Youth and earliest days in the House, 1650-1676
Theophilus Hastings’s distant ancestor William Hastings† was made Lord Hastings in 1461 for his services to Edward IV. He was granted the manor of Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, which became the base of the family’s influence in the midlands for the next several centuries. George Hastings†, 3rd Baron Hastings, a follower and companion of Henry VIII, was created earl of Huntingdon in 1529 and in succeeding years he helped the king to enforce and implement the Reformation settlement in the midlands. From that time the family became associated with the ‘puritan’ strand of protestantism. Theophilus was born, by his own account, on 10 Dec. 1650 into a troubled family, wracked by debt and with its principal seat at Ashby-de-la-Zouch sacked by Parliamentary troops while being used as a royalist garrison by Henry Hastings, later Baron Loughborough, the younger brother of Theophilus’s father the 6th earl. Ferdinando died in February 1656 leaving his five-year-old heir an estate reduced to £900 p.a. From this point the late earl’s redoubtable and highly educated widow Lucy, the daughter of the former attorney-general of Ireland Sir John Davies and the notorious prophetess, Lady Eleanor Davies, became the main force in the new earl’s life, managing her own estates in Ireland efficiently and ensuring that sales her husband had made of land during the Interregnum were confirmed by parliamentary statute. Indeed Huntingdon began his experience of the House of Lords early, for in one of his many draft autobiographical accounts he reminisces that ‘this winter [i.e. 1661-2] it was that a bill was brought into the Lords house of Parliament to confirm the sales of Loughborough, Alton, etc[.] My mother attending the committees of both houses carried me (though not 11 years of age) several times with her to declare my consent to the passing of the bill into an act which was effected’. The bill to confirm the late earl of Huntingdon’s sales of some of his lands was first read in the House on 5 Dec. 1661, and committed nine days later. It was not actually discussed in committee until 16 Jan. 1662, where the crux of the matter was whether these sales, effected through an act passed by Parliament in 1653, benefited the new earl. On 8 Feb. the dowager countess insisted in committee that the bill was to the advantage of her young son, who otherwise she feared could be involved in suits over the lands for many years to come, and it was probably at this time that the young Huntingdon signified his own consent to the bill. Richard Sackville, 5th earl of Dorset, reported the bill on 14 Feb., it was passed by the House three days later and received the royal assent at the end of the session on 19 May 1662.
Huntingdon was ready to ‘first appear in the world’ when he reached his majority at the end of 1671, but at that time there was little scope for him to do so in the House of Lords, as Parliament had been prorogued at the end of April 1671 and was to remain so until February 1673. Whilst the political world became increasingly concerned with the effects of Charles II’s secret treaty with France—the third Anglo-Dutch war, the Declaration of Indulgence and the stop of the Exchequer—Huntingdon looked to more domestic and personal concerns. On 19 Feb. 1672, after negotiations for a match with Lady Mary Langham, a daughter of Sir James Langham‡, had fallen through, Huntingdon married Elizabeth, a daughter of Sir John Lewis. She brought with her a portion of £4,000 and the promise of the inheritance of land in Yorkshire worth £600 p.a.
Court follower, 1677-9
Huntingdon sat in the House again on 3 Mar. 1677, just over two weeks after Parliament had reconvened for business after another long prorogation of over 15 months. On his first day he was named to the committee to consider the bill to prevent the increase of new buildings in London. The notes for a speech on this bill among his papers suggests that, after several years of rural retreat, he had a deeply cynical attitude to the metropolis, seeing it as the ‘rendezvous of desperate seditious persons and the seminary of treasonable practises’, an attitude he was to retain well into the 1690s as he forbade his son and heir to live in the capital out of fear of its corrupting influence.
In his account of his own life Huntingdon notes that in early December 1677 he permanently ‘removed with his family to London’ (regardless of his suspicions of the capital expressed earlier in the year) and that ‘making his residence in and about that town [he] gave his constant attendance in the several parliaments’.
Indeed much of his attention throughout 1678 was devoted to matters involving the privilege and honour of the peerage, and these concerns may have sprung from Huntingdon’s own intense interest in the history and genealogy of individual noble families (including of course his own), as suggested by his ongoing correspondence and collaboration with William Dugdale, who looked to Huntingdon as a leading patron and indeed colleague. Judging by a brief marginal annotation in the manuscript Journal, on 12 Apr. 1677 he requested the clerk of the Parliaments to supply him with a copy of the order, based on a report of 6 Apr. from the Committee for Privileges, concerning the proper precedency of eldest sons of younger sons of peers, and his personal papers are mostly concerned with such antiquarian and genealogical interests.
He was greatly exercised throughout the session of May-July 1678, when he was present at all but seven of the meetings, by the damage to the dignity of the peerage he saw in the petition of Robert Villiers, claiming the viscountcy of Purbeck. Villiers was the son of Robert Villiers or Danvers, a bastard, who had voluntarily extinguished his title by a fine at the Restoration. Huntingdon felt (and may have so spoken in the House) that ‘From the times of Henry III to this day I dare be bold that if this [cause?] be admitted to be good there has not been so great a blow to the nobility of England as this would be’, and on 7 June 1678 he entered his dissent against the House’s decision to consider the matter as a whole, instead of debating the individual points raised by it.
Huntingdon attended all but two of the meetings in the following session of the last three months of 1678. On its third day, 23 Oct., he was placed on the large committee assigned to examine the evidence of the Popish Plot and Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s murder. His notes of the testimony heard regarding the plot suggest that he was devoting much of his attention to this matter and seems to have believed the allegations. He made notes of the allegations of the queen’s complicity in the plot and on 28 Nov. was appointed a reporter for a conference on the Commons’ motion to remove her from Whitehall.
Country peer and Exclusionist, 1679-81
In the days preceding the opening of the new Parliament on 6 Mar. 1679 Danby’s assessment of Huntingdon went from considering Huntingdon a likely supporter to marking him as an opponent. The lord treasurer’s political antennae were unusually alert, for between the time of the dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament and the convening of the first Exclusion Parliament Huntingdon changed his political colours to the point where throughout 1679-81 he was as violent a partisan for Exclusion and the succession of James Scott, duke of Monmouth, to the throne as he had previously been for the rights of York, ‘loyal Catholics’ and Danby. Perhaps as a political opportunist Huntingdon felt that the wind was blowing in favour of the country opposition. He may also have felt betrayed by the court when, after having made an application to York to replace the ailing Rutland as lord lieutenant of Leicestershire in July 1677, insisting on his family’s traditional influence in that county, he found himself usurped by Rutland’s son and heir, Lord Roos, who was appointed to that position and continued in it as the 9th earl (and later duke) of Rutland well after his father’s death in 1679.
Huntingdon had the zeal of a convert and attended every meeting of the first Exclusion Parliament in the spring of 1679 and was named to all but five select committees established. He was now at the forefront of the attack against Danby. His notes show that he was paying careful attention to the debate of 18 Mar. 1679 which resolved that Danby’s impeachment proceedings of the last days of the previous Parliament were still in force and under consideration in the new Parliament.
Danby surrendered himself to black rod almost immediately after the bill’s passage by the House. From that point Huntingdon was closely involved in the discussions, and disputes, between the Houses on the pending trials of the impeached former lord treasurer and the five Catholic peers in the Tower and he kept among his papers manuscript accounts of the proceedings and debates of this Parliament.
During the long interim of May 1679-October 1680, as the king continuously postponed meeting Parliament, Huntingdon became one of the inner circle of the aristocratic fringe of the country opposition. In the newsletters and political gossip of the time his name appears frequently in tandem with Shaftesbury, Anthony Grey, 11th earl of Kent, Ford Grey, 3rd Baron Grey of Warke, William Howard, 3rd Baron Howard of Escrick, Henry Herbert, 4th Baron Herbert of Chirbury, and James Brydges, 8th Baron Chandos, all of whom were notorious as ‘discontented lords’. This group of ‘opposition’ peers met regularly in the Swan Tavern in Fish Street in the winter of 1679, in order to devise a petition to the king to ensure a speedy sitting of the next Parliament. On 1 Dec. Huntingdon was at a dinner at the lord mayor’s house, at which were also present Shaftesbury, Grey of Warke, and most of the other members of the Swan Tavern group. An unexpected, and unwelcome, guest was the lord chief justice William Scroggs. After Huntingdon had proposed a toast to the duke of Monmouth, Scroggs replied with a toast to the duke of York, to which Huntingdon added ‘and to the confusion of popery’, which caused some consternation among the assembly.
When the new Parliament did eventually meet on 21 Oct. 1680, Huntingdon was an assiduous attender, coming to all but nine of the meetings and named to all but two select committees. On 28 Oct., a week after Parliament was first convened, he reported the amendments made by the committee of the whole House to the bill for the regulation of the trial of peers, and on 8 Nov. was among those managers appointed by the House to deliver to the Commons in conference transcripts of papers recently received from the clerk of the Privy Council concerning the ‘Popish Plot’ in Ireland. His notes on the course of the debate on 15 Nov. 1680 on the Exclusion bill are among the only, if not the only, record we have of the arguments made by the different peers ranged for and against this bill.
Huntingdon was one of the 16 peers who signed the petition of 25 Jan. 1681 requesting Charles II not to summon the forthcoming scheduled Parliament to Oxford, but to maintain it in Westminster, close to the Whig heartland of the city of London, instead.
Later testimony given in the wake of the Rye House Plot in 1683 consistently named Huntingdon as one of those involved in tentative plots to capture the king and set up a ‘Long Parliament’ in the wake of the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament.
Tory and courtier, 1681-8
The attacks of 1681, and the failure of the Exclusionist movement, may have led Huntingdon to perform in November 1681 his second radical switch of allegiances in less than three years and by the end of that year was once again firmly in the court’s orbit and favour. As the nascent Whig movement was weakened by the failure of Exclusion, the dissolution of Parliament and the purges in the commissions of peace, Huntingdon must have begun to feel that he had backed the wrong horse, as he saw his own local influence ebb away. In his brief autobiographical account, Huntingdon is coy about the period 1677-81, when he was so active in Parliament and during which he was briefly a leading member of the Whig opposition, but he positively revels in his re-entry into the king’s favour:
The earl after this making his residence in and about that town [London] gave his constant attendance in the several Parliaments of King Charles the second, but coming very seldom to the Court, it was intimated to him that if he waited on the king he should be well received by his majesty, and accordingly he had the honour to kiss the king’s hand at Whitehall 21 October 1681 and received many gracious expressions of his favour, and from that time had access to him on all occasions.HEHL, HAG, Box 1 (32).
His own explanation of his change of heart, given, supposedly, when he attended the king on 21 Oct. was that he ‘had by experience found, that they who promoted the bill of exclusion were for the subversion of monarchy itself’. The court had made an important convert and on 15 Nov. 1681 Huntingdon was reinstated custos rotulorum of Leicestershire in the place of Basil FeIlding, 3rd earl of Denbigh, who voluntarily resigned the post to the king’s new supporter.
Huntingdon’s betrayal caused great anger among the Whigs and a brief print war flared up between Huntingdon and three of his former colleagues—Grey of Warke, Herbert of Chirbury and Monmouth—over the comments Huntingdon had reputedly made to the king concerning the exclusionists’ desire to subvert monarchy and which had been printed in Thompson’s Publick Intelligence of 25 October. The three Whig peers claimed to be satisfied by Huntingdon’s denials upon his honour that he had ever said these words, but demanded a published retraction from him to counter the damage done. Huntingdon refused to do this, insisting that his word should be sufficient, but did extract from Thompson a printed apology for being too free with publishing the earl’s reputed words. This was still insufficient for the other peers, who on 2 Nov. published their own defense and apology, with obscure aspersions on Huntingdon’s truthfulness. Huntingdon was prompted in turn to print his own broadside emphasizing his truthfulness, and making vague threats to the other peers for accusing him of slander. The matter became more ill-tempered when two of Huntingdon’s kinsmen, Knyvett and Ferdinando Hastings, tore down the Whig peers’ sheet from where it was posted up in Peter’s Coffeehouse in Covent Garden, leading to a series of challenges and counter-challenges between them and Herbert of Chirbury, which only the king’s intervention prevented from descending into bloodshed.
This marked the end of Huntingdon’s brief flirtation with the Whigs and, never one to do things by halves, Huntingdon now became as much a zealot for the court interest and the Tory reaction as he had ever been for exclusion and Monmouth. The king took advantage of this new convert and showered Huntingdon with the offices and honours the young man evidently felt were his due. In June 1682 he was, for a consideration of £4,500 which was raised by mortgage from his wife’s Yorkshire estates, appointed captain of the band of gentleman pensioners, replacing his brother-in-law Scarsdale in this office.
Despite this, Huntingdon was active in local affairs in Leicestershire for the court as custos rotulorum of the county and through his family’s traditional influence in the borough of Leicester. The borough’s loyalty to the crown was suspect, as there was a large Dissenting population, and three of the four members for Leicestershire (two for the county and two for the borough) returned for the Exclusion Parliaments in 1679-81 had voted in favour of Exclusion in May 1679, including Huntingdon’s own former client Beaumont. From September 1684 Huntingdon worked closely with his chaplain the Reverend Dr John Gery, whom he had preferred to the Leicestershire livings of Swepstone and Stony Stanton, and who was later to be appointed archdeacon of Buckingham, to persuade the corporation to surrender their charter to Charles II, less than 20 years since they had received a new charter in 1665. Even though Leicester’s common hall had voted in October 1684, with only four dissenting voices, to surrender the charter voluntarily, the mayor and aldermen found numerous reasons for delaying the official surrender of the charter to the king, reflecting perhaps a more seated reluctance to part with it. This was much to the irritation of Huntingdon, who was keen to show his usefulness to the crown and also intent to be made recorder of the borough in the new charter. Only after the threat of a writ of quo warranto did the borough’s recorder Nathan Wright (later the lord keeper) hand the old charter to the king on 2 November. During the rest of that month Huntingdon, from his house on Gerrard Street, maintained a correspondence with Gery in Leicester discussing the composition of the new remodelled and ‘loyal’ corporation. In the new charter issued on 10 Dec. 1684 Huntingdon replaced Wright as recorder, although he maintained the future lord keeper as his deputy to placate local opinion, and the purge of the corporation was not extensive, although it was reduced in size from 72 to 36.
Reign of James II, 1685-8
By his own account Huntingdon was present in the royal bedchamber at the time of Charles II’s death on 6 Feb. 1685, suggesting (if true) that he was in the inner circles of the court.
In the capital Huntingdon was well set to become a leading member of James II’s new regime. He was continued in his place on the Privy Council and helped to proclaim the new king throughout London. He played a prominent part in James II’s coronation, as a commissioner on the court of claims, captain of the gentlemen pensioners and cupbearer at the coronation banquet.
Shortly after Parliament reconvened on 9 Nov. 1685 it was ordered that Granville’s petition against Huntingdon’s privilege would be taken up again and on 14 Nov., after a fracas involving Huntingdon’s threats to Granville’s counsel, both the earl and Granville agreed to waive their privilege. For the next several years this dispute over Sir John Lewis’s estate, in which Huntingdon was joined by his brother-in-law and co-heir Scarsdale (whose wife had died in 1684), continued to rumble on in the lower courts.
Huntingdon was at the centre of James’s government for the remainder of his reign. The Jacobite loyalist Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, later recorded in his own memoirs, with some gloating, Huntingdon’s change of heart from his days as an exclusionist in 1679-81. At the time of the sentencing of Titus Oates, whose claims he had once promoted, ‘the earl of Huntingdon owned he had been too credulous (and I am almost sure he was one of the guilty lords at the Lord Stafford’s trial [i.e., those who had found Stafford guilty]), but that now he was convinced that the prisoner was one of the worst and most perjured men’.
Huntingdon’s acceptance of, indeed sympathy towards, the king’s religion was an unusual step for one who came from such a famously puritan family and when Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester, having already resigned as lord treasurer in December 1686, was also removed from his place on the commission for ecclesiastical causes in January 1687, James II looked to the compliant Huntingdon to take his place. Huntingdon’s commission was dated 2 Jan. 1687 and he first took his seat on the commission eleven days later.
Huntingdon also tried to help further James II’s policies in the localities, and especially the Midlands. Morrice recounts a story from February 1687 when Huntingdon dissuaded James from appointing a gentleman, highly commended by two of the king’s other advisers (one Catholic and one Protestant), to the Staffordshire commission of the peace because that man had been bred a Catholic but had recently turned Protestant ‘and he thought no such gentleman whatsoever fit’ to serve the king.
Revolution and Convention, 1688-9
At the landfall of the Prince of Orange at Exeter on 5 Nov. 1688 Huntingdon rushed south from the Midlands to join his regiment at Plymouth, where it was then garrisoned and commanded in his place by his lieutenant-colonel and kinsman Ferdinando Hastings. Hastings and the town’s governor the earl of Bath had already colluded to declare for William of Orange and surrender Plymouth to him and on 28 Nov. Bath captured and imprisoned Huntingdon when he was having dinner at the governor’s house, while the rest of the garrison declared for William.
He was sufficiently recovered from this tragedy to attend the Convention from its first day on 22 Jan. 1689. Although Clarendon was to remark of its important first days when the disposition of the crown was determined, that Huntingdon ‘had all along voted against the king’, in reality the earl had a distinctly idiosyncratic and inconsistent record.
Immediately following the offer of the crown to William and Mary on 14 Feb. 1689 Huntingdon’s attendance in the House was intermittent for a period. He became more involved in the House from mid-April as he took on a number of roles. He was busy as a chairman of and reporter from the committee for privileges. On 18 Apr. he reported on the dispute between James Annesley, 2nd earl of Anglesey, and his wife over whether Lady Anglesey had breached her husband’s privilege by writing to one of his tenants concerning the non-payment of a rent charge owing to her. The committee left the decision of whether this was a breach of privilege to the House itself, which appointed a committee of four peers, one of whom was Huntingdon himself, to try to effect a reconciliation and agreement between Anglesey and his wife.
Huntingdon quickly became involved in the proceedings surrounding the bill for abrogating the oaths to James II and the House’s controversial amendment which aimed to allow William III to dispense chosen members of the clergy from the requirement of swearing the new oaths, a measure which Huntingdon undoubtedly would have supported, judging by his later actions. On 20 Apr. he was appointed a manager for a conference at which the Commons spelled out their objections to the amendment and Huntingdon was later that day placed on the committee to draw up the House’s arguments in defence of it. Two days later, on 22 Apr., he was a manager for two conferences on this matter where he took detailed notes on the arguments presented by Sir John Treby‡ for the Commons and Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, for the House. The following day the House gave in and agreed to the bill as envisioned by the Commons, without a special royal dispensation for members of the clergy.
Despite Huntingdon’s vote in favour of William of Orange’s claim to the throne, he was too heavily implicated in some of the more unpopular measures of the previous regime and retribution followed, as throughout the spring of 1689 he was stripped of all his offices. The worst blow came on 1 July 1689 when the Commons, considering the bill of indemnity recommended to them by William III, decided to exempt from its provisions of amnesty all those who had acted in the late commission for ecclesiastical causes, including Huntingdon.
In a list compiled by Carmarthen (as Danby had become) between October 1689 and February 1690 Huntingdon was classified as one of the supporters of the court, to be approached by John Sheffield, earl of Mulgrave (later duke of Buckingham and Normanby). Huntingdon came to just over three-quarters of the meetings when the Convention gathered again in late October 1689 and was named to thirteen committees, including the committee of inspections established on 2 Nov. 1689 to determine those responsible for the political trials and quo warranto proceedings of the previous reigns—an investigation which could cut very close to home.
Under William III, 1690-1695
Undoubtedly his loss of office and exemption from the Act of Grace encouraged him to withdraw from parliamentary business, but his new marriage, solemnized on 8 May 1690, to the young Frances Needham (née Leveson Fowler), widow of Thomas Needham, 6th Viscount Kilmorey [I], also played its part, especially as she quickly started bearing children and, as Huntingdon’s later family biographer explained it, ‘after [the Revolution] he lived chiefly at Donington Park, the better to provide for his children by his second lady’.
He was present for only nine meetings at the beginning of the 1691-2 session, which began on 22 Oct. 1691, and left the House for the session on 14 November. During his last few days of attendance he was busy as a reporter of bills from select committees—a bill for naturalization (10 Nov.), a bill to take away benefit of clergy (11 Nov.) and a private estate bill (13 Nov.). Away in the country he received disturbing news that on 9 Dec. 1691 a young man named Fuller, previously a page to Mary of Modena, had made copious allegations of a Jacobite plot, which implicated Huntingdon as well as Scarsdale, Sidney Godolphin, Baron (later Earl) Godolphin, George Savile, marquess of Halifax, and several others.
On 16 Apr. 1692 Huntingdon received a letter from James II (signed ‘J.R.’ and with the royal seal, he noted) in which the late king requested his presence, as a member of his Privy Council, at the confinement of Mary of Modena in order to testify to the birth of the child (as Huntingdon had done with the prince of Wales in June 1688).
In mid-August Huntingdon was finally bailed from the Tower.
Now a free man, on 29 Dec. 1692 Huntingdon was placed on the committee to consider precedents for the Commons’ unusual action of presenting an address praising the action of Edward Russell, earl of Orford, the previous summer to the House’s reporters in a free conference which had been ostensibly been convened to discuss other naval matters. This committee was assigned to hold a conference with the Commons on this matter on 4 Jan. 1693, but Huntingdon was not there to attend it, for he left the House on the last day of 1692 and registered his proxy with Scarsdale on 3 Jan. 1693, who used it to vote in favour of the place bill on that same day. Huntingdon returned to the House on 9 Jan. and over the following days signed a number of dissents: from the decisions of 17 Jan. that Sir Charles Knollys had no claim to the earldom of Banbury; from the motions of 19 Jan. not to refer to the committee for privileges, and then to reject outright, the House’s amendments to the land tax bill; and then from the resolution of 31 Jan. not to proceed further with the trial of Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, that day. Huntingdon found Mohun not guilty four days later. He was absent again from 17 Feb. to 6 Mar. 1693, when Mulgrave held his proxy. On 6 March he signed another dissent from the unwillingness of the House to share with the Commons the information it had received concerning the perilous condition of Ireland. On 7 Mar. he laid before the House his complaint of a breach of privilege against John Beesley who, during the time of Huntingdon’s imprisonment, had distrained the cattle of several of his tenants. Three days later he was a reporter for the conference on the duchy of Cornwall bill and helped to draw up reasons why the House insisted on its amendment.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his brush with royal power in 1692, Huntingdon became even more deeply involved in Jacobitism thereafter and from April 1693 James II’s secretary of state John Drummond, earl of Melfort [S], after having finally learnt the true identity of the ‘Mr Courtney’ who had been addressing supportive letters to St Germain, began a regular correspondence with their true author, Huntingdon.
Huntingdon was absent at Donington Park for the first two months of the session beginning on 7 Nov. 1693, but a clerk of the House, John Relfe, supplied him weekly with copies of the minutes of meetings throughout November and December and accompanied his first packet of minutes with a blank proxy so that the earl could register his proxy with Ailesbury.
He did not attend any of the sittings of the following session of 1694-5. He was marked as absent at a call of the House on 26 Nov. 1694 and yet his name was not included when the House ordered on 3 Dec., following a subsequent call of the House, that letters be sent to the absent members demanding their presence by 18 December. This may have been because the House was already aware that Huntingdon was making arrangements to register his proxy, which was duly entrusted on 4 Dec. to Ailesbury. Nevertheless, when 18 Dec. came Huntingdon still felt the need to address a letter to the House asking that his absence be excused, as he was represented by proxy. There was still some controversy surrounding this excuse and the House ordered that a debate concerning proxies be held after Christmas, although this appears to have been quickly overtaken by the news of the death of Queen Mary.
Final years, 1695-1701
Although Huntingdon eventually came to only 35 per cent of the meetings of the 1695-6 session, the first of William III’s second Parliament elected in October 1695, he was among the most engaged members in the House in December 1695 when a whole series of issues around the ‘state of the nation’ were being debated. On 3 Dec. 1695 he was chairman of the committee of the whole House considering the state of the nation and the detailed notes he took of the debate concerning the crisis in trade and the coinage reveal the concerns of many members of the House. Huntingdon was once again in the chair the following day when the committee of the whole resolved to address the king calling for the prohibition of clipped coin. He was placed on the committee assigned to draw up the address and in this role was made a manager of the conference on the address held on 5 December.
Huntingdon left the House on 27 Dec. 1696, registering his proxy with Ailesbury three days later, and was absent throughout January and February 1696. While Huntingdon was away at Donington Park, the Assassination Plot against William III was revealed and Parliament drew up the Association. Huntingdon never signed this document, but returned to the House, vacating his proxy, on 9 Mar. 1696.
At this time Huntingdon was undoubtedly most preoccupied with the continuing problems with his wayward son and heir, George, Lord Hastings, which came to a head during this session of Parliament. Hastings had long been disobedient and unreceptive to his father’s efforts to provide him with a good education and marriage.
The other matter which preoccupied Huntingdon at this time was the case of Thomas Watson, bishop of St Davids, who was his good friend. Watson, like Huntingdon, had distinguished himself as a willing and active follower of James II, and the earl may even have played a role in the elevation of the cleric to the see of St Davids in June 1687. The bond between the earl and the bishop was probably only strengthened when both were left out of the Act of Grace of 1690 and they supported each other in their objections to their exclusion.
With these problems with family and friends, Huntingdon barely attended the last few sessions before his death in June 1701. He did not appear at all in the 1697-8 session and registered his proxy on 15 Dec. 1697, in the early days of the session, with Robert Shirley, 8th Baron (later Earl) Ferrers, and after Ferrers himself had left the House, entrusted his vote on 20 Apr. 1698 to Scarsdale. However he made clear to Watson his views on the divorce proceedings that Charles Gerard, 2nd earl of Macclesfield, brought against his wife in early 1698, deeming them ‘against the ecclesiastical laws and canons of the Western church’, and concluding ‘If I were in the House I should be against the bill [of divorce]’.
He first sat on 25 Apr. 1701 in the new Parliament which had convened over two months previously. He may have come to take part in the impeachment proceedings against John Somers, Baron Somers, and his fellow former Junto ministers. On 5 May Huntingdon was appointed to the committee to draft a message to the Commons urging them to submit the precise articles of impeachment against their targets, and four days later he was placed on another large committee assigned to consider the Commons’ improper way of delivering these impeachments. It is likely that Huntingdon would have supported the prosecution of the former Junto ministers, but he died before he was able to cast his vote on this matter. One of his last acts in Parliament was his subscription to the protest of 22 May against the passage of the Act of Settlement, which effectively put an end to Huntingdon’s long-held hopes for the restoration of James II. He died shortly after, on 30 May 1701, still only 50 years old. He was succeeded in his title by his estranged son George, Lord Hastings, who pursued his dispute with his father beyond the grave by actively supporting the Whigs and the Williamite court in the House. He also appealed, on 14 Dec. 1702, against a Chancery decree of 12 May 1702 which had granted to his stepmother, Frances Leveson Fowler, dowager countess of Huntingdon, then tending to his six young half siblings, the right to his maternal grandfather’s estates in Yorkshire. On 12 Jan. 1703 the House complied with the petition and the Lewis estates centered on Ledstone in Yorkshire fell under the 8th earl’s disposition, despite the scant provision for him made in his father’s will.