Willem van Nassau van Zuylestein was the son of Frederik, lord of Zuylestein and Leersum, an illegitimate child of Frederik Hendrik, prince of Orange, and thus the uncle of William of Orange, later William III of England. Frederik’s wife was Mary Killigrew, a maid of honour to Mary Stuart, and the princess of Orange chose him to act as guardian and tutor to the young and fatherless prince of Orange from 1659. Frederik’s son Willem was only one year older than his cousin the prince and quickly became one of his close hunting and military companions. He apparently had a propensity for idleness, at least according to one hostile observer: ‘Nobody could have shone better than him’, a fellow courtier wrote in his memoirs, ‘if only he had wished to make the effort.’ He was good-looking, witty, gallant and had ‘the air of a man of quality’, but, this commentator continues, ‘an enemy of work and discipline’.
William entrusted him with an embassy to England in 1687, whose covert purpose was to gauge the extent of the opposition to James II. In June 1688 he led another embassy to congratulate James II on the birth of his son, but on the side he was reforging his links with the English opposition, thrown in turmoil by the birth of this prince, and probably had a hand in encouraging the ‘Immortal Seven’ to address their invitation to William of Orange.
Nassau van Zuylestein, usually referred to merely as Zuylestein, was part of William’s new ‘Dutch’ regime in England and was one of the king’s favourites after the Revolution. But he and some of William’s other close Dutch companions, such as Hendrik van Nassau-Ouwerkerk, made it clear to William’s secretary, Constantijn Huygens the younger, that they did not wish to become involved in English politics, knowing that ‘in England the manner was that the favourites and counsellors were accused and punished when the kings had done some wrong’. Nor did he wish – at that point at least – to be made a peer of the realm by the king, for then he would have to serve in Parliament.
Eventually Zuylestein’s resistance to a title seems to have relented and on 10 May 1695 he was created Baron Enfield (after the birthplace of his wife), Viscount Tunbridge and earl of Rochford. He was the second of William’s original Dutch followers, after Portland, to receive an English peerage. At the same time his duties as master of the robes were conveyed to William III’s new favourite, Arnold Joost van Keppel, earl of Albemarle, in 1697. Indeed, Rochford’s creation may have been in part a way of ‘kicking him upstairs’ in order to bestow the court position close to the person of the king on Keppel, who was climbing rapidly in the king’s favour and was already a fierce rival of Portland. In June 1695 William also promoted Rochford to be a lieutenant-general in the Allied army. Finally, in December Rochford was provided with an annual pension of £1,000, out of the receipts of the post office, to better support his new English dignity.
Rochford did not take his seat in the House until 20 Feb. 1696, well into the 1695–6 session of the new Parliament, and in total he only attended 29 per cent of its sittings. On his first day he was introduced between Algernon Capell, 2nd earl of Essex, and Charles Mordaunt, earl of Monmouth (later 3rd earl of Peterborough). He next sat on 24 Feb., when William III addressed both Houses with information about the assassination plot against him. Perhaps Rochford, in the inner circles of William’s court, knew the details in advance and decided to start attending the House at this period of crisis for the regime. Certainly he was quick to sign the Association when it was ready for subscription on 27 February. He may also have made a special effort to be in the House to see through a bill for the English naturalization of his seven eldest children, who were all under 16 years old at the time.
His attendance was better in the following session of 1696–7, at 54 per cent, the highest rate of attendance of his parliamentary career, and he was named to 12 committees. He was absent in the middle of December during the hearings on the attainder bill against Sir John Fenwick‡, and at the calls of the House on 15 and 16 Dec. his absence was excused because he was ‘indisposed’. He thus missed the vote on the second reading of the bill but, a loyal supporter of the king and his ministry, arrived back in the House on 22 Dec. to vote in favour of the attainder the following day. He was present at 39 per cent of the meetings of the 1697–8 session, when he was named to 11 committees, voted for the committal of the bill to punish Charles Duncombe‡ on 15 Mar. 1698 and protested when the bill was rejected. On 30 June Rochford left the House and registered his proxy in favour of Richard Lumley, earl of Scarbrough, for the remaining five days of the session and of that Parliament.
Rochford was principally occupied in this session with a controversial matter involving his estate and his position in England. At the time of creating him earl in May 1695, the king had taken steps to grant to both Rochford and Portland the forfeited estate of the outlawed Jacobite exile William Herbert, marquess of Powis. The estate was estimated to be worth £10,000 p.a., with property principally in Middlesex, Northamptonshire and Montgomeryshire.
In April 1697, as he was about to embark for Flanders for another summer’s campaigning, Rochford formally invoked his privilege of peerage to forestall a number of actions of ejectment that were then in the law courts against his tenants on the former Herbert lands. On 17 Mar. 1698 he submitted to the House a petition against the contravention of his privilege which had occurred in the preceding year and which had resulted in the ejection of some of his tenants and loss of much of these properties. Counsel for both sides were heard, and debate on the petition held, during the last week of March. Rochford found himself opposed by the trustees of the late marquess of Powis, the prominent English peers Thomas Herbert, 8th earl of Pembroke, and Henry Somerset, duke of Beaufort. Perhaps seeing that the House’s mood was against him, Rochford agreed on 31 Mar. 1698 to waive his privilege and withdraw his petition so that the legal hearings could proceed.
Rochford maintained a low attendance of only 19 per cent (17 sittings in all) in the 1698–9 session, and he was named to no committees. He may have been discouraged by his troubles with Montgomery, as well as by the attacks in Parliament on the army, and especially on the Dutch troops, of which he was such a prominent representative. He came to 40 per cent of the meetings of the session of 1699–1700, when again he was not named to a single committee, but did on 23 Feb. 1700 sign the protest against the passage of the bill to continue the old East India Company as a corporation. He clearly had a personal stake in the bill for the resumption of William’s grants of forfeited Irish lands, but he did not sign the protest of 10 Apr. 1700 against the House’s decision not to insist on their own wrecking amendment to the bill, probably because by that time William III had ordered his followers to desist from opposing the bill so that he could receive badly needed supply. Interestingly, contemporaries writing about the tumult surrounding this measure did not generally make a point of commenting on Rochford’s large holdings of forfeited Irish lands, while they took delight in noting the discomfiture that the measure caused to other favoured grantees such as Portland, Albemarle and Edward Villiers, earl of Jersey.
In the wake of the humiliation caused by this bill, William dissolved the uncooperative Parliament, dismissed many of his Junto ministers and set about forming a new mixed ministry. Rochford attended just less than a third of the meetings of this Parliament of 1701, where he was nominated to four committees. He was involved in the impeachment proceedings of the former Junto ministers and on 15 May helped the new ministry successfully carry two divisions aimed to shut down discussion of motions critical of the king’s decision of the previous summer to follow the advice of his ministers and to prorogue and ultimately dissolve Parliament. The attack on the Junto ministers then facing impeachment was, according to one commentator, defeated ‘by the help of some unusual friends’, including Rochford, Albemarle and Jersey.
Badly afflicted by gout, Rochford was increasingly withdrawing from life at Westminster, or indeed even Kensington. At the turn of the century he bought from the Wingfield family an English residence, ‘the White House’, at Easton in Suffolk, and he also frequently travelled back to his Dutch properties at Zuylestein, near Utrecht.
With the death of William III and the accession of Anne, Rochford abandoned an England whose ruler he did not know and who showed no favour towards him. His absence was largely accepted as a given among the English political class. Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, continued to include him in his calculations of Whig strength in the divisions on the Occasional Conformity bill in 1703, but noted next to his name that it was ‘uncertain whether he will come over but if he does certainly good [for the Whigs]’. An English commentator still marked him as a Whig in his analysis of the partisan composition of the House preceding the first meeting of the first Parliament of Great Britain in 1708. But Rochford only attended one meeting of any of Anne’s Parliaments, during a brief visit that he made to England in January 1706 in the company of Sunderland, John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, and Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, in which they presented the captured standards of the French forces defeated during the previous summer’s campaign.
Rochford spent the years of Anne’s reign on his estates in Zuylestein, where he developed the house’s gardens and assiduously promoted the military careers of his first three sons with his colleagues Marlborough and James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond.