Scroop Egerton acquired his unusual forename from his great-grandfather, Emmanuel Scrope†, earl of Sunderland. He became heir to his father’s earldom in April 1687 after a disastrous fire at the family’s London home of Bridgwater House in the Barbican killed his two elder brothers; an older half brother had died in infancy. When his grandfather Bolton died in February 1699 he bequeathed close to £40,000 to his daughter Jane and her children, while barely mentioning and making virtually no provision for his heir Charles Powlett, 2nd duke of Bolton.
It was reported in 1698 that Brackley had been made a page to the duke of Gloucester, but by May 1699 the young man was setting out for a tour of the continent.
Allied to Marlborough 1702-10
This marriage put the young Bridgwater firmly at the centre of the court and government, allied to the most powerful and influential couple in the kingdom, the duke and duchess of Marlborough. Shortly after the marriage both he and his wife gained positions at court – she as a lady of the queen’s bedchamber and he as a gentleman in the bedchamber of the prince consort, George of Denmark.
Bridgwater first sat in the House two months into Anne’s first Parliament, on 15 Dec. 1702, and in total came to 35 per cent of the meetings of its first session in 1702-3. In his political views Bridgwater most likely in these early years, and certainly in his later, followed the Whig proclivities of his father, but also like his father he was a loyal servant of the court and ministry. His marriage and the interest at court it brought him tied him strongly to his father-in-law Marlborough and his political trajectory followed his. Thus the Tory leader Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, forecast that in 1702-3 Bridgwater would support the occasional conformity bill. However, although Bridgwater was marked as present on 16 Jan. 1703, when it came to the divisions on the Whig wrecking amendments to the bill, he chose to abstain by absenting himself from the chamber. During the second session of the Parliament in 1703-4 (during which Bridgwater attended 84 per cent of the sittings), Bridgwater’s brother-in-law Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, initially considered him ‘uncertain’ in his attitude to the revived occasional conformity bill, as ‘last year [sic] chose to be absent’. Sunderland later marked him as an opponent of the bill, though doubtful, which suggests that contemporaries were unclear how the competing pulls of his parents’ political heritage and those of the family he had married into would sort themselves out. In this case Bridgwater was a dutiful son-in-law and followed Marlborough’s lead in voting in favour of the bill on 14 Dec. 1703, though he did not join his father-in-law in signing the protests against the denial of the second reading or the eventual rejection of the bill. Later that session he joined the Tories in fighting against the attempt to use the Scotch Plot investigations to bring down the secretary of state Nottingham. On 3 Mar. 1704 he protested against the resolution to make the content of the ciphered ‘gibberish’ letters made known only to the queen and members of the committee investigating the Plot. On 22 Mar. he was named, alongside all those present, to the committee entrusted with drawing up the address encouraging the queen to prosecute the Scottish conspiracy, but presumably he took little or no part in its deliberations because three days later he dissented from the decisions both to put the question on the motion that Nottingham’s failure to commit or prosecute the Scottish conspirator Robert Ferguson ‘is a great encouragement to her Majesty’s enemies’, and from the eventual passage of the resolution. He came to relatively few meetings of the following session of 1704-5, first sitting in the House almost a month after the session had started, on 16 Nov. 1704, and then proceeding to sit in exactly half of the meetings, but apart from his nominations to 29 committees, no other activity of his in the House during this final session of Anne’s first Parliament is recorded.
Outside the House, Bridgwater was keen to exercise electoral influence. Control of his lieutenancy of Buckinghamshire was far from straightforward, as there were many competing interests in the county, the most formidable being that exercised by the active and aggressive Junto peer Wharton, who in 1696 had been described as having ‘the greatest interest of any man in Buckinghamshire’. Against Wharton stood the leader of the Buckinghamshire Tories, Lord Cheyne.
Buckinghamshire was infamous for its party strife and contested elections. Bridgwater, nevertheless, entered the fray and tried to make his own mark on the parliamentary representation of the county shortly after taking up his lieutenancy. In October 1704 one of the sitting Members, Wharton’s younger brother, Goodwin Wharton‡, died and Bridgwater immediately joined with the other sitting member Lord Cheyne to promote the Buckinghamshire landowner Francis Duncombe‡ as the Tory candidate in the resulting by-election. Duncombe was defeated by Sir Richard Temple‡ by over 200 votes.
When he was not promoting family members as candidates, Bridgwater chose Tories in opposition to Wharton’s Whig nominees. When the antiquarian Browne Willis‡ felt ‘compelled’ by the overwhelming dominance of Wharton in the elections of the borough of Buckingham to make his own foray into politics, it was to Bridgwater he turned for support at a by-election in December 1705; he won at the poll by a deciding vote cast by a member of the corporation who was brought out of prison to declare his choice.
After 1705 when Marlborough and the government looked increasingly towards the Whigs for support of his continental war aims, Bridgwater followed suit. He came to just over half of the sittings of the first session of Anne’s second Parliament, in 1705-6. On 6 Dec. 1705 he voted in favour of the motion in a committee of the whole that the Church was not in danger under the queen’s administration and was later assigned to draw up the reasons for this vote to be presented to the Commons in conference.
By February 1708, preparations were already underway for the elections of May 1708. Bridgwater had been canvassing for his brother William throughout the summer of 1707 and Cheyne tried to muster Tory support for his candidacy as a way of making ‘him [Egerton] and our lord lieutenant our own’. But in December 1707 Cheyne had to write to his Tory colleagues with the regrettable news that, despite all previous assurances, Bridgwater ‘has laid aside all thoughts of setting up his brother at the next election for the county of Buckinghamshire’. Matters were made worse for the Tories because after the Union, Cheyne’s possession of a Scots peerage made him ineligible to sit in the Commons. ‘Tis a melancholy story, but a true one’, he concluded, ‘that now the Lord Wharton names both the knights of our county: Mr Hampden [Richard Hampden‡] and Sir Edmund Denton‡ will carry their point without any opposition’. The ensuing election on 19 May 1708, proved to be the only uncontested election for the county between 1698 and 1715.
Three days before Bridgwater took his place at the first meeting of the new Parliament on 16 Nov. 1708 he had overseen, as master of horse, the procession and ceremonies for the funeral of Prince George of Denmark.
In January 1710 it was rumoured that Bridgwater would be chosen to replace the deceased Algernon Capell, 2nd earl of Essex, as lord lieutenant of Hertfordshire, but in the prevailing political climate, it may have been thought that he was insufficiently Whiggish, and the post went instead to William Cowper, Baron (later Earl) Cowper.
In the Buckinghamshire elections for the Parliament in October 1710 Bridgwater reportedly lent his support to the Tory John Verney‡, Viscount Fermanagh [I], whom he may have preferred to Wharton’s candidate, the Junto follower Richard Hampden.
The Oxford ministry
In October 1710 Robert Harley, (later earl of Oxford and Mortimer) forecast that Bridgwater would be opposed to the new ministry he was constructing, and Bridgwater’s discernible activities in the new Parliament’s first session in 1710-11, during which he attended 77 per cent of the sittings, bore out this assessment. A follower of Marlborough and the war effort he had led, Bridgwater opposed the attack on the previous ministry and its military aims in Spain. On 11 Jan. 1711 he signed the protests against the rejection of the petitions of the Whig generals Henri de Massue de Ruvigny, earl of Galway [I] and Charles O’Hara, Baron Tyrawley [I] and then from the resolution that it was their advice that led directly to the debacle of the Battle of Alamanza. The following day he also subscribed to the dissent from the resolution criticizing the leaders of the previous ministry for advocating an offensive war in Spain, and 12 days later, on 24 Jan. he was a teller, probably for the Not Contents, in the division on the motion (which was won by a majority of 20) in a committee of the whole to censure Galway for his role in the campaign.
He was even busier in the following session (1711-12), of which he attended three-quarters of the meetings, when the Whigs in the House put up a spirited rearguard action against the peace being negotiated by the ministry of the earl of Oxford (as Harley had become). He was probably among those Whigs who negotiated with Nottingham in early December 1711 to garner his support for the ‘No Peace without Spain’ clause in the address to the queen. Oxford was clearly angered that Bridgwater, a pensioner of the court, would oppose the ministry by supporting the address on 7 December. On 20 Dec. Bridgwater followed this up by voting against the right of James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton [S] to sit in the House using his British title of duke of Brandon.
Bridgwater’s father-in-law Marlborough was stripped of all his offices by the queen on 30 Dec. 1711, and Bridgwater, so clearly opposed to the ministry, fell with him. He had already been punished by Oxford who had ensured that the uncooperative Whig was not paid any of his pension as master of the horse of the late Prince George. In May 1711 Oxford’ colleague Sir Simon Harcourt, later Viscount Harcourt, recommended that Bridgwater be replaced as lord lieutenant and custos rotulotum of Buckinghamshire by the more reliable Cheyne, but it took a year before this change was formally put into effect.
Despite these setbacks, Bridgwater continued to be active in the proxy exchanges that helped to sustain Whig forces in this session. On 30 Dec. Bridgwater received the proxy of his cousin Leicester, who vacated it by his return to the House on 14 Jan. 1712 only to register it again to Bridgwater on 23 Feb. before coming back into the House once more on 4 March. Bridgwater registered his own proxy with Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, on 12 Apr. 1712, who kept it for the two weeks Bridgwater was absent until his return on 28 April. On 13 May Sunderland returned Bridgwater’s earlier favour by registering his own proxy with his brother-in-law, though he returned to the House to vacate it only four days later. On 19 May 1712 Bridgwater told in the division on whether to insert words that would exempt peers in the bill to establish commissioners to investigate the value of the land grants made by William III.
Bridgwater, out of office both at court and in the county, fully joined the Whig effort against his erstwhile ally Cheyne in the Buckinghamshire election in the summer of 1713. Cheyne, now lord lieutenant of the county, was able to convince Fermanagh to stand again, and partnered him with his own nephew, John Fleetwood‡. Against them Bridgwater tried to convince the freemen of the county to vote for the Whig candidates Richard Hampden and the sitting Whig Member Sir Edmund Denton‡.
The Whigs … put wool in their hats, saying ’twas all going into France, and they resolved to keep some on’t, before ’twas all gone. Lord Wharton, Lord Bridgwater, Lord Portland [William Henry Bentinck, 2nd earl (later duke) of Portland] and Lord [Essex William Capell, 3rd earl of Essex] were all at the head of them with wool in their hats: and Lady Wharton with her own fair hands made up several cockades for the country fellows. The Tories had oaken boughs in their hats, and these jokes in their mouths against their adversary that their wits were gone a wool gathering, and that they looked very sheepish, and ba’d them out of the field.Wentworth Pprs. 351.
Similarly, in 1713 the Tory members of Brackley corporation fielded two candidates, John Burgh‡ and Henry Watkins‡ against Bridgwater’s and Wharton’s nominees, William Egerton and a rising star in the Whig party, Paul Methuen‡. The latter two were formally returned, but on 3 Mar. 1714, well into the session, Burgh and Watkins petitioned against the result. The elections committee unexpectedly resolved in favour of the sitting Members, but the Tories marshalled their forces and in a contentious vote that went straight down party lines managed to unseat the two Whigs. After this electoral defeat, Bridgwater tightened his grip on his manor, and the Egertons controlled both seats of the corporation for most of the rest of the eighteenth century.
Bridgwater himself came to only 13 meetings of Parliament in February and March 1714. He left the House on 19 Mar. 1714, registering his proxy with his brother-in-law John Montagu, 2nd duke of Montagu, for the remainder of the session. It may have been with this proxy in mind that Nottingham forecast that Bridgwater would oppose the schism bill, against whose passage Montagu did protest on 16 June 1714. Bridgwater’s departure from the House may have been prompted by the illness of his wife, who died of smallpox in early April. To his bereaved mother-in-law, then in self-imposed exile on the continent, he expressed the confident hope that their mutual enemies would ‘so fall out amongst themselves, that we shall have the comfort to have your grace and the duke of Marlborough return more beloved than ever’. It was their daughter’s death which prompted the duke and duchess to hasten their return to England.
Through his Marlborough connections, Bridgwater benefitted from the Hanoverian succession, although the duchess of Marlborough later turned her full anger against her former son-in-law and claimed that ‘he was so little liked and there were so many useful men to be employed that I could only obtain that he should be lord chamberlain to the princess of Wales’. He was appointed to that office in October 1714.
Bridgwater further confirmed his place among the Whigs by his second marriage, in August 1722, to Lady Rachel Russell, a sister of Wriothesley Russell, 3rd duke of Bedford. In 1725 he matched the 3rd duke, still a minor at that point, to his own only surviving child by his first marriage, Lady Anne Egerton. This marriage, coupled with earlier failed marriage negotiations for Lady Anne and disputes over the duke of Marlborough’s will, severely embittered relations between Bridgwater and his former mother-in-law, the duchess of Marlborough, who had been planning to marry her favourite granddaughter, Lady Diana Spencer, to the young duke.