At the death of John Colepeper, 3rd Baron Colepeper, in 1719, his wife and cousin, Frances Colepeper, erected a monument to him in the parish church of Hollingbourne, Kent, ‘to show the great respect she had to the memory of her husband’ and on which she recorded what she thought were his signal achievements. Apart from being ‘the best of Friends and the best of Husbands’ and having been ‘in four Sea-Fights, wherein he behaved with great Courage & Bravery, having his cabin shot to pieces and his commanding officer killed’, his widow boasted that ‘He attended the House of Lords 18 years constantly, with a very small fortune, where he always behaved with steadiness for the good of his King & Country.’
The 3rd Baron Colepeper did sit in the House ‘constantly’, with an attendance rate of about 95 per cent, for the 18 years from 1689 to 1707, whereafter he continued to attend intermittently until his death in 1719, but with much reduced frequency. And he did subsist there ‘with a very small fortune’, the aspect of his career to which most of his contemporaries drew attention. His status as one of the poorest of the ‘poor lords’ resulted from a long-standing family squabble regarding the provisions that his father John Colepeper, Baron Colepeper, had made for his large family. The first baron’s three sons by his second marriage, Thomas*, (later 2nd Baron Colepeper), John and Cheney* (later 4th Baron Colepeper), all joined their royalist father on the continent in 1651, but Thomas and John appear to have been back in England in 1657–8 when, under instructions from Baron Colepeper, his heir Thomas was assigned to settle various of the family’s Kentish manors on trustees, in order to provide his younger brother with an annuity.
Baron Colepeper died shortly after he himself had returned to England at the Restoration, and in his will of 3 July 1660 he made extensive financial provisions from his restored estates in Kent, Lincolnshire and Radnor for his six younger children, who were enjoined to trust to the protection and management of their eldest brother, the Baron’s successor, Thomas.
Charles II had assured his old councillor of many years, the 1st Baron Colepeper, that he would protect his children, and one way in which he did this (not being able or willing to pay the sum of £12,000 he had originally promised) was to offer the 2nd Baron the right to fill the vacancies in the six clerks’ office in chancery. John later calculated that a single nomination could garner £5,000, none of which ever went to his annuity, which was badly in arrears.
At his death the 2nd Baron left to his younger brother his title and nothing else, dividing his estate between his legitimate daughter, Katherine, and his two illegitimate children, Charlotte and Susannah. The 3rd Baron set out his long list of complaints against his brother in a series of chancery bills that he brought against the latter’s heirs from 1698, and in his will of August 1710 he made clear his continuing resentment that the estate left to him by his father ‘was by my brother Thomas late Lord Colepeper most unjustly detained from me for above eight and twenty years till the time of his decease and a considerable part thereof hath ever since been and is still as unjustly withheld from me by his daughter and sole executrix Katherine’.
John inherited this impoverished peerage on 27 Jan. 1689, five days after the commencement of the Convention. The 2nd Baron had been one of William of Orange’s most vocal supporters in the proceedings of the peers in December 1688 and when the 3rd Baron first sat on 30 Jan. 1689 he took up where his brother had left off, vigorously defending William’s pretensions to the throne. He voted to declare William and Mary king and queen on 31 Jan., his second day in the House, and held that James had ‘abdicated’ and that the throne was thereby ‘vacant’, entering his dissent on both 31 Jan. and 4 Feb. when the House rejected that wording. At the crucial vote on 6 Feb. Colepeper joined with the majority in voting through the resolution that James had abdicated and that the throne was vacant.
With William III safely on the throne, Colepeper hardly slackened in his engagement in the Convention Parliament – he was absent on only four occasions across its two sessions – or in his support of the new king. He was named to 59 committees on legislation, and was assigned to consider many bills which furthered the Whig or Williamite agenda. These included the bills to reverse the attainders of a number of Whig martyrs and victims of the Tory revenge of the early 1680s: William Russell‡, styled Lord Russell (8 Mar. 1689), Algernon Sydney (24 Apr.), Alice Lisle (3 May), Henry Cornish (10 June) and Thomas Walcott (8 Nov.). In other legislation involving a perceived Whig hero, Colepeper voted on 31 May in favour of the bill to reverse the two punitive judgments against Titus Oates and, after the bill had been returned from the Commons some weeks later, on 30 July both voted and protested against the House’s resolution to adhere to its amendments to the bill, which appeared to cast doubt on the veracity of the Popish Plot.
In a list compiled between October 1689 and February 1690, Carmarthen (as Danby had become) classed him as among the supporters of the court, and added the name Groandman next to his: the identity of Groandman has not been determined. In the winter of 1689 he was also placed on the large committees to examine what the Whigs considered to be the judicial murders of Lord Russell, Algernon Sydney and others (6 Nov.) and to investigate the related matter of the subornation of witnesses used to attest to the alleged complicity of a number of Whig peers in the rebellion of James Scott, duke of Monmouth (7 Dec.). Colepeper was also placed on committees for measures to establish the Williamite regime, to counter opposition to it and to prosecute the new war against France, such as the bills to make corresponding with King James a treasonable act (25 Apr.), to suspend habeas corpus for those suspected of such treason (25 May), to attaint those considered to be in rebellion (13 July), to prohibit trade with France (10 Aug.) and to halt the export of arms and ammunition (21 December). On 15 June he was also placed on the drafting committee for an address requesting the new king to repair the military garrisons, to disarm papists and to examine further the dangerous situation in Ireland. Most of his other committee appointments involved numerous estate and naturalization bills.
Colepeper continued to be an assiduous attender of the Parliaments of both William III and Anne, at least in her early years. In total he was present at close to 98 per cent of the sittings of the House during William’s reign. In the king’s first two Parliaments, between March 1690 and July 1698, his attendance level in each of the nine sessions consistently stood between 90 and 96 per cent, apart from an anomalous dip to 87 per cent in the session of 1696–7. He came to 93 per cent of the meetings in the first session, 1698–9, of the following Parliament, but his attendance level again decreased to 88 per cent in 1699–1700, a level he maintained in the Parliament of early 1701. He was back to his usual constant self, at 95 per cent, in the Parliament of the first months of 1702, which saw William III’s death and the accession of Anne.
Throughout these sessions Colepeper continued to be named to almost every select committee established. Other than committee nominations, we have only a few votes and protests by which to gauge his activities and attitudes. On 6 Oct. 1690 he voted against the discharge of James Cecil, 4th earl of Salisbury, and Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, from their imprisonment in the Tower, with Carmarthen adding the comment that he thought he had a pension.
In the session of 1694–5 Colepeper protested on 19 Jan. 1695, with only seven other peers, against the decision not to engross the bill making wilful perjury a felony. He also began his opposition to the claim of Sir Richard Verney, to be declared Baron Willoughby of Broke, by dissenting on 19 Mar. 1695 from a decision of the House which appeared to favour Verney’s claim. He alone continued and strengthened this opposition to Verney’s claim in the session of 1695–6, the first of the new Parliament elected in the summer of 1695. On 17 Jan. 1696 he signed a protest against the decision to hear Verney’s counsel, arguing that the previous Parliament had already determined that Verney had no claim to the title, and on 13 Feb. he further subscribed, with just four others, to the protest against the decision to grant Verney his sought-after writ of summons as Lord Willoughby de Broke.
Earlier in that session, on 16 Dec. 1695, Colepeper had been added to the group of managers who were to discuss in conference the address concerning the Scottish East India Company. In the 1696–7 session he sided with the ministry in the most publicly controversial matter of that period, voting on 23 Dec. 1696 for the attainder of Sir John Fenwick‡. Colepeper was most interested, however, in a private bill that concerned his brother’s contested estate. The disarray of the last Baron Colepeper’s life had already come before the House in January 1690, when the 2nd Baron’s widow brought in a bill to make null and void all of her husband’s wills and conveyances to his illegitimate daughters by Susanna Willis, and to direct his estate to their legitimate daughter, Katherine. Despite some evident sympathy for the abused Lady Colepeper, the House rejected her bill 36 to 35. Colepeper’s stance on this is not recorded, but he probably opposed his sister-in-law’s attempt, for when a bill was introduced in the 1696–7 session which would have allowed Katherine’s husband, Thomas Fairfax‡, 5th Baron Fairfax [S], to compound with the two illegitimate daughters of the late baron for their portions, Colepeper clamoured for his own long-standing claims. The bill was brought up from the Commons on 17 Mar. 1697 and given its first reading in the House eight days later, when it was ordered that Colepeper’s case would be heard, either by himself or his counsel. Arguments both for and against the bill were heard on 7 Apr. and the second reading of the bill was debated on 12 and 13 Apr. but it had not been committed by the time Parliament was prorogued on 16 April. Both Colepeper and Fairfax having waived their privilege, the dispute went to chancery, where in August 1698 Colepeper exhibited a number of bills against Lady Colepeper and her daughter and son-in-law, in which he set out in great detail the ways in which his brother had tried to defraud him of his maintenance. After many delays, chancery decreed on 9 Nov. 1700 that Colepeper was to be paid the arrears, with interest, of the £50 annuity his father had intended for him from the revenue of a number of Kentish manors then in the possession of Lady Colepeper.
In the remaining sessions of William’s Parliaments, Colepeper remained a reliable vote for the Whigs. On 15 Mar. 1698 he voted for the Junto bill to punish the former cashier of the excise, Charles Duncombe‡. This session also saw his more frequent involvement as a manager of conferences. On 7 Mar. 1698 he was delegated to manage a conference on the House’s amendments to the bill explaining the system of poor relief. On 24 May he was likewise appointed a manager for the conference, to be held the following day, on the bill for the suppression of blasphemy; a month later, on 20 June, he was assigned to represent the House in a conference on the bill for the Alverstoke waterworks.
In the 1699–1700 session of the 1698 Parliament Colepeper dissented, on 23 Jan. 1700, from the House’s reversal of the judgment in the case of Williamson v. the Crown and the same day opposed the Tory-led bill to maintain the old East India Company as a corporation, both through his vote against adjourning into a committee of the whole to consider further amendments to the bill and by his protest against its passage. Perhaps significantly, around this time he acquired nine shares in the new East India Company, which he seems to have disposed of in 1703.
For the first few parliamentary sessions of the new monarch, Colepeper continued his usual diligent attendance on the House, being present for 87 per cent of the meetings of the 1702 Parliament. In its first session (1702–3) he opposed the Occasional Conformity bill and voted for the Whig amendments to the bill on 16 Jan. 1703. Three days later he also signed a protest against the decision to include a clause in the bill settling a revenue on George of Denmark (and duke of Cumberland) that would enable the foreign-born prince to continue in public employments after the death of the queen, as it seemed implicitly to bar other foreign-born peers (such as William III’s Dutch followers) from the same rights. In the following session, of 1703–4, he voted for the rejection of the bill against occasional conformity on 14 Dec. 1703. On 21 Mar. 1704 he signed the dissent from the resolution not to give a second reading to a rider to the Recruitment bill, which would require churchwardens and overseers of the poor permission to approve of new recruits.
An analysis of the peerage drawn up circa April 1705 listed Colepeper as a supporter of the Hanoverian Succession, and he corroborated this opinion by his known stances in the first session of the new Parliament of 1705–6, when he was absent for only ten sittings. He joined with the Whigs on 6 Dec. 1705, when he voted to agree with the committee of the whole that the Church was not in danger under the queen’s administration.
Throughout this long parliamentary career, Colepeper’s poverty became almost proverbial and seems to have been the most salient aspect of his political personality. When asked in September 1689, only a few months after inheriting his title, for a self-assessment of his personal estate, in order to be taxed under the Act for a General Aid to their Majesties, Colepeper was forthcoming about the limitations of his estate:
my personal estate is very inconsiderable. That part of that little I have is put out and secured by mortgage upon lands …. Part is lent to their Majesties upon the security of this Act and so not liable to be taxed. I desire likewise it may be intimated to their Lordships that I have lately paid for my dignity £20, a sum greatly disproportionable to my small fortune.
Chatsworth, Halifax Collection, B.42.
He received occasional bounties of £100 or £200 from the crown from 1689 onwards.
The king’s token largesse was to little avail in relieving Colepeper’s reputation for poverty. In May 1695 there was a report that Leeds was trying to ‘debauch’ Colepeper, Robert Hunsdon, 7th Baron Hunsdon, and other noble ‘mumpers’ (contemporary slang for a genteel beggar) by offering them roast beef and ale at ‘Hell’, an eating establishment near Westminster Hall. Another report stated that the new and widely derided lords justices, who ruled the country during William III’s absence on the continent, refused to appear in public because they could find nobody but Colepeper and Hunsdon to bear the sword of state before them on formal occasions. This caused the lords justices to be dubbed ‘the overseers of the poor’.
That ‘competent provision’ was a pension of £600 p.a.
Colepeper died on 8 July 1719 in his house, ‘Brickhouse’, in Hollingbourne. His long will of August 1710 (with a codicil of February 1715) suggests that at the time of his death he may have been better off, or at least have had more assets, than alleged by Sunderland in 1713. Chancery decrees in his favour in his dispute with Lady Colepeper and Lord and Lady Fairfax had certainly helped. In a series of decisions of 1703, 1706 and 1708 it had been determined that Colepeper was owed £2,285 7s. in arrears (with interest) of his annuity of £50 and it had been ordered that that part of the 2nd Baron Colepeper’s estate which had originally been intended for his brother’s provision was to be sold to raise the money.