Thomas Colepeper’s father John Colepeper had been one of the principal advisers of Charles I during the civil war, for which service he was created in 1644 Baron Colpeper, using that spelling of his surname in the patent. The peerage was accompanied by a grant of lands in Thoresway in Lincolnshire and Kevinlice in Radnor as compensation for the parliamentary sequestration of his extensive land-holdings in west Kent and Sussex. The first Baron Colepeper accompanied the prince of Wales into exile on the continent in 1646, and in 1651 his three remaining sons by his second marriage all joined him there.
The first Baron Colepeper died on 11 July 1660, the very day his request for the restitution of his sequestered property was granted by the Convention House of Lords. The following day the House, being informed of his death, ordered that the benefit of that order would accrue to his son Thomas. Having made extensive provisions for the maintenance of his six younger children in his will of 3 July 1660, Lord Colepeper had stipulated in a codicil that Thomas was to be heir not only to his title, but also to all his real property in Kent (which would otherwise have been subject to gavelkind and divided with his brothers). The will with its codicil was proved on 6 Aug.; Thomas first sat in the House as 2nd Baron Colepeper on 7 August. Three days later he brought in a private bill for the formal restoration of his father’s estate, with its principal lands in Kent and Sussex, and some outlying properties in Lincolnshire and Wales. This bill was committed on 13 Aug. and reported from committee with some amendments and passed by the House on 27 August. On that same day Colepeper was concerned with the introduction of another bill, that for the naturalization of his wife and several other Dutch spouses of recently returned royalist noblemen. This bill was reported from committee a scant two days later and was passed on 31 August. On 8 Sept. the House further ordered that all papers relating to Colepeper’s sequestered estates were to be returned to him and his estate bill and his wife’s naturalization bill both received the royal assent on the day of the Convention’s adjournment on 13 Sept. 1660.
The first Baron Colepeper’s attempts to provide for his younger children was dependent on the receipt of £12,000 promised to him by the king for his past services, but over the following years the second baron became another of the many returned royalists who found themselves disappointed in their expectations of royal generosity. Much of Colepeper’s career revolved around his constant search for money and the grasping methods he took to acquire it. He gained a bad reputation in Virginia, of which he was governor for a short time. Some colonial contemporaries, writing a few years after Colepeper’s death, described him as ‘one of the most cunning and covetous men in England’ and a man ‘who had a singular dexterity in making use of all advantages to his own interest’.
Charles II did make some provision for the heir of his former councillor. The first Baron Colepeper had been restored to the office of master of the rolls in June 1660. After his death a month later it was determined that his son would hold the office in reversion pending the death of the new master of the rolls, Sir Harbottle Grimston‡. In the meantime the king granted Colepeper the right to appoint candidates to the vacancies among the six clerks in chancery, a privilege which could gain for the baron up to £5,000 a nomination.
The Cavalier Parliament
Most likely because of these responsibilities elsewhere, Colepeper’s attendance in the House during the 1660s was intermittent and usually low, particularly during the Dutch war. He only came to one-fifth of the sittings of the first session of the Cavalier Parliament, but was present on 11 July 1661 when Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, recorded that he opposed the claims heard that day of Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, for the office of great chamberlain. Colepeper did not appear again after the adjournment of summer 1661 until 9 May 1662. He may have come specifically to see through the final stages of a bill confirming the Convention’s act restoring his father’s property, which passed the House on 10 May. The bill received the royal assent on the last day of the session, 19 May, on which day Colepeper also subscribed to a protest against a concession to the Commons in the highways bill which threatened to erode the House’s right to begin or amend money bills.
He came to 34 of the meetings of the session of 1663, and in July Wharton predicted that Colepeper would oppose the attempt of George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, to impeach Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. On 18 July his name was added in select committee to the subsidy bill as a commissioner responsible for assessing the peers.
Colepeper attended the House more diligently in November and December 1667, coming to 63 per cent of the sittings before the Christmas adjournment. On 9 Dec. 1667 he was placed on a sub-committee of the committee for privileges assigned to draft a declaration and address considering the rights and precedence of ‘foreign’, that is Scottish and Irish, peers in England.
For much of 1669 he was in the Netherlands, probably in an attempt to effect some sort of compromise with his wife, who had returned there because of the scandal of Colepeper’s public liaison with Susanna Willis, ‘one of the greatest gallants about the town’, as a correspondent described her to Colepeper, ‘and your Lordship hath still the reputation of keeping her so’.
Colepeper does not appear to have been involved in the conflict between the Houses over the bill for additional impositions on sugars which was going on at the same time and led to the session’s prorogation four days later. This is notable considering Colepeper’s apparent interest in matters of colonial trade and government at this point. In March 1671 Colepeper was appointed to the newly formed council of foreign plantations, becoming vice-president when it was reorganized in September 1672 as the council of trade and foreign plantations, and through this role he began to take an active interest in the colonies and their financial possibilities.
At the same time he was battling with his younger siblings Judith, Philippa and John over the meagre provision he was making for their maintenance. From the time of their father’s death in 1660 Colepeper had used underhand means to amass the money intended for his siblings for himself.
Colepeper’s interests in the royal colonies and particularly his business dealings with Danby bound him tightly to the lord treasurer and the court interest in Parliament. From the session of spring 1675, during which he missed only one meeting, he began to attend the business of the House far more closely than previously. He most likely supported Danby’s proposed ‘non-resisting’ Test Bill; certainly his name does not appear on any of the protests intended to block its progress through the House and he is not listed as an opponent of the bill in the Letter from a Person of Quality. On 6 May 1675 he signed the protest against the decision to send a message to the House of Commons regarding the cause of Sherley v. Fagg, a message which Colepeper and the other protesters thought gave far too many concessions to the Commons in the matter of the House’s judicature. This dispute between the Houses led to the early prorogation of the following session (autumn 1675), of whose meetings Colepeper attended just over half. He was much more attentive in the long session of 1677-8, when he came to 82 per cent of the meetings. On 15 Mar. 1677, early in the session, he signed the protest against the passage of the bill to enforce the Protestant education and upbringing of children of the royal family. Colepeper registered his proxy with Bath on 14 May 1677, but Bath only held it between 21 and 28 May 1677; it was vacated on 15 Jan. 1678 when Colepeper took his seat again after a long adjournment. In spring 1677 Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, imprisoned in the Tower for his insistence that Parliament was dissolved, considered Colepeper’s political stance ‘triply vile’. On 4 Apr. 1678 Colepeper voted Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, not guilty in his trial for murder.
Colepeper was present at all but one of the meetings of the short session of spring 1678. He supported the right of Robert Villiers to the viscountcy of Purbeck, signing two protests in the claimant’s favour: against the decision of 7 June that members of the House had to consider the claim as a ‘whole’ matter, instead of its three constituent issues and against the decision of 20 June to address the king to bring in a bill to ban Villiers permanently from claiming the viscountcy. On 25 June Colepeper was named a manager for the conference requested by the Commons to discuss the House’s amendments to the supply bill for the disbandment of the army and, after the report on the conference, he was placed on the committee assigned to draw up the reasons why the House could not agree with the lower House’s proposed proviso to the bill. From 26 June to 2 July he managed four conferences on this contentious, and ultimately unresolvable, dispute between the Houses. During the consideration of the appeal of Louis de Duras, 2nd earl of Feversham, against a chancery decree against him over his claim to the marriage portion of his late wife, Colepeper denied in the ‘long and serious’ debate of 8 July that the House was bound by the same rules as chancery. Thus it could vote to relieve the courtier Feversham, one of the duke of York’s favourites.
Colepeper’s attendance dropped to 59 per cent in the following contentious session (autumn/winter 1678), the last of the Cavalier Parliament. In the period 23-27 Nov. 1678 he represented the House in all five of the conferences in which the amendments to the Test Bill, especially those regarding the number of Catholic servants the queen could keep in her household, were discussed and eventually agreed upon. On 26 Dec. 1678 he voted in favour of the House’s insistence that the money raised by statute for the disbandment of the army was to be paid into the exchequer, and not to the chamber of London. He was placed on the committee assigned that day to draw up reasons for the House’s insisting on their amendments, although he was not made a manager for the subsequent conferences on this matter. He voted on 27 Dec. with the majority against the motion to commit the impeached Danby to the Tower. Instead the House gave Danby a set deadline by which to enter his answer to the articles against him.
Exclusion Crisis and supporter of James II, 1679-87
Colepeper actively defended Danby in the Parliament of spring 1679, as the treasurer himself expected he would. He came to 82 per cent of the sitting days in the second session of the Parliament and was initially resolutely opposed to the motion that Danby’s impeachment was still pending before the House despite the dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament. On Essex’s report from the committee for privileges on 18 Mar. confirming that the impeachment could be transferred across Parliaments, Colepeper initially moved to adjourn the debate and then in the ensuing debate of that day and the next argued that the precedents adduced by the committee were insufficient to bear their argument.
On 28 Dec., Colepeper was one of the few supporters of the former lord treasurer placed on the drafting committee for the bill to disqualify Danby from ever holding office again. Later that day he was also appointed a manager for a conference at which the House was to tell the lower chamber of the steps they were taking against Danby by the bill for disqualification. The Commons were not satisfied with this bill and, once it was known that Danby had gone into hiding, submitted their own to the House calling for the disgraced minister’s attainder if he did not surrender himself. On 2 Apr. 1679 Colepeper won the point in debate that this bill should be returned to the Commons with the word ‘attainder’ left out, which an observer noted ‘seemed a contradiction that there should be a bill of attainder without the word attainder in it’. Following Colepeper’s lead the House amended the Commons’ bill to the point to which it merely threatened Danby with banishment and in this form the bill passed the House on 4 April. Colepeper and Thomas Belasyse, 2nd Viscount Fauconberg, both friends of Danby, joined his enemies Anglesey and Essex on the committee to draw up reasons justifying the bill’s amendments to be presented to the Commons. Colepeper and Fauconberg subsequently joined, and perhaps, judging by the manuscript minutes for this day, may even have replaced Danby’s avowed enemies Shaftesbury and George Savile, Viscount (later marquess of) Halifax, as managers for the conference that day at which the House’s bill was presented to the Commons.
He was absent for almost all of the second Exclusion Parliament, for from 3 May until 11 Aug. 1680 he was in Virginia acting as governor, a position he had formally held since the death of Sir William Berkeley in 1677.
Danby included Colepeper among the select group of peers with which his son Viscount Latimer was instructed to consult at Oxford in March 1681 to promote Danby’s petition for bail, and on 24 Mar. Colepeper did strongly press the former lord treasurer’s case before the House. By 26 Mar. Latimer confessed to Danby his concern that Colepeper was wavering, although he did own that he ‘made one very good speech in your behalf’ and ‘spoke very well’ in a response to speeches by his father’s foes. Nevertheless Latimer feared that Colepeper was ‘much changed in his opinion since his coming from London’, owing to the influence of Halifax, whose ‘power at this time works a little on his lordship’.
This may have been a precursor of the break between Danby and Colepeper that took place in the months after the dissolution of Parliament. Colepeper’s reputation at court was only worsening owing to his continued ill usage of his younger siblings. He offered them, or at least his sister Judith, fair promises and long, complicated explanations of why he was not able to provide the amounts due to them, but never actually supplied the money itself. In that sense he was glad to get away to Virginia, for as he wrote to Judith upon his arrival in early May 1680, ‘I have here I thank God no relations to defame or hinder me’. He was faced by a rude shock on his return. Not only was Judith hardly mollified by his assurances, threatening to bring Anglesey on her side again and telling him that ‘I am resolved not to be the good natured fool no longer for I do not find that fair promises will either feed or clothe me or pay my debts’, but the king had taken the unilateral step on 18 Oct. 1680, while Colepeper was still en route from Virginia, of giving the nomination of a vacant place in the six clerks to John Colepeper, ‘in fulfilment of the promise to the late Lord Colepeper to provide for his younger children’.
I formerly used the utmost extent of my poor interest to hinder you from being committed, so I did the last Parliament at Oxford persevere to have you forthwith heard or released (contrary to the opinion of some persons who have credit with me and who thought it unseasonable in point of time to the king’s affairs) and in order thereunto gave you likewise the best informations I could for you to take your measures by.Ibid. ff. 35-42; Eg. 3332, ff. 61-62.
Colepeper ran into trouble again when, after news of popular unrest in Virginia owing to the low price of tobacco had reached London in June 1682, the king ordered him to embark for the colony by 1 Aug. to restore order.
Although he had greatly angered Charles II, Colepeper appears to have remained in favour with the duke of York, who acted as his protector when the feud between Colepeper and Danby came to a head in early 1685. With both George Johnson and Sir Harbottle Grimston dead, Charles granted the mastership of the rolls not to Danby, who held the reversion, but to a qualified lawyer, and in compensation offered Danby the right to nominate candidates to the second and third vacancies among the six clerks. Danby was not to get the nomination to the first place because, Charles explained, York was insisting that a promise made to Colepeper to give it to him be fulfilled. Just before the king’s death Colepeper defeated Danby in a contest before the Privy Council over their competing claims to the first six clerks appointment. This arrangement was later confirmed by York, now James II, shortly after his accession.
Colepeper became an adherent of James II and attended almost every one of the sittings of his Parliament. There he frequently acted as a chairman of select committees on legislation. He chaired two meetings on a naturalization bill, on 27 and 30 May 1685, on which latter day he reported the bill to the House as fit to pass. On that latter day he also chaired a meeting the bill to prevent the clandestine marriages of minors. He chaired the final meeting of the committee on the bill for the king’s carriages on 16 June and reported it to the House the following day. On 27 and 29 June he chaired committees on the bill for reviving several acts and he reported the heavily amended bill to the House on 30 June.
William’s supporter, 1688-9
So much was Colepeper associated with James II, that some observers in 1687-8 listed him as a supporter of the king’s religious policies. Later and often more cautious lists, such as that drawn up in December 1687 by the French ambassador, merely considered his attitude on the religious issues as doubtful and undeclared. James was still showing his favour even in the tense days of autumn 1688, as his renewal of the lease of the Northern Neck attests. James also issued a warrant to commission Colepeper lord lieutenant of Kent on 13 Oct. 1688, before replacing him five days later with the more experienced military leader Feversham. In the first days following William of Orange’s invasion Colepeper refused to subscribe to the petition calling on James to summon a free Parliament.
At the time of the king’s first flight Colepeper threw in his lot wholly and enthusiastically with William of Orange, quickly becoming one of the leading supporters of the prince. He was a member of the ‘violent party’, so named by Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, because of their forceful championing of William’s cause.
Burnet further claimed that, apart from Halifax, Colepeper was the only peer in favour of giving William the crown outright, to the exclusion of Mary. He wrote that Colepeper ‘was a vicious and corrupt man, but made a figure in the debates that were now in the House of Lords and died about the end of them’.
After his return from the Netherlands in 1670 Colepeper had permanently abandoned his wife Margaretta van Hesse and had openly cohabited with his mistress Susanna Willis, by whom he had two daughters. The abandoned Lady Colepeper took out letters of administration of her husband’s estate on 22 Feb. 1689, but she quickly learned that by an indenture of Oct. 1688 he had settled his estate (which consisted of property in Hampshire, Kent, Sussex, Warwickshire, and Lincolnshire, much of which he had purchased with the fortune she had brought to the marriage) on trustees for the benefit of his two daughters by Willis and that he had confirmed this arrangement by a will of 17 Jan. 1689, which revoked all preceding wills and left only the residue of his estate to his legitimate daughter Katherine.