HOWARD, Charles (1628-85)

Cromwellian and royalist 1651-61

Charles Howard, earl of Carlisle, came from a younger branch of one of the great noble houses of England. Through the marriage of his great-grandfather, Lord William Howard, a younger son of Thomas Howard^†, 4th duke of Norfolk, to Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Dacre^†, 5th Baron Dacre of Gilsland, this branch of the family had acquired the extensive Dacre properties in Cumberland and Northumberland which were to form the basis of its wealth and influence in the northernmost English territories. An orphan and heir of the estate by 1644, the young Charles Howard was captured by parliamentary troops while trying to escape to France. His estate was in danger of being sequestered, but upon promising that he would willingly surrender himself to Parliament, the committee for sequestration found him ‘a fit subject for favour’ and left his estate intact. HMC 6th Rep. 116. To cement the young man’s new position in the parliamentary camp further in 1645 he married Anne, daughter of Edward Howard, Baron Howard of Escrick, a kinsman and an increasingly influential (and corrupt) member of the committee for the advance of money.

In April 1651, under the patronage of Sir Arthur Heselrige^‡, Howard was appointed captain of Cromwell’s personal life guard and quickly rose to prominence in this role, especially after conducting himself well against the exiled Charles II at the battle of Worcester. He was chosen to represent the four northernmost counties in the Nominated Assembly in July 1653, while at the same time he was also appointed a councillor of state. Following the failure of this experiment in ‘godly rule’ in December 1653, he continued to rise under the newly established Protectorate. He effectively became Cromwell’s principal agent in the northernmost counties of England, and was the principal ‘major-general’ there in 1655-6 (although officially only deputy major general under Colonel John Lambert^‡). His influence even extended into Scotland. A fuller list and description of his many offices and commissions in the north during the Interregnum appears in his entry in the volumes on the Commons 1640-60. Most prominently he sat for Cumberland in the two Protectorate Parliaments, until the protector conferred on him on 21 July 1657 the hereditary titles of Lord Gilsland and Viscount Howard of Morpeth, (although this promotion was reported to have been effected as early as January 1657). HMC 15th Rep. VII, 160. Under these titles Howard took his seat in the Cromwellian ‘Other House’ when it first met on 20 Jan. 1658 and proceeded to attend it regularly. He supported Richard Cromwell in his struggle with the army leaders in 1659, although he came far more intermittently to the embattled ‘Other House’ when it starting meeting again under the new Protector from late January 1659. Second Narrative of the Late Parliament, 19-20. The Protectorate’s fall in late April brought about Howard’s own dismissal from his military posts, and he was placed under scrutiny for his communications with the exiled court and was even arrested for his suspected involvement in the rising of August 1659. Nicholas Pprs. iii. 259; CCSP, iii. 153, 173; iv. 153, 169, 184, 192, 194, 209, 212, 226, 227, 236, 351, 376. On 25 Feb. 1660, on his expedition from Scotland, George Monck, later duke of Albemarle, appointed Howard governor of Carlisle and a colonel of the regiment of horse previously commanded by Col. John Desborough^‡. Firth, 209. Howard and his brother Philip Howard^‡, made captain in the Life Guards at the same time, became some of Monck’s most trusted allies in the purge and re-indoctrination of the army which preceded the Restoration. Throughout May he maintained a correspondence with both Sir Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, and the king in which he expressed his duty to the royalist cause, receiving positive assurances from Charles II for ‘the part you have acted for the advancement of my service’. Bodl. Clarendon 72, ff. 240, 279, 376, 385.

Howard was elected to represent Carlisle in the Convention and in June 1660, most likely on the recommendation of his patron Monck, he was one of four former Cromwellians sworn to the new Privy Council. Add. 15750, f. 59. Throughout the remainder of his career he was a diligent and frequently active member of the council. TNA, PC 2/55, pp. 60 et seq. From this point he turned his back on his former political and religious allegiances and stood as a firm supporter of both monarchy and episcopacy. Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, later caustically commented on the varied career of Charles Howard, and noted that when captain of Cromwell’s Life Guards, he ‘had then run into a high profession of religion, to the pitch of praying and preaching in their meetings. But after the restoration he shook that off, and ran into a course of vice. He loved to be popular, and yet to keep up an interest at court; and so was apt to go forward and backward in public affairs’. Burnet, ii. 271-2. Always a keen observer of the prevailing political wind, Howard was notorious for constantly trimming his sails accordingly.

In October 1660 he was appointed lord lieutenant of Cumberland and Westmorland but in December, owing partly to local opposition, he was deprived of the governorship of Carlisle conferred on him earlier by Monck. This post was given instead by the king to the ardent royalist Sir Philip Musgrave^‡, Howard’s local rival, whom he had particularly targeted and harassed while acting as a loyal agent of the Protectorate. HMC Le Fleming, 26, 27; CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 304, 431. At least on this occasion Howard’s Cromwellian past came back to haunt him, but he still had sufficient interest in the corporation to ensure the return of his younger brother Sir Philip Howard^‡ as member for Carlisle in 1661, a seat which he shared with Christopher Musgrave^‡, son of the town’s governor, for the next three Parliaments. HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 184. As lord of the manor of Morpeth, Howard was similarly able to have his brother-in-law Sir George Downing^‡ (who had married Howard’s sister in 1654) selected as representative for that borough for all of Charles II’s Parliaments, from which position Downing was able to exercise his extraordinary influence on English trade and financial legislation. Ibid. i. 346; ii. 224-9.

Earl of Carlisle, 1661-7

Howard’s loss of the Carlisle governorship was more than recompensed when on 20 Apr. 1661 he was created earl of Carlisle at the coronation of Charles II (without any acknowledgement being made of his previous Cromwellian titles). James Stuart, duke of York, further made him vice admiral of the Cumberland and Northumberland coasts in June. Castle Howard, J3/3/2-3. Carlisle first sat in the restored House of Lords on the first day of the Cavalier Parliament, on 8 May 1661, and was formally introduced to the House three days later, when the 11 newly created or promoted peers from the coronation all submitted their writs of summons. He continued to come to the House for just over four-fifths of this long first session. During the first weeks of the sittings of spring and summer 1661, when he came to three-quarters of the sittings, he was almost never nominated to committees, at least not according to the Journal. He reported on 27 June from a select committee with the amended bill for John Nevill, 10th Baron Abergavenny, even though there is no previous indication of his being nominated to that committee. On 1 July he acted as the spokesman from the Privy Council referring to the House the two petitions from the northern counties praying for the re-establishment of the court of York. Carlisle had a personal interest in this matter, as he had signed the petition submitted by the northern peerage and gentry; indeed his name appears near the head of the signatories. PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/306, 1 July 1661. Carlisle was further named to the committee established that day to consider the petitions and on 18-19 July, just before the summer adjournment, he was placed on the committees for the corporation bill, the militia bill and the bill for preserving deer.

He came to a full 84 per cent of the sitting days after the session resumed on 20 Nov. 1661, but during the winter of 1661-2 he was still placed on only three committees, including those for the uniformity bill and for the Admiralty jurisdiction bill. As a privy councillor, and perhaps as a former Cromwellian, he signed the protest of 6 Feb. 1662 against the bill to restore to Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby, the lands in north Wales he had conveyed by legal instruments during the Interregnum. As Carlisle is marked as absent in the Journal for that day and his signature appears at the bottom of the signatures in the manuscript Journal with no additional signatures appearing beneath it, it is likely that he either arrived late that day or that he appended his signature to the protest when he arrived in the House the day following the division and protest. PA, HL/PO/JO/1/49, p. 532. From this point the number of his committee nominations increased – 15 between 13 Feb. and the prorogation of 19 May 1662. One matter concerned him particularly, the government of the north, especially the lawless Anglo-Scottish borderlands. On 26 Apr. he was placed on the committee for the bill to prevent theft and rapine on the northern borders, and he took a sufficiently prominent role on it, that on 7 May he reported from committee with the amended bill. He was to continue to be involved in further bills on this matter in succeeding sessions.

Carlisle was in the House for a little less than two-thirds of the meetings of the 1663 session. During the session he was named to seven committees on legislation, and on 18 Mar. 1663 he was consulted, in his role as one of the commissioners of the office of earl marshal, by the committee considering the heralds’ bill. He and his fellow commissioners were consequently added to this committee the following day. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 297, 325. On 4 Apr. 1663 he was appointed to the committee for the bill to settle an annuity on Charles Weston, 3rd earl of Portland, which he chaired on 7 Apr., along with that for the bill to vest the lands of John Copleston in trustees. Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton further predicted that Carlisle would support George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, in his attempt to impeach Clarendon in late July 1663, and Carlisle later in 1667 signalled himself as one of the lord chancellor’s leading opponents.

In June 1663 Carlisle was sent on an embassy to Russia to reaffirm the good relations that had been established between Charles II and Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in the 1650s and to reinstate the highly advantageous trading conditions that the Muscovy Company had enjoyed before the tsar had abrogated them as a gesture of support for the Stuarts. Unfortunately, owing to Carlisle’s high-handed manner, his obsession with the punctilios of diplomatic etiquette, his readiness to perceive slights to his and his king’s honour and his unwillingness (or inability) to offer the Russians anything in return for the trading concessions, the embassy ended in failure. Carlisle, embittered by what he saw as the deviousness of the Russians, went so far as to refuse to accept the gifts which the tsar presented to him to take back to Charles II. On his return from Russia in the winter of 1664-5 Carlisle paid additional ambassadorial visits to Sweden and Denmark, and in Sweden, still angry at the tsar, he sounded out the government there about the possibility of an Anglo-Swedish alliance against Russia. In his dispatches to the English ministers he espoused the Swedes’ offer to blockade Archangel and have the English staple port moved to the Baltic ports of Narva or Riga. Oxford Slavonic Studies, x. 60-104; Guy de Miège, Relation of the Embassies … by the … Earl of Carlisle (1669).

Carlisle was back in England by February 1665, for he sat in the House again on 3 Feb. 1665 and proceeded to attend 17 further sittings in that last month of the 1664-5 session, during which he was named to one committee on legislation. Here, on 16 Feb., he brought to the attention of the House a breach of his privilege involving the arrest of one of his servants. The perpetrators were discharged at Carlisle’s request two days later. Carlisle was involved in the defence of the north-western English counties in the summer of 1665, as the second Anglo-Dutch War commenced. CSP Dom. 1664-5, p. 513; HMC Le Fleming, 34, 36. He took time off from his duties in the north to attend four days of the session at Oxford beginning on 25 October. There he promoted the bill to prevent the importation of Irish cattle. He was named to the committee on the bill on 26 Oct. and chaired the first three meetings of it, all held four days later, although these meetings were adjourned without proceedings while opponents of the bill were allowed to prepare their arguments. On 26 Oct. he was also placed on the committee for the bill to prevent the spread of plague, and was nominated a reporter for a conference on the bill held on 31 Oct., where the Commons made clear their objections to provisos of the bill that appeared to exempt the peerage from its provisions.

In the following months he continued his involvement in military preparations in the north, both against the Dutch and the dreaded ‘mosstroopers’ on the Anglo-Scottish border. CSP Dom. 1665-6, pp. 205, 222. In late June 1666 he was commissioned a captain of an independent, non-regimented troop of horse, apparently intended for the defence of the vulnerable port of Newcastle. The government also relied on him to keep an eye on developments in Scotland during the war. Ibid. 476, 518, 523, 561; HMC Le Fleming, 40. At a by-election in Morpeth in September 1666, held after the death of the Member Henry Widdrington^‡, Carlisle initially promised Henry Bennet, Baron (later earl of) Arlington, that he would provide the empty seat for undersecretary Joseph Williamson^‡. The corporation defied the earl by electing Carlisle’s own son Edward Howard, then styled Viscount Morpeth (later 2nd earl of Carlisle) instead. Carlisle himself was angered by this, and this disappointment may well have caused some bitterness between Williamson and the Howards in the following years. CSP Dom. 1666-7, pp. 163, 164, 196, 198, 308; 1660-85 Addenda, p. 163; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 346-7. Carlisle was more than usually attentive in the session of winter 1666-7, when he attended 71 per cent of the sittings and was named to eight committees on legislation. He was prominent in the proceedings on the Irish cattle bill and Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, included Carlisle in a list of privy councillors who defied the government’s wishes and supported the bill. Bodl. Carte 217, f. 353. On 17 Nov. 1666 he was placed on the committee assigned to draft a proviso to the bill which would allow the Irish to send slaughtered and barrelled cattle to London as a charitable gesture after the devastation of the Fire. The resulting malicious proviso, framed by some of the most anti-Irish members of the House, in effect ‘aspersed the intention of the givers, and called the contribution a contrivance to mischief England’. On 21 Nov., after debating this measure further, the House appointed Carlisle, Anglesey and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley (later earl of Shaftesbury), to amend the proviso further according to the House’s wishes. It was Carlisle who later that day reported from this small working group with a proviso which allowed for an effective ‘charitable’ import of live cattle from Ireland, which was duly passed. Trans. Am. Phil. Soc. n.s. lx. 30. The following day, 21 November, Carlisle was also assigned to devise heads for a conference, which he was also to manage, concerning the Commons’ request for the establishment of a joint committee of both Houses to examine the public accounts.

Carlisle’s involvement in all these matters was suddenly interrupted by an express on 24 Nov. 1666 from the king ordering him to the north to raise forces against the Covenanter insurgents in the ‘Pentland Rising’, whose forces were perilously close to the English border. Bodl. Carte 222, ff. 136-7. The uprising was quickly crushed by Scottish forces at Rullion Green and Carlisle was back in the capital by 22 December. He was able to report personally to the king, ‘that those who engaged in the late rising were zealous, hot-headed people, like our fifth monarchy men [but], incited by the gentry to try the issue and success’, and he further predicted that if the French were to send troops to the northern kingdom, Scotland would quickly rise in rebellion. CSP Dom. 1666-7, pp. 283, 286, 299, 302; Bodl. Carte 35, f. 197. In the wake of this incident the security of the northern borders again came to Parliament’s attention. On 22 Dec., the day when Carlisle first sat again in the House, his son Morpeth brought up from the Commons the bill to continue the act to prevent theft and rapine on the borders. Carlisle himself was not added to the committee for this bill at first, but it must have been thought that those involved in the government of the north should have a voice in the bill, and consequently Carlisle with Edward Rainbowe, bishop of Carlisle, and the Northumbrian peer William Grey, Baron Grey of Warke, were added to the committee on 4 Jan. 1667. The bill was passed by the House on 12 Jan. 1667 and received the royal assent six days later. On 8 Jan. Carlisle was also added to the committee on the bill concerning lead mines in county Durham, and three days before the end of the session, on 5 Feb., he was placed on the committee for an additional bill on the Bedford Level.

Opponent of Clarendon and the court, 1667-74

By 20 June 1667 the government’s estimation of Howard’s military abilities and activities in the north had risen sufficiently for him to be commissioned joint commander-in-chief of all the forces in the four northern counties and lieutenant general of all the forces of the kingdom against the Dutch and French. Carlisle confined his efforts largely to the north and throughout July was instrumental in once again preparing the defences of Newcastle and the mouth of the Tyne against attack. CSP Dom. 1667, pp. 208, 214, 230, 242, 243, 255, 266, 279, 286, 289, 302; HMC Le Fleming, 49-51. He had a personal stake in protecting Newcastle, for in March 1667 he had been granted an annuity of £1,000 p.a., derived from the customs duties on the export of coal. Castle Howard, J3/3/6, A5/35. Carlisle did not attend any of the sittings of the short session of late July 1667 where the peace was discussed, but during the autumn and winter of 1667, he was among the principal opponents of the disgraced Clarendon and his allies. In the Privy Council in early October he sided with George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, (whose sister had married Carlisle’s brother in 1664) and Denzil Holles, Baron Holles, in attacking the interests of James Butler, duke of Ormond [I] (also earl of Brecknock), in the case of an appeal from Ireland submitted to the council. Bodl. Carte 220, ff. 296-8. Carlisle came to 90 per cent of the meetings of the House in the winter of 1667, and was very quickly placed on a committee in which his expertise was needed, that ‘to consider and examine how the present condition stands between England and Scotland in point of trade’, which was to be the genesis of the bill for free trade between the two kingdoms. In this first part of the session he was named to eight other committees, including that on another northern matter, the bill of John Cosin, bishop of Durham. On 15 and again on 19 Nov. he represented the House in conferences discussing the Commons’ insistence on the commitment of the former lord chancellor. On 20 Nov. the House adhered to its decision that it could not order the commitment of Clarendon without specific charges of treason, and Carlisle signed the protest against this resolution. Carlisle was appointed a reporter or manager for subsequent conferences on this dispute on 21 and 28 Nov., but as Carlisle’s name does not appear in the attendance register for that latter day, it is likely that he did not take part. After Clarendon’s flight, made known to both Houses on 3 Dec., a bill for permanently banishing and disenabling the former lord chancellor was brought in, and Carlisle was placed on the committee for this bill on 7 December. Three days later Carlisle was named as a reporter for a conference where the Commons presented their recent votes affirming their right to free speech in Parliament. On 14 Dec., two days after the passage of the bill for Clarendon’s banishment, Carlisle helped to draft, and then presented in conference, the reasons why the House could not agree with the lower House in its address to the king calling for Clarendon’s apprehension to face impeachment.

On the last two days before the adjournment, 18-19 Dec. 1667, Carlisle watched the rapid passage through the Houses of the bill to establish free trade between England and Scotland. He had a stake in this act, for from 4 Jan. 1668 he was a prominent and assiduous member of the English commission to put this act into execution, although he was later described by one of the Scots commissioners as ‘still in earnest in the union, but backward in the trade’. CSP Dom. 1667-8, p. 156; NLS, Yester Pprs. ms 14492, ff. 2-49; ms 7023, letter nos. 117, 206. He attended 83 per cent of the sittings of February-May 1668 but, apart from nominations to six committees, there is little indication of significant involvement in the affairs of the House. James II’s later memoirs suggest that in this same period Carlisle and Ashley were the two leading promoters of the scheme to have Charles II recognize James Scott, duke of Monmouth, as his legitimate heir, and according to Burnet, Carlisle and Buckingham suggested to the king that they would introduce a motion in the House leading to his formal recognition of his ‘marriage’ to Lucy Walters. Macpherson, Orig. Pprs. i. 44; Burnet, i. 479. Carlisle does appear to have been becoming more fractious with members of the court at this time, and the French ambassador Ruvigny reported to his master Louis XIV in late April 1668 that the secretary of state Arlington had complained to the king of Carlisle’s ‘violent behaviour’. At this juncture, Charles II, ‘chose the part of silence, and letting things remain as they are’. TNA, PRO 31/3/119, p. 1.

In view of the recently concluded Triple Alliance, Carlisle was entrusted in November 1668 with an embassy to Sweden to confer the order of the garter on the king Charles XI. He performed the investiture ceremony in Stockholm ‘with very much state’ in June 1669. Carlisle returned to England from his mission on 26 Oct. 1669, and sat in the House again three days later. CSP Dom. 1668-9, pp. 79, 214; Add. 36916, ff. 118, 123, 125, 133, 137, 144, 149; TNA, PRO 31/3/123, p. 32. He proceeded to come to just over four-fifths of the meetings of the session of winter 1669, and he was present at all but two of the meetings from March and April 1670. Here he was named to 20 committees, including that for the bill for commissioners to discuss a treaty of union between England and Scotland. On 24-25 Mar. 1670 he was the recipient of the proxies of both William Widdrington, 2nd Baron Widdrington, and Benjamin Mildmay, 17th Baron Fitzwalter, neither of which was vacated until the session resumed in the autumn of 1670. He represented the House in three conferences on the amendments to the bill for highways, two on 2 Apr. and the last on 6 Apr., after which the House decided to agree with the Commons. On 5 Apr. he subscribed to the protest against the House’s resolution to accept the clause in the conventicles bill allowing searches of peers’ houses and attachment of their persons. On 11 Apr. 1670 he reported from the committee considering the bill for jurors concerning a controversial proviso. That afternoon the session was adjourned for the summer, but not before the king gave his royal assent to the act for negotiating a union between England and Scotland, with which measure Carlisle must have had an interest, if not an active involvement. Carlisle was far less attentive and active when the session reconvened on 24 Oct. 1670 and he did not resume his seat in the House until a week into proceedings. He came to only 42 per cent of the sittings of this part of the session until the prorogation on 22 Apr. 1671, and during this period was named to ten committees. He became heavily involved in conferences in the last busy days of the session. He reported and managed conferences on the amendments to the bill against abuses in the selling of cattle at Smithfield market on 18 and 20 April. In the afternoon of 22 Apr. he was a reporter for the conference where the Commons made clear their objections to the amendments to the bill against the export of wool, but before the House could proceed further on this matter, the king arrived to prorogue the session, which had descended into acrimony between the Houses and the bill was lost.

At the death of Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, in May 1671 there were rumours that Carlisle was one of the many ‘competitors’ to take over his office as lord chamberlain, but instead the white staff was given to Henry Jermyn, earl of St Albans. Add. 36916, f. 222. Carlisle, however, soon found other ways to fulfil his interest, if not obsession, with ceremonial, prestige and privilege. On 29 May 1671 he stood in for, and represented, Charles XI of Sweden in a ceremony in St George’s Chapel in Windsor confirming his investiture as a knight of the Garter. CSP Dom. 1671, p. 284. In early June 1673 Carlisle was also appointed deputy earl marshal. Since 1662 he had been one of the commissioners to exercise the office of earl marshal, in the place of his mentally disabled, and permanently absent, kinsman Thomas Howard, 5th duke of Norfolk, the hereditary earl marshal. Norfolk’s younger, English-based brother, Henry Howard, Baron Howard of Castle Rising (future 6th duke of Norfolk), was created earl of Norwich in October 1672, and Carlisle was present on the prorogation of 30 Oct. 1672 to help to introduce him to the House under this new title. Norwich briefly took on the hereditary earl marshalship until he, as a Catholic, fell afoul the provisions of the 1673 Test Act. He deputized his office to a number of peers, the principal of whom was his kinsman Carlisle, who over the ensuing years delighted in the prestige and ceremony he was able to indulge in this role. Verney ms mic. M636/26, Sir R. to E. Verney, 26 May 1673; Williamson Letters, i (Cam Soc. n.s. viii), 54. However, Carlisle’s principal usefulness to the crown in the period 1672-4 lay in his military abilities and authority in the north, and these were relied upon heavily during the third Anglo-Dutch War, when he was commissioned colonel of an infantry regiment in January 1673. HMC Le Fleming, 88-90; CSP Dom. 1671-2, pp. 286, 331; 1672-3, p. 455.

These years of 1673-4 were also his busiest days in the House. He came to all of the sittings in February-March 1673, although he did not come to any of the four sittings of the session of late October 1673. In the first, longer, session of 1673 he was appointed to ten committees. On 5 Mar. 1673 he was appointed to the committee to draft an address to the king confirming that his recent referral to Parliament of the controverted Declaration of Indulgence in order to have it settled by legislation ‘is good and gracious’, while the next day he was named a manager for a conference on the address to the king regarding the dangerous growth of popery. Bodl. Tanner 43, f. 190. He was also named a reporter for a conference considering the House’s amendments to the Test bill on 24 Mar., although he was not placed on the committee established after the report which was to draft reasons why the House adhered to its amendment concerning the number of Catholic servants attending the queen consort. On 25 Mar. he chaired committees on the bills to provide the palatinate of Durham with parliamentary representation and to continue existing legislation on the coinage, both of which he reported to the House on that same day, as well as on the bill to lift the duties on alien merchants trading in English manufactures, which he reported two days later. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/3, p. 39. On 28 Mar. he, most likely in his role as a commissioner for the office of earl marshal, informed his colleagues that the king had given leave to the House to hear the claim of James Percy for the title and estate of the earl of Northumberland. The House duly heard Percy’s case and subsequently rejected both his petitions and branded him an impostor. HMC 9th Rep. pt. 2, 21. On 29 Mar. Carlisle was appointed to represent the House in two conferences on the House’s amendments to the bill for the ease of dissenters, but these proceedings were cut short with the arrival of the king and the announcement of the adjournment of the tumultuous session to 20 Oct. 1673, when it was peremptorily prorogued.

By this time Carlisle was openly associating with the growing country opposition to the duke of York and Charles II’s pro-French policies. In December 1673 Colbert reported to Louis XIV that Buckingham was strengthening his ties with Carlisle, and York numbered the earl among his enemies in the session which began on 7 Jan. 1674. Carlisle came to all but one of the sittings of that session, during which he was named to five committees. York told the French ambassador Ruvigny in late January that Carlisle, with Shaftesbury (as Ashley had become), Thomas Belasyse, 2nd Viscount (later Earl) Fauconberg (a long-standing colleague of Carlisle’s, from the days when they sat in Cromwell’s ‘Other House’ together) and James Cecil, 3rd earl of Salisbury, were meeting regularly at the house of Holles ‘where they concerted together the matters which were to be proposed in the lower house, where those lords had great influence’. TNA, PRO 31/3/130, ff. 16-17, 44-48. York also recorded the story of how Monmouth’s supporters Carlisle and Shaftesbury, on being told by the king that he had never married Lucy Walters, assured him ‘let him but say it, they should find such as would swear it’. Macpherson, i. 70; Life of James II, i. 490. In the House on 26 Jan. 1674 Carlisle seconded the motion of Salisbury for a bill to ensure the Protestant education of the York’s children and further moved a bill forbidding the marriage of a member of the royal house without Parliament’s permission. Macpherson, i. 71. Two weeks later, on 10 Feb., when the House was further discussing this bill, Carlisle proposed, and was seconded and supported by Shaftesbury and George Savile, Viscount (later marquess of) Halifax, that the penalty for any infringement of this condition should be exclusion from the royal succession, a suggestion that raised the ire of the majority of the House and foreshadowed the debates on exclusion five years later. Ibid. i. 72; Lauderdale Pprs. iii (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxxviii), 32-33; TNA, PRO 31/3/130, ff. 79-84. On 7 Feb. Carlisle also brought a breach of privilege case before the House against the Catholic workman Ezekiel Linke, who had called him ‘a heretic rogue’ and had further added, ‘You think that we Roman Catholics are cast down, but you are mistaken’. Ten days later Linke duly made his submission to both Carlisle and the House and was discharged from his commitment. HMC 9th Rep. pt. 2, p. 42. It was said that Shaftesbury and Carlisle were also planning to propose the disbandment of the York’s regiment of guards whilst at the time of the prorogation on 24 Feb. a correspondent of Sir Joseph Williamson^‡ reported the ‘whisper’ that Carlisle, Shaftesbury, Holles and Halifax were to be removed from the Privy Council for their behaviour during the session. Macpherson, i. 72; Williamson Letters, ii. 158. De Ruvigny described Carlisle in April as one of those ‘who during the parliamentary session had seemed to be the most venomous towards the interest of his Highness’. TNA, PRO 31/31/131, ff. 23-24.

Carlisle’s hostility to Catholicism is noteworthy considering his Catholic upbringing and the adherence of many of his kinsmen to the old faith. Indeed, many contemporaries, such as Sir John Reresby^‡, widely suspected him of being a Catholic himself. Reresby Mems. 101-2. Yet as Burnet noted he had adopted Protestant ‘enthusiasm’ in the 1650s and seems to have maintained a sympathy for that style of worship, or at least an opposition to its persecution. He was apparently concerned by the projects of the lord treasurer Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), in consultation with the bishops, to press from January 1675 for the full enforcement of the penal statutes against Dissenters and Catholics alike. York was equally concerned at the effect on his co-religionists and even approached Carlisle and other of his foes from the 1674 session to work together on a policy that would give relief to both religious groups. Essex Pprs. i (Cam. Soc. n.s. xlvii), 285. Carlisle, however, did not wish to extend York’s campaign for toleration or comprehension to Catholics. According to Sir Ralph Verney^‡, there was a ‘very warm’ debate at the Privy Council on 3 Feb. 1675, when Carlisle, with Holles, Halifax and Anglesey, approved a proclamation containing ‘very large directions for prosecution of papists’ but with the similar instructions regarding Protestant nonconformists made much more lenient. Verney ms mic. M636/28, Sir R. to E. Verney, 4 Feb. 1675; CSP Ven. 1673-5, p. 357. Carlisle also joined with Halifax in ‘encouraging’ the plans for an ‘act of comprehension and union’ formulated between Dissenters such as Richard Baxter and moderates of the Church such as John Tillotson, later archbishop of Canterbury, and Edward Stillingfleet, later bishop of Worcester. Reliquiae Baxterianae, iii. 157. He was seen as a leading member of the country opposition and on 3 Feb. 1675 Shaftesbury, then in a brief retirement in Dorset, addressed a letter to Carlisle – with explicit instructions to convey its contents to Holles, Fauconberg, and Salisbury – to reassure his colleagues that he was not about to abandon their campaign for the dissolution of Parliament in favour of the rumoured offer of high office under the crown. This letter, quickly copied, printed and published became notorious in its time, and contemporaries took it to be a public expression of Shaftesbury’s defiant attitude towards the court in the weeks before the next session of Parliament: CSP Dom. 1675-6, p. 87; HMC Ormonde, n.s. iii. 363.

I hear from all quarters that a great office with a strange name [there had been rumours that Shaftesbury was to be made ‘vicar-general in ecclesiastical affairs’], is preparing for me and such like. … But I will assure your Lordship there is no place or condition will invite me to Court during this Parliament until I see the king thinks frequent new Parliaments as much his interest as they are the people’s right. For until then I cannot serve the king as well as I would or think a great place safe enough for a second adventure. In the mean while no kind of usage shall put me out of my duty and respect to the king and duke but I think it would not be amiss for the men in great offices, that are at ease and where they would be, to be ordinarily civil to a man in my condition, since they may assure themselves that all their places put together shall not buy me from my principles. Bodl. Carte 38, f. 286; Carte 59, f. 543, Carte 81, f. 607, Carte 228, f. 125; Add. 32094, f. 346.

Court rapprochement and colonial office, 1675-80

Despite this apparently high position in Shaftesbury’s confidence and his opposition to Danby’s Anglican policies, Carlisle surprisingly did not subscribe to any of the protests against Danby’s non-resisting test in the session of spring 1675. His only recorded intervention in that session, of which he attended 82 per cent of the sittings, was his protest on 10 May 1675 against the resolution to overturn the 1642 parliamentary decree in the case of Dacre Barret v. Viscount Loftus. By the spring of 1675 there appears to have been another notable shift in Carlisle’s political allegiances. His sudden abandonment of the opposition to side with the court may in part have been owing to his position as governor of Jamaica, the reversion of which had been promised him late in 1674. In any case his political affiliations after spring 1675 were remarkably different. On 14 Oct. 1675 he registered his proxy for the first and only time in his parliamentary career, in favour of Danby’s kinsman and ally Robert Bertie, 3rd earl of Lindsey. This would have been vacated by his appearance in the House on 4 Nov. for the short session of autumn 1675, of which he only attended 21 sittings. By June 1676 he was writing in a friendly vein to Danby on northern matters, telling him how ‘I am now very busy in doing justice upon our border thieves’, the ‘mosstroopers’ whom Carlisle persecuted so mercilessly. Eg. 3329, f. 105. Danby relied on his influence among northern members of the Commons in 1675 and 1677 and considered the earl as one of his supporters, though absent from the House at the time, during his impeachment hearings in the spring of 1679. Browning, Danby, iii. 83, 102. By spring 1677 Shaftesbury for his part regarded Carlisle as ‘doubly vile’, quite a reversal from the position of two years previously. Shaftesbury drew up his estimation of Carlisle and other peers when he was imprisoned in the Tower for asserting that the Parliament which reconvened on 15 Feb. 1677 was automatically dissolved by its fifteen-month prorogation. According to one account, at this time Carlisle undertook to promise the king on behalf of Shaftesbury that if the disgraced earl were released from captivity, he would retire to the country. After the unrepentant Shaftesbury did eventually procure his release in late February 1678 he denied that he had ever given permission to Carlisle to make such a promise to the king. Carlisle sent a challenge to Shaftesbury by his son-in-law, Sir John Fenwick^‡, but Shaftesbury refused to engage in a duel, explaining that if Carlisle killed him in a duel, he was likely to be pardoned, but if he in turn killed Carlisle there was little chance he would receive royal mercy. The narrator of this account saw the resentful exchanges between the men as a prime example of ‘how uncertain friendships are in their perpetuity’. NLS, ms 7008, ff. 104-5.

During 1676-8 Carlisle was principally involved in local northern politics and particularly with his long feud against the Musgraves, both the father Sir Philip Musgrave^‡, governor of Carlisle, and his son Sir Christopher Musgrave^‡, Member for Carlisle, for the predominant influence in that town. CSP Dom. 1675-6, pp. 269, 489, 540, 573; 1676-7, pp. 2, 108, 229, 230, 369, 483. Sir Christopher found a sympathetic listener in Sir Joseph Williamson^‡, and in December 1677 he informed the secretary of the grave illness of Sir Philip and warned him that, ‘If his distemper reached Lord Carlisle’s ears it would fire his zeal to secure the government’ of the northern garrison. Williamson could not keep this important secret hidden for long, and at Sir Philip’s death in early February 1678, Carlisle secured his re-appointment to the governorship of Carlisle, which he retained for the remainder of his life, although often delegating the actual duties to his son, Viscount Morpeth. CSP Dom. 1677-8, pp. 512, 649, 677. In national politics, Carlisle only came to a little less than two-thirds of the gatherings of the House in the session of 1677-8. He first appeared in the House on 19 Mar. 1677, and a year later he made his only intervention in the House during that session, when on 11 Mar. 1678 he brought before the House notice of a breach of his privilege involving the arrest of one of his servants. Reportedly when Powell, Carlisle’s servant, had claimed Carlisle’s protection to the attorney prosecuting the arrest, that attorney had insouciantly replied that ‘he had been lately before the House of Lords, and he knew the way thither again’. The following day it was ordered that he should make his submission to the House for his ‘saucy and insolent words’. HMC 9th Rep. pt 2, p. 108. On 4 Apr. he voted Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, guilty of manslaughter.

Carlisle had long been interested in trade and colonial matters, having been appointed to several successive councils and committees of trade from 1656 onwards. He appears to have been soliciting for the governorship of the island of Jamaica as early as 1670. Hatton Corresp. i. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxii), 56. In late 1674 or early 1675, after having joined the ‘Lords of Trade’ the subcommittee of the Privy Council which dealt with the plantations, he was promised the post attendant upon the retirement of the incumbent governor John Vaughan, later 3rd earl of Carbery [I], and 2nd Baron Vaughan. His commission finally passed the Great Seal on 1 Mar. 1678, while Vaughan was still en route from the island. CSP Col. 1677-80, p. 220. As one of the lords of trade, Carlisle himself helped to draft his instructions for the government of the island. The goal of the subcommittee, to be effected through Carlisle’s governorship, was to impose on the distant colony the constitution then in effect in Ireland under Poyning’s Law, whereby the council in England drafted the laws for the colony which the local legislative body, the Assembly, would merely approve. When he left for the island sometime in May 1678 (his last appearance in the House that session was on 29 Apr.), Carlisle took with him 40 such bills which were to be passed by the Jamaican Assembly in this manner, including one which was to make the revenue remitted by the colony to the treasury permanent. The local planters who met the new governor in the Assembly when it convened in early September 1678 were not at all pleased by this curtailment of their legislative powers and, before Carlisle exasperatedly dismissed them on 11 Oct., rejected all but four of the 40 bills, taking particular offence at the revenue bill. The lords of trade were preoccupied with the Popish Plot for much of 1679. Carlisle sent increasingly anxious and frustrated letters complaining of the committee’s neglect and taking the side of the local planters by insisting on the impracticalities of Westminster trying to govern the island at such a distance. A modern historian notes ‘the curiously ambiguous part [Carlisle], took throughout his years in Jamaica; on the one hand, protesting [to the lords of trade], his eagerness to obey his instructions, although he disapproved of them; on the other, assuring the planters of his entire disapproval of the new system, and of his earnest efforts to have it altered’. A.M. Whitson, Constitutional Development of Jamaica, 1660-1729, p. 95. Perhaps this is another example of Carlisle’s constant attempt, as Burnet would have it, ‘to be popular, and yet to keep up an interest at court’ by trying (unsuccessfully) to please all parties. He called another gathering of the Assembly, this time without the authorization of the lords of trade, only for the colonial legislature to reject the majority of his bills again and to send an address to the king and the lords of trade complaining of the new model of government. Carlisle, heartily sick of the problems of governing the island, was only too pleased to receive, via his agent Sir Francis Watson, the king’s verbal permission to leave the island (which had not been communicated to the lords of trade). He left Jamaica on 27 May 1680, ‘having put that colony into great disorder’ and bringing his two principal opponents back with him to have their differences settled before the lords of trade. Whitson, 70-109; Add. 75363, Sir T. Thynne to Halifax, 13 June 1680; State Trials, vi. 1349-1400.

Return from Jamaica, 1680-5

Carlisle had been in Jamaica during the first Exclusion Parliament and was absent when he had been removed from the Privy Council at its reorganization in April 1679. HMC Var. ii. 394. He was able to attend regularly (89 per cent attendance) the second Exclusion Parliament where he opposed the exclusion bill on 15 Nov., although the reasons given in his speech on the day suggest that he was more concerned by the threat of war, with either or both Scotland and France, that exclusion would bring than by any attachment to York or the hereditary principle. Instead he thought that measures should be taken ‘to take off the appetite or zeal of popery’ and that ‘we are more secure in the banishment of the duke of York during the king’s life than [by], the bill’. BIHR, xx. 32. He also voted in favour of the establishment of a joint committee of both Houses to consider the state of the nation. He voted his Catholic kinsman William Howard, Viscount Stafford, guilty of treason but in the days leading up to his execution acted as an intermediary between the condemned man and the House, conveying on 18 Dec. Stafford’s offer to make a full confession to the House of what he knew of the Popish Plot. York felt that Carlisle and his brother-in-law William Howard, 3rd Baron Howard of Escrick, really went on their mission to Stafford ‘to get somewhat out of him [Stafford], against the duke of York’, but as the lords would not allow them to speak to Stafford alone, and they were accompanied by Burnet and Henry Compton, bishop of London, ‘their project was disappointed’. Burnet, ii. 271-2; HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 529; Macpherson, i. 110. At the end of the Parliament, on 7 Jan. 1681, Carlisle signed the protest against the resolution not to divide on the question whether to address the king for the suspension of chief justice William Scroggs during his impeachment hearings. Danby relied on Carlisle to support his petition for bail during the 1681 Parliament, and on 23 Mar. Edward Osborne^‡, styled Viscount Latimer, regretfully wrote to his father that Carlisle was among Danby’s ‘friends’ who had not yet arrived in Oxford. HMC 14th Rep. IX, 425. Fauconberg on 22 Mar. doubted whether Carlisle would be able to make it at all as Carlisle had sent his fellow northern peer (then living in Middlesex) a letter ‘which speaks doubtfully of your motion southwards’. Fauconberg in any case despaired of the tone of proceedings, judging by a printed copy of the king’s speech he saw, ‘which is very brisk, and forbids meddling with the title of succession’. Sloane 2724, f. 110. Carlisle did manage to come for one sitting on 24 Mar. and then stayed away from the House for the remainder of the Parliament. That was his last day in the House of Lords.

By June 1681, when the king ordered him back to Jamaica, Carlisle was either too unwilling or too ill of the gout to return there, and a commission was drawn up for Carlisle’s successor as governor, Sir Thomas Lynch, on 6 Aug. 1681. CSP Col. 1681-5, p. 98. After 1681 most of Carlisle’s attention was taken up with a long-running and acrimonious dispute with Sir George Fletcher^‡, Member for Cumberland during the Cavalier and Oxford Parliaments, and a prominent figure in that county and Carlisle, who had been deprived of many of his local offices by Morpeth in 1680 and who further annoyed Carlisle upon his return from Jamaica. HMC Dartmouth, i. 75-76. Fletcher efficiently allied himself with interests at court such as Sir Christopher Musgrave^‡ and Colonel George Legge, later Baron Dartmouth. Carlisle even warned Legge in July 1682 that by his continuing support of Fletcher, ‘you lay a foundation of perpetual enmity betwixt us, for as in general I am a very easy man to live with, yet in what concerns my honour I cannot be removed’. Sloane 2724, ff. 111, 184; CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 362; HMC Dartmouth, i. 75. The king-in-council eventually heard Fletcher’s case in late April 1683 and gave formal orders that he was to be restored to all his positions on the Cumberland bench, lieutenancy and militia, and this time Carlisle reluctantly accepted the royal will. HMC Le Fleming, 170, 171, 174, 181, 182, 185, 188, 190, 191.

Ormond described Carlisle in July 1683 as ‘the decripidest man that ever I saw out of bed’ and in the years after 1681 he was wracked and crippled by gout. HMC Ormonde, n.s. vii. 61; Add. 22920, ff. 214, 216; Sloane 2724, ff. 121-2. Carlisle died on 24 Feb. 1685 and was buried at York Minster. By his will he left his personal estate to his widow, who survived him 18 years, and his real estate as well as the remainder of the term of his £1,000 annuity and a lone southern manor in Yarnfield in Somerset, to his only surviving son (his second son having been killed at the siege of Luxembourg in 1684) Edward Howard, now 2nd earl of Carlisle. TNA, PROB 11/380; Castle Howard, A5/35.