CLINTON, Francis (c.1635-93)

At the death of the childless Edward Clinton, 5th earl of Lincoln, in November 1692, his title and estates passed to a distant cousin, Sir Francis Clinton. However, in the early 1680s another kinsman, Captain William Fiennes-Clinton, a noted Exclusionist and acolyte of James Scott, duke of Monmouth, had been widely considered ‘next heir to the earldom of Lincoln’. CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 378; 1683, p. 43; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 156; Dalton, Army Lists, i. 9, 33, 38, 68. Perhaps because of this continuing uncertainty of the succession, the 5th earl explicitly named Sir Francis Clinton as his heir and entailed his lands and personal goods to him when he composed his will in November 1684. TNA, PROB 11/410. Both Captain Fiennes-Clinton and Sir Francis could claim the title through descent from Henry Clinton^†, 2nd earl of Lincoln, but Sir Francis’s claim was the stronger as he was descended through the male line from an elder son of the earl. Sir Francis’s own father Francis Clinton^‡ (the 2nd earl’s grandson) appears to have owned considerable property around Baumber in Lincolnshire and was involved in the administration of that county, serving as its member in two of the Protectorate parliaments, throughout the 1640s and 1650s. The younger Francis Clinton was also closely connected with the courtier and fen drainage undertaker, Sir William Killigrew^‡, who was both his maternal uncle and, later, his father-in-law, as Clinton married Killigrew’s only daughter Elizabeth. Probably through Killigrew’s court connections, Clinton was knighted shortly after the Restoration, and after his father-in-law was appointed vice-chamberlain to the queen consort in 1662 he became immersed in the life of Charles II’s royal household. Both Clinton’s wife and mother-in-law were made dressers to the queen, and Clinton himself was briefly a gentleman pensioner at court between 1662 and 1667. CTB, ii. 544; iii. 832; iv. 140; v. 123. He, like his importunate father-in-law, notorious for his constant efforts to reclaim lost lands in the Lindsey Level, maintained an interest in the Lincolnshire fenlands and was a commissioner of sewers for that county in the 1660s. TNA, C181/7, 240, 260, 551.

He had to wait until the 5th earl of Lincoln’s death in November 1692 before he could inherit the titles and heavily mortgaged lands promised him in the will of 1684. There was still sufficient doubt about this succession that when Sir Francis first appeared at the House with his writ of summons on 25 Jan. 1693 he was told to wait to take his oaths until the committee for privileges, with the assistance of the heralds, had properly judged of the validity of his pedigree. Two days later, on 27 Jan. 1693, it was reported from committee that ‘the pedigree is clear’, whereupon Sir Francis took the oaths and assumed his seat on the earls’ bench. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 22. Having achieved this confirmation of his right to sit in the House, he then absented himself for almost two weeks, but the House excused this absence on 4 Feb. upon the report from Lincoln's servants of his serious illness which made him ‘not able to stir’. He returned on 9 Feb. and sat throughout February and early March for 15 of the remaining 38 sittings of the 1692-3 session. On 8 Mar. 1693 he entered his protest against the passage of the measure to revive a number of bills facing expiration, objecting principally to the revival of the act for print censorship as it would ‘subject all learning to the arbitrary will and pleasure of a mercenary licenser’. Two days later he was appointed a reporter for a conference on the Commons’ objections to the Lords’ amendment to the bill to enable grants and leases to be made for lands in the duchy of Cornwall, and after the conference he was placed on the committee assigned to draft reasons in defence of the amendment. His brief parliamentary career ended with the prorogation of the session on 14 Mar., as he died only a few months later in late August 1693. William Fiennes-Clinton’s claims to the earldom still appear to have been current at this time, as Luttrell, on first recording the death of the 6th earl, recorded that he ‘is succeeded by Capt. Clinton in his honour and estate’. In a subsequent entry a few days later, Luttrell was better informed and correctly wrote that the title now descended to Lincoln’s eldest son Henry, a minor of ‘about seven years of age’, then in the care, like his younger siblings, of the dowager countess. Ibid. 182, 183.