Born into an infamous family
In stark contrast to his infamous elder brother Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, Thomas Herbert led an exemplary youth in the 1670s which was ultimately to lead to his being one of the most respected and revered men of his age. John Macky in around 1703 claimed that in his youth Pembroke had ‘applied himself to the law and knowledge of the constitution of his country’ and had become ‘a good judge in all the several sciences; … a great encourager of learning and learned men’, while Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury described him as ‘a man of eminent virtue, and of great and profound learning, particularly in the mathematics’.
Burnet was later to claim (in relation to Pembroke’s role as plenipotentiary at the Rijswick negotiations) that, ‘There was somewhat in his person and manner that created him an universal respect, for we had no other man among us whom all sides loved and honoured so much as they did him’, while John Macky told his Hanoverian patrons that Pembroke was ‘a lover of the constitution of his country, without being of a party and yet esteemed by all parties’.
As Member for the Wiltshire borough of Wilton, near the family’s famous residence of Wilton House, Thomas Herbert left little trace of his parliamentary activities. He is not known to have served on any committees or to have made any speeches, and he was conspicuously absent when the crucial division on the exclusion bill took place. He succeeded to the earldoms of Pembroke and Montgomery upon his elder brother’s death without male heirs on 29 Aug. 1683. A number of other Wiltshire peers stood ready to take over the lieutenancy of the county from the late unstable peer, but by early October it was confirmed that the young 8th earl would take up his late brother’s role governing Wiltshire. His local rival Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth, however, was made custos rotulorum.
Reign of James II, 1685-8
Pembroke sat in the House on the first day of James II’s Parliament on 19 May 1685 and a week later he introduced his own estate bill. The 7th earl of Pembroke had died intestate and had left behind him £20,000 worth of debt and a seven-year-old daughter, Charlotte, as heir-general. She had settled in France and was being raised as a Catholic by her French mother, Henriette Mauricette, the sister of Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth. The dowager countess of Pembroke had taken out letters of administration on the late earl’s estate, which consisted of lands in Wiltshire, Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, and disputes between her and the new earl had begun almost immediately. The bill would have given the earl control of all these lands, provided he raise £10,000 for his niece Charlotte’s portion, maintain the dowager countess’s jointure of £1,500 p.a. and supply portions and maintenance for his two sisters.
The bill was dropped after Pembroke left the House on 13 June to raise the Wiltshire militia against the invasion of James Scott, duke of Monmouth; these troops joined the royal forces in the latter stages of the battle of Sedgemoor.
Pembroke may have initially received personal tokens of the king’s favour, but progress in his career was blocked by his growing opposition to James II’s policies.
That the young earl already acted, and was seen, as a moderate, fundamentally loyal to the crown is suggested by the fact that Pembroke was one of the few lords lieutenant critical of the king’s policies who retained his position throughout 1685-8. In March 1688 he was merely ‘joined’ in his administration of Wiltshire by James II’s follower William Paston, 2nd earl of Yarmouth, a Norfolk peer, who was sent to monitor Pembroke’s actions in the county without actually ousting him. Pembroke may well have been one of the few among the king’s critics who was allowed to debate with the king. As late as November 1687 Pembroke ‘has been several times in the closet with his Majesty and has at large very rationally debated the matter [the imposition of the Three Questions] with the king and tells [him] he is very confident it will not succeed, but he will propose his Majesty’s pleasure with all the advantage he can.’
At the time of the king’s first flight on 11 Dec. Pembroke signed the Guildhall Declaration and, with his Wiltshire rival Weymouth, as well as Thomas Colepeper, 2nd Baron Colepeper, and Francis Turner, bishop of Ely, was delegated to present the Declaration to William of Orange at his camp at Henley.
The Convention, 1689
According to Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, Pembroke was convinced that ‘all endeavours must be used in the Convention ... to provide for the safety of the government with regard to the king’s interest.’
Yet despite his manifest opposition, once this important vote had passed, Pembroke quickly reconciled himself to the new situation and regime. Like his loyalist colleague Nottingham, who had led the House’s managers in the conferences, his constitutionalist scruples were satisfied by the Convention’s vote and resolution of 6 Feb., and three days later he and Nottingham were the only two supporters of a regency, among a host of ardent Williamites, named to the committee assigned to draw up reasons justifying the House’s amendments to the Declaration of Right, among which was one which stated that William and Mary had the ‘sole and full exercise of the regal power’. When Clarendon tried to convince these two former loyalists to enter a protest against the amendment of 9 Feb. giving William and Mary full regal powers or, failing that, to boycott attendance of the House in protest, Pembroke and Nottingham both declined, Pembroke explaining that ‘it would be of ill consequence; the Government must be supported, or else we should all be ruined’, while Nottingham told Clarendon ‘we must support the Government as well as we can, and the Lords can never answer it, if they leave the House’.
Pembroke quickly showed as much loyalty, and application, to the new regime as he had previously shown for James II. His loyalties appear not to have been to individual monarchs but to the crown and government in place itself, as is suggested by his responses to Clarendon and Ailesbury and by a comment attributed to him by Roger Morrice. This may have arisen from Pembroke’s role in the committee appointed on 1 May to draft an address on the king’s desire to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, ‘that their Lordships might put what clauses they thought fit into acts of Parliament touching the prerogative, but the branches and roots of the prerogative were unalienable and inseparable from the crown, and such acts [i.e. the Habeas Corpus Act], did not bind the crown’.
On the same day he took the oaths to the new monarchs, 2 Mar. 1689, Pembroke chaired a meeting of the select committee considering the bill for the trial of peers and he took a major role in guiding this bill through its tortured proceedings, although he was not satisfied with its final outcome. The committee, following an order made in the previous meeting of 28 Feb., also chaired by Pembroke, considered and approved an amended clause of the bill which lowered the number of lords required to try a peer outside time of Parliament. Pembroke reported this amendment to the bill on 4 Mar., and then chaired the committee of the whole which considered and ultimately rejected them. Upon Pembroke’s report, the House divided, with Pembroke acting as teller for the minority contents (which side lost by one vote), on whether to put the question whether the new clause should stand. The following day, after further debate, the House rejected the committee of the whole’s amendments requiring the entire House to be summoned and passed the version of the bill with the reduced criteria. On 6 Mar. Pembroke entered his protest against this version of the bill.
Pembroke showed his attachment to the regime in other ways and acted as the bearer of the third sword at the coronation of William and Mary on 11 April.
First Lord of the Admiralty, 1690-2
Pembroke returned from his successful embassy in early October and was almost immediately rewarded for his efforts by being sworn on to the Privy Council on 14 Oct. 1689. Carmarthen classed him as among the supporters of the court in a list of October 1689 to February 1690. A new session of the Convention began on 23 Oct. and Pembroke was present on that day and for a total of 79 per cent of the ensuing sittings, but other than being named to various select committees with the other peers present he was not heavily involved in the affairs of the House throughout most of the winter of 1689. That winter saw his first entry into ministerial office – a position which he was to retain, though in different guises, for the following 20 years. Sometime around the turn of 1690 Pembroke and his kinsman Torrington were each commissioned to raise and command a regiment of marines.
For the elections to the new Parliament, and indeed for all the elections of this period, Pembroke, despite his growing prominence in Whitehall, did not exercise a predominant influence in the county of Wiltshire and even in his own borough of Wilton he was rarely able to return both members to the Commons. In March 1690 his client, the clerk of the Privy Council Sir John Nicholas‡, of a family long associated with the Herberts, was defeated by a local Whig candidate, Sir Richard Grobham Howe‡.
As trailed earlier in the spring, Pembroke was one of the ‘Council of Nine’ assigned to advise Mary during her tenure as regent while William was campaigning in Ireland from June 1690.
A Grave Eye, and an Overthinking Face
Seems to distinguish him from all his Race.
But Nature’s proud and leaving all Restraint
By sudden start shows there’s a Mortal taint:
Which to a good Observer, makes it plain,
His frenzy will ere long break out again.
But after all to do him right it’s sad,
The best of all the Race should be stark Mad.POAS, v. 197-8.
Suspicions that he took after the more infamous members of his family dogged Pembroke throughout his career, but the only times he did appear to give vent to his family’s penchant for rages was when he was in his cups – as William III was happy to witness, for it reassured him that Pembroke was not, as commonly rumoured, ‘faultless’.
As first lord of the Admiralty, Pembroke was heavily involved in the major crisis of the summer of 1690 – the defeat of the Anglo-Dutch fleet off Beachy Head. He co-signed, with Nottingham, the positive orders to the admiral of the fleet, Pembroke’s kinsman Torrington, to engage the numerically superior French fleet in battle.
The question of who should replace Torrington in command of the fleet, with a threatening French fleet still in the Channel, quickly engulfed and divided the Council of Nine. Within only a few days of the battle it was decided to entrust command of the fleet to two experienced naval commanders headed by a figurehead ‘man of quality’. At first the obvious candidate was Pembroke himself, and Mary seemed to have preferred him to some of the other more ambitious peers who were pushing themselves forward, such as Carmarthen, Devonshire or especially the wayward peer Charles Mordaunt, earl of Monmouth (later 3rd earl of Peterborough). By 22 July, though, Pembroke had made clear that he was not willing to take the responsibility, and even ‘disapproved having a man of quality to go, saying it was only to send him to be knocked on the head, without the hopes of having any credit of what was well done.’ Instead the queen chose two experienced captains Sir Richard Haddock and Sir John Ashby and left it to the king to choose the third. Pembroke was then confronted with ruling over a divided Admiralty Board as three of the seven commissioners, led by the Whig Sir Thomas Lee‡, refused to countenance these royal choices and strongly asserted the Board’s right to have a consultative, and even deciding, role in the appointment of naval officers. A number of stormy interviews took place between the queen and the commissioners in late July and early August 1690, in which Pembroke stood in the difficult position of trying to be both the spokesman for the recalcitrant Board, ‘for form’s sake’, and a loyal servant to the monarchs. It was to Pembroke that the queen sent ‘positive orders’ on 5 Aug. that the commission for the Tory Sir Richard Haddock, the chief target of Lee’s partisan enmity, was to be signed and shortly afterwards a bare majority of four Admiralty commissioners, led by the first lord, Pembroke himself, signed the commission for the new royal appointees as co-admirals, while ‘the other three continue obstinate’.
At the same time the Admiralty commissioners, presided over by Pembroke, refused to sign a commission establishing a court martial for Torrington, arguing that by statute such a court martial could only be established by a single lord high admiral and not a commission. Despite the exasperation of the queen and her ministers, the Admiralty commissioners continued to delay and the matter of the method and timing of Torrington’s trial dragged on throughout September.
On 2 Jan. 1691 Pembroke reported from a committee of the whole with amendments and a proviso to the bill to suspend those parts of the navigation acts which prohibited the employment of foreign sailors on English ships during the war with France. Three days later, as the Houses were trying to wrap things up before the prorogation scheduled for that day, Pembroke acted as manager or reporter for a total of four conferences on the Commons’ disagreement with one of the provisos. It was only at the third conference that one of the parties budged, when, as Pembroke reported to the House, the Commons accepted one of the House’s amendments but wished to make the penalty against those infringing the act a term in gaol rather than a fine. The House still refused to accept this and Pembroke was one of five peers assigned to draw up reasons to adhere to their original amendment when the matter was lost by the prorogation of Parliament.
Pembroke’s marine regiment, of which he had been colonel since January 1690, was given instead to the admiral Henry Killigrew‡ shortly after the prorogation, perhaps owing to Pembroke’s association with the disgraced Torrington, who similarly had all his commands removed.
Pembroke attended three-fifths of the meetings of the 1691-2 session when Parliament resumed in October 1691, but apart from being named to the majority of select committees established, including the two small drafting committees assigned on 22 and 27 Oct. to formulate addresses of thanks to the king and queen each, Pembroke’s only notable intervention in the House in this session came on 9 Feb. 1692 when he acted as a teller at the report from a free conference on the question whether to agree with the Commons in their objections to the House’s amendments to the public accounts bill.
Lord Privy Seal, 1692-9
Pembroke was apparently more active in the Admiralty and in the council than he was in the House and his reputation for knowledge, loyalty and moderation, ensured that he would remain at the heart of William’s continuing efforts to put together a ‘mixed ministry’. Earlier, in February 1691, Carmarthen had put Pembroke’s name forward to William as a suitable lord lieutenant of Ireland.
Pembroke, as lord privy seal, first attended the 1692-3 session on 10 Nov. 1692, a week after it had commenced, and a week after his arrival was named to the group of 16 peers assigned to draft the House’s response to the king’s speech and to thank the queen for her management of the government. In total he came to three-fifths of the sittings of this session. His attitude towards the contentious place bill at the turn of 1692-3 is ambiguous and difficult to disentangle. Ailesbury originally listed Pembroke under the ‘not contents’ in his division list on the question whether to commit the bill on 31 Dec. 1692 but then subsequently crossed the name through, either because Pembroke was not present at the vote – his name does not appear in the attendance list of the day – or because Ailesbury was mistaken in his assessment of Pembroke as an opponent of the bill. The Prussian ambassador, Bonet, for his part regarded Pembroke as the bill’s ‘great protector’, which would have made Pembroke unusual as one of the only, if not the only, Tory government ministers and office-holders who supported the bill. For 3 Jan. 1693, the day of the final vote on the bill, Ailesbury marked Pembroke as one of seven peers ‘that went away and for the bill’, that is, he abstained from the vote despite his support, perhaps because the court Whig Scarbrough (as Viscount Lumley had become at the Revolution), took Pembroke out to dinner that day to keep him away from the vote. Pembroke agreed to this invitation thinking that thereby both sides in the division would lose one vote but, according to Bonnet, Scarbrough managed to get back in time to cast his vote against the bill and even brought another court Whig with him. If Pembroke, as seems likely, had indeed been in favour of the bill, he did not publicly show it, as he did not subscribe to the protest against its narrow rejection that day.
He was assigned by the committee of the whole House on 16 Jan. 1693 to draw up a clause for the Triennial Act, and two days later he reported from conference the Commons’ objection to the House’s amendment to the land tax bill. The House reluctantly agreed to recede from its amendment the following day, assigning Pembroke and a number of other peers to draw up a statement expressing the House’s dislike of the Commons’ bill but its willingness to concede for the sake of granting the king necessary supply. On that same day, 19 Jan., Pembroke introduced in the House a private bill which reflected the increasingly complicated and controversial disposition of the Herbert estate. In July 1688, the 7th earl of Pembroke’s only daughter and heir Charlotte, barely 13 years old but reputedly a heiress worth £70,000, had married the son and heir of James II’s lord chancellor, George Jeffreys, Baron Jeffreys.
Pembroke’s star continued to rise and by late March 1693 it was widely rumoured that he would be appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in the place of Henry Sydney, Viscount Sydney (later earl of Romney).
Pembroke attended just less than half of the meetings of 1693-4 and on 11 Dec. 1693 the court Whig Charles Howard, 3rd earl of Carlisle, registered his proxy with him for the remainder of the session. On 5 Jan. 1694, upon Pembroke’s report from conference, the House agreed to recede from its amendment to the place bill by which it sought to remove the Commons’ exemption of its speaker from the bill’s provisions. William, nevertheless, promptly vetoed this bill so offensive to him.
Once again after the prorogation, Pembroke was appointed to the council assigned to advise Mary during William’s absence – except this summer the council was notably slimmed down by William and reduced to five members. Although contemporaries gave varying accounts of the numbers and members of this new council, it had at its core the lord president of the council Carmarthen, now raised in the peerage to be duke of Leeds, the lord privy seal Pembroke, the lord keeper John Somers, Baron Somers, and the secretaries of state Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury and John Trenchard‡ – an indication of Pembroke’s continuing place at the heart of William and Mary’s government, despite the increasing turn to the Whigs in 1693-4.
Pembroke was a commissioner for the three prorogations between 18 Sept. and 6 Nov. 1694, but it was only on the last of these that he was actually present to officiate. When Parliament reassembled on 12 Nov. Pembroke attended and proceeded to sit in over two-thirds of the meetings of this session (69 per cent). L’Hermitage reported to the States General that on 18 Dec., in the debates in the committee of the whole considering the triennial bill, Pembroke ‘harangued’ lengthily, insisting that the Parliament should be dissolved immediately after the end of the current session, regardless of the terms of the bill which allowed it to remain in being until November 1696.
The lord privy seal was most prominent in the proceedings at the end of the session. On 11 Apr. 1695 he was added to the group of delegates dealing with the Commons in conference on the Houses’ disagreements over the trials for treason bill and he attended conferences on 15 and 20 April. On 18 Apr. he was also named a reporter for the conference on the bill to continue various laws, including the law on press censorship. He was named on 16 Apr. to the committee entrusted with drawing up a bill to indemnify Sir Thomas Cooke‡ for any evidence he provided about bribery and corruption in the affairs of the East India Company and on 22 Apr. was chosen by ballot as one of the 13 members of the House committee which, joined with a committee of the Commons, took Cooke’s testimony. He reported the result of these examinations to the House on the following two days and on 24 Apr. acted as principal spokesman for the House in a conference on this matter, upon which report he was further named to the committee which was to examine those implicated by Cooke’s testimony such as Sir Basil Firebrace‡. He reported from another conference the agreement that the joint committee which had investigated Cooke would do the same for the others implicated, and on 27 Apr. he delivered to the House the results of the joint committee’s examination of Firebrace and his accomplices.
Pembroke had served on Queen Mary’s cabinet council during William’s absence for every summer since 1690. After the queen’s death in December 1694, Pembroke continued in this role as caretaker of the kingdom in the king’s absence, and was appointed one of the lords justices from May to October 1695.
Pembroke attended the first day of the new Parliament on 22 Nov. 1695 and continued to sit in 69 per cent of the meetings of its first session. In early December he took an active part in debates in the committee of the whole, at least according to the notes taken by the chairman of the committee, Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon. On 4 Dec. 1695 he supported Torrington in his argument, in the committee of the whole dealing with the state of the coin, that an address should be made to the king to prohibit the import of debased English coin. Pembroke also suggested the coins of smaller value, such as half-crowns, should be called in first to be made into smaller pieces first, to limit the loss in value in the recoinage. He also felt that an address had to be made to call in coins, and he was placed on the committee of 17 assigned by the committee of the whole to draft an address calling for a royal proclamation that no clipped money be accepted as valid currency and to present this address to the Commons in a conference.
Pembroke first sat in the House on 2 Nov. 1696 when Parliament resumed and continued to sit for a total of 64 per cent of the meetings of the session. Vernon listed him, among a host of Whig managers such as Gilbert Burnet, the bishop of Salisbury, Ford Grey, earl of Tankerville, and the earl of Monmouth, as one of the managers of the debate on the second reading of the bill to attaint Sir John Fenwick‡ on 18 December. With many other court supporters he voted for the attainder bill’s second reading, though he stated in the debate that this was only done in order to encourage Fenwick to make a more full confession, and that he had still not decided how he would vote in the final stages of the bill. At the bill’s third reading on 23 Dec. 1696, he and several other ministers and court followers including the lord steward Devonshire, the lord chamberlain Charles Sackville, 6th earl of Dorset, James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond, and Charles Seymour, 6th duke of Somerset, went against their previous stance and voted against the bill, though they did not subscribe to the subsequent protest against its passage. This unexpected reversal of so many courtiers and ministers led Vernon to comment to Shrewsbury that he was surprised the bill passed at all ‘when one considers who they were that voted against it, particularly all the lords justices who had voices, except the archbishop of Canterbury’.
On 10 Mar. 1697 John Lowther, Viscount Lonsdale, registered his proxy with Pembroke, who was able to use it until his own departure from the House that session, intended for a more important duty, on 7 April. In late 1696 Pembroke had been appointed chief plenipotentiary for William III at the peace negotiations at Ryswick and on 11 Apr. 1697, five days before Parliament’s prorogation, he formally took leave of the king to travel to the United Provinces. He returned to the king’s presence, with the Treaty of Ryswick successfully concluded, on 26 December.
Another matter took up his attention in late March 1698. Pembroke and Henry Somerset, duke of Beaufort had been made trustees of the estate of the Jacobite William Herbert, marquess of Powis, shortly after his flight to France in 1689. In May 1695 William III had granted much of the forfeited Welsh land of the outlawed and exiled Powis to his close companion William Nassau van Zuylestein, earl of Rochford. On 17 Mar. 1698 Rochford, with Powis’s son and heir William Herbert, styled Viscount Montgomery in exile and deprived by outlawry of his title as 2nd marquess of Powis, submitted to the House a petition against the legal actions which Montgomery’s lawyers and agents had brought against many of Rochford’s tenants on the former Herbert lands in Wales. Exactly two weeks later, facing stiff opposition in the House from Powis’s trustee Pembroke, and perhaps sensing the general anti-Dutch mood in Parliament and the country, Rochford desisted and agreed not to insist upon his privilege in this matter.
Unruly Parliaments and ministerial reshuffles, 1699-1702
Pembroke was present when the new Parliament commenced on 6 Dec. 1698, but attended only just over half of the meetings of the first session. This may have been because of illness, as on 28 Mar. 1699 his absence from the trial of Edward Rich [1553], 6th earl of Warwick, was excused for this reason, or perhaps out of distress at the lack of co-operation with the king shown by the Commons in the wake of the Treaty of Ryswick. This first session was prorogued on 4 May 1699 and two weeks later Pembroke was replaced in his position as lord privy seal by Lonsdale, and was made lord president of the Privy Council, in which he succeeded the dismissed duke of Leeds. This was part of William III’s major reshuffling of offices in his attempt to bring in moderate court Tories into a mixed ministry to counterbalance the increasingly unmanageable and ineffective Junto Whigs, who had let William down by their inability to prevent the country members in the Commons from passing the act disbanding the army. That Pembroke still ranked high in the estimation of all parties concerned during this highly partisan time is suggested by the anecdote that the political fixer Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, on hearing that William was planning to abandon England altogether upon the passage of the Disbandment Act, commented, ‘Does he so? There is Tom of Pembroke, who is as good a block of wood as a king can be cut out of. We will send for him, and make him our king.’
Pembroke was present for less than half (44 per cent) of the meetings of the session beginning on 16 Nov. 1699. In the first week of the new year he was named to drafting committees to compose addresses on the dispute between William King, bishop of Derry [I], and the Irish Society of London (10 Jan. 1700) and on the House’s resolution against the Darien colony of the Scottish East India Company (8 Feb. 1700). On 23 Feb. 1700 he voted against the motion to adjourn into a committee of the whole to discuss amendments to the bill to continue the East India Company as a corporation, a vote for the court which once again placed him alongside many Whigs. He came to the fore in the House as a prominent actor in the last days of the session as both Houses argued over the Irish forfeiture and land tax bill. The Commons had loaded the bill with amendments which appeared to many lords to be ‘tacks’ on a money bill. On 6 Apr. 1700 Pembroke voted to delete from the bill the ‘place clause’ which sought to exclude excise officials from sitting in the Commons, a move which set up the confrontation between the two Houses. Three days later he reported to the House from conference that the Commons did not agree with the lords’ amendments as they argued that the upper House did not have the right to amend money bills, and Pembroke chaired the committee subsequently assigned to draw up the House’s reasons for insisting on its amendments. Vernon explained to Shrewsbury that the lord privy seal Lonsdale and Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron (later marquess of) Wharton ‘have been the great instruments in stirring up the lords to make the amendments in the bill’, and that it was through their exertions that Thomas Tenison, archbishop of Canterbury, and Pembroke, also members of William’s cabinet council, ‘came blindly into it, as supposing the king had some scheme in reserve for carrying on the public business’ in case the measure was lost. But William did not have such a scheme in reserve and as the dispute between the Houses reached an impasse, he instructed his followers in the House to switch position and recede from the amendments. This message either did not get through to Pembroke, or he ignored it, and on 10 Apr. he continued to lead the opposition against the Commons’ bill and their ‘tacks’. He reported from the two conferences that day in which the Houses, with increasing bad temper, debated the right of the upper House to amend money bills, and upon his second report a sufficient number of peers heeded the king’s desire to let the bill pass and voted to recede from their amendment – but not Pembroke, who voted in favour of continuing to adhere and then subscribed to the protest against the amendment’s abandonment. With the bill passed and relations between the Houses tense, the king prorogued Parliament the following day.
Despite this brief bout of disobedience, Pembroke was honoured shortly after the prorogation by being made a knight of the garter, alongside William III’s favourite Arnold Joost van Keppel, earl of Albemarle. The formal installation at Windsor took place on 5 June 1700 and shortly afterwards it was rumoured, once again incorrectly, that Pembroke was to be further honoured with the lord lieutenancy of Ireland.
On 11 Nov. 1701 William took the controversial decision to dissolve Parliament again, overriding the objections of Pembroke and some of his other moderate councillors. With a new Parliament William embarked on another reshuffling of his ministry, this time favouring the Whigs. In the last days of January 1702 William replaced Pembroke as lord president of the council with Somerset, but at the same time he took the Admiralty affairs out of commission and appointed Pembroke sole lord high admiral of the realm, a move widely thought to be merely a stop-gap until a more thorough-going Whig could be placed there.
Anne’s Lord President of the Council, 1702-8
Pembroke continued in his role as lord high admiral following the death of William III, and throughout April and May preparations continued for his first venture to sea. In the council Pembroke was a strong advocate, with John Churchill, earl (later duke) of Marlborough, of war with France, refuting Rochester’s insistence that England act only as an auxiliary force.
Pembroke’s borough of Wilton took on a new significance in the election of July 1702. It had long been a centre of Dissent and after the election of November 1701 the Whig mayor of the corporation had made at least 19 new freemen, all of them Nonconformists. In the election of July they returned two Whig members against the sitting members. The Tory-dominated Commons’ committee for elections seated Pembroke’s client John Gauntlett on petition instead, and although not the sole cause for the introduction of the occasional conformity bill, the evidence heard in the committee in November 1702 about the Wilton corporation’s manipulation and evasion of the Corporation Act only further heightened the temperature surrounding this issue in Parliament.
Pembroke’s role in the controversy surrounding this election is not clear, but he may have been moved by it and by his role as a government minister to support the occasional conformity bill throughout the three sessions of Anne’s first Parliament (Oct. 1702-Apr. 1705). He attended slightly more than half of the meetings of each of these sessions, and in the first two he voted to pass the occasional conformity bill. In November 1704 it was at least predicted that he would support the Commons’ tack, although he probably ultimately sided with the court position against it. He did not subscribe to either of the protests of 14 Dec. 1703 or 15 Dec. 1704 against the rejections of the bill. In other matters of the 1702 Parliament, Pembroke intervened in the debate on the bill to settle a £100,000 p.a. jointure on prince George by arguing that the controversial clause maintaining the prince in his place in the House and the Privy Council after the queen’s death was not a ‘tack’, as the Whigs insisted, but was a necessary provision for the effectiveness of the bill. He was not concerned with the consequences of the clause for the position in the House of the other peers of foreign descent, whom, he thought, ‘were already safe as to their peerage’.
In late August 1705, following the recent disagreements between Marlborough and the States General over the conduct of the war, it was proposed to send Pembroke to the United Provinces to ‘endeavour to unite them to us, in a more vigorous prosecution of the war’. It was felt that Pembroke’s ‘gentle temper would make that apparent that the queen’s intention was to heal and not to exasperate’, but Marlborough advised against this potentially inflammatory diplomatic mission and it was cancelled at the last minute.
On 30 Apr. 1707 Pembroke was, after a number of previous false rumours, made lord lieutenant of Ireland as a compromise candidate in the place of the Tory duke of Ormond. This change took place in the midst of the constant demands for office by the Junto Whigs. The Junto hoped that the lord lieutenancy of Ireland would go to Wharton and Pembroke’s lord presidency to Somers. Both men were so strongly disliked by Anne that she stymied these plans, at least temporarily, by giving the lord lieutenancy to Pembroke at the end of April while still maintaining him as lord president, arguing that he was only going over to Ireland to oversee and manage that kingdom’s Parliament meeting that summer and would be back in September.
The principles upon which the generality of the people of the country act are so strange to the honesty and integrity of my lord lieutenant that it has been none of the least difficulties with those that knew them better that twas possible for my Lord to do, to prevail with him to guard himself against them. And the intrigues of one who expected to fill his place [Wharton], carried on by some of his emissaries sent over for that purpose, has been like to make this parliament very uneasy. But we have overcome both, and the vote for the support of the government was carried by so great a majority, and without a division, that I can’t but conclude from it that all here will end entirely to the satisfaction of her majesty.
Add. 61365, ff. 151-2.
By early August the Irish Parliament had voted supply for the queen, but Pembroke was not able to finish his business there and embark for England until 28 November.
Last office, 1708-14
During the winter of 1707-8 the House engaged in a thorough and, under the leadership of the Whigs, highly critical investigation of the administration of the Admiralty under the governance of George of Denmark and his council led by George Churchill‡. There were calls for the prince’s resignation and the Junto suggested that Pembroke, at that time still inoffensive to them, should return to his former post of lord high admiral in his place, in which case Somers would be able to take over as lord president and Wharton as lord lieutenant of Ireland.
The queen refused to acquiesce to Junto demands and refused to remove either her husband or Pembroke from their posts. This stalemate continued for the next few months, during which time Pembroke, whose first wife had died in November 1706, entered into a strange courtship with Lady Barbara Slingsby. Having already been twice widowed, most recently by the death of John Arundell, 2nd Baron Arundell of Trerice, and with many of her own children to provide for, the dowager baroness was wary of attaching herself to another widower with nine children of his own and known for his eccentricities. She admitted she considered marriage with Pembroke only out of ‘mercenary’ concern for the interest of her children. The summer months of 1708 were spent in protracted marriage negotiations, which the dowager baroness recounted in detail to her friend the duchess of Marlborough, over her insistence on keeping her own fortune from her previous marriages while having a jointure of £4,000 settled on her. After Pembroke had eventually conceded to these demands, the couple were married on 21 Sept. 1708, prompting a number of caustic comments among observers.
On 22 Oct. 1708 Godolphin was able to alert Marlborough that the queen had been worn down sufficiently and that she was willing to persuade Pembroke to move aside so that Somers and Wharton could be placed in his two offices.
I am sure there is no longer occasion for the service of the earl of Pembroke. When it is necessary to look out for the fittest man for every place, ’tis high time to drop one who is fit for none at all... Having had so much more than his share of favour and advantage, he ought to have been contented to let others have their turns: especially since that party prevails in this Parliament which he was so far from being a friend so that he opposed it with all the little interest he has anywhere. ... But if the queen will have other measures kept with this strange man, yet I can’t help thinking that what he demands is monstrous and not fit to be granted. Must he have a pension of £2,000 per annum given him to accept a place of eight? ... But the teller’s place for his son is the best jest of all. It looks as if he meant to entail incapacity upon all the offices in the kingdom, and that no useful man should have an employment as long as any Herbert was alive. Those are almost the only places that any very considerable man in the House of Commons can be gratified with. ... Yet after all, if even this reversion and the pension will satisfy him, without the office, for so great a good I think it should be complied with, but if he has the office, I am sure the least consideration more cannot be added to it without enraging all the world.
HLQ, xxxv. 328; Add. 61459, ff. 144-6.
Pembroke’s conditions were met, but the queen and the ministry refused to acquiesce to the Whig demands for a public statement that this was only a temporary appointment, which Whigs such as Maynwaring saw as a sign of the weakness of the declining Godolphin ministry:
Your Grace [the duchess of Marlborough] judges right that there is nothing intended in the business of Lord Pembroke. For when Lord Wharton spoke about it, the answer [by Godolphin] was very snappish, these words, ‘Lord! what would people have me do? It is impossible he [Pembroke], should hold it three months, but if such a declaration be made nobody will obey three days’. Lord Wharton asked me if he should mention it more. I told him I thought not, for that it was plain it must be the work of time, and I saw no use of angering people to no purpose. And having had some conversation with Mr Peyton [Craven Peyton‡], (who is of the mind of our Governors in the House of Commons) he thanked God that Lord Pembroke had accepted and that the [Whig], Lords had not carried their Admiral [Orford], too; for then Lord Treasurer could not have stood three months, so that it is plain this matter is laid deep, and that Lord Treasurer’s flatterers advise him to it as a necessary means of his own preservation. ... I have heard since, that Lord Somers is not dissatisfied about Lord Pembroke, but that rather, from the extreme niceness of his temper, he is pleased with the other’s being Admiral some time, that it may not be thought he turned him out.
HLQ, xxxv. 328-9; Add. 61459, ff. 147-52.
Pembroke was made lord high admiral on 29 Nov. 1708, a post which, according to Burnet, ‘he entered on with great uneasiness’.
Pembroke only attended one-fifth of the meetings of the 1708-9 session of the new Parliament beginning on 16 Nov. 1708, and on 21 Jan. 1709 he supported Godolphin and the ministry against a Whig attack by voting in favour of the motion that Godolphin’s ally James Douglas, 2nd duke of Queensberry [S], who sat in the House as duke of Dover, could vote in the election of the representative Scots peers. In this session Pembroke was also consistently named a commissioner for passing legislation (on 23 Dec. 1708, 26 Jan., 24 Feb., 23 Mar. and 21 Apr. 1709) and he was a commissioner for prorogation in the period between sessions. But he was primarily preoccupied for most of 1709 with his attempts to reform the Admiralty and with fending off Whig calls for him to be replaced by Orford. One historian has claimed that ‘throughout the year 1709 the question of the Admiralty was the most critical political problem with which Godolphin and Marlborough had to contend’.
Pembroke, now out of office for the first time in his career since 1689, came to barely over a third of the meetings of the controversial session of 1709-10. On 20 Mar. 1710 he voted that Henry Sacheverell was not guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours, a vote which greatly surprised Marlborough on the continent.
The Hanoverian Succession, 1715-33
Despite this prominent role, and his previous support for the Hanoverian succession, Pembroke did not take in active part in the government or Parliament in the new regime and seldom attended the House in the reigns of the first two Georges. A full discussion of his activities in Parliament and in public life during these sparse years of attendance will appear in the next volumes in this series.
Pembroke died in his London townhouse at 12 St James’s Square on 22 Jan. 1733. He left behind him a wealthy estate, owing to his careful management of his Wiltshire lands and the proceeds of his numerous offices, and one of the most famous collections of antiquities, consisting of statues, busts and reliefs in England at his house at Wilton.