FINCH, Charles (1672-1712)

FINCH, Charles (1672–1712)

styled 1672-89 Visct. Maidstone; suc. grandfa. 28 Aug. 1689 (a minor) as 4th earl of WINCHILSEA

First sat 7 Nov. 1693; last sat 21 June 1712

b. 26 Sept. 1672, o.s. (posth.) of William Finch, styled Visct. Maidstone (d. 28 May 1672) and Elizabeth, da. of Thomas Windham of Felbrigg, Norf. m. 28 Sept. 1692 (with £7,000) Sarah (d. 29 Oct. 1735), da. of Henry Nourse, of Woodlands, Wilts.,1 1s. d.v.p. d. 4 Aug. 1712; admon. 23 Oct. 1712 to John Stratford, esq., principal creditor (wid. renouncing).2

First ld. of trade 12 June 1711-d.; PC 14 June 1711-d.

Dep. warden, Cinque Ports 1702-5; lt. gov., Dover Castle 1702-5;3 v.-adm., Kent 1702-5; ld. lt. and custos rot., Kent 1704-5.

Env. extraordinary, Hanover 1702-3.

Associated with: Eastwell Park, Wye, Kent.

Under William III, 1689-1702

Finch inherited the earldom of Winchilsea and its heavily indebted estate from his grandfather while still underage, his father having been killed at the battle of Sole Bay in 1672. He, with his mother Lady Maidstone and uncle Leopold Finch became embroiled in a dispute with the deceased earl’s fourth wife Elizabeth over the disposition of the house at Eastwell and the personal estate. The dowager countess of Winchilsea brought her complaint of breach of privilege of peerage before the House on 8 Nov. 1689. All the parties looked to their second cousin Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, to resolve the dispute and agreed to abide by his decision.4 Nottingham was also involved in protracted marriage negotiations for Winchilsea in 1691-2. These negotiations fell through, and it was because of this experience that on 9 Dec. 1691 another uncle and guardian, Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth, brought before the House an estate act for his young nephew, which would enable Winchilsea to settle a jointure upon a prospective wife during the time of his minority.5 The bill was passed by the House on 23 Dec. by which time it was already rumoured that Winchilsea was ready to contract a marriage that would gain him a £20,000 portion.6 The bill did not receive the royal assent until 24 Feb. 1692 and in late September Weymouth negotiated a marriage with an admittedly more modest portion of £7,000 between the young earl and Sarah Nourse, daughter to Henry Nourse, sheriff of Wiltshire.7

Both Nottingham and Weymouth acted as Winchilsea’s guardians throughout his minority and they continued to act as protectors and advisers thereafter. From Winchilsea’s first appearance in the House of Lords on 7 Nov. 1693, the day after Nottingham was dismissed as secretary of state, he sided with his Finch and Thynne kin and their espousal of High Tory measures. Writing early in Anne’s reign, John Macky emphasized the political implications of these family connections when he described Winchilsea as ‘of the family of Finch’ and ‘an opposer (to his power) of the measures of King William’s reign’.8 On 22 Dec. 1693 Winchilsea joined his uncle Weymouth and nine other peers in protesting against the decision to allow the duchess of Grafton to withdraw her petition against the judges of king’s bench in her cause against William Bridgeman. On the penultimate day of the session, on 24 Apr. 1694, he subscribed to another protest, against the measures in the supply bill incorporating the Bank of England. He attended just under three-quarters of this, his first session, and was named to 16 committees on legislation. After this, however, he showed a disinclination to come to the House for the remainder of William III’s reign. Weymouth held his proxy from 30 Nov. 1694 for all of the session of 1694-5. He first sat in the session of 1695-6, the first in William III’s second Parliament, on 31 Jan. 1696 and came to only 23 per cent of its sittings. He was named to only six committees on legislation, and on 14 Feb. he was placed on the small drafting committee to compose a report to the king on the House’s treatment of the petition of Sir Richard Verney, who was seeking to receive a writ of summons as Baron Willoughby de Broke. He was also placed on the committee of 24 Feb. to draw up a response to the king’s speech regarding the discovery of the Assassination Plot. As part of this committee he was a manager for the conferences that day in which an address to the king congratulating him on his escape was developed. Winchilsea, however, clearly showed his opposition to William III and his rule by his persistent refusal to sign the Association that was promulgated over the following days. Shortly afterwards Winchilsea left the House for the session on 17 Mar. and registered his proxy with Thomas Tufton, 6th earl of Thanet, until the prorogation of 27 April. His attendance in the following session of 1696-7 was even lower, as he came to only 21 of its 117 sittings and only appeared in the House on 23 Nov. through compulsion as the House had ordered his appearance by that date. Shortly after his arrival he began to oppose the projects of the ministry. On 28 Nov. he, with Nottingham, Weymouth and two other Tories, dissented from the passage of the recoinage bill and on 2 Dec. dissented from the House’s decision to recede from its amendments to the bill against which the lower House objected. He also fought to stop the attainder of Sir John Fenwick‡, 3rd bt. He subscribed to the dissent on 15 Dec. from the resolution to read the tainted and suspect evidence of Cardell Goodman and three days later he joined 47 other members of the House in dissenting from the decision to give the bill of attainder a second reading. He was a teller, almost certainly for the not contents (his opposite teller was the court Whig Richard Lumley, earl of Scarbrough), in the close and controversial division on 23 Dec. for the passage of the bill, which scraped through by a majority of seven votes. Despite this effort in ensuring the bill’s defeat, his name, surprisingly, does not appear on the protest of that day against the bill’s passage.9 He registered his proxy with Thanet once again on 23 Dec., who held it until the prorogation of 16 Apr. 1697.

He was entirely absent from the 1697-8 session but appears to have kept informed of proceedings in the House. On 6 Feb. 1698 he wrote to Weymouth, referring to the salacious testimony being heard by the House at that time in the proceedings of the divorce bill of Charles Gerard, 2nd earl of Macclesfield, that ‘I am sensible of the diversion absent peers have missed this session, in a very entertaining cause and should regret my being in the country at such a time, if I had not been present at one of the same kind, wherein a noble duke was concerned’. The similar case he referred to was the earlier attempt of Henry Howard 7th duke of Norfolk, to effect a divorce through parliamentary legislation. He confided to Weymouth that James Bertie, earl of Abingdon, and his friends were strongly encouraging him to come up to Parliament to support Abingdon’s son Hon. James Bertie‡ in his appeal to the House against the chancery ruling against him in his testamentary dispute with Lucius Cary, 6th Viscount Falkland [S]. ‘But [I] have excused myself hitherto’, he explained, ‘as I hope I shall be able to do for the remainder of the winter, hearing nothing as yet that the House will proceed to compulsion as they did the last year’.10 He registered his proxy with Thanet for this session on 23 Feb. 1698, and then transferred it to John Jeffreys, 2nd Baron Jeffreys, on 11 Apr., 10 days after Thanet had quit the session. Winchilsea himself did not appear in the House again until 20 Dec., well in the midst of the 1698-9 session of William III’s third Parliament, and he came to 64 per cent of the session’s sitting days. On that first day back he was placed on the committee for the answer to the king’s speech, but again he quickly showed his opposition to the king, and voted and protested against the resolution of 8 Feb. 1699 to help William maintain his Dutch Guards and to exempt them from the provisions of the disbandment bill. He was named to eight committees on legislation and was a manager for a conference on 29 Apr. on the House’s amendments to the naturalization bill for Richard Legg and others. After this brief spurt of activity, Winchilsea retired to the country again for the following session of 1699-1700.

Winchilsea took his seat in the first Parliament of 1701 on 24 Apr., and came to just under a quarter of its sittings. He was named to three committees on legislation and acted as a teller in a division of 6 June (against the Whig Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford) on whether the House should direct a trial at law in the cause Lloyd v. Cardy. He quit the session on that day and thus was not in Westminster Hall to pass judgment on the impeached Junto ministers. In the following Parliament, of which he attended 60 per cent of the meetings, he protested on 20 Feb. 1702 against the attainder of Mary of Modena and was also opposed to the bill for the oath of abjuration. On 23 Feb. he was a teller (against Charles Bodvile Robartes, 2nd earl of Radnor) in a division in the committee of the whole on whether to add the words ‘and I will to the utmost of my power support, maintain and defend the constitution and government of this realm in King, Lords and Commons, as it is by law established’ to the oath, a motion which lost by a majority of 37 votes.11 The following day Winchilsea joined several other Tories in signing the protest against the bill’s passage. On 25 Feb. he reported a private estate bill from committee, which was to become a frequent duty of his under Anne. He became more involved in Parliament following Anne’s accession. On 18 and 20 May, following the declaration of war, he was a delegate of the House to two conferences on methods to prevent correspondence between the allies and France and Spain. He also participated in a conference on the bill to encourage privateers. Perhaps as a sign of his enthusiasm for the Tory regime of the new queen, Winchilsea stayed in the House until the prorogation of this session on 25 May.

Favour under Anne, 1702-5

Winchilsea benefitted greatly from the large-scale redistribution of offices and honours to Tories, especially those in Nottingham’s circle, at the beginning of Anne’s reign. John Macky attributed his preferment to Nottingham while observing: ‘He hath neither genius nor gusto for business, loves hunting and a bottle… and [is] zealous for the monarchy and Church to the highest degree’.12 Winchilsea was made deputy warden of the Cinque Ports and lieutenant governor of Dover Castle, as well as vice-admiral of the Kentish coast, all under the nominal authority of the queen’s consort, Prince George of Denmark, duke of Cumberland. It was rumoured at the time that this host of positions was bestowed on Winchilsea that he was to be made lord-lieutenant of Kent as well.13 However he had to wait an additional two years until he acquired that office. The office of warden of the Cinque Ports was largely honorific, and it was really Winchilsea, as deputy warden, who managed the ports. This was especially important to Nottingham, then secretary of state, at the time of the parliamentary elections following the dissolution of Parliament on 2 July 1702, in which Winchilsea managed the Cinque Port constituencies assiduously, although not always successfully, for the Tories. Only a few days before the elections, he sent a long letter to Nottingham discussing the electoral prospects in each of the ports and in the county and boroughs of Kent. He found Dover the most difficult of the ports and unlikely to elect his preferred candidate Sir Charles Hedges‡:

I find there reigns such a spirit of obstinacy among the bench, they will not admit of any application to remove either of the old members, though the most probable means has been used to persuade them they do not regard their own interest in setting up such men as they must know will be obnoxious, and can do them no service.

More promisingly, though, ‘most of the other ports seem inclined to mend their hand’. A few days after the elections he wrote belatedly to Nottingham, apologizing that since receiving his last letter ‘I have been hurried from one election to another’. He reported on the results of the elections in the ports, especially the controversial one at Rye, where his candidate Edward Southwell‡ lost because of the recent ‘irregular’ creation of freemen opposed to him. He further lamented the results of the borough election of Maidstone, where the Tory candidates lost, ‘the strength of bribery joined to a factious disposition of that town, prevailing over any honest interest could be made for them’.14 Already, he reported, the defeated candidates, Thomas Bliss‡ and Sir Thomas Twisden‡, bt. were preparing to petition against the results. The Commons on hearing the case found that all the candidates at Maidstone had engaged in bribery, and they declared the election void. Maidstone had to wait for over two years before a writ was issued for new elections.15

Nottingham was also able to procure for his second cousin in the summer of 1702 the role as envoy extraordinary to Hanover to greet the dowager electress and her son the elector of Hanover in the name of the new queen. Winchilsea was initially appreciative of this honour bestowed on him, but he seems not to have been first choice for the embassy: William Legge, 2nd Baron (later earl of) Dartmouth, claimed to have been approached by Nottingham first but refused what he thought to be a thankless task.16 Dartmouth and Nottingham then settled on Winchilsea, who ‘was very unacceptable, having voted against their [the Hanoverians’] succession’.17 Winchilsea also appears to have found the embassy more trouble than it was worth. Having inherited his grandfather’s precarious finances, he constantly complained to Nottingham that he had not been granted a sufficient allowance for his mission and resented having to pay so much of his expenses out of his own pocket. This especially grated on him when he was stranded in The Hague for several months while the Hanoverian court moved from one hunting lodge to another. At The Hague he was able to indulge his prejudices against the Dutch as ungrateful and unreliable allies. He also became seriously ill in the winter of 1702-3. Although he had initially asked Nottingham and Weymouth to procure for him the embassy to Prussia after the completion of his mission to Hanover, he later retracted this request and asked to be allowed to return to England as soon as possible in order to recover his health and to participate in Parliament.18 He started making his way back home in March 1703. Shortly after his departure the dowager Electress Sophia sent a letter to Anne expressing her satisfaction in his embassy.19

Owing to his embassy and his illness he was absent for the entirety of the first session of Anne’s first Parliament in 1702-3, whose elections in Kent he had so dutifully managed. He first sat in the following session of 1703-4 on 24 Nov. 1703 and came to 80 per cent of its sittings. Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, forecast that he would support the occasional conformity bill on its second appearance in the House that winter. Winchilsea did sign the protests of 14 Dec. against both the decision not to give the bill a second reading and to reject it outright. He was particularly busy in the first three months of 1704. Between 4 Jan., when he reported from the committee on Sir John Ivory’s bill, and 28 Feb. he reported from seven different committees on estate bills and on 12 Feb. he also brought from committee the bill to extend the time allowed in a previous act to repair Dover harbour, a measure with which he would have been particularly concerned as lieutenant governor of that port’s castle. He was also a teller in a number of divisions: on whether the word ‘grantee’ should stand part of the clause in the West Riding register bill (25 Jan. 1704); on whether to reverse the decree in the cause Hassell v. Knatchbull (16 Feb.); on whether the committee of the whole agreed with the committee’s report on Hore’s petition concerning abuses in victualling the Navy (2 Mar.); on whether to put the question to set a date for the first reading of the subsidy bill (4 Mar.); and on whether the House should agree to the condition that the contents of the deciphered ‘gibberish letters’ concerning the Scotch Plot should be divulged only to the queen and the Privy Council (3 March).20 Winchilsea’s position on this last matter is pretty clear and he almost certainly would have told for the not contents, for that same day he signed the dissent from the resolution that the House would forego its right to see the content of the deciphered letters. In the proceedings on the Scotch Plot he tried to defend his kinsman Nottingham and on 25 Mar. he subscribed to the large dissents – each with over 25 signatories - from the House’s censure of the secretary of state’s lax handling of the examination of the informer Robert Ferguson, which the House considered ‘an encouragement to the enemies of the crown’. In other matters, Winchilsea also joined the Tories in dissenting from the House’s decision of 16 Mar. to remove the High Church Tory Robert Byerley, a scourge of the Junto, from the list of commissioners of accounts in the bill for taking public accompts. The Commons were, unsurprisingly, not pleased with this change and on 27 Mar., a week before the prorogation, Winchilsea was chosen a manager for a conference on the House’s amendments to the bill.

At the beginning of May 1704, shortly after the removal of his patron Nottingham from office, Winchilsea replaced the recently deceased Henry Sydney, earl of Romney, as lord lieutenant of Kent. He now was the principal agent of the crown throughout Kent and parts of Sussex, both as lord lieutenant of the county and deputy warden of the Cinque Ports. From the outset his mind was on party matters. The prorogation of Parliament on 3 Apr. appears to have given rise to rumours of a new election and in June Winchilsea informed Weymouth of the electoral prospects in the county: ‘The business of elections is less talked of now then soon after the rising of the Parliament, though some honest gentlemen are not unactive in making the best interest they can against another’. For the county Winchilsea feared that the Whig Sir George Choute‡ was only standing down ‘with design to favour another [who] will be as unacceptable to the best part of the gentry’, while at Rochester he despaired that Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s‡ stated intention to run would disrupt the chances of the Tory candidate Edward Knatchbull‡. Winchilsea was equally occupied with the Cinque Ports, trying to ensure that they would return men of his party. In August he wrote a tardy response to a letter of Weymouth’s, explaining that

I have been almost continually from home and returned very lately from my progress through the Ports, which I performed with some difficulty in ten days … I found some places still under the bondage of their late masters, but in general I think a good account is to be given of the Ports [at] another election.

He also reported to Weymouth that he had been to the recent assizes in order to reconcile the disputes among the west Kent gentlemen, which he feared threatened Tory chances at the county election, but ‘hitherto all endeavours have been ineffectual and I fear some advantage may be made of the division by another Party’.21 But there were no elections in 1704 in which he could exercise his careful control of the county and its ports, and by the time there were, the following year his situation was very different.

Winchilsea only attended half of the sitting days of the 1704-5 session, the last of the Parliament before the elections. He first sat on 23 Nov. and sat for a week before assigning his proxy to Robert Leke, 3rd earl of Scarsdale, on 30 November. He returned to the House two weeks later, probably specifically to help push through the occasional conformity bill, now on the third attempt. William Nicolson, bishop of Carlisle, singled Winchilsea out as one of those who argued for the bill in the debates on 15 Dec., even ‘seeming to threaten the House with being hereafter forced by the Commons to pass the bill’. For this Charles Mordaunt, 3rd earl of Peterborough, accused him of trying to bully the House, to which Winchilsea replied provocatively ‘that he was neither for bullying, nor would he be bullied’. Montagu Venables Bertie, 2nd earl of Abingdon, was able to quieten down the tumult caused by these words, seen by some as amounting to a challenge, by proposing a motion enjoining peace in the House. On that day Winchilsea joined the Tories in signing the protests against the resolutions not to give the bill a second reading and to reject it outright.22 In January 1705 Winchilsea subscribed to protests against measures which threatened some of his fellow Tories. On 17 Jan. he and seven others protested against the resolution to give a first reading to the estate bill of the underage William Henry Granville, 3rd earl of Bath, despite the strenuous opposition of Bath’s uncle, John Granville, Baron Granville of Potheridge. Five days later he joined eight others in protesting against the rejection of the petition of Thomas Watson, bishop of St Davids, asking to submit a writ of error against his deprivation from his bishopric; the reasons given in the protest were subsequently erased from the Journal. He was also again involved in chairing and reporting from committees. On 12 Jan. he chaired a committee of the whole House discussing the annuities bill and between 31 Jan. and 14 Feb. he reported from three committees dealing with private estate bills. On 27 Feb. he was placed, along with the rest of the House, on a committee to draw up heads to be presented to the Commons in a conference on the case of the ‘Aylesbury men’, but he was not named a manager for the conference on this matter held the following day.

The Tories in disgrace, 1705-10

Early in April 1705 Winchilsea was deprived of the lieutenancy of Kent and the deputy wardenship of the ports, in the redistribution of offices following the disgrace of the High Church Tories and just before the elections to Anne’s second Parliament. He was replaced in both offices by Whigs: Lewis Watson, 3rd Baron (later earl of) Rockingham, was made vice-admiral, lord-lieutenant and custos rotulorum of Kent, and Thomas Fane, 6th earl of Westmorland, was appointed deputy-warden and lieutenant-governor of Dover. In his autobiography Westmorland clearly stated that he came in with the intention of turning out Winchilsea’s clients from the Cinque Port seats in the forthcoming election.23 The Junto leader Charles Montagu, Baron (later earl of) Halifax, breathed a sigh of relief at these changes, for ‘if that had been done sooner, and followed with a good spirit, not one ill man had been chose in that county, which has ever [been] well disposed till Sir George [Rooke]‡ and Lord Winchilsea were allowed to spoil them’.24 The changes in office were only partly successful in the 1705 elections. Westmorland was able to claim that in the Cinque Ports ‘the members were almost all changed to the Principal I was of’, but the freeholders returned two Tories as knights of the shire, though different from the incumbents. Winchilsea’s brother-in-law Philip Herbert‡ was elected for Rye, which may have provided the earl with some small consolation.

Despite his comprehensive fall from office in April 1705, Winchilsea continued to attend the House during Anne’s second Parliament, although with decreasing regularity. He still managed to sit in almost three-quarters of its meetings in the first session of 1705-6. He joined with the disgruntled High Church Tories in their controversial actions surrounding the Hanoverian Succession and the regency bill. He supported Nottingham in his call on 12 Nov. 1705 to request the queen to lay before the House material on the ‘present state of the kingdom of Scotland in relation to the Succession and the Union’, no doubt referring to the Scots Parliament’s Act of Security.25 On 15 Nov. he prominently backed the ‘Hanover motion’ for an address requesting that the dowager Electress Sophia come to reside in England during the lifetime of the queen and he signed the protest when this inflammatory motion was not even put to the question. During the proceedings on the regency bill, drafted by the Whigs in response to the Hanover motion, he acted as a teller on 20 Nov. in a division in the committee of the whole House on whether the name of the incumbent lord treasurer, Sidney Godolphin, Baron (later earl of) Godolphin, should be inserted in the bill as one of the seven lords justices to govern the country following the queen’s death and during the time the Hanoverian successor travelled to England. The motion passed in the affirmative by a large majority, but Winchilsea probably told for the not contents, as Godolphin was then under strenuous attack from the High Church Tories.26 Winchilsea later voted and protested on 6 Dec. against the Whig motion made in the committee of the whole House that the Church was not in danger under the queen’s administration, and that those who suggested that it was were enemies to the kingdom.27 In January 1706 the regency bill was returned from the Commons with a controversial place clause, depriving officers of the court from sitting in Parliament. On 31 Jan. Winchilsea supported this country-inspired clause and subscribed to three separate protests on 31 Jan. against the House’s rejection of the Commons’ wording ‘regulating and altering’ the earlier place clause in the 1701 Act of Settlement. The controversy surrounding the Hanover Succession and the Regency Act reappeared at the end of the session, as Parliament sought to take action against the libellous printed ‘letter’ from Sir Rowland Gwynne‡ to Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, which defended the idea of the dowager electress residing in England during the remainder of the queen’s life. On 9 Mar. Winchilsea dissented from the resolution to agree with the Commons that Gwynne’s letter was ‘a scandalous, false and malicious libel’ and he, along with the rest of the House, was named to take part in conferences two days later on the address to the queen concerning this pamphlet. He was also named a manager for a conference on 22 Feb. on a bill to allow two merchants to import a quantity of French wines and, as previously, he reported from a number of committees on private estate bills, four in this session between 8 Feb. and 13 March.

He came to just over half of the sitting days of the session of 1706-7, and held the proxy of Other Windsor, 2nd earl of Plymouth, from 4 Feb. 1707 for the remainder of the session. Joseph Addison‡, reporting on 18 Feb. to Horatio Walpole‡ on the debates on the bill for union with Scotland, commented that ‘The Finch family appeared the warmest against it (vizt) Lords Nottingham, Guernsey [Heneage Finch, Baron Guernsey, later earl of Aylesford] and Winchilsea’. Winchilsea voted on 4 Mar. for the rider to the bill proposed at the last minute by William North, 6th Baron North, which stated that nothing in the act should be construed as an approbation of the Presbyterian Kirk’s claims to be the true Protestant religion, and he subscribed to the protest when that amendment was rejected.28 Later that same day Winchilsea also dissented, with 13 other members, from the passage of the Act of Union itself. Even after its passage he continued in his opposition to aspects of the Scottish Union. On 23 Apr. Winchilsea and a group of eight other Tories, perhaps as a sign of their opposition to the bill and the Union in general, signed a protest against a resolution to consider further the matter of ‘drawbacks’ that allowed merchants trading through Scotland to evade English custom duties. Winchilsea attended five of the meetings of the short session of April 1707. That summer, Winchilsea, Guernsey, Sir George Rooke‡ ‘and a great party of that side’—meaning Tories—met in Kent in expectation of an imminent election ‘to carve us out two knights of the shire’. The commentator, a correspondent of Sunderland, despaired of the Whigs’ chances at the next election, calculating that three-quarters of the clergy and most of the gentry of Kent ‘are against us’.29 But there were no elections at that time and Winchilsea, perhaps out of distaste for sitting with the new Scottish members, came to only 14 sittings of the session of 1707-8, all in March 1708.

He was more attentive in the new Parliament of Great Britain elected in the summer of 1708, despite the majority the Whigs had there. Throughout the first session of 1708-9, where he attended 65 per cent of the sittings, he was principally busy in committees, often serving as chairman to both select committees and committees of the whole House on estate and other private legislation. He reported from a private estate bill on 29 Mar. 1709 and acted as a chairman of committees of the whole House on 24 and 25 Mar. and 6 April. On 21 Apr. he was a manager for a conference on the bill to continue the act to prevent false coining. This new burst of activity suggests that, owing to his adverse financial situation and dependence on patronage, Winchilsea found himself increasingly reliant on the favour of the Whigs then in power in Parliament and at court.30 Jonathan Swift, who considered Winchilsea ‘a particular friend of mine’, later commented in his annotations to Macky’s character of the earl, that ‘being very poor he complied much with the party he hated’.31 He apparently satisfied the government with his actions during the first session of 1708-9, for in the summer following the prorogation of 21 Apr. 1709 there were rumours, ultimately unfounded, that he would be rewarded by being made either a major-general in the army, or governor of the colony of New York.32 He then appeared in a similar number of sittings in the following session of 1709-10 (57 per cent). On 31 Jan. 1710 he reported an estate bill from committee, while on 30 Mar. he was manager for a conference on amendments to the Edistone Lighthouse bill. It was concerning the trial of Dr Henry Sacheverell that Winchilsea behaved most uncharacteristically. Here he moved against the doctor, taking a stand in opposition to his Finch cousins, Nottingham and Guernsey, and in line with the wishes of the Whig ministry. He did not subscribe to any of the protests of February and March over the proceedings against Sacheverell, was a teller in a division on 18 Feb. on whether to adjourn discussion on the matter, and surprised many contemporaries by voting the doctor guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours on 20 March. The following day he voted that Sacheverell should receive no further preferment.33

The Oxford ministry, 1710-12

Winchilsea’s apostasy was short-lived, however, as reaction against the trial of Sacheverell soon brought the Tories back into power, and a new patron for Winchilsea in the person of Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford. Already in July Weymouth was corresponding with Harley about the elections that all thought were imminent, and suggested his nephew be reinstated to his positions of influence in Kent: ‘the Cinque Ports are much guided by the lord warden, as well as Kent by a popular lord lieutenant, and though Lord Winchilsea’s unhappy circumstances forced him with reluctance to make a false step, yet no man is more beloved and pitied there, or capable of doing more service; and greater sinners must be restored, if they did not offend out of malicious wickedness’.34 Harley certainly considered Winchilsea a potential supporter for the upcoming parliamentary session and even included him on a list of September of members of Parliament to be provided for and rewarded for their loyalty.35

Despite Weymouth’s urgings, Winchilsea did not regain control of the Cinque Ports or the lieutenancy of Kent. These offices remained in the hands of, respectively, Lionel Sackville, 7th earl (later duke) of Dorset (warden since the death of Prince George of Denmark in 1708) and Rockingham. Tory leaders in the county resented this and feared that they would lose the elections of 1710, ‘the lieutenancy, the commissions of the peace and the Cinque Ports being all against them headed by a great man in post’. The Tories did win most of the Kentish seats, though, helped no doubt by Winchilsea who was able to lead 1,000 freeholders to the poll for the county election.36 The Whig officers were not immediately replaced and when rumours spread in January 1711 that Edward Villiers, earl of Jersey, was to be made warden of the Cinque Ports and lord admiral, Winchilsea himself wrote to Harley stressing his claims on that office, ‘not only from my past services and sufferings, but from the late hopes and promises which have been given me, that the Queen designed me some recompense for the large share of my own private fortune I have sacrificed to her service’. Even, he added, his journeys to London to attend upon the queen and the House were depleting his limited funds and he was desperately in need of some sign of favour to recompense him for his sacrifices.37 His wishes were partly fulfilled in the spring and summer of 1711. On 12-14 June he was sworn of the Privy Council and made first lord of trade. Even with these he remained dissatisfied. He complained to Harley, recently created earl of Oxford, that the salary allotted to him at the board of trade was insufficient for his expenses incurred in attending the court and Parliament, and that his new post was ‘inferior… both in profit and honour to those employments I had before.’ He even requested an advance of £1,000 ‘to make me easy at my entrance’.38

Even in his continual disappointment, Winchilsea loyally attended the House throughout the first two sessions of the 1710 Parliament. He first sat in the 1710-11 session on 11 Dec. 1710 and proceeded to sit in just over two-thirds of the sittings. He left the House briefly on 26 Jan. 1711 and registered his proxy with Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, who held it until Winchilsea’s return to the House on 5 February. On the day of his return, Winchilsea subscribed the protest against the rejection of the bill to repeal the Act for General Naturalization and received in turn the proxy of Francis North, 2nd Baron Guilford, which he held until 19 February. Winchilsea chaired, and reported from, a select committee on an estate bill on 23 February. He was called upon on 24 Apr. and 12 June to chair committees of the whole House on bills concerning trade and mercantile matters. He was also a teller, probably for the contents, on the motion in a committee of the whole on 24 Jan. whether to censure the general Henri de Massue de Ruvigny, earl of Galway [I], for his conduct of the war in Spain.39 On 9 Mar. he was a manager for two conferences in which the Houses drafted the address to the queen condemning Guiscard’s attempted assassination of Harley. That same day Winchilsea left the House for over a month. He registered his proxy with John Poulett, Earl Poulett, from 10 Mar. until his return on 12 April.

The session of 1711-12 was the last Winchilsea attended and the one he frequented most assiduously, appearing at just over 90 per cent of the sittings. He remained loyal to the Oxford ministry, even where the head of his family and his erstwhile patron did not. On 7 Dec. Winchilsea voted with the ministry to reject the Whig motion to include a clause in the address to the queen emphasizing that there could be ‘No Peace without Spain’, while Nottingham ‘apostasized’ and voted for the motion. Winchilsea also voted and protested against the decision of 20 Dec. that James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton [S], could not sit in the House as duke of Brandon. He seconded a motion made by Edward Hyde, 3rd earl of Clarendon, on 17 Jan. 1712, that an address be delivered to the queen thanking her for promising to keep Parliament informed of the proceedings of the peace negotiations at Utrecht, even though Scarbrough raised objections to the procedure by which the queen’s message had been presented to the House.40 Winchilsea’s proxy was registered with William Cowper, Baron (later Earl) Cowper, the following day, perhaps with the intention of covering his vote for the brief period he was away from the House between 22 and 28 January. Winchilsea was later a teller in the division of 19 May on whether to insert the words ‘except Peers of Great Britain’ in the bill to appoint commissioners to assess the value of the land grants made by the crown since the time of the Revolution.41 Near the end of the session he voted on 28 May against the motion to address the queen condemning the ministry’s ‘restraining orders’ commanding the captain-general James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond, not to engage in offensive military action against the French.42 Throughout the first months of 1712 he was again involved in reporting from select committees—on 25 Mar. and 5 May—and committees of the whole House—on 14 Apr. and 10 June. He was particularly engaged with the bill to offer assistance to insolvent debtors, and he chaired committees of the whole on this measure twice, on 10 and 14 April. He also chaired a committee of the whole in one of the House’s first discussions of the South Sea Company bill, on 11 June.

Despite his attachment to the ministry, prominent Whigs suspected that Winchilsea’s finances were in such bad condition that he could be swayed by a pension. In January 1712 the Hanoverian envoy Bothmer, following suggestions from John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, recommended to George, elector of Hanover, that Winchilsea’s opposition to a separate Anglo-French peace could be bought for a pension of £1,000. Winchilsea himself turned increasingly desperately to Oxford, writing to him on 15 May that ‘I am so far from having mended my circumstances in the station the queen has commanded my service is most certain’ and making the ‘short’ request ‘that I may know in what time and manner her Majesty has thought of providing for me, that I may not spend the best part of my life only in expectation’.43 Winchilsea did not have to live in expectation much longer, for in the first days of August he fell dangerously ill. He died in his house in the capital on 5 August. He died without any surviving children and intestate. Two days after the earl’s death, Swift wrote to ‘Stella’ in Ireland, ‘Poor Lord Winchilsea is dead, to my great grief, he was a worthy honest gentleman, and particular friend of mine’. He added that without heirs the title had passed to the 4th earl’s paternal uncle Heneage Finch, 5th earl of Winchilsea ‘but without much estate’.44

C.G.D.L.

  • 1 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 9/20/33; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 584.
  • 2 TNA, PROB 6/88, f. 141.
  • 3 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 186, 535, 539.
  • 4 HMC Lords, ii. 333; HMC Finch, ii. 261; Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 17, ff. 208, 212, 242, 338-75.
  • 5 HMC Finch, iii. 111, 127, 208; HMC Lords, iii. 439.
  • 6 HMC Hastings, ii. 341.
  • 7 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 9/20/33; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 584.
  • 8 Macky Mems. 85.
  • 9 HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 206, 208, 286; HMC Portland, iii. 574; eBLJ 2007, Art. 4.
  • 10 Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 17, ff. 247, 257.
  • 11 HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 356, 479.
  • 12 Macky Mems. 85.
  • 13 Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 183.
  • 14 Add. 29588, ff. 93-94, 102, 104.
  • 15 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 313.
  • 16 Add. 29588, f. 131.
  • 17 Burnet, v. 13n.
  • 18 Add. 29588, ff. 131, 163, 250, 275, 308, 330, 341, 350, 385, 404; Add. 28912, ff. 136, 220, 235; Add. 28927, ff. 149, 153; Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 17, ff. 266-73, 276-79.
  • 19 HMC 9th Rep. pt 2, 466.
  • 20 HMC Lords n.s. v. 246, 273, 303, 455.
  • 21 Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 17, ff. 294-95, 300-301.
  • 22 Nicolson, London Diaries, 253-54.
  • 23 Add. 34223, f. 15.
  • 24 Add. 61458, f. 160.
  • 25 Nicolson, Diaries, 302.
  • 26 HMC Lords, n.s. vi. 323.
  • 27 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 3790/1/1, p. 60.
  • 28 Bodl. Ballard 31, f. 61; Nicolson, London Diaries, 394-95.
  • 29 Add. 61496, f. 92.
  • 30 Add. 31143, f. 313.
  • 31 Jnl to Stella ed. Williams, ii. 555; Macky Mems. 85.
  • 32 Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 46, ff. 9, 101.
  • 33 Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 558; Holmes, Trial of Dr Sacheverell, 284, 286.
  • 34 HMC Portland, iv. 551.
  • 35 Add. 70333, memorandum, 12 Sept. 1710.
  • 36 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 309.
  • 37 HMC Portland, iv. 654; Add. 70225, Winchilsea to R. Harley, 17 Jan. 1711.
  • 38 Add. 70027, ff. 250-51; HMC Portland, v. 12.
  • 39 HMC Lords, n.s. ix. 80.
  • 40 Wentworth Pprs, 253.
  • 41 HMC Lords, n.s. ix. 243.
  • 42 PH, xxvi. 177.
  • 43 Add. 70294, Winchilsea to Oxford, 5 May 1712.
  • 44 Jnl to Stella, ed. Williams, ii. 555.