oct. 1690.70
The rule of the council of nine became notorious for its disunity and in-fighting, particularly between the Whigs and Tories. Mary did not think a great deal of any of her councillors, as she made clear in her own memoirs, where she described Devonshire as one whom ‘the king had … recommended as … might be trusted and must be complimented, but … I found weak and obstinate, made a mere tool by a party’.71 She also wrote dismissively to her husband that the ‘lord steward, you know, will be a courtier among ladies’.72 Devonshire’s actions at the time of the Battle of Beachy Head suggest, however, that there was more substance to him than just courtier-like emollience. Upon the first news from the admiral of the Anglo-Dutch fleet, Arthur Herbert, earl of Torrington, of the approach of the larger French fleet in the Channel, Devonshire told the queen and council ‘that he believed it very dangerous to trust Lord Torrington with the fate of three kingdoms … and that he was absolutely of opinion, that some other should be joined in commission with him’. He was later part of the small group in the council that supported Monmouth’s request to join Torrington in that command. Torrington’s conduct during the confused battle of 30 June 1690 was widely condemned and on 3 July Devonshire and Thomas Herbert, 8th earl of Pembroke, the first lord of the Admiralty, were dispatched by the queen to Portsmouth, to investigate and to bring the disgraced Torrington up to London to account for himself before the queen and council.73
The council was then confronted with the question of who was to command the fleet in Torrington’s absence. It was decided that the command should be put in commission, led by a peer with the assistance of two experienced seamen. Fearful that in the continuing uncertainty Devonshire would put himself forward for the command, Mary decided to nominate the two seamen first, Sir Richard Haddock‡ and Sir John Ashby. In this matter, Devonshire showed that he was not shy of directly opposing the queen to support the partisan goals of the Whigs, which may have been what led her to brand him a ‘tool’ of that party. On 22 July the commissioners of the admiralty, led by the Whig Sir Thomas Lee‡, took the initiative and in a meeting with the queen insisted that they would not sign a commission that included the Tory admiral Haddock. The queen’s anger was made worse when the next day Devonshire came to her to excuse and justify Lee, arguing that the selection of Haddock was ‘a concerted thing’ done by the Tories who had ‘imposed’ him upon the king against the wishes of the Whigs. ‘I was very angry’ wrote Mary, ‘at what Sir Thomas Lee said yesterday; but this is to make me more so, since I see ‘tis not reason, but passion, makes [him] speak thus’. Devonshire still did not give up and ‘complained that people were too much believed that ought not to be so, and we could not agree’.74
On another occasion Devonshire angered the queen when he and Monmouth remonstrated with her after she had decided that it was not necessary for her to attend a meeting of the full Privy Council.
They were very pressing; and lord steward told me, there were many there who absolutely told him they would not speak but before me; that they were privy councillors, established by law; and did not know why they should be refused my presence. I answered them at first as civilly as I could, and as calmly, but being much pressed, I grew a little peevish, and told them, that between us I must own I thought it a humour in some there, which I did not think myself bound to please. … But all I could say would not satisfy them; and had not Lord Nottingham come in, I believe they would not have left me so soon.
Again, in early August, Devonshire and Monmouth, surprisingly confident of the certainty of Whig electoral success, urged on Mary the dissolution of Parliament: ‘for this one he is sure will do no good … I see it is a thing they’ (undoubtedly meaning the Whigs) ‘are mightily set upon’, Mary commented to William.75
Court Whig, 1690-93
Devonshire’s pleas were to no avail and the Parliament was not dissolved. During the 1690-1 session he came to 58 per cent of the sittings and was nominated to six select committees, including that on 20 Oct. 1690 to draft a resolution confirming that Torrington’s commitment, like Devonshire’s before the Revolution, was a breach of privilege.76 In November he was made chief justice in eyre north of the Trent, a position which had been held by his Cavendish cousins, the dukes of Newcastle, from the time of the Restoration.77 On 11 Dec. he was placed on a committee to draft two new clauses for inclusion in the bill preventing the export of bullion. At about this time it was decided that Devonshire would be part of William’s retinue in the congress of the allies to be held at The Hague in the first months of 1691. It was even rumoured that Devonshire and Nottingham were to be the king’s ‘two commissioners or plenipotentiaries to treat there upon any business about the League’.78 Devonshire was kept busy in the final months of 1690 as lord steward preparing for the transfer of William’s court to The Hague.79
Devonshire returned with the king to England in April 1691 and on 1 May he helped to interrogate Matthew Crone and Richard Grahme‡, Viscount Preston [S], and other recently-apprehended Jacobites. Embarrassingly Preston claimed in his wide-ranging confession that his colleague William Penn had told him that Devonshire, Dorset, Shrewsbury and other leading Whig adherents of William III were also in contact with St Germain and ‘well affected’ to James II. Carmarthen tried to use these allegations to damage his enemies, including Devonshire, but there is no evidence beyond Preston’s hearsay account to suggest that Devonshire had made approaches to the Jacobite court and William did not countenance this line of attack. When the king left shortly afterwards in mid-May to return to the continent for that summer’s campaigning, Devonshire was once again named to the small cabinet council entrusted to assist and advise the queen in the government of the realm. He also had thoughts of promotion in the peerage. The death of his kinsman Henry Cavendish, 2nd duke of Newcastle, without male heirs in late July spurred talk that the loyal Devonshire would be further rewarded with the now extinct dukedom of Newcastle.80
Devonshire appears to have remained in the capital on cabinet business until about 9 September.81 He returned to the House on 27 Oct. 1691, three days after the Parliament had reconvened, on which day he was placed on the committee of ten members assigned to draft an address of thanks for the speech from the throne, and specifically to the queen for her governance of the realm that summer. He was also placed on a drafting committee for the bill for regulating the aulnage. He sat in two-thirds of the meetings of the session and was nominated to a further five select committees. On three occasions he was also placed on drafting committees established in response to reports by a committee of the whole House. He was a reporter for the conference on 17 Nov. which discussed Jacobite conspiracies and on 4 Jan. 1692 he was a manager for a conference on the bill against corresponding with the Jacobite court. On 2 Feb. he was named to the committee entrusted with drawing up the reasons why the House adhered to its amendments to the public accounts’ bill and was involved in managing the three conferences on the subject held on 5, 8 and 10 February. Indeed, on the 8th he ‘spoke and insisted on the Lords having the naming commissioners to take the public accounts’.82 Devonshire also signed the protest against the resolution on 2 Jan. 1692 not to send for the original record of a precedent cited during a debate on the Commons’ vote of 18 Dec. 1691 regarding the East India Company.
Devonshire was again placed on the regency council to advise the queen during the king’s absence on campaign that summer. In early May 1692 he was also appointed lord lieutenant of Nottinghamshire, a position that had been vacant since the early death of William Pierrepont, 4th earl of Kingston in September 1690. The summer saw another invasion scare which led to the apprehension and commitment of suspected Jacobite sympathizers such as Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon, and John Churchill, earl of Marlborough. Devonshire was among those councillors who refused to sign the arrest warrant for Marlborough and, after the crisis had been dissipated by the allied naval victories at Barfleur and La Hogue, Marlborough looked to him for help in procuring his bail.83 Devonshire also became involved in the disagreements between Edward Russell, the future earl of Orford, and Nottingham over the abortive plans for Russell to follow up the naval victories of that summer with an armed descent on France. He was part of a delegation dispatched to Portsmouth in early August to query the sudden and unexpected return of the fleet and ‘to consult with the admiral and general what measures are most proper to be taken in this juncture’.84
Devonshire was present in the House on the opening day of the next session, 4 Nov. 1692, and attended over three-quarters of the total sittings. He held the proxy of Derby from 10 Nov. for the remainder of the session. He was placed on the drafting committee for the address of thanks on 17 November. That day also saw him appeal, together with John Cecil, 5th earl of Exeter, against a chancery decree in a suit with the executrix and creditors of Philip Warwick (son of Sir Philip Warwick‡), which appeal was rejected on 12 December.85 Devonshire was involved in the proceedings and committees on the House’s ‘advice’ to the king regarding military and naval matters and on 29 Nov. 1692 he was named part of the delegation of three officers of the court to attend the king with the address urging him to employ only English officers in the army.
In the partisan conflict between Russell and Nottingham over the failed descent on France that summer, Devonshire at first opposed the latter. On 7 Dec. 1692 the House divided on a motion to form a joint committee of both Houses to examine the papers submitted by Nottingham in his defence. This motion was rejected by a majority of 12 but Devonshire sided with Nottingham’s opponents Shrewsbury, Monmouth and John Sheffield, 3rd earl Mulgrave in voting for it.86 On 10 Dec. Devonshire was named to the House’s own committee to examine the papers and a week later it was resolved to pass the papers and the committee’s report on to the Commons. Although he was not named to manage the conference on 21 Dec. at which the Commons took the unusual step of using the meeting merely to deliver their vote praising Russell, the following day he was named to the committee to investigate whether there were any precedents of conferences of this kind.
Devonshire’s role as a court Whig entrusted to espouse the king’s interest in the House came into stark relief over the debate on the place bill in late 1692 and early 1693. The measure had long been strenuously opposed by William and the ministry. On the last day of 1692 Devonshire voted against the motion to commit the bill, and on 3 Jan. 1693 he voted against its passage. Bonet, the ambassador for the Brandenburg Court, gave his masters a detailed account of the debates surrounding the bill and singled out Carmarthen, Nottingham and Hans Willem Bentinck, earl of Portland, as the ‘principals’ among the bill’s enemies, ‘to whom were joined three considerable Whigs, but all three of the cabinet council, and very well informed of the intentions of his majesty’ – these were Devonshire, Dorset and Sidney Godolphin, Baron Godolphin – ‘to whom must be added Lord Sunderland as a good courtier’.87 On 16 Jan. 1693 the committee of the whole House considering the triennial bill discussed amendments relating to annual sessions and ‘a set time for the determination of this Parliament’. Devonshire was a teller on the question of whether to resume the House, which having been agreed upon, he was placed on the committee to draw up the appropriate clause.88 The following day Devonshire brought in a bill for a detailed oath abjuring fealty to James II, which received so much opposition that it was effectively dropped for the session after its committal on 25 January.89 His kinsman through marriage, Bedford, registered his proxy with Devonshire on 19 Jan. 1693, but that extra vote was vacated by Bedford’s return to the House on 27 January. Devonshire on 24 Jan. was named to the drafting committee for a condemnation of the libel King William and Queen Mary Conquerors and was subsequently named as a manager of a conference on the subject. On 11 Feb. he was placed on a sub-committee to form the ‘Heads of Advice’ agreed upon in the committee of the whole into a coherent address to the king. He held the proxy of William’s chief confidant, Portland, during a six day absence starting 15 Feb. 1693 during which the House considered the ‘advice’ that foreigners such as Portland should no longer be employed in the army and other positions about the king.
Not all of Devonshire’s involvement in the House involved his promotion of the court’s interest. On 2 Jan. 1693 he voted against the reading of the divorce bill of Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk. Perhaps, as Burnet suggested, the infamous womanizer Devonshire, with many illegitimate children already to his name, opposed the bill in solidarity with the adulterous duchess of Norfolk.90 On 19 Jan. he was named to the committee assigned to draw up reasons why the House had, controversially and far from unanimously, decided to recede from its amendments to the Commons’ land tax bill.91 He probably approached the trial of Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun with some sympathy, as an old rake and duellist himself, and perhaps with some sense of responsibility, for Mohun’s father, Charles Mohun, 3rd Baron Mohun, had died (while the 4th Baron was still an infant) of wounds incurred when acting as a second for Devonshire in a duel in November 1676.92 Devonshire signed the protest of 31 Jan. 1693 against the decision not to proceed with the case of Mohun that day, and on 3 Feb. he proposed a set of questions to be asked the judges in Westminster Hall which had a common subject, to establish whether Mohun was or was not an accomplice to murder. The sketchy notes on the trial made by Portland on 4 Feb. suggest that Devonshire argued ‘that Lord Mohun would have delivered up his sword if he would have taken it, [which] shows no malice or design’.93 Not surprisingly, Devonshire voted Mohun not guilty of murder or manslaughter.
Devonshire was again part of Queen Mary’s council to help govern the realm after the king departed in April 1693. He was a member of the delegation of six sent to Portsmouth in May which made the disastrous decision to assign the main allied fleet to accompany the Turkey merchant ships which resulted in the loss of the Smyrna fleet.94 In late August he, with Shrewsbury, Montagu (now an earl), Godolphin, Edward Russell and Marlborough met at a conclave at Althorp, Sunderland’s country house, to discuss ways of furthering the Whig interest in the ministry and in Parliament.95
‘The turn to the Whigs’ and a dukedom, 1693-5
Devonshire came to the House for the 1693-4 session on its first day, 7 Nov. 1693, and a week later was entrusted with the proxy of Derby which he held until that earl’s return to the House on 13 Mar. 1694. Devonshire sat in just over two-thirds of its meetings, where he continued to obstruct the country measures the king disliked so much. William having vetoed the triennial bill at the end of the previous session, Monmouth brought in an identical bill in early December 1693. Devonshire proposed a rider, most likely as a wrecking amendment, which stated that a session might be considered to have been held even if no act or legal judgment were passed. The bill, with Devonshire’s rider, passed the House and even made headway through the Commons before being defeated in late December.96 Devonshire also protested on 13 Dec. 1693 against the resolution that the Tory Simon Harcourt‡ (1653-1724) was still clerk of the peace of Middlesex, as it was deemed his appointment, which was to be ‘on good behaviour’, did not necessarily end on the dismissal from office of the custos rotulorum who appointed him, John Holles, 4th earl of Clare (later duke of Newcastle). Devonshire had a personal as well as political interest since Clare’s replacement as custos was Devonshire’s kinsman, Bedford, who wished to appoint his own clerk.97
The matter which took up most of Devonshire’s, and the House’s, attention during the winter of 1693-4 was the investigation into the loss of the Smyrna fleet. The king’s failure to respond to a request for papers meant that on 29 Dec. 1693 the House ‘intimated’ to the lord steward specifically that they expected the king’s answer immediately. Devonshire reported on 2 Jan. 1694 the king’s answer that the papers were then being considered by the Commons, but would be laid before the House after the lower chamber was finished with them. On 8 Jan. he also reported the king’s positive response to the address requesting the further papers. Two days later, after hearing copious evidence from the admirals, the House resolved that ‘the admirals who commanded the fleet the last summer have done well in the execution of the orders they received’. Devonshire joined in the protest against this resolution. Both the vote and the protest had a strongly partisan edge for the two admirals thus exonerated – Sir Ralph Delaval‡ and Henry Killigrew‡ -- were associated with the Tories, whilst most of the protesters were Whigs. On 15 Jan. Devonshire was a manager for a conference about the Privy Council’s proceedings with the admirals; he was also named to a committee assigned to draft heads of the arguments to be offered at another conference on the lack of intelligence on the Brest fleet, but was not then named as a manager for this second conference. As late as 15 Feb. he was still involved in this matter, as he served as a teller, against Marlborough on the other side, on a division over whether to put the question on a motion that Nottingham and the Privy Council should have sent intelligence on the Brest fleet to the admirals. On 22 Feb. Devonshire introduced a private estate bill to allow him to sell or mortgage part of his entailed estate so that a higher maintenance could be provided for his middle son Lord Henry Cavendish‡. Devonshire’s old friend Cornwallis reported the bill fit to pass with some amendments on 28 February. The bill was rejected at a third reading in the Commons on 9 Apr. by 100-85 votes.98
Devonshire was also heavily involved in the mutiny bill. On 2 Mar. he reported from the committee assigned to draw up a clause for the bill that they had ‘found difficulty in the case’ and had ‘not come to any conclusion’, whereupon the committee of the whole House took over. The bill passed the Lords on the following day, and when it was returned by the Commons on 6 Mar. Devonshire was named a manager for a conference on the bill. On the 7th he was appointed to a committee to draw up the reasons for the Lords’ insistence on their amendments. This committee was revived on 22 Mar. although this was not formally noted in the Journal, and then again on 27 March. After a further conference on 29 March, for which Devonshire was also named as a manager, the Commons receded from its objections to the amendments.99
Shortly before William’s departure for the continent in early May 1694 he signed warrants for creations and elevations of various of his most faithful ministers and courtiers.100 Devonshire was promoted to be duke with the same title, while the Newcastle dukedom that had often been associated with him was instead given to the late duke of Newcastle’s son-in-law, Clare, the wealthy Nottinghamshire peer, who soon replaced Devonshire as lord lieutenant of that county.101 The two were to remain political colleagues but local rivals for many years to come. Devonshire’s position in the queen’s cabinet council in this summer of 1694 was endangered by a new scheme suggested by William before he left England. The larger council was to be replaced by a much smaller group consisting of the great officers of state while other members of the council would be called on to attend on an ad hoc basis, ‘sometimes one, sometimes another, as they should be judged most proper for the business they were to advise about’. The marquess of Normanby (as Mulgrave had become in the honours of that May) took umbrage at his exclusion and it was feared he would influence Devonshire to be equally dissatisfied. Sunderland was happy to report that ‘such care has been taken even with [the queen] and by my means … that [Devonshire] likes everything very well and [Normanby] will be alone by himself’. Shrewsbury (who had also become a duke that summer) was similarly confident that Devonshire’s ‘taking it so right, will have a good effect upon others, who cannot reasonably complain, if he be satisfied’. But, he added, ‘I cannot answer that it will have that good effect upon the marquess of Normanby, but rather believe the contrary’. Indeed, so satisfied was Devonshire with this new arrangement that he was away from the capital for much of the summer while important decisions were being taken in the reduced council.102
Devonshire was present on the first day of the following session, 12 Nov. 1694, when he was introduced as duke of Devonshire between his nephew, Ormond and Meinhard Schomberg, 3rd duke of Schomberg. The following day he and Charles Lennox, duke of Richmond, introduced the new duke of Newcastle to the House and on 8 Dec. he performed the same function for his kinsman Bedford, also created a duke, this time assisted by Bolton. With this new honour Devonshire was more than usually active and came to three-quarters of the sittings of this session. He signed a protest on 10 Dec. 1694 against the resolution to reverse the judgment given in king’s bench in favour of Arthur Bury against Robert Phillips and two days later he received the proxy, for the third time in as many years, of Derby, which was eventually vacated by Derby’s return on 26 Feb. 1695. On 18 Dec. 1694 he joined three other normally Tory peers – Halifax, Ailesbury, and Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth – in signing a protest against the passage of the Triennial Act. It is almost certain that his protest derived more from his general opposition to this bill itself, as seen in previous sessions, than to the specific reason given in the protest – the failure to move the terminal date of the current Parliament from 1696 back to 1695. At the death of the queen on 28 Dec. 1694, he was named to the committee to draft the address of condolence to the king and to the delegation to ask William when he would be ready to receive the address. It was Devonshire himself who the following day told the House that the king would receive the House and its address in two days’ time, on the last day of the year.
On 11 Jan. 1695 Devonshire was placed on the committee of ten members to draw up an address to the king on the claim of Sir Richard Verney, later 11th Baron Willoughby de Broke, to that barony. On 19 Jan. he joined seven other peers in protesting against the decision not to engross the bill to make perjury a felony in some cases. On 26 Feb. the House presented an address to the king calling for the papers concerning the naval expedition of the previous summer to be laid before the House; Devonshire and Dorset appear to have been the court officials deputed both to deliver the address and to report the king’s answer.103 On 6 Feb. Devonshire was appointed to draft a bill to prevent coin clipping. On 8 Feb. during the hearing of evidence about the ‘Lancashire Plot’ it was alleged that John Lunt had initially placed Devonshire among his list of purported Jacobites, but even Lunt’s colleagues did not believe the allegations against the lord steward.104 Newcastle registered his proxy with Devonshire on 18 Feb. which he held for the remainder of the session. Two days later he was placed on the committee to draw up reasons why the House insisted on some of their amendments to the treason trials bill and on 2 Mar. reported to the House the king’s answer that he would soon be able to receive the House with its address on the state of the Navy (to whose drafting committee Devonshire had been appointed the previous day).
Devonshire was involved in the investigations of bribery and corruption of April and May 1695 which brought William’s second Parliament to a close. On 13 Apr. he was named as a reporter for the conference on the bill to compel Sir Thomas Cooke‡ to account for money disbursed out of the treasury of the East India Company, and four days later he was placed on the committee of seven members to draw up heads for this bill to be offered to the Commons at a further conference, which he helped to manage. When the Commons brought up its articles of impeachment against the duke of Leeds (as Carmarthen had become) on 29 Apr., Devonshire was named to the committee entrusted to inspect the Journal for precedents. On the penultimate day of the session, 2 May, he was named as a manager for the conference on the House’s objections to the Commons’ amendments to the bill to imprison Cooke for malfeasance.
Devonshire was appointed one of the seven lords justices entrusted with the government of the realm during the king’s absence on the continent but he appears most prominently in the letters of that summer (as in so many previous years) not as a minister but as a courtier and social figure at the races at Newmarket or in the social life of the capital and Derbyshire.105 Shortly after the king’s return the Parliament was dissolved. Devonshire had long been preparing for this and had already solicited the support of his neighbour Newcastle for the election for Derbyshire of his eldest son, William Cavendish, known by the courtesy title of marquess of Hartington, who had only recently come of age. Devonshire declined to interfere in the selection of the second seat ‘because he would not disoblige the country gentlemen’ and the freeholders choose as Hartington’s partner one of the incumbents, Sir Gilbert Clarke‡. Devonshire also oversaw the election of his second son Lord Henry Cavendish for Derby, though he was successful only after a poll. The elections were expensive and Devonshire refused in the end to pay all the expenses, insisting that his sons themselves pay for part.106 Thus from the Parliament of 1695 there was a significant Cavendish interest in both Houses of Parliament, though the sons did not always vote the way their father may have wished.107
The Parliament of 1695-8
Devonshire himself was present on the first day of the new Parliament, 22 Nov. 1695, and went on to attend just under two-thirds of the session. From that first day he also held the proxy of Bedford, which was not vacated until Bedford’s arrived in the House on 2 Jan. 1696. On 30 Dec. he was named to a committee charged with amending clauses to the bill for reforming the coinage. After the bill was passed by the House on 3 Jan. 1696 the same members were deputed to manage the conference at which the bill was returned to the Commons. Devonshire was similarly named a reporter for the conference on 7 Jan. where the Commons stated their objections to the Lords’ amendments; two days later he was placed on committee to draft the reasons for the House’s insistence on its amendments, which were presented at a conference on 11 January. Devonshire subscribed to the protest of 17 Jan. against the resolution to hear the petition of Sir Richard Verney on his claim to the barony of Willoughby de Broke, because ‘the petitioner’s case has been already heard and adjudged in this House upon his former petition’. On 27 Jan. he reported the king’s answer to the address concerning the East India Company’s petition which he had been deputized to deliver four days previously. He was appointed to the large sub-committee established on 7 Feb. to draft new clauses relating to the encouragement of privateers to be added to the bill to continue the act prohibiting trade with France.
Devonshire was placed on the committee assigned on 24 Feb. 1696 to draw up an address expressing the House’s relief for the king’s escape from the assassination plot and was named as a manager of two conferences at which the address was agreed upon with the Commons. He signed the Association on the first day subscription was possible, 27 February. A contemporary newsletter writer claimed that it was Devonshire himself who brought in the finished text of the Association and presented it to the House, while L’Hermitage wrote to his masters in the States-General that in the ensuing debate over the wording of the Association, Devonshire supported some compromise wording put forward by Leeds about whether William III was ‘rightful king’.108 Devonshire reported to the House on 21 Mar. 1696 that his second cousin Ailesbury, who was heavily implicated in the testimony of the interrogated Jacobite conspirators, had been committed to the Tower under suspicion of high treason.109 Devonshire may have taken some delight in Ailesbury’s fall, as the two men were engaged in a long-term family squabble. In his memoirs Ailesbury, a trustee of the entailed Cavendish estate, presented himself and his father (Robert Bruce, earl of Ailesbury) as the financial saviours of his profligate, spendthrift and rebellious cousin.110
Devonshire, once again a lord justice during William’s absence in 1696, was involved in the interrogation of one of the chief Jacobites involved in the plot, Sir John Fenwick‡, 3rd bt, who was apprehended and sent to the Tower on 19 June 1696. Fenwick specifically asked to see the lord steward, who first visited him in the Tower on 7 July and found him willing to make a confession of Jacobite conspiracy – for William’s knowledge only – in exchange for a pardon and the promise that he would not be forced to appear as a witness in future trials. Upon orders from the king, Devonshire interviewed Fenwick on 10 Aug. when the prisoner accused some of the king’s leading ministers and courtiers – Shrewsbury, Godolphin, Marlborough and Edward Russell in particular – of negotiating, or ‘compounding’, with St Germain. Throughout this long affair of many months Devonshire showed a good deal of solicitude in his dealings with Fenwick and his wife, Lady Mary (a distant kinswoman through their mutual connection to the Howards), in contrast to the vituperation directed towards Fenwick by the king and his other ministers. Devonshire was himself shaken by Fenwick’s revelations and he sent a copy of his evidence to William, without showing it to any of those who had been implicated.111 The king told Devonshire that the confession contained nothing new, reassured Shrewsbury and refused to postpone Fenwick’s trial unless he produced more pertinent information.112 Fenwick promised to make good his allegations, prompting Devonshire and the secretary to the lords justices, James Vernon‡, to arrange another delay to the trial. On 23 Sept. Fenwick produced new information against active Jacobite conspirators, including Ailesbury and William Herbert, 2nd marquess of Powis (usually referred to as Viscount Montgomery) and his trial was put off once again.113
Despite Devonshire’s assurances of secrecy, news of Fenwick’s confession quickly leaked out and wild speculation gripped the capital in the late summer about who exactly had been named. Fenwick and his supporters blamed Devonshire himself for this. Thomas White, the former bishop of Peterborough, felt that Fenwick had ‘hearkened too much to the charms of Lord Devonshire’s honour’, only to be deceived by him. Yet Devonshire himself strenuously denied that he had let the information slip out.114 At the same time, Devonshire’s ministerial colleagues blamed him for what they saw as his gullibility in believing Fenwick’s allegations, his lax handling of the affair in allowing the rumours to spread and his unwillingness to warn them of the accusations against them. Portland believed that if Fenwick ‘had not unfortunately addressed himself to Lord Devonshire, and if from the beginning he had been spoken to as he ought to have been, I think he would not have had either leisure or inclination to invent the tales which he has told’.115 Edward Russell, one of those charged by Fenwick, spoke to Vernon with ‘some resentment’ against Devonshire, thinking, like Portland, that he had given too much credit to hearsay when accepting Fenwick’s confession and dispatching it to the king. Russell, Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron Wharton and the lord keeper, John Somers, Baron Somers became convinced that Fenwick’s damaging allegations had to be refuted publicly.116
In what Vernon considered ‘another unaccountable step’, Devonshire left the capital at the end of September 1696 and he had not returned by the time Parliament reassembled on 20 Oct. 1696. His continued absence further complicated matters as it was thought proper that he should be present at any interview between Fenwick and the king, but Wharton, Somers, and Russell were able to persuade William to interview the suspect himself. This he did in Council on 2 Nov., the day before the lord steward’s intended return. The king turned a deaf ear to Fenwick’s pleas that he be allowed to consult with Devonshire, who had promised him that his testimony was only for William’s ears. As Fenwick refused to say anything more before the full council, William in turn refused to delay his trial any further and dismissed him. Devonshire appears to have cut a chastened and derided figure when he finally arrived in the capital, being snubbed by the king and having his apology and explanation rebuffed by Russell.117
Devonshire took his seat for the 1696-7 session on 6 Nov. but even with this late start he still managed to attend 69 per cent of the sittings. Despite his close involvement in the proceedings against Fenwick, the immediate reason for his return to the House on that day was personal, a petition to the House by Normanby against Devonshire’s claim to privilege in a Chancery case depending between them concerning the sale of Berkeley House in Piccadilly. Hearings in this cause were constantly postponed in the House until 10 Dec. when Devonshire declared that he would not insist on his privilege.118 The case rumbled on in Chancery for several months and the interminable hearings were frequent fodder for news and gossip in the capital. In January 1698 Lord Chancellor Somers finally determined the case in Devonshire’s favour and he acquired possession of the London residence which he, and his descendants, transformed into one of the showpieces of opulent aristocratic Whig power in the capital, renaming it Devonshire House.119
In the first weeks of November 1696 Devonshire presented to the House the excuses of John Manners, 9th earl of Rutland.120 Rutland’s Derbyshire residence Haddon Hall was a stone’s throw from Chatsworth and his heir John Manners later 2nd duke of Rutland, now known as Lord Roos, was brother-in-law to Hartington, through their marriages to the two daughters of Lord Russell. On 30 Nov. 1696 Devonshire held the proxy of Francis Newport, earl of Bradford, which became operative when Bradford stopped attending the House between 4 and 13 December. On 2 Dec. Devonshire was appointed a manager for a conference on the bill for reforming the coinage. The session soon, however, came to be dominated by the proceedings against Fenwick. After the loss of the vital second witness against Fenwick a normal trial became impossible and the ministry turned to the drastic measure of a bill of attainder as the only way to discredit and silence him. The bill, having originated in the Commons under Russell’s guidance, was read for the first time in the House on 1 Dec., when Devonshire, on the king’s orders, laid before the House Fenwick’s two confessions. Some of the Tory peers, led apparently by Normanby, also pressed to see Devonshire’s own letters to the king, in an attempt to expose his mismanagement of the interrogation. Devonshire also fell foul of the insistence of the House that all peers attend the proceedings. He was absent when the House was called on 15 Dec. so black rod was ordered to take him into custody so that he would be forced to appear the following day. The motion was strongly supported by Normanby and Rochester.121
According to Vernon’s later comments, it seems clear that Devonshire voted for the second reading of the attainder bill on 18 Dec. 1696. When Fenwick appeared before the House on 22 Dec. he refused to testify further without a guarantee of a general pardon for his own actions and a binding assurance that his evidence could not be used against him in other courts and claimed that Devonshire had agreed to this. Devonshire denied it and, demanding that Fenwick be interrogated on his behalf, eventually extracted from the prisoner the admission that no explicit promises had been made; Devonshire had merely not raised objections to Fenwick’s request and assured him he would acquaint the king of his conditions. Fenwick wrote to his wife suggesting that Devonshire and Normanby were taking their dispute about Berkeley House into this other matter, for he implied that Normanby was trying to persuade him to testify that Devonshire explicitly promised him a royal pardon, ‘and they two were like to quarrel about it’. However, Devonshire seems to have become uneasy about the controversial nature of the proceedings. When it became clear that Fenwick would not confess further without guarantees, Devonshire at first moved to change the penalty in the bill from loss of life to perpetual imprisonment, which was seconded by Rochester, an unusual collaboration. That motion having been defeated, on 23 Dec. 1696 Devonshire surprised many contemporaries by voting against the Fenwick attainder bill at its third reading, although he did not subscribe to the subsequent large protest against its passage. In this rejection of the bill he joined, as Vernon put it, ‘all the lords justices who had voices’.122
In the last days before his execution on 28 Jan. 1697, Fenwick became increasingly convinced that Devonshire had acted in bad faith and had deserted him, and he put in a last damaging dig against the lord steward in a paper he delivered before his death to the sheriffs of London and Middlesex. He mentions in this account that when he delivered to Devonshire (‘a great man who visited me in the Tower’ as he obliquely refers to him) his first confession against Shrewsbury and the others, Devonshire had assured him that William ‘had been acquainted with most of those things before’ – which was tantamount to claiming that the allegations were true and that Devonshire was involved in a ‘cover-up’.123 Thomas White, the non-juring former bishop, who attended Fenwick in his last hours, himself expressed surprise at the relative moderation of Fenwick’s accusations towards Devonshire in this final paper. For his part, White admitted he would have been much harsher towards ‘that great man who pawned his honour to Sir John for his security, and yet dropped it so patiently, that a man would think he valued it as little as his creditors do’.124 Devonshire, however, was still incensed – he ‘stamps and frets’ – at Fenwick’s insinuation and the ministry was more than a little irritated at the need to limit the damage caused by his purported words (which were probably accurate, as William himself had made much the same comment to Shrewsbury) when composing its official refutation of Fenwick’s allegations and vindication of the drastic procedures against him.125
Devonshire was also involved in the proceedings against Monmouth, who had interfered in the Fenwick affair by delivering to him, via Lady Fenwick and the duchess of Norfolk, papers advising what Fenwick should say, and lines of defence to take, when questioned before the House. According to Vernon, Devonshire, on 15 Jan. 1697, was the first to propose the Tower as a suitable punishment for the wayward earl, ‘but he would have assigned some indiscretion for the cause, which the duke of Leeds and others did not think a reason for sending peers there’.126 On 19 Jan. Devonshire reported the king’s thanks for the address the House had composed on the matter and the ‘consideration’ it had thus shown to him.127 On 5 Mar. he was appointed a manager for, and reported from, the first conference on the House’s amendments to the bill to prohibit the import of East India silks. The House considered Devonshire’s report on 9 Mar. and established a committee to draw up reasons for insisting on its amendments; Devonshire reported from the conference on 13 Mar. at which these reasons were given to the Commons. On 17 Mar. the same committee was deputed to consider the arguments to be presented at a further conference the following day, although Devonshire was not listed as attending on that day, nor did he play a noticeable role in the further proceedings on the bill, before it was lost over a ‘wrecking amendment’ relating to a penalty clause.128
Following the prorogation on 16 Apr. 1697 Devonshire was one of the nine lords justices appointed to govern the realm while the negotiations for the treaty of Ryswick were being hammered out on the continent. Rumours soon abounded that Devonshire and Montagu were to be sent joint ambassadors to France following the peace, but nothing came of these.129 Devonshire was back in the capital from Chatsworth to attend the first day of the new session on 3 Dec. 1697, when he was also appointed to the committee to draft the address of thanks to the king for his speech on the peace. Narcissus Luttrell‡ recorded that it was Devonshire who reported the speech to the House on 6 Dec., although the Journal has Robert Shirley, 8th Baron Ferrers as the reporter.130 From 11 Dec. Devonshire held Bedford’s proxy, which he was able to retain for the entirety of the session. Between 10 and 13 Jan.1698 he was named as a manager for two separate conferences over the space of four days: one concerning the House’s amendments to the bill against corresponding with James II, the other on the amendments to the bill for continuing the imprisonment of the conspirator Stephen Counter. On 14 Feb. he was placed on the committee assigned to draw up an address to the king for the encouragement of English manufactures. Although he attended diligently at the beginning, Devonshire missed most of the sittings of March and April 1698 and over the course of the whole session came to only 54 per cent of sittings. He began to sit regularly again from mid-May, and on the 14th he was one of only five members of the House who supported the bill to punish John Knight for making false endorsements on Exchequer bills, which was thrown out that day at its second reading.131 On 10 June he reported to the House the king’s answer to the address on the woollen manufacture in Ireland. He was heavily involved in the proceedings against John Goudet and other French merchants and on 15 June he managed and reported from the conference on the Commons’ request to have more ‘convenient’ space for their counsel in the House’s chamber to make their case against Goudet. Devonshire, having made this report from the conference, was then one of only three peers (with Stamford and John Thompson, Baron Haversham) to sign the protest against the House’s ensuing resolution that members of the Commons could not pass beyond the bar of the House, insisting that the House’s judicature would not be lessened if the Commons’ counsel was allowed to do so. Devonshire was not named to the committee assigned to draft reasons for adhering to this resolution or a manager for the ensuing conferences, but when the managers for the conference of 21 June did report the next day, Devonshire was placed on a committee of 15 assigned to search for precedents of how to proceed in such a matter after a free conference.
Court or Country peer, 1698-1702
In the summer of 1698 Devonshire was again named as a lord justice. During the election his sons Hartington and Lord Henry Cavendish were again returned.132 Devonshire returned to London in time for the first day of the new Parliament on 6 Dec. 1698 and he was a diligent attender throughout its first session, coming to just over three-quarters of the sittings. In the session’s early weeks he was placed on two drafting committees for addresses to the king (on 20 Dec. 1698 and 4 Feb. 1699), and on 27 Jan. 1699 was appointed a manager for a conference on the House’s amendments to the bill to prohibit the export of corn. Most controversially, he emerged as a supporter of the measures taken to disband the army. At the disbanding bill’s first reading on 24 Jan. 1699 he took issue with a point of fact in the speech against the bill made by Haversham but, embarrassingly, ‘he was mistaken about the matter in dispute, and Lord Godolphin came to his relief, by saying that this was not at present the point in question’.133 More seriously, on 8 Feb. he voted and protested against the resolution for the retention of the king’s Dutch Guards. This protest, following on from his refusal to vote for the Fenwick attainder, marks the second time in short succession that Devonshire, previously seen as an archetypal courtier, openly defied the stated wishes of the king. It suggests that he had not completely abandoned many of his ‘old Whig’ and country ideals – such as opposition to a standing army in peacetime – and may have been increasingly distancing himself from the ministerial Whigs of the Junto. Both of his sons voted for the disbanding bill in the Commons and Hartington in particular was prominent in opposition to it. When William berated his lord steward for the disloyalty shown by the young Cavendishes, Devonshire could only defend them, saying that ‘they had advanced nothing but what was reasonable, nothing but what he would have said himself if he had been in their place’. Louis XIV’s envoy in England, Count Tallard, suggested to his master in late April that because of these reproaches Devonshire was ‘discontented’ and was contemplating resigning as lord steward.134
In the event, Devonshire continued in office and remained active in Parliament. On 21 Apr. 1699 he reported from a conference the Commons’ disagreement with the House’s amendments to the bill for Billingsgate Market. Four days later he was placed on the committee to draft reasons for the House’s adherence to the amendment, and consequently managed the ensuing conference on 27 Apr., after which the Commons withdrew their opposition to the House’s clause. In one of the last acts of the session, Devonshire was placed on the committee of 13 on 4 May that decided that an entry noting the Commons’ refusal to respond to a request for a conference that day should be placed in the Journal. Following the end of the session, Devonshire was again appointed a lord justice of the realm during William’s time on the continent but, as in previous summers, he spent much of it at Chatsworth, where he also had to work to maintain his position, both as ranger of Needwood Forest against the competing claims of Stamford, the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, (an acrimonious dispute which had its origins back in 1698), and as chief justice in eyre north of Trent in face of the rivalry of the duke of Newcastle, the warden of Sherwood Forest.135
Devonshire was back in the capital for the opening of the next session of Parliament, on 16 Nov. 1699, and in total came to 58 per cent of that session’s sittings. He was absent for all of January 1700. On 23 Feb. 1700 he voted and protested against the bill to continue the old East India Company as a corporation. At the time of the bill, Devonshire was highly involved in the East Indian trade, being one of only three peers with stock in both companies. He had holdings of more than £2,000 in the old company and an even higher commitment to the new one, having subscribed £6,000, the third largest subscription among the peerage. Shortly afterward he was confronted with a petition from one of his disgruntled workmen on the building works at Chatsworth, Benjamin Jackson, who complained that Devonshire refused to pay him and his workmen and then tried to block legal measures for payment by claiming privilege. Devonshire asked the House on the day the petition was submitted, 11 Mar., that he be allowed to maintain his privilege and the matter was referred to the committee for privileges, in which no further proceedings are recorded.136
Vernon noted that Devonshire was opposed to the provisions for the resumption of the Irish land grants ‘tacked’ on to the land tax bill, when the bill’s second reading was debated on 4 Apr. 1700.137 However, Devonshire was not involved as manager for any of the conferences on the House’s amendments to the bill before the king ordered his followers to abandon their resistance in order to secure supply. Devonshire may have kept a low profile during these proceedings, as Hartington was one of the leaders in the Commons of the attack on Irish land grants and on those who had benefited from them.138 At about this time even Devonshire was beginning to express doubts about the prominence of foreigners in the ministry and the king’s counsels. In July 1700, after the death of the duke of Gloucester threw the issue of the succession into turmoil, Vernon reported that Devonshire had ‘particular notions about the succession’. While on one hand he ‘makes no scruple of coming up to anything that may put an exclusion upon King James and the prince of Wales, and he does not care how soon, and how strongly that is done’, on the other he nevertheless thought ‘the nation will not submit to any more foreigners’.139 Thomas Carte later recorded in his notebook the anecdote that at about this time the ‘old duke of Devonshire’ was ‘infinitely averse to the settling of the crown of England on the Hanover family, and said the inconvenience of a foreigner were terrible’. He ‘pressed the finding out of an Englishman to give it to, and maintained that it was more eligible to set it on long Tom’s head’ (the earl of Pembroke).140
When the king left for the continent in late June 1700 Devonshire was again appointed as one of the lords justices.141 In a marked printed list of the Whig nobility from that summer Devonshire was indicated as a Whig willing to work with the new ministry, rather than a diehard member of the ousted Junto. Since at least 1696 there had been differences between him and the Junto leadership, suggesting that he would not have been greatly perturbed by the creation of the new mixed ministry. In the general election of January 1701 Devonshire’s third son Lord James Cavendish‡ replaced his late elder brother Henry, who had died the previous May, as candidate for Derby and was returned without a contest. The relative tranquillity of the borough election was in stark contrast to the contention and high partisan feeling in the county. Hartington had fallen out with his Tory partner, Thomas Coke, over a number of issues, and late in the day he announced that his new electoral partner would be Lord Roos. Coke and the Tories refused to stand aside and in a bitterly contested poll, Hartington and Roos were only narrowly returned.142
Devonshire attended 71 per cent of the sittings of this brief Parliament from its second day, 10 Feb, to the prorogation of 24 June 1701. On 17 Feb. he was named as a manager for a conference on the address of thanks and on 20 Mar. he joined the protest against the resolution not to communicate the House’s address on the partition treaty to the Commons. Devonshire was, however, most involved in the attempt to halt the Commons’ impeachment proceedings against Portland and the Junto lords. Whatever his personal relations with individual members of the Junto may have been, these impeachments from the Tory-led Commons were an attack both on the king’s right to choose his own ministers and on fellow members of the peerage. On 16 Apr. Devonshire reported from the committee on the address requesting the king to refrain from punishing or removing the accused peers from office until they had been suitably tried, and, with Henry Sydney, earl of Romney (the two of them ‘greatly in the king’s interest’ as one commentator noted), he was delegated to attend the king with it. Romney reported to the House the following day that the king had received the address without making an answer to it, an unprecedented act ‘at which the House of Lords were somewhat piqued, and thereupon appointed a committee to enquire, if there was any precedent of the king’s silence upon the like occasions’, to which committee Devonshire was appointed.143 On 5 May Devonshire reported from the committee assigned to draw up a message to the Commons reminding them that the House was still waiting impatiently for the actual articles of impeachment.
The impeachments came to a head in early June 1701, with Devonshire to the fore in the campaign against them. On 6 June he reported to the House from the conference at which the Commons’ representative Simon Harcourt, the future Viscount Harcourt, suggested that the differences between the Houses on the conduct of the trials could be resolved by a joint committee of both houses. The already-established committee to consider the method of proceeding with impeachments, to which Devonshire was added on 7 June, was assigned to draw up reasons against the establishment of a joint committee. Stamford reported to the House the reasons on 10 June, but it was Devonshire who managed and reported from the conferences on that day and three days later. This latter was the most tumultuous to date, as Devonshire himself reported to the House, for as Harcourt and Sir Bartholomew Shower‡ were explaining why the Commons could not agree to the House’s arguments, the mercurial Haversham ‘used some expressions, at which the Commons, taking exceptions, abruptly broke up the conference’. Attempts were made to placate the Commons, but they for their part sent their own account of what Haversham had said and insisted he be charged before the House. The House assigned the managers of the conference to draw up a statement of what had happened and to search for precedents of how similar incidents had been settled. Devonshire, as principal manager and reporter of the conference, chaired the committee and reported from it on 14 June, although he and the committee perhaps disingenuously claimed not to remember the offensive words Haversham had allegedly used. At the same time the House continued to insist on its resolution not to allow a committee of both houses and charged ahead in its determination to try Somers and Orford – with or without the cooperation of the Commons. Devonshire was, not surprisingly, one of those who acquitted them at their ‘trials’ on 17 and 23 June respectively.144
By this time relations between the two houses had deteriorated so badly and in such acrimony that the king had no choice but to prorogue Parliament on 24 June. Only four days after the prorogation William convened a meeting of the Privy Council, where he once again commissioned Devonshire as one of the lord justices.145 Devonshire was one of only three ministers (the others being Pembroke and Thomas Tenison, archbishop of Canterbury) who served as a lord justice on each of William III’s seven absences from the realm after the queen’s death. Yet he remained at the periphery of this council whilst Somers and Sunderland attempted to persuade William to discard his ineffectual ‘mixed’ ministry, call a new Parliament and reinstate the Whigs in office.
In the second general election within a year, held in November, the Cavendish interest had its most severe test yet. The election at Derby was described as ‘the nearest poll was ever seen’ in the borough, and Lord James Cavendish squeaked in by one vote. The county election was similarly close-run but did not end well for Devonshire and his heir. Elements of the Derbyshire gentry had shown a resentment at being represented by two young noblemen and this was exploited by Coke and his new partner, John Curzon‡. Although the Cavendish and Manners interest lavished money on the election, Roos suffered a comprehensive defeat and took Hartington down with him. Following Hartington’s defeat, Devonshire was heard to say that his son having lost in his county he should not stoop so low as to pick up a seat in a borough. He took steps to rectify this humiliation to the family, ordering his agents to take copies of the poll books and search for fraudulent voters in view to a petition. Hartington, ignoring his father’s strictures, managed to return to the Commons through ‘picking up’ the borough seat of Castle Rising in Norfolk.146
Devonshire himself was present for the first day of the Parliament, on 30 Dec. 1701 and on the last day of the year he was placed on the committee to draw up an address on that part of the king’s speech which took note of Louis XIV’s recognition of the Pretender as king of England. Early in the new year of 1702 he signed the House’s address condemning this and pledging continued loyalty and support to William. On 6 Feb. 1702 he reported from the conference on the bill for the Pretender’s attainder the objections of the Commons to the inclusion of Mary of Modena in the bill. Devonshire and the other conference managers were assigned to search for precedents to amendments to bills of attainder and to draw up reasons in their defence to be presented in subsequent conferences, which Devonshire helped to manage on 10 and 12 February. On 2 and 7 Mar. 1702 Devonshire was one of the officers of state commissioned by the dying king to give the royal assent to that and other bills passed by both houses.147
Reign of Queen Anne, 1702-7
On the day of the king’s death, 8 Mar. 1702, Devonshire appears to have chaired the committee appointed to draft the statement to be offered to the Commons at a conference, as he reported the committee’s order for an immediate proclamation of Queen Anne and later reported the conference itself. On 9 and 13 Mar. he reported the new queen’s responses to addresses and requests sent to her from the House. In a debate on 11 Mar. the Whig Charles Howard, 3rd earl of Carlisle, was ‘smartly replied’ to by Francis North, 2nd Baron Guilford, John Jeffreys, 2nd Baron Jeffreys and Edward Montagu, 3rd earl of Sandwich, among others, for some comments he made about the queen. Devonshire made a sufficiently ‘mollifying speech’ on Carlisle’s behalf to calm tempers and to avoid the earl being censured.148
As a faithful servant and officer of William III, Devonshire was prominent at the late king’s funeral in early April, he and Charles Seymour, 6th duke of Somerset ‘supporting’ the chief mourner Prince George, duke of Cumberland. The burial of William in Westminster Abbey formally ended Devonshire’s tenure as lord steward of the household. He ceremoniously broke his white staff but Anne almost immediately reappointed him. She gave further indications of her continued favour towards the Cavendish family when she retained Hartington as captain of the yeomen of the guard and made his wife one of her ladies of the bedchamber. Devonshire served as lord high steward for her coronation on 23 Apr. 1702.149
On 4 May 1702 Devonshire first reported from the drafting committee for the address of thanks for the declaration of war against France and then together with other officers of the late king assigned to search through his papers he reported that they had not found anything that prejudiced the queen or her accession to the throne. The House thereupon declared the many rumours about the existence of such papers, ‘groundless, false, villainous and scandalous’.150 On 9 May Devonshire was placed on the committee to draft a motion on the publication of the proceedings of the House in The History of the Last Parliament. He remained busy until the prorogation of 25 May in conferences on measures for the defence of the new regime against its enemies. He reported from the conference on 7 May on the House’s amendments to the bill to alter the oath of abjuration. A week later, on 15 May, he was placed on the committee to draw an address calling for all correspondence between the allies and France to be stopped and on 18 and 20 May he managed conferences on this address. On 20 May he was also a manager for another conference at which the Commons presented their objections to the House’s amendments to the bill for the encouragement of privateers. Five days later, before the prorogation, he reported the queen’s answer to an address on the subject. In the elections on July Lord James Cavendish did not contest Derby, while Hartington took refuge in Yorkshire as knight of the shire.151
Devonshire was more than usually assiduous in his attendance of the first session of the new queen’s first Parliament, attending on its first day, 20 Oct. 1702, and continuing to sit in 82 per cent of the meetings. On the second day, 21 Oct. he was placed on the drafting committee for the address in response to the queen’s speech; he chaired and reported from the committee with the completed address on the following day and was one of those deputed to enquire when she would be ready to receive the House and its address.152 On 11 Nov. he reported her reception of the address (which he had been assigned to help draft two days previously) congratulating her on the safe recovery from illness of Prince George. On 19 Nov. he chaired and reported from the drafting committee on an address concerning the Commons’ vote condemning William Lloyd, bishop of Worcester, for his interference in that summer’s elections and he was again delegated to present it to the queen. He was one of the first to sign the House’s resolution against the Commons’ practice of ‘tacking’ alien matters on to money bills, on 9 December.
From mid-December 1702 Devonshire became one of the principal actors in the House in the campaign against the occasional conformity bill. On 17 Dec. he was the principal manager for the conference in which, as he later reported to the House, the Commons disagreed to some of the Lords’ amendments. The following day the House charged the conference managers with drafting reasons for the House’s insistence on their amendments and to search for precedents to refute the Commons’ principal complaint, that the House could not initiate bills with pecuniary penalties in them and could not alter such penalties in bills from the Commons. Devonshire, according to William Nicolson, bishop of Carlisle, subsequently moved that all the lords present in the House when the committee was established be added to it. He himself chaired this busy committee on six occasions over the course of the winter; he presented the committee’s very long report to the House on 8 Jan. 1703 and was a manager for the consequent conference the following day.153 The matter rested there for several days while the Commons considered the points raised by the House. On 11 Jan. the bill to settle a revenue on Prince George was read a second time. It included a controversial clause allowing him to remain in the House and the Privy Council after the death of the queen despite his foreign birth. Devonshire and the others considered that this clause would effectively disqualify the Dutch born peers. To resolve this matter, Devonshire suggested that a separate declaratory bill be introduced to explain that neither the prince nor any of the foreign peers in the House at the time of the Act of Succession were covered by its clauses incapacitating foreign-born peers from office or grants of land from the crown. Though ‘warmly’ espoused by other Whigs such as Richard Savage, 4th earl of Rivers, the proposed bill failed to gain sufficient support. On 19 Jan. Devonshire continued to speak against the offending clause and subscribed to the protest against the decision to maintain it in the bill.154
Devonshire was the principal manager and reporter for the Lords at the turbulent and pivotal conference of 16 Jan. 1703 on the occasional conformity bill, where the Commons continued in their disagreement to the House’s amendments. After a long debate, Devonshire was one of those who voted to adhere to the amendments, which motion squeaked through by two votes.155 On 29 Jan. Devonshire reported from the committee on precedent and procedure that the bill, with its amendments, should be delivered to the Commons at another free conference. Devonshire himself managed and reported from this conference on 1 February. This conference effectively marked the demise of the bill as the Commons continued to refuse the Lords amendments.156 Devonshire also chaired the committee assigned to draw up an account of the proceedings of that final conference and he worked away until he was able to deliver a long report to the House almost a month later on 24 February.157 On that day he was also placed on the committee to oversee the printing of both the failed bill and his own report on the conference.
Apart from preparing this report, Devonshire was also in the first week of February 1703 involved in drafting an address thanking the queen for the small number of licences granted to people to come from France and calling for a proclamation for the apprehension of all unlicensed persons arriving from thence.158 Having already clashed with the lower house over the occasional conformity bill, he became embroiled in another controversy with the Commons, over the ‘Observations’ of the Commons’ commissioners of accounts, in which Charles Montagu, Baron Halifax was accused of malfeasance in office. On 5 Feb. the committee entrusted to examine the ‘Observations’ (of which Devonshire was a member), reported that the Commons’ commissioners had failed to appear before it despite being summoned. The House then voted to agree with the committee and to exonerate Halifax. Devonshire was a manager for the ensuing conference on 17 February. The ‘unparliamentary’ language used by representatives of the Commons at that conference led to the formation of another committee from which Devonshire reported on 22 February. He was the principal manager for another conference held that day at which he delivered the Lords’ resolution condemning their expressions. He likewise managed the conference requested by the Commons on 25 Feb. and was able to report to the House that he and the other managers had ‘endeavoured to maintain their resolutions delivered at the last conference’. Not surprisingly, with relations this far deteriorated, the queen prorogued Parliament the following day.159
The lord steward was back in the House for the next session on its first day, 9 Nov. 1703, and went on to attend just over two-thirds of the sittings. As usual he was named on the session’s second day to the drafting committee for the address of thanks and the following day he was appointed to a small committee of seven members to consult with the surveyor-general Sir Christopher Wren‡ ‘to propose remedies for keeping off the crowd when the queen is present’. He spoke against the occasional conformity bill when it came before the House again and voted to reject it at its second reading on 14 Dec. 1703. That day also saw his first involvement in what was to become his main preoccupation for the next few months, the House’s investigation into the ‘Scotch Plot’. The principal target of the investigation, the Tory secretary of state Nottingham, identified Devonshire and Somerset as the leaders of the attack against him and as his principal enemies in the Cabinet, even insisting at one point on their dismissal as a condition of his continued service.160 The two dukes may have been the instigators on 14 Dec. of the House’s examination into the government’s handling of the conspiracy.161 Devonshire reported the following day the queen’s assurances that some of the captured Jacobite agents would be sufficiently secured but on 16 Dec. he conveyed the queen’s more negative response that she wanted the principal suspect, Sir John Maclean, to be examined by Nottingham rather than at the bar of the House. Distrust of the Tory ministry was amply demonstrated when Devonshire on 18 Dec. topped the secret ballot to choose members of the seven-man committee of the House assigned to interrogate the Jacobites Boucher and Ogleby. Devonshire appears to have chaired this committee for he delivered a report of its findings to the House on 21 Dec. and he and Somerset were assigned to present the queen with the House’s address for the prosecution of Boucher for high treason.162
On 13 Jan. 1704, shortly after Parliament had reconvened after the Christmas recess, the House passed two resolutions asserting its ‘undoubted right’ to order people into custody and to commit them by its own authority, a response to a Commons’ address of 21 Dec. 1703 which had complained that the House was contravening the queen’s prerogative by conducting its own examination of the Jacobite suspects. After Somerset reported the long address stating the House’s rights on 17 Jan. 1704, Devonshire was paired with him to attend the queen to ask when she would receive the address. At the end of January Devonshire also reported the queen’s irritated answer to a hectoring address from the House urging her government to hasten the prosecution of Boucher.163 Devonshire’s involvement in the examination of the Scotch Plot continued well into February and March, as the investigating committee of seven Whigs originally established in December 1703 was from 19 Feb. 1704 reconstituted as a committee to examine ‘farther into the Scottish conspiracy’, once the queen had relented and laid before the House more papers in the case, particularly the ciphered ‘gibberish’ letters. After Somerset had delivered the committee’s report to the House on 20 March, on the following night some of the leading Whigs, including Devonshire, met at Sunderland’s residence in St James’s residence to plan further attacks on Nottingham.164 With this concerted campaign against him Nottingham resigned the seals as secretary of state shortly after the session’s prorogation on 3 Apr. 1704. Devonshire ended the session with another dispute with the lower house. On 27 Mar. he managed and reported from the conference where the Commons made clear their disagreements to the House’s amendments to the public accounts bill.
Devonshire was late in arriving at the next session of Parliament; he first sat on 4 Nov. 1704, over two weeks after the commencement of the session. He probably arrived specifically to supervise his complaint of a breach of privilege, as the House heard that day that one of his menial servants had been arrested during the time of Parliament.165 On 14 Dec. Devonshire registered his proxy for four days with Newcastle before he returned to the House on 18 December. Despite these absences were not long in total the lord steward attended two-thirds of the meetings of this session. On 24 Jan. 1705 he reported to the House the queen’s positive response to a request that the ship Judith be stopped from sailing and on 3 Feb. he again reported her willingness to receive the House with an address. Principally, he was concerned in these early weeks of 1705 with seeing through Parliament an estate bill which would allow him and Hartington to mortgage part of the entailed estate to pay debts. It was first read on 1 Feb., was reported from committee with only one amendment four days later, and went through the Commons almost as quickly; it received the royal assent on the day of prorogation, 14 March.
It was only in late February and early March 1705 that Devonshire became closely involved in some of the more controversial matters between the Houses. Between 28 Feb. and 9 Mar. he was named as a manager for three conferences on the dispute with the Commons on the Aylesbury men. He was placed on a committee to draft a statement of this case as it stood between the Houses and to request the queen to allow two of the petitioners to bring in their writs of error before the House. On 7 Mar. he was also a manager for a conference on the Lords’ amendments to the bill to prevent traitorous correspondence, while on 12 Mar. he was again a manager for a conference on the amendments to the militia bill. That same day he registered his proxy with Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend and left the House for the final two days of the session.
With the general swing to the Whigs in the election of that summer the Cavendish interest saw victory in Derby, where Lord James Cavendish and the town’s recorder, the Whig Thomas Parker†, the future earl of Macclesfield, defeated the sitting Tory members.166 Devonshire was an early patron of Parker, and it was apparently on his recommendation that Parker was made the queen’s serjeant-at-law only a few weeks after he had been returned for Derby.167 Parker was later named an executor of Devonshire’s will. Hartington retained his seat for Yorkshire.
The first session of the 1705 Parliament saw one of Devonshire’s lowest attendances for many years, as he came to only 36 per cent of the sittings. He first sat on 31 Oct. 1705. On 20 Nov. on behalf of the queen, he laid before the House five letters and papers regarding the forthcoming negotiations for a union with Scotland. Devonshire was at the forefront of those opposed to the Tory-led motion of 15 Nov. 1705 to invite Sophia, dowager electress of Hanover, to England during the life of the queen.168 White Kennett later claimed that Devonshire ‘distinguished himself’ in the debates on the resolution that the Church under Anne was not in danger but there is no other evidence for his involvement in these debates which took place on 6 Dec. 1705, during one of Devonshire’s long periods of absence from the House.169 He is not recorded in the presence lists of the Journal between 21 Nov. 1705 and 31 Jan. 1706 and no account of the ‘Church in danger’ debate, even that in Kennett’s own papers, nor the division list for that day, features the duke.170 Having returned to the House on 1 Feb., Devonshire took a prominent part in the debates about the place clauses the Commons wished to insert in the regency bill. He was named as a manager of a conference on the bill on 7 Feb. and reported back later in the day on the Commons’ objections to the House’s amendments (which effectively nullified the force of the Commons’ place clause). He was then placed on the committee to draw up reasons justifying the House’s insistence on these amendments and was appointed a manager for the ensuing conferences on 11 and 19 February. At the latter meeting the Commons receded from their objections. He was also involved in the dispute with the Commons over the House’s amendments to the private bill of Francis Seymour Conway, Baron Conway. On 28 Feb. 1706 he was placed on the committee of ten members assigned to draw up reasons in defence of the amendment and he was a manager for the conferences on 28 Feb. and 2 March. On 9 Mar. he was placed on a committee of nine assigned to draw the address condemning the publication of the letter, purportedly by Sir Rowland Gwynne‡, to Stamford arguing in favour of the dowager electress Sophia’s residence in England. Two days later, all those present (including Devonshire) were named as managers for two conferences on this address. On the last day of the session, 19 Mar. 1706, Devonshire managed and reported from a conference on the bill for the amendment of the law, after which the House agreed to the changes made by the lower House in order to see the bill through.
In April 1706 he was one of the prominent Whigs appointed as commissioners to negotiate the union with Scotland, along with his son Hartington.171 Devonshire had shown his support for the Union in a letter he wrote on 23 Jan. 1705 to Patrick Hume, earl of Marchmont [S], saying that ‘the measures the Parliament here are now taking’ (the appointment of commissioners), would lead to the ‘securing the succession in the Protestant line, and also remove the jealousy of the ancient right and liberty of that kingdom being given up, for it there be an union the right of both kingdoms will stand upon the same foot’.172 The notebook of John Clerk‡ of Penicuik, one of the Scottish commissioners, does feature Devonshire as a participant in the proceedings, such as at the debate of 12 June 1706 on the relative apportionment of Scottish representatives in the Commons, although Clerk thought that Devonshire was but a ‘very indifferent man’ whose views did not have to be taken seriously.173
Devonshire reverted to his usual attendance levels for the 1706-7 session, coming to 62 per cent of its sittings. On its first day, 3 Dec. 1706, he was placed on the drafting committee for the address of thanks, while 11 days later he was assigned to a drafting committee for an address requesting the queen to allow a bill to be introduced to settle and continue the titles and honours of the duke of Marlborough through the female line. He was present in the House as the treaty of Union was being debated, and he played a prominent part in chairing the drafting committee for the address of thanks to the queen for her royal assent to the Act of Union and her speech in its praise on 6 Mar. 1707, which was reported to the House on the following day.174 Devonshire left the House on 27 Mar. and did not return until 24 Apr. 1707, the last day of the brief ten-day session of April 1707, and his last sitting in the House.
Devonshire was still able to attend a meeting of the cabinet council on 13 July 1707 but on 16 Aug. it was reported that he was ‘dangerously ill of the stone and strangury, and has made his will, and received the sacrament’. He died in the morning of 18 Aug. of ‘suppression of urine’.175 His son Hartington inherited the office of lord steward (despite numerous other suitors for the office), and all of his father’s (unentailed) real and personal property, including Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Devonshire House in Piccadilly.176 Devonshire was generous in his will bequeathing jewels or substantial bequests to his three surviving legitimate children, as well as providing for a number of surviving illegitimate daughters by his many mistresses. Henrietta, one of his natural daughters by his long-term mistress Mary Heneage had recently entered the minor Scottish nobility by marrying Lionel Tollemache, styled Lord Huntingtower, the only son and heir of Lionel Tollemache‡ 3rd earl of Dysart [S].177 Another young daughter, Elizabeth, was the issue of his liaison with Katharine Jones whose mother, Lady Elizabeth Jones (sister of Richard Jones‡, earl of Ranelagh [I]) had already caused family scandal by marrying a footman. Hostile contemporaries and Devonshire’s own will suggest that Lady Jones heaped further opprobrium on herself by effectively pimping her daughter to the duke. Devonshire kept going until the end and in 1704, at the age of 63, ‘with one foot in the grave’, he took up with the young actress and singer Mary Anne Campion, ‘a pretty young creature’, who bore him a daughter before she died in 1706 at age 19. He took especial care to erect a lavish and fulsome funeral monument for the young actress in the family vault and to provide for this infant daughter who was still at nurse within Devonshire House at the time he made his will.178
Within a few months of Devonshire’s death, White Kennett, at that point a royal chaplain at Windsor, had laid down the first marker in the battle over the late duke’s posthumous reputation when he delivered a laudatory funeral sermon, and accompanied this with a ‘memoir’ of the family of Cavendish in its printed version. He was rewarded with the deanery of Peterborough, largely through the patronage of the new duke. But Kennett’s flattery did not go unanswered and his claims about the late duke’s piety and religion were quickly countered by The Hazard of a Death-bed Repentance Fairly Argued which, while reserving judgment on Devonshire’s political activities, took great delight in refuting Kennett’s praise of Devonshire’s probity by going into detail about his many mistresses and illegitimate children and generally impugning his moral character. Enemies, particularly Tories, quickly picked up on these aspects of Devonshire’s character. Thomas Hearne likewise condemned Kennett’s book ‘in praise of that notorious debauchee and rebel the late duke of Devonshire; such is the spirit of these prickeared, starch, sanctified fellows that … they will cry up the greatest villains for saints’.179 Devonshire’s contemporary Bishop Burnet gave perhaps one of the more sophisticated and ambivalent views of the duke, in which he contrasted his evident self-interest and egotism with his patriotism, his courtier-like sycophancy with his courage to stand on principle. When first drafting his History Burnet wrote that Devonshire ‘was an ambitious and revengeful man; but had the courage of an hero, with a much greater proportion of wit and knowledge than is usual in men of his birth. He had a softness in his exterior deportment to which there was nothing within that was answerable.’180 Perhaps the last word should be given to Devonshire himself, who showed his own view of himself and how he wanted to be remembered in the funeral inscription he himself ordered in his will: ‘ Willielmus Dux Devon bonorum principum fidelis subditus, inimicus et invisus Tirannis’ (William duke of Devonshire, a faithful subject of good princes, an enemy to tyrants, and hated by them).
C.G.D.L.- 1 W. Kennett, A Sermon Preach'd at the Funeral of … William duke of Devonshire … with some Memoirs of the Family of Cavendish (1708), 117.
- 2 HMC 15th Rep. VII, 161; Pepys Diary, i. 134.
- 3 Bodl. Carte 32, f. 131, Carte 215, f. 385.
- 4 Kennett, Mems. 119-20.
- 5 TNA, PROB 11/496; Hazard of a Death-bed Repentance Fairly Argued (1708), 23-26.
- 6 TNA, PROB 11/496.
- 7 CSP Dom. 1689-90, p. 97.
- 8 CSP Dom. 1690-91, pp. 240, 473-4.
- 9 CSP Dom. 1694-5, p. 204; CSP Dom. 1695, pp. 111-12; CSP Dom. 1697, pp. 510-11.
- 10 CSP Dom. 1699-1700, p. 92.
- 11 CSP Dom. 1705-6, p. 110; Boyer, Anne Annals, v. 12.
- 12 Duchy of Lancaster Officers, ed. Somerville, 162, 170; CTB, x. 273.
- 13 Manning and Bray, Surr. i. 342.
- 14 CSP Dom. 1690-91, p. 163; Nottingham Bor. Recs. vi. 36.
- 15 CSP Dom. 1687-9, p. 372; CSP Dom. 1689-90, p. 71.
- 16 Hunter, Royal Society, 86-87, 140-41.
- 17 Macky, Mems. 18.
- 18 Oxford DNB.
- 19 SR, v. 380-88.
- 20 CSP Dom. 1665-6, p. 431; Kennett, Mems. 120.
- 21 Burnet, ii. 84.
- 22 Lorenzo Magalotti, Relazione ed. Middleton, 117; Bodl. Carte 38, f. 221; HMC Rutland, ii. 12, 32, 34, 50, 65; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 221-2.
- 23 Kennett, Mems. 120-23; HP Commons, 1660-90, ii. 36-38; HMC Rutland, ii. 39-40.
- 24 HMC Ormonde, n.s. vi. 161, 380; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 132.
- 25 TNA, PROB 11/379.
- 26 Add. 63776, ff. 63-64.
- 27 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 502.
- 28 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iiii. 56; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 363; Add. 72481, ff. 70-71.
- 29 Dalrymple, Mems. (1790), ii(1), p. 63; Burnet, iii. 88-89; Halifax Letters, i. 458-9.
- 30 Add. 72482, f. 60; HMC 6th Rep. 463.
- 31 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iii. 82, 91-92; iv. 16, 25-26; Evelyn Diary, iv. 497; CSP Dom. 1686-7, p. 209; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 369-70, 400.
- 32 Add. 28051, f. 116; Eg. 3332, ff. 9, 11, 13; Harl. 6820, ff. 42v. et seq.; Harl. 7535.
- 33 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iii. 30-31; Evelyn Diary, iv. 453-4; BL, Verney ms mic. M636/40, J. Stewkeley to Sir R. Verney, 28 July 1685.
- 34 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 401-6; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 31, 50-51, 53-55, 79, 89, 94, 100-1; Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs, 42, ff. 177, 185, 187, 199, 201, 210-11, 220, 222-3.
- 35 Chatsworth, Devonshire mss, Letter Series I, 18.01.
- 36 Kennett, Mems. 139-44.
- 37 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 417-18; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 139-40; Bath mss, Thynne pprs, 42, ff. 318-19; Verney ms mic M636/42, Stewkeley to Verney, 2 Nov. 1687.
- 38 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 143.
- 39 Dalrymple, Mems. ii(2), pp. 71, 86-89, 94-95; Burnet, iii. 180-81.
- 40 Bodl. Tanner 28, f. 76; Add. 34515, ff. 77-78.
- 41 Kennett, Mems. 46-47, 134-5.
- 42 Chatsworth, Devonshire mss, Letter Series I, 18.1- 18.13; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 445.
- 43 Dalrymple, Mems. ii(2), p. 107.
- 44 Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North, 85-95, 104-7; Morrice Ent’ring Bk. iv. 337, 346, 364, 374, 400, 405, 407-12; Dalrymple, Mems. ii(2), pp. 197, 250-1; Add. 19253, ff. 193-191 .
- 45 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 400-1.
- 46 Kingdom without a King, 121, 150-1; Add. 19253, ff. 193-191.
- 47 Kennett, Mems. 167.
- 48 Kingdom without a King, 159-67; Clarendon Corresp. ii. 235.
- 49 Parlty. Hist. of Glorious Revol. ed. D. Jones, 80; Clarendon Corresp. ii. 254.
- 50 HMC Lords, ii. 14-17; Morrice Ent’ring Bk. iv. 522.
- 51 HMC Lords, ii. 28-9; L. Schwoerer, Declaration of Rights 1689, 245.
- 52 HMC Lords, ii. 22-28; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/4, pp. 2-5, 7-15, 19-22; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 10.
- 53 HMC Lords, ii. 179.
- 54 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 520.
- 55 Bodl. Ballard 45, f. 58; Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 22.
- 56 HMC Lords, ii. 63.
- 57 HMC Lords, ii. 87-91; PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/3, pp. 4, 6-7, 12; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 102-3, 110.
- 58 CSP Dom. 1689-90, p. 97; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 117.
- 59 Burnet, iv. 27.
- 60 HMC Lords, ii.260.
- 61 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 184.
- 62 Schwoerer, Declaration of Rights 1689, 278.
- 63 HMC Lords, ii. 392-408; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 310-11, 413.
- 64 Bodl. Ballard 48, f. 78; Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 54.
- 65 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 431.
- 66 Eg. 3347, ff. 4-5.
- 67 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 456; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 5; Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 59.
- 68 HEHL, HL 30659 (4), newsletter, 30 Jan. 1690; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 371; Add. 17677 KK, ff. 407-12.
- 69 HMC Finch, ii. 313; iii. 381.
- 70 CSP Dom. 1690-91, p. 49.
- 71 Mems. of Mary, ed. Doebner, 29-30.
- 72 Dalrymple, Mems. iii(1), p. 95.
- 73 CSP Dom. 1690-1, p. 46; HMC Finch, ii. 335-48.
- 74 Dalrymple, Mems. iii(1), pp. 103-5, 106-12, 114-16; CSP Dom. 1690-1, p. 53.
- 75 Dalrymple, Mems. iii(1), pp. 97-98, 119-20.
- 76 HMC Lords, iii. 93; PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/3, p. 63.
- 77 Add. 40791, f. 19.
- 78 Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 544; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii 130, 134, 165, 183.
- 79 Add. 40791, ff. 3-5.
- 80 Bodl. Carte 76, f. 108; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 304.
- 81 Bodl. Carte 79, ff. 393, 405.
- 82 Luttrell Diary, 177.
- 83 Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 105.
- 84 Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 528; Verney ms mic. 636/42, J. Verney to Sir R. Verney, 3 Aug. 1692.
- 85 HMC Lords, iv. 110-12.
- 86 Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 108; Add. 34096, f. 232.
- 87 Ranke, Hist. of England, vi. 198-200; HMC 7th Rep. 212.
- 88 HMC Lords, iv. 300.
- 89 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 16; Bodl. Carte 79, f. 474; UNL, PwA 1219.
- 90 Burnet, i. 84.
- 91 HMC Lords, iv. 305-7.
- 92 HMC Rutland, ii. 32; HEHL, HM 30314 (11); Verney ms mic M636/30, Dr W. Denton to Sir R. Verney, 20 Nov. 1676.
- 93 UNL, Portland mss, PwA 2381-2384.
- 94 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 97; CSP Dom. 1693, p. 134.
- 95 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 167-8.
- 96 Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 124-5; HMC Hastings, ii. 232, 233, 234; HMC 7th Rep. 216-20.
- 97 HMC Lords, n.s. i. 8-9.
- 98 HMC Lords, n.s. i. 94-103, 349-50.
- 99 HMC Lords, n.s. i. 366-7.
- 100 CSP Dom. 1694-5, p. 121.
- 101 UNL, Pw2 89/1; HMC Buccleuch, ii. 107.
- 102 Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 132-3; UNL, PwA 1233; Shrewsbury Corresp. 34-36, 66; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 332.
- 103 Add. 17677 PP, f. 140.
- 104 HMC Lords, n.s. i. 444-5.
- 105 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 467; Bodl. Carte 13, f. 355; Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 153.
- 106 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 128, 132; HMC Portland, ii. 173.
- 107 Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 165, 189, 216, 227.
- 108 Browning, Danby, iii. 188; HEHL, HM 30659 (57); Add. 17677 QQ, ff. 297-9.
- 109 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 32.
- 110 Ailesbury Mems, 262-3, 394-5, 400.
- 111 CSP Dom. 1696, pp. 259-60, 328, 337, 339; 344-5; HMC Buccleuch, ii. 393-6; Add. 47608, ff. 104-17.
- 112 Shrewsbury Corr. 145-6.
- 113 Add. 47608, ff. 104-12; CSP Dom. 1696, pp. 377-8, 381, 383, 384-6; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 83, 110, 114-15.
- 114 Add. 47608, ff. 59, 73-74, 93.
- 115 Shrewsbury Corresp. 151.
- 116 Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, i. 11-12, 28-29.
- 117 Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters. i. 8, 12, 32, 38, 40n, 44; Shrewsbury Corresp. 416-24.
- 118 HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 259-60.
- 119 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 149, 151-2, 224, 249, 298, 326; CSP Dom. 1697, pp. 237-8, 246, 251, 263, 451; 1698, pp. 7-8.
- 120 Rutland mss vol. xxi (Letters and Papers 1694-1710), ff. 134-5.
- 121 Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, i. 91, 132-3; Shrewsbury Corresp. 437-8; HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 277.
- 122 Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, i. 139-40; HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 282-5; Add. 47608, ff. 42-43; Shrewsbury Corresp. 446-7.
- 123 An Account of the Behaviour of Sir John Fenwick at his Execution (1697).
- 124 Add. 47608, f. 93.
- 125 Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, i. 194, 199-200, 201-2; A Letter to a Friend in Vindication of the Proceedings against Sir John Fenwick (1697), 25-26.
- 126 Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, i. 174.
- 127 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 170-1.
- 128 Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 190-1.
- 129 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 215, 289; Verney ms mic M636/50, A. Nicholas to Sir J. Verney, 23 Sept. 1697.
- 130 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 315.
- 131 CSP Dom. 1698, p. 248.
- 132 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 128-9, 131-2.
- 133 Grimblot, Letters of William III and Louis XIV, ii. 245-6.
- 134 HP Commons, 1690-1715, iii. 494; Grimblot, Letters of William III and Louis XIV, ii. 321.
- 135 Add. 75370, G. Eyre to Halifax, 19 Aug. 1699; Bodl. Carte 228, f. 318; Add. 40772, ff. 162, 239, 257; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 474, 477; CSP Dom. 1698, pp. 390-1, 394-5, 399; UNL, Pw2/98.
- 136 HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 125.
- 137 Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, iii. 4-5.
- 138 Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, iii. 23-24; Horwitz, Parl. Pol. 268.
- 139 Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, iii. 137-8.
- 140 Bodl. Carte 237, f. 1a.
- 141 Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 661; Vernon-Shrewsbury Letters, iii. 98.
- 142 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 128-9, 131-2.
- 143 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 39; Timberland, ii. 27.
- 144 HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 298-300, 388-9; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/6, p. 185.
- 145 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 66; CSP Dom. 1700-02, pp. 392-3.
- 146 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 129-32, 414; HMC Cowper, ii. 443-4.
- 147 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 148; Add. 70073-4, newsletter, 3 Mar. 1702.
- 148 Add. 70073-4, newsletter of 14 Mar. 1702.
- 149 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 162, 163; Add. 70073-4, newsletter, 14 Apr. 1702; HMC Lindsey, 373.
- 150 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 169; Burnet, v. 14-15; Timberland, ii. 36.
- 151 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 130-2, 718.
- 152 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/6, p. 237.
- 153 HMC Lords, n.s. v. 158; Nicolson, London Diaries, 146, 150, 160-61; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/6, pp. 247, 250, 254, 257, 258.
- 154 Nicolson, London Diaries, 164-6, 177, 180-1.
- 155 Nicolson, London Diaries, 175; Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 258-9.
- 156 Nicolson, London Diaries, 191; Luttrell, Brief Relation¸v. 264; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/6, p. 289.
- 157 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 271.
- 158 Nicolson, London Diaries, 200.
- 159 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/6, p. 331.
- 160 Burnet, v. 131, 134.
- 161 Horwitz, Rev. Pols. 193-4.
- 162 HMC Lords, n.s. v. 300; Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 371; CSP Dom. 1703-4, p. 238.
- 163 HMC Lords, n.s. v. 301; Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 45, ff. 15-16.
- 164 C. Jones, ‘Parliamentary Organization of the Whig Junto’, PH, x. 172.
- 165 HMC Lords, n.s. vi. 5-6; Nicolson, London Diaries, 223.
- 166 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 131-2.
- 167 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 560, 561.
- 168 Nicolson, London Diaries, 304.
- 169 Kennett, Mems. 183.
- 170 C. Jones, ‘Debates in the House of Lords’, HJ, xix. 764-9; Nicolson, London Diaries, 320-5; WSHC, Ailesbury mss 3790/1/1, p. 60.
- 171 CSP Dom. 1705-6, p. 110; Boyer, Anne Annals, v. 12.
- 172 NRS, GD 158/966, p. 153.
- 173 NRS, GD18/3132/77-79.
- 174 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/7, pp. 214, 216.
- 175 Add. 61498, f. 58; Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 202.
- 176 Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 204; Add. 61450, ff. 195, 199; Add. 61494, ff. 146-7.
- 177 Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 116.
- 178 TNA, PROB 11/496; Hazard of a Death-bed Repentance, 23-26; Bodl. Carte 38, f. 221.
- 179 Hearne, Remarks and Collections, ii. 74.
- 180 Burnet, ii. 83-84.