NORTH, Dudley (1582-1667)

Dudley North’s great-grandfather Edward North^† was a trusted servant of the Tudors who bought the manor of Kirtling (also known as Catlidge) in Cambridgeshire at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and was ennobled as Baron North in 1554. Both Edward’s son, Roger North^†, 2nd Baron North, and his grandson, Sir John North^‡, distinguished themselves as soldiers and courtiers under Elizabeth I. Sir John died prematurely in 1597 so it was his eldest son, Dudley, who inherited the title from his grandfather in 1600. The new Baron North tried to follow in the family tradition, but he damaged his health and his finances with an extravagant life at the court of James I and, realizing upon the accession of Charles I that no further preferment at court was going to come his way, decided to retrench by selling off a number of properties and retiring to his principal seat at Kirtling. Add. 61873, ff. 87–105.

Having been appointed lord lieutenant of Cambridgeshire by Charles I in the weeks immediately preceding the convening of the Long Parliament, he was continued in this role under Parliament’s 1642 Militia Ordinance. North’s grandson Roger North^‡, in some unpublished notes on the baron’s life, gave an account of his career in the Civil War House of Lords. He asserted that North was initially dismayed by the outbreak of war and purposely stayed away from the House for most of 1643, but, after being tricked into taking the Covenant, decided to devote himself to parliamentary life and ‘in everything he could opposed their proceedings, and from a sullen absentee became an active patroniser of the suffering Cavaliers’. Add 32510, ff. 17v–19. North’s role in the House during the war was far more ambiguous than this wishful thinking on the part of his Tory descendant would suggest. As tensions rose in the weeks leading up to war he was active in the House, even serving as Speaker on 13 occasions between 12 May and 12 July 1642. He was, however, absent for almost two years after this time, returning in June 1644; he was again Speaker on three occasions in October 1644, and occasionally again in 1645. Despite his grandson’s claims, in this latter period North generally supported the war effort and the remodelling of the army, and held largely tolerant views on religion and the Church. He did become increasingly alienated from the radicalism of Parliament, but he only left the House a few days after Pride’s Purge, returning once thereafter, to vote against the ordinance for the king’s trial. J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1986), App. A, B, D.

Both the former parliamentarian Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, in his list of the potential composition of the Convention House of Lords, and the royalist John Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt, in his correspondence with the exiled royal court, assumed that North would be among the small number of veterans from 1648 to attend the re-established House in its first days in April 1660. Bodl. Clarendon 71, ff. 305–6. North, however, was close to eighty years old at the Restoration, and by that time he preferred his life of retirement. Roger North^‡, then a young boy, recalled him as a cantankerous and ill-natured old man at this time:

as his humour was to be very tyrannical and vindictive, so he had taken a resolution never to be in the wrong. And he cared not whom he persecuted nor how unjustly or unreasonably, if it tended, as he thought, to justify anything he had done; and the more mistaken he found himself the more violent he was in his proceedings, as if by that means he was to set himself right. These are the dregs of an old courtier. North, Lives, i. 34–35.

North did not attend the Convention and for much of the time he entrusted his proxy to Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester, a fellow East Anglian landowner with whom North would have been acquainted from the Civil War. Moreover, the Presbyterian Manchester was a political, or at least a dining, associate of his son and heir, Sir Dudley North, later 4th Baron North, a friendship cemented by his kinship with Sir Dudley’s wife, Anne Montagu. Pepys Diary, i. 75. Manchester held North’s proxy in the Convention for the period 30 July–29 Dec. 1660, and during the Cavalier Parliament for 10 Dec. 1661–19 May 1662 and 17 Mar.–17 May 1664. North did make one appearance in the House in these years, on 6 April 1663, but he does not seem to have taken part in any of the proceedings of that day and it is not clear what, if any, business had attracted his attendance.

Manchester held North’s proxy again from 5 Nov. 1666, but it was vacated at North’s death early in January the following year. In his will he bequeathed £200 to his wife and various small sums to servants. In a 1662 codicil, which perhaps reflects the still perilous condition of his estate at that time, he asked that his lands in the parish of Burrough, Cambridgeshire, be sold to help pay his debts. His executor, and sole surviving son and heir, Sir Dudley, inherited the title and the Kirtling estate, where he had long resided with his cantankerous father.