GORING, George (1585-1663)

George Goring was born into a cadet branch of a prominent family which had been settled in Sussex since the reign of Edward I. From about 1608, owing to family connections and to his charm and affable nature, he became a leading member of the households of James I and Charles I, closely connected with the royal favourite George Villiers^†, duke of Buckingham. He accompanied Buckingham and the prince of Wales to Madrid in 1623 to arrange the Spanish Match. With the failure of that project he then took part in negotiating the marriage of Prince Charles with the French princess Henrietta Maria, and he served her from 1626, first as vice-chamberlain and then as master of horse.

Goring began his parliamentary career in the Commons, where he sat for the Sussex borough of Lewes in every Parliament from 1621 until he was raised to the peerage on 14 Apr. 1628 as Baron Goring of Hurstpierpoint, Sussex. Sussex remained the base of his land-holding and political interest until he was forced to abandon and sell many of his properties during the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century he held a wide range of local responsibilities and commissions in that county. HP Commons 1604-29, iv. 437. But the other centre of his influence gradually shifted to Westminster and the court. Through royal favour and his own financial acumen he quickly grew very rich. By 1619 he was receiving a pension of £3,000 p.a. and from 1623 he earned for himself a reputation as ‘captain projector’ for his involvement in many schemes of tax farming and monopolies. Under the protection of the crown and its patents and monopolies he acquired a fortune in the import or production and retail sale of soap, wine, tobacco and many other luxury and domestic goods. He was given the sinecure of secretary of the Council of Wales in 1630 and in 1639 attained his apogee of court influence when made vice-chamberlain of the royal household and a member of the Privy Council. At the time of his death in 1663 it was estimated that Goring’s income in 1641–2 had amounted to £26,800 p.a., much of it earmarked for the repayment of the massive debts of his extravagant and flamboyant heir, also George Goring^‡, styled Lord Goring. CSP Dom. 1663–4, p. 6.

During the Civil War Goring remained loyal to the king and in August 1643 he was appointed ambassador extraordinary to France to try to firm up French assistance to the royal cause. He was back in Oxford by 28 Nov. 1644, on which date he was advanced in the peerage as earl of Norwich, the title previously held by his maternal uncle Edward Denny^†, who had died in 1637 without male heirs. Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, suggested that this promotion was influenced by the solicitations of Norwich’s son and heir, George, who was fast becoming the principal royalist military leader in the western and southern theatres of war. Clarendon, Rebellion, iv. 27. Norwich went abroad as the royalist cause collapsed, but had returned to England by May 1648 as general of the royalist forces in Kent and Sussex; during the second Civil War he was one of the commanders leading the besieged royalist forces in Colchester. After the city’s surrender in August 1648, Norwich was imprisoned for several months and in early March 1649 was condemned to death, but was reprieved by one vote in a division in the Rump on his petition for mercy.

Norwich was still stirring up trouble in Surrey in August 1649, but in September 1650 he was given a pass to go abroad, and he settled in the Netherlands from where he engaged in a frequent correspondence with Sir Edward Nicholas^‡. CSP Dom. 1649–50, p. 269; 1650, pp. 558, 482; Nicholas Pprs. In 1652 he served Charles II as his agent to the duke of Lorraine and Elizabeth of Bohemia in the Netherlands, while in 1656–8 he took an active interest in the plans for a military alliance with Spain and a descent on England. CSP Dom. 1651–2, pp. 134–8; 1656–7, p. 117; 1657–8, pp. 310, 313, 314, 317, 327, 349. Charles II for his part showed his appreciation of Norwich’s long service to his father and mother and in 1657 confirmed his appointment as captain of the Yeomen of the Guard, which had originally been conferred on him by Charles I in October 1645.

Norwich’s relations with Nicholas’ colleague Sir Edward Hyde were much cooler. He thought Hyde’s ‘overvaluing himself and undervaluing others, together with his grasping at too much’ would ‘bring irrecoverable inconveniences, if not ruin, to affairs’. Nicholas Pprs. ii. 279. For his part, Hyde in his History of the Rebellion portrays Norwich as a simple, inoffensive, almost buffoonish, courtier with no great political ambition or ability:

He had always lived in the Court in such a station of business as raised him very few enemies; and his pleasant and jovial nature, which was every where acceptable, made him many friends, at least made many delighted in his company. So that by the great favour he had with the king and queen, and the little prejudice he stood in with any body else, he was very like (if the fatal disorder of the time had not blasted his hopes) to have grown master of a very fair fortune; which was all that he proposed to himself. Clarendon, Rebellion, iv. 355–6.

Samuel Pepys^‡ later recorded anecdotes which similarly emphasized Norwich’s jovial character, even in the solemnity of the French court. Pepys Diary, ii. 29; vii. 290.

Norwich was in Antwerp preparing to return to England in early April 1660 and Samuel Pepys^‡ recorded his arrival at Dover on 10 Apr. as the Convention was preparing to convene. Bodl. Carte 214, ff. 21–22; Pepys Diary, i. 106. He was in England as an agent for the exiled court as the initial moves for a restoration of Charles II were made. On 21 Apr. it was reported that he had had a ‘civil reception’ from the council of state and George Monck, later duke of Albemarle, while a week later, after the Convention had first met, Norwich and a number of other lords dined at the London residence of Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland. HMC 3rd Rep. 89; Alnwick, Alnwick mss xviii, ff. 87–89. Throughout May he acted as an observer on political affairs for the exile court, informing Nicholas, Hyde and James Butler, marquess (later duke) of Ormond [I] (and later earl of Brecknock in the English peerage) of developments in the Convention and giving advice on actions to take and people to promote. Bodl. Carte 214, ff. 113, 184. Norwich himself first sat in the Convention House of Lords with the general influx of formerly exiled royalists on 1 June, on which day he was also reappointed to his places as privy councillor and captain of the Yeomen of the Guard. In this latter role he played a prominent ceremonial role in the coronation of April 1661. R. Hennell, The History of the King’s Body Guard (1904), 152. That his death in January 1663 occurred while en route from Windsor to the capital suggests that even in his advanced age he attended the court and Privy Council. Add. 28103, f. 45; Eg. 3349, f. 2. However, the elderly Norwich was not active in the House and only came to 35 per cent of the sittings of the Convention and 15 per cent of the 1661–2 session of the Cavalier Parliament. He was appointed to only four committees throughout 1660–2 and signed one protest, that of 13 Dec. 1660 against the resolution to vacate the fines of Sir Edward Powell levied during the Interregnum.

Norwich was most concerned in the years following the Restoration with satisfying his creditors. To this end, in 1661 he surrendered his post as captain of the Yeomen of the Guard in exchange for a pension of £2,000 p.a. for seven years, and he frequently petitioned Hyde, now earl of Clarendon, for the restitution of the other lucrative offices and privileges he had enjoyed before the civil wars. He was reappointed secretary of the Council of Wales in 1661, but his ambitious request for the farm of the custom was turned down definitively in late 1662. CCSP, v. 40, 54, 214; CSP Dom. 1661–2, pp. 96, 163, 503. Norwich blamed Clarendon directly for this, and on 2 Jan. 1663, as he lay deathly ill at an inn at Brentford, he composed an angry letter to Clarendon’s son Henry Hyde, styled Lord Cornbury (later 2nd earl of Clarendon), complaining that he had received by the hands of his father ‘the most fatal blow’ to his fortune. CCSP v. 291. The same day he also composed a brief will, which is concerned almost exclusively with the settlement of debts and which made his second son (from 1657 his sole heir male), Charles Goring, 2nd earl of Norwich, executor of this depleted estate. The 2nd earl, writing a few days after Norwich’s death on 6 Jan. 1663, claimed that Clarendon’s refusal of the farm of the custom had broken his father’s heart and had effectively reduced his estate to a mere £450 p.a. CSP Dom. 1663–4, pp. 5–6. Despite his impoverished and lonely death, attended only by his few servants at the inn, ‘the good old earl of Norwich’ (as Nicholas dubbed him) was rewarded for his long and faithful service to the Stuarts by burial a week later in Westminster Abbey. Bodl. Carte 47, f. 385; Registers of Westminster Abbey, ed. J.L. Chester, 158.