BRYDGES, William (1621/2-1676)

William Brydges’ forebears had established themselves in Gloucestershire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many served in Parliament and his direct ancestor Sir John Brydges^† was created Baron Chandos in 1554. Little is known about the 7th Baron Chandos. Even his date of birth has to be guessed using a calculation derived from the dates of his older brother’s birth and his father’s death. He inherited a depleted estate that had been encumbered with debt by his brother, George Brydges^†, 6th Baron Chandos, in order to provide portions for his many daughters and to pay his composition to Parliament. William Brydges received an annuity of £150 a year during his brother’s lifetime but when he inherited the peerage he expected to acquire the family estates in Gloucestershire and Middlesex as well. He was horrified to discover that instead he had received ‘an honour without any provision to support it’ because his brother’s will, drawn up shortly before his death, left him an income of only £250 a year. The entire estate went to the 6th Baron’s widow, Jane, daughter of the impoverished John Savage^†, 2nd Earl Rivers.

The will surprised others too. The 6th Baron’s first wife, Susan Montagu, daughter of Henry Montagu^†, earl of Manchester, had brought him a portion of £5,000 and goods said to be worth a further £2,000; his second wife’s portion had never been paid. Under the circumstances the 6th Baron might have been expected to have made better financial provision for his two daughters by his first marriage than for those of the second marriage. Instead, he had disinherited them. The will was challenged by the 7th Baron as well as by the Montagus, on the grounds that it had been obtained either fraudulently or under undue influence. They clearly believed that John Lovelace, 2nd Baron Lovelace, was a party to the fraud and that a legacy to him of £500 under a codicil drawn up just days before the 6th Baron’s death was effectively a bribe from Lady Chandos. TNA, DEL 1/18, 17, passim; C 6/142/6; C 6/132/39. The circumstances under which the will was drawn up while the 6th Baron was dying of smallpox in Lovelace’s house at Hurley certainly invited suspicion, but all attempts to overturn the will failed and the 6th Baron’s wealth, including the ancestral estate at Sudeley in Gloucestershire, passed to his widow and eventually to her third husband, George Pitt^‡. The 7th Baron was left struggling to maintain his aristocratic status: Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, commented that Chandos’ house in Ruislip was ‘a pitiful place’. HMC 13th Rep. VI. 276.

Chandos’ kinship network brought him into a potentially close alliance with the court. His cousin John Egerton, 2nd earl of Bridgwater, was associated with Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, while his daughter Rebecca married Thomas Pride, nephew of George Monck, duke of Albemarle (and grandson to the regicide of the same name). CSP Dom. 1690–1, p. 324. Chandos took his seat on 1 May 1660, and attended over 93 per cent of the remaining sittings of the year. Between 1660 and the end of 1665 his attendance never fell below 92 per cent of sitting days. Between 1666 and the end of 1671 it was slightly lower, but was never less than 82 per cent. Yet he made little impression on his contemporaries: Samuel Pepys^‡ described him in passing as ‘my simple Lord Chandos’. Pepys Diary, iii. 287–8.

One of Chandos’ first recorded acts was to revive his dispute about the ownership of Sudeley by obtaining a restraining order from the House on 22 June 1660 against George Pitt’s attempts to fell timber there. Since Pitt had already won a chancery case against the Montagus in a similar cause, Chandos’ action was perceived as both unjust and high-handed by Pitt’s colleagues in the Commons, who required little encouragement to take the issue up as a matter of privilege. In 1661 Chandos opposed the claim of Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, to the office of great chamberlain. In 1663 Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton listed him as an opponent by George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol to impeach Clarendon. Whether this indicated genuine support for the chancellor or Chandos’ fear of the king’s displeasure is a moot point: when the countess of Bristol offered him her husband’s petition in March 1664, he was said to have ‘leapt back [and] swore he would [not] touch the paper for forty pound’. Bodl. Carte 44, f. 513. The following year he was rewarded, through Bridgwater’s influence, with a pension of £200 for the education of his only son, also named William Brydges. CTB i. 611; CTBiii. 801.

Chandos was regularly, but not frequently, named to committees. In 1664, a year in which he was present on every sitting day, he was nominated to a mere 15 committees. These included the sessional committees, a committee on an abortive transportation bill, and another concerned with the duchy of Cornwall; the remainder involved a series of estate bills. On 21 Nov. 1667 Chandos entered a protest against the Lords’ resolution to grant the Commons’ request for a conference on the impeachment of Clarendon. He chaired a committee on a naturalization bill on 17 Dec. 1667. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2. On 16 Mar. 1668 he entered a dissent to the reversal of the chancery decree in Morley v Elwes; and on 23 Mar. 1670 he was appointed to the committee that was to oversee the razure of the records of Skinner’s case. The following year, on 15 Mar. 1671, he dissented to the suspension of the judgment in Cusack v Usher, a case that raised tricky questions about the right of the House of Lords to hear appeals from the court of claims in Ireland.

On 16 Mar. 1671 Chandos was awarded a pension of £200 a year from the crown ‘during pleasure’. CSP Dom. 1671, p. 164. It seems likely that his only son had died at about this time and that this was simply a continuation of the pension granted in 1664. Like the earlier pension, this too was obtained through the influence of Bridgwater, who may also have paid Chandos a personal allowance. HMC Hastings, ii. 169–70. After Chandos’ death the pension was paid to his daughter Rebecca Pride, until it was discontinued after the revolution of 1688. CTB, v. 412; TNA, SP 34/1, f. 122. The pension was said to be a reward for services rendered by the Brydges family during the civil wars. It cannot have been understood as a bribe to secure Chandos’ future attendance and support in Parliament, for he did not attend at all during the 1672, 1673, or 1674 sessions; since he was excused at the calls of the House in February 1673 and January 1674, it seems likely that he was genuinely unable to attend. There is no record of his having entered a proxy at any time in his parliamentary career.

Chandos returned to the House at the beginning of the 1675 session, perhaps in response to pressure from Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), who had included him as a potential supporter of the non resisting test in a pre-sessional list. He was almost certainly ill; a letter written at about this time describes him as being ‘in a miserable condition, for he has lost his memory, and has parted with all his estate to his daughters’. HMC Hastings, ii. 169–70. At his death, which was probably in August 1676, the title passed to his third cousin, James Brydges, 8th Baron Chandos.