BENNET, John (1616-95)

John Bennet’s family first made its way in the world in the early seventeenth century through the exertions of his grandfather, Sir John Bennet^‡, an ambitious civil lawyer who rose to prominence in the law courts of both York and Westminster, and who purchased the estates of Dawley and Harlington in Middlesex in 1607. Bennet’s father, Sir John Bennet, lived more the life of a country gentleman, most famous for the use of his house at Uxbridge as the meeting place for the abortive Uxbridge Treaty negotiations of February 1645. He died in 1658 and passed these Middlesex estates to his eldest son and namesake, an officer in the royalist army in the Civil War. A ‘Col. John Bennet of Uxbridge’ who petitioned the king for local office in 1660 and recounted his military service and sufferings for the Stuarts is almost certainly the subject of this biography. Ibid. Bennet rose to prominence after the Restoration, owing both to this lucrative inheritance, which endowed him with wealth and local influence and offices in Middlesex, and to the meteoric rise at court of his younger brother Henry Bennet, later earl of Arlington. By his first marriage he became stepfather to the underage John Sheffield, 3rd earl of Mulgrave (later duke of Buckingham and Normanby). In 1662 Sir John was recommended by the king to the electors of the Berkshire borough of Wallingford as the replacement for their recently deceased burgess George Fane^‡. HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 623-4. From 1664 he was involved with Sir John Monson^‡ in the consortium for providing alum from the northern mines of the young earl of Mulgrave, and when the farm of the mines was leased to other speculators in 1666, Bennet was granted £400 p.a. out of its rent. CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 366; 1665-6, pp. 330, 400; 1667-8, pp. 196, 408. From 1666 to 1672 he acted as deputy postmaster and assignee for five years of the profits arising from his brother’s ten-year lease of the office of postmaster general. His tenure was controversial as his bullying and high-handed manner elicited many complaints, and he often charged postage on proclamations and other official dispatches, which was unprecedented and opened him to charges of peculation. CSP Dom. 1667, p. 481; 1667-8, pp. 35, 183, 248, 344; 1671-2, p. 2; CTB, viii. 1139-40, 1859.

By 1676 Bennet was gradually divesting himself of offices and responsibilities, shoring up his income instead with a number of shrewd and successful investments. In 1671 he joined a consortium to farm the customs and between 1672-4 he purchased many fee farm rents in a wide variety of counties – Suffolk, Norfolk (including the rents of the city of Norwich), Gloucestershire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire. CSP Dom. 1671, p. 407; TNA, C104/113/2, Fee Farm Rents purchased by Sir John Bennet. He maintained an interest in each of these far-flung counties, which may account for his appointment as a commissioner of assessment in so many of them during the 1670s. He, perhaps with his brother, had invested in a plot of land in St. James’s Square during its earliest development and by 1676 it was sufficiently inhabitable for him to reside in it and occasionally rent out for profit. Dasent, app. A; Survey of London, xxix. 78-79.

He sat in the Commons until the dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament. As a client of his brother and a courtier he was considered a government supporter for much of the time. By 1676, though, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds) considered Bennet’s membership among his followers in the Commons uncertain, probably owing to Bennet’s loyalty to Arlington, who had been effectively removed from influence by Danby. Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, considered Bennet ‘triply vile’ in 1677, and he was accused in an opposition pamphlet of this time, A Seasonable Argument, to have ‘got of the poor indigent Cavaliers’ money £26,000, and other ways £40,000’. In the weeks preceding the first election in 1679 he was numbered by the opposition among the ‘unanimous club’, but he did not stand for that election nor for any subsequent ones. HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 623-4.

On 24 Nov. 1682, probably as a delayed gratification to his brother Arlington, Bennet was raised to the peerage as Baron Ossulston, named after the Middlesex hundred in which his manor of Dawley was located. He was one of 12 individuals whose creations and promotions passed the Great Seal in November and December 1682 as part of Charles II’s campaign to confer public marks of favour on loyal courtiers and converts from the opposition. Ossulston first sat in the House on the first day of James II’s Parliament, 19 May 1685, introduced by William Paget, 7th Baron Paget and Charles West, 5th Baron De la Warr. He came to three-quarters of the sittings of that Parliament and was named to 11 committees on legislation. On his third day in the House, 23 May, he was placed on the committee for the bill against the clandestine marriage of minors, which committee he chaired on 27 May. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, p. 379. On 30 May, as a member of the subcommittee for the Journal, he signed his approval of the account of the proceedings in the House on 23-26 May. Of particular relevance to him, considering later events, was his nomination on 15 June to a committee of 25 members to consider the bill for consolidating the revenue owing to the king from the profits from the Post Office.

Ossulston was enough of a political cipher, seen perhaps as principally concerned with feathering his own nest, that none of the commentators, whether English, French, or Dutch, who in 1687-8 tried to analyse the attitudes of the peerage to James II’s proposed repeal of the Test Acts, could determine where he stood on this matter. However, he did turn against James II, fiercely, owing to the decision made in January 1687 by the lord treasurer Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester, that Ossulston owed £12,375 for the postage that he as deputy postmaster had charged on official correspondence which should have been carried free. In the event a small reduction was allowed and Ossulston paid £12,000. CTB, viii. 1139-40, 1859. A few years later Roger Morrice was to attribute to this act the ‘prejudice’ of Ossulston’s son and heir Charles Bennet, 2nd Baron Ossulston (later earl of Tankerville) against James II, ‘who dealt severely with his father’. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 497.

Ossulston supported the prince of Orange during the invasion in 1688. He was one of the 19 members of the House who subscribed to the petition of 16 Nov. 1688 for a free parliament, and, after the king’s first flight, he signed the Guildhall Declaration to William of Orange on 11 December. Bodl. Tanner 28, f. 249; Kingdom without a King, 71-72. As a peer resident in the capital, he was a regular attender of the provisional government of 11-16 Dec., and signed many of the orders the lords meeting at Guildhall sent out to maintain civil government during the king’s absence. On 15 Dec. he was commissioned, with Charles North, 5th Baron North and James Brydges, 8th Baron Chandos, to interrogate the lord chancellor George Jeffreys, Baron Jeffreys, as to the whereabouts of the great seal and the writs for Parliament. Kingdom without a King, 67, 85, 92, 109, 114, 115, 117-19; HMC Buckinghamshire, 453-4. After William’s arrival at St. James’s Ossulston took part in the debate on 22 Dec. concerning measures to remove Catholics from the capital. Ossulston suggested that those Catholics who could not supply bail be committed to inns in the City, to be guarded by members of the trained bands. Later, discussing the threat of wandering Irish Catholic soldiers, he complained ‘that there are 2 or 300 of them at his house near Uxbridge; that he is told they are ready to give up their arms, and therefore [he] desires somebody may be appointed to receive them’. Kingdom without a King, 154. He likewise contributed two days later, after James II had fled England for good, to the discussion on the whereabouts of the king and the proper methods of summoning a Parliament in his absence, but the exact nature and content of his intervention was not recorded by George Savile, marquess of Halifax, in his notes. Add. 75366, Halifax’s notes on the debates of 24 Dec. 1688.

Ossulston attended three-fifths of the sitting of the first session of the Convention. After being nominated on its second day, 23 Jan. 1689, to a committee to consider ways of removing papists from Westminster and London, and chairing that committee the following day, Ossulston was noticeably absent from the House in late January and February when all the controversial constitutional issues regarding the disposition of the Crown were debated and resolved. HL/PO/CO/1/4, p. 5. Having avoided taking any contentious positions on this delicate issue, he returned to the House on 1 Mar. and took the oaths to the new monarchs the following day.

In late April 1689 the committee for privileges considered the many breaches of the privilege of the peerage perceived to have been perpetrated during the reign of James II. Ossulston brought to its attention on 30 Apr. the case of his dealings with Rochester and the exchequer over the postage he had embezzled as deputy postmaster general, and particularly the bond for £20,000 that he had been forced to submit as security for payment of any fine. HMC Lords, ii. 88. On 10 May he chaired one meeting of the committee on the bill to establish commissioners of the great seal, and at the end of that month, after having been added to the Journal committee on 17 May, he signed his name against the manuscript account of the proceedings of 22 March. HL/PO/CO/1/4, p. 70. On 14 June he was placed on a drafting committee for an address requesting the king to forbid French papists from coming into Whitehall or St. James’s. July 1689 was a particularly busy month for Ossulston. On 10 July he joined a group of Whigs in dissenting from resolutions that would have disabled Titus Oates from being able to give testimony in court. Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, later recorded that on 30 July Ossulston voted against the decision to adhere to this amendment in the face of the Commons’ continuing objections to it, even though Ossulston does not appear in the presence list in the Journal for that day. On 11 July Ossulston and John West, 6th Baron De la Warr, introduced to the House two eldest sons of peers who had been summoned by writs in acceleration: Charles Berkeley, summoned to the House as Baron Berkeley of Berkeley (later 2nd earl of Berkeley) and Robert Sydney, summoned as Baron Sydney (later 4th earl of Leicester). Ossulston was named to 23 committees on legislation in this session, and on 17 July he chaired a meeting of the committee to consider the bill to recover small tithes. Ibid. p. 147; HMC Lords, ii. 226. Six days later he was part of the group of the former servants to Charles II who petitioned against the bill for a duty on tea and coffee, on the grounds that their salaries and continuing pensions were charged on the revenue from these imposts which the bill wished now to vest in the Crown. Eg. 3346, ff. 78-79.

Ossulston’s attendance level during the second session of the Convention stood at 64 per cent and he was named to nine committees on legislation. Between 16 Nov. 1689 and 21 Jan. 1690 he acted as chairman on ten or so occasions (it is not always clear from the minute books who was chair) for the committee dealing with irregularities in the courts of Westminster Hall. This was a matter in which he took a personal interest as he used the opportunity of these committee meetings to pursue his complaints, earlier voiced in the committee for privileges, against the exchequer and his bond for £20,000. HMC Lords, ii. 313-14; iii. 24; HL/PO/CO/1/4, pp. 275, 293, 315, 340-1. Related to this concern with legal procedure, he protested on 23 Nov. 1689 against the rejection of a proviso in the bill of rights which would have required parliamentary approval for any royal pardon of an impeachment. He was also placed on the ‘committee for inspections’ investigating what were considered to be the judicial murders of William Russell^‡, styled Lord Russell, and Algernon Sydney in 1683, as well as the other committee examining the subornation of witnesses under James II. An allegation that he had made disparaging remarks about a fellow member of the committee for inspections, Edward Clinton, 5th earl of Lincoln, led him to beg the committee’s forbearance. HMC Lords, ii. 288. He was also, on 9 Dec. 1689, placed on the committee of 17 members assigned to draw up an address to the king requesting that the laws against papists be duly put into execution.

After attending 96 per cent of the sittings of the first session of the new Parliament in spring 1690, Ossulston’s attendance in the House dropped precipitously, probably owing to his age, as he was in his late 70s by this time. On 1 and 4 Apr. 1690 Ossulston chaired meetings of a committee that was investigating the high price of coal in the capital, and on 12 Apr. he also chaired the committee on the estate bill of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 2nd earl of Shaftesbury, which he reported to the House two days following. HL/PO/CO/1/4, pp. 389, 391-2, 400; HMC Lords, iii. 25. Ossulston supported the right of the corporation of London to present its case against the surrender of its charter in the preceding reign, and he entered his protest on 13 May 1690 when the time allowed the City’s counsel was curtailed. He came to only a little over a quarter of the meetings of the 1690-1 session, and on the first day of the year 1691 he formally registered his protest against the passage of the bill incorporating the York Buildings Waterworks Company. He maintained the same attendance level for the 1691-2 meeting, and during this session his absence from a division on 24 Nov. was noted by a newsletter writer because he was one of those ‘who was against the party of my Lord Carmarthen’ (as Danby had become). HMC 7th Rep. 209. It was during this session that he registered his proxy for the first time, on 11 Feb. 1692 with the Whig, Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, who had it for the remaining two weeks of the session.

In the following session of 1692-3, when his attendance stood at 36 per cent, he registered his proxy, on 23 Jan. 1693, with another Whig, John Egerton, 3rd earl of Bridgwater, but this was vacated upon Ossulston’s return to the House on 9 February. On 27 Feb. 1693 he chaired the committee for the bill on buying and selling offices. HL/PO/CO/1/5, p. 172; HMC Lords, iv. 364. A week later, on 8 Mar., he protested against the rejection of a proviso to the bill to revive expiring legislation which would have allowed for a relaxation of the restrictions on publishing books without licence. He only came to 14 per cent of the meetings of the following session of 1693-4. On 2 Dec. 1693, while Ossulston was away from the House, counsel for Catherine, the queen dowager, presented a petition requesting the House demand that Ossulston waive his privilege so that a long-delayed cause over who had the right to the fee farm rights of the city of Norwich, which the queen dowager claimed as part of her jointure, could be heard in the courts. Ossulston, who had been away from the House since the beginning of the session in early November, appeared there on 8 Dec. and the matter was referred to the committee for privileges the following day, although there is no record of this case in the committee’s minute book. HMC Lords, n.s. i. 52-53. On 10 Jan. 1694, Ossulston joined the Whigs in protesting against the resolution exonerating the Tory admirals from responsibility for the capture of the Smyrna fleet the previous summer. Eight days after this protest he sat in the House for the last time.

At his death on 11 Feb. 1695 Ossulston was able to leave his surviving family ‘a great estate’. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 438. In his will, drawn up in late 1694, Ossulston gave all his personal estate and the house in Middlesex to his wife and assigned trustees to provide his daughter with a portion of £30,000. She married John Cecil, styled Lord Burleigh (later 6th earl of Exeter) in 1697. To his son and heir Charles he bequeathed his real property, which he took the trouble to entail in the male line. The new Baron Ossulston also inherited an enduring prejudice against James II and a predilection towards the Whigs.