Companion to the Prince of Orange
Born on 10 July 1649 Hans Willem Bentinck had little chance of inheriting his noble father’s title or estate, being one of the younger of nine children.
Bentinck also became William’s principal diplomat. He first encountered members of the English elite when he accompanied William on a trip to England in the winter of 1670 to request, unsuccessfully, the repayment of debts owed to the prince by his uncle Charles II.
Further honours, rewards and responsibilities were bestowed on Bentinck. In 1681 he was made verderer of Holland, in charge of the stadholder’s parks and gardens, an area of aesthetics in which Bentinck was keenly interested.
Revolution
By 1687 Bentinck had become aware of the growing unrest in Britain against James II’s rule, especially from the large number of Scottish exiles at William of Orange’s court, such as William Carstares, Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth, later earl of Marchmont [S], James Johnston‡, and Gilbert Burnet, later bishop of Salisbury.
bred about the prince, and he observed in him that application to business and those virtues that made him think fit to take him into his particular confidence, and to employ him in the secretest of all his concerns as well as the looking to all his private affairs. He is a man of a great probity and sincerity, and is as close as his master is. He bears his favour with great modesty, and has nothing of that haughtiness that seems to belong to all favourites. He is a virtuous and religions man, and I have heard instances of this that are very extraordinary, chiefly in a courtier. He has all the passion of a friend for the prince’s person, as well as the fidelity of a minister in his affairs, and makes up the defects of his education in a great application to business; and as he has a true and clear judgment, so the probity of his temper appears in all his counsels, which are just and moderate; and this is so well known, that though commonwealths can very ill bear any inequality of favour that is lodged in one person, yet I never heard any that are in the government of the towns of Holland complain of him; nor does he make those advantages of his favour which were ordinarily made by those that have access to princes, by employing it for those pay them best. I do not know him well enough to say much concerning him; but though I naturally hate favourites, because all those whom I have known hitherto have made a very ill use of their greatness, yet by all I could ever discern, the prince has showed a very true judgment of persons in placing so much of his confidence on him.
Burnet Supp. ed. Foxcroft, 196-7.
From late December 1687 at the latest Bentinck began to receive detailed newsletters of developments in English politics from a number of correspondents in Britain, particularly Sydney and James Johnston‡.
Despite his earlier protestations to Clarendon, from the time of James II’s first abortive flight Bentinck began to sense that his master could perhaps gain more than a role as a protector through the evident disorder in James’s government. After the king had been ordered – via the intermediaries Halifax, Charles Talbot, 12th earl (later duke) of Shrewsbury and Henry Booth, 2nd Baron Delamer (later earl of Warrington) – to leave the capital, ‘for his own safety’, it was Bentinck who, at 5 o’clock in the morning on 18 Dec. 1688, wrote to Halifax to tell him that the prince accepted James’s request to reside in Rochester, from which the king more easily effected his escape in the early hours of 24 December.
How far the prince himself entertained this, I cannot tell. But I saw it made a great impression on Benthink [sic]. He spoke of it to me, as asking my opinion about it, but so, that I plainly saw what was his own. For he gave me all the arguments that were offered for it; as that it was most natural that the sovereign power should be only in one person; that a man’s wife ought only to be his wife; that it was a suitable return to the Prince for what he had done for the Nation; that a divided sovereignty was liable to great inconveniences: and though there was less to be apprehended from the Princess of any thing of that king than from any woman alive, yet all mortals were frail, and might at some time or other of their lives be wrought on. To all this I answered, with some vehemence, that this was a very ill return for the steps the princess had made to the prince three years ago: it would be thought both unjust and ungrateful: it would meet with great opposition, and give a general ill impression of the prince, as insatiable and jealous in his ambition … We talked over the whole thing for many hours, till it was pretty far in the morning.
Burnet, iii. 390-2.
Bentinck evidently was keeping a very close eye on events in Parliament in the early days of February 1689 and gave William’s personal secretary Constantijn Huygens the younger a detailed breakdown of the vote of 6 Feb. 1689 which declared the throne vacant and William and Mary king and queen.
The Convention, 1689-90
Bentinck was quickly rewarded for his faithful service. On 14 Feb. 1689, the day of the proclamation of William and Mary as king and queen, he was sworn to the new king’s Privy Council, and over the following few weeks he was appointed keeper of the king’s privy purse, groom of the stole and first gentleman of the bedchamber. These positions put him closer than any other courtier to the person of the king; his favoured status was further emphasized when he was given apartments adjoining the king’s. For the next ten years or so Bentinck remained the closest adviser and secretary to the Dutch king and acted as his intermediary with the English, indeed the British, political nation. In effect he was the gatekeeper to the king’s presence, by which discretion he was able to wield a great deal of power and influence. As Burnet commented about the king’s appointments: ‘The king’s chief personal favour lay between Bentinck and Sydney: the former was made earl of Portland and groom of the stole, and continued for ten years to be entirely trusted by the king; and served him with great fidelity and obsequiousness: but he could never bring himself to be acceptable to the English nation’
Huygens reported as early as 29 Dec. 1688 that the English political class ‘already held a grudge against Bentinck because he had so much authority’ and a month later was told by Dijkvelt that ‘Bentinck already gave great jealousy to the English’, a view confirmed by the other ambassador Odijk.
As a new member of the English aristocracy, no matter how resented this may have been, the earl of Portland was introduced in the House on 15 Apr. 1689, between Shrewsbury and Charles Montagu, 4th earl (later duke) of Manchester. This late entry into the House and his later absence on military and administrative duties in September and early October 1689 meant that in total he came to only 16 per cent of the sittings of the first session of the Convention. He was also not particularly prominent in the House’s affairs, and was named to only four very large select committees on legislation. Huygens reported that in May Portland was proposing a parliamentary bill so that the funds voted for the queen would be managed and disbursed through the privy purse, which he of course controlled, but this project does not appear to have gone very far.
Portland was more often present in the short second session of the Convention which began in late October. He came to just under half of its sittings in the autumn and winter of 1689 but was named to only two large select committees on legislation. His lack of presence and activity in the House was explained to Huygens in the week before the autumn meeting, for ‘he was not a man who could do the king either great service or disservice, having no considerable estate nor following and credit in Parliament’.
As Huygens’s comment suggests, Portland, though not a considerable figure in Parliament at this time, was at the very heart of William III’s government from its beginning. He acted as the conduit for the British political nation to the king. He was personally sent by the king in early September 1689 to Shrewsbury to try to convince him not to resign the secretaryship of state, as Shrewsbury so often threatened, and it was to Portland that Shrewsbury finally delivered up the seals of office in June 1690.
Portland spent the next three months in the Netherlands, engaged in complicated negotiations with the anti-Orangist city fathers of Amsterdam who wished to appoint the town’s bailiffs (schepenen), without the advice or confirmation of William of Orange. These same anti-Orangist Amsterdamers also tried to deprive Portland of his seat as a noble (ridderschap) in the Estates of Holland, as he was now a naturalized subject of the English crown.
The Parliament of 1690
While he was in the Netherlands, Portland learned from the king himself of the continuing party disputes over the bill of indemnity and other measures and of the surprise prorogation of 27 Jan. 1690. William recounted, perhaps with some glee, that ‘it seems the Tories are happy with it, but not the Whigs.’ Similarly, in informing his friend of the dissolution on 6 Feb., William could only comment, ‘the animosity of the two parties grows from day to day and causes me terrible problems’.
Portland accompanied William on his expedition to Ireland in spring 1690, and he and his regiment of horse participated in the Battle of the Boyne. When William returned to England in early September he left Portland effectively in charge of the army in Ireland, making him a lieutenant-general of both the horse and foot in the English Army before he left.
Shortly after Portland’s departure from Ireland, Sydney and Coningsby addressed a long letter to him setting out their advice on how he and the king should manage the Commons in the forthcoming Parliament in England, for ‘it is without all question impossible for a king of England to do any considerable thing in a House of Commons without a formed management’. This is the first indication that, among his other duties for the king, Portland was also beginning to take on the role of parliamentary manager, or as a co-ordinator of the court’s other parliamentary managers. Sydney and Coningsby concentrated their analysis on the Commons, and insisted that the crown rely on ‘two or three men who have fair reputation in the House’ and were not allied to James II.
Shortly after the prorogation in early January 1691, Portland accompanied William to the Congress of Allies meeting at The Hague.
Certainly the 1691-2 session proved difficult for the court and considerations of the management of the parties had to be taken into account after the disgrace of John Churchill, earl (later duke) of Marlborough in early 1692 and the vacancy in the secretaryship of state caused by Sydney’s appointment as sole lord lieutenant of Ireland in March 1692. From February 1692 Portland clearly became more involved in ensuring the smooth functioning of the government in England for the court’s interest by managing the parties and their expectations.
A third figure often mentioned in the correspondence of Portland and Capell was Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, James II’s disgraced former secretary of state who in 1691 had been allowed to kiss the king’s hand and even to take up his seat in the House. Feeling confident of his rehabilitation, and of the king’s desire for his advice, Sunderland addressed the first in what was to become a long series of letters to Portland on 5 May 1692. He welcomed Portland’s return to England, sent there to help the queen and the cabinet council deal with the threat of a French invasion. In his letters of May 1692 he urged the king’s immediate return as well and lashed out at the current Tory-based ministry, for ‘the considerable part of [the nation], do not care who are ministers of state, whether this man or that, so we may be safe and secure’ and that ‘it will be a very ill preparative to the persuading the Parliament to take care of the government next winter, to leave all at random this summer’.
The need for a reform of the ministry was further emphasized by the military failures of the Allies that summer. Following the victories of Admiral Edward Russell, later earl of Orford, against the French invasion force at Barfleur and La Hogue in mid-May, Portland, with Sydney (about to be dispatched to Ireland again as sole lord lieutenant) and Rochester, went to Portsmouth to convene a council of war with Russell and the other admirals in order to plan an Allied ‘descent’ and invasion of the French coast. Shortly after these meetings Portland returned to the continent to take part in the campaign in Flanders, where he was one of the commanders who oversaw the disastrous defeat of the Allies at Steenkirk following the French capture of the fortress of Namur.
In this depressing international context Portland returned with the king in late Oct. 1692.
That which will ruin the king, if not remedied, is, that every one thinks this Government cannot last, which makes, that many of those who wish well to it, have a mind to secure themselves, for the generality of mankind will ever intend that chiefly. … A good session of Parliament is necessary, which – as much as I can judge – is yet in the king’s power ... But if the foundation is not made good, that will not save us; for if the fears and discontents continue, though the Parliament doth give money, we shall be undone … People are possessed of a most dangerous opinion, that England is not taken care on; that must be cured, or all signifies nothing, which may be done, and the Allies supported to the height; but if it is not done, the confederacy will quickly be at an end.
Correspondentie, I. ii. 36-38 (no. 31); UNL, PwA 500.
Portland, and through him the king, were ready to listen carefully and follow Sunderland’s advice at this time. Marlborough suggested to Halifax at about this time in the autumn 1692 that ‘Lord Sunderland had gained Lord Portland, and that he [Marlborough] was sure the king had a great mind to have him in employment’.
Others also expressed their fears to Portland of the danger to the confederacy from the forthcoming Parliament. Even before Portland’s departure from the continent, Dijkvelt had written to him recommending that Jean de Robéthon, the secretary of the Hanoverian envoy Schütz, should write a pamphlet aimed at Members of the English Parliament convincing them of the benefits of continuing the war.
That there are many Members of Parliament that would do all they could to delay and hinder his majesty in his most generous and glorious acquirements your lordship can not be ignorant, and that they design to do the like now is too obvious. They resolve to spoil all business if possible and are upon several projects to make a division in this next session of Parliament. Some members are for impeaching your lordship as advising his majesty to keep up the Dutch confederacy and thereby expending the English blood and treasure beyond sea and doing no good therewith against the French: they also intend to make other articles against the bishop of Salisbury [Gilbert Burnet], looking on him as accessory to the same; and these men are churchmen and friends of my Lord Nottingham, though I cannot say his lordship knows of it. And they are for finding fault with the last summer’s expedition both by land and sea; and say they will call Admiral Russell to account for failures on his part; and will also have an account of the miscarriages beyond sea. All which things they are encouraged to by the many and great complaints made by some of his majesties officers who tell them, the English were sacrificed at Steenkirk, the Dutch would not fight, nor let the other English relieve them.
This correspondent went on to recount at length allegations made by a kinsman of Sir Edward Seymour‡ to Sir Thomas Clarges‡ about Portland’s refusal to allow James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond, to march his troops to the relief of the hard-pressed English troops at Steenkirk. This, he predicted, would give Clarges a handle for refusing to promote supply for the continuation of the war. He further suggested Portland advise the king to adjourn Parliament for a further few days so that the government’s supporters could come up and make a ‘full house’, as there were rumours that Clarges and the ‘Country’ opposition were trying to muster their troops early for an attack at the beginning of the session.
Portland’s anonymous correspondent was not wrong. Almost immediately after the session had begun, the Commons, under the cover of offering ‘advice’ to the king, attacked almost every aspect of the government’s administration of the previous summer, particularly the management of the military effort, both at sea with the failed descent, and on land with the disaster of Steenkirk. As Sunderland later sarcastically complained when detailing to Portland all that went wrong with the management of the session of 1692-3, ‘The king in his speech at the beginning of the last sessions by the word advice gave a handle to the Parliament, which was well improved’. Portland was very concerned by these attacks. Among the few parliamentary papers in his surviving archive are fair copies of the debates in the Commons of 21-26 Nov. 1692 on the ‘advice’ to the king. Most disturbing would have been the attacks of country Whigs such as ‘Harry’ Mordaunt‡ on Nottingham on his conduct of naval affairs and on Portland, who was included in the motion that all general officers in the army should in future be ‘natives of their Majesties’ dominions’ (although the motion’s supporters were primarily aiming at Hendrik Trajectinus van Solms, Count Solms, for his perceived misconduct at Steenkirk).
To Portland’s discomfort the Lords took up the same theme against foreign-born general officers in the Army when they considered their ‘advice’ in late November and early December. This led to Huygens to record on the first day of December that Parliament was ‘lingering’ in its attacks against the ministers, and especially Nottingham and Portland.
Portland’s management of the beleaguered court interest in the House did not end there. It may have been to ensure Portland’s ability to fight against the Triennial bill, another country measure opposed by the court, that Lovelace, who had returned to the House to vacate his proxy on 13 Jan., registered his proxy with Portland again on 21 Jan., the day the bill was sent down to the Commons.
Other evidence of Portland’s increasing involvement in the affairs of the House comes from his careful interest and participation in the trial of Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun. His hurriedly written pencil notes – written in English with the occasional Dutch word or spelling – on the debate of 4 Feb. 1693 on Mohun’s guilt still survive among his papers.
Following the prorogation of Parliament on 14 Mar. 1693, Portland in late April set out with the king to Holland for that summer’s campaigning.
At the end of the sessions, that the next might be a good one, the advice, the business of Ireland, the Triennial Act, the descent, which the king would not mention his last speech, the Streights Fleet, and many other things were to be laid asleep, if possible, by care and good conduct against the winter, in order to which a keeper and a secretary were made and well chosen. But the clutter at their coming in, by the pressing of the ministers very much spoiled the good that was designed. Then the ministers were suffered to be insolent, who of all others ought to be least so. The king was accused of breach of his word by several … The descent is now carrying on, in most men’s opinion, without a possibility of success, at a time that there is not money for the subsistence of the army. The whole government is loose, no respect paid to it, no order in any of the councils, nor care of anything. It is pretty plain what good preparations these things are for next sessions, either of this or of a new Parliament. The king went away thinking he had done too much, because the ministers were ill pleased, who have little credit, and that is always wrong employed.
Ibid. 1219.
In a long letter of advice to Portland of 20 June, Sunderland set out various measures required to secure the smooth running of Parliament, including acts needed to mollify certain influential members of the House and bring them over to the government.
Sunderland’s projections for an easy parliamentary session were complicated by the military reverses of summer 1693 in which Portland himself was wounded. Sunderland expressed relief at the news that Portland was not badly hurt and, more importantly that, despite rumours, the king was still alive, but continued to fret about the next session. The last in the series of Sunderland’s letters to Portland of that summer, dated 21 Aug., suggests that Portland returned with the king to England shortly after that date.
Portland himself maintained the same level of attendance – 64 per cent – in the following session (1693-4). From 19 Dec. 1693 until 15 Jan. 1694 he held the proxy of John West, 6th Baron de la Warr. Once again Portland was not frequently named to select committees, being appointed to only three (including a small one of ten members appointed by a committee of the whole to draft a clause for the Mutiny bill). Otherwise, he only appears in the pages of the Lords Journal for this session on 21 Dec. 1693 and 2 Jan. 1694 as the victim of a breach of privilege of Parliament after one of his menial servants had been arrested.
Nevertheless, he was undoubtedly behind the scenes managing Parliament and trying to maintain discipline in the court party. He was widely reputed to have been responsible for advising William to veto the Place bill in January 1694. Certainly Sir Thomas Clarges seemed to be thinking of Portland, William’s closest counsellor, when he moved on 26 Jan. 1694 ‘That the advisers of the rejection of this bill are enemies to the king and kingdom’.
Shortly after the prorogation on 25 Apr. 1694, and before the king’s and Portland’s departure for the continent, a further step was taken in Sunderland’s project to build a loyal court party with a mass promotion of loyal court followers in the peerage. Nine followers of the court, who had worked for its agenda in the recent session, were either created peers or raised in the peerage, five of them – Carmarthen, Devonshire, Shrewsbury, William Russell, 5th earl of Bedford, and John Holles, 4th earl of Clare – being made dukes. With these rewards having been distributed, William, Portland and other military officers set off for the continent in early May for that summer’s campaign. While on the continent Portland received regular missives from Sunderland concerning his continuing efforts to ensure the smooth running of the king’s government. One matter in particular that summer concerned Sunderland. He had long insisted that the ‘cabinet council’, especially that entrusted to run the country during the king’s absence, should be small, ‘one fitted for business and not a ridiculous one’.
The king and his entourage stayed longer than usual on the continent and Sunderland was writing to Portland well into September with his views, making clear in a letter of 13 Sept. what the purpose of this ongoing correspondence was and Portland’s role in it: ‘I have not writ directly this year to his Majesty because I told him before he went away that what I had to say to him I would write to you and so you see I have always done’. Sunderland warned of the potential for trouble in the next session, but concluded that ‘It will be much easier this year than it was the last. The business is now in so good hands that nothing need to be done but to keep it so and to pursue the present track.
Once again ignoring Sunderland’s incessant urgings for a speedy return, the king and Portland did not return to England until 9 Nov. 1694.
Portland’s surviving correspondence with Capell in Ireland is most plentiful in 1695-6 as the two friends and kinsmen had a great deal to discuss concerning the government of Ireland. Capell’s advocacy of summoning a new Parliament there and his efforts to negotiate with the recalcitrant leaders of the Irish Commons set him apart from his two fellow lord justices and met with the approval of the new secretary of state Shrewsbury, Sunderland and the king. It was Portland who in March 1695 was able to inform Capell that the king had decided to give him sole government over Ireland and its Parliament by making him lord deputy – a promotion Capell was to keep secret until it was formally announced in May 1695.
Perhaps as, or more, serious to both men was the continuing bad behaviour, always discussed in oblique terms, of the young earl of Essex. He was not obedient to the king’s wishes in Parliament where Portland had tried to guide him, even holding Essex’s proxy for two days between 21 and 23 Jan. 1695. On 2 May Portland complained to Capell that ‘there are so many occurrences where in the Parliament he distinguished himself against the wishes of all those who are for the present government’. In particular Portland lamented Essex’s vote against the Act of Grace which the king sent to Parliament on 29 Apr. 1695 and which was clearly seen by all to benefit the king’s principal adviser (after Portland), Sunderland. But Essex voted against the measure, one of the few to do so, as he continued to blame Sunderland for his father’s death in the Tower in 1683 which he regarded as murder. This, as Portland recounted, ‘seems extraordinary in someone who is a member of the royal household; everybody was surprised by it … I told him that I was very surprised by that, and particularly because my Lady Essex, his mother, and you wish to live in great friendship with him [Sunderland]’. He also stressed the potential risk to Essex if this behaviour was noted by Sunderland or, more dangerously, the king himself.
Portland had long been resented for his influence with the king and the great wealth he was able to enjoy from that position, thought by many to have been gained by corruption and the sale of offices. He thus came to the attention of the House most noticeably towards the end of the session, during the hearings on bribery and corruption in the East India Company. On 27 Apr. 1695 both Sir Basil Firebrace‡ and a Mr. Tyssen testified before the House that Sir Josiah Child‡ and Sir Thomas Cooke‡ had drawn up a note for £50,000 which was to be presented to the king if he would pass a bill advantageous to the old company, but that Portland, as the king’s intermediary, refused to accept this ‘gift’ or bribe, saying that ‘the king would not meddle with it’. Tyssen further denied accusations that he had made a similar offer to Portland himself, saying that ‘If he had [done so], he must never have seen his face more’. Portland at first looked on bemusedly at the corruption proceedings being played out in Parliament, comparing the hearings to ‘a party, who having got drunk together, quarrel, and separate with bloody noses’.
You will learn from other quarters that we are in expectation of great disclosures in our Parliament. I believe that they may very well reach some who will find it difficult to clear themselves; all that I fear is that it may delay the departure of the King for some days, otherwise I should be very glad that they should investigate this affair to the very bottom, particularly as there are malicious people who, judging me by themselves, think that it is impossible that I could be proof against £50,000, and have taken the liberty to make use of my name to hide their own knavery. It is annoying to be exposed to such an accusation here, where corruption is too general.
Ibid. 80-81.
However, any lessening of the resentment felt against him and his wealth because of his exoneration from the bribery allegations would have been undone shortly after. On 7 May William issued a warrant granting Portland extensive lands in Wales, the manors of Denbigh, Bromfield, Yale and Swaden, some of which were part of the hereditary estate of the Prince of Wales.
Portland and the king then left England for that summer’s campaign, but almost immediately upon his arrival Portland was greeted with a letter of 17 May from Sunderland’s associate Henry Guy recounting the strenuous opposition the grant was already facing in the treasury. Charles Montagu, later earl of Halifax, had purposely absented himself from the proceedings on the grant, Sir Stephen Fox‡ had already brought in a petition against it and Guy advised him ‘it will be best that the king do send for the report and afterwards declare to them, that he will have it done, for if it be delayed till you come back, I fear the opposition will get such strength, that it will hazard the passing it at all’.
The Parliament of 1695
Portland was closely involved in the allies’ triumphant retaking of the fortress of Namur in September and personally took custody of the French Maréchal Boufflers, arrested, despite the terms of the surrender, because Louis XIV had broken the terms of a previous agreement and had taken the garrisons of Deinze and Dixmuide. Portland maintained his usual attendance rate of around two-thirds of the sittings in the first session of the 1695 Parliament and held the proxy of the earl of Scarbrough from 10 to 13 Jan. 1696. As usual he was seldom named in the Journal in connection with the business of the House, but he was at the heart of one of the first altercations between the country Whigs led by the new Speaker Paul Foley and his associate Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford, and the court. As Godolphin had predicted many of the new members, particularly from Wales, came up to Parliament ‘full of animosity and anger’ against the proposed grant. On 17 Jan. 1696 the Commons agreed to an address to the king urging him to stop it from passing the great seal, because ‘such a grant is in diminution of the honour and interest of the crown, by placing in a subject such large and extensive royalties, powers, and jurisdictions, which ought only to be in the crown’.
Gentlemen, I have kindness for my Lord Portland, which he has deserved of me by long and faithful services. But I should not have given him these lands, if I had imagined the House of Commons could have been concerned. I will therefore recall the grant, and find some other way of showing my favour to him.
CJ, xi. 409; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv, 8-9.
William was good to his word for on 21 May 1696 he granted to Portland less noticeable and controversial lands and estates scattered throughout England – in Lincolnshire, Cumberland, Chester, Norfolk, Yorkshire, Sussex – which had been Catherine the queen dowager’s jointure lands and together were worth £4,332 p.a. By the time of Portland’s death in 1709 their value had risen to £86,643 p.a.
It was to Portland that the Jacobite conspirators Fisher and Pendergrass went in February 1696 to inform him and the government of the plans to assassinate the king at Turnham Green and a projected French invasion. Despite the king’s initial scepticism, Portland was able to convince him to stay away from danger and to round up the leading conspirators, including Peter Cook and Sir John Fenwick‡. Over the following weeks he was kept informed of their interrogations by James Vernon‡.
Portland joined William III on the continental campaign again in the summer of 1696 but was sent back to England in late July for the onerous task of raising £300,000 to enable William to continue the war, as funds were rapidly dwindling during England’s liquidity crisis. Portland arrived on 26 July and immediately sent an express to Sunderland and the lords justices to convene at Whitehall with him on the crisis; Somers’s hasty departure from a church service caused much comment and alarm about the nature of the crisis.
One result of this mission was Portland’s closer relationship with Shrewsbury, whom he praised to the king for his valuable assistance in this matter.
Ever since I had the honour to know you, I have perceived a coldness and reserve towards me, which I wished not to deserve; but rather than attribute it to you, I have concluded that I was myself the cause of it, being sufficiently just to myself, to know part of my failings. But as we cannot control those which arise from nature, and which are born with us, I have deemed the evil incurable, and have merely paid to the minister and secretary of state, the respect which was due to him, without troubling myself farther. But as it is the will of fortune, that you should personally testify to me your approbation of my conduct, and express your satisfaction with it, I assure you, sir, that I shall return the same cordiality, and that this cold and reserved disposition, which I frankly avow, shall wholly vanish after the candour which you have had the goodness to promise me. I will request some indulgence in regard to my judgment, but none respecting my integrity; and I shall not solicit your friendship, until I shall have taken the first step to render myself worthy of it.
Ibid. 141.
This letter was almost certainly written after Portland, having returned to the king’s side in Flanders, was made aware of the allegations of Jacobite conspiracy made by Sir John Fenwick against Shrewsbury, Godolphin, Marlborough and Russell. The accusations which had been sent to William for his eyes only by the lord steward, Devonshire, who had received Fenwick’s written ‘confession’ in confidence on 10 August. These allegations were not new to William III, who had long known of his ministers’ shadowy negotiations with St Germain and decided to overlook them. To reassure the anxious Shrewsbury in particular he sent him a copy of the allegations with a covering letter affirming his continued support. Portland too on 1 Sept. quickly wrote to Shrewsbury to reassure him that ‘the little appearance of sincerity in that man is sufficiently manifest in his accusing persons, on whom the king has so much reason to repose confidence’.
Sir John Fenwick’s story is as wonderful to me, as if he had accused me of coining. However I shall always acknowledge the king’s great goodness and generosity in the manner he has received the information, and your lordship’s friendship, in not permitting so foul a thought of your humble servant to receive credit one moment in your breast.
Correspondentie, I. ii. 68-69 (no. 73).
Portland instead turned his ire towards Devonshire whom he thought had been too lenient and too apt to give credit to Fenwick. He felt that if it ‘had been possible to prevent access to him [Fenwick], he would have spoken quite another language’ and if Fenwick ‘had not unfortunately addressed himself to Lord Devonshire, and if from the beginning he had been spoken to as he ought to have been, I think he would not have had either leisure or inclination to invent the tales which he has told’. Throughout September it was Portland who managed the Fenwick affair from the king’s side and it was to him that Shrewsbury addressed his letters detailing the prisoner’s repeated promises of further allegations and the insistence of his wife that her husband be heard by Devonshire alone. To Portland, all this smacked of a deliberate attempt by Fenwick to delay his trial by making unfounded accusations, and always promising more. ‘I hope that no more delay will be allowed him, and that he will be tried before the arrival of the king’, Portland commented on 24 Sept. – at the same time that Fenwick had procured another postponement of his trial with a confession targeting better-known Jacobites.
After Portland’s return with the king in early October 1696 he was immediately thrown into discussions with the ministers and the Junto on how best to deal with Fenwick’s claims.
On 10 Feb. 1697 Portland’s rival Arnold Joos van Keppel, was raised to the peerage as earl of Albemarle. This marked the pinnacle of the rapid rise in favour of this young, handsome and sociable Dutchman at William’s court. Particularly after the death of the queen, William turned increasingly to the pleasant, diverting company of Keppel for solace – which inevitably gave rise to allegations of more illicit activities between them among William’s enemies. William’s grant to Portland of the Welsh estates in May 1695 had most likely been an attempt to assuage Portland’s growing jealousy of this rival at court. In May 1695 Albemarle was promoted to the mastership of the robes, replacing another of William’s childhood companions and veteran Dutch followers, William Henry van Nassau van Zuylestein, who in compensation for his removal was himself created earl of Rochford.
Keppel’s elevation to an earldom was too much for Portland, and in March 1697 he asked to resign from William’s service. The king implored him to desist from ‘the cruel resolution they have told me that you have asked to leave my service’ and, invoking ‘the good and faithful services you have done for me during the thirty-three years you have been with me’, insisted that if Portland really was intent on this resolution he should serve him for at least another year, to which Portland apparently agreed.
Despite this wealth of honours, Portland was still disgruntled with the king’s favour towards Albemarle. As he made clear to the king in a letter of 30 May from his sickbed in Brussels, it was not for his own sake and feelings of jealousy that he wished to leave William’s service but:
it is your honour which is close to my heart, and the favour which your majesty shows to a young man and the manner by which it appears to justify his liberties and his pride, makes the world say things which it shames me to hear …. I believed that it was only the malicious in England who fabricated these bloody [sanglantes] things but I have been struck as if by thunder when I saw that The Hague and the Army spread [fournissoit] the same stories and tarnished a reputation which has never been subject to such attacks.
Correspondentie, I. i. 198-9 (no. 170).
Similar rumours and allegations of homosexuality had long been levelled by the regime’s enemies against the king and Portland. That Portland was so shocked by them and so concerned for the king’s reputation, and that the king in his angry answer to Portland’s letter could also expressed outrage at such allegations of ‘criminal’ acts, suggests that there is little foundation to the claims by the regime’s enemies – or by later historians.
Portland agreed to serve William for another year, as the king had asked him to do in March.
Portland was widely praised internationally, and especially by his colleagues in England, for being ‘so successful an instrument in the effecting’ the peace of Ryswick.
In Paris Portland became a respected and admired figure. Luttrell reported shortly before Portland’s public entry in Paris on 20 Feb. 1698 that ‘most of the French nobility have been to compliment the earl of Portland’ and that ‘no ambassador before ever received so much civility from the French court as his lordship’.
After Parliament’s dissolution on 7 July 1698 Portland returned with William to the United Provinces. He was asked by the king to continue negotiations which he had informally commenced during his formal embassy in Paris, and which the French ambassador Tallard had continued with William when he arrived in England in March, to ensure a peaceable partition of the Spanish Empire after the apparently imminent death of Carlos II of Spain. Not sure of his position in these negotiations, Portland at The Hague in August wrote to the new secretary of state James Vernon asking whether he and their other Whig colleagues in England – such as Somers, Shrewsbury, Montagu and the earl of Orford (as Edward Russell had become) – approved of his taking over this role. More importantly, and controversially, he and the king requested that Somers, as lord chancellor, send over a commission to appoint negotiators, complete with the great seal but with the names blank to be filled in later by the king. In addition, all these proceedings were to be kept absolutely secret and only known to Vernon, Somers, Shrewsbury and that small circle; not even the other lord justices were to know the details. Portland’s name was inserted in the blank commission as chief plenipotentiary for these negotiations. The terms of the Partition Treaty were communicated in August from Portland, via Vernon, to Somers, Montagu, Orford and Shrewsbury who, despite raising some concerns on the terms, signified their acceptance of the treaty as a fait accompli.
The Parliament of 1698
He was back in England in time for the first day, 6 Dec. 1698, of the new Parliament but came to just less than half of the sittings and left the House early on 12 Apr. 1699. Despite the worsening international situation, Parliament was intent on disbanding most of the Army; prominent among their targets were William’s own Dutch Guards. Portland’s regiment of Horse Guards left England for the last time in March 1699.
At the same time Portland’s resignation can be seen as just one in a series of resignations that led to the weakening and ultimate demise of the Junto Whig ministry established by Portland and Sunderland in 1693-4. Sunderland had resigned as lord chamberlain in December 1697 and his client Trumbull as secretary of state that same month. The other secretary of state, Shrewsbury, was finally able to leave his office officially in December 1698. Albemarle’s client Jersey, a Tory, replaced him in April 1699. In this changing balance of power, Portland’s resignation of his offices was followed that same year by resignations by Montagu from both the exchequer and the treasury and Orford from the admiralty. Out of office Portland retired to the warden’s lodge of Windsor Great Park, and continued to live as a country gentleman. He maintained his position as ranger there and had also been made ranger of Windsor Little Park in January 1699
Portland, however, did not ‘exit’ from the scene, nor was Albemarle fully triumphant in ousting his rival from public life. William still consulted with his old adviser; they remained close and more importantly, Portland, having removed himself from the English court, and from Albemarle’s hated presence, remained active in less publicly visible roles for his old master. As L’Hermitage wrote to his masters at the States-General, ‘This earl says that the plan he has formed to rid himself of his charges does not hinder him, should the king have need of his services, to busy himself with the same zeal and attachment he has always had’.
Portland was also personally affected by the Irish Grants Resumption bill which caused so much anger between the Houses, and between Parliament and the king, in April 1700. Portland, having learned his lesson with the Welsh land grants in 1695-6, had taken steps to ensure that Clancarty’s forfeited estates, awarded to him by the king in 1697, would be formally granted to the less visible target of his son, Woodstock. He also tried to defuse local opposition by arranging that a parliamentary bill confirming the grant of the estate to Woodstock was passed by the Irish Parliament in its session of autumn 1698.
it seems some of our own people had a mind to have a fling at the foreigners, so they carried it by eleven for proceeding. Then my Lord Hartington grounding his own motion upon the forwardness the foreigners had shown to embroil them with the Lords, proposed an address for removing them his majesty’s councils. It was afterwards added, that they should be removed from the councils, both in England and in Ireland, which was done to comprehend my Lord Galway [Henri Massue de Ruvigny, earl of Galway [I]]. In the English council, your grace knows that there is only the duke of Schomberg [Meinhard Schomberg, 3rd duke of Schomberg], and the earl of Portland. Though this last never comes thither, yet it was done for his sake. The vote passed, he having been very busy in stirring up the Lords to reject the bill, and persisted in it to the last …
The king had made preparations to come to assent to the land tax and Irish resumption bill that day, 10 Apr. but arrived after the House had risen. ‘If he had come as soon as that bill was passed, it would have prevented the address about my Lord Portland and Lord Galway, which you may be sure he dislikes’, Vernon continued to Shrewsbury. Instead he came early on 11 Apr. to prorogue Parliament and to prevent ‘any more angry votes in the House of Commons’. Significantly, he could not bring himself to give any thanks to the Commons ‘for a bill he had such exceptions to’.
Shortly after the end of the parliamentary session, and perhaps as a further signal of his entry into private life, Portland remarried, after over 11 years of life as an, admittedly very busy, widower. There had long been speculation of Portland’s remarrying. In 1692 there had been talk of a match between him and Lady Arabella Cavendish, a daughter of Henry Cavendish, 2nd duke of Newcastle, who later went on to marry Sunderland’s heir Charles Spencer, then styled Lord Spencer (later 3rd earl of Sunderland).
International affairs were greatly complicated that summer by the death, on 21 Oct., of the Spanish king Carlos II who had bequeathed the entirety of the Spanish Empire to Louis XIV’s grandson the duke of Anjou contrary to the terms of the (second) Partition Treaty. In this dangerous international situation, with war with France seeming inevitable, William returned to England late in the autumn, brought more Tories, particularly Rochester and Godolphin, into the ministry and on 19 Dec. 1700 dissolved his unmanageable Parliament.
The Parliaments of 1701
Portland came to three-quarters of the meetings of the new Parliament, which first met on 6 Feb. 1701, far more than usual as the fate of his Irish lands was again in the balance. In mid-March he became the central figure in the controversial proceedings surrounding the Tory-dominated Commons’ investigation into the Partition Treaties. The second Partition Treaty had been made public in July 1700, after the end of the previous parliamentary session, and had almost immediately caused consternation, because of its terms, the secrecy in which negotiations for it had been conducted and the lack of consultation with members of the English political nation. On 14 Mar. 1701 when the House took into consideration the second Partition Treaty, Nottingham and Normanby condemned both the terms of the treaty and the manner in which it had been negotiated, signed and ratified. Nottingham reported ‘the matters of fact’ concerning the treaty on 15 Mar. when many of the peers ‘loudly expressed their disapprobation’ of the treaty, ‘which they wholly laid at the earl of Portland’s door’. Portland in turn had been given license by the king to provide details on the negotiation and was at pains to point out that he had convened a meeting of a number of leading English ministers – Somers, Jersey, Lonsdale, Marlborough, Baron Halifax (as Charles Montagu had recently become), Thomas Herbert, 8th earl of Pembroke and James Vernon – at his house in February 1700 to consider the terms of the treaty. On 17 Mar., the peers named by Portland (except for Lonsdale, since deceased) all confirmed before the House that they had been at this meeting and had seen a draft of the treaty. But they insisted that it was Portland alone who had drawn it up in French, that they had raised several objections to its terms, which were subsequently ignored by Portland who presented the treaty as a fait accompli, and that ‘as for themselves, that they had neither given, nor refused, their consent to it, because the treaty was never communicated to the Privy Council’.
The Lords’ address was presented to the king on 24 Mar. 1701 on which day the Commons drafted their own address condemning the second Partition Treaty. On 29 Mar., when the Commons took up the matter of the second Partition Treaty again, John Leveson Gower, later Baron Gower, argued that the treaty was very prejudicial to trade and commerce ‘and that the making of it was a great crime and misdemeanour’. Leveson Gower ‘named the Lord Portland to be the maker of it’, and the question was put that Portland ‘by negotiating and concluding the Treaty of Partition, which was destructive to the trade of this kingdom, and dangerous to the peace of Europe, is guilty of a high crime and misdemeanour’. After Sir Bartholomew Shower‡ had unsuccessfully tried to include the English lords consulted by Portland, probably aiming at Somers in particular, the motion against Portland was passed, ‘nobody speaking one word for him’. This prompted John (‘Jack’) Howe‡, a frequent critic of Portland and the lavish grants bestowed on him, to enter into a philosophical disquisition on the transience of fortune, remarking how:
he could not but reflect upon the instability of human affairs that that great lord that so lately had so many obeisances from the gentlemen of this House, so many respects paid him that even gentlemen of good quality thought it a high honour to drink chocolate with his footmen, and that now this great man had not one friend to speak for him.
Cocks Diary, 77.
At the end of that day’s session the Commons went into a committee of the whole to consider the treaty further, during which Sir Bartholomew Shower‡ continued to insist that ‘if this was such a wicked treaty there must be more than this Lord, this stranger, concerned in it, and that the putting the great seal was an illegal and dangerous thing to our constitution and so he moved after his usual harangue to put the same question upon John, Lord Somers’. The Tories were so enraged against Somers that they almost wished to exonerate Portland in attacking the lord chancellor, arguing that
the Lord Portland was a poor stranger ignorant of our laws and customs a friend to his own native country, to be rather pitied and excused than punished, that my lord chancellor was an Englishman knowing in our laws and customs, that they were sorry that he had committed so great [a] crime but that it must be for the precedent’s sake censured.
Despite these urgings the question for a motion censuring Somers failed and Portland remained – at that time – the sole target of the Commons’ anger.
Thus on 1 Apr. 1701 Leveson Gower* came to the bar of the House to impeach Portland for high treason and misdemeanours, with the assurance ‘that the Commons will in due time exhibit particular articles against him’.
told Lord Jersey he knew I lived in great intimacy with Lord Berkley of Stratton, who had married Lady Portland’s sister [William Berkeley, 4th Baron Berkeley of Stratton, married to Lady Frances Temple]; therefore desired I would aggravate Lord Portland’s treatment to him, and try if he could prevail with him to take his revenge (which he had it very much in his power to do), and I was authorized to assure him the king would be pleased with his so doing. Lord Portland seemed willing, but was afraid of the Whigs, who he thought would ruin him, and did not think the Tories were either able or willing to protect him: which put an end to that negotiation.
Burnet, iv. 488.
Portland only further complicated matters and implicated some of the previous ministers who had so far escaped by inadvertently revealing the secret negotiations for the first Partition Treaty in 1698. On 3 Apr. 1701 Portland read from a paper he had prepared setting out what he had said before the select committee on his role in the negotiations. Portland thus told the House his memory of the events surrounding his involvement in the Partition Treaty negotiations:
At the beginning of the summer of the year [16]99, when I was in Holland at my country-house, and when the King would have me be concerned in the negotiating of this Treaty with the Emperor, the French King, and The States; being very unwilling to meddle with business again, from which I was retired; before I would engage myself, I advised with my friends in Holland, and writ into England, to Mr. Secretary Vernon as my particular Friend, whether it was advisable for me to engage in any business again; to which Mr. Vernon answered in Substance, “That this would not engage me but for a little while; that I being upon the place, and generally acquainted with the foreign ministers, it would be easier for the King, and properer for me to be employed in it than any body else, that must be otherwise sent for on purpose”.
HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 222-3.
Somers was aware that he was potentially implicated in this testimony and received permission from the House to ask Portland directly whether his own name was mentioned in the letter he received in reply from Vernon. Portland declared ‘That, if he had remembered any such thing in the letter, and had not inserted it in the paper which he had delivered to the House, he should have thought he had deceived the House’.
Unfortunately for himself – and for Somers – Portland had ‘deceived’ the House, although unwittingly, in that in his paper submitted to the House he was actually remembering the correspondence with Vernon of August-September 1698 at the time of the first Partition Treaty, not of 1699 as he stated. Secondly, Somers had actually appeared in almost all the letters between Portland and Vernon of that time, as he was a principal figure in this affair, entrusted with sending over the blank commission for appointing plenipotentiaries for the discussions and for commenting on the contents of the treaty in its final stages. Vernon, ordered by the Commons to deliver in the letters mentioned in Portland’s statement, was resistant and in ‘great confusion’ because, in order to match Portland’s account, he had to produce the correspondence of August 1698 on the hitherto secret first Partition Treaty. These letters were first laid before the Commons on 12 Apr., Portland’s letters in French were ordered to be translated and all of them read before the House on 14 April. The resulting anger was now fully turned on Somers for having signed, sealed and sent a blank commission for the negotiations, without having formally consulted either the lord justices of that summer or the Privy Council.
The impeachments of the Whig lords were brought up to the House the following day and quickly led to a rancorous breakdown in relations between the two Houses. The Commons had also addressed the king on 15 Apr. to remove the impeached lords from his counsels, but this was almost immediately countered the following day with an address from the Lords asking the king not to impose any censure or prohibition on the peers while their charges were still pending.
when my Lord Portland was first impeached it was because he did being a foreigner make treaties to the prejudice of England without consulting English council and so it did then appear. But looking further into matters upon these other impeachments it does appear he has acted nothing but by and with the direction and advice of English councils, so that it does appear that he is not so guilty as at the first we had reason to believe him.
Ibid. 163.
The ‘breach of that good correspondence between the two Houses’ warned of by the Commons only grew wider throughout late May and June. Members of the Commons stayed away from Westminster Hall when Somers was acquitted by a majority of his peers, including Portland, on 17 June 1701, to be followed six days later by a unanimous acquittal of Orford.
Parliament was prorogued that day in rancour and an atmosphere of intractable partisan division. Initially, the king hoped to stay the course and maintain the ministry and the Parliament. But under the advice of Sunderland and Somers, and in the light of James II’s death in September 1701 and Louis XIV’s unexpected recognition of the Pretender as king of England, he was persuaded once more to trust Whig support and to dissolve Parliament, as he did, much to the surprise of many of his cabinet, on 11 Nov. 1701. Following the elections of December 1701 the parties were more evenly balanced in the Commons and, given the growing threat of war, it was likely to be less hostile to William and his former ministry. Portland attended the first day of the Parliament, on the penultimate day of 1701 and went on to attend three-fifths of the session’s sittings. On 3 Dec. 1701, and then again in the first two days of January 1702, he was placed on committees to draft addresses to the king, the first to condemn Louis XIV’s recognition of the Pretender and the second to assure the king that the House would help him resist the ‘exorbitant power of France’. The final illness and death of William III on 8 Mar. 1702 marked a principal turning point in Portland’s career. Burnet wrote of final farewell between the two old friends and how the king on his deathbed ‘called for the earl of Portland, but before he came his voice quite failed, so he took him by the hand and carried it to his heart with great tenderness’.
The New Reign 1702-9
William’s death and the queen’s accession removed the personal link between Portland and the government. Anne had never liked Portland, associated as he was with William III, the Villiers family and with the disgrace of Marlborough in 1692 and took some delight in reducing his power and influence. He was quickly removed from his last remaining positions in England – privy councillor, superintendent of the royal gardens, and ranger of Windsor Park, the latter of which she gave to Sir Edward Seymour‡. Portland’s favourite residence of Cumberland Lodge went to her own favourite and groom of the stole, the countess of Marlborough.
Early in Anne’s reign Macky provided his contacts at the Hanoverian court with a character sketch of Portland now,
turned of fifty years old ... [and] supposed to be the richest subject in Europe, very profuse in gardening, birds and household furniture, but mighty frugal and parsimonious in everything else; of a very lofty mien, and yet not proud; of no deep understanding, considering his experience; neither much beloved nor hated by any sort of people, English or Dutch.
Macky, 62.
The Tory Jonathan Swift later annotated his copy of Macky’s character with the judgment that Portland was ‘as great a dunce as ever I knew’, and even Sunderland, who had relied so much on Portland’s patronage, was said to have ‘had a very mean opinion of the earl of Portland; and said upon Keppel’s being sent to him by the king upon some business, “This young man brings and carries a message well; but Portland is so dull an animal, that he can neither fetch nor carry”’.
Portland during Anne’s reign remained an important figure in both England and the United Provinces, acting as an informal intermediary between the States General and the English government during the renewed war. In just about every year from 1702 he stayed at his Dutch estate of Sorgvliet during the summer months. Narcissus Luttrell’s‡ many notes of his departures and arrivals from the continent suggest that he was also involved in diplomacy and furthering the war effort while abroad. In October 1702 he returned bringing ‘the good news of the surrender of Ruremond’. In July 1703 he accompanied Algernon Seymour†, styled earl of Hertford, later 7th duke of Somerset, to Hanover, and returned with Marlborough with news of the arrival of the archduke Charles. In July 1704 he went to confer with the States General about Portugal and the Camisard revolt.
Portland came to 55 per cent of the sittings of the first session of Anne’s Parliament in 1702-3, similar to his attendances on the House in the mid-1690s. But now no longer a minister or seen as the ‘favourite’ of the monarch, he was treated much more as an ordinary working peer. Whereas during William’s reign he was almost never appointed to select committees, perhaps because of his ‘alien’ Dutchness and his perceived role as an agent in the House for the king, he was now, like most other peers in the House, appointed to just about every select committee – especially the very large ones dealing with private legislation or committees of inquiry and inspection. Portland reached his highest attendances in the House in the following two sessions – 83 per cent (his highest rate of attendance ever) in 1703-4 and 76 per cent in 1704-5. His support for the war against France was again assumed when he was placed on a slightly smaller drafting committee, of only 27 members, assigned on 24 Oct. 1704 to compose an address on the first day of the 1704-5 session congratulating the queen on the recent military successes and particularly Marlborough on the victory at Blenheim. Likewise, in 1705-6 he attended over three-fifths of the sittings and was named to almost every select committee established.
Portland protested to the dowager electress of Hanover in 1706 that ‘I do not ever want to be Whig or Tory’ but insisted that circumstances, and particularly the war effort and the maintenance of the Protestant Succession impelled him to side with the Junto Whigs, among whom he counted many old friends and frequent correspondents.
Yet he was not in the House for most of the proceedings on the Union he advocated. From 1706 he increasingly devoted more time to his new life as a country gentleman, with a growing brood of children from his second marriage. After the first session of the 1705 Parliament his attendance on Parliament dropped sharply. He only attended a further 32 sittings between 13 Feb. 1707 and his last appearance in the House on 5 Apr. 1709. Shortly after that appearance he set off for Holland in the company of Marlborough and Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, most likely to act as an unofficial presence at the negotiations for the Barrier Treaty.
He was back in the autumn at his house at Bulstrode in Buckinghamshire, where it was reported on 19 Nov. 1709 that he ‘lies dangerously ill of a pleurisy’.