BENSON, Robert (1676-1731)

Robert Benson, Baron Bingley, was derided by his contemporaries for his lowly origins and for his rise up the Tory ranks through an advantageous marriage, and has been dismissed by more recent historians for an innocuous ‘moderate’ Toryism and a seemingly slavish devotion to Robert Harley, earl of Oxford. Coxe, Marlborough, vi. 36; Gregg, Queen Anne, 338; K. Feiling, Tory Party 1640-1714, p. 419. At the time of the change of ministry in 1710, before there was any thought of Benson’s becoming a peer, Thomas Wentworth, 2nd Baron Raby (later earl of Strafford) wrote of him and his origins:

Mr. Benson is of no extraction. His father was an attorney and no great character for an honest man, and I think concerned in the affairs of Oliver Cromwell. He left him a good estate in Yorkshire of about £1,500 a year, and an old seat just by Wakefield. This gentleman has been a very good manager and has saved 5 or 6,000 pounds or more. He has lived very handsomely in the country without being a drinker, though very gallant amongst the ladies. Wentworth Pprs. 133.

Benson’s father held a succession of minor local offices during the Interregnum and rose to be clerk of the assizes in the northern circuit of Yorkshire from 1662 to 1673, when he was employed by Thomas Osborne, the future earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), as a treasury official. J.S. Cockburn, Hist. Eng. Assizes, 76, 318. Sir John Reresby^‡ described him as ‘the most notable and formidable man for business of his time, one of no birth, and that had raised himself from being clerk to a country attorney to be clerk of the peace at the Old Bailiff, to clerk of assize of the northern circuit, and to an estate of £2,500 p.a., but not without suspicion of great frauds and oppressions’. Reresby further sourly noted that Benson senior ‘had greatly ingratiated himself with my lord high treasurer under pretence to find out extraordinary ways ... to get the king money’. Reresby Mems. 90-91, 106. When Benson senior died suddenly of apoplexy in July 1676, it was reported that, apart from the £1,500 p.a. in land recorded by Strafford, he also was also possessed of £120,000 in money.

His death came only four months after the birth in March 1676 of his only son Robert who was soon taken into the care of his mother’s new husband, Sir Henry Belasyse^‡. In 1691 Robert Benson attended Christ’s College, Cambridge and then embarked on a tour of the continent in 1693, during which he appears to have studied at the university at Padua during 1694. CSP Dom. 1693, p. 111; H.R.F. Brown, Inglesi e scozzesi all'università di Padova. From about the time of his return in or around 1698 he was engaged in building his residence of Bramham Hall, northwest of Leeds, which took many years to complete. Wentworth Pprs. 133; HMC Portland, v. 533; vi. 139, 182; HMC Dartmouth, i. 318, 319. His parliamentary career started in Norfolk where for the election of May 1702 his brother-in-law, Sir John Wodehouse^‡, stepped aside to allow Benson to take his seat for the borough of Thetford while he tried his fortune (unsuccessfully) for the county seat. HMC Var. vii. 148.

Strafford believed that it was in Italy that Benson ‘had the good fortune to’ strike up a friendship with William Legge, 2nd Baron (later earl of) Dartmouth. Dartmouth was married to Anne, a daughter of Heneage Finch, Baron Guernsey (later earl of Aylesford), himself a younger brother of Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, and through Dartmouth’s patronage Benson, although a commoner, married another of Guernsey’s daughters, Elizabeth. This marriage bound Benson to the extended Finch clan, and to the Tories in general, for many years to come; Dartmouth in particular remained an especial friend well into the reign of George I. For the 1705 elections Benson replaced his maternal uncle, Tobias Jenkins^‡, as a burgess for York, and he continued to represent that borough in all the succeeding Parliaments until he was raised to the peerage in 1713. Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, regarded his election in 1705 as a ‘loss’ for the Whigs and Strafford thought that it was largely through ‘the means of Lord Dartmouth’ that Benson ‘first came over to the Tory party’ and even then ‘he has been very moderate’. Wentworth Pprs. 133.

By July 1710 the paymaster of the forces James Brydges, later duke of Chandos, could tell a correspondent that Benson was ‘a very considerable gentleman’. HEHL, Stowe mss 57 (4), p. 60. His position in political circles was no doubt helped by the appointment of his brother-in-law and friend Dartmouth as secretary of state in June. While John Drummond thought that an ambassadorial role would best suit Benson, ‘who speaks all languages, ... and knows the world very well’, Dartmouth, at least according to Strafford, ‘procured’ for Benson his appointment on 10 Aug. 1710 as the third of the treasury commissioners, along with Harley himself, replacing the ousted lord treasurer Sidney Godolphin, earl of Godolphin. Luttrell, vi. 616; Wentworth Pprs. 131. He had the advantage, for Harley, of being a ‘moderate’; this was certainly how political opposites as Strafford and Addison perceived him. Wentworth Pprs. 133; Addison Letters, 233. His appointment also placed one of the more malleable and less difficult members of the extended Finch clan in the heart of government. Throughout the early months of 1711 Benson attended to treasury business and also supported the ministry in the Commons, as when he seconded a tax upon leather, and by April he was included on lists of both ‘Tory patriots’ and ‘worthy patriots’. Wentworth Pprs. 189. He was rewarded in June 1711, after the end of the session, when he was sworn to the Privy Council and was made chancellor of the exchequer after Harley’s creation as earl of Oxford and subsequent appointment as lord treasurer led to the disbanding of the treasury commission. Not everybody approved of his appointment to the exchequer, George Lockhart^‡ complaining that ‘Mr Benson was one of the most confused speakers ever opened a mouth and was rather, or at least affected more to appear, a man of wit and pleasure than of parts and capacity of business’. Lockhart Pprs. 411-12. Abel Boyer, though, was later to praise Benson’s tenure as chancellor,

which office he executed with remarkable exactness and dexterity, being a man of very great natural abilities and thoroughly versed in business as well as all kinds of useful knowledge and polite literature and always remarkable for a firm adherence to the true interest and fundamental constitution of his country. Pol. State, xli. 411-12.

Jonathan Swift was impressed with other qualities, remarking that Benson ‘eats the most elegantly of any man I know in town’. Jnl. to Stella ed. Williams, 461. Benson was one of the leading and most effective spokesmen for the ministry in the Commons throughout this Parliament. In July 1711 he also became one of the first directors of the South Sea Company, subscribing £3,000 to the stock, and he was to remain prominent in the company’s affairs for several years. Carswell, South Sea Bubble, 274. He was also appointed in September as one of the commissioners for building 50 new churches, in which he was able to use the architectural knowledge he had gained in the construction of Bramham Hall.

Benson was removed from his important role in the Commons when he was raised to the peerage shortly after the end of the 1713 session. He took his title from the town of Bingley in the West Riding, close to Leeds and to Benson’s mansion at Bramham Hall. In telling his masters of this promotion, the Hanoverian agent Kreienberg noted that Benson ‘has always shown himself closely attached to the interests of the lord treasurer and is the one who has managed all this winter the affairs of the court in the lower House’. HEHL, HM 44710, ff. 125-6 (copy of Kreienberg dispatch of 24 July 1713). Benson’s creation was not popular with all his colleagues: Henry St. John* [355], Viscount Bolingbroke, wished that Benson had stayed in the Commons and been made secretary of state to help Oxford’s troubled ministry. HMC Portland, v. 312. Others objected to Benson’s lowly origins. ‘It was justly alleged in the late creation [of 12 peers in January 1712] that all of them were of ancient families; no one I have met with is much acquainted with the new lord’s pedigree, nor are his merits in the House from whence he is removed sufficiently known’, complained Dr William Stratford. Ibid. vii. 160. William Berkeley, 4th Baron Berkeley of Stratton, thought that Benson’s elevation was further proof that ‘every year that House [of Lords] receives some great blow, that I am persuaded ... it is the interest of the public to have the dignity kept up’. Peter Wentworth gleefully related to his brother Strafford a story of how Bingley had been embarrassed by the heralds. The newly ennobled baron requested ‘supporters’ to accompany his new honour, but the heralds told him that they could not even find a coat of arms for his family. When he had the temerity to compare himself to the famous John Somers, Baron Somers, whom he claimed had likewise had neither arms nor supporters until he had been made a lord, the heralds informed him that on the contrary, Somers had had the foresight (in implicit contrast to Bingley) to know that he would soon be made a peer and had taken the precaution of getting a privy seal from the king to give him arms well in advance of his creation. Wentworth Pprs. 347-8.

Benson’s peerage was thought to be incompatible with his office of chancellor of the exchequer, and he was replaced there by Sir William Wyndham^‡. Oxford, Bolingbroke and Dartmouth instead tried to find a suitable ambassadorial role for him. Bolingbroke initially suggested France as a destination, as ‘his estate will bear it, and his obligations to the queen will, if she requires it, I suppose make him willing’. HMC Portland, v. 324. By September he was also considering sending Bingley to Spain to negotiate a commerce treaty and sought Oxford’s help to persuade him, especially as Bingley seems to have feared such a complicated and thankless mission would keep him ‘in exile’. Ibid. 342, 360. Oxford succeeded and in December 1713 Bingley was formally appointed ambassador extraordinary to the court at Madrid. Add. 70070, newsletter of 12 Dec. 1713.

After months of protracted negotiations between the ministers, the board of trade, the South Sea Company and the merchants trading to Spain, Bingley’s instructions for the trade negotiations he was to conduct in Madrid were finally ready in early June 1714. HMC Lords, n.s. x. 451-2, 462, 464-5; HMC Portland, v. 441; Add. 70070, newsletter of 14 Jan. 1714. In the event he never did leave for Spain, as the crisis within the Tory party and the illness and death of the queen in the summer of 1714 overtook his preparations. He took his seat in the House when the new Parliament convened on 16 Feb. 1714, being introduced that day between William Paget, 8th Baron Paget (later earl of Uxbridge) and Thomas Mansell, Baron Mansell. HMC Lords, n.s. x. 223. He sat in 44 of the 79 sittings (56 per cent) of the session of Feb.-July 1714, but even when he was away for only a few days he was anxious to ensure his proxy was registered with a fellow supporter of the ministry. On 5 Apr. 1714 he was named to the drafting committee for an address requesting the queen to desire the Emperor and other princes to enter into a ‘Guaranty’ with her to ensure the protestant succession in Britain and 11 days after that he was involved in proceedings on another address to the queen. On that day, 16 Apr., he was a teller, probably for the contents, in the division on whether to put the question whether to deliver a controversial and highly partisan Tory address to the queen regarding the peace. He was then appointed to the committee, charged with drafting an address thanking her for saving Britain, ‘by a safe, honourable, and advantageous peace with France and Spain, from the heavy burden of a consuming land war, unequally carried on, and become at last impracticable’. Ibid. 305. The previous day, 15 Apr., he had registered his proxy with Dartmouth, but he was in the House on 16 Apr. for these proceedings and this proxy may not have taken effect until 20 Apr., when Bingley was away from the House for a week, returning on 28 April.

By late May 1714 his kinsman by marriage, Nottingham, forecast that Bingley would be in favour of the schism bill and Bingley ensured that his proxy was properly registered during the few days he was absent in the House during the bill’s proceedings. On 3 June 1714 he registered his proxy with George Hay, Baron Hay (later 8th earl of Kinnoul), Oxford’s son-in-law and one of the 12 peers created at the turn of 1712, but the following day he switched his proxy and registered it instead with Charles Seymour, 6th duke of Somerset, for three days until he returned to the House on 7 June. Later, Bingley again entrusted his proxy to another of the 12 Tory peers created in 1712, registering it on 12 June to Allen Bathurst, Baron (later Earl) Bathurst, who likewise held it for only two days. The day following his return, 15 June, Bingley was in the House to vote for the schism bill. On 30 June he was a teller in the division whether to set a date for the second reading of the bill to examine the public accounts. The session was prorogued in the first week of July just as hearings were about to commence concerning Bolingbroke’s suspicious dealings with the Spanish court over the negotiations for the trade treaty (the asiento), negotiations in which Bingley, in his role as putative ambassador to Spain and a director of the South Sea Company, could not help but be involved and implicated. Add. 70070, newsletter of 14 Jan. 1714; HMC Lords, n.s. x. 451-2, 462, 464-5.

Bingley came to only two meetings of the session of August 1714, first sitting on 4 August. The following day he registered his proxy with Hay, with whom it remained until Bingley returned to the House on 21 August. In November Oxford used him as an intermediary with Bolingbroke to procure his assistance in defending the impeachment which was bound to be brought against him. L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, 185. By this time, however, Bingley was a leading representative of a regime out of favour, and in September 1714 he was removed from the privy council by order of George I.

Bingley’s parliamentary career in the reign of George I can only be sketched here: in brief, until 1730 he stood in opposition to the court and the Whig ministry. In the early sessions of George I’s first Parliament a number of measures of the new ministry – such as the septennial bill in April 1716, the impeachment of Oxford in June 1717, and the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts in December 1718 – exercised him sufficiently to lead him to take public stances against the government through formal protests. BIHR, lv. 80; Add 47028, ff. 264-5. Even when he was not in the House, he continued to entrust his proxy with oppositional Tories, particularly with Dartmouth and members of Oxford’s group of 12 new peers from January 1712. As noted above Bingley had been one of the first directors of the South Sea Company in 1711. He continued to invest heavily in it over the intervening years, even when no longer a director after 1715. P.G.M. Dickson, Financial Revolution in England, 450; HMC Dartmouth, i. 325; HMC Portland, v. 599. He appears to have emerged relatively unscathed from the bursting of the Bubble, but was reportedly ‘not happy with it since so many are undone ... what concerns him the most of all is that the morals of the nation seem to be quite corrupted’. HMC Dartmouth, i. 326; HMC Portland, v. 613. The corruption he saw in government at the time of the Bubble only threw him further into opposition. In January 1730, though, he determined that the Tories in opposition were about as effectual as ‘a rope of sand’, and went over to the court by speaking in the House in favour of the Treaty of Seville. HMC Carlisle, 67; Colley, 209.

Bingley died on 9 Apr. 1731, of a ‘pleurisy and a fever’. His only legitimate child, Harriet, inherited a reputed £100,000 in cash and her father’s property at Bramham Park in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He also left £7,000 to his illegitimate daughter Mary Johnson, whom he insisted should take his surname after his death, and gave an annuity of £400, and the lease of her house on Prospect Park, to Anna Maria Burgoyne, wife of John Burgoyne. This bequest has led some to suggest that Anna Maria’s son, John Burgoyne, the future military commander best known for his defeat at Saratoga in the American War of Independence, may well have been another of Bingley’s illegitimate children. Bingley had no male heir so his peerage was extinguished at his death, but it was recreated in 1762 for his daughter Harriet’s husband, George Fox-Lane.