CLINTON, Edward (c. 1653-92)

Described by Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, as ‘half-mad’ and reprimanded by the Speaker of the House of Lords for ‘too great a liberty’ in his discourse, Edward Clinton, 5th earl of Lincoln, consistently provoked the anger and bewilderment of his fellow peers during the rare times he actually appeared in the House. Clarendon Corresp. ii. 261; LJ, xv. 81. Edward Clinton was of strongly Presbyterian and even Puritan lineage from both sides of his family. After the early death of his father in 1657, his guardianship was entrusted first to his grandfather John Holles, 2nd earl of Clare, and after his death in 1666, to his great-uncle, Denzil Holles, Baron Holles. TNA, C6/34/62. Edward Clinton’s mother, Lady Clinton, was a known nonconformist, frequenting at least two ‘conventicles’ in Westminster in the 1670s and eventually buried ‘in a Presbyterian meeting house yard’ at her death in 1707. HMC 11th Rep. vii. 15; Le Neve’s Obituary. On his paternal side Edward Clinton was connected, through his father’s many sisters, to Hugh Boscawen^‡ and Sir George Booth, Baron Delamer, and Henry Booth, 2nd Baron Delamer (later earl of Warrington) and Samuel Rolle^‡. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 402.

The estate Lord Clinton was set to inherit was in such bad condition that in 1665 his guardian Clare petitioned the crown hoping that some measures could be taken to help the Clintons, ‘to preserve an ancient family from ruin’. After the 4th earl of Lincoln died on 21 May 1667, his will assigning trustees to settle his many debts was not transcribed in the official registers of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury because it appears to have quickly become a matter of dispute. TNA, PROB 20/1636. The dowager countess of Lincoln submitted a petition in 1668 complaining that as the deceased earl’s named executors and trustees had refused to act according to the terms of the will, she had been induced to ask her step-grandson the 5th earl of Lincoln to take out letters of administration on her behalf. She later found he was keeping goods bequeathed to her for himself and was refusing to release her jointure. The dispute over the 4th earl’s will was protracted and eventually ended up before the court of delegates. CSP Dom. 1664-5, p. 379; 1668-9, pp. 129-30; TNA, PROB 20/1636; DEL 1/89.

Throughout the 1680s Lincoln further worsened the estate’s condition by mortgaging much of his remaining of lands in Lincolnshire, lands which were not redeemed by his heirs until 1755. Devon RO, 1262M/TLI/15-78. Perhaps to rescue his financial situation negotiations were entered into in 1671 for a match between him and Dorothy, daughter of John Ferrers^‡, which would have brought him a portion of £7,000 as well as lands in the Netherlands through her mother. A private bill was introduced in the House on 4 Jan. 1671 to enable him, although still underage, to settle a jointure on her of certain Lincolnshire manors, but it was eventually dropped when the marriage failed to go through. PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/343/345, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 402. Lincoln travelled on the continent from late 1672 to 1677, and as early as December 1672 it was reported that he had contracted a marriage with Jeanne de Galière, daughter of the sieur de Verune in Languedoc, who ‘hath a good reputation, though her birth is ordinary’. Verney ms mic. M636/25, Sir R. to E. Verney, 12 Dec. 1672; CSP Dom. 1673-5, p. 229. The marriage appears to have taken place privately, for Lady Clinton in England was still receiving propositions for other brides in 1673 and complaining of the difficulties in communicating with her son abroad. Add. 70113, Lady Clinton to Sir E. Harley, 27 July, 2 Oct. [1673?]. While Lincoln was away, his agents in England petitioned the House on 26 Apr. 1675 against a Chancery decree concerning ownership of the lodge and park of Tattershall Castle. After hearing counsel on the matter, the House decreed on 26 May that the petition be dismissed ‘as coming irregularly here’, and Lincoln was left to apply himself ‘below’ to Chancery to obtain an alternate decree. This was the first of what was to be many occasions in which Lincoln’s ‘irregular’ actions exasperated the House.

Lincoln was back in England in early 1678. The bill for the naturalization of his French wife was introduced into the House on 1 Feb., quickly passed through both Houses and received the royal assent on 13 May 1678. HMC 9th Rep. pt. 2, 99; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, p. 226; Huguenot Soc. Pubs. Quarto Ser. xviii. 119. Lincoln himself first sat in the House on 15 Mar. 1678, and on 4 Apr. he voted Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, guilty of murder. He only came to nine sittings in that session in total, however, and only one in the following session of summer 1678. His sparse attendance made contemporaries uncertain of his political stance. In the spring of 1677 Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, considered the absent Lincoln, a nephew of his trusted lieutenant Gilbert Holles, 3rd earl of Clare, only ‘worthy’. Lincoln’s behaviour on one his rare days of attendance, 2 May 1678, when he delivered a speech praising the military prowess of James Stuart, duke of York, comparing him to Henry V as a scourge of the French, would have cast doubt on Shaftesbury’s earlier assessment. HMC Rutland, 51. Perhaps for this reason Thomas Osborne,earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds) could, in the weeks preceding the first Exclusion Parliament, consider Lincoln a potential court supporter in the forthcoming impeachment proceedings against him, and even assigned his management to Charles Bertie^‡. Lincoln’s most noticeable contribution to the Exclusion Parliaments occurred on 19 Mar. 1679 when he came into the House late in the day (and thus his name is not on the attendance register for that day) and made the House suspend a debate while he took the oaths and signed the declaration. Later that day the House passed a standing order requiring that members needing to take the oaths were to be present for that purpose at the beginning of the day’s sitting, or were to withdraw from the chamber. Lincoln did not sit again in that Parliament, although he did register his proxy on 2 Apr. 1679 with John Granville, earl of Bath. Danby consistently marked him merely as ‘absent’ in all his subsequent working lists and forecasts, although he still appears to have held out the hope that Lincoln would come to Oxford in March 1681 to help promote his petition for bail. HMC 14th Rep. IX, 425.

During the reign of James II contemporaries considered him an opponent of the king’s policies. He came to only three meetings of the first session of the Convention in early 1689, but his actions there, and particularly on the day of his return to the House after almost ten years, confirm that he was a keen, if not over-zealous, Whig supporter of William of Orange. Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, listed Lincoln as one of the four peers who previously had not attended the House and who were instrumental in passing the vote of 6 Feb. 1689 agreeing with the Commons that James II had ‘abdicated’ and that the throne was only ‘vacant’. Clarendon described how in order to sway the vote in favour of the Commons’ resolution, ‘all imaginable pains were taken to bring other lords to the House, who never used to come: as the Earl of Lincoln, who, to confirm the opinion several had of his being half-mad, declared he came to do whatever my Lord [Shrewsbury Charles Talbot, 12th earl (later duke) of Shrewsbury], and Lord [Mordaunt Charles Mordaunt, 2nd Viscount Mordaunt (later 3rd earl of Peterborough)], would have him’. Clarendon Corresp. ii. 261. Roger Morrice provided further details of the extent of Lincoln’s political ‘presbyterianism’:

The Earl of Lincoln also spoke (who does not use to do so) and he desired the Prince and Princess might be declared, and the Bishops opposing so strongly he said all his time the Bishops had opposed all good bills and acts relating to Church and State, especially those that tended to the strengthening of the Protestant Interest, and the encouraging of Religion and godliness, and his forefathers had told him they had done so for above hundred years most openly, and even constantly (since the year Anno 1583 when Whitgift was made Archbishop). Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 523.

His duty to William of Orange done with this vote, Lincoln dropped out of sight again the following day, only returning to the House once more that session, on 24 April. Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, noted that on 30 July 1689 Lincoln’s vote was cast by proxy against the decision to adhere to the House’s amendments to the bill reversing the judgments against Titus Oates. The proxy registers for the Convention do not have an entry for Lincoln’s proxy at this time but, if Ailesbury is accurate and he had indeed entrusted his proxy by the time of this vote, it was most likely to Charles Powlett, duke of Bolton, for the duke was Lincoln’s proxy recipient on three future occasions in 1689-90, on 23 Nov. 1689, again on 6 Dec. 1689 and on 12 May 1690.

Lincoln incurred the anger of the House again in November 1689, during the second session of the Convention, for his attempt to suborn Josiah Keeling, the man who had revealed the Rye House Plot in 1683 and who was now a witness for the committee investigating the trials and executions of William Russell^‡, styled Lord Russell, Algernon Sydney and others (the Committee of Inspections). Lincoln does appear to have been connected, in a shadowy way, with some of the protagonists involved in the Whig conspiracies of the early 1680s. He knew the radical printer and bookseller Samuel Harris, and in early 1682 was reluctant to testify in a case of scandalum magnatum in which he was implicated, for fear ‘he must speak several things that will be … of very great prejudice to Mr Harris’s reputation, particularly in several trusts [he] employed him in’. CSP Dom. 1682, p. 94; R. Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom, 48, 296-301. The radicals themselves appeared to have made much of the kinship of one of their number, Captain William Fiennes-Clinton, to Lincoln, even spreading the rumour, which Lincoln was keen to suppress, that he was heir to the earldom. CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 378. Lincoln was clearly concerned, it is not clear why, with the testimony he feared Keeling was going to give against George Savile, marquess of Halifax, and, as Keeling later informed the Committee on 25 November, ‘Lord Lincoln sent for him this day, and spoke to him of £3,000 or £4,000 and of going into France’ and ‘he told Lord Lincoln he would be torn in pieces before he would discover anything against any nobleman’ and that he was under great obligations to Halifax for a place in the Victualling Office. According to the Journal Lincoln was never formally appointed to the Committee of Inspections, but the minutes of the Committee suggest that he was there as a member on the 25th and record that when Keeling did inform the committee of this secret meeting, Lincoln exclaimed, ‘My Lords, is not this a rogue? He swore to me he would not tell and now he doth’. On 26 Dec. the House itself summoned Lincoln to appear before it to explain his actions, and he appeared the following day, admitted that he had promised Keeling £3,000 ‘not to speak of a friend of his’, and formally begged the House’s pardon. HMC Lords, ii. 287-8, 254. His appearance in the House that day, one of only three in that session, vacated his proxy with Bolton, with whom it had been registered since 23 Nov. 1689, and Lincoln entrusted it to him again only a few days after this humiliation, on 6 Dec., and never appeared in the Convention again.

The first session of William III’s first Parliament, in the spring of 1690, was the only session where Lincoln came to the House with anything approaching regularity. He attended 17 of its 54 sittings, or 31 per cent. Roger Morrice recorded that on 1 May 1690, Lincoln intervened in the debate on the State of the Nation.

About noon they something unwillingly read the order [for the State of the Kingdom] and then sat silently about half an hour. Then the Earl of Lincoln said they sat like Quakers in their silent meetings etc. but it may be grief and consternation was the cause of their silence, for they were to take into consideration the State of the Kingdom; which he thought had never been in a sadder condition. They had but three human supports, their Army, their Fleet, and the militia of London. The Army and fleet were in a desperate condition, beyond all hope of being made serviceable, and therefore so he must leave them. For the Militia of London it was in the hands of persons of estate and fidelity to the King, and the Citizens placed entire confidence in them, but the Lieutenancy was changed, and many rascals put into it that were of no estates, that enabled King James to do all the arbitrary things he did, and still retain their old affection to him, and would return to him as soon as they had opportunity.

With this change to a Tory lieutenancy, Lincoln felt, the London citizens had lost confidence and credit had dried up. He then successfully moved that a committee be established ‘to enquire into the reasons of our want of money and of our want of credit; and also who advised the King to change the City Milita, for whilst the City counted themselves safe under that Militia His Majesty upon any occasion might borrow what money he pleased’. On that day as well Lincoln, perhaps intending it as a political parable reflecting the current tussle for influence between the ascendant Tories and the disgruntled Whigs, regaled the House with a bizarre story of how the king of Siam had recently put all his trust and reliance for counsel on his great white elephant, ignoring the advice of his wisest ministers, until the country’s affairs had declined so badly that he finally put away his elephant and turned again to his natural advisers (by which Lincoln would almost certainly have been thinking of the Whigs), upon which the state of his kingdom improved. Morrice, v. 432, 434. Shortly after this intervention, Lincoln left the House for a long period again, registering his proxy with Bolton on 12 May 1690 for the last few days of the session.

In the summer of 1690, with William III away on campaign in Ireland, Queen Mary was left to govern the country, assisted by a ‘cabinet council’ of nine peers and ministers. Her reliance on this Council of Nine, the most trusted of whom were the Tories Carmarthen (as Danby had become) and Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, sparked resentment both among the Whigs and within the larger Privy Council who felt sidelined in making decisions. Two of the Whig members of the Council, the earl of Monmouth, as Viscount Mordaunt had become, and William Cavendish, 4th earl (later duke) of Devonshire, remonstrated with the queen personally for her decision on 8 July 1690, taken on the advice of Carmarthen, not to attend a meeting of the Privy Council. They told her bluntly that there were many of her privy councillors who would only speak before her and who were offended at being denied her presence. She was outraged at these importunate demands and she must have been even more shocked when, as she was having these arguments with Devonshire and Monmouth, Lincoln was in the ‘gallery’ at Whitehall ‘crying aloud, that five or six lords shut me [the queen] up, and would not let nobody else come near me’. By the ‘five or six’ lords he was almost certainly referring to the Council of Nine, or at least its Tory members. Dalrymple, Mems. iii. 98 (pt. II, bk. V. app.)

Lincoln was on a number of occasions censured by the House for his indiscriminate use of protections for his ‘servants’. The House received a petition on 23 Dec. 1690 from William Dixon complaining of the cruel treatment and confinement he had been subjected to by Lincoln’s servants acting under his ‘protection’. Four days later, Lincoln having failed to respond to a summons to explain his continued abuse of this privilege, the House ordered that all protections formally registered by him and a number of other peers were to be vacated. Lincoln did come to the House on 29 Dec., one of only three days, all in late December, on which he attended the House in 1690-91. HMC Lords, iii. 231-4.

Lincoln’s increasingly violent and intemperate acts brought him to the attention of the House again in his last parliamentary session, that of 1691-2, when he came to only 17 sittings. After sitting for four days in November 1691, he registered his proxy with Richard Lumley, earl of Scarbrough, on 9 Jan. 1692, but vacated it by beginning to attend the House again from 1 Feb. for the proceedings on the bill for the divorce of Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk. He appears to have had a great interest in this matter for his attendance throughout February 1692 was steady and regular. He almost certainly supported the bill, for during the course of the debate on its second reading on 17 Feb. 1692 he got into a bad-tempered exchange with Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester, one of the bill’s opponents. The exchange, as recorded in the Journal, and confirmed by other members of the House, was that Rochester had exclaimed after a comment by Lincoln, ‘That noble lord takes great liberty with the House’, to which Lincoln responded audibly, ‘I do not take so much liberty with the House as you do with the nation’. Lincoln was subsequently summoned to the bar to apologize, before which he received a harangue from the acting Speaker, Sir Robert Atkyns^‡: ‘Your Lordship ought to kneel, but in respect to your Lordship’s unwieldiness, their Lordships are pleased to dispense with that part of your submission. … I am further commanded to let you know, that the Lords have observed, that you are apt to take too great a liberty in your discourse in this House … which the Lords expect that for the future you should take care to avoid’. Ibid. iv. 24. Perhaps the comment that earned Lincoln his original rebuke from Rochester was that recounted in a newsletter account of that day’s proceedings, that Lincoln had ‘told the great marquess of Carmarthen, that he was not surprised why that noble peer was against divorce of adulteresses; for he was afraid having [sic] all his daughters should be turned on his hands’. Bodl. Ballard, 22, f. 24.

Lincoln received the reprehension and disapproval of the House on other matters during that session. It accepted another petition against Lincoln’s use of protections on 12 Feb. 1692. Far more serious was his alleged involvement in the assault and apparent murder of Anthony Webb. In November 1691 two of Lincoln’s servants had seriously beaten the young Webb, perhaps on the orders of Lincoln, for ‘gazing at him in the street’. The boy had later died of his wounds, and while the servants were later acquitted of murder on extenuating circumstances, Lincoln, on 12 Apr. 1692 and as one of the last pieces of business on that day of prorogation, entered a recognizance in the sum of £4,000 for his appearance at the next session of Parliament ‘to answer what shall be objected against him by Mr Webb, of Kensington, for the death of his son’. Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 369-71, 416, 419; HMC Lords, iv. 80-82.

Lincoln did not attend the first day of the next (1692-3) session. In his absence, it was alleged, once again, that he was issuing too many unwarranted protections, and on 21 Nov. 1692 a motion in the House to vacate all his protections was defeated. The following day, upon the House’s particular summons, he was present at the end of the sitting to account for his protections, upon which he asked the pardon of the House, removed his protection from some of his ‘servants’ and promised to grant no more. HMC Lords, iv. 248-9. This was Lincoln’s last appearance in the House, and he was there on 22 Nov. 1692 more to be reprimanded than to take part in the House’s proceedings. He died only three days later at his house in Bloomsbury Square. Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 625. Childless throughout his marriage, in his will of 6 Nov. 1684 he had strictly entailed his heavily mortgaged lands and his household goods at Tattershall Castle to his male heir, his second cousin once removed Sir Francis Clinton, without making any provision at all for his wife (who was still alive when the will was made) nor for any of his closer relations. The will was later contested, first unsuccessfully by his own mother, Lady Clinton, and then more successfully several years later by the heirs general of the 4th earl of Lincoln. They argued that the strict settlement made in the will of 1684 had been later rendered void by the terms of a marriage settlement the 5th earl had entered into in 1691 when he was considering marriage with Anne Calvert, although the marriage did not take place. HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 260-2. At the time of his death in 1692 the terms of the will were accepted, and his distant kinsman Sir Francis Clinton inherited both the peerage and the estate and goods settled on him.