CECIL, James (1666-94)

As a member of one of the most politically significant families of the Tudor and early Stuart periods, James Cecil, 4th earl of Salisbury, had a prestigious name and title, as well as the grand residence of Hatfield House in Hertfordshire to add physical display to his prominence. Yet upon the death of his father James Cecil, 3rd earl of Salisbury, on 24 May 1683, the Cecil estate was in a perilous state, caused largely by the extravagant generosity of the late earl to his ten surviving children. In the last of many recensions of the will the 3rd earl provided for legacies of £10,000 to each of the five daughters, as well as annuities of £150 p.a. until the age of 18 or their marriages, and legacies of £6,500 to each of the four younger sons, as well as annuities of £300 p.a. to the three youngest. The cash legacies to the children and others amounted to £78,600, and the annuities totalled £2,600 p.a., while the earl left outstanding personal debts of £33,918. At his death it was estimated that the estate enjoyed a gross annual income of £12,200 p.a., while Salisbury’s personal estate was worth £11,093, which was hardly sufficient to cover the vast expenditures Salisbury had set out in his will. L. Stone, Family and Fortune, 155-6, 162; TNA, PROB 11/380; HHM, Estate pprs. Legal, 200/5.

The trustees appointed by the 3rd earl’s will, including John Tillotson, later archbishop of Canterbury, immediately sought a rich heiress for the new 17-year old earl, and quickly settled on the 13-year old Frances Bennet, one of two co-heiresses of Simon Bennet, a merchant of substantial City wealth. Frances was the heir to a landed estate worth £1,800 p.a. and a further £1,100 p.a. in reversion. Estate pprs. Legal 132/14. She could also bring with her a portion of £20,000 from her father’s personal estate. However, only half of that promised portion was to be disbursed if Frances married before the age of 16. Salisbury and his advisers could not wait and sought to effect the marriage immediately. They exacted an agreement out of John Bennet^‡ of Abingdon, the husband of the other remaining daughter and co-heiress, Grace Bennet, that he would not contest the full payment of the £20,000 portion despite the breach of the terms of the will. The marriage took place on 13 July 1683. Stone, 156-7; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 269.

It has been calculated that in the 1680s Salisbury’s wife’s income brought him more than £1,500 p.a. and the Cecil estate enjoyed a gross revenue of about £5,000 p.a. Stone, 157. This was still, however, a situation that called for economizing and austerity, but legal squabbles and Salisbury’s own character quickly got in the way of this project. Almost immediately after the death of the 3rd earl, his second son, Robert Cecil^‡, commenced suits in Chancery against his eldest brother concerning the terms of the will; suits which were to occupy Salisbury and the trustees and executors of the will in acrimonious litigation over the next several years. TNA, C10/147/23; Family pprs. Supplement 2, 314; Estate pprs. Legal 104/13; 141/9; Estate pprs. General 24/15, 27/2. In addition, John Bennet almost immediately went back on his promise to Salisbury’s guardians and used the courts in an attempt to reduce payment of the portion to £10,000. TNA, C6/250/80; C6/263/119; C6/275/25; C6/262/37; HMC Lords, iii. 271-3. Furthermore, shortly after his marriage Salisbury set out on his travels on the continent, as it had been arranged that his marriage with Frances Bennet would not be consummated until she was 16 years old. While abroad Salisbury made matters worse by lavishly gambling and spending his way across the continent. Family pprs. ix. 159; Estate pprs. General 74/5, 74/8, 92/46.

Worse was to follow and by late April 1686 the rumour was rife in England that the earl had converted to Catholicism. Verney ms mic. M636/40, J. to Sir R. Verney, C. Gardiner to Sir R. Verney, both 28 Apr. 1686. A lampoon Cecil the Wise, contrasted the 4th earl’s obesity, rumoured conversion to Catholicism and adventuring on the continent with the ‘wise’ statesmanship and protestantism of his illustrious forebears William Cecil^†, Baron Burghley, and Robert Cecil^†, earl of Salisbury. Family pprs. ix. 170. Communications between his estate managers confirm that the earl had definitely converted to the Church of Rome in May 1686. Throughout 1687 political commentators consistently reckoned Salisbury as a Roman Catholic politically sympathetic to James II and supportive of a repeal of the Test Acts. HHM, Cranborne accounts 1680-9, 1; EHR, lxix. 304; BIHR, xlii. 119. This dating from correspondence counters the common Whig version of events that has it that Salisbury converted out of political expediency only months before the invasion and revolution of November 1688. Diary of Abraham de la Pryme (Surtees Soc. liv), 94. Despite his portrayal as a cynical pragmatist and political dupe, Salisbury does appear to have harboured a genuine personal and ideological attachment to James II and Catholicism.

Salisbury returned to England some time in the last days of December 1687, upon which he promptly attended the king, by whom he was well received. Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 426; Family pprs. ix. 173; General 25/8, 25/10. Throughout 1688 Salisbury willingly participated in the king’s catholicizing policies. Locally, he began to build a Catholic chapel at Hatfield, heard a Jesuit preach at the Hertford assizes (while the Protestant divines took themselves off to the parish church) and was specifically named as that borough’s high steward (an office which he had held since coming to the title) when its new charter was granted in August. Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 433; HMC Le Fleming, 209; CSP Dom. 1687-9, p. 246; Family pprs. ix. 179; x. 114. By July 1688 he was touted for high office, when it was rumoured that either he or his fellow Catholic Robert Carey, 6th Baron Hunsdon, would be made lord chamberlain. Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 43, pp. 146-7. It was only on 27 Sept. that his brief military career began, when he was commissioned captain of a troop of horse. He spent some £1,000 to equip them at his own charge; they exercised before the king in October in red cloaks lined with orange. CSP Dom. 1687-9, p. 285; Estate pprs. Accounts 145/6, 145/12; HMC Le Fleming, 217. With the news of William of Orange’s landfall, he was promoted to be colonel of a troop of horse on 5 Nov. and appointed gentleman of the bedchamber at the very end of that month, as James’s regime slowly crumbled. CSP Dom. 1687-9, pp. 341, 367, 368. On 4 Dec., with the prince’s army approaching ever nearer to the capital, a royal pardon exempting Salisbury for all offences relating to his recusancy passed the Great Seal. CSP Dom. 1687-9, pp. 371, 374; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 482. Nevertheless, on 7 Dec., the Middlesex grand jury at Hicks Hall presented Salisbury, as well as Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, and Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, as guilty of high treason for converting to Rome. The jurors were faced with ‘such powerful mediations and persuasions’ that they agreed to let the presentment drop for the law term. Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 483; Add. 61486, f. 162; Family pprs. ix. 188; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 370, 372; Add. 18675, f. 48; Kingdom without a King, 30. Salisbury and Peterborough accompanied the queen and the prince of Wales on their escape from the capital to the Kentish coast on 10 December. The following day, after the departure of the king himself, the provisional government at the Guildhall ordered the sheriff of London to search the earl’s London house for arms. HMC Dartmouth, i. 228; Beinecke Lib. OSB mss, fb. 210, ff. 359-60; Kingdom without a King, 47, 70; CSP Dom. 1687-9, p. 378. Salisbury and Peterborough were detained in Kent on 11 Dec. and confined at Canterbury. On Christmas Eve 1688, the provisional government ordered their commitment to the Tower on charges of high treason. Kingdom without a King, 158, 162-3; HMC Lords, ii. 12; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 487; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, iv. 398; Estate pprs. Box T, 69. They had to be brought up from Kent first and were not incarcerated until the first days of 1689; Salisbury’s detention in the Tower was noted at a call of the House during the Convention on 25 Jan. 1689. Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 493; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, iv. 459-60, 465. Within weeks Salisbury was rumoured to have reconverted to Protestantism, ‘being regained per the great pains and piety’ of Tillotson, who had long been involved with the 4th earl as one of the trustees of his father’s will. This rumour was unfounded, for by February his reconversion to the national church was still a favourite project of many divines. HMC Portland, iii. 423; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, iv. 495; v. 15.

On 12 Mar. 1689 the new secretary of state Charles Talbot, 12th earl (later duke) of Shrewsbury, relented sufficiently to grant Salisbury the liberty of the Tower. CSP Dom. 1689-90, p. 20. Almost immediately afterwards an issue arose that would only have worsened his reputation and standing with the crown and Parliament. On 16 Mar. Elizabeth, countess of Burlington, wife of Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington, and the guardian, by the terms of the 3rd earl’s will, of Salisbury’s younger brothers William and Charles Cecil, presented a petition in the House against Salisbury for removing his brothers from Eton and sending them to France for a Catholic education. The House ordered that Salisbury be interviewed in the Tower. On 25 Mar. Heneage Finch, 3rd earl of Winchilsea, who had apprehended Salisbury in Kent and brought him back to the capital, reported that at the interview Salisbury claimed that his brothers had gone of their own volition to visit James II in France. A committee was quickly established to consider his answer and to take the testimony of others involved with the Cecil family, such as Tillotson and the estate steward, Ebeneezer Sadler. After these witnesses were sworn on 27 Mar., testimony was heard from the master of Eton, and on 3 Apr. the House decided that Salisbury had indeed taken his brothers away from that school without Lady Burlington’s consent and he was ordered to return them to her care before 15 May. HMC Lords, ii. 62-63. Passes were quickly drawn up for an agent of the earl to go to France to retrieve the boys, but he was taken ill at Dover and was unable to travel so on 11 May the House extended the deadline for the boys’ return to 1 June. CSP Dom. 1689-90, p. 58. The boys still had not been returned by 11 June, whereupon the House, in exasperation, ordered that a writ of de homine replegiando be brought against Salisbury for failing to obey the House’s orders. Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 546; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, v. 136.

Salisbury’s Catholicism was now a major factor in the ongoing dispute over the Cecil patrimony. On 17 Aug. 1689 a bill intending to attaint those Catholics and ‘disaffected to the government’ who refused to take the requisite oaths was brought up from the Commons, including a last-minute clause, added by the Commons at the third reading, ensuring that any of Salisbury’s estates forfeited were to go directly to the trustees of the 3rd earl for the payment of his debts and the legacies and annuities intended for the younger, Protestant, children. The bill was brought up just days before the adjournment of 20 Aug. and was eventually lost at the prorogation of 21 October. HMC Lords, ii. 267. Meanwhile, Salisbury remained in the Tower. On 26 Oct. 1689, Salisbury appeared at King’s Bench on a writ of habeas corpus but was refused bail. On that same day, 26 Oct. 1689, only four days into the following session of the Convention, Paul Foley^‡ came from the Commons to inform the House of the impeachment of both Salisbury and Peterborough on charges of high treason, ‘in departing from their alliance, and being reconciled to the Church of Rome’. Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 596; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, v. 217. Two days later, Salisbury was brought from the Tower and kneeling at the bar of the House, gave his terse answer to the charges against him: ‘I went abroad young, and was seven years out, and did not return a year before I was committed. As for my religion, when I come to defend it, I will defend myself as well as I can. I hope this honourable House doth not expect I should accuse myself’. This response, perceived as arrogant, did little to aid his cause, and he was immediately recommitted to the Tower, although he was granted liberty to walk abroad within the prison and to visit his ailing wife as he was conveyed to the Tower. CSP Dom. 1689-90, p. 308.

The articles of impeachment were never delivered and Salisbury had to spend the next several months in the Tower. On 10 Feb. 1690, with the Convention dissolved, he stood before the court of King’s Bench in a last-minute attempt to be bailed before the end of the law term but was instead recommitted by the court, with Peterborough, because of the pending articles of impeachment. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, v. 400, 401. Salisbury’s estate managers were glad to announce that he and the countess, then with him in the Tower, remained in good health and were ‘content’ but were dismayed at the effect of the earl’s behaviour on both the estate and his dependents. This ‘unhappy self-willed man has put fair to undo himself, his relations, friends’, leaving them all in a ‘ruinous’ condition. Estate pprs. General 131/21. As a result of the Act of General Pardon passed in the first session of William III’s 1690 Parliament, the prospects for Salisbury’s release from the Tower were more favourable. Certainly, Salisbury had sight of a letter of 26 May 1690 from the secretary of state Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, to the attorney general specifying that as Peterborough and Salisbury had not been excepted from the general pardon and that it was the king’s desire that they be released. Estate pprs. Box T, 92; CSP Dom. 1690-1, p. 18. Salisbury again appeared before King’s Bench on both 30 May and 20 June 1690, expecting to be discharged on the basis of the Act of General Pardon, but each time the court, despite the king’s apparent wishes, was unprepared to discharge him, ‘being an inferior court to that which impeached and committed him and that legally still sitting.’ While several other prisoners incarcerated for actions against William III were released under the Act of General Pardon in the late summer of 1690, Salisbury remained imprisoned, as he was ‘there upon other accounts’. It was clear that he would have to apply to Parliament itself for his release. Estate pprs. General 131/25, 16/8; Family pprs. x. 8-9; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 49; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, v. 450, 452, 501.

On the first day of the 1690-91 session, 2 Oct. 1690, Salisbury submitted a petition to the House for release on the grounds that he had been a prisoner for a year and nine months, despite and the Act of General Pardon, and that in addition the Convention which had originally impeached him had since been dissolved. On 6 Oct. the judges gave their opinion that both Salisbury and Peterborough fell under the terms of the Act and should be released. After ‘a long debate’ the House, nevertheless, resolved not to discharge either Salisbury or Peterborough, though only by a majority of eight (29 to 21). The lord president of the council, Thomas Osborne, marquess of Carmarthen (later duke of Leeds), intervened and was able to get the House to vote that the two peers could be bailed rather than set at liberty. On 7 Oct. 1690 Salisbury was brought before the House to be bailed. His first choice of a surety, Sir John Fenwick^‡, was rejected as he was himself under bail. Instead, Thomas Tufton, 6th earl of Thanet, and Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntington, came forward each standing surety for him to the amount of £5,000, while Salisbury himself put up a remaining £10,000. HMC Lords, iii. 91-92; Estate pprs. Box T, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91; Browning, Danby, i. 482; iii. 179-81; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 113.

This still left unresolved the central issue: whether impeachments remained in force from Parliament to Parliament. The House established a committee to inspect precedents in this matter on 6 Oct., as it was discussing the fate of the two Catholic earls. The report from the committee, with a long series of precedents, was heard on 30 Oct., after which the House resolved that Salisbury, Huntingdon and Thanet, should be discharged from their bail and recognizances and the earl released unconditionally. The vote prompted a protest from eight peers, who objected that the two peers were not discharged by the royal Act of General Pardon because their offence was under parliamentary jurisdiction, an impeachment submitted by the Commons (who had not been consulted in this decision to release them), and their impeachments had not been specifically pardoned in the Act. HMC Lords, iii. 96-103; Estate pprs. Box T, 90; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 123; Add. 70014, f. 350.

When Salisbury gained his release from the Tower, the dispute over his father’s will entered a new phase in his siblings’ attempt to obtain private legislation against their eldest brother and his management of the estate. On 22 Oct. 1690, the House heard the first reading of Robert Cecil’s bill which sought to prevent his brother Salisbury from cutting off the entail and disposing of the estate as he wished. In the preamble to the first draft of the bill, Cecil made clear the reasons he was submitting the bill and his concerns. He claimed that Salisbury:

still continuing a Papist and persisting in his zeal for that party, and having conceived a very great prejudice against and hatred unto your suppliant for no other reason in the world but your suppliant being a Protestant and zealous for their Majesties’ service and the present government, doth intend (as your suppliant is credibly informed and hath just reason to believe) to suffer several other common recoveries of all the residue of the said estate on purpose to bar your suppliant of the said remainder and with a design to settle the said estate upon some person of his own religion, or convey the same to the use and service of the Romish party, he, the said now earl, having seriously and publicly declared that he would leave your suppliant a poor earl and disinherit your suppliant of all he could. HMC Lords, iii. 141.

Counsel for both Cecil, who had the reversionary interest in the entailed estate, and Salisbury were heard on 27 Oct. and Salisbury, through his counsel, objected strongly to the legislation, particularly on the question of his popery and hatred and malice to his brother as stated in the preamble, which he challenged Cecil and his counsel to prove. Bodl. Carte 78, f. 690; Estate pprs. Legal 176/6. The bill was committed to a large committee of 65 members of the House and from 29 Oct. to 10 Nov. Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester, chaired nine intense meetings of the committee. The wording of the preamble caused concern and it was determined to postpone its consideration and leave it to the House to decide what to do with it. HMC Lords, iii. 142-4; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/4, pp. 436-49. Rochester reported the bill, with several amendments and provisos added by the committee, to the House on 10 Nov. and the House agreed to excise an offending part of the preamble. They still recommitted the bill and assigned the lord chief justice, Sir Henry Pollexfen^‡, to draw up a special clause for the bill to bind the tenant-in-life of the entailed estate to pay the legacies and annuities of the two youngest Cecil brothers (those spirited away by Salisbury to France and whom he had never summoned back despite all the orders of the House) who were now apparently ‘in rebellion’ and convinced Catholics. This, Robert Cecil’s counsel objected, seemed to go against the wishes of Parliament which was then considering measures to prevent Catholics from inheriting; in addition, the remaining Protestant brother did not seem to be provided for by the clause. The committee deferred a decision on this clause to the House and when it was reported the following day, 11 Nov., the House rejected it by a majority of seven. On 12 Nov. one last addition was made to the bill at the table and then it was read a third time and passed and sent down to Commons. HMC Lords, iii. 144-6; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/4, pp. 449-50. Throughout this procedure the Cecil estate managers commiserated over the miserable state of ‘our great family’ and the ‘great storms and animosities’ caused by the bill which, they believed, had now created an irreconcilable rift between the older brothers. Estate pprs. General 131/23. There was, indeed, continuing bad blood between the brothers. On 20 Nov., with his bill still under consideration in the Commons, Robert Cecil and his siblings petitioned the House to prevent Salisbury from insisting on his privilege in the ongoing chancery dispute, ‘he having once waived his privilege when it was for his advantage and now takes it up again when he perceives the causes are likely to go against him’. On 24 Nov., when the House was to hear counsel and witnesses on this matter, the Speaker Sir Robert Atkyns^‡ read a letter from Salisbury in which the earl insisted that he had previously waived his privilege in such causes, prompting the House to order that he should not insist upon his privilege in the future. HMC Lords, iii. 185-6; Estate pprs. Box T, 96. A few weeks later, on 17 Dec. 1690, the bill to limit the power of Salisbury to cut off the entail on his estates was returned from the Commons, with some amendments. Debate on these was postponed to the following day, when the House agreed to two of the new provisos but felt the need to amend the third and called for a conference with the lower House to present their own amendments. On 19 Dec. the Commons returned the bill with the message that they agreed to the amendments made by the House and the bill received the royal assent the following day. This was not the last time the family’s internal squabbles were dealt with in Parliament in that session. On 30 Dec. 1690 the committee of the whole House considering the bill of attainder for those ‘in rebellion’ against William and Mary, and the forfeiture of their estates, heard several petitions and provisos in mitigation of the bill’s harsh conditions, among them one to exempt the two youngest Cecil brothers, in case they received a royal pardon from the king and provided due evidence that they had received the sacrament in the Church of England. The proviso was debated again before the committee on 1 Jan. 1691 when it was accepted, but the bill in its entirety was lost at the prorogation four days later. HMC Lords, iii. 235-6.

By the following spring, Salisbury’s pessimistic estate managers concluded that Cranborne and the other estates put in trust to raise money to fulfil the 3rd earl’s legacies ‘will unavoidably go to pot’ and they saw ‘already the vultures and ravens falling on us after the slaughter of a battle’. One matter gave them a glimmer of hope, Lady Salisbury’s pregnancy: ‘the little great belly is thus far safe, about Easter we shall expect delivery’. Estate pprs. General 131/22, 23. It was actually not until June 1691 that Salisbury’s sole son and heir James Cecil, styled Viscount Cranborne from birth (later 5th earl of Salisbury) was born, which in one swoop undid the complicated and acrimonious legislative effort of Robert Cecil’s act. Family pprs. Supplement 3, 3. In March 1691 Salisbury’s hopes of preserving a Catholic dynasty among the Cecils was given a grievous blow when one of his younger brothers – the objects of so much parliamentary concern – was killed by the other one after a midnight argument. CSP Dom. 1690-91, p. 312; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 185. In July, when dining with Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, Salisbury argued with a fellow guest when discussing the hunting prowess of James II; he appears to have interpreted a comment on James II’s bad aim as having a wider political meaning. Both men were ‘confined’ by their friends to their houses to prevent a duel. Family pprs. x. 71; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 259; HMC 7th Rep. 200.

Although he was not eligible to sit in the House, Salisbury was still a frequent point of conversation in the session of 1691-2, just as he had been in the previous one. On 2 Nov. 1691, John Bennet and his wife Grace appealed to the House against a chancery decree of 1 May 1691 in favour of Salisbury and his countess in the matter of the contested marriage portion. Salisbury was given until 13 Nov. to submit his answer and, after hearing counsel for both sides, on 20 Nov. the House dismissed Bennet’s petition. HMC Lords, iii. 271-3; Estate pprs. General 131/26. On 9 Dec. 1691 Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth, reported from the committee for petitions that a proposed bill ‘for the better securing the portions, debts, and legacies given and owing by James, late earl of Salisbury’ was fit to be received by the House. It received its first reading the following day and on 11 Dec. was committed to a committee of 37 members. After committee meetings on 16 and 18 Dec. its chairman, Rochester again, reported the bill on 21 Dec. with several amendments, which were quickly approved by the House. The engrossed bill was passed on 31 Dec. and sent to the Commons in time for the new year. It was returned from the Commons on 25 Jan. 1692 with one further amendment, to which the House agreed and the bill received the royal assent on 24 Feb. 1692. HMC Lords, iii. 438.

Suspicions of Jacobite activity continued to surround Salisbury in these fraught years. In the winter of 1691-2 he was mentioned in the testimony of William Fuller, as a correspondent with the exiled court at St Germain. HMC Hastings, ii. 221-2; Bodl. Carte 130, ff. 337-8. He was also presented in early 1692 for recusancy at the Hertfordshire assizes. Estate pprs. Box T, 98. When a more serious and real Jacobite threat than that envisaged by Fuller was afoot with the possibility of a French ‘descent’ in the summer of 1692, Salisbury was one of the many suspects rounded up and committed to the Tower by order of the Privy Council, and again charged with high treason, on 6 May. Initially he was a ‘close’ prisoner, but the queen quickly relented and allowed him visitors and the ‘liberty of the leads in the Tower’. TNA, PC 2/74, p. 388; WO 94/7; CSP Dom. 1691-2, pp. 280, 285. When it shortly after transpired that Salisbury’s name had been forged on the document produced by the informer Robert Young which appeared to implicate him in a treasonous association, he was bailed, for £5,000, on 18 June. HMC Finch, iv. 230-31; CSP Dom. 1691-2, p. 329; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 489; Verney ms mic. M636/45, J. to Sir R. Verney, 22 June 1692. It was not until 18 Nov. 1692, or shortly after, that Salisbury was discharged from his bail and released, the decision to do so (and the delay) being in the context of the debates in the House throughout November on the commitment of Salisbury’s fellow peers and prisoners of spring 1692, Huntingdon and John Churchill, earl (later duke) of Marlborough, who were not discharged from their bail by order of the House until 18 November. Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 621; Estate pprs. Box T, 99, 100. Salisbury faced suspicions of Jacobitism for the rest of his life. In June 1694 James Lunt saw fit to include Salisbury, albeit tangentially, in his list of those sympathetic to the spurious plans of a Jacobite assassination of William III which became infamously known as the ‘Lancashire Plot’. HMC Kenyon, 300, 369.

In September 1694 Salisbury fell ill with ‘black jaundice’ and rumours of his death were widespread. He died on 24 Oct. 1694 at his lodging in Gerrard Street, Soho. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 370, 388; Verney ms mic. M636/47, J. to Sir R. Verney, 12 Sept. 1694; Genealogies, 65. Salisbury, whose only experience of the House of Lords had been to be on the receiving end of its judicial and legislative activities, was buried in the family vault at Hatfield after being carried ‘in great state’ from London, though one commentator could not resist noticing that the coffin was ‘a yard deep’ owing to the earl’s infamous obesity. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 394; C. Gardiner to Sir R. Verney^‡, 30 Oct. 1694; Genealogies, 65; Estate pprs. General 2/6. Salisbury left the Cecil estate in even worse condition than he had found it. During his 11 years as earl his average annual expenditure had been £9,757, on a disposable income of only about £4,000 p.a. as most of the income, including the windfalls of the Bennet portion (eventually adjusted between the contending parties to £17,000) and sale of land totalling £36,000, had to go towards paying the legacies intended by his father. He left behind him his own debts of £52,000, to add to those of his father still outstanding. By his will and its codicil he left various bequests to his estate and business managers, £200 to his sister, Lady Mary Forrester, wife of Sir William Forester^‡, and an annuity of £300 p.a. to his sister, Lady Frances Holford (but excluding her husband Sir William Holford who had been an active Whig conspirator against James II). He also left his sister, Frances, £3,000 for portions and the education of her children. With the outstanding charges and legacies from the wills of both the 3rd and 4th earls, the guardians of the heir and successor, three-year-old James Cecil, 5th earl of Salisbury, had, on average, about £2,240 p.a. disposable income by which to maintain the household of the young man in a manner fitting for an earl – and to pay over £50,000 of debts. The settlement of the 4th earl’s will took some 50 years to effect, despite the extreme youth of the successor which allowed a programme of austerity to be implemented within the estate during his prolonged minority. Stone, 157-8; TNA, PROB 11/423; HHM, Cecil pprs. Accounts 71/6; Estate pprs. Legal 16/4.