FIENNES, William (c. 1583-1662)

Dubbed ‘Old Subtlety’, Saye and Sele was one of those at the centre of events surrounding the outbreak of Civil War, and the restoration of the monarchy and House of Lords. He owed his promotion to a viscountcy to the influence of George Villiers^†, duke of Buckingham, in a vain attempt to secure his support. But for most of the 1620s and 1630s he was in opposition to the court, and by the 1640s he was one of the most prominent of the peers supporting Parliament against the king’s policies. J. Adamson, Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I, 13.

The Fiennes family was able to claim kinship with both royal houses of the Wars of the Roses, but it was as descendants of William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, founder of New College, Oxford, that they inherited their principal seat of Broughton Castle. This provided the source of most of the family’s annual income, amounting to £1,452 by 1688. VCH Oxon. ix. 94; Bodl. Rawl. D 892 f. 183. Besides this, Saye and Sele also possessed the lordship of Banbury Castle, held estates at Shutford East and leased the manor of Adderbury from New College, though this last seems to have caused him nothing but trouble. VCH Oxon. x. 40, 233; ix. 16. He found his tenants there ‘very clamorous and unruly’, and they vexed him by demanding that he uphold a local custom by giving them a bull at Christmas and dole of 3d. as well as bread and beer. Saye and Sele denied that any such custom existed, there being no mention of it in the tenants’ leases and that the practice was only a courtesy occasionally observed by a previous lord. Progress Notes of Warden Woodward 1659-75 ed. Rickard, 18, 20. Adderbury was also tarnished in Saye and Sele’s eyes by being home to a thriving Quaker population led by Bray Doyley, lord of the manor of Adderbury West. A prominent Presbyterian, Saye and Sele was an inveterate foe of the Quakers, and he lamented that Doyley had fallen in among ‘these seduced and seducing people.’ VCH Oxon. ix. 39. He published two harangues against them, Folly and Madness Made Manifest (1659) and The Quakers Reply Manifested to be railing (1660). He was also responsible for evicting at least two Quaker families from cottages on his estates at Broughton, when he was said to have ‘had their goods thrown into the street, and obliged them, their wives, and seven children, to lie in the streets three weeks in a cold wet season; and their goods much damnified.’ Besse, Sufferings of the Quakers (1753), i. 565.

Bad relations with his tenants seems to have resulted in Saye and Sele acquiring a reputation for covetousness, and he may well have been the intended target of a jibe that he was reckoned to be a ‘grasping landlord … one who would lay field to field and house to house, till there be no place for the poor.’ VCH Oxon. ix. 94. His flinty heart was not only apparent in his dealings with his tenants. Aubrey recounted how Saye and Sele allowed his ward, William Fairfax, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Emley [I], to die of want out of mere cruelty. Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 88-89.

Besides his dubious reputation as a landlord and guardian, Saye and Sele excited equal controversy on the national stage. In 1640 he narrowly avoided being prosecuted for treason for conspiring with the Scots; he was later prominent first as one of those seeking the impeachment of Thomas Wentworth^†, earl of Strafford, and then as one of the advocates of a compromise that might have saved Strafford’s life. Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, was highly critical of Saye and Sele’s contribution to the unsettled atmosphere of the 1640s describing him as, ‘a man who had the deepest hand in the original contrivance of all the calamities which befell [this] unhappy kingdom.’ Adamson, 22-24, 100, 275-6; Clarendon, Rebellion, vi. 409. William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, was more polemical, describing Saye and Sele as the ‘Anabaptist’ leader of ‘a pack of half witted lords’ who should be ‘torn in pieces’ for their actions. HMC Salisbury, xxiv. 277. A friend to noble government but bitter foe of monarchical tyranny, Saye and Sele’s political philosophy was firmly based on the leadership of the peerage, who he believed should be the principal arbiters in a theocratic state,

Democracy I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government, either for church or for commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for monarchy, and aristocracy, they are both of them clearly approved, and directed in scripture. J. Winthrop, History of New England from 1630 to 1649, 135.

Saye and Sele’s influence declined as the war progressed, and he eventually retired to the country. Walpole, Royal and Noble Authors, iii. 70; A. Beesley, History of Banbury, 451. Closely associated with Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, and with Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland, he not only refused to accept a seat in the ‘Other House’, for which he earned Cromwell’s undying anger but was also instrumental in convincing Wharton not to take up his seat either. Saye and Sele’s reasoning was that he was unconvinced that the new chamber would have the dignity or power he believed necessary. ‘The peers of England’, he opined, ‘and their power and privileges in the House of Lords, they have been as the beam keeping both scales, king and people, in an even posture.’ EHR, x. 106; Bodl. Carte 80, f. 749. Especially proud of his standing as a peer, when he discovered that Bulstrode Whitelocke^‡ meant to compete with his eldest son, James Fiennes, later 2nd Viscount Saye and Sele, for one of the Oxfordshire seats in 1640, Saye and Sele had wondered that ‘Mr Whitelocke an upstart lawyer should contest with his son in that country.’ Whitelocke Diary, 122.

By 1659 Saye and Sele appears to have been persuaded to support the restoration of the monarchy, having been brought round by the ‘agency’ of Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester. M. Coate, Letter Book of John Viscount Mordaunt 1658-60, pp. 21-23; CCSP, iv. 235. In February 1660 both he and his heir, James Fiennes, set their names to the Oxfordshire address. Verney ms mic. M636/17, W. Denton to Sir R. Verney, 2 Feb. 1660. Hoping for a new constitutional settlement based upon the treaty of Newport, which he had been involved in negotiating, Saye and Sele was consequently disappointed by the Declaration of Breda. He was also concerned about his own future under a restored king, but he was, eventually, said to have been reassured by the promise of high office under the new regime. Swatland, 23. According to Noble, ‘it was surely more than a “grand climacterical absurdity” after having been “excepted from pardon” by the father, as an inflexible republican, thus to crouch at the last, and to die a placeman and a courtier to the son.’ Diary of Thomas Burton ed. J. Rutt, iii. 536n. Noble’s statement seems to have been founded on a common misapprehension that Saye and Sele was appointed lord privy seal at the Restoration. Wood reported that he had been appointed lord privy seal and lord chamberlain of the household. Both reports are mistaken. The latter office was held by Manchester, and there is no evidence that Saye and Sele was appointed to the former.

Saye and Sele did not, like some, rush to London to force the pace of events in the spring of 1660. Instead, he remained in Oxfordshire to oversee the elections there, where he hoped he ‘might do more service’ to ensure that ‘men well principled and discreet might be chosen and that care might be taken for settling the militia.’ Once that was done Saye and Sele resolved to return to town, ‘so we may advise what is and will be fittest for us to do in claiming our own rights and the right of the whole nation.’ PA, MAN/53. Saye and Sele’s eldest son, James, was accordingly elected one of the knights of the shire, though another son, John Fiennes^‡, failed to secure Banbury. HP Commons, 1660-1690, i. 356-7. He arrived in London a few days before the opening of the Convention. HMC 8th Rep. ii. 65. In spite of his retirement during the 1650s, as a veteran member of the House who had experienced Parliaments under both James I and Charles I, Saye and Sele remained a figure of central importance and much was expected from the other lords once he joined them in town. CCSP, iv. 583. Noted by Wharton in his assessment of the peerage as one of the lords who had sat, Saye and Sele took his seat in the House on the first day of the Convention on 25 Apr. 1660, and the same day he was named to the committee to draw up a list of lords to be summoned to the restored House. He was also one of those nominated to wait on George Monck, later duke of Albemarle, to thank him for his services. He attended almost 84 per cent of all sitting days in the session prior to the September adjournment.

Despite the intention to limit membership of the House to approved former parliamentarian peers, Saye and Sele and his fellows were swiftly outnumbered by returning royalists, and they were forced rapidly to moderate their expectations. Saye and Sele’s attitude to the Restoration can be gleaned from a cartouche which he had inscribed over the arch in the oak drawing room at Broughton: ‘Quod olim fuit, meminisse minime iuvat’ [There is no pleasure in the memory of the past]. Broughton Castle, Banbury. There were initial apprehensions of Saye and Sele’s enduring influence, but his decreasing attendance on committees after the first feverish sessions of the Convention, in which he was initially one of the most prominent committeemen, soon showed his waning authority. CCSP, v. 12; Peers, Politics and Power: the House of Lords, 1603-1911 ed. Jones, 15.

Named to the committee for preparing an ordinance appointing Monck captain general on 26 Apr. 1660, the following day he was named to three further committees, including that to frame an ordinance constituting a committee of safety for both Houses. On 1 May he was named to the committee to consider an answer to the king’s letter and, the following day, to that for settling the nation. Named to more than a dozen further committees that month, including that for investigating the readmission of excluded fellows to New College, Oxford, on 9 May the House ordered that Saye and Sele’s title of warden of the Cinque Ports and constable of Dover Castle should be confirmed. Kennett, Register and Chronicle, 153; LJ, xi. 34. Two days later (11 May) the House considered propositions from Thomas Fairfax^‡, 3rd Viscount Fairfax [S] and Thomas Bushell over surrendering the Isle of Lundy to him. Although Saye and Sele had been added to the committee for the king’s reception on 9 May, he was not himself one of the welcoming party. During the negotiations surrounding the king’s return and the question of what should be done with those responsible for Charles I’s execution, he had attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade Monck to except some of the regicides from the threat of punishment. Ludlow Mems. ed. Firth, ii. 268. Prior to the adjournment Saye and Sele was nominated to ten more committees as well as being named to the sub-committee for the Journal, but he does not appear to have taken a leading role in any of them.

That summer the question of the lord lieutenancy of Oxfordshire opened up fissures within the county elite. Amid rumours that either Saye and Sele or Montagu Bertie, 2nd earl of Lindsey, would be appointed, another local magnate, Henry Carey^‡, 4th Viscount Falkland [S], complained of Lindsey that he had never done ‘anything for the king’s service.’ Although he considered Saye and Sele ‘much more worthy’, in the event it was Falkland himself who was appointed to the vacant position. Bodl. Clarendon 73, f. 64.

Saye and Sele resumed his seat following the adjournment on 7 Nov. 1660. Once again present on approximately 84 per cent of all sitting days, he was named to eight committees in the session. Despite Clarendon’s severe criticism of his role in politics in the 1640s, Saye and Sele was reputed to have had the lord chancellor’s ear after the Restoration. C. Andrew, Beginnings of Connecticut, 73-74. Like many English landowners dismayed by the prospect of lawsuits overturning contracts made during the Commonwealth, he united with Clarendon in opposing the bill to restore Sir Edward Powell to his estates. Saye and Sele was then one of 25 peers to subscribe the protest against the measure on 13 December. Just over a fortnight later, on 30 Dec. (nine days after he had sat for the last time in the Convention) he received the proxy of Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh.

It is not clear whether Saye and Sele attempted to exert his interest in the elections for the new Parliament, but if he did he was presumably disappointed as none of his sons were returned. He took his seat shortly after the opening of Parliament on 16 May 1661, after which he was present on just over 20 per cent of all sitting days. On 28 May he was named to the committee considering the Quakers’ petition, to two committees on 28 June (one for the Westminster streets bill and the other concerning the sanguinary laws) and on 1 July he was nominated to the committee to consider the petition for the re-establishment of the council at York. He was then named to a further two committees prior to 8 July 1661 after which he no longer features on the attendance lists, though it appears that he did attend at least once more, as on 16 July he was also named to the committee considering the application of the penal laws against priests and Jesuits.

Saye and Sele increasingly withdrew from politics from the middle of 1661. In July he wrote to the governor of Massachusetts explaining that the missive might well be his last, ‘my glass being almost run out.’ T. Hutchinson, History of the Colony of Massachusets Bay, 220-1. During the 1630s Saye and Sele had hoped to establish an ‘aristocratic’ colony in the Bahamas, but he had been thwarted by the opposition of the prospective colonists. Winthrop, 333. He had also been involved with Robert Greville^†, Baron Brooke, John Pym^‡ and John Hampden^‡ in founding a colony at Saybrook [Seabrook] in Connecticut, but this too had been short lived. After the Restoration, he maintained his interests in America, and he was one of the lords the colonists looked to for assistance in influencing the new regime. Hutchinson, 212. He spoke in favour of his great-nephew, Thomas Temple, later governor of Nova Scotia, to the committee for plantations in America. HMC 8th Rep. 485. When John Winthrop travelled to England to deliver a petition on behalf of the Puritans of Connecticut, he hoped to recruit Saye and Sele’s support, though by then the almost-octogenarian peer was too ill to be of much use. He died on 14 Apr. 1662. According to Wood, ‘this noble author, after he had spent 80 years mostly in an unquiet and discontented condition, had been a grand promote of the rebellion’ and was in part responsible for the death of Charles I ‘did die quietly in his own bed, but whether in conscience I cannot tell’. Ath. Ox. iii. 550. In his will Saye and Sele demonstrated his puritan credentials by making provision for the satisfaction of a bequest of £200 to his son James’ former college, Emmanuel, Cambridge, made by Dr Preston to provide allowances for poor scholars. Saye and Sele added a further £40 to the total in acknowledgment that interest had not always been paid on the capital as a result of the ‘late troubles’. He was buried at Broughton and succeeded by James Fiennes as 2nd Viscount Saye and Sele.