Early life
John Egerton, styled Lord Brackley, was the eldest of six sons. At the coronation of Charles II he was made a knight of the Bath at the age of only 14. As his father, the 2nd earl, became more influential in the parliaments and Privy Council of Charles II, so the expectations attached to the young man rose. In November 1664 Brackley married Lady Elizabeth Cranfield, but the marriage ended early when Elizabeth died in childbirth on 3 Mar. 1670. Bridgwater was soon engaged in arranging another match for the young man, and in early April 1673 Brackley married for a second time.
Bridgwater, as lord lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, entrusted his heir with increasing local responsibilities. As early as November 1667 he had made the young man a justice of the peace, deputy lieutenant and colonel of a militia regiment for the county, and in 1672 he further commissioned him captain of a company of horse.
On his succession to the title at his father’s death on 26 Oct. 1686 it was said that ‘no son does bear the image of his father more exactly’.
The Convention, 1689-90
Bridgwater took no known military role in the Revolution of late 1688, but when he first sat in the Convention in January 1689 he clearly distinguished himself as a Williamite. Throughout late January and early February he consistently voted for the acceptance of the Commons’ resolution that James II had ‘abdicated’ and ‘that the throne is thereby vacant’, signing the protests of 31 Jan. and 4 Feb. against the House’s rejection of this wording.
He attended all but 12 of the sittings (93 per cent) of the first session of the Convention, his highest attendance rate throughout his parliamentary career. He was named to 44 select committees, and of these he chaired nine separate committees concerning different pieces of legislation on a total of 13 occasions. In early March he chaired the committee on the removal of Papists for a substantial discussion, although he was not the only chairman on this matter.
Bridgwater was a strange choice of proxy recipient for Ailesbury, as from the time of Ailesbury’s return the two peers frequently found themselves telling for differing positions in some key divisions. On 20 Apr. Bridgwater chaired the committee of the whole which discussed the Commons’ objections to the House’s amendment to the bill for the abrogation of oaths which exempted members of the clergy from taking the oaths to the new monarchs. Three days later he told, with Ailesbury on the opposite side, in a division on the question whether to agree to a resolution which left it to the king to determine which members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to dispense from the requirement to take the oaths. On 10 May he told, once again against Ailesbury on the opposing side, in favour of dismissing the appeal in the cause Agutter v. Collins,
From late April he chaired and reported from select committees on bills which attempted to redress some of the most egregious of the perceived crimes of the last reign, such as those for annulling the attainders of Algernon Sydney (reported 25 Apr.), Alice Lisle (reported 6 May) and Henry Cornish.
Bridgwater was otherwise occupied in mid May with framing addresses to be presented to the king and queen suggesting ‘what means to use to secure us from the designs of the Papists and power of the French king’. On 14 June he was named to a select committee entrusted with revising an address to forbid all French papists from coming to Whitehall or St James’s, and the following day he chaired a long committee of the whole on ‘means to use to secure us from the designs of Papists’, the records of whose proceedings are found in the select committee minute books, and reported the principal heads to the House.
For the remainder of July and August, with the exception of a brief absence between 25 July and 2 August, during which time his Whig father-in-law, recently created duke of Bolton, held his proxy, Bridgwater was principally busy as a chairman for select committees and committees of the whole. Between 19 July and 17 August he chaired six different select committees on 12 occasions, and on 24 July oversaw the committee on the bill for Christopher Monk, one of the claimants in the Albemarle inheritance case, which heard copious testimony on the controversial marriage he had contracted while still a minor.
Bridgwater was slightly less attentive to the second session of the Convention, first sitting on 30 Oct., a week after its commencement. He attended 70 per cent of its meetings. In a list drawn up between October 1689 and February 1690, Thomas Osborne, marquess of Carmarthen. classified him as among the supporters of the court. On his first day in the House he chaired the committee of the whole considering the bill against the clandestine marriages of minors, and throughout the session he chaired committees of the whole on various other bills: for preventing doubts concerning the collection of the public revenue (21 Dec. 1689); for granting a 2s. aid to the king (15 Jan. 1690); to establish an additional poll tax for the war in Ireland (21 January). On 10 Jan. 1690 he also reported from the committee for privileges the decision, then a controversial point in the debates on the unsuccessful treason trial bill, that peers could only be tried by the full House in time of Parliament. On 15 Jan. he also chaired a meeting of the committee for petitions.
Two activities principally occupied him during this session. First was his stewardship of the committee established to examine the irregularities in procedures and fees in the courts held at Westminster Hall. He chaired this committee on eight occasions between 9 Nov. 1689 and 21 Jan. 1690 on which it heard evidence of practices in the court, and particularly of fees collected, and he made a preliminary report to the House on 14 November.
Bridgwater was also a busy agent for the regime outside of Parliament. He had been reinstated as lord lieutenant of Buckinghamshire as early as 4 Apr. 1689, although he appears to have already been acting in this role, albeit informally, from late February at least.
The Parliament of 1690: first session
Bridgwater himself attended all but five of the sittings of this first session of the 1690 Parliament (91 per cent) and first sat in the House on 24 Mar. 1690, four days after it had started. Already on the following day he was reporting from the committee for privileges. In the first week of April he was closely connected with the bill introduced by Bolton on 26 March to ‘declare’ the acts of the Convention ‘to be of full force and effect’ and to ‘recognize’ William and Mary as ‘rightful and lawful’ monarchs. Bridgwater first chaired the committee of the whole on this measure on 1 Apr., and then proceeded to direct the proceedings of the committee of the whole at all but one of its subsequent four meetings in which the language regarding the status of the acts of the Convention was debated. On 5 Apr. he reported a host of alternative wordings in different clauses and finally Carmarthen came up with acceptable language: that it was ‘the opinion of the House, that all the acts passed in the last Parliament ... were and are good laws, to all intents and purposes whatsoever’. Two days later Bridgwater reported from the committee of the whole different amendments whereby it was merely ‘enacted’ that the acts of the Convention ‘were and are’ legal statutes. Many peers were still dissatisfied and when the bill was read a third time and passed the following day, 8 Apr., 17 peers entered their protest, complaining that the phrase was ‘neither good English nor good sense’. A few days later the wording itself of this protest was expunged from the Journal, which prompted yet another protest from 13 peers. Copies of both these protests, including that of 8 Apr. with its original language, are among Bridgwater’s surviving papers.
A few days after this controversial bill was pushed through, Bridgwater was again at the centre of further heated debates in the House, when the Whigs in the House tried to further their advantage from the recognition bill by proposing, on 1 May, a bill for an oath abjuring loyalty and all previous oaths to James II. On 3 May Bridgwater reported from the committee of the whole a first version of the abjuration oath and the results of the series of divisions, the product of several hours’ debate. The vote on Bridgwater’s report itself was saved until two days later when the House, after much more acrimonious debate, rejected the oath as first worded and the provision that it should only be tendered to civil and military officers. He chaired two further meetings of the committee of the whole on this bill over the following days as alternative versions of the oath continued to be worked over and reported a version from the committee, at whose debates the king himself had been present, on 8 May. When that oath was debated in the House four days later, the king once again present, a decision could still not be reached and debate was adjourned, while Bridgwater chaired another committee of the whole on the bill and reported that it had been agreed that the oath and declaration determined by the House was to be administered to all civil and military officers, ecclesiastics and members of both houses of Parliament. He was named to the select committee entrusted with drawing up a clause enforcing the oath on such persons, and there the clause and the bill itself appear to have languished, as the House turned its attention to other matters in the last days of the session.
Bridgwater was named to 15 select committees on legislation during this session. From 9 Apr. to 10 May 1690 he chaired committees dealing with eight of these bills, and in the first week reported to the House with four of them – the bills for the regulation of coal prices and three estate bills.
Bridgwater was present at 86 per cent of the sittings of the 1690-1 session. He remained occupied with select committees, being named to 31. He chaired committees on nine different matters and reported eight bills to the House, including those for regulating the price of coals (23 Oct. 1690), for suspending parts of the navigation and corn acts during the duration of the war (30 Dec.), as well a number of personal estate bills.
Second and third sessions, 1691-3
Both in the House and in his efforts in early 1691 to recruit soldiers and seamen in Buckinghamshire, Bridgwater had marked himself out as an industrious and efficient follower of the government.
Bridgwater missed only 12 of the sittings in 1692-3, an attendance rate of 89 per cent. In this session he chaired select committees dealing with 16 different matters on 24 occasions, and he reported from seven of these committees with bills, including the bill to allow their majesties to make leases and grants of their estate in the duchy of Cornwall (on 7 Mar. 1693), as well as several personal bills concerning private estates.
The most notable and controversial committee with which Bridgwater was concerned was that investigating the failure of the military campaigns of the previous summer, particularly the heavy defeat at Steenkerke, accompanied by the accusations that the Dutch general Hendrik Trajectinus, Count Solms, had abandoned the English troops under his general command to face the full force of the French attack unaided, and the apparent reluctance of Admiral Edward Russell, later earl of Orford, to follow up his resounding naval victories at Barfleur and La Hogue with an aggressive ‘descent’ on the French coast. Bridgwater acted as chairman of the committee of the whole which from 28 Nov. 1692 to 13 Jan. 1693 discussed on seven occasions the advice to be given to the king on military and naval matters in the wake of these setbacks. On 12 Dec. 1692 the committee approved an address to the king that insisted that, according to the treaty with the United Provinces of 1678, English general officers had command over Dutch and other Allied commanders of the same rank – a rebuke to Solms for his purported dismissal of the concerns of the English commander James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond.
Even more controversy arose when the committee on the advice turned its attention to the naval events of the previous summer. The secretary of state Nottingham submitted his papers to the House on 6 Dec., and Bridgwater chaired the committee of the whole that considered them, as well as the four meetings of the select committee assigned on 10 Dec. to examine the matter further.
At the turn of the year Bridgwater was a teller, once again against Ailesbury, for the not contents in the division on whether to commit the place bill, and he voted against both its commitment and, on 3 Jan. 1693, its passage. At the same time he supported Norfolk’s divorce bill and voted to read it a second time. In late January 1693 he was involved in the dispute with the Commons over the House’s amendments to the land tax bill which provided for a separate body of commissioners, drawn from the peerage itself, to assess the value of the peers’ lands. He chaired the committee of the whole on 18 Jan. which reluctantly consented to a conference with the Commons on the matter, but was not made a reporter. Upon the report the following day the House declined to follow the opposition members George Savile, marquess of Halifax, and Mulgrave in insisting that the clause be submitted to the consideration of the committee for privileges and instead receded from the clause. Bridgwater did not sign either of the protests against these decisions and instead was placed on the committee to draw up a statement explaining the House’s decision to recede from the amendment, which was not to be taken as a precedent of the House’s abandoning of its rights and privileges.
During the first three months of 1693 he also frequently acted as a teller in divisions on judicial cases and private bills.
Third and fourth sessions, 1693-5
The level to which Bridgwater’s star had risen at court can be suggested by the rumours circulating in November 1693 that he would replace Nottingham as secretary of state after the latter’s resignation.
On 13 Dec. 1693 Bridgwater joined six other peers in dissenting from the decision to uphold the original judgment in favour of Simon Harcourt‡ in the writ of error brought before the House by John Fox. His principal occupation at the turn of the year, however, appears to have been the continuing negotiations on the place bill. He chaired the committee of the whole that put some amendments to the bill on 14 Dec., and he was a manager for a conference on 5 Jan. 1694 in which the Commons objected to a House amendment which placed the Speaker of the Commons under the same pains and penalties as other members. Upon report, Bridgwater was a teller in the division on the question whether to agree with the Commons in its objections. Once again a naval matter caught his attention, and he registered his protest against the resolution of 10 Jan. that the Tory admirals had done well in executing the orders they had received in the previous summer in directing the movements of Sir George Rooke‡, which had resulted in the Turkey fleet being captured by the French. Bridgwater appears to have been one of the driving forces behind this protest, as a number of different draft versions of the text of the protest are found among his papers, some of them much harsher in their condemnation of the admirals than the final version found in the Journal.
He attended the 1694-5 session on its first day, 12 Nov. 1694, when he introduced into the House Francis Newport, elevated from Viscount Newport to earl of Bradford and Henry Sidney, similarly elevated from Viscount Sydney to earl of Romney, and then went on to attend a further 111 of its 127 sittings (88 per cent). He chaired committees considering 30 separate bills on a total of 58 occasions, and reported bills to the House from 19 of these committees, the majority on estate or naturalization bills, but also including the bills for exempting apothecaries from local offices (9 Feb. 1695), for establishing new oaths to William III as sole monarch (8 Mar.), for determining the rates of water carriage along the Thames (8 Apr.), and for approving the process to make salt water fresh (14 March).
One issue with which he became heavily involved, in both a select committee and a committee of the whole, was the bill against coin clipping. He was named to the select committee assigned to draw up a bill on the matter based on the evidence delivered before the House by the officers of the mint on 6 Feb. 1695. He first took over the chair of the committee on 12 Feb. and chaired it for its further three meetings before he reported the bill against counterfeiting and clipping coin on 22 February.
Three issues in particular occupied him in the closing weeks of the session in April and May 1695. He reported on 18 Apr. from a conference on the House’s amendments to the bill to make several acts perpetual, the Commons’ objections to the clause in the Licensing Act which would strengthen the licensing power of the Stationers’ Company and the bishops. Another matter was the affair of Sir Thomas Cooke‡ and his suspected misuse of the funds of the East India Company. The House proposed a bill which would indemnify him in exchange for further evidence against his accomplices, and Bridgwater chaired the committee of the whole on 16 Apr. which debated this bill and reported a version fit to be engrossed. A week later he and Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, came a joint top of the ballot (each receiving 46 votes) for a place as one of the 12 peers on the committee assigned to take evidence from Cooke.
The 1695 Parliament, first session
William III’s first Parliament was dissolved on 11 Oct. 1695 and new elections called. The elections for Bridgwater’s lieutenancy county of Buckinghamshire were straightforward, as the sitting member Wharton and his new partner Sir Richard Atkins‡ were returned without a contest in a county where the Whartons had the greatest interest. There had already been some change at Brackley, for at the turn of 1691-2 one of its burgesses, Bridgwater’s brother William, had died and at the ensuing by-election Bridgwater had supported as his replacement Harry Mordaunt‡, the younger brother of Charles Mordaunt, earl of Monmouth (later 3rd earl of Peterborough). In the autumn of 1695 Bridgwater once again returned Mordaunt and instituted as his partner another younger brother, Charles Egerton‡, who was to sit continuously as a Whig burgess in the Commons until unseated by petition in 1711.
Bridgwater himself sat in 85 per cent of the sittings of the 1695-6 session, the first of William III’s second parliament. He spent the first two weeks of December involved in committees and conferences on a number of trade and military issues, such as the condition of the army and the damage done to English trade by the Scottish East India Company. He was one of the delegates of the House sent to discover when the king would be able to receive the House’s addresses on these matters, and on both occasions he reported the king’s answer to the House. Only from late December did he once again take up his usual activity in select committees, chairing committees on 21 different bills on 33 occasions and reporting 18, almost all of them personal bills for naturalization or estate management.
Bridgwater was involved in drafting the Association in defence of William III from his first involvement on 24 Feb. in the committees and conferences on the address to be presented to the king concerning the assassination attempt against him. Two days later Bridgwater chaired the committee of the whole concerning the state of the nation, and it was he who reported the text of the Association as agreed upon by the committee. He signed the Association signifying his loyalty to the Williamite regime as soon as he could on 27 Feb. and a copy of the Association survives in his own papers, with his own annotations indicating the numbers of those who signed it and those who refused.
During the final month of this session Bridgwater was principally employed as a chairman of committees of the whole as Parliament tried to wrap up the legislation of the session. He reported from eight committees of the whole between 15 and 25 Apr. 1696, on the bills to accept ‘affirmations’ instead of oaths from Quakers in courts of law (15 Apr.), against the export of wool, to vest the profits of the honour of Tutbury in the king (both 18 Apr.), for setting an excise on low wines, and for enforcing the laws against marriages entered into without license or bans (both 24 Apr.), among others. Bridgwater was the principal actor in the House on the penultimate day of the session, 25 April. Not only did he report from the conference on the House’s amendments to the Greenland trade bill, whose formulation he had overseen himself as chairman of the committee of the whole on 20 Apr., but he also reported from another committee on the bill to continue duties on salt, glass and stoneware. One of his last acts of this day and of the session suggests his increasingly important role in the government of William III. The night before Bridgwater had received a letter from secretary of state Sir William Trumbull‡ conveying the king’s pleasure that Bridgwater should lay before the House the following day ‘the state of the Lords who are now in the messenger’s hands’. It was, indeed, Bridgwater who on 25 Apr. 1696 informed the House of the king’s warrants for the commitment of Peterborough, Edward Henry Lee, earl of Lichfield, and Charles Gerard, 6th Baron Gerard of Gerard’s Bromley for high treason.
Second and third sessions, 1696-8
Bridgwater’s increasing influence at William’s court was confirmed in the following months. On both 16 June and 28 July 1696 he was the king’s commissioner entrusted with proclaiming Parliament’s prorogation and setting the date on which it was to reconvene. More significantly, on 15 May 1696 he was commissioned first lord of the new royal council of trade.
Most likely Bridgwater was busy at the council of trade and also perhaps dealing with local matters, for the political complexion of Buckinghamshire changed over the course of 1696. There had already been a by-election in the county in February following Thomas Wharton’s succession as 5th Baron Wharton on the death of his father. Bridgwater joined with Wharton and a Tory of the county Charles Dormer, 2nd earl of Carnarvon, to back the candidacy of Wharton’s ally (and Bridgwater’s own cousin) William Cheyne‡, at that point styled Lord Cheyne (later 2nd Viscount Newhaven [S]), who came top of the poll. The other sitting member Atkins died in late November 1696, prompting another by-election in December. Both Wharton and Bridgwater supported as the Whig candidate, Henry Neale‡, who won by a large margin.
He maintained his busy activity in the House from March 1697. Over the two days 6 and 15 Mar. he chaired committees of the whole on the bills to set duties on paper and vellum, to allow the Turkish merchandise laden on two foreign ships to be sold as if they had been transported by English ships, and to enlarge highways. From 17 to 22 Mar. he held the proxy of Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford. His involvement in the House increased greatly in the last two weeks of the session, as the House tried to clear up its legislative backlog. From 31 Mar. to 15 Apr. he chaired nine committees of the whole; eight of these were in the last week of the session alone. He reported from committee on such matters as the bills to enlarge the capital stock of the Bank of England (31 Mar.), to enforce the existing act to prevent delays at quarter sessions (9 Apr.), to prevent the clandestine marriages of minors (12 Apr.), to raise the militia for that year, to increase the number of seamen for the navy (both on 13 Apr.), to supply the king with tonnage and poundage, to better observe procedure in the receipt of the Exchequer, and to license hawkers and peddlers (all three on 15 Apr.). In those same final few days he chaired three meetings of select committees on three different matters, and reported from two of them, on the bills to prevent counterfeit of coins (10 Apr.) and to pave the streets of London and Westminster (13 Apr.).
Bridgwater was the commissioner who announced Parliament’s prorogation on 13 May 1697 and its next meeting date, and at another prorogation on 22 July he was appointed by commission as Speaker of the House during the absence of the newly appointed lord keeper, John Somers, later Baron Somers. Bridgwater’s period as Speaker was short-lived, consisting of only two days, 22 July and the subsequent day of prorogation, 26 Aug., for he was replaced by Sir John Holt‡ on the following day of prorogation, 30 September. Bridgwater maintained his usual diligent attendance on the House when the 1697-8 session finally began in December, and he came to all but 15 of its meetings (89 per cent). Here he chaired 16 meetings of the committee of the whole between 16 Dec. 1697 and 2 July 1698, six of them from 20 June alone. From 26 Feb. 1698 he chaired all five meetings of the committee of the whole considering the bill for the divorce of Charles Gerard, 2nd earl of Macclesfield, and the many petitions and objections raised against it, finally reporting the bill fit to pass on 2 Mar. He chaired other committees of the whole on matters such as the bills to prevent clandestine marriages (16 Dec. 1697), for the continuing imprisonment of one of William III’s suspected assassins (8 Jan. 1698), to prevent the import of foreign bone lace (25 Feb.), for licensing hawkers and peddlers (31 May), for duties upon coals (12 May) and on stamped vellum (20 June), for raising money by poll (22 June), for raising the militia for the following year (28 June), and for establishing the new East India Company, and for declaring two prize ships free to trade as English ships (both on 2 July). Bridgwater also chaired select committees on 18 occasions between 7 Jan. and 30 June 1698. These dealt with 21 different pieces of legislation, and he reported from 13 of them, the majority of them personal estate or naturalization bills.
Among Bridgwater’s papers is a copy of a speech against the bill to punish the exchequer official Charles Duncombe‡ and what appears to be Bridgwater’s own division list recording the defeat of the bill (by one vote) in the House on 15 Mar. The division list indicates that Bridgwater himself followed the Junto line and voted in favour of the bill. The following day he entered his one protest of the session, against the House’s reversal of the chancery decree in the cause James Bertie v. 6th Viscount Falkland on 16 Mar. He reported from the conference held on 7 Mar. 1698 where the Commons presented their objections to the House’s amendments to the bill for remedying defects in the poor law passed the previous session, and a number of sheets among his manuscripts detailing objections to the bill may be the papers delivered to him at this conference.
As first lord of the Board of Trade, much of Bridgwater’s involvement in the House involved matters of trade. On 2 and 18 Apr. 1698 he reported from select committees bills to repair navigation and docking facilities in both Bridgwater in Somerset and Colchester in Essex. From 20 Apr. Bridgwater’s fellow Whig Stamford had been directing the committee considering the bill to encourage woollen manufacture in England and to ‘restrain’ the export of rival woollen manufactures from Ireland. On 6 May he reported that the king should be asked to supply the committee with papers concerning the English Privy Council’s amendments to a bill sent from the Irish Parliament for the establishment of linen manufacture in that country. There is no record in the Journal of the establishment of this committee or its composition, but the presence of pages in Bridgwater’s surviving manuscripts endorsed, ‘Some observations on the amendments offered in England to the bill for encouraging the linen manufacture in Ireland’, suggest that he was a prominent member of this committee or consulted with it in his position as first lord of trade. The final address, as reported by Stamford on 9 June, recommended that strict measures be taken against Irish manufacturers continuing to export woollen products, while it strongly encouraged the development of linen manufacture on the island, which was not seen to compete with vital English manufactures. Also among Bridgwater’s papers is a sheet of ‘Objections and Amendments to a Bill relating to Plantations in Africa, and trading to the same’, no doubt dealing with the bill ‘to settle Trade to Africa’ which was first read on 24 May and passed by the House on 10 June. This act, which received the royal assent on 5 July, secured for the Royal African Company the statutory charter it had long sought.
The 1698 Parliament: first session
Bridgwater spent the remainder of July 1698 managing the elections in Buckinghamshire and Brackley for the next Parliament, which was summoned for that autumn. In Buckinghamshire Wharton, who still controlled the principal interest there, put forward his own brother ,Goodwin Wharton‡, and Henry Neale‡ against his former ally William Cheyne, now 2nd Viscount Newhaven [S]. At the poll Newhaven, owing to his long preparations and perhaps the growing Tory and country mood, came top of the poll by a wide margin, followed by Wharton’s brother Goodwin. Sir John Verney came very close to pipping Goodwin Wharton at the poll, and the tallies in a Buckinghamshire poll book in Bridgwater’s papers even suggest that Verney did come second.
Bridgwater was in the House when the new Parliament convened on 6 Dec. 1698 and proceeded to attend three-quarters of the meetings of its first session, down from the high attendance he had shown in recent sessions. Nor was he active in select committees, as he only chaired them on four occasions on three different matters; and of these he only reported from one.
Bridgwater was directly involved in the address of thanks and advice to the king regarding the proposed disbandment of the army in early February 1699. On 4 Feb. he chaired the select committee assigned to draw up the address to the king thanking him for his speech in which he had reluctantly acquiesced to a disbandment. After reporting the committee’s address of thanks, Bridgwater then went on to chair two committees of the whole, on 7 and 8 Feb., in which the king’s speech was debated. He reported that the committee thought the state of the fortifications on the south coast should be examined, and on 8 Feb. he reported the controversial motion that the House was ‘ready and willing to enter into any expedient’ to retain the king’s Dutch Guards for the year 1699, which produced a dissent from 38 peers. Notes endorsed by Bridgwater ‘Heads of Advice upon the King’s Speech’ and recommending ‘that no troops may be left here this summer but his subjects ... except his Guards’, undoubtedly come from these duties as chairman of the committee.
One other matter closely affecting Bridgwater was dealt with in the final days of the session as well. On 29 Apr. Bridgwater and other petitioners received permission from the House to prove, as the appointed executors, the will of the duke of Bolton, who had died in February 1699. The House resolved as a general rule that no peer had privilege to stop probate. Bolton’s heir Charles Powlett, 2nd duke of Bolton, may well have been trying to hinder probate of his father’s will, as he was severely disadvantaged by it. Bolton left his daughter the countess of Bridgwater and her children, in whom he clearly delighted, close to £40,000 by his will, while barely mentioning and making virtually no provision for his heir.
Second session, and the 1701 Parliament
The summer of 1699 also saw a major reshuffling of offices in which Bridgwater at the beginning of June 1699 replaced Orford as first lord of the Admiralty. This was only after Ford Grey, earl of Tankerville, had declined the offer, telling William III that ‘he would be drawn through a horse pond’ rather than take such a politically vulnerable post and was made first lord of the treasury instead.
When Parliament resumed in November 1699 Bridgwater came to over three-quarters (77 per cent) of the sittings but did not play a noticeable role in the first three months or so of the session, during which his only known stance was his opposition on 23 Feb. 1700 to the bill to continue the old East India Company as a corporation. Unusually, he chaired no committees, neither select nor of the whole House, during this session. This was most likely because as of 1 Mar. he had a new responsibility thrust on him which may have precluded such close involvement in committees. For on that day a commission was read in the House making Bridgwater Speaker of the House in the periods of absence of the lord chancellor, Somers. He served as Speaker, directing proceedings in the House in the periods 1-9 and 21-25 Mar. and 1-11 Apr., Somers having returned to the House briefly during 11-20 and 26-28 Mar.
He was thus presiding over the House on 10 Apr. 1700, when the debate between the two Houses over the bill to resume the Irish lands forfeited to William III came to its head. Narcissus Luttrell‡ has this account of the events of that day:
The Lords debated the Commons’ reasons for not agreeing to their [the House’s] amendments to the land tax and Irish forfeiture bill; and the question being put for adhering to the said amendments, yeas 37, noes 34; but proxies being allowed of, the numbers were then equal; and the lord Bridgwater, officiating for lord chancellor (who was indisposed) gave his casting vote against adhering: so the bill passed as sent from the Commons.Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 632-3.
Immediately after this bill was passed, Bridgwater and 20 other peers signed a dissent against its passage. Luttrell’s account throws up some questions about procedure in the House. The general practice was that if the vote at a division was tied, it was decided in the negative. There was thus no reason for Bridgwater to cast a deciding vote, and the manuscript minutes record the division as a tie at 43 voices each and imply that the motion was lost on that basis, with no need for a casting vote from the Speaker tipping the not contents over into 44 voices. It may have been that Luttrell, unfamiliar with procedure in the House, misinterpreted Bridgwater’s pronouncement as Speaker of the result of the tied division in the negative. William III did not like the Commons’ version of the Irish forfeiture bill, but was eager to have some supply bill passed, and at the last moment enlisted enough of his supporters to vote, with a narrow majority of five this time, to accept the bill without the controversial amendments. Still angry, he came to the House the following day to dismiss Parliament hurriedly, and Bridgwater, as Speaker, made the formal announcement proroguing Parliament to 23 May.
Bridgwater continued in his role as Speaker of the House and formally announced Parliament’s prorogation when it met again on 23 May 1700, one of a long series of prorogations as William reordered the ministry to try to counter the hostility of the Commons. He was removed from the Speakership on the next day of prorogation, 20 June, and replaced by Sir Nathan Wright‡, recently made lord keeper in the place of the disgraced Somers, but Bridgwater still served as a commissioner of prorogation on that day and on two more successive prorogations on 24 Oct. and 21 Nov. 1700.
Bridgwater’s choice for Brackley in 1698, Sir John Aubrey, had died in a riding accident in the interval before the long-anticipated elections of January 1701 and, with the selection of candidates now narrowed down, Bridgwater conceded and allowed Wharton’s candidate, Harry Mordaunt, to be returned unopposed with his own brother, Charles Egerton. Buckinghamshire was of course more contested. Verney hoped to join interests with Newhaven this time and looked to him for support in gaining Bridgwater’s favour, but Newhaven wrote to him in mid November 1700 that, ‘my interest with the earl you mention is not sufficient for any such purpose if you were in danger’.
Bridgwater consistently came to meetings in the first month of the new Parliament throughout February 1701. On 12 Feb. he was named to the large committee assigned to compose the address of thanks for the king’s speech. The following day Charles Mordaunt, now 3rd earl of Peterborough, reported the address, which asked the king to lay the recently signed Partition Treaties before the House for their examination. The House’s address was sent down to the Commons on 14 Feb. and Bridgwater was appointed one of 14 managers to attend a conference three days later when the lower House announced that it had drafted its own separate vote on the same matter. Bridgwater was more directly involved when the House called for a report on the state of the navy on 19 Feb., arising from a specific request of William in his speech of the previous week. Bridgwater assured the House that, as first lord of the Admiralty, he would have the report ready for the House by the following day. When Bridgwater submitted the Admiralty’s report to the House as promised he was, not surprisingly, named to the very large committee entrusted to draw up an address on the state of the navy, which was ultimately reported to the House by Rochester.
Bridgwater’s sudden death on 19 Mar. 1701 must have been unexpected. He was ‘much lamented’, as he died ‘with a good reputation’ and ‘leaving a very honourable character behind him’ at the height of his ministerial and official career in a regime which he had long and well served, and which was about to face some of its sternest tests.