PIERREPONT, Evelyn (1665-1726)

Youth and marriage, 1685–90

Evelyn Pierrepont was the third and longest-lived of the sons of Robert Pierrepont, eldest son of ‘wise’ William Pierrepont^‡. Robert was heir to both his wealthy father and his uncle Henry Pierrepont, 2nd earl of Kingston-upon-Hull and marquess of Dorchester, but he died early in 1669 and it was his three sons who inherited in turn the estates of their grandfather based at Thoresby in Nottinghamshire and their great-uncle’s title of earl of Kingston-upon-Hull and the estate of Holme Pierrepont. An elaborate survey of the 5th earl of Kingston’s Pierrepont inheritance in Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and parts of Huntingdonshire from 1694 (but apparently representing the condition of the estate in 1690) suggests that the property consisted of about 31,000 acres and brought in £10,000 p.a. Eg. 3564. On the Pierrepont side Evelyn also inherited multiple connections to leading noble families of England, as his father’s four sisters had married extraordinarily well. He could number among his uncles George Savile, marquess of Halifax, and Henry Cavendish, 2nd duke of Newcastle, and his many aristocratic cousins included John Holles, duke of Newcastle, Thomas Tufton, 6th earl of Thanet, Ralph Montagu, earl (later duke) of Montagu, and Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, at least during the time of Sunderland’s brief marriage to Pierrepont’s cousin Lady Arabella Cavendish. Evelyn’s personal name derived from the family name of his mother, Elizabeth Evelyn, daughter and eventually sole heiress of Sir John Evelyn^‡ of West Dean, Wiltshire. He bequeathed to his youngest grandson in his will of 1676 the reversion of his Wiltshire lands after the death of his daughter Elizabeth. This too was an extensive estate, as Elizabeth Evelyn herself died a rich widow in 1699, able to bequeath to her daughter £2,000 and to her granddaughter a portion of £12,000, as well as leaving the remainder of the estate, calculated by some as worth £3,000 p.a., to her son. Eg. 3517, ff. 59–72, 153–65; Add. 75376, ff. 90–91.

In June 1687 Evelyn Pierrepont married Mary, daughter of the late William Feilding, 3rd earl of Denbigh, a member of a prominent Warwickshire family. He was elected to represent the Nottinghamshire borough of East Retford in both the Convention and William III’s first Parliament, probably on the interest of his Williamite elder brother William Pierrepont, 4th earl of Kingston, who was appointed lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of Nottinghamshire in 1689. This young earl of Kingston died unexpectedly and childless on 17 Sept. 1690, when Evelyn inherited the title and perhaps, for a brief period, his local offices in Nottinghamshire. There is an unexplained vacancy in the lieutenancy of the county until 1692, when William Cavendish, 4th earl (later duke) of Devonshire, was appointed, and in the custos until 1694, when Kingston’s cousin Newcastle, the rising man in the county, stepped in. It is possible, although it cannot be positively proved, that the new earl of Kingston informally exercised these offices in place of his deceased brother in the intervening months.

Earl of Kingston under William III, 1690–1702

Kingston first sat in the House on 6 Nov. 1690 and maintained a steady attendance rate of between three-fifths and two-thirds of the sitting days in both the 1690–1 and 1691–2 sessions. His attendance dropped to 34 per cent in the 1692–3 session, his lowest attendance of any session before 1715, but he played a controversial role in the murder trial of Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun. On 3 Feb. 1693 the House decided that each peer could ask a pertinent question of the judges sitting in Westminster Hall if the queries were agreed upon by the assembled House beforehand. Kingston nevertheless asked an impromptu question in the Hall, which compelled the peers to adjourn to their chamber to consider and approve it before returning to the Hall to continue proceedings. With this precedent, the peers resolved that peers could ask whatever question they wished of the judges without prior approval. Kingston was also one of the 14 peers who found Mohun guilty of murder on 4 Feb., against the 64 who acquitted him. HMC Lords, iv. 296; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 30. He began to take a more active role in the procedures of the House in the sessions of 1693–4 (56 per cent attendance) and 1694–5 (69 per cent). He was a teller on 4 Dec. 1693 on a question in the committee of the whole House whether the word ‘holden’ should remain in the Triennial bill. He was again a teller on 22 Dec. 1694 on the question whether the House should adjourn into a committee of the whole to consider the treason trial’ bill. On 23 Jan. 1695 he further dissented from the resolution to add an amendment to that bill which would postpone its implementation for three years.

In William III’s second Parliament Kingston’s attendance steadily dropped over the three sessions: 62 per cent in 1695–6; 52 per cent in 1696–7; and 49 per cent in 1697–8. On 13 Dec. 1695 he was placed on a committee to inspect papers from the East India Company concerning their recent losses at sea and the effects of competition with the Scottish East India Company, and the following day he acted as a manager in a conference on the address against this rival company. On 9 Jan. 1696 he also protested against the abandonment of a clause in the bill to reform the coinage. He was a teller on 6 Mar. in a division in the committee of the whole House on whether to reject a clause in the wine duties bill. He fought strenuously against the bill for the attainder of Sir John Fenwick^‡, voting against it and subscribing to the dissents against the bill’s commitment, on 18 Dec. 1696, and its eventual passage, on 23 December. He assigned his proxy on 17 Feb. 1697 to his brother-in-law Basil Feilding, 4th earl of Denbigh, but this was vacated a week later. He told in the division of 9 Mar. 1697 on the question whether to insist upon an amendment in the wrought silks bill. On 10 Apr. Kingston was a manager for a conference on the bill against the sale of offices. In the final session, he voted on 15 Mar. 1698 against the commitment of the Junto-inspired bill to punish the exchequer official Charles Duncombe^‡, while the following day he dissented from the decision to grant relief to James Bertie^‡ in the case of Bertie v. Viscount Falkland.

Before the elections of summer 1698, Kingston’s support was solicited by his cousin William Savile, 2nd marquess of Halifax, on behalf of Gervase Eyre^‡ as a country candidate for Nottinghamshire. After Halifax’s intervention, Kingston ‘promised all the assistance he could give’ to Eyre and his fellow candidate, Sir Thomas Willoughby, later Baron Middleton; with his help and that of Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon, the two country candidates were able to outpoll the incumbent court Whig Members. Add. 75370, G. Eyre to Halifax, 9, 19 Mar. 1698. Kingston’s own attendance continued to decrease over the two session of William’s third Parliament – 45 per cent in 1698–9 and 39 per cent in 1699–1700. He was involved in two conferences on markets and trade on 20–21 Apr. 1699, acting as a manager for a conference on the bill for restoring Blackwell Hall Market, and on the next day being named to manage another conference on a bill concerning the fish market at Billingsgate. In February 1700 he was thought to be in favour of the bill to maintain the old East India Company as a corporation and on 23 Feb. he voted that the House should be adjourned into a committee of the whole to discuss two amendments to the bill. On 5 Apr. he was a teller in a division in the committee of the whole House on whether to postpone discussion of the first enacting clause in the Commons bill to resume William III’s grants of forfeited Irish lands. HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 141.

In the Parliaments of the 1690s Kingston obviously shared many of his votes, dissents and protests – such as on the Fenwick attainder bill, the Charles Duncombe bill and the East India Company bill – with country, if not Tory, members of the House. It may be significant that he spent September 1700, in the period between the prorogation of April and the surprise dissolution of Parliament in December, visiting France in the company of his contemporary Thomas Coke^‡, a country, and increasingly Tory, Member for neighbouring Derbyshire. HMC Cowper, ii. 405-6. Kingston’s second cousin William Pierrepont^‡, who from 1691 was also the husband of his widowed sister-in-law, the dowager countess of Kingston, was another country Member of Parliament with whom Kingston was closely connected. Pierrepont’s election as a burgess for Nottingham at a by-election in December 1695 was probably achieved through the interest of his cousin. Pierrepont continued to be selected for the borough, with the help of his kinsman, in every successive Parliament until his death in August 1706.

A list from the summer of 1700 marked Kingston as a Whig who could potentially be persuaded to support the new ‘mixed’ ministry being formed after the fall of the Junto ministry. It appears that up to the turn of the century Kingston’s political allegiances were fluid and indeterminate and he was not at that point seen as an associate of the Junto. It may have been the vindictive backlash against these former ministers during the Parliament which convened on 6 Feb. 1701 which turned Kingston decisively against the Tories, and it is from about this point that he became a major figure among the Whig aristocracy, a position he solidified during the reign of Anne. He came to just over half of the sitting days of this Parliament and took part in the resurgence of Whig unity which it saw, voting for the acquittal of John Somers, Baron Somers, and Edward Russell, earl of Orford, in June 1701.

For the elections of the winter of 1701, following yet another dissolution (in November 1701) of an uncooperative Parliament, Kingston changed tack from his efforts in previous years and exerted his influence in Nottinghamshire in the Whig interest. He tried to exact from Sir Thomas Willoughby a promise that he would not join with Gervase Eyre, now gone over to the Tories, against the Whig candidates. He also probably assisted Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron (later marquess of) Wharton, in assuring a rare Whig victory in the Wiltshire elections, where Kingston had acquired more of an interest by the inheritance of his mother’s estate at West Dean in 1699. Add. 70501, ff. 41, 45. Perhaps reflecting his new dedication to the Whigs, Kingston himself came to 71 per cent of the Parliament of 1702 which saw William III’s death on 8 Mar.; he, along with the rest of the House present, was chosen as a manager for a conference to discuss the arrangements for Anne’s accession to the throne. In the days before the Parliament’s prorogation and eventual dissolution, Kingston acted as a teller, against the Tory Montagu Bertie, 2nd earl of Abingdon, in the division of 16 May 1702 on the ultimately unsuccessful motion to burn publicly the sermon of William Binckes which compared Charles I favourably to Christ himself.

A Whig under Anne, 1702–6

In the early years of Anne’s reign, John Macky informed his Hanoverian masters that Kingston ‘hath a very good estate, is a very fine gentleman, of good sense, well bred, and a lover of the ladies; entirely in the interest of his country; makes a good figure, is of a black complexion, well made, not forty years old’. Macky, Mems. 75. The death of his wife, Mary Feilding, in 1697 allowed Kingston in these first years of the queen’s reign to indulge himself as a relatively young, and very rich, widower around town. His celebrated daughter Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had good reason in later years to resent her father’s treatment of her and in an autobiographical ‘fragment’ written in 1715 described the death of her ‘noble mother’ as the ‘first misfortune’ in her life, as she ‘was now left to the care of a young father, who though naturally an honest man, was abandoned to his pleasures and (like most of those of his quality) did not think himself obliged to be very attentive to his children’s education’. M. Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems ed. R. Halsband and I. Grundy, 77.

While neglecting the upbringing of his four children, Kingston took part in the social high life of the Whigs in the capital. The diary of his contemporary Charles Bennet, 2nd Baron Ossulston (later earl of Tankerville), makes it clear that from 1704 at the earliest Kingston was frequently found at the grand dinners hosted by his Whig associates in their Westminster townhouses, as well as at more informal gatherings in taverns such as the Queen’s Arms in Pall Mall. At these Westminster gatherings, Kingston was in frequent touch with the principal Junto peers, and especially with its most prominent parliamentary managers, Somers, Sunderland, Wharton and Charles Montagu, Baron (later earl of) Halifax, as well as their close allies, including Charles Powlett, 2nd duke of Bolton, Charles Howard, 3rd earl of Carlisle, Charles Montagu, 4th earl (later duke) of Manchester, Charles Cornwallis, 4th Baron Cornwallis, and Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend. TNA, C104/113 pt. 2, C104/116, pt. 1, Ossulston diary; PH, xvi. 209. Kingston was also a member of the Kit Kat Club by 1711, although the story that he introduced, and toasted, his daughter Mary there when she was still a child suggests he probably joined much earlier, perhaps at the club’s foundation in the early years of the century. Lady Mary later emphasized her father’s predilection for the fashionable horse races at Newmarket, where so many other Whig grandees congregated. ‘He had a seat very near the town [i.e. in Acton]’, she continues in her autobiography, ‘and as he never consulted the pleasure of his daughters when his own were in question, the matches at Newmarket [gave] him an occasion of leaving the town’. Wortley Montague, Essays and Poems, 79.

Despite his commitment to a fashionable social life, Kingston maintained a steady rate of attendance in each of the three sessions of Anne’s first Parliament of 1702–5 of between 52 and 69 per cent. In the first session, a division on 11 Nov. 1702 on whether the peers should go in their robes to St Paul’s Cathedral for the celebrations for the victories at Cadiz and Vigo saw Kingston for the first time facing as his opposing teller Robert Leke, 3rd earl of Scarsdale, heir of a family who had been local rivals to the Pierreponts in Nottinghamshire from the time of the Civil War. HMC Lords, n.s. v. 103; Clarendon, Rebellion, ii. 332–3. These two peers were at the centre of the controversial and very close votes of 16 Jan. 1703 which ultimately led to the defeat of the occasional conformity bill. Contemporaries were sure that Kingston would oppose the bill by supporting the Whig-inspired amendments to it. Kingston and Scarsdale acted as tellers for opposite sides in the first two divisions held that day, the first on whether to accept the principal ‘wrecking’ amendment which altered the terms, and levels of fines, in the penalty clause and the second on the amendment which extended the time in which an offence had to be presented to a justice of the peace. The first division, maintaining the amendment which ultimately sank the bill in the Commons, was passed by a majority of only two, after proxies had been called for.

Three days later, on 19 Jan., Kingston was second teller in the division in the committee of the whole House on whether there should be a clause in the bill to settle a revenue on George, prince of Denmark (also duke of Cumberland), which would specifically empower the prince to sit in the House and Privy Council and hold other offices after the death of the queen, despite the provisions against foreigners’ employment in the Act of Settlement. Kingston and his opposite teller, Scarsdale once again, both counted the same number of votes (48); by the rules of the House the motion was resolved in the negative and the clause thrown out. However after the committee of the whole had adjourned and the regular House considered the report, it reversed the committee’s decision to exclude the clause and instead voted to accept it. Kingston had almost certainly been the teller for the not contents against the original motion, for he subscribed to the detailed protest against this latter decision by the House to reinstate the clause. Whigs such as Kingston objected to this clause because it seemed to put in doubt the right of other foreign peers – such as William III’s many Dutch friends who had been given English titles – to sit in the House and hold office without a similar formal dispensation. Nicolson, London Diaries, 181.

Kingston’s houses at Thoresby and Holme Pierrepont in Nottingham were on the itinerary of the Junto peers Orford and Halifax as they visited their political associates in the country – Wharton (Chippenham), Sunderland (Althorp) and Devonshire (Chatsworth) – during the summer of 1703. Boston Pub. Lib. Somerset mss (K.5.5), Halifax to Somerset, 17 Aug. 1703. Politics were undoubtedly discussed at these summer gatherings and strategies may have been taken against the inevitable re-introduction of the Occasional Conformity bill. Kingston played a co-ordinating role in the Whig bid to defeat this bill, acting as teller, almost certainly for the not contents, on both occasions when the motion to give the bill a second reading was before the House over the next two sessions. He was a teller in the division of 14 Dec. 1703, Scarsdale again acting as his opposite, and was recorded as voting against the motion himself. He performed the same duty as teller, on the same question, almost exactly a year later, on 15 Dec. 1704, with this time the Tory John Annesley, 4th earl of Anglesey, telling for the other side. On both occasions the not contents had the majority, ensuring the defeat of the bill. HMC Lords, n.s. vi. 229.

On 13 Feb. 1704 Kingston was present at a gathering in the St James’s townhouse of Sunderland, along with Wharton, Somers, Halifax, Rivers, Newcastle, Richard Savage, 4th Earl Rivers, Charles Bodville Robartes, 2nd earl of Radnor, and Henry Herbert, Baron Herbert of Chirbrury, among others. Ossulston noted that this meeting lasted from six in the evening and may still have been going on after ten at night when he left, and ‘there tea drunk and our discourse was only about the Scotch plot which the papers was before the House of Lords’. TNA, C104/116, pt. 1, Ossulston’s diary, 13 Feb. 1704. Kingston had been involved in the investigations and proceedings concerning the alleged ‘Scotch Plot’ from the moment it first came to the House’s attention. On 20 Dec. 1703 he reported from the committee assigned to draw up an address to the queen thanking her for her promise to keep the House informed of developments in the investigation of those suspected of involvement in the plot. He was then assigned, with Talbot Yelverton, 2nd Viscount Longueville, to attend the queen to ascertain when she would be ready to receive the address, and he reported her answer at the end of the day’s proceedings.

Two days after the dinner at Sunderland’s house, on 15 Feb. 1704, Kingston again formed part of a delegation to present the queen with an address requesting her to make available to the House further papers bearing on the conspiracy and the involvement of the secretary of state Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham. On 3 Mar. Kingston was a teller, Charles Finch, 4th earl of Winchilsea, telling for the opposite side, in the division on the motion that the select committee considering these papers should agree to the conditions laid down by the informant in possession of the key to the ciphered letters, that the information gleaned from them should only be divulged to the committee and the queen and not to the House at large. HMC Lords, n.s. v. 303. It is highly probable that further dinners with Whig peers (which were attended by Kingston on 18 and 31 Mar. and duly recorded by Ossulston) were also held to discuss strategy in prosecuting the allegations against Nottingham. Ossulston’s diary, 18 and 31 Mar. 1704. These were ultimately successful and the Tory secretary of state resigned his post on 22 Apr. 1704.

Kingston’s most frequent role in the sessions of 1703–4 and 1704–5 was as teller. Apart from the tellerships he exercised in divisions on the occasional conformity bill and the Scotch Plot, he was also teller in divisions on: the motion to reverse the original judgment against the petitioner Matthew Ashby in Ashby v. White (14 Jan. 1704); the motion to reverse the original decree against Anthony Rowe^‡ in Rowe v. Cockayne (25 Feb. 1704); the previous question on the motion to appoint a day for the first reading of the subsidy bill (4 Mar. 1704); the motion in the committee of the whole House to agree to an amendment replacing one of the Commons’ choices for commissioner in the public accounts bill (16 Mar. 1704); and the motion to give the estate bill of William Henry Granville, 3rd earl of Bath, a first reading (17 Jan. 1705). HMC Lords, n.s. v. 262, 547, 561; vi. 250. In all these divisions his opposite tellers were Tories, including some of his frequent counterparts: Scarsdale, Abingdon, Anglesey and Winchilsea, as well as Peregrine Osborne, Baron Osborne (later 2nd duke of Leeds). On 12 Mar. 1705 Kingston registered his proxy with Townshend for the remaining two days of the session, and of Anne’s first Parliament, which was dissolved on 5 April.

A political analysis of the members of the peerage drawn up in preparation for the following Parliament categorized Kingston as a supporter of the Hanoverian Succession. Certainly he showed his Whig and Hanoverian proclivities in the elections of the summer of 1705, when he exerted his regional and political influence and showed a determination to unseat ‘tackers’ in a number of constituencies. For Nottingham he was content to see his second cousin William Pierrepont^‡ returned again, but he and other Whigs such as Newcastle and Scrope Howe^‡, Viscount Howe [I], unsuccessfully put forward two candidates (their names are unfortunately not known) to defeat the other sitting member, Robert Sacheverell^‡, who had been a tacker. HP Commons, 1690–1715, ii. 466. He also put his influence behind the attempt to defeat the two sitting members for Lincolnshire, ‘they being tackers’. HMC Rutland, ii. 182. He was one of a group of Whig peers with interests in Wiltshire who urged Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, to persuade his younger brother Maurice Ashley^‡ to stand as a Whig candidate for the county. TNA, PRO 30/24/20/87; HP Commons, 1690–1715, ii. 650.

Kingston maintained his frequent attendance in the House in the first session of the new Parliament, of 1705–6, when he came to 68 per cent of the sitting days. He first took his seat on 31 Oct. 1705, about a week into the proceedings, and on 27 Nov. reported to the House from the committee assigned to draw up an address to the queen encouraging her to maintain a good correspondence with the United Provinces and the other allies. The next month he helped to introduce the Scottish military leader John Campbell, 2nd duke of Argyll [S], to the House under his English title as earl (later duke) of Greenwich, on 3 Dec. 1705. Nicolson, London Diaries, 317.

Kingston was particularly busy in February and March 1706. In early February he became involved in the debates with the Commons over the ‘whimsical’ place clause they wished to add to the regency bill. On 7 Feb. he was appointed a manager for a conference on the House’s own amendments to the clause, about which the country Members of the Commons objected. Upon report of the conference, the House resolved to insist on its amendment and Kingston was placed on the committee assigned to draw up the reasons for insisting which were to be presented at a subsequent conference. These reasons were ready three days later when Kingston attended another conference as one of the House’s managers. He was a manager once again for the final conference of 19 Feb. when both Houses compromised over the clause in order to get the bill passed. Kingston was also a manager for a conference on 22 Feb. on the House’s amendments to a bill to allow two merchants to import French wines. He was only a teller twice in this session, and that only on one day. On 23 Feb. he told first in the division in the committee of the whole House on whether a clause should be made part of the bill to restore to William King, archbishop of Dublin, lands he had purchased from the trustees of the forfeited Irish lands. The committee having adjourned and the House resumed, he was a teller on the final question whether to appoint a day for the third reading of this bill. In both divisions his opposite teller was his former brother-in-law the 4th earl of Denbigh.

Kingston’s decrease in activity as a teller appears to have been compensated for by an increased role as chairman of select committees on legislation. Between 25 Feb. and 11 Mar. he reported five finished bills from committee, four of them private estate or naturalization bills, as well as the bill for more efficient collection of charity money. On 9 Mar. he was placed on the committee to draw up an address stating the House’s resolutions concerning ‘the oppressions the province of Carolina labours under’ through its assembly’s recent legislation to enforce conformity to the Church of England in the colony. On that same day he was one of the small number of managers who attended the first conference requested by the Commons to hear their vote condemning the open published letter from Sir Rowland Gwynne^‡ to Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford. Two days later all the members present in the chamber, including Kingston, were appointed managers for two conferences in which a final address roundly condemning Gwynne’s Letter was hammered out between the Houses.

On a more personal matter, on 18 Feb. 1706 Kingston’s brother-in-law William Cheyne^‡, 2nd Viscount Newhaven [S], usually known as Lord Cheyne, brought up from the Commons (where Cheyne had probably been instrumental in its passage) a bill for vesting the inheritance of property that Kingston had recently purchased in Acton, Middlesex, in his heir, William Pierrepont, for whom Cheyne was later to act as guardian. The bill was committed the following day and reported without amendment only four days later, on 23 Feb., when it passed the House. It received the royal assent at the prorogation of 19 Mar. 1706.

Marquess of Dorchester and Junto associate, 1706–10

Kingston’s enhanced status, particularly as his colleagues among the Junto began increasingly to encroach into the ministry and political power, is reflected in a number of appointments made or projected in the summer recess between sessions and by his elevation in the peerage in December 1706. He was appointed a commissioner for the union with Scotland in early April 1706, where he joined many of his colleagues among the Whigs. At the same time it was rumoured that he was one of several Junto competitors, such as Wharton and Bolton, in the running to replace Ormond, as lord lieutenant of Ireland. In June 1706 he was appointed custos rotulorum of Wiltshire in the place of the Tory Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth. Lockhart Mems. 118; KSRL, Simpson-Methuen corresp. ms c163, Simpson to Methuen, 13 Apr. 1706. His patent making him marquess of Dorchester, his great-uncle’s former title which had been extinguished in 1680, passed the great seal on 23 Dec. 1706 and contained a special remainder, failing heirs male to Kingston, in favour of his uncle Gervase Pierrepont, Baron Pierrepont of Ardglass [I] (later Baron Pierrepont of Hanslope). It can be no coincidence that Dorchester’s patent was sealed on the same day as that raising his friend Wharton to be an earl.

Kingston was introduced under his new title on 30 Dec. 1706, between Bolton and Henry Grey, marquess (later duke) of Kent, on a day when the ten peers recently created or elevated in the brief period 14–30 Dec. (including Kent himself) were all introduced in the House. Nicolson, London Diaries, 405. He had been sitting in the House during the 1706–7 session fairly regularly from its opening day (3 Dec.) and throughout maintained an attendance rate of 57 per cent. As a commissioner for the union and a Whig, Dorchester almost certainly worked to push the Act of Union through the House. It is clear from Ossulston’s diary that the marquess was a regular participant at dinners of Whig peers in late January and early February 1707, and particularly at the height of the debates in early March, when Ossulston records Dorchester, Wharton, Halifax, Carlisle, Bolton, Manchester and Cornwallis as his companions at two late dinners held in a tavern after two particularly gruelling days of debates in the House. TNA, C104/116, pt. 1, Ossulton’s diary, 24 Jan., 3, 15, 24 Feb. 1707.

In the period between the final passage of the Act of Union on 6 Mar. 1707 and the convening of the first session of the new Parliament of Great Britain on 23 Oct., Dorchester consolidated his interest in Nottingham with appointment as a freeman and then recorder of the borough following the death of Devonshire. Nottingham Bor. Recs. vi. 36, 106, 314. He attended a little over two-thirds of the sittings of the 1707–8 session, and was involved in composing a number of addresses to the queen. On 18 Dec. 1707 he was placed on the drafting committee for an address of thanks to the queen for her speech regarding the war, while the following day he was assigned by the committee of the whole House to assist in drawing up an address to insist that there could be ‘no peace without Spain’. On 4 Mar. 1708 he was placed on the committee to draft an address to the queen thanking her for submitting to the House the papers regarding the threatened French invasion of Scotland and assuring her of their willingness to assist and protect her. Earlier, on 7 Feb. 1708, he alone dissented – that is, his name appears singly and separately from the further 25 who signed a protest with written reasons for their opposition – from the passage of the bill to abolish the Scottish Privy Council. In this he took a stance opposed to the Junto, suggesting that he retained his political independence, in the same way as his fellow opponent of the bill, Townshend, who objected to some of the Junto’s more belligerent anti-ministerial tactics in the 1707–8 session. Beinecke Lib. OSB mss fc 37, vol. 13, no. 19; Pols. in Age of Anne, 242. Dorchester chaired and reported from two committees of the whole House on one day, 19 Feb., when he led proceedings on the bill for the export of white woollen cloth and for that to encourage the native dyeing of white cloth. On the penultimate day of the session, 31 Mar., he was a manager for a conference on the House’s amendments to the bill to encourage trade to America.

Despite his brief aberration on the Scottish Privy Council bill, in the months following the dissolution of 15 Apr. 1708 Dorchester became even more integrated in the inner counsels of the Junto and benefitted from that group’s own progress in further infiltrating the queen’s ministry. On 26 June 1708, on the eve of the Whigs’ national victory in the 1708 general elections, Dorchester was sworn to the Privy Council, along with his Junto colleagues Bolton and Wharton. Add. 28041, f. 16. Sometime later that summer Dorchester and Bolton participated in a conference convened by Sidney Godolphin, earl of Godolphin, in order to discuss the terms by which the Whigs would support the lord treasurer in the forthcoming Parliament. Pols. in Age of Anne, 289–90.

In December 1708 it was reported that Dorchester was being set up to be the ‘rival’ of Charles Seymour, 6th duke of Somerset, who had seriously fallen out with the Junto. Add. 4163, f. 263; HMC Downshire, i. 867. By that point Dorchester had been consistently present in the first session, of 1708–9, of the new Parliament since its first day, and overall he attended close to three-quarters of that session’s sittings, his highest attendance level of any session in the period before 1715. On 19 Nov. 1708 he reported from the committee assigned to draw up an address of condolence to the queen for the death of the prince consort and the House decided that Dorchester should present the address to the queen in her mourning by himself and unattended. Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 374. Later, on 23 Dec., he was assigned to help draft a happier address to the queen, congratulating her on the capture of Ghent. On 1 Mar. 1709 he was placed on another drafting committee for an address encouraging her to maintain a good ‘friendship’ with the Allies and to demand the removal of the Pretender from French territory.

Dorchester joined in the Junto–Squadrone attack on Godolphin and his Scottish ally James Douglas, 2nd duke of Queensberry [S], by voting on 21 Feb. 1709 that Queensberry could not take part in the election of the Scottish representative peers because he had a post-Union British title as duke of Dover. He was involved in another Scottish matter on 25 Mar. when he was a teller on the motion to adjourn the Committee of the Whole House considering the treasons bill. His opposite teller was William Johnston, marquess of Annandale [S], who would have been opposed to the bill and its claims to ‘improve’ the Union. HMC Lords, n.s. viii. 288. On the last day of the session, 21 Apr., Dorchester reported to the House from a conference on the amendment to the bill to make the act against counterfeiting coin perpetual. In late May Arthur Maynwaring^‡ reported to Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough, his own presence at a ‘great feast’ which Halifax and some of those peers now most closely affiliated with the Junto, such as Dorchester, Bolton, Carlisle and William Cavendish, 2nd duke of Devonshire, also attended.

Dorchester maintained an attendance rate of 69 per cent in the following session, of 1709–10. In February 1710 he chaired and reported from two committees – a select committee on a private bill which he reported on 15 Feb., and, 12 days later, a committee of the whole House on the recruitment bill. Not surprisingly he voted Dr Henry Sacheverell guilty on 20 Mar. 1710; it seems likely that discussion of the trial featured during a dinner he attended on the last day of that month, with Carlisle, Ossulston and William Henry Bentinck, 2nd earl (later duke) of Portland, also in attendance. Ossulston’s diary, 31 Mar. 1710.

In opposition, 1710–14

Dorchester worked closely with his cousin Newcastle in the summer of 1710 to effect Whig victories in the Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire elections of that autumn. For Nottinghamshire the two grandees supported the candidacy of Viscount Howe [I]. Dorchester was a more committed Whig than Newcastle, who was at that time currying favour with Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford, and was later to retain his office (as lord privy seal) in Harley’s ministry. Dorchester wanted Howe to stand with the sitting Whig member John Thornhagh^‡, who had already angered Newcastle over a dispute about the depredations of the deer in Sherwood Forest. Newcastle was opposed to Thornhagh’s candidacy on both political and personal grounds and thought that his standing would only take votes away from Howe. Newcastle’s agents, John Plumptre^‡ and George Gregory^‡, were at pains to try to convince Dorchester to desist from his support for Thornhagh, but the resulting confusion led to Thornhagh coming at the bottom of the poll, handily beaten by the Tory candidate William Levinz^‡. Howe stood at the top of the poll. HP Commons, 1690–1715, ii. 458, 466; UNL, Portland (Holles) mss, Pw2 74, 138, 187.

The two peers seem to have worked more in concert, although no more successfully, in neighbouring Lincolnshire, where from July 1710 Dorchester was encouraging Newcastle to press his client, the sitting member George Whichcot^‡, to stand again. There was a breach between Whichcot and the other knight for the county, Peregrine Bertie* , styled Lord Willoughby of Eresby and later 2nd duke of Ancaster, who now went over to the Tories, and Whichcot found himself standing alone as a Whig. He was defeated, at great expense to himself, and in October requested that his patrons Newcastle and Dorchester help defray his costs (£160) with a suitable contribution. HP Commons, 1690–1715, ii. 356; UNL, Portland (Holles) mss, Pw2 138, 291/1. In Wiltshire Dorchester’s attempts to break the Tory hold on the county, which he had tried to do in his role of custos rotulorum by purging the commission of the peace in 1708 and 1709, was still unsuccessful and the sitting members were once more returned. HP Commons, 1690–1715, ii. 650.

Harley, not surprisingly, considered Dorchester a certain opponent of his new ministry, and Dorchester did not disappoint these expectations in the first session (1710–11) of the new Tory-led Parliament. His attendance dipped slightly, to 62 per cent of its sitting days, but he was in the core of the Whig opposition, particularly in the debates in January 1711 on the conduct of the Spanish war. On 11 Jan. he submitted before the House the petition of the general Charles O’Hara, Baron Tyrawley [I], requesting more time to submit his answer to the charges against him for his role in the Spanish campaign. Dorchester also subscribed to the protests that day against the rejection of this petition, as well as that of Tyrawley’s fellow general Henri Massue de Ruvigny, earl of Galway [I], and against the motion that these commanders in Spain were responsible for the military debacle of Almanza. The following day he further joined in the protest against the resolution censuring the ministers in office in 1706–7 for approving an offensive war in Spain. Timberland, ii. 308-9, 331.

In the first two days of February 1711 Dorchester received the proxies of his colleagues Newcastle (vacated 19 Feb.) and Ossulston (vacated 5 Feb.), and he may have used these to vote against two resolutions made on 3 Feb. further condemning the previous ministry for its ‘neglect of service’ in not adequately providing supplies for the forces in Spain. Dorchester himself subscribed to the protests against them. On 9 Feb., still holding Newcastle’s proxy, he voted and signed the protests against the three resolutions that ordered the text of the protest of 3 Feb. to be expunged from the Journal. He reported a private bill from committee on 26 Feb. and later in the session, on 9 May, he was made a manager for a conference on the House’s amendments to the bill for repairing highways between Dunstable and Hockley. On 21 May he received the proxies of both Wharton and Herbert of Chirbury, but Dorchester himself stopped attending the House on 22 May, and he in turn registered his proxy with Wharton on 7 June for the remaining five days of the session until the prorogation of 12 June.

From 1710 family matters also bulked large in Dorchester’s personal and parliamentary life. Negotiations for the marriage of his only son, William, Lord Kingston, to Rachel Boynton, ‘a Wiltshire lady of a vast fortune’, had been going on for some time. Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 47, ff. 257–8. As early as November 1709 William Jessop^‡ reported to his master Newcastle that, by the terms of the settlement, the merchant John Hall, dubbed ‘godfather’ to Rachel Boynton but in fact her biological father, was to supply a portion of £20,000 to the bride and settle an estate worth £2,000 p.a. on the young couple at his death. Dorchester in turn was to settle £3,000 p.a. upon them for the moment, of which £1,000 was to revert to Dorchester if Hall, then 78 years old, died before him. Portland (Holles) mss, Pw2 136. In 1710 Edward Wortley Montagu, the frustrated suitor to Dorchester’s eldest daughter Lady Mary, estimated that all told this marriage would add £60,000 to the family’s estate, by which he hoped Dorchester would be able to increase Lady Mary’s portion. Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ed. Halsband, i. 68. On 25 Jan. 1711 Dorchester petitioned to bring in a bill to confirm the marriage treaty of the underage couple and to settle his estate and that of John Hall in preparation of the marriage. The bill itself was given its first reading in the House on 20 Feb. 1711 and was committed two days later. ‘Lord Dorchester’s long bill’, as William Nicolson, bishop of Carlisle, termed it, came back from committee with several amendments on 9 Mar. and was passed the following day. It received the royal assent on 16 May, four days after the wedding between Lord Kingston and Rachel Boynton had been formally celebrated. HMC Lords, n.s. ix. 95; Nicolson, London Diaries, 557; Thynne pprs. 47, ff. 257–8.

In July 1711 Dorchester was in in his turn ousted from his position as custos rotulorum in Wiltshire and replaced by his local rival Weymouth, who proceeded to rid the bench of Whigs just as Dorchester had earlier done to the Tories. HMC Portland, iv. 693–4. In the days preceding the commencement of the session of 1711–12 Dorchester may have taken part in the negotiations with Nottingham to seal his support for the Whig motion that there should be ‘no peace without Spain’. In the first days of the session, 7–8 Dec. 1711, Dorchester duly voted, against the wishes of the ministry, to include the ‘No Peace without Spain’ clause in the Address to the queen. He further opposed the ministry by voting on 20 Dec. that James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton, as a Scottish peer, could not sit in the House of Lords under his British title of duke of Brandon. He was appointed on 22 Dec. to the drafting committee for an address requesting Anne not to make a separate peace with France at the ongoing peace conference at Utrecht.

As the proxy records from April 1707 to April 1710 are now missing it cannot be determined what role Dorchester played in those years in the extensive and well-organized network of proxy-sharing among Whigs, but it is highly probable that he exchanged proxies in these earlier years with two peers who by 1712 had become especially close friends – Wharton and Carlisle. In his will of April 1715 Wharton named his ‘dear friends’ Dorchester and Carlisle executors and trustees of his estate, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was to reminisce many years after her father’s death that ‘Lord Carlisle was the most intimate friend of my father’ and that it was only Carlisle’s preference for a retired life that prevented Dorchester from naming him a trustee for his underage grandson in his will. PROB 11/548; Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, iii. 162. Certainly in the 1711–12 session, when Dorchester was present at fewer than half of the sittings, these three formed a tight group of proxy-sharing to ensure that at no point were any of their votes unaccounted for in the House. Wharton, for example, held Dorchester’s proxy for the two days of 11–12 Mar. 1712, while Carlisle later had it for a longer period, from 2 Apr. to 8 May 1712. Dorchester in fact had last sat in the House before assigning his proxy on 28 Mar. and Carlisle held the fort in Westminster for this period while Dorchester, Wharton and several of their Whig companions were enjoying the races at Newmarket.

All of them were hurriedly summoned back to Parliament by an express dispatch from Townshend on 1 May warning that several important votes on the peace were forthcoming, though Dorchester was the last of the group to arrive back on 8 May. Pols. in Age of Anne, 308–9. Issues of the peace being negotiated at Utrecht continued to occupy his attention in the month after his return. On 28 May 1712 he voted and signed the protest against the ministry’s refusal to countenance an address condemning the ‘restraining orders’ preventing the commander-in-chief, the duke of Ormond, from conducting an offensive war against France. Only a few days later, on 7 June, Dorchester joined in a further protest against the House’s refusal to include in an address to the queen a clause advocating a ‘mutual guaranty’ with the United Provinces to ensure the Hanoverian Succession. Timberland, ii. 374, 379. Wharton again registered his proxy with Dorchester on 12 June, but Dorchester himself left the House for the session the following day and both peers were unrepresented in the House during the session’s final days until the prorogation on 21 June.

Dorchester only came to 27 of the 77 meetings of the brief session of the spring of 1713, when the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht were announced to the House. By this time, though, most of his attention would have been taken up with countering a petition submitted on 5 May by his brother-in-law Lord Cheyne, who was acting as Lord and Lady Kingston’s guardian. Cheyne claimed that Lady Kingston’s father, John Hall, had died before the passage of the act of 1711 confirming the marriage settlement, including Rachel’s portion of £20,000, and that Dorchester had recently received a decree ordering the payment of the portion, with interest, out of the estate, which, Cheyne argued, could not support such a large amount and continue to pay for the other provisions of Hall’s will such as the maintenance of Lord and Lady Kingston. On 18 May the House, after hearing counsel for both sides in the matter, rejected Cheyne’s petition and upheld the decree in Dorchester’s favour. HMC Lords, n.s. x. 66–67.

Dorchester then absented himself from the House until 13 June and thereby missed most of the contentious debates and divisions over the malt tax and the motion to dissolve the Union. He left the House again at the end of June, probably because of the sudden death from smallpox of the young Lord Kingston, in the first days of July 1713. Wentworth Pprs. 341–2. In memory of this early death, years later Lord Kingston’s own young son was to be one of the first subjects of the experiments in smallpox inoculation carried out by his aunt Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ii. 49. Dorchester was made administrator of the late Lord Kingston’s estate and guardian of his two infant children, while Lady Kingston, herself still a minor, renounced her claims to the estate and leased to Dorchester, as trustee, her jointure lands and mansion in West Dean.

Dorchester was present at 63 per cent of the sittings of the first session of the 1713 Parliament, in the spring of 1714. He attended consistently until the adjournment of 19 Mar., but was not present when the session reconvened on 31 Mar. to consider the queen’s speech. He registered his proxy with James Berkeley, 3rd earl of Berkeley, on 1 Apr. to represent him as the House considered the papers regarding the contentious commercial treaty with Spain and the condition of the Catalans after the peace. He returned to the House on 8 Apr., when the political temperature was rising as the Whigs forced through a number of addresses in support of the Hanoverian Succession and against the Pretender. In the days following his return, Dorchester held his full complement of proxies from two fellow Whigs – from Cornwallis (from 9 Apr.) and from Wharton (from 13 Apr.). He himself would only have been able to use these proxies for a short time, as he absented himself from the House from 16 April. Upon Wharton’s return to the House on 24 Apr., the absent Dorchester in turn registered his proxy with him, which was vacated when Dorchester reappeared in the House on 5 May. Dorchester may have returned to oversee the passage through Parliament of Lady Kingston’s Estate Act, which confirmed by statute the arrangement made in 1713 whereby the underage Lady Kingston leased her jointure lands and mansion in West Dean to Dorchester as trustee for her and her two infant children. Lady Kingston petitioned on 11 May for the bill to be brought in, but its first reading was delayed to 1 June by the House’s two-week adjournment in mid-May. It went through both Houses quickly and received the royal assent on 9 July. HMC Lords, n.s. x. 331–2.

Nottingham considered Dorchester an opponent of the Schism bill and Dorchester began attending the House regularly from 27 May as that bill was fought over in the House. He was present on 15 June to sign the protest against its passage. The day following this protest he received the proxy of Manchester, who did not reappear in the House for the remainder of the session. Dorchester himself left the House after the sitting of 25 June and registered his proxy with Cornwallis three days later, but was back in the House the very next day, thus vacating this proxy. He continued to sit regularly until the prorogation of 9 July.

In these last years of the reign of Anne, Dorchester was, aside from political concerns, heavily preoccupied by the marriages of his three daughters. His eldest, Mary, caused him the most aggravation as Dorchester did not approve of her relationship with the Whig member for Huntingdon, Edward Wortley Montagu^‡; he rebuffed proposals for a marriage in 1710. Lady Mary was promised to another suitor but she permanently estranged herself from her father by continuing her secretive epistolary courtship with Wortley Montagu and by eventually eloping with and marrying him in August 1712. Dorchester’s second daughter, Evelyn, married in March 1712 (with his approval) John Leveson Gower, 2nd Baron (later earl) Gower, who was later to distinguish himself, to Dorchester’s disappointment, as a Tory. HMC 5th Rep. 189. In 1714 Dorchester celebrated another marriage which was also ultimately to disappoint him, when his third daughter, Frances, married John Erskine, 22nd earl of Mar [S]. HMC Portland, v. 473. Mar’s later conversion to Jacobitism must have shocked and appalled his Whig and Hanoverian father-in-law, and the rigours of a life in exile appear to have seriously damaged the mental stability of the countess of Mar. Dorchester himself married on 2 Aug. 1714, after 17 years as a widower and a ‘lover of the ladies’ (as John Macky had earlier described him), his new wife being Isabella, a sister of his Whig colleague the 2nd earl of Portland. The wedding unfortunately coincided with the queen’s death and the hurried meeting of Parliament to arrange for the succession. Both Dorchester and Portland appeared at the beginning of the session but immediately registered their proxies on 2 Aug. (Dorchester with his recent proxy donor Manchester), so that they could attend the wedding. Add. 61463, ff. 85–86.

Hanoverian Succession, 1715–26

Dorchester could clearly expect favour from George I owing to his long-term support for the Hanoverian succession and in the months after August 1714 he was laden with offices and honours. In December he replaced Weymouth, once again, as custos rotulorum of Wiltshire and was appointed chief justice in eyre north of the river Trent (which he resigned in March 1717). He was promoted to a dukedom on 10 Aug. 1715 and on 19 Dec. 1716 he was made lord privy seal. He was briefly lord president of the council from February 1719 to June 1720 before returning to the privy seal. Kingston was made a knight of the garter on 23 June 1719 and served several times as a lord justice or regent of the realm during the king’s absences in Hanover. He continued to attend the House regularly and came to 70 per cent of the sitting days of George I’s first Parliament of 1715–22. There he acted as one of the principal Whigs, helping to introduce his old friend Wharton when he first sat in the House as marquess of Wharton on 21 Mar. 1715. A more detailed account of Kingston’s parliamentary activities under George I will be found in the next section of this work.

At his death on 16 Mar. 1726 Kingston owned mansion houses at Thoresby Hall and Holme Pierrepont in Nottinghamshire, West Dean in Wiltshire, Acton in Middlesex and in Arlington Street in St James, Westminster, as well as at Tonge Castle in Shropshire and Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire; the last two he had inherited in May 1715 at the death without heirs of his uncle Gervase, Baron Pierrepont of Hanslope. He placed his vast landed estate into the hands of trustees who were to manage the fee simple parts of the estate for the benefit of Kingston’s five daughters and one granddaughter. The property in Lincolnshire was to be held in trust for the countess of Mar on the sole condition that she and her heirs conform to the Church of England and reside in England. PROB 11/602. The entailed part of the estate, largely in Nottinghamshire, was to be managed by the trustees during the minority of Kingston’s grandson and heir, Evelyn Pierrepont^†, 2nd duke of Kingston. He took after, indeed exceeded, his grandfather in his enjoyment of life as a bon viveur and man of fashion, and was, briefly, the ‘second’ husband of Elizabeth Chudleigh, whose trial for bigamy scandalized society in 1776. The 2nd duke, however, did not follow in his grandfather’s political footsteps and played almost no role in the Parliaments of George II and George III.