Before the Restoration
Holles, the second and favourite son of John Holles, created earl of Clare in 1624, began his long parliamentary career that same year when his elder brother was returned for borough seats in both Nottinghamshire and Cornwall, and bequeathed the west country seat to Denzil. He subsequently married into two Dorset families, his first father-in-law, being recorder of Dorchester, helping to establish his interest in the borough. In the 1628 Parliament Holles quickly became known for his opposition to the policies of the crown and on 2 Mar. 1629 he and Benjamin Valentine‡ forcibly held the weeping Speaker in his chair while Sir John Eliot’s‡ declaration against Arminianism and non-parliamentary tonnage and poundage was passed. Holles was arrested and lodged in the Tower, and on 12 Feb. 1630 king’s bench fined him 1,000 marks, a judgment which Holles ensured was reversed when in a more powerful position in the House of Lords in 1668.
He was again elected for Dorchester in both the Short and Long Parliaments, during both of which he was prominent among the king’s opponents and a supporter of the measures against episcopacy ‘root and branch’. He was one of the five Members marked out by Charles I for arrest in January 1642. After the failure of the presbyterian occupation of Parliament in July 1647, Holles went into exile in France, where he remained for almost a year, but was able to resume his seat on 14 Aug. 1648. He was one of the principal members of the commission which negotiated the Isle of Wight Treaty with Charles I and he presented these terms to the Commons on 4 Dec. 1648. Two days later he was excluded by Pride’s Purge. After a further spell in France, he returned to tend his damaged Dorset estates in 1654; he stayed out of politics or conspiracy for the remainder of the 1650s, although he remained bitterly opposed to Oliver Cromwell‡.
The early years of the Restoration, 1660–2
Holles resumed his seat in the Commons on 21 Feb. 1660, and two days later was appointed to the Council of State.
Holles was elected to represent Dorchester in the Convention, and he was an active Member of the Commons in its early days, when he tried to implement the projects of the Suffolk House Cabal by insisting that before his return Charles II should agree to the terms of the 1648 Treaty of Newport. The moderate terms of the Declaration of Breda may have softened his views, for he reported from the committee appointed to draw up the response and was one of the 12 delegates from the Commons assigned to go over to the Netherlands to present Charles II with this answer. There he delivered a fulsome speech to the king, begging him to return to his benighted people.
For the rest of 1660 Holles became, both in council and in Parliament, a vigorous advocate of the restoration and of the king’s policies.
Holles first sat in the House of Lords on 10 May 1661, and was formally introduced on the following day by John Robartes, 2nd Baron Robartes, and Robert Sutton, Baron Lexinton. Over the 1661–2 session as a whole, he proceeded to sit for almost 70 per cent of the sittings, and he sat on 55 days before the adjournment at the end of July 1661, nearly 86 per cent of the total. He quickly became an active member of the House, and was named to 15 committees before the adjournment. On 18 May he reported from the committee on the estate bill of Richard Sackville, 5th earl of Dorset, and on 17 July he and Anglesey were delegated to redraft a proviso in the bill to vacate the fines levied by Sir Edward Powell. On 11 July he was listed as voting against the claim of Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, to be great chamberlain.
Holles was not present when the Lords resumed on 20 Nov. 1661, after the adjournment, and he was absent from a call of the House on 25 November. He first attended on 20 Dec. and he was then absent until 14 Jan. 1662. Thereafter, he attended regularly, being present on 80 days before the prorogation on 19 May, 61 per cent of the total. He was named to 21 committees, in addition to being appointed to manage a conference on the bill for the execution of attainted persons (4 Feb. 1662), reporting Neville’s estate bill (4 Apr.), and being named on 13 May to draw up reasons to present to the Commons to explain why the House had preferred to use the term ‘lord lieutenant’ in the militia bill. Most significantly, he was appointed on 8 Apr. to draw up a clause to the bill of uniformity allowing the king to make provision for such of the deprived clergy as he should think fit, an ameliorative clause which fell in the Commons.
As early as 29 Mar. 1662, Sir William Morrice‡ was indicating in correspondence that Holles would be ‘speedily’ sent to the French court, ‘to lie resident there’, but his departure was delayed for over a year until July 1663.
On 7 May Holles complained of the arrest of his servant Thomas Chamberlen, with the result that the eight men responsible were ordered into custody for that offence and for speaking ‘unfitting words’ of Holles. They were released on 27 May, having applied to Holles and promised to be more careful in the future. On 8 June Holles was one of the commissioners who ‘began the French treaty’ with the ambassador, the comte de Cominges.
Diplomatic interlude, 1662–7
This assessment of Holles’ relationship with Clarendon was at odds with the reports of the French ambassador d’Estrades in 1662–3 that ‘at this court [Holles] is accounted to be a member of no faction other than the chancellor’s’, that ‘he is a great friend of the chancellor’, and that ‘he is completely attached to Chancellor Hyde’; and with that of the diplomat Comminges that Holles was ‘entirely dependent on the chancellor’.
Despite consistently good relations with French diplomats, going all the way back to negotiations in the 1640s over the search for a settlement between king and Parliament, Holles’ embassy was marked by constant battles with the court of Louis XIV over diplomatic protocol and slights which Holles perceived to his station and the honour of his royal master. Although he arrived in Paris in July 1663, he did not have his first formal royal audience until March 1664 because of a long-running dispute over the precedence of his coach in the planned formal entry to the court. The embassy ended on a bad note when, despite his efforts, France joined with the United Provinces in the war against England, and at his departure Holles refused to accept the gifts offered him, ‘by which, it seems, he intends to triumph over all the greatness of this court’.
Having been abroad, and recognized as such at calls of the House in April and December 1664, Holles was ready to return to England in January 1666, only to be delayed by the gout and the fatal illness of his wife.
Holles resumed his seat in the House on the second day of the 1666–7 session, 21 September. On 12 Oct. he was named to prepare reasons for a conference over the vote of the Commons to petition the king for a proclamation prohibiting all French imports, which led to his appointment to manage the subsequent conferences on 15, 17, 23, and 30 October. On 14 Oct. he complained that one John Skilling had taken possession of a house of his in Cerne, Dorset, and denied access to Holles’ servants; Skilling was ordered to appear to answer for his offence on 2 Nov., but the House did not sit that day and nothing further was recorded in the Journal. Generally, Holles was not happy at the turn of events, Samuel Pepys‡ being told on 14 Nov. that Holles in conversation with Sir George Carteret‡ had ‘wept to think in what condition [we] are fallen’.
Shortly after the prorogation in February 1667, Holles was appointed one of the plenipotentiaries to treat with the Dutch at Breda over peace terms. The meetings took place between May and September.
Back in the Lords, 1667–75
In retrospect, James Stuart, duke of York, considered Holles a leading member of ‘the disaffected party’ of the ‘Presbyterian and Commonwealth gang’, who met ‘in private meetings and cabals’, particularly at Guildford, with the intention of fomenting opposition before Parliament met in October 1667.
It was effectively from this session beginning in October 1667 that Holles resumed the position that he had enjoyed in the 1640s as one of the busiest parliamentarians. From this point until his death he was constantly named to select committees, often appointed a manager or reporter for conferences, and, from what can be gathered from the surviving evidence, frequently contributed to debate. He defended the privileges of the peerage and of the House as aggressively as he had previously done for the rights of the Commons. On 23 Oct. 1667 he reported that he had recently been a witness in a case in the prerogative court and had entered his deposition upon his honour, but that the court would only receive it if upon oath. This he was wary of doing in case it breached the privilege of the peerage. The matter was referred to the committee for privileges; its report on 12 Nov. listed precedents, but finding the business ‘too weighty’ referred it back again to the House. After debating the matter on 19 and 21 Nov. the committee allowed it to lapse.
On 22 Nov. 1667 Holles was named to draw up reasons for a conference on the methods of proceedings between the Houses, which had arisen as a result of Clarendon’s impeachment, duly managing the conferences on the 23rd. On 25 Nov. he was named to manage a conference charged with delivering to the Commons the resolution of the Lords not to sanction the sequestration of Clarendon or his imprisonment without particular charges of treason being specified, and was named to manage one further conference on the impeachment on 27 Nov., in which he duly took part.
On 12 Dec. 1667 Holles was one of five peers to enter their dissent to the bill banishing Clarendon. Two days later he was named to draw up reasons for a conference on the Lords’ refusal to join with the Commons in addressing the Crown for a proclamation to be issued for Clarendon to surrender himself, duly being appointed to manage the conference. Holles had attended on 48 days before the adjournment of 19 Dec., 94 per cent of the total, and was named to a further 17 committees. Following the adjournment, there was talk that he, his cousin, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley (later earl of Shaftesbury), and Anglesey were going to be removed from the Privy Council, Pepys noting on 30 Dec. that ‘these men do suffer only for their constancy to the chancellor, or at least [for being] against the king’s will against him’.
Holles attended on the second day of the resumed session, 10 Feb. 1668. He was present on 63 days from February to May 1668, more than 95 per cent of the total, and was named to a further 17 committees. In this part of the session Holles put his knowledge of parliamentary history and his researches in the rolls of Parliament to good use on the side of the Lords in the battles with the Commons over the judicial rights of the House, most notably in the matter of Thomas Skinner v the East India Company. In this he was assisted by his long friendship with William Prynne‡, who not only revealed details of the Commons debates on the subject but who, as keeper of the records in the Tower, was well placed to assist in trawling for precedents.
said he could almost sit down and weep to see the good agreement between the two Houses, the foundation of our peace and the ligament of the present government so much in danger. That for the divisions of Reuben there were great thoughts of heart, Reuben was the first born, and the house of Lords is the Reuben.
Holles continued, ‘the kingdom consists of the king and his people, the people are the Parliament. The peers of the realm, whatever others think have an inherent trust for the whole body of the people, and for every village and borough in it.’ The Lords were not claiming a new power and were careful not to make a continual practice of it.
After an interruption from Anglesey, Holles then showed that the ancient practice of making triers of petitions in the beginning of every Parliament was to no purpose if the Lords could give no relief upon such petitions. He went on to cite a vast array of precedents. This obviously provoked a reaction because on 9 May Finch recorded that Edmund Waller‡
took notice of my Lord Holles’ expression and turned it upon him thus that if the scarlet thread was upon the house of Lords, it was a plain sign the Commons were born first, and it must needs be so, for sure there were Commons before ever there were Lords.
Others were offended against Holles because he had said that ‘the Lords were trusted for all the Commons in England’, which Finch thought ‘true in a qualified sense, for so is every court of justice, and every public magistrate, but they understood his lordship as if he had meant it by way of representation’.
In October 1668 Colbert produced more evidence of Holles’ essentially pro-French orientation, noting that Buckingham had told him that Holles, Ashley, and Anglesey ‘understand as well as he does that there is at present nothing which would be so advantageous to England as a good union with France, have promised him to second him when he judges it the right moment to make the proposition’, but that Arlington was too powerful to allow it at present.
On the eve of the parliamentary session of October 1669, Colbert reported that Charles II was ‘really angry’ at Holles because at a time when the king was working to minimize the differences between the Houses, Holles had printed a book explaining the position of the Lords, adding that he hoped that he escaped punishment for ‘I would be annoyed if anything happened to him, having received many courtesies and tokens of his good intentions from him’. A few days later Colbert added that Holles’ book was seen as deliberately sowing the seeds of division, because as one of the main leaders of the Presbyterians he saw no better way of serving his party than by raising discord in Parliament, so that the king would react to the deadlock by sanctioning a dissolution.
Disrupting Parliament in this way was almost certainly Holles’ primary goal in composing his work. As Colbert had written to Louis XIV in September 1668, ‘the presbyterian party’, which must have included Holles, wished to see Parliament dissolved, in order to secure a number of goals, such as a grant of toleration or comprehension to Dissenters, basing their plans on a belief that a new Parliament would be more sympathetic to such aims.
Holles’ book was based on the precedents researched by him for the Skinner case. Published anonymously during the prorogation of Parliament, The Grand Question Concerning the Judicature of the House of Peers Stated and Argued provided a strongly partisan case for the Lords’ judicial rights to hear cases and appeals in the first instance. With the subsequent obliteration of all records of these debates from the pages of the official Journal, his book remains one of the few existing accounts of the proceedings in this case.
Holles had been present on the opening day of the 1669 session, 19 Oct., attending on 31 days (nearly 89 per cent of the total) and being named to four committees. He had held the proxy of his nephew William Wentworth, 2nd earl of Strafford, from 8 Nov. 1669 to the prorogation on 11 December. Shortly after the prorogation Holles told Colbert that the Commons was ‘so ill-tempered’ that the king was ‘well-advised that he should not reassemble them’.
Holles opposed the second conventicle bill, protesting against its passage on 26 Mar. 1670. On 30 Mar. he was named to a conference on a naturalization bill. The same day he was named to report a conference on amendments made to the conventicles bill, also being named to manage conferences on the bill on 2 and 4 April. He was particularly incensed against the proposed measures concerning searches of peers’ houses and he formally objected to these amendments in a protest of 5 April. Three days later he also dissented from the passage of the act for settling an imposition on brandy.
Holles was absent when the House resumed after the adjournment on 24 Oct. 1670, first attending on the next sitting, 27 October. In this part of the session he attended on 99 days, 79 per cent of the total, and was named to a further 27 committees. Overall, Holles maintained his usual busy activity in the 1670–1 session, attending 68 per cent of the sittings. On 24 Nov. the Lords referred to the committee of privileges a complaint from Charles Fane, 3rd earl of Westmorland, that he had been wrongly dispossessed by Holles of the manor of Aldenham, Hertfordshire. Holles put in his answer on 5 Dec., denying Westmorland’s title to the lands, and on the 6 Dec. the committee of privileges referred the complaint back to the House. When the cause was heard on 15 Dec., it was established that Westmorland held the land as a trustee and so could not invoke privilege. Westmorland was in effect acting as a proxy for Sir Erasmus Harby (d. 1674), who had married Frances, daughter of Mildmay Fane, 2nd earl of Westmorland, and had sold Aldenham to Holles in the early 1660s. Further, the manuscript minutes reveal that, on 16 Dec. when a vote was taken rejecting Westmorland’s paper as aspersing Holles, Francis Newport, 2nd Baron Newport, later earl of Bradford, had taken the paper from the table and torn it up, with Anglesey collecting the pieces and carrying them away.
On 18 Jan. 1671 Holles reported the bill for making Haslington, Cheshire, into a parish. On 26 Jan. he was named to report a conference on the bill to prevent malicious wounding, being appointed on 3 Feb. to prepare reasons for maintaining the Lords’ amendments to the bill and to manage conferences on 4, 6, 9, and 11 February. On 1 Mar. he was named to prepare heads for a conference on the Commons’ petition against the growth of popery; the following day he was named to report a conference on the subsidy bill. On 9 Mar. he entered his dissent to the resolution not to engross the bill concerning the privilege of Parliament. On 13 Mar. he was named to report on two conferences, one on the Boston and Trent navigation bill and the other on the merchants’ ships bill. The same day he was also nominated to recommend the marchioness of Worcester’s case to the king following her petition about the king’s indebtedness to her late husband.
Holles brought forward his own complaint of breach of privilege on 1 Mar. 1671, complaining of ‘some indignities’ put upon him by Lord Chief Justice Keeling at the trial of some French gentlemen, falsely accused of robbery. The case was heard on 6 and 10 Mar., after which the House ordered Keeling to apologize for having said in open court that Holles had been involved in ‘a foul contrivance’ in his attempts to prove the defendants innocent, and to ask Holles’ pardon.
On 16 May 1672 Holles provided a clear sign of his religious sympathies by applying for licences under the Declaration of Indulgence to dispense at least a dozen Dissenting ministers from the requirements of conformity.
Holles himself was a patron of other Dissenting clergyman and some on the more latitudinarian wing of the conforming clergy. These included Gilbert Burnet, the future bishop of Salisbury, whom Holles hosted during his embassy in Paris and later recommended for a position to Harbottle Grimstone‡, although there is some anecdotal evidence that he found Burnet tiresome.
Holles was present on 4 Feb. 1673, the opening day of the session. On 19 Mar. he chaired the adjournment in committee of the bill on the wages of servants and apprentices.
On 7 Oct. 1673, three weeks before the scheduled start of the next parliamentary session, Holles wrote to Sir Edward Harley from Peper Harrow, Surrey (a former Covert property), hoping to meet him ‘in London ere many days, which is one benefit of the Parliament, to bring friends together, and when we come there if we can make it produce more I shall be very glad’. At the end of his letter, he added, ‘the best was we did no hurt as we did no good. I wish we may say so after this great meeting.’
On 27 Jan. Edward Conway, 3rd Viscount (later earl of) Conway, referred to a ‘cabal’ meeting at Holles’ house in Covent Garden, consisting of Shaftesbury, Buckingham, and George Savile, Viscount (later marquess of) Halifax, to discuss tactics for the forthcoming session.
On 3 Feb. Holles was named to report a conference on a joint address about a peace treaty with the States General. On 9 Feb. he was named to mediate in a dispute involving the dowager marchioness of Worcester.
The campaign against Danby and the Popish Plot, 1675–80
Holles was opposed to the emerging strategy of the new treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), which was to rely upon the Anglicans to manage Parliament and govern the country. While Danby and the bishops were conferring about their strategy, William Harbord‡ reported on 9 Jan. 1675 that York had approached Holles, among others, to counteract it.
Holles first attended the April–June 1675 session on the fourth day, 16 April. He was closely involved in its two major battles: opposition to Danby’s non-resisting Test and the dispute with the Commons over the case of Sherley v. Fagg. He was a leader of the opposition to Danby’s Test bill and on 21 Apr. protested against the resolution not to throw the bill out as a breach of privilege of peerage. Although he is marked as present in the attendance list for 26 Apr. ‘his sickness forced him out of the House’ and he was not able to put his name to the protest against the commitment of the bill made that day. Three days later there was a debate on whether the protest of 26 Apr. was scandalous because it reflected upon the honour of the House. ‘Great officers and bishops raised a storm against the protesting lords … but that was defended with so great ability, learning and reason by the Lord Holles that they quitted the attempt’, remarked the author (possibly John Locke) of the Letter from a Person of Quality, who then recounted that Holles offered to put his name to the protest of 26 Apr., even though he had not been present at the time, so that he could share the fate of the other ‘protesting lords’ who were being threatened with the Tower. His dramatic offer appears to have been declined, but he joined in the protest of that day, which rejected the proposition that the previous protest had been derogatory to the honour of the House.
In May Holles was at the heart of the dispute with the Commons over the case of Sherley v. Fagg, which raised the issue of the right of the House of Lords to summon and hear Members of the lower House in appeals. In a series of conferences on 17, 19, and 21 May, Holles and his ‘country’ colleagues vigorously insisted on the right of the House to judge and hear all parties concerned in appeals brought before it. The Commons were equally enraged by two similar appeals, the cases of Stourton v. Onslow and Crisp v. Dalmahoy, brought against other Members of their chamber, and Holles took a prominent part in defending the judicial rights of the House in the bad-tempered disputes and conferences on 31 May and 2 and 3 June. Following the referral on 28 May of the petition of John Crew* , Baron Crew, to the committee of privileges, Holles was one of the peers charged with discussing the matter with Strafford before the committee reported; no further proceedings were recorded.
When Parliament reconvened on 13 Oct. 1675 tempers remained high, stoked by the publication, just prior to the session, of an anonymous book, The Case Stated Concerning the Judicature of the House of Peers in the Point of Appeals, which almost all contemporaries attributed to Holles and which resoundingly defended the right of the House to hear all appeals, both from common law and equity (the latter jurisdiction had been disputed by the Commons in May) and from all parties.
By now Holles’ prominent role in the opposition to the policies pursued by Danby had become too much for the king to bear and on 7 Jan. 1676 he and Halifax were dismissed from the Privy Council, neither being present, having had intimation of it on the previous night. The final straw may have been their opposition to the government’s attempt to close down the coffee houses.
In the absence of employment at the council board, Holles may have found time to write works on English politics. A number of anonymous works from 1676 were attributed to him, although his authorship of some is questionable.
Holles seems to have been involved in encouraging peers to attend the session due to begin on 15 Feb. 1677; a letter of 2 Feb. purporting to be to him, probably from Horatio Townshend, Baron (later Viscount) Townshend, is full of apologies for his likely absence, and giving Holles a ‘disappointment after so kind an invitation as you have been pleased to give me to join head and heart with your Lord and those noble Lords with you in a service of so noble and high a concern’.
Holles was absent on the second day of the session, 16 Feb., when the House appointed a committee to investigate the authorship of the ‘libels’ arguing for the dissolution of Parliament, quickly targeting ‘The Grand Question’. Cary proved remarkably resilient to questioning both by the king and by the Privy Council and never explicitly named Holles, although it was rumoured in early March that Holles ‘is like to go to the Tower about writing the book’. On 1 Mar. Cary was fined £1,000 and committed to the Tower by the House for contempt in refusing to divulge all he knew of the pamphlets. Holles silenced his critics by coming to the House on 2 Mar. (the day after the committee on the libels had made its report), where he ‘took notice that his name had been tossed about there concerning a book’ and openly challenged his peers to state their complaints and charges against him explicitly, to which he would answer. There was a long silence and then the House proceeded to other matters.
Holles next attended on 29 Jan. 1678, but was excused attendance on the House on 16 Feb. and then was not present until 20 Feb., being present in all on 40 days before the prorogation of 13 May, two-thirds of the total, although his attendance was poor at the end of March and beginning of April. He was named to 11 committees. Nicholas Tufton, 3rd earl of Thanet, registered his proxy with Holles on 2 March. On 8 and 19 Mar. he was appointed to manage a conference on the Commons’ amendments to the bill for regulating fishing in the rivers of England. Over the whole session of February 1677–13 May 1678 he attended 52 days, 45 per cent of the total.
Holles’ main concern was to protect the liberties and constitution of England. Throughout the spring, he, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, and William Russell‡, Lord Russell, had several conferences with the French agent de Ruvigny in order to concert measures for their common goals of disbanding the English army, procuring the dissolution of Parliament, and effecting the dismissal of Danby. Holles and his colleagues were concerned that Charles II was merely using the threat of war with France as a means of raising an army and receiving a generous supply from Parliament, which, after abandoning the war, he would use to exercise despotic rule in England without Parliament. De Ruvigny reassured them that there was no secret arrangement between the English and French kings to establish absolutism or Catholicism in England, and that France looked on the mustering of the English army with as much anxiety as the ‘country’ opposition did.
De Ruvigny offered to provide bribes to Members of the Commons to exert themselves to deny supply to the king or to put such conditions on any money bill that it would prove too distasteful for the court to accept. The French agent and his English associates hoped that by this means Charles II would be forced to turn to Louis XIV for funds. The French king would then, de Ruvigny promised, demand of the English king the dissolution of Parliament and dismissal of Danby. De Ruvigny’s master, the French ambassador Barrillon, reported that Holles was less easily persuaded than Russell of the feasibility of this plan and was
so embittered against the court and the ministry, that he [de Ruvigny] did not dare to say anything to him of the desire which the king of England shows for peace, lest he should bring his cabal, from his desire to oppose all the designs of the court, to be partisans for the war.Dalrymple, Mems., i. 184–90.
In the House Holles, Halifax, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, and Wharton further hoped to flush out Charles II and make him reveal his true intentions in the military preparations by insisting on an ‘immediate’ declaration of war against France in the address to the king, which the Commons sent to the Lords on 15 Mar. and which was debated on 16 and 18 Mar. 1678.
Holles next attended on 23 May, the opening day of the May–July 1678 session. From 25 May he held the proxy of William Fiennes, 3rd Viscount Saye and Sele. In the hearings surrounding the appeal of York’s favourite, Louis de Duras, 2nd earl of Feversham, against a chancery decree against him, Holles joined with Shaftesbury in arguing that the House still had to obey the rules of equity (by which Feversham would lose his case) even if it did act as the highest court of the land, ‘for though we are above forms, yet certainly we are not above rules’.
Holles was absent when the next session convened on 21 Oct. 1678. He first attended the House on 1 Nov. and on that very day was thrown into the thick of business by being asked to be a reporter for a conference on the Test bill. On 6 Nov. he was added to the committee considering the evidence of the Popish Plot, but Burnet considered that in this affair Holles ‘had more temper than I expected from a man of his heat’.
Following the prorogation on 30 Dec. 1678 Holles became a principal actor in the secret negotiations leading to the dissolution of Parliament. In mid-January the court physician and nonconformist patron Sir John Baber, ‘a neighbour and intimate’, contacted Holles to discuss means of procuring a dissolution.
Danby’s informants kept him apprized of the legislation that Holles wished the new Commons to pass, the first priority being ‘the enacting of some laws whereby the liberty and property of the subject might be preserved’, such as that ‘a habeas corpus might be procured at any time, as well out of term, as in term’, and that judges be made for life and the treason trials procedure for peers be reformed.
The exact relation of Holles to these Members of the Commons is not clear; certainly the foremost members of the ‘country’ opposition in the Commons respected Holles for his past heroic actions in the defence of Parliament against the encroachment of the crown and for his staunch advocacy of the rights of nonconformists. They may have consulted with him for advice born from his long experience but it is unlikely that they took direct orders and instructions from the aged baron. Most of them were far more radical and vociferous in their opposition to the court – and especially in their hatred towards Danby and Catholics – than the more moderate Holles, who was to spend the last months of his life defending both Danby and York from the more extreme measures projected against them.
When Charles II dissolved Parliament on 24 Jan. 1679, he did not include many of the other conditions to which he had agreed, such as Danby’s resignation, the declaration setting limits on the duration and frequency of Parliaments, and an interim committee to investigate the Popish Plot, which suggests that Barrillon may have been exaggerating Holles’ influence in the political life of the period. Holles attended on the opening day of the new Parliament, 6 Mar., and on every day before the prorogation on 13 Mar., being named to four committees. He was in his place again when the new session began on 15 Mar., and missed only four of the first 15 days before 1 April. On 19 Mar., the House considered the report of the committee for privileges on whether petitions of appeal and impeachments determined with the Parliament. Holles argued apropos of impeachments that there was ‘no abatement by dissolution if the attorney-general dies’, so there was no abatement as the knights of the shire and burgesses never die.
It has been suggested that Holles’ absences were strategically planned to coincide with periods of the aggressive prosecution of Danby, as he may have felt duty bound to protect Danby owing to his part in securing the dissolution. According to Morrice, Holles said during a debate in the House
that if the lord treasurer … were not only guilty of all those crimes and misdemeanours he was accused of but of far greater, yet this common blessing that he had had the happiness and honour to be the chief instrument in procuring from his majesty did at least merit a pardon from the kingdom.
Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, ii. 102.
Although in or about March 1679 Danby initially considered Holles a likely opponent in his impeachment hearings, two lists of a slightly later date indicate Holles’ position as ‘doubtful’ and then merely noted him as ‘absent’.
Holles was appointed to the revamped Privy Council on 20 Apr. 1679. On the day following his return, 11 May, he was named to the joint committee of Lords and Commons discussing the procedures for the trial of the treasurer and the Catholic lords. On 16 May, stricken with gout, he left the chamber again, this time never to return, being noted as absent from a debate on the bishops on 19 May as ‘his gout has changed his stomach for his foot’.
At the beginning of July, Barrillon noted that the presbyterians ‘would be stronger if Lord Holles had more health and energy to attend to affairs, but his great age keeps him away from business. He is however consulted by all the parties and his advice is followed’. The goal of Holles and the presbyterians, Barrilon went on to note,
is to establish a good form of government according to the laws of England [and] not to push the Catholics to the limit and make them desperate by their complete ruin. They hate episcopal government and greatly fear that these disorders will provide an opportunity to the court to establish a greater authority.
Before the dissolution of July 1679 Barrillon emphasized to Louis XIV Holles’ political importance as the leader of these ‘presbyterians’ who held the important swing votes in any division and whose adherence and alliance both Shaftesbury and Sunderland (whom Barrillon saw as the leaders of the two parties which divided the court) actively solicited.
Holles’ attitude towards Danby remained ambivalent. He may have wished to protect Danby from the full extent of the penalties that the Commons envisaged in thanks for his role in achieving the dissolution of Parliament, but he was also annoyed that Danby and the king had not fully upheld their part of the agreement of January 1679. He was especially angry at the king’s pardon to the lord treasurer, which tried to circumvent Parliament’s impeachment proceedings. He attacked Danby indirectly, through the bishops who had been a prop to his ministry and were to play such an important role in the defence of the lord treasurer. Reprising his role as a ‘root and brancher’ from 1641, he vigorously opposed the right of the bishops to vote in capital cases in the House and made his views clear, ‘with great vehemence’, on the issue in a work published anonymously immediately after the prorogation, and he responded to the many attacks on this work in another book, published posthumously.
On 6 Dec. 1679 Holles was one of the signatories of the petition presented to the king on the following day, calling for the immediate convening of Parliament.
for I have long looked on him as very much my friend, and when so ever it has come in my way to talk of him have always said it, and that I knew him to be a man of as great honour as any man living, tho in some things we did not agree, I do not remember I so much as named him, I am sure if I did, it must have been what I have now said, and nothing to his prejudice.Bodl. Clarendon 87, ff. 321–2.
Holles died on 17 Feb. 1680, at his house in Covent Garden, and was buried in the parish church of St Peter’s, Dorchester on 10 Apr., at which ceremony Morrice observed that ‘as great respects and honour [were] paid to his memory by the town and country as hath ever been known, and more coaches and horsemen attended his corpse out of the city than (as it’s said) has ever been seen’, Anglesey recording on 6 Apr. that he had ‘sent my coach to Lord Holles, his funeral’.
Holles left to his only surviving son, Francis Holles, 2nd Baron Holles, an estate which creditors anxious for payment of Holles’ substantial debts claimed was worth between £3,000 and £6,000 p.a. in land and with ‘a magnificent and noble personal estate in money, debts, plate, jewels’ worth between £20,000 and £50,000.
Holles had one of the longest and most active parliamentary careers of any figure of the seventeenth century. He had made his mark in the Commons as a young man in the late 1620s, and was a leader of the ‘peace party’ and of the presbyterians in the Long Parliament before Pride’s Purge, and helped to oversee the restoration of Charles II. His later years and membership of the Lords have usually been glossed over on the assumption that he had passed his prime. Yet a closer examination of his activity in the Lords in the 1670s suggests that, however old-fashioned some of his political precepts may have been, he remained an important figure in the House and was probably the most aggressive and respected defender of its judicial rights and privileges. Holles was always keen to protect his rights and his dignity, bringing a case of scandalum magnatum in 1678 against one Edward Brisco for saying, when challenged about hunting on Holles’ land, that Holles was ‘so greedy and covetous, that none but rogues and Frenchmen will serve him’, and that he was a gentleman before Holles was a lord.
Holles was respected by figures in the ‘country’ opposition in both the Lords and Commons and was an influential figure to be reckoned with by all parties in Parliament and the government, even in the months leading up to his death. His posthumous reputation has seen many changes. Revered as a Whig hero after the Revolution, especially following the efforts of his eventual heir, Newcastle, to claim a direct political lineage, more recent judgments have concentrated on his ‘failures’, especially in the 1640s, when it has been claimed that his political judgment was overwhelmed by his fiery passions and overweening pride.