NORTH, Dudley (1602-77)

For much of his life Sir Dudley North remained in the shadow of his demanding and long-lived father. This biography is based on Randall, Gentle Flame. Sir Dudley’s youngest son, Roger, was later to write of his filial obedience and deference:

He lived to a good old age before the barony descended upon him, and had stood as an eldest son of a peer at the state in the House of Lords at sixty-three. He never would put on his hat or sit down before his father, unless enjoined to do it. So far was he from moving anything to him that he knew would displease him, and so egregious was this dutiful demeanour that all people took notice of and admired it. North, Lives, i. 35.

A Knight of the Bath from 1616, he spent some years travelling and soldiering on the continent in the early 1620s before, as he later wrote in the autobiographical preface to his Observations and Advices Oeconomical (1669), he ‘became a married man, and was speedily called to public affairs, being elected to four successive parliaments, where the service and approaches were excessive chargeable, and of no profit as to my particular’. D. North, Observations and Advices Oeconomical (1669), sig. A3v–A4v. In 1628 he was elected to the first of his four Parliaments, for the Sussex borough of Horsham, and in April 1632 he married Anne Montagu, niece of Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester. Randall, Gentle Flame, 48; HMC 7th Rep. 548. He was selected for the county of Cambridge, where his family’s principal estate of Kirtling (or Catlidge) was located, for both Parliaments of 1640. His father was appointed lord lieutenant for the county under the Militia Ordinance but was not active in this role, and it was his heir, and principal deputy-lieutenant, Sir Dudley, who for the next two decades effectively administered the county for Parliament and the Interregnum governments, serving as a justice of the peace and parliamentary commissioner frequently tasked with raising revenue and maintaining order in the county. C. Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War, 52–55. He was purged from the Commons by the Army in December 1648, whereupon he retired to the family manor in Kirtling and to his own, purchased in 1638, in Tostock, Suffolk, devoting himself to his writings and estate management. North, Lives, iii. 312 .

North was allowed to take up his place in the Commons again in February 1660, and may have been conferring during this time with his wife’s relatives Manchester and Edward Montagu, later earl of Sandwich, about their plans for the return of the king. Pepys Diary, i. 75. He reluctantly complied with his father’s wishes to stand for knight of the shire again for the elections to the Convention, but his unwillingness to support an unconditional restoration – ‘to stand for the Parliament and a King and the settlement of the Church’ – cost him and his running mate the voices of the freemen of the county, although they were later returned by the perhaps more sympathetic voters of the borough of Cambridge. North, Lives, iii. 312; Pepys Diary, i. 112. He later declined to stand for the Cavalier Parliament.

In 1670 North anonymously published a complete repudiation of Parliament during the Civil War, A Narrative Relating to Some Passages in the Long Parliament, which says little about his own activities in the Long Parliament but a good deal about his political thinking (or what he felt obliged to say) in the years following the Restoration. What, he wondered, did Englishmen have to rebel against, ‘who live in an extraordinary well-tempered Monarchy, where the perfect constitution is sufficiently proved by an efflux of very much time, without the least appearance of any visible defect’. D. North, Narrative Relating to Some Passages in the Long Parliament (1670), p. 6. Similarly, in a posthumously published volume of religious reflections, Light in the Way to Paradise (1682), he showed something of his ecclesiastical thought, condemning both Catholics and Presbyterians, the latter of whose church rule ‘is a government which seemeth adjusted to the latitude of a Democracy, and not to the altitude of a Monarchy’, while the power thus conferred on their ministers is ‘an authority little less than Papal’. D. North, Light in the Way to Paradise (1682), 21–27.

In his 1669 Observations and Advices Oeconomical, North also waxed lyrical about the joys of his life of retirement in the country. North, Observations and Advices, sig. A5r–v. He did indeed remain largely distant from public affairs in his later years, but he was not completely uninvolved. Upon his father’s death in the first days of January 1667, and his own consequent succession to the peerage at the age of sixty-four, he received a number of letters from friends, including his kinsman and parliamentary correspondent Henry North^‡, which expressed the hope that he would now be able to direct his energies towards the House of Lords. Add. 32500, f. 9; Bodl. North mss, c.4, ff. 120–3. At first the new baron himself appears to have been keen to sit. In the last week of January he asked his agent John Hallam to get his robes ready in London and even directed his second son, the lawyer Francis North, later Baron Guilford, to ensure that his writ of summons was properly drawn up and made ready for him. Francis, following the advice of the clerk of the crown, went to the lord chancellor, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, around 23 Jan. for the writ, as he ‘thought it might be an easier way than to have it by motion and order in the House of Lords’. Bodl. North mss, c.4, ff. 126–8. It is not clear what was meant by this last comment, as writs of summons were issued by the office of the chancellor and not by the House itself. The writ was duly prepared and left in Francis North’s possession pending the new Baron North’s arrival in Westminster. North presented the writ of summons and first took his seat on 31 January, and then attended each of the seven sittings that still remained in the 1666–7 session, during which he was named to five select committees. HMC 8th Rep. pt. 1, 109.

This initial burst of enthusiasm may have been due to Sir Dudley’s long-delayed expectations for the title, and his desire to show that he had finally come into his rightful inheritance. But his interest in the actual proceedings of the House quickly cooled. Like so many other peers he did not come at all to the brief five-day session of July 1667, and attended only a quarter of the sittings of the following session of 1667–9. He sat only in the first part of the session, which first met on 10 Oct. 1667, and was named to 15 committees. On his last day in the session, 27 Nov. 1667, he assigned his proxy for its remainder (it was prorogued on 1 Mar. 1669) to William Grey, Baron Grey of Warke. Grey of Warke had been a colleague of the 3rd Baron North in the 1640s House of Lords and was by this time father-in-law to North’s eldest son and heir, Sir Charles North, later Baron Grey of Rolleston and 5th Baron North, who had secretly married Katherine Grey in April 1667. Bodl. North mss, c.4, ff. 131–2, 137–8, 146.

Grey of Warke appears to have valued his connection with the Norths, for his daughter Katherine was one of his few surviving children, the only one to marry into a noble family, and he had a great liking for his son-in-law Charles. Bodl. North mss c.4, ff. 283–4; c.11, f. 30; adds.c.11, ff. 30–31. In October 1669 Grey of Warke in his turn delegated to his son-in-law the task of sending an unsigned proxy to North, a procedure which Sir Charles was sure was unprecedented and unorthodox. ‘But’, he reassured his father, ‘his Lordship says it is sufficient (as he has often experienced) to intimate his desire thereof to the clerk of Parliament and paying his fees’. Bodl. North mss, adds.c.11, f. 36. The proxy was duly registered on 16 Oct., three days before the session of winter 1669 began, one of the few sessions of Parliament from which Grey of Warke was absent. North himself did not attend the House until 6 Nov. and sat for two-thirds of the sitting days until the end of the session on 11 Dec., during which he was placed on all three of the select committees established in that period.

North was present at the beginning of the following session, on 14 Feb. 1670, and was present for just over three-quarters of the sitting days until the summer adjournment of 11 Apr., during which time he was named to 24 select committees. On 21 Oct. 1670 he again assigned his proxy to Grey of Warke for the remainder of the session, which ended on 22 Apr. 1671. He was present at the turbulent session that met in early 1673, attending 87 per cent of the sitting days, his highest attendance in his career in the House, and being nominated to 18 committees. It was in the session that for the first and only time in his parliamentary career he was made a conference manager, for the conferences held on 6 and 7 Mar. 1673 on the address to the king concerning the growth of popery. His last day in this session, 27 Mar. 1673, was also his last ever appearance in the House. He again registered his proxy with Grey of Warke on 5 Jan. 1674, two days before the session of 7 Jan.–24 Feb. 1674 was set to begin. Grey of Warke died in July 1674, and North transferred his proxy to his own son Charles, who in October 1673 had been summoned to the House as Baron Grey of Rolleston, registering it with him on 10 Apr. 1675, three days before the session of that spring, and then again on 4 Oct. 1675, more than a week before the autumn session commenced.

When he was present in the House, North’s activity was largely limited to nominations to select committees; he was named to all but nine of those established on the days when he attended. When he was not present, his vote was cast through his proxies to Grey of Warke and then to Grey of Rolleston, in ways which would have associated him with the presbyterian and country groupings in the House. Following the defeat of Danby’s test bill in the spring of 1675, North was praised by the author of A Letter of a Gentleman of Quality as one of those absent lords who through their proxies had ‘taken care their votes should maintain their own interest and opinion’. Cobbett, Parl. Hist. iv. lxv. Similarly, the division list of the vote of 20 Nov. 1675 for an address for the dissolution of Parliament notes that North voted for the address through the proxy held by Grey of Rolleston.

Perhaps because of this association by proxy with his son, who was rapidly becoming a core member of the country opposition, Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, at first categorized North as ‘worthy’ in his estimation of lay peers drawn up in spring 1677, before later amending his list to reflect the baron’s death in June 1677, and the accession of Grey of Rolleston to his father’s more ancient barony of North. While Grey of Rolleston inherited the title and the Cambridgeshire estates (and was in line to inherit the Tostock estate at the death of his mother), the 4th baron ensured by his will of 1675 that his five younger sons were provided for with annuities worth £400 in total. These sons all excelled in their chosen fields of law, scholarship or trade, and three of them – Sir Francis, Baron Guildford, Sir Dudley^‡ and Dr John – all later received fulsome biographies from their youngest brother and admirer, Roger North, in which the virtuous example set by their parents was frequently stressed.