SANDYS, Henry (by 1637-82)

It has not been possible to determine precise birth and death details for Sandys, but it seems likely that he was in his early thirties when he succeeded his brother, sometime between 9 May and 14 Sept. 1668, to a significantly depleted estate. All the evidence suggests that the family’s decline continued unabated under his stewardship. By 1674 references were being made to his impecuniousness. His decision to sell the majority of the remaining lands proved controversial and invited comment as to whether he could continue to denude the inheritance without an act of Parliament. Verney ms mic. M636/27, C. Gardiner to Sir R. Verney, 13 June 1674. By the time of his death in 1682 it was noted that his successor had nothing left to inherit save the title itself. Hants RO, Barker Mill mss 23M58/35.

Shortly after the death of his brother, Sandys was confirmed as his successor as keeper of game in Hampshire. CSP Dom. 1668-9, p. 205. This appears to have been his only local office, and there is some evidence to suggest that he abused his position, being arraigned at the forest eyre in September 1670 for hunting a buck with four greyhounds two years previously. Calendar of New Forest Documents ed. D.J. Stagg, (Hants Rec. Soc. v), 255. Initially, rather more regular in his attendance at Parliament than his predecessor, Sandys took his seat in the House at the opening of the 1669 when he was named to the sessional committees. Although he was present for approximately 94 per cent of all sitting days in this brief session, he was named to just two select committees, both on 10 December. Besides this he appears to have made little impact on the House’s business. He resumed his seat on 14 Feb. 1670 and was again named to the sessional committees. Although his rate of attendance was significantly lower than in the previous session (amounting to some 39 per cent of all sitting days), he was added to 27 committees during the course of the session. On 26 Mar. he entered his dissent at the resolution to pass the conventicles bill. Absent for seven months from the end of March, on 1 Apr. he registered his proxy in favour of Richard Sackville, 5th earl of Dorset, which was vacated by his resumption of his seat on 4 November. Sandys was marked absent at a call of the House on 2 Feb. 1671, and it was not until 10 Mar. that he again resumed his seat. In the course of 1671 an account of his manor of Cholderton in Hampshire was compiled, presumably with a view to its being sold, with a note of the sum total of the purchase being £2,673 19s. 3d. Hants RO, Clayton mss 3M49/9.

Present once more at the opening of the new session on 4 Feb. 1673, Sandys was again named to the sessional committees and to a further five committees in the brief session, during which he was present on 85 per cent of all sitting days. On 10 July a warrant was passed granting the precedence of the children of a baron to his younger brother, Edwin Sandys, later 8th Baron Sandys, and sisters in acknowledgement of their father’s service in the civil wars. CSP Dom. 1673, p. 430. Absent for the brief parliamentary session that followed in October 1673, Sandys attended the 1674 session for some 47 per cent of the whole and was named to three committees. In July an attempt by the government to install Sandys, Charles West, 5th Baron De la Warr, and four other local gentlemen as justices in Andover failed. A.M. Coleby, Central Government and the Localities, p. 97.

Sandys failed to return to the House for the first session of 1675, but on 29 Apr. he registered his proxy in favour of Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, and the same day was marked excused at a call. During the second session of 1675 Sandys attended some 76 per cent of all sitting days. On 8 Nov. he was named to the committee appointed to discover the identity of the publisher of the Letter from a Person of Quality, and he was named to six further committees during the session. On 20 Nov. he voted in favour of addressing the crown to request a dissolution of Parliament and entered his protest when the motion was rejected.

Sandys may have travelled abroad in 1676. A will composed on 5 June that year, in which he appointed his brother, Edwin Sandys, as his executor, noted that he was shortly to take ‘a great journey’. Hants RO, Barker Mill mss 23M58/32. He returned to the House for the 1677-8 session. Although he was only present on 38 per cent of all sitting days, he was nevertheless named to 27 select committees. Since 1675 Sandys had come increasingly to be identified with the opposition, and in 1677 Shaftesbury assessed him ‘worthy’. Local and family ties may have played a part in determining his allegiances. James Cecil, 3rd earl of Salisbury, brother-in-law of Sandys’ predecessor, the 6th Baron, was also associated with opposition, as were many of Sandys’ neighbours in Hampshire. Jones, Party and Management, 15; Coleby, 155.

He was then absent for the entirety of the first 1678 session, and he attended just two days of the second session of that year. Listed among the absent opposition peers on 12 Mar. 1679, he returned to the House on 26 Mar., 11 days after the opening of the first Exclusion Parliament's second session, after which he was present for 38 per cent of all sitting days. Reckoned a likely opponent by Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), Sandys was again excused at a call on 9 May. He resumed his seat 11 days later, sitting for just eight more days before attending for the final time on 27 May, when he voted against adhering to an earlier vote that the lords spiritual had a right to stay in court in capital cases until judgment of death came to be pronounced.

Excused once more on account of ill health at a call of the House on 30 Oct. 1680, Sandys was listed among those absent from the divisions on the Exclusion bill on 15 November. His failure to attend was presumably on account of his continuing poor health, but may perhaps also have been because of a family dispute. Towards the end of his life Sandys’s relations with his brother and heir, Edwin Sandys, had deteriorated to the extent that he attempted systematically to strip his successor of what remained of his inheritance. The reason for the rupture is not known, but given the selection of two opposition members of Parliament to be his executors in place of Edwin Sandys, it is possible that the dispute was political. In his last will of 17 Apr. 1682, in which he described himself as being ‘of Rookely’ rather than of Mottisfont, suggesting that he was no longer living at the abbey, Sandys made a final effort to steer his remaining estates away from his brother. Of the £1,100 Sandys appointed for particular uses in the will, more than half (£600) was directed towards his funeral expenses and only one relative, his nephew Thomas Savage, son of the former master of Balliol, received a substantial bequest. Oliver St John^‡, Henry Doyley and Giles Eyre^‡ were appointed executors and each granted £100 ‘for their pains’. Sandys died shortly after and was buried, according to his wishes, in the Holy Ghost Chapel at Basingstoke on 28 April. His slighted sibling succeeded him in the peerage but in little else.