In 1686, as the young Lord Hinchingbrooke set out for France to visit his invalid father, he was described by Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, as a ‘very hopeful’ youth disadvantaged by the long absence of his sickly father, who was ‘quite a stranger’ to his two young sons.
Sandwich’s true character and condition always remained, and still remains, largely overshadowed by the forceful characters who surrounded him. In July 1689 he was married to the wilful 15-year-old Lady Elizabeth Wilmot. According to Noble, the new countess of Sandwich (whose mother had previously been intended for Sandwich’s father) ‘partook of all the fire and vivacity of her father’ and she later had a string of admirers who relished her wit and high spirits. Strong-willed, ‘she detested restraint herself, but put her lord into “durance vile” in his own house’, supposedly keeping him in captivity there.
Macky’s and Swift’s comments appear to reflect Sandwich’s domestic situation after 1705, for from 1691 to that time he was, by and large, engaged in the affairs of Parliament and was reasonably attentive to it. His forceful wife was a high Tory and by 1718 a professed Jacobite, trying to win people over to the cause of the Old Pretender.
Sandwich’s attendance continued to increase and he came to 61 per cent of the 1693–4 session. On 27 Jan. 1694 he brought to the House’s attention a breach of his privilege after his coach and horses were distrained for debt. The House swiftly took action against the offender, Benjamin Walbrook, who was discharged on 5 Feb. after submitting to Sandwich.
In the 1694–5 session Sandwich was present for 77 per cent of the sitting days – his highest attendance at any parliamentary session – and on 24 Jan. 1695 he served as a teller in three divisions concerning adding clauses to the Treason Trials bill. He was later one of only four Tories who protested on 18 Feb. against the resolution that the judges acting in the ‘Lancashire Plot’ trials had done their duty according to the strict letter of the law. In February 1695 the House was also busy considering a bill to settle the estate of the late 2nd earl of Rochester, in which Sandwich had a personal stake as his wife was one of the principal surviving children and heirs of the earl.
Sandwich’s attendance declined slightly in the Parliament elected in 1695. He still came to 69 per cent of the meetings of the first session in 1695–6, where he was a teller in a division about the recommitment of the Small Tithes bill on 27 Jan. 1696 and was appointed a manager for a conference on the Greenland trade bill on 25 April. However, his attendance decreased to 44 per cent in the 1696–7 session. On 23 Dec. 1696 he, somewhat surprisingly, voted to pass the bill to attaint Sir John Fenwick‡, but on that same day was one of those to request, and be granted, leave to be absent from the House for ten days over the Christmas period.
From the 1696–7 session Sandwich began a proxy alliance with John Churchill, earl (later duke) of Marlborough, who was to be the only peer to whom Sandwich ever entrusted his proxy. The connection lay in the household of Princess Anne and her consort, Prince George. Sandwich may have looked upon Marlborough and his wife, Sarah, both the princess’s favourites, as his patrons and protectors (which makes his earlier support of Monmouth, who wished to tar Marlborough as a Jacobite, even more unaccountable). He first registered his proxy with Marlborough on 26 Feb. 1697 and vacated it upon his return to the House on 17 March. The following day Sandwich again left the House for an extended period, whereupon he gave his proxy to Marlborough, who held it until Sandwich’s return on 8 April. Sandwich’s attendance rate in the following session of 1697–8 was again 44 per cent. On 15 Mar. 1698 he was a teller in the division on the question whether to commit the bill to punish the exchequer official Charles Duncombe‡. He himself voted against the commitment and the motion ultimately failed by one vote, so both his vote and his telling were important in defeating this Junto-inspired measure. In May Sandwich and his wife took advantage of the recently concluded peace to travel to France, a country that Lady Sandwich was said to always prefer to England.
The earl and countess of Sandwich spent the rest of 1698 and almost all of 1699 in Paris. While there Lady Sandwich became famous for her wit and liveliness and acquired a number of admirers, including the English diplomats Edward Villiers, earl of Jersey, Matthew Prior‡ and the French literary patron Ninon de l’Enclos. Sandwich himself was clearly eclipsed by his wife, but they had to return to England in late 1699 because of the expense of her lifestyle in the French capital. Charles de St. Evremond informed de l’Enclos of his encounter with her at a dinner held by Jersey, himself recently returned from his mission in France. He assured de l’Enclos that Lady Sandwich ‘was admired in London as she had been in Paris’.
He was present at 64 per cent of the meetings of the Parliament of early 1701, called after William III had dissolved the uncooperative Parliament which had forced the Irish Forfeitures bill on him and dismissed many of the Junto ministers who had failed to manage the Parliament. Early in the new Parliament’s proceedings, on 25 Feb. 1701, Sandwich and his wife presented to the House, in tandem with his wife’s sisters and their husbands, an appeal against a decree in chancery dismissing their bill against Edward Henry Lee, earl of Lichfield, which had claimed that the manor of Adderbury in Oxfordshire, part of the Wilmot estate, had been wrongly conveyed to Lichfield by the dowager countess of Rochester. At a hearing before the House on 8 Mar. Lichfield’s counsel successfully argued that the dowager countess had purchased the estate outright in her own name and that it had been in her disposition to bequeath it to Lichfield. On 22 Mar. the House upheld chancery’s decree and dismissed the appeal.
Sandwich was against the impeached Junto lords from the beginning of proceedings against them and on 16 Apr. 1701 subscribed to the protest against the address to the king requesting that he not punish the impeached lords before they had been tried. When the House moved that same day that the reasons given in this protest be expunged from the Journal Sandwich entered his protest against this measure too. He served as a teller in a division on 21 May 1701 on whether the New Deal fresh water bill should be read a second time, but he left the House for that session on the last day of May and was not present to engage in the trial of the impeached peers, nor to enter his protest against their eventual acquittal.
It is highly likely that Sandwich registered his proxy with Marlborough before he left in that session, as he may well have done in the preceding two sessions of 1698–9 and 1699–1700. The proxy registers for those three sessions are no longer extant, but Sandwich had given Marlborough his proxy in the last session for which we have records, 1697–8, and was to do so again, for a brief period of two days between 3 and 5 Jan. 1702, in the Parliament of early 1702 summoned in the wake of another dissolution by the king, angered by the attack on his ministers. Sandwich only attended 34 per cent of the sittings of this Parliament but never saw fit to assign his proxy again during his other periods of absence.
After the death of William III he acted as an adherent of the new queen, as he was already serving her husband as master of the horse, and in the House shortly after William’s death he ‘smartly replied’ against a motion of Charles Howard, 3rd earl of Carlisle, that an enquiry be made to discover the identity of those who had advised the queen to include the last clause of her address to Parliament, which Carlisle and his fellow Whigs saw as an insult to the memory of the late king. Carlisle was only saved from the ire of the House by a ‘mollifying speech’ from William Cavendish, duke of Devonshire.
In the early years of Anne’s reign Sandwich sided with the Tories. In the first session of her first Parliament in 1702–3 he came to 69 per cent of the sittings. He served as teller on 17 Feb. 1703 in a division on a motion condemning the handling of the invasion of Vigo and Cadiz in the previous summer’s campaign. Five days after that he signed the protest against the resolution not to commit the bill for the landed qualification of Members of the Commons. Most prominently, he supported the Occasional Conformity bill. He was a teller on 7 Dec. 1702 in the division on the question whether to adjourn the committee of the whole on the bill and on 16 Jan. 1703 he voted against the Whig amendments to the bill. On 24 Feb. he signed the protest against the decision of the victorious Whigs to publish the text of the bill with the amendments which had wrecked the chances of the bill’s passage in the Commons. This session saw the effective end of his parliamentary career under Anne. He attended just 20 sittings in the 1703–4 session, and left the House on 11 Dec. 1703, five days before the vote on the Occasional Conformity bill, which he is marked as voting for by proxy, probably through Marlborough again (the proxy registers for this session are missing). He came to just one sitting of the House in 1704–5, on 25 Jan. 1705, when he was listed as likely to support ‘the Tack’ of the Occasional Conformity bill. After that one sitting he was completely absent from the House until he returned over 20 years later, on 10 Feb. 1727.
The reason for this absence was that, by late 1703, some sort of debilitating illness or distemper had befallen Sandwich, which cut short his participation in public life. In June 1703 Narcissus Luttrell‡ and the queen herself feared that Sandwich had died of a serious illness, but were disabused of this by the end of the month.
In early July 1705 Sandwich was removed as master of horse to the prince, ostensibly because of his long-term absence from court, and was recompensed for the loss of this position with an annual pension of £1,000.
Local affairs also had a great deal to do with Sandwich’s disappearance from national politics, indeed society itself, from around 1705. He and his estate had long been the subject of a tug-of-war between his Tory wife and his Whig uncle, Sidney Wortley Montagu‡, and this only increased after his illness had set in. As trustee and principal manager of the estate, with its ‘noble and ancient seat’ of Hinchingbrooke House dominating Huntingdon, Wortley Montagu was the principal electoral patron in borough politics; from 1690 he always controlled at least one seat in the Huntingdon borough representation. Sandwich’s younger brother Richard Montagu‡ was Member for the borough from 1690 until his death in 1697, when he was replaced by Wortley Montagu’s son Francis‡. In the 1695 election the countess of Sandwich had turned her attention to the country, where she successfully used her husband’s interest to ensure the election of her candidate, the Tory Anthony Hammond‡, and it was not until the election of early 1701, after her return from Paris, that Lady Sandwich set herself against Wortley Montagu. ‘Vive la guerre’, Lady Sandwich’s admirer Matthew Prior wrote to Charles Montagu, 4th earl of Manchester, when he heard that the countess was bringing in the young Oxford graduate, and a distant maternal relation of her husband’s, Charles Boyle, later 4th earl of Orrery [I] and Baron Boyle, to set him up for the election.
Over the course of the next three elections in 1701–2 Lady Sandwich pitched Boyle against Francis Wortley Montagu (in 1702 pairing him with her other candidate, Hammond) – and was successful in getting her candidates elected each time. Sandwich himself appears to have been a visible presence in the election of January 1701, for a petition by a defeated Wortley Montagu candidate John Pedley‡ alleged that Sandwich,
with the assistance of others, with swords and clubs, did menace, assault and strike the recorder of the borough [Francis Wortley Montagu], and others of the petitioner’s voters. Some being wounded, others were carried under a strong guard to give their votes for Mr Boyle, but were not permitted to give their second votes, which they would have done, for the petitioner, nor his friends, could speak with them.CJ, xiii. 333.
Boyle himself in his maiden speech in the Commons defended Sandwich from the allegations of interference in the election, pointing out that the earl had, following orders of the Commons, refused the compliment of receiving the freedom of the borough when it was offered to him, which would have given him even more power in corporation politics. Boyle asserted that Sandwich had only been exercising the hereditary and legitimate influence of a local lord of the manor and took umbrage at the Commons’ insistence that peers remove themselves from all involvement in elections, even when it was merely to support a friend and relation. Pedley withdrew his petition on 25 Apr. 1701, but not before Boyle and his fellow member for Huntingdon, Francis Wortley Montagu, had fought a near-fatal duel over some of the allegations raised in the petition.
The 1702 election was even more fiercely contested, when the Sandwich interest, ‘being much increased since the last election’, fielded two Tory candidates, Boyle and Anthony Hammond against Francis Wortley Montagu and his Whig partner. The election came to a contest, with the Sandwich candidates emerging victorious. Sandwich and his countess further put forward a Tory candidate for the 1705 election, who was initially returned but then unseated upon petition, and on 10 Nov. 1705 the earl, no longer attending Parliament himself, petitioned the Commons that the elder Wortley Montagu should not be able to use his privilege to avoid a chancery case involving his management of the estates.
At or around this time, and from at least 1710, Wortley Montagu was able to convince or compel Sandwich to exchange houses with him and the earl began his long residency, or captivity, at Wortley Castle near Leeds.
Sandwich’s only son and heir apparent, Edward Montagu, styled Viscount Hinchingbrooke, came of age in time for the 1713 election. He was already a captain in a regiment of dragoons and was later to pursue a successful military career. He had been raised a ‘strenuous Tory’ by his mother. He stood for both the county and borough in the election of that year, and to improve his chances he engineered the return to the county of his father, who, according to the Tory Post Boy, ‘has for about three years past resided at Wortley Castle in Yorkshire’. Sandwich was met at the county border upon his return by Hinchingbrooke and ‘near 1,500 of the loyal clergy, gentry and freeholders … and was received upon the road, and at Huntingdon, with the utmost joy and satisfaction of all people’. Hinchingbrooke was returned for one of the borough’s seats, Sidney Wortley Montagu ensuring that he himself was selected for the other, for both the 1713 and 1715 elections. In 1722, having been appointed lord lieutenant of the county only a few months previously, Hinchingbrooke was returned as knight of the shire. He was set to take over his father’s putative position as county leader when he died on 3 Oct. 1722, shortly after taking his seat for the county.
It may have been the unexpected death of his son and heir apparent that brought Sandwich back to the House for, surprisingly after so many years of absence and virtual confinement by his kin, he returned to Parliament on 10 Feb. 1727 and proceeded to sit fairly regularly for a year, until his last attendance of the House on 16 Apr. 1728. An account of his brief parliamentary career under the Hanoverians will be found in the next phase of this work. Sidney Wortley Montagu, who had had such an influence on Sandwich’s life, died in November 1727 and Sandwich followed him two years later, dying on 20 Oct. 1729 in Yorkshire. By his brief will, Sandwich left his personal estate to his redoubtable wife, who took advantage of his death by returning to Paris, where she maintained a glittering social circle until her own death in 1757. The heir to the title and the estate was Sandwich’s 11-year-old grandson, John Montagu†, 4th earl of Sandwich, who in his naval and political activities was to hark back more to his great-great-grandfather Edward Montagu, the 1st earl of Sandwich, than to either his reclusive and unstable grandfather or his sickly great-grandfather.