Charles II’s son-in-law, 1674-85
Thomas Lennard succeeded to the peerage as a minor and was raised by his mother and her second husband David Walter, a groom of the bedchamber. His stepfather undoubtedly helped foster his connections at court, but the most important relation for Lennard’s future life and career was his cousin (both were grandchildren of Viscount Bayning), Lady Castlemaine, who became Charles II’s mistress after the Restoration. Lady Castlemaine looked to further the prospects of her Bayning relations and from May 1674 it was openly rumoured that the young Lord Dacre was to be married to Castlemaine’s first daughter by the king, Lady Anne Fitzroy, ‘who is above 13 years old and extraordinary handsome’, and was to be raised in the peerage.
The king also promised his new son-in-law a portion of £20,000 and an annuity of £2,000 p.a. until that dowry was raised. The annuity was only paid for a few years and the £20,000 was never paid. This, coupled with Sussex’s own expensive habits and tastes, meant that much of the remainder of his life was spent petitioning for arrears of this portion, or for additional grants or loans.
Connected by marriage to the king, he was seen as a certain court supporter in the Lords. He conveniently reached his majority in the middle of the contentious session of spring 1675 and was introduced in the House on 21 May, barely three days after his 21st birthday. He very quickly showed himself to be a lacklustre member of the House, and after his introduction he came to only a further five meetings before the prorogation on 9 June 1675, and only came to five meetings of the following session of autumn 1675.
Domestic matters kept him preoccupied during the late 1670s, for it had quickly become apparent that his new wife took after her mother, becoming a figure of scandal at court. The social correspondence of the winter of 1676-7 was full of tales of the disagreements between Sussex and his wife as he forced her to accompany him to his seat at Herstmonceux Castle to remove her from the bad influence of the duchess of Mazarin at court.
Sussex, trying to keep his wife sequestered in Sussex, remained absent from the House for all of 1677. Five days before the session that ended the long prorogation since 15 Feb. 1677 he registered his proxy with his wife’s uncle James Stuart, duke of York. Unsurprisingly, such court connections led Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, to consider Sussex ‘vile’. They were only strengthened when in September 1677 he was made an ‘extra’ gentleman of the bedchamber, to serve without pay until one of the existing regular places became vacant. Nevertheless, he was absent from the House for most of 1678 as well, during which year he only attended the final three days of the long session of 1677-8, one day in that of spring 1678 and missed the final session of the Cavalier Parliament in the winter of 1678 completely. When summoned by the House he sent two representatives to attest to his incapacitating illness, which excuse the House accepted on 21 Dec. 1678.
In the weeks preceding the new Parliament Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), considered Sussex a court supporter who could be encouraged to attend the House by the king himself; the lord treasurer also placed him under the watchful eye of his son Peregrine Osborne, then styled Viscount Osborne [S] (later 2nd duke of Leeds). Sussex dutifully came to almost all of the meetings of the short session of 6-13 Mar. 1679 and attended 64 per cent of the meetings of the longer session of 15 Mar.-27 May, during which he was named to only one select committee. Yet although Danby initially listed Sussex among those who voted against the bill for his attainder, the earl’s name was subsequently crossed out when it became clear to the lord treasurer that Sussex was inclining against him. Sussex was clearly a waverer (or else a nonentity) to the extent that different sources disagree on the stance he took: Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton marked Sussex as voting to agree with the Commons on the attainder bill when it came to a final vote on 14 Apr., while a list on the same division in the Hatton-Finch papers placed him among the not contents. He probably voted on 27 May for the right of the bishops to stay in the House during capital cases.
Despite this wavering, Sussex became a full gentleman of the bedchamber in August 1680. He was present for a little under three-quarters of the meetings of the second Exclusion Parliament and came to every sitting but one of the short Oxford Parliament. He was present in the House on 15 Nov. 1680 to vote for the rejection of the Exclusion bill, and again on 7 Dec. to cast his vote of guilty against William Howard, Viscount Stafford. In March 1681 Danby considered Sussex among those who would support his petition for bail, and indeed Sussex did later subscribe in support of Danby’s petition for bail in February 1684.
Under James II, 1685-8
Sussex lost his place in the bedchamber after the death of Charles II and was never appointed to another position at court, but he still came to 61 per cent of the sittings of the first part of James II’s Parliament, and on its first day introduced his brother-in-law Edward Henry Lee, earl of Lichfield, like him the husband of a daughter of Charles II and the duchess of Cleveland. He did not attend any of the sittings when Parliament reconvened in November 1685. Never having been active in politics, his views and actions could never be easily predicted, and Sussex remained a cipher during the reign of James II, as he would continue to be for the remainder of his career. Contemporaries in the mid 1680s did not know how he stood on James II’s policies. It was probably his old position as a courtier and client of James II (even if he was no longer associated with the bedchamber) and his marital connections with an overtly Catholic family which led so many contemporaries to forecast that Sussex supported the king’s ambition to repeal the Test Acts. At the same time some other commentators, including Danby, felt that he was opposed to the king’s measures. The view that he was a supporter of the king was perhaps borne out by his refusal to subscribe to the petition of 16 Nov. 1688 calling for a free Parliament, and it could have been in order to protect the king that he became so active in the provisional government established at the Guildhall following the king’s first flight in December 1688. He signed the Guildhall Declaration on 11 Dec. 1688 and a number of the council’s other declarations, orders and warrants intending to prevent bloodshed and maintain order over its first few days. He also remained a frequent attender of its sessions until the prince of Orange established himself in Whitehall, the king had fled and elections were called for the Convention.
Courting William III, 1689-95
Within the first few days of the Convention, Sussex revealed himself as a committed Williamite. He showed a dedication to its proceedings not previously seen and attended 140 of its meetings, 86 per cent – his highest rate of attendance of any parliamentary session in his 40 year career. Between 29 Jan. and 6 Feb. 1689 he consistently worked to make William and Mary king and queen of England, voting against the motion for a regency, in favour of immediately declaring them king and queen and in favour of the words ‘abdicated’ and ‘vacant’ in the Commons’ resolution. He also signed the protests of 31 Jan. and 4 Feb. when the Commons’ phrasing was rejected. He was also on 2 Feb. one of ten peers added to the committee to examine the case of Arthur Capell, earl of Essex, and was on 8 Mar. named to the committee to consider the bill for reversing the attainder of William Russell‡, Lord Russell. He was also named to the committees to consider the comprehension bill (14 Mar.) and a bill to prevent simony (19 Apr.). Throughout the remainder of this first session of the Convention he continued to be nominated to select committees, 28 in total, far more than in any previous session. He was present in the House on 31 May but, according to the division list drawn up by Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, he abstained from the vote of that day on whether to reverse the judgments against Titus Oates. Yet on 12 July Sussex joined with Whigs in protesting against the amendments to the bill which would prohibit Oates from ever giving evidence in court again, and two weeks later he was part of a smaller group of six peers, the others being staunch Whigs, who protested against the decision not to have a free conference with the Commons on the matter of the amendments. At the very end of July he again voted against the motion to adhere to these amendments, which he and others saw as excessively punitive against the discoverer of the Popish Plot. On 16 August he acted as a teller, against William Richard George Stanley, 9th earl of Derby, on a division on the question whether to accept a clause in the tanned leather bill which would exempt various chartered trading companies from the free trade provisions of the bill; the motion was passed. He was less attentive to the session of winter 1689, although he still came to almost three-fifths of its meetings.
Sussex may have been more than usually active in the early days of the Convention for the Williamite cause in order to counteract the effect that the actions of other members of his family could have on his standing with the new regime, and its potential bounty. Too many members of his family sided with James II to make him seem entirely trustworthy. His nominal father-in-law, the Catholic Roger Palmer‡, earl of Castlemaine [I], was imprisoned in the Tower from February 1689: Sussex was given special dispensation to visit him and was even approached to act as his bail.
As Sussex looked to the new regime to help him financially, he needed to emphasize that he did not share in his kin’s sympathy with the deposed king. In July 1689 Sussex was one of the signatories and leaders of a petition presented to the Commons from Charles II’s former gentlemen of the bedchamber requesting that the grants and pensions bestowed on them in their letters patent not be infringed by the bill for new impositions on sugar, tobacco, coffee and tea.
Knowledge of Sussex’s dependence on court favour to relieve his financial distress persuaded the marquess of Carmarthen, as Danby had become, that Sussex would be a ‘court lord’ in the new Parliament, and one who could be managed by John Sheffield, 3rd earl of Mulgrave (later duke of Buckingham).
Sussex attended 62 per cent of the 1691-2 session, but after that session until well into Anne’s reign his attendance declined. He came to only half of the meetings of 1692-3. He was summoned to appear by 5 Dec. 1692 to explain the ‘protections’ he had been distributing to his servants; he first appeared well before that time, on 24 Nov., and his involvement with protections was not subsequently raised by the House. On 17 Dec. 1692 he was involved in a family matter when he told, almost certainly for the contents, against Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, on the question of whether to reverse a chancery decree that had been found against his own sister the dowager countess of Meath [I], now married to William Moore, regarding the settlement of the late earl of Meath’s estate. Unfortunately for him and his sister the decree was upheld. Two weeks later, on 31 Dec., he was marked as present in the House but appears to have been absent for, or abstained from, the vote on whether to commit the place bill. Three days later, on 3 Jan. 1693, he voted to pass the bill. The previous day he had also voted against giving the bill for the divorce of Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk, a second reading.
Sussex’s financial situation had become so dire by 1693 that he felt the need to bring in an estate bill to allow him to sell some of the jointure lands of his wife and settle other lands on her instead, so that he could raise money to pay his debts of £20,000, ‘partly contracted by his late father Francis, Lord Dacre, and partly occasioned by the great expense he has been put to by his marriage’. The bill was first read in the House on 26 Jan. but was not proceeded with further, not even receiving a second reading.
Disappointment and absence, 1695-1702
Sussex did not attend more than half of the sittings of any of the three sessions of the 1695-8 Parliament. He expressed his support for the regime by signing the Association on 27 Feb. 1696, but at the end of that same year showed once again that he was not always a reliable follower of the court line by consistently opposing the bill to attaint Sir John Fenwick‡. He protested against giving the bill a second reading on 18 Dec. 1696, and then again protested against its passage five days later. On 26 Jan. 1697, although he appears to have been in the House when the attendance register was drawn up, he was absent by the time the House moved on to discussing vacating his written protections of menial servants.
He missed the 1698-9 session of the Parliament of 1698-1700 entirely, and on 27 Jan. 1699 the House accepted his reasons for his ‘inability to attend’. He only came to just over a quarter of the meetings of the following session and stayed away for the vote on 23 Feb. 1700 regarding the bill to maintain the East India Company as a corporation, even though parliamentary managers knew he was ‘in town’ and in favour of the bill. He was in the House, though, on 8 Mar. 1700 to subscribe to the protest against the decision to give the bill to divorce the duke of Norfolk a second reading, as he had done earlier in January 1693. A month later, on 9 and 10 Apr. 1700, he acted as a representative of the House in three increasingly ill-tempered conferences with the Commons over the House’s amendments to the land tax bill, with its controversial provisions for parliamentary resumption of William’s Irish land grants, but he did not enter his protest against the House’s eventual decision not to adhere to its own amendments. He was largely absent during the last two turbulent Parliaments of William III’s reign – 11 sittings in the Parliament of early 1701 and 19 in that of early 1702, and in the latter he only first took his seat two days after the death of William III.
Anne’s first Parliaments, 1702-10
His attendance rate was only slightly better in the 1702-3 session of Anne’s first Parliament, at 30 per cent, perhaps in a half-hearted effort to ingratiate himself with the new Tory regime. After this initial effort at maintaining a presence in the House, he quickly slipped back into his persistent absenteeism, but when he did take action in the House in the reign of Anne it was usually in support of the court. In the 1702-5 period he appears to have come to the House specifically to lend support to the various bills against occasional conformity. He voted against the Whig ‘wrecking amendments’ to the occasional conformity bill on 16 Jan. 1703, and his first day (of a total of 16) in the session of 1703-4 was significantly 14 Dec. 1703, when he voted against the rejection of the bill, although he did not feel strongly enough on the matter to sign either of the two protests against its rejection. Similarly his six attendances in the session of 1704-5 were all in late November and early December 1704, at around which time his name appeared on a list of members of Parliament who were likely to support the effort to ‘tack’ the occasional conformity bill on to a supply bill. His last day in the House for that session was 15 Dec. 1704, when the bill was brought up from the Commons and immediately rejected by the House. Perhaps because of the tacit approval of the court and the queen’s ministers for this bill’s demise, Sussex did not sign either of the protests against this, its third rejection.
Before the convening of the 1705-8 Parliament a contemporary considered Sussex a supporter of the Hanoverian Succession, but the earl was hardly active enough in this Parliament to give any evidence of his commitment to this cause. During Anne’s second Parliament, 25 Oct. 1705-1 Apr. 1708, he came to the House on only 49 occasions, the majority of them in the 1707-8 session of the new Parliament of Great Britain. He came to only five sittings in the 1705-6 session, but significantly one of those was 6 Dec. 1705, when he voted against the motion that the Church was not in danger under the queen’s administration.
He continued his low attendance at the beginning of the Parliament of 1708-10, but that changed in the 1709-10 session when he was present for over two-thirds of the meetings, apparently gripped, as were so many others, by the trial of Dr Henry Sacheverell. He was named on 28 Feb. and 13 Mar. 1710 to the large committees, comprising almost the entire House, dealing with aspects of the trial and was among the core group of peers, largely Tories, who protested against every step in the impeachment. In the period 14-18 Mar. 1710 he put his signature to all six protests against the motions that furthered the trial and on 20-21 Mar. he voted the doctor not guilty and then protested both against the guilty verdict and the censure laid against him.
Client of Oxford, 1710-14
Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford, considered Sussex a sure supporter of the Tory ministry he formed in the autumn of 1710. Sussex did register his proxy on 7 Nov. 1710, well in advance of the convening of the new Parliament, with the stalwart Tory, Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester. However this would have been vacated by Sussex’s appearance on the first day of the session on 25 Nov., after which he did not appear in the House again until late January 1711. He came to the House only four times in total during the entire session. Despite the little evidence of political activity he provided, Sussex was still considered a ‘Tory Patriot’ in an analysis drawn up shortly after the end of the 1710-11 session.
The earl of Oxford, as Harley had become in May 1711, and all the other party managers sought to take advantage of Sussex’s continuing financial problems. Increasingly pressed by his debts and the obligation to provide portions for his two daughters, Sussex had placed his estates in Sussex, Kent and Cumberland in the hands of trustees, including his wife’s brother, now the duke of Northumberland, and in 1707-8 he and they disposed of a large number of his properties, culminating in the sale of the family’s grand fifteenth-century manor house of Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, and all its grounds, for the princely sum of £38,215 to the rising Whig star George Naylor‡.
Sussex’s dependence on the lord treasurer and his ministry was reflected in his radically different parliamentary activity in the session beginning December 1711. He attended 72 per cent of the sittings – his highest attendance rate since the Convention – and was there for Oxford from the first day. Oxford may have had some doubts how he would vote on the ‘No Peace without Spain’ motion, particularly on the attempt to remove the clause by a controversial and unparliamentary division on 8 Dec. 1711, but Sussex appears to have fallen in line with the ministry. He was not noted by Oxford as one who voted against him that day and Sussex duly entered his protest against the resolution to present the address with the clause to the queen. He again sided with the Oxford ministry when he voted against the Whig motion to disable James Hamilton, 4th Duke of Hamilton [S], from sitting in the House under his post-Union title as duke of Brandon. Sussex left the House for a period after 21 Dec. but again, in marked contrast to his many previous long periods of absence when he neglected to assign a proxy, on the following day he registered his proxy with none other than Oxford himself, who held it until Sussex returned to the House on 14 Jan. 1712. After his return Sussex gave further key support for the ministry when on 28 May he voted against the Whig motion to present the queen with an address against the ‘restraining orders’ recently issued to the captain general James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond. He was also for the first time active in the subcommittee for the Journal, and his signature appears three times in the Journal for that session – on 29 February, 5 April and 14 June – to indicate his approval of the record of the House’s proceedings. Similarly, he broke new ground in the long-delayed session of spring 1713, 61 per cent of whose sittings he attended, when for the first time in his career he reported, on 28 May 1713, from the select committee on the bill to invest the lands of the late Sir Roger Burgoyne, in trustees – even though he had not even been originally named to this committee. Not surprisingly Oxford forecast that Sussex would support the bill confirming sections of the controversial French commercial treaty – if it got beyond the fierce opposition in the Commons. During his periods of absence Sussex may well have assigned his proxy to Oxford or a peer designated by Oxford, as he did at other times in 1710-14, but the lack of proxy registers for this session precludes certainty on this matter.
Nor was his involvement confined to the House. Sussex had never been a particularly avid election manager, either in Sussex or Cumberland.
Yet at precisely this time things began to grow sour between Sussex and Oxford, as they often did with the lord treasurer’s pecuniary clients. Sussex was working unusually hard at the Kent elections of 1713 in the hope that his efforts would spur Oxford to fulfil his part of the bargain they had agreed upon, and shortly after the election he was desperately reminding Oxford of the promise he had made on his
word of honour in as solemn a manner as is possible that you would pay me £2,400 p.a. within the year and my Lord I have not lived so long in a court not to know the power of a lord treasurer when he has a mind to oblige his friends and I am not conscious to myself I have done anything to forfeit the least good opinion you were pleased to conceive of me.Add. 70255, Sussex to Oxford, 14, 18 Sept. 1713.
Oxford seems to have placated him temporarily, apparently by paying him £200 out of his own pocket in September, but nevertheless Sussex felt compelled to write to the lord treasurer again on Christmas Day reminding him of ‘your word and honour you gave me, as earl of Oxford and Robert Harley that I should be punctually and regularly paid within the year, which is what I rely upon entirely, and the obligations you lay upon me ought to convince how much I’m your creature to you and your family’.
This disenchantment with Oxford may explain Sussex’s lack of application in the 1713 Parliament for which he had been so busy making an interest in Kent. He came to only seven meetings of the session beginning in February 1714 and left the House for a period of four months on 3 March. At about this time he apparently looked to register his proxy with Oxford but, learning that Oxford ‘was full’, that is, he held his full complement of two proxies, he requested him ‘to let me know any of our friends that wants one, and I will give it’.
With the advent of a new monarch, Sussex was fairly attentive to the proceedings of the first Parliament of George I and attended the House fairly regularly in June and July 1715 before he became ill with his final sickness. He died on 30 Oct. 1715, aged 61 and intestate. He left a troubled legacy. Of the four children born to him by his estranged wife Anne, his two sons had predeceased him, so the earldom of Sussex became extinct, while the older barony by writ of Dacre was held in abeyance for several years between his two daughters Barbara and Anne, until at Barbara’s death in 1741 the younger daughter Anne became the Baroness Dacre. His surviving widow and daughters, all Catholics, continued to live in financial straits and in 1715 the dowager countess of Sussex sold the Cumberland manor of Dacre, including Dacre Castle, to Sir Christopher Musgrave‡, and in 1717 the house and grounds of Chevening for £28,000 to the Whig politician James Stanhope* [1242], Viscount (later Earl) Stanhope.