GERARD, Fitton (1663-1702)

Fitton Gerard owes his unusual first name to his grandmother Penelope Fitton and the claim to the lucrative estate of Gawsworth in Cheshire that she brought to the Gerard family after the death in 1643 of her childless brother Sir Edward Fitton^‡. Fittton Gerard’s father had long been engaged in legal battles with Sir Edward’s distant cousin and legatee Alexander Fitton over Gawsworth and the disposition of the estate was to hang over much of Fitton Gerard’s life, and even more his death. His branch of the Gerard family originated in Lancashire but because of Gawsworth began to associate itself increasingly with Cheshire.

Fitton Gerard joined his father and elder brother, also named Charles Gerard, styled Viscount Brandon (later 2nd earl of Macclesfield), in enthusiastically hosting James Scott, duke of Monmouth, during his 1682 progress through Cheshire, while in the following year he was named by Josiah Keeling as a Whig sympathizer who uttered treasonable healths in Wapping taverns during the months preceding the Rye House Plot. CSP Dom. 1682, p. 396; State Trials, ix. 371. Gerard also relied on his family, and particularly his brother, lord lieutenant of Lancashire from 1689, to maintain his position in the county. The 2nd earl of Macclesfield, as Brandon became in January 1694, was a controversial Whig lord lieutenant in a county with a largely Tory gentry. He engaged in a long campaign to gain control over nominations to the Lancashire commission of the peace and was able to ensure that his younger brother was appointed a justice of the peace throughout William III’s reign. Glassey, JPs, 279-83, 284n7. The lord lieutenant also used threatening and controversial means to ensure his brother’s return to Parliament for Lancashire boroughs. Fitton Gerard was involved in a double return for Clitheroe in a by-election of late November 1693 but the committee for elections judged that the election had been rendered invalid by dishonest tactics used by Macclesfield and Gerard to elect a returning officer and ordered the poll to be held again. The second by-election resulted in another double return, and Gerard was only able to claim his seat, by petition, on 17 Apr. 1694 after months of deliberations. So controversial were the Gerards that Fitton Gerard was not immediately returned for any seat at the following Parliament and his brother Macclesfield had to wait until a by-election in Lancaster in February 1697 before he could force his younger brother again into the Commons. At the elections of 1698 it was noted that Macclesfield ‘hath with great difficulty got in his brother’ for the county seat. Fitton Gerard was not returned for any constituency in January 1701. HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 320, 324-5, 328; HMC Kenyon, 273, 278-9, 285, 287-90; Verney ms mic. M636/47, J. to Sir R. Verney, 11 Nov. 1693; CSP Dom. 1698, pp. 376-7.

Macclesfield had largely sponsored Gerard’s political career, but the brothers had a falling out over Macclesfield’s divorce bill of 1698. This would have enabled the earl to separate from his long-estranged wife and have any children born to her during their long separation declared illegitimate. By the original marriage settlement Fitton Gerard would inherit Gawsworth if there were no children of the union, but the bill aimed to annul the settlement, leaving the disposition of the estate after Macclesfield’s death an open question. On 26 Feb. 1698 during the proceedings on the bill Fitton Gerard presented a petition to the House requesting that his own condition and inheritance be taken into consideration. This appears to have upset his brother and Fitton Gerard quickly withdrew the petition. HMC Lords, n.s. iii. 63, 67. Fitton Gerard ran afoul of his brother again on 2 June 1701, when he petitioned the House to the effect that a bill the now divorced Macclesfield had recently introduced to settle jointure lands on his prospective bride Laetitia Harbord deprived him of property settled on him by his father in a deed of 1671. Macclesfield’s counsel informed the select committee considering the bill that the earl, professing his loyalty and service to his younger brother, had informed him well in advance of his intentions and had even procured a paper purporting to be Fitton Gerard’s written consent to the bill, although it remained suspiciously unsigned. In exasperation at his brother’s obstruction Macclesfield declared before the committee on 3 June 1701 that he would proceed no further with the bill. Ibid. iv. 371-2; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/6, pp. 175, 176. The damage was done though, and when Macclesfield died unexpectedly on 5 Nov. 1701 Fitton Gerard, now 3rd earl of Macclesfield, was in for a rude shock. The late earl had bequeathed various small legacies of money and jewellery to his two surviving sisters (who had joined Fitton in the opposition to their brother’s bill) and their children and allowed his brother to continue to live on the estate of Gawsworth for his natural life, but otherwise his entire real and personal estate, including Gawsworth after the 3rd earl’s death, was to go to Macclesfield’s friend, nephew and fellow soldier Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun. TNA, PROB 11/462. Years later, during the protracted legal disputes between the Gerard and Mohun heirs and descendants, the Gerards complained that Mohun’s only claim to Gawsworth was through the 2nd earl’s ‘unnatural and barbarous act’, which ‘broke through the laws of God and man’. He had tried to subvert the first earl’s settlement of 1671 through his bill, ‘and being afterwards opposed in it by his brother and sister, he destroyed the deed itself in revenge to them, and to complete his revenge gave away the estate from his own family to the Lord Mohun, a stranger to his own and father's blood’. Another petition from the Gerards pointed out that the late earl’s siblings, now effectively disinherited, had earlier pleaded for their brother’s life when he was under threat of execution for treason in 1685. Add. 70283, ‘An Answer to the objections made on the behalf of Lord Mohun’, c.1713; Add. 70321, petition of duchess of Hamilton and Brandon, Thomas and Charlotte Orby and John Elrington, 6 Mar. 1713. The new earl of Macclesfield did not immediately contest the provisions of the will. He was already ill and lived almost as a recluse. Unmarried with no children to provide for, he may have been satisfied by the life interest at Gawsworth.

Macclesfield attended the House on the first day of the 1701-2 Parliament, on 30 Dec. 1701, but while the first appearance in the House that day of two other peers who had just inherited their titles was recorded in the Journal, the presence of the new earl of Macclesfield was passed over without a note. This one day appears to have been enough for Macclesfield and he never attended the House again. He was briefly implicated when Mohun complained on 7 Jan. 1702 of a breach of privilege concerning the arrest of his steward for Gawsworth, Thomas Shepherd, at Macclesfield’s suit. Shepherd himself, in his petition to the House, suggested that the action had been brought against him by Macclesfield’s agents without the earl’s knowledge. HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 417. Whatever local influence in the northwest may have remained to Macclesfield was further attenuated by the Tory turn in politics following Anne’s accession, as evidenced by the purposeful exclusion of the earl from the Lancashire commission of the peace in July 1702. Glassey, JPs, 286. He himself died, young and unmarried, on 26 Dec. 1702 in his house at Chelsea, and with his death the short-lived Gerard earldom of Macclesfield became extinct. His will, written just before his death, distributed small bequests to a wide array of nieces, nephews, sisters and their husbands. The dispute over the estate continued for many years, taken up by his two surviving sisters and their heirs against the pretensions of Mohun, and leading ultimately to the fatal duel in November 1712 between Mohun and James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton, like Mohun a nephew by marriage of the brothers Charles and Fitton Gerard, earls of Macclesfield.