CORNWALLIS, Sir Frederick, 1st bt. (1611-62), of Brome Hall, Suff.

Frederick Cornwallis was born between six and seven o’clock on the morning of 14 March 1611 at his father’s London house in the parish of St Botolph without Bishopgate. The godparents at his baptism a fortnight later were the queen, Anne of Denmark (who was represented by the countess of Bedford), the duke of York, and the lord treasurer, the 1st earl of Salisbury (Robert Cecil†).31Regs. of St. Botolph, Bishopgate ed. Hallen, i. 179. Such a distinguished group of sponsors reflected the status of the Cornwallis family as a prominent courtier dynasty. Their wealth dated back to the late fourteenth century and since the fifteenth they had owned estates in Suffolk, at Brome Hall on the outskirts of Eye. Frederick’s great-grandfather, Sir John Cornwallis, had served as steward of the Household to Prince Edward (later Edward VI) and his grandfather, Sir Thomas†, had briefly been comptroller of the Household to Mary I. Frederick’s father for many years acted as deputy to Elizabeth I’s groom porter.32Vis. Suff. 1561, 1577 and 1612, 21-2; Vis. Notts. 1569 and 1614 (Harl. Soc. iv.), 161-2; J. Edmondson, Baronagium Genealogicum (1764-84), iii. plate 289; J. Burke, Extinct Peerages (1866), 137-8; G.A. Moriarty, ‘Early generations of Cornwallis of Brome’, N. Eng. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., cx. 122-7; A. Simpson, The Wealth of the Gentry (Cambridge, 1961), 142-78. Frederick was the son and heir Sir William Cornwallis had been waiting for since the death in 1565 of his last son from his first marriage.33P.B. Whitt, ‘New light on Sir William Cornwallis, the essayist’, Review of Eng. Studies, viii. 156. He was born just in time, for Sir William died eight months later on 13 November 1611, leaving his estates encumbered with debts of almost £4,000, so that the family was ‘altogether without maintenance’.34C142/329/185; CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 268; PROB11/118/441; ‘Will of Sir William Cornwallis, 1611’, E. Anglian Misc. (1934), 38-9, 48, 50-1; APC 1613-14, p. 484. Frederick’s wardship was granted to his mother.35CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 90.

In May 1614 the young Frederick acquired a stepfather on Lady Cornwallis’s marriage to another Suffolk gentleman, Nathaniel Bacon of Culford. Now remembered as the finest amateur artist in early Stuart England, Bacon (who was knighted in 1626) appears to have been an affectionate surrogate parent and he fathered by his new wife a stepbrother, Nicholas, and two stepsisters, Anne and Jane, for Frederick. The children were all brought up together at Brome.36Cornwallis Corresp. 77, 78, 79, 81, 86, 95, 97, 112, 113. Frederick had probably already left home when Sir Nathaniel died in July 1627.37Cornwallis Corresp. 145, 170; PROB11/152/743 .

It is not certain when Cornwallis first appeared at court. Later claims that he had attended on the prince of Wales in Spain in 1623 are uncorroborated.38Collins, Peerage, ii. 549. That he instead entered royal service as an equerry to Charles I is much more plausible. He had the essential connections, through his cousin, Thomas Meautys, with the master of the horse, the 1st duke of Buckingham (George Villiers†), and it was the support of Buckingham which allowed Meautys (who was one of the clerks of the privy council) to secure a baronetcy for Cornwallis shortly after he had passed his sixteenth birthday.39Cornwallis Corresp. 157-9; CSP Dom. 1627-8, pp. 156, 163. If Cornwallis was an equerry, it would explain why he was required to accompany the duc de Vendôme to Windsor for stag hunting in November 1631.40Cornwallis Corresp. 214.

By the time Cornwallis had reached the age of 18 his female relatives had begun the search for a suitable marriage partner for him.41Cornwallis Corresp. 190-2, 198-9, 200-1. All these laborious negotiations came to nothing, however, for Cornwallis, with the encouragement of the king, took the initiative and married one of Henrietta Maria’s maids of honour, Elizabeth Ashburnham, sister of John Ashburnham* and William Ashbournham*. The ceremony, at which the king and queen were present, probably took place on 2 December 1630 (the date of Cornwallis’s knighthood) in the king’s own apartments at Whitehall. Charles promised the couple £2,000 and jewels worth £1,000.42PRO30/11/268, f. 5; Cornwallis Corresp. 205, 208; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 198. Lady Bacon, who had not been told of the union in advance, did not take the news well and it required intervention by the king and queen for a half-hearted reconciliation to be effected between Sir Frederick and his mother. To smooth her ruffled feathers, he pledged his mother the promised gifts from the king.43PRO30/11/268, ff. 1-6; Cornwallis Corresp. 205-11, 216; CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 213, 522; 1634-5, p. 298; 1635, p. 134. The new Lady Cornwallis continued to serve the queen as one of her chamber attendants.44NLW, Wynnstay ms 166, p. 6; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 48.

Cornwallis’s precarious finances were a further strain on his relations with his widowed mother. Within a year of his marriage he may already have been borrowing money from her.45Cornwallis Corresp. 214, 224. In fairness to Sir Frederick, the debts left by his father had probably made his difficulties unavoidable. A series of court cases brought by some of Sir Frederick’s creditors drove him to reach an arrangement with his mother in November 1636, whereby Lady Bacon should pay him £6,000 in return for a 1,000 year lease on the Cornwallis estates in Suffolk and Norfolk.46Cornwallis Corresp. 246-7; PROB11/300/192; CCC, 1390. The following year he used some of this money in an agreement involving his stepbrother, Nicholas Bacon, and his brother-in-law, John Ashburnham, which allowed Cornwallis to borrow more money.47CCAM 1208; CCC 1390, 1863. The desire of Lady Bacon to gain control of her son’s estates may have been boosted by a fear that Cornwallis's attendance at court led to the neglect of those estates while encouraging his extravagance.

During the early 1630s Cornwallis appears to have been close to the earl of Holland (Henry Rich†), the groom of the stool, and he stayed with him at Kensington during the period of Holland’s disgrace from court in the spring of 1633.48Cornwallis Corresp. 222, 224. Given that Holland was high steward to the queen, this friendship strengthened the connections Cornwallis already had, through his wife, with the circle around Henrietta Maria. At that time Sir Frederick had just returned from the Low Countries, where he had gone with the 21st earl of Arundel, who was to escort the king’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, to England and in May 1633 he accompanied the king to Scotland. On 24 May, when the court was at York, Cornwallis was appointed as one of the gentlemen of the privy chamber.49LC5/132, p. 335; N. Carlisle, Inquiry into the Place and Quality of His Majesty’s Most Hon. Privy Chamber (1829), 134; Cornwallis Corresp. 230. The first half of the following year he spent in France, for reasons which remain unknown. He was back in England by November 1635, when he was sent by the king to greet the elector palatine at Rochester.50Cornwallis Corresp. 233-5. In July 1638 Cornwallis became an extraordinary gentleman usher of privy chamber and seems to have been promoted to one of the places in ordinary within the next two years.51LC5/134, pp. 269, 414; Ceremonies of Charles I ed. Loomie, 285; LC3/1, f. 1v. An attempt by him to obtain a monopoly to enforce the quality of vellum and parchment came to nothing.52CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 433. One puzzle is why he agreed to act as surety for John Alured* in July 1638, when the privy council examined alleged remarks by Alured interpreted as being favourable towards the Scottish rebels and critical of the king’s policies in England.53CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 558, 574. Cornwallis is most unlikely to have shared these views. The following year he volunteered to serve with the king’s army in the campaign against the Scots and his later conduct in Parliament confirms that he had few sympathies with the Covenanters.54CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 37, 162; CSP Dom. Add. 1625-49, p. 607.

The proximity of the Cornwallis estates to the borough of Eye gave Sir Frederick a strong claim to control one of its parliamentary seats and his electoral position was enhanced by the fact that the other major landowner in the immediate area was the queen, whose jointure estates included the honor of Eye. Cornwallis had been the obvious appointment as steward of the honor and so also controlled the crown’s patronage in the borough.55Cornwallis Corresp. 258. Predictably, the borough returned him as its senior MP in an uncontested election on 14 April 1640.56HMC 4th Rep. 24. His only committee appointment in the Short Parliament was to that on an apparel bill (21 Apr.), which was probably being promoted by the town’s other Member, Sir Roger North*.57CJ ii. 8a. The second elections in 1640 at Eye were an exact re-run of those earlier in the year: Cornwallis and North were re-elected on 26 October 1640.

During the early years of the Long Parliament Cornwallis belonged to the group of MPs who were hardline supporters of the king. In the key division on 5 March 1641 on the peace negotiation with the Scots, Cornwallis and his brother-in-law John Ashburnham acted as minority tellers for the anti-Scot element in the House in favour of a proposal that would have hastened the departure of the Scottish army from England, in accordance with the king’s wishes.58CJ ii. 97a; Procs. LP ii. 639, 640-1; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 200. Cornwallis caused offence eight days later by suggesting that the Irish army should not be disbanded because there was ‘an enemy in our bosom’.59Procs. LP ii. 745. The suspicion that the enemy to which he referred was the Scots reinforced fears that, unless it was disbanded, the Irish army would be used by the king to expel the Scottish army. Cornwallis encountered further difficulties over an imprudent comment during the acrimonious debate on the second reading of the Strafford attainder bill (14 Apr.). His facetious enquiry as to whether his heckling counted as a speech was considered insolent enough for him to be called to the bar to explain himself. The point he was trying to make was probably that a man’s fate could not properly be decided in such a chaotic debate.60Procs. LP iii. 550-1, 553, 555. Cornwallis, in any case, believed the case against Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, to be groundless.61Procs. LP iv. 42, 51; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 248; Verney, Notes, 58; Nalson, Impartial Colln. ii. 189; Cobbett, Parl. Hist. ii. 755. Nevertheless, he took the Protestation on 3 May.62CJ ii. 133a. A sudden bout of ill health forced him to leave the Commons’ chamber during one of the debates on 6 May, but it was only temporary and he was attending debates again by 19 May, when the breaking of one of the windows in St Stephen’s Chapel caused him to be showered with dust.63Procs. LP iv. 230, 232, 460, 470. In June 1641 he wrote to his mother assuring her that

hitherto I have carried myself with a reasonable clear reputation on both sides, I mean the king’s and Parliament’s; so I shall continue still to do nothing that may render me unworthy either of my mother or country.64Cornwallis Corresp. 265.

However, he was soon forced to choose which of his reputations he wished to protect.

Cornwallis acted as a teller in seven divisions between the end of the recess in October 1641 and the end of that year: on each occasion he was on the losing pro-court side. On 29 October he and Sir Thomas Bowyer* opposed the attempts to block the king’s appointments of five new bishops.65CJ ii. 298b; D’Ewes (C), 54. In three of the four final divisions on the Grand Remonstrance on 22 November, Sir Frederick served as teller for those who wanted to wreck the Remonstrance. It was he and Giles Strangways* who counted the 148 noes (against 159 yeas) in the final division which determined that the whole Remonstrance would pass.66CJ ii. 322b. With Edward Hyde*, he performed the same service two days later for those who opposed the moves to punish Geoffrey Palmer* for attempting to enter a protest against the Remonstrance.67CJ ii. 324b; D’Ewes (C), 195. The last of his tellerships was on 7 December when, together with another court supporter, Sir John Culpeper, he was teller for those who opposed the appointments of a lord general and a lord high admiral by Parliament.68CJ ii. 334b; D’Ewes (C), 248. The minorities in all these divisions were sizable but the regularity with which Cornwallis found himself on the defeated side made plain that he was at odds with the prevailing sentiments in the Commons.

The decision by the queen in February 1642 to go to the United Provinces to escape possible impeachment provided Cornwallis with a pretext to get away from Westminster. On a motion by Sir Philip Stapilton*, Cornwallis was granted permission to accompany her on the crossing.69CJ ii. 447a; PJ i. 428, 435. It seems likely that he remained with Henrietta Maria in Holland for the time being; his wife was certainly in The Hague in May 1642.70Cornwallis Corresp. 271. By the autumn the parliamentarian leadership was concerned that Cornwallis was organising the men to be sent by Henrietta Maria from Holland to serve in the king’s newly-raised army. This was the explicit reason given for the decision by the Commons on 23 September to disable him from sitting.71CJ ii. 779b, iv. 262a. Within weeks, Parliament’s agent in Holland, Walter Strickland*, was reporting that Cornwallis, ‘a great taker-up of men’, had left for England with 20 officers. Strickland’s comment that ‘no man here was more busy than Sir Frederick Cornwallis, nor more active against whatever I did for the Parliament’ was a grudging tribute to Cornwallis’s efficiency as a recruiter for the king.72HMC 10th Rep. vi. 89-92. Once back in England, Cornwallis joined the court at Oxford.73Northants. RO, FH3775.

Cornwallis’s next mission related to the negotiations arising from the articles of cessation offered by Parliament to the king in early March 1643. On 10 April Cornwallis delivered to the acting Speaker of the House of Lords, the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†), the king’s lukewarm reply to the proposals from the parliamentary negotiators for an immediate disbandment of both armies.74LJ v. 709b-710a, 711b-712a; CJ iii. 39b-40a. Allegations about Cornwallis’s activities, however, soon added to the complications of the negotiations. His departure for Oxford was halted by the Commons, who had him placed under arrest on suspicion of having smuggled to London copies of the latest royalist pamphlet about the proposed treaty.75CJ iii. 40b; The Reasons of the Lords and Commons in Parliament (Oxford, 1643, E.95.1); Mercurius Aulicus (16-22 Apr. 1643), 197. The king used his meeting on 15 April with the delegation from Parliament to complain about the treatment inflicted on Cornwallis. Rather than make an issue of the matter, the House of Lords moved on 18 April to persuade the Commons to release him and the following day the Commons agreed.76LJ vi. 10b-11a; CJ iii. 52b. Cornwallis himself proved less accommodating and refused to fulfil the terms of his release by returning immediately to Oxford. It required a further three orders from the Commons before he complied.77CJ iii. 64a, 66b, 68b.

Cornwallis (according to the contemporary biographer, David Lloyd) ‘often hazarded himself in the temple of virtue in the time of war’.78Lloyd, Memoires, 662. Somewhat at odds with that claim is Cornwallis’s submission to the Committee for Compounding in July 1646, which, for reasons other than modesty, was at pains to deny any direct service in the royalist armies.79CCC 1389-9. Cornwallis’s statement may have been correct, for he was probably mainly used by the king as a trusted messenger. Examples of his acting in this role are numerous. In early July 1643 he was sent with instructions for Henrietta Maria as she made the risky journey from Lincolnshire to Oxford. Less distinguished was his conduct in October 1643, when his negligence in delivering a message to Sir Lewis Dyve† was blamed for the loss of Newport Pagnell.80Mems. of Prince Rupert, ii. 225, 322n. His only experience as a combatant during the civil war seems to have been at Cropredy Bridge in June 1644, when he is credited (again by Lloyd) with the rescue of Lord Wilmot (Henry Wilmot*).81Lloyd, Memoires, 662-3. Cornwallis attended the first session of the royalist Parliament at Oxford in January 1644 and it is likely that he also attended its second session held in late 1644 and early 1645.82Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574. During his time as a member of the court at Oxford, his first wife died and was buried in Christ Church Cathedral.83Collins, Peerage, ii. 550.

On the departure of the prince of Wales to the west in March 1645, Cornwallis went with him, perhaps because he was already treasurer of his household. When they reached Exeter that autumn, Cornwallis fell ill and so remained there, to be caught up in the siege of the town by Sir Thomas Fairfax*. After Exeter surrendered to Fairfax in April 1646, Cornwallis travelled to London and took the Negative Oath. Fearful of action by his creditors, he left the country and in July 1646 applied for permission to compound.84CCC 1390.

Calculating how much the delinquent Cornwallis now owed the parliamentarian authorities proved to be far from simple. The Committee for Advance of Money had already ordered him to pay £1,000 in July 1644.85CCAM 424. A second petition from Cornwallis to the Committee for Compounding in February 1648 revived his offer to compound. Rejecting his argument that his estates were controlled by his mother under the terms of the 1636 lease, the fine was fixed by the Committee at £800. In November 1648 Cornwallis persuaded them to reopen his case. Investigations by the Suffolk committee eventually established that the arrangement with his mother was not a ploy to avoid paying. In September 1650, by which time Lady Bacon had offered to compound for these lands, it was ruled that Cornwallis had failed to pay any of his fine. Permission to compound was therefore refused.86CCC 1390.

The Committee for Advance of Money were able to get at Cornwallis through Sir Henry Crofts’s† objection to Sir Frederick’s marriage to his daughter Elizabeth. Using Sir Henry’s power to block half of the £4,000 bequest left to Elizabeth by the late countess of Devonshire if she married without his consent, in March 1647 they decided that Lady Cornwallis could keep the £600 which had already been paid to her but that Crofts should pay the remaining £1,400 to Parliament.87CCAM 696. However, returning to Cornwallis’s own case in 1651, the Committee decided, on the grounds of his indebtedness, to reduce his assessment to £50. This money was paid in for him by Edmund Harvey II*.88CCC 1390.

Cornwallis spent part of the 1650s abroad with the exiled court. He was with Charles Stuart in Jersey in 1649 as his ‘purse-bearer’ and in November 1651 he was at The Hague, conducting financial business on behalf of the exiled king.89Hoskins, Charles the Second in the Channel Islands, ii. 315, 377; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 228; HMC Ormonde, n.s. i. 240-1; Nicholas Pprs. i. 299. It is likely that he now held the treasurership of the royal household or some position akin to it. But he did not spend the whole decade in exile. By early 1655 one of the spies of the secretary of state, John Thurloe*, was reporting that Cornwallis was one of the more important of the royalist agents operating in England. On 8 June 1655 Cornwallis was arrested in London in the large-scale operation to round up the leading royalist suspects. He was released from prison several months later.90TSP iii. 339, 537; CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 204, 588; Nicholas Pprs. iii. 5; Mems. of the Verney Family, ii. 18, 22. Later that year the Suffolk commissioners for securing the peace of the commonwealth regarded him as a royalist deserving of their attentions and summoned him to appear before them at Bury St Edmunds on 23 November. As his estates were still tied up in the lease to his mother, they were out of reach of the commissioners levying the decimation tax, but it was discovered that he had a personal estate worth a modest £100.91PRO30/11/268, f. 7; TSP, iv. 428. In the summer of 1656 his wife and his daughter, Henrietta Maria, received permission from the council of state to travel to France and it was in Paris later that year that Henrietta Maria died of consumption.92CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 582; Nicholas Pprs. iii. 286; Add. 34015, f. 63v. By June 1657 Lady Cornwallis was evidently back in England: one of Thurloe’s agents in France recommended then that she and Sir Frederick should be questioned as to the whereabouts of the 2nd duke of Buckingham.93TSP vi. 363; CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 6.

The death of Lady Bacon on 8 May 1659 allowed Cornwallis to resume some control over the family estates. Shortly before her death, she had evidently once again helped clear Cornwallis’s debts – on that occasion the obligations amounted to £7,000. By the complicated terms of her will, formal control of the estates was vested in a trust consisting of (Sir) Harbottle Grimston* (Lady Bacon’s son-in-law and husband of Cornwallis’s stepsister, Anne Bacon, widow of Thomas Meautys*), Charles Cornwallis (Sir Frederick’s eldest son), Charles Cornwallis† of Rock, Worcestershire (Sir Frederick's first cousin), and Edmund Harvey II. Any profits were left to Cornwallis and his heirs and it can be assumed that effective control of the estates rested with him.94PROB11/300/192; Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA411/Box 25, no. 1. Nicholas Bacon, Lady Bacon’s only son from her second marriage, died in January 1660 and the Bacon estates at Culford then passed into the possession of Cornwallis.95Copinger, Manors of Suff. i. 284-5.

Cornwallis’s fidelity to the royalist cause was fully rewarded by Charles II at the Restoration. He was confirmed in office as treasurer of the royal household and appointed to the privy council.96LS13/104, ff. 4-5; LS 13/170, ff. 4-64; PC2/54, f. 57. The reappointment of William Ashbournham as cofferer of the Household meant that Cornwallis’s former brother-in-law joined him on the board of greencloth. In April 1660 Cornwallis secured the return of his eldest son, Charles, for the senior parliamentary seat at Eye and he briefly joined him in the Convention, being elected at Ipswich in October 1660 in the by-election held after the death of Nathaniel Bacon*. Having already been promised a peerage, there was no need for Cornwallis to seek re-election at Ipswich in April 1661. He was among those raised to the rank of baron in the creation ceremony held on 22 April as a preliminary to the coronation the following day.97HMC 5th Rep. 159; Evelyn Diary ed. de Beer, iii. 277; C66/3000, mm. 29-30; Cent. Kent. Stud. U24/F2. But he did not have long in which to enjoy his new rank. An apoplectic fit on 7 January 1662 resulted in his death and he was buried at Brome at the end of the month.98Lloyd, Memoires, 663; Pepys, Diary, iii. 10; Collins, Peerage, ii. 550-1; PRO30/11/279, f. 136; PROB4/7012. Later that year his widow was granted a pension of £600 a year, in recognition of ‘the long, faithful and acceptable services’ she and her late husband had performed for Charles I, Henrietta Maria and Charles II.99CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 289, 353, 356, 368, 480; CTB i. 373, 412, 413, 675; C66/3027, m. 31.