Charles Bennet had Whiggish antecedents and influences from many sides in his early development. In August 1690, when as a fifteen-year old he was made a colonel of militia in Middlesex, he was noted by Roger Morrice as being ‘prejudiced against King James who dealt severely with his father’, John Bennet, Baron Ossulston.
On 12 Dec. 1695, now of age, Ossulston first took his seat in the House and began a long political career. At this point Tankerville was one of the leading spokesmen for the Whigs in the House of Lords. Although Ossulston appears to have been under the influence of his energetic and flamboyant father-in-law, he was not at this point an active member of the House. He diligently attended for the rest of December 1695 and the first week of January 1696, but then his attendance became sporadic; in total he came to only 28 sitting days of the 1695-6 session and was named to only two committees. He left the House on 13 Feb. 1696 and was absent when the Association was introduced in the House. He had to be summoned by a special letter addressed to him on 27 Feb. before he indicated his belief in William III’s ‘lawful and rightful’ rule with his signature to the Association on 14 March. He maintained the same attendance rate of just under a quarter of the sittings in the following session of 1696-7, when he was named to five committees. Ossulston voted on 23 Dec. 1696 in favour of the bill to attaint Sir John Fenwick‡, in the passage of which Tankerville played a major role. Ossulston registered his proxy with his father-in-law on 1 Mar. 1697, and again on 12 Feb. 1698 in the 1697-8 session, when Ossulston came to just over a third of the sittings.
He probably used Tankerville as his proxy at other times during the succeeding Parliaments of 1698-1700 and early 1701, but the relevant proxy registers are now missing. For the Parliament elected in the summer of 1698, Ossulston took his seat on 9 Dec. 1698, but after this late start he attended regularly and came to 45 per cent of the 1698-9 session’s sitting days when he was named to 12 committees on legislation. His attendance dropped steeply in the following session of 1699-1700 when he came to only 16 sittings from 20 Feb. to 22 Mar. 1700. He may have been summoned specifically to take part in the debates surrounding the bill to continue the old, Tory-led, East India Company as a corporation, and on 23 Feb. 1700 he voted against the motion to adjourn into a committee of the whole House to discuss amendments that would further the bill’s progress through the House. He did not, however, join the many Whigs who signed the protest of that day against the bill’s passage.
His attendance dropped even further, to only 13 sittings, in the Parliament which met in early 1701. He first sat on 24 Feb. 1701, when he was named to a committee, and then absented himself until 26 Mar., whereupon he sat for five successive days until leaving the House again on 1 April, the day of his second committee nomination in that session. He did not return for over two months but was probably urgently summoned to return, for he sat again on 17 June, the day of the controversial trial of the impeached Junto peer John Somers, Baron Somers. Over the next week he did his duty by the Junto and voted to acquit both Somers and Edward Russell, earl of Orford. On the day after that latter vote, 24 June 1701, the earl of Tankerville died and bequeathed to his daughter, Ossulston’s wife Mary, a share of his property, including most notably the estate and manor house at Up Park in Harting, west Sussex.
Ossulston first sat in the following Parliament of the first half of 1702 on 9 Jan. 1702 and proceeded to come to exactly half of this Parliament’s sitting days and was named to 15 committees on legislation. He also acted as a teller on 23 Feb. 1700 on the question of whether to add a clause to the bill for the oath of abjuration providing that those clergymen who refused to take the oath by the deadline should nevertheless be allowed to retain their livings for another three months.
He attended half of the sittings of Anne’s first Parliament of 1702-5, although he was more diligent in the first two sessions, coming to 63 per cent of the sittings of each, while his attendance slipped to 25 per cent during the 1704-5 session. He subscribed on 9 Dec. 1702 to the House’s resolution against accepting bills with ‘tacked’ clauses and showed the extent of his opposition to this tactic when he joined the Whig protest against retention of a clause in the bill to settle a revenue on George, prince of Denmark (also duke of Cumberland) which stipulated that he could retain his place in the House and in the Privy Council even after the queen’s death, despite his foreign birth. The Whigs considered this clause to be an unnecessary ‘tack’ on a supply bill which could cast doubt in the future on the rights of a number of other peers of foreign birth, such as William III’s Dutch followers, to sit in the House.
Three days before this protest Ossulston cast his vote in favour of the Whig amendment to the penalty clause in the occasional conformity bill. In this and the following sessions Ossulston was closely involved in proceedings on this controversial bill. On 24 Feb. 1703 he dissented from the resolution that, in the wake of the bill’s defeat in the Commons because of the House’s amendments, the text of these amendments and of the reasons for their inclusion given during a conference should be printed and made publicly available. The household account book of the Junto leader Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron (later marquess of) Wharton, shows that Ossulston was present at a meeting of ten Whig peers at Wharton’s house on 29 Jan. 1703, most likely to discuss the strategy to take at the free conference on the bill which had been scheduled for 1 February.
He continued to attend the House regularly following the defeat of the occasional conformity bill. On the day of that vote, 14 Dec. 1703, his wife’s uncle Ralph, 4th Baron Grey of Warke, petitioned to bring in a bill to compound with various parties to settle the affairs of the troubled estate left to him by his late brother Tankerville. By the terms of the bill Ossulston was to receive a composition of £15,000 to release various estates in Northumberland and London in which his wife had a reversionary interest. Ossulston was absent from the House after 18 Dec. 1703, during the preliminary stages of Grey of Warke’s bill but was present on 12 Jan. 1704 when it was reported as fit to pass with amendments. On 13 Jan. Ossulston met with Grey of Warke ‘about our act of Parliament’ and the following day the bill was passed in the House. It received the royal assent on 24 Feb. 1704.
On 14 Jan. 1704 Ossulston also recorded that he called on his wife’s uncle Charles Berkeley, 2nd earl of Berkeley, to accompany him to the House ‘where there was a cause heard of a writ of error from the King’s Bench in a cause of an elector of Aylesbury in Bucks. The House did not rise till 9 of the clock’. He was on a committee to draw up an address to the queen concerning this matter, better known as the case of the Aylesbury men, as he noted for 15 Jan. that he was in Westminster although the House was not meeting, and ‘there was a committee to draw up a representation but it was adjourned till Monday’. That he had a part in this is suggested by his note three days later that ‘we carried the representation’ to the queen.
there was a report from a committee of seven lords that there was a man who would decipher the gibberish letters and a debate thereupon arose. I was against the man’s deciphering the letters only to the lords [of the committee established to examine the papers on the Plot] and not to the whole House.Ibid. 1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18 Mar. 1704.
Political meetings and dinners hosted at Sunderland’s or Somerset’s came in rapid succession in late March, perhaps especially as Ossulston and his dining companions were placed on the large committee established on 22 Mar. to draw up a statement for the queen of the many resolutions taken by the House regarding the discoveries made in their examination of the Plot.
Clearly by 1704 Ossulston was seen by the Junto as a key member of the House on whom they could rely to assist in prosecuting their political strategies. As the occasional conformity bill came up before the House again in the following session of 1704-5, Ossulston received a letter from Somers on 15 Dec. 1704 requesting his presence in the House that day to help throw out the bill on its first reading.
He came to 45 per cent of the sitting days of the following session of 1705-6, the first of the new Parliament elected in the summer of 1705, and first sat on 27 Nov. 1705. He is recorded as being in the House on 6 Dec. when he almost certainly voted in favour of the motion that the ‘Church was not in danger under the queen’s administration’, for five days after this vote he was one of 12 members appointed to a committee to draft an address to the queen asking her to punish those spreading such reports. When he left the House on 5 Mar. he registered his proxy in favour of Sunderland, who held it for the remaining two weeks of the session.
Ossulston was in Bath during the summer between sessions, and there he first met William Johnston, marquess of Annandale [S], with whom he struck up a lifelong and close friendship. Their friendship was further cemented when they discovered they had a common interest in the borderlands of England and Scotland. On 20 June 1706, two weeks after the first mention of Annandale in the diary, Ossulston became a major landowner in the north through the death without heirs of his wife’s uncle Grey of Warke, whose estate of Chillingham (as well as property in Charterhouse Yard and elsewhere) fell to the Ossulstons.
This may explain his renewed interest in the business of the House during the 1706-7 session which saw the passage of the Act of Union, and when he attended almost three-quarters of the sittings. Ossulston was active in the Whig strategizing for the debates on the Union, and throughout January and February 1707 was a regular member of several mealtime gatherings of peers and Members, consistently listed in detail in his diary, that inevitably would have discussed the proceedings of the House. On 24 Jan. he hosted a Whig dinner in his own house in St James’s Square.
The Act of Union having passed into law, Ossulston came to only 40 per cent of the sittings of the session of 1707-8, only sitting regularly from 16 Jan. 1708 until the last week of March. He returned to the House most likely to keep an eye on proceedings on the bill, first read on 23 Jan. 1708, of his former brother-in-law John Cecil, 6th earl of Exeter, a measure which affected him. Exeter’s first wife had been Ossulston’s sister Annabella. She had brought a £30,000 dowry to the marriage, as well as a detailed marriage settlement involving her jointure lands. She died within two years of the wedding and after her death Exeter, then styled Lord Burleigh, quickly remarried. However, according to the terms of Annabella’s marriage settlement, if she died within five years of the marriage (as she did), £10,000 of the original dowry was to revert to the Ossulstons. Burleigh had entered into his second marriage on the understanding that he and his father John Cecil, 5th earl of Exeter, would take steps to revoke the terms of this settlement. The death of Burleigh’s father in August 1700 had delayed these proceedings, although it is not clear why it took seven years for the new earl of Exeter to bring a bill in Parliament to accomplish the revocation. Ossulston, only a week back in the House, was named to the committee on this bill on 24 Jan. 1708. Despite the threat to a portion of the large dowry originally bestowed at Annabella’s marriage, Ossulston does not appear to have objected to the bill, perhaps because the jointure lands would revert to him, for it went through both houses fairly easily and received the royal assent on 11 Mar. 1708.
His recent inheritance of the Chillingham estate gave Ossulston some electoral influence in Northumberland, which he determined to put to use in the elections of May 1708 when he supported the candidacy of his kinsman and man-of-business Sir John Bennet‡ for a seat for Morpeth.
Ossulston maintained his association with the Junto and other Whigs during the Parliament of 1708, while also increasing his contacts with his Middlesex neighbour John Walker, the clerk assistant to the House of Lords, and with Scottish peers and Members in Westminster. He was present at 62 per cent of the sittings of the session in 1708-9, and first took his seat for continuous attendance on 11 Jan. 1709 (after a token appearance on the first day of the Parliament to take the oaths). That same evening he was at Devonshire House and recorded that ‘here there was a great many other Lords to consult about the Scotch election, as the duke of Newcastle and several other lords’.
From early March 1709 Ossulston began to associate with the Scottish peers in Westminster and their allies, to the point where by 1710 they had become his principal dining companions. On 2 Mar. 1709 he was at dinner at the residence of James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton [S], where was also Annandale, Charles Douglas, 2nd earl of Selkirk [S], and the Scottish Member, Lord Archibald Hamilton‡; four days later Ossulston had the same company in turn over to his house for dinner. On 15 Mar. he was at Annandale’s residence in an even larger company of Scottish peers: Hamilton, John Ker, duke of Roxburghe [S], James Graham, duke of Montrose [S], Thomas Livingstone, Viscount Teviot [S], as well as the English peer Basil Feilding, 4th earl of Denbigh.
After the death of his wife in May 1710, and the sense of isolation it appears to have brought him, Ossulston became even closer with the Scots in London and from the autumn of 1710, when the political landscape was changing greatly with the dissolution of the Parliament and the breakup of the ministry of the ‘duumvirs’, Ossulston became a central member of what has been dubbed a ‘Westminster Anglo-Scottish dining group’. Between 25 Nov. 1710 and 26 June 1711, when Ossulston left London for his Northumbrian estates, he was at 136 mealtime meetings of this group, which had as its inner core the Scottish peers Annandale, John Elphinstone, 4th Baron Balmerino [S], William Livingstone, 2nd Viscount Kilsyth [S], William Keith, 8th earl of Marischal [S], and Archibald Primrose, earl of Rosebery [S], the Scottish Members John Montgomerie‡, William Cochrane‡, Sir James Abercromby‡, George Hamilton‡, Sir Hugh Paterson‡, and John Houston‡, and the English peer William Ferdinand Carey, 8th Baron Hunsdon.
Against this socio-political background, Ossulston attended 56 per cent of the sittings of the 1710-11 session, the first of the Tory-led Parliament elected in the autumn of 1710. He was this time a fairly regular attender from the first day of the session but on 2 Feb. 1711Ossulston registered his proxy with Dorchester for the following three days.
Ossulston was back in time to attend the 1711-12 session on its first day, 7 Dec. 1711, when he voted against the ministry of Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, by supporting the ‘No Peace without Spain’ motion. On these first days of the session he followed his parliamentary activities with dinners with leading Whigs.
The treatment of his Scottish friends may have alienated Ossulston temporarily from the Whigs. Ossulston’s closest companion among the Scots, Annandale, was so incensed by the vote of 20 Dec. that he and Hamilton himself continued their boycott of the House far longer than any of the other Scottish members of Parliament—. For a brief time in the latter stages of this turbulent session, Ossulston supported the Oxford ministry, and he may even have brought his friend Herbert of Chirbury, who had joined him in associating with the boycotting Scottish peers, over too. On 28 May 1712 Ossulston (and Herbert) surprisingly sided with the ministry by voting against the motion for an address to the queen over the ‘restraining orders’ issued to the captain general James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond.
These [peers] had made a sort of agreement that the court should prevent a division, by which means they should not be discovered, but they were gudgeons, for the Court wanted not a majority, but a triumph, to show the people the disparity of numbers, and so they were caught like fools. A great deal of money and promises were spent to work this apostacy.Christ Church, Oxford, Wake mss xvii. f. 329; C. Jones, ‘The Vote in the House of Lords’, PH, xxvi. 169-71, 182-3.
This was certainly a triumph for the ministry, which had a majority of 45 in the Lords of this vote, one of the largest Whig defeats in the session and one which marked the end of concerted Whig opposition to the peace terms negotiated in Utrecht. The session was prorogued two weeks later, on 21 June.
Nevertheless, Jonathan Swift still considered Ossulston an opponent of the ministry in the months preceding the following session of spring 1713 when the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht were formally presented to the House. Ossulston came to half of the meetings of that session, when Oxford fully expected him to oppose the French commercial treaty, if it ever arrived in the House from the Commons. In the first session, in spring 1714, of the following Parliament, Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, saw him as an opponent of the schism bill. Ossulston was present at less than a quarter of that session’s sittings and on 16 Apr. 1714 he registered his proxy with Somerset, but this was vacated two weeks later by his return to the House. He was present for much of the first half of June during the proceedings on the schism bill but did not sign the protest against it on 15 June, and then absented himself from the House for a period of two weeks after the bill’s passage. After returning briefly for one day, he registered his proxy with Bolton on 3 July, who was only able to hold it for a week before the Parliament was prorogued. Ossulston arrived in the House again on 1 Aug. 1714, the first day of the brief session charged with seeing a peaceful transfer of the crown to the elector of Hanover following the death of the queen, and sat in a further eight sittings of that session before the prorogation at the end of August.
In September 1714 Ossulston rented a portion of his townhouse on St James’s Square to the Hanoverian envoy Hans Caspar von Bothmer, and this favour to his representative, as well as Ossulston’s long allegiance to the Whigs, may have prompted George I on 19 Oct. 1714 to create Ossulston earl of Tankerville, his father-in-law’s old title.
Tankerville maintained his Whig loyalties in George I’s new Parliament. On 4 Mar. 1721, Tankerville received the green ribbon of the specifically Scottish Order of the Thistle, fittingly replacing his old friend Annandale, who had died in 1721. He was only the second English peer to receive the honour, which was a tribute to his long association with the Scottish nobility and political class.