CLINTON, Theophilus (1599-1667)

Theophilus Clinton’s ancestor John de Clinton had been raised to the peerage as Lord Clinton in the fourteenth century. They became coheirs of the Say barony after the death of the last Lord Say in 1399 and then styled themselves Lords Clinton and Say. The other coheir of the title was the family of Fiennes, one of whose members was created Lord Say and Sele in 1447. Perhaps to cement his own claim to the Say title, John, 6th Lord Clinton and Say, married a Fiennes and from that point on the Clintons also took the surname Fiennes for themselves. Theophilus Clinton’s great-grandfather, Edward Clinton⁺, 9th Lord Clinton and Say, served the Tudor monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, for which he was rewarded with former monastic lands in Lincolnshire by Henry VIII and created earl of Lincoln by Elizabeth I. In 1664 the earl calculated that the income from his Lincolnshire estates, or at least from his principal manor of Folkingham, stood at £3,000 a year. CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 416-17; TNA, C6/29/22.

Theophilus Clinton inherited the title and its Lincolnshire lands in 1619 when he was only 19 years old. In 1622 he solidified his family’s connection with the Fiennes by his marriage to Bridget Fiennes. This was a natural alliance because of the families’ distant kinship and perhaps owing as well to similar political and religious views. Lincoln came from a Puritan household, stamped by the influence of his mother, Elizabeth Knyvet, dowager countess of Lincoln. He attended Queens’ College, Cambridge, where his religious instruction would have been conducted by the Puritan John Preston. Many of his connections participated in the early Puritan emigration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His younger sisters Arabella and Susan were among the early colonists as were, more prominently, his estate steward Thomas Dudley, and Dudley’s daughter Anne and son-in-law Simon Bradstreet. Both Thomas Dudley and Simon Bradstreet, later served as governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Lincoln himself was hauled before the High Commission in the 1639 in a case involving impropriated tithes, although in this case he took pains to stress to Laud his wish ‘to wash my hands before you from the charges of demolishing or profaning the Church’. CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 14-15, 382-434; 1640-1, p. 210. Two of Lincoln’s own daughters were to marry leading Puritans and Parliamentarians from the West Country, Robert Rolle^‡ and Hugh Boscawen^‡, while another married the Cheshire Presbyterian Sir George Booth, later Baron Delamer.

Lincoln joined his father-in-law in opposing, and even actively resisting, the fiscal and religious policies of Charles I, and he was imprisoned for a time in the Tower for refusing to pay the Forced Loan. CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 485; 1627-8, pp. 116, 294; 1635-6, p. 289; 1640, pp. 66, 641; HMC Hamilton, i. 116. Personal and political interests coincided in the Parliaments of 1640 when he pursued a long-standing dispute with the royalist leader Robert Bertie^†, earl of Lindsey, over drainage schemes in the fens of south-eastern Lincolnshire, which Lincoln claimed were doing irreparable damage to his own property. CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 404, 526, 534; 1633-4, p. 95; 1640, p. 34; 1640-1, pp. 416-17; 1641-3, p. 227; HMC 4th Rep. 29, 32. In the early stages of the Civil Wars Lincoln fought for Parliament, but he subsequently became alienated from the more radical developments in Parliament. He declined to swear the Covenant and from late 1645 voted consistently with the Presbyterian lords, usually in opposition to his father-in-law Saye and Sele, whose influence on him may have decreased after his second marriage to his cousin, the widow of Sir Robert Stanley^‡, younger brother of the royalist James Stanley^†, 7th earl of Derby. CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 340, 395; HMC Portland, i. 79; C. Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire. 168-71; Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics, 1645-9’ (Cambridge PhD 1986), App. B. Lincoln was one of the seven peers impeached by the Commons in 1647 for supporting the City Presbyterian uprising against the Army. CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 570; HMC 7th Rep. 6, 13, 17, 19, 29. He returned to the House in early June 1648 after the charges were dropped but stopped attending the House entirely after Pride’s Purge and did not take any part in the king’s trial and execution. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics, 1645-9’, App. D. An informant later told the Council of State that in the projected rebellions of 1651, Lincoln was looked upon by the exiled court as one ‘that would freely engage upon the Presbyterian score’, but it does not appear that he took part in this or any other uprising during the Interregnum. HMC Portland, i. 586; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 210.

In March 1660 Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, drew up a list of the potential composition of the House of Lords in which he included Lincoln among the ‘Lords who sat’ in the House in the 1640s and whom he thought might still be supportive of a Presbyterian church settlement. Lincoln greeted the Restoration enthusiastically and was one of the nine lords who sat in the House on the first day of the Convention. He took an active role in the proceedings of the Convention, attending 90 per cent of the meetings of that assembly. He only missed 15 days in the first part of the Convention which engineered the Restoration. On the very first day, 25 April, he reported from the committee entrusted to draft an order for Henry Scobell’s return of all papers and records of the House. The same day he was also one of the group of eight lords delegated by the House to thank General George Monck, later duke of Albemarle, for his services to the country. On the following two days he was nominated to the committees to make Monck captain-general and to frame an ordinance to establish a committee of safety of Both Houses. On 1 May the House named him to the committee to draft a letter of thanks to Charles II for the Declaration of Breda, and on that same day Lincoln dispatched one of his own servants, William Langton, as the bearer of a letter from Major-General Edward Massey^‡ (who had been impeached for treason with Lincoln in 1647 and was involved in planning the risings of summer 1659) to Charles informing him of both Houses’ acceptance of the Declaration and of Lincoln’s ‘great zeal … for the promoting of your Majesty’s service therein’. CCSP, v. 2, 22. In a separate letter to Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, Massey further informed him that ‘Lord Lincoln is much your lordship’s servant’ and that he would soon dispatch William Widdrington, 2nd Baron Widdrington, another Lincolnshire landowner, to the Netherlands bearing a letter from Lincoln to the king. The king’s response to this letter, thanking Lincoln for his loyalty and service, was dated 18 May. Bodl. Clarendon 72, ff. 96, 109, 245, 257, 264; CCSP, v. 2, 21, 22. By that time Lincoln was heavily involved in preparations for the Restoration. On 2 May he was placed on the committee to settle the militia and two days later he, with his former father-in-law Saye and Sele, Richard Sackville, 5th earl of Dorset, and William Craven, Baron Craven, were assigned to draw up an order to repeal and annul an act of the House of 20 July 1642 barring nine peers from sitting in the House. Four days later he was appointed to the committee of both Houses assigned to prepare the realm for the return of the king, and on 10 May he chaired this committee, whose minutes are among the records of the committee for privileges. PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, pp. 4, 7, 9. He was also named to the committee to consider what votes passed by the Convention should be presented to the king upon his arrival. On 14 May he gave evidence before the House ‘that there was another person’, apart from a Justice Baynes then under consideration by the House, ‘that had spoken other treasonable words against the king’. The next day he was placed on the committee to consider which ordinances made since the abolition of the House in 1649 should be kept and which annulled. He also became heavily involved in a dispute between the Houses over the treatment of the regicides. On 18 May the Commons presented to the House for its concurrence a series of votes ordering the seizure of the persons and estates of those who had sat in judgment of Charles I. Lincoln was part of the select group of three peers – with Saye and Sele and John Robartes, 2nd Baron Robartes (later earl of Radnor) – assigned to consider these votes. The House felt that the Commons’ unilaterally voting these resolutions involving judgments against the regicides was an entrenchment on the House’s own judicature. To make this point Lincoln’s committee rewrote the Commons’ vote – largely to the same effect and purpose but with different wording – and the House requested a conference with the lower House to make its concerns clear. The committee drew up the points for the conference, which was managed for the House on 19 May by its Speaker Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester. The Commons objected and at a further conference on 22 May the Commons complained of a printed version of the House’s revised order that the Lords had issued without consulting them and further argued that the matter was not about judicature. Lincoln was appointed to the committee established to develop a further answer to the lower House’s complaints. By this time his attention was taken up by the imminent arrival of the restored king, and he left the House on 22 May in order to gather a large body of gentlemen to go with him to greet Charles II at Dover. HMC 5th Rep. 150.

After the return of the king to Westminster, Lincoln’s activity in the House dropped steeply. From being nominated to about one committee a day throughout May, he was appointed to only five committees from 1 June until the summer adjournment of the Convention. However, his local knowledge was occasionally utilized. One committee to which he was named, on 16 July, was for a bill for nominating commissioners of sewers, an office with which he had long experience as he had served intermittently as a commissioner of sewers for Lincolnshire for the past three decades. CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 404, 526, 534; TNA, C181/5, pp. 18, 221; C181/6, pp. 203, 322, 388; C181/7, pp. 75, 239, 259. Another bill to whose committee he was only subsequently added on 3 Sept. dealt with the fens and their drainage. His lack of appointments may have stemmed from royalist distrust of the old Parliamentarian, despite his effusive professions of loyalty to Charles II and Hyde in mid-May. In keeping with Charles II’s stated wishes for the speedy passage of a merciful bill with few exemptions he protested against the decision of 1 Aug. 1660 to exempt wholly the former Parliamentarian leaders, Sir Henry Vane^‡, Arthur Hasilrigg^‡, John Lambert^‡, Daniel Axtell^‡ and Francis Hacker^‡ from the Indemnity Bill. He was the only peer to do so but predictably the Lords’ intervention did lead to renewed conflict with the Commons and slowed the passage of the bill. Lincoln was assiduous in his attendance when the Convention resumed in November 1660, and missed only two of the sitting days before the dissolution on 29 December. He was named to only eight committees on legislation, mostly on bills concerning individuals, as well as that for the observation of the Sabbath on 15 Dec. 1660.

Lincoln attended the Cavalier Parliament regularly (except for the short session of October 1665) until his death in May 1667, sitting in at least half the meetings of each session until late 1666. He came to two-thirds of the first session of 1661-2, when he was named to 19 select committees. He was nominated to eight committees in the first part of the session before the summer adjournment. He voted in favour of the claim made on 11 July 1661 by Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, to the lord great chamberlaincy, an office then held by Montagu Bertie, 2nd earl of Lindsey, son and heir of Lincoln’s fenland rival the 1st earl of Lindsey. In this part of the session he used Parliament to settle personal matters and to insist on his privileges. On 24 July, Lincoln complained to the House that his privilege had been breached when the under-sheriff of Middlesex and his men had violently broken into his house in Chelsea and distrained goods. The House referred the matter to the committee for privileges and on 26 July, after being ordered peremptorily by the House to meet, the committee heard copious testimony from the earl and countess of Lincoln and from the under-sheriff in this matter. PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, pp. 66-68. The Middlesex officials all swore that according to their records the house in question belonged to Sir Charles Stanley, Lincoln’s stepson. The Clintons and Lincoln’s wife’s family, the Gorges, had long held property in Chelsea from a common Clinton ancestor, Henry Clinton^†, 2nd earl of Lincoln. Survey of London, iv. 43. Using the overlapping and complicated histories of Clinton/Gorges ownership in Chelsea, Lincoln may have been claiming the house as his own in order to use his privileges to protect his debt-ridden and troubled stepson. Four days after this case, and on the day of Parliament’s summer adjournment, 30 July 1661, Lincoln brought a further complaint of breach of privilege before the House, and produced affidavits to prove that Sir Lawrence Goodman had illegally entered into his grounds in Threckingham, ‘and destroyed the mounds and hedges and by force took away part of the hay’.

On 28 May 1661 Lincoln had been put on the committee to consider the petition submitted by the Quakers. After the session had resumed he was on 26 Nov. further entrusted to consider the bill for ‘preventing mischiefs and dangers’ from this group of Nonconformists. He was appointed to two further committees that month. He was largely absent from the House from 11 Dec. 1661 and returned in early February 1662. On 6 Feb. 1662 he registered his proxy with John Egerton, 2nd earl of Bridgwater and vacated this proxy upon his return to the House on 26 February. From this part of the session to its end he was named to a further eight committees.

Lincoln was named to only one committee, on an estate bill, in the session of 1663, where he attended 56 per cent of the sittings. Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, forecast that he would oppose George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, in his attempt to impeach Clarendon. Lincoln came to 30 sittings of the session of spring 1664, 83 per cent of the meetings, but was not named to any committees on legislation. In the session of 1664-5, when he came to just over two-thirds of the sittings, he dissented on 29 Nov. 1664 from the House’s order that the lord chancellor reverse a decree in Chancery concerning the son of Baron Robartes. Lincoln, one of only two protestors, was concerned that as Robartes’s son was a member of the Commons this peremptory order would engender a jurisidictional row between the Houses and, furthermore, that the order ‘opens a gap to set up an arbitrary power in the Chancery’. Timberland, i. 69-73; HP Commons, 1660-90, iii. 338. He was named to only three committees on estate bills, but two of these had family and local connections to him: a bill to restore in blood his stepson, Sir Charles Stanley (27 Feb. 1665), and one to entrust the newly elected Member for Lincolnshire, Sir Robert Carr^‡, with part of his paternal estate (22 February).

Lincoln missed the session of October 1665 in Oxford entirely and then came to only 38 per cent of the sittings of the 1666-7 session. He first sat in this session on 13 Nov. 1666 but that day registered his proxy with William Russell, 5th earl of Bedford, who held it until Lincoln’s return to the House on 18 December. Lincoln on 23 Jan. 1667 protested against the resolution not to add a clause allowing for appeals to the king and the House of Lords to the bill for adjudicating disputes arising from the Great Fire. On 4 Feb. 1667 he was appointed to a committee for another bill dealing with his troubled stepson, Sir Charles Stanley. Having managed to have his bloodline restored by the previous act of 1665, this bill sought to appoint trustees to make leases of Stanley’s property to pay debts and provide maintenance for his children. Lincoln was also appointed to a further four committees on legislation.

Lincoln died, apparently suddenly, on 21 May 1667, ‘whilst going upstairs to bed’. CSP Dom. 1667, p. 122. Writing to her brother Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington, Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, commented ‘My Lord Lincoln has left his Lady a widow and no rich one’. Add. 75354, ff. 70-73. By his will, hurriedly written and signed on the day he died, he entrusted his lands and tithes in Pointon, Swayton and other manors in Lincolnshire to trustees to pay off his debts and then to distribute the residue among his wife and two grandchildren. This will was not transcribed in the official registers of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury because it appears to have quickly become a matter of dispute. In 1668 the dowager countess of Lincoln submitted a petition to the king complaining that as the deceased earl’s named executors and trustees refused to act for her, she had been induced to ask her step-grandson to take out letters of administration for her, but found that now he was keeping her goods for himself and refusing to release her jointure of the manors of Threckingham. CSP Dom. 1668-9, pp. 129-30. This was Edward Clinton, 5th earl of Lincoln, who had inherited the peerage with its troubled estate at the age of about fourteen.