PERCY, Algernon, Lord Percy (1602-1668), of Petworth, Suss.; later of Northumberland House, Westminster

Percy was descended from William de Percy, who probably took his name from Percy-en-Auge, in Calvados, Normandy. He came to England shortly after the Conquest, becoming an important Yorkshire baron before his death on the First Crusade.30 Oxford DNB sub Percy, William de. A member of the family represented Yorkshire in Parliament as early as 1297, and in 1377 Henry Percy, the father of Henry ‘Hotspur’, was made earl of Northumberland. However, the Percys were frequently at odds with royal authority and consequently the earldom fell into abeyance in 1537. In 1557 it was conferred on Percy’s great-uncle, who was executed in 1572 for his part in the rising of the northern earls. It was nevertheless allowed to pass, by a special remainder, to Percy’s grandfather, but the family were obliged to live at Petworth, their west Sussex residence, although they retained vast estates in the north.31 OR; CP, ix. 710, 713, 728-30.

Percy’s father secured the place of captain of the band of gentleman pensioners at the accession of James and a place on the Privy Council, but he unwisely admitted his kinsman, the gunpowder plotter Sir Thomas Percy, to the band without first requiring him to take the Oath of Supremacy, and consequently spent 16 years in the Tower, where his taste for chemical experiments earned him the sobriquet of ‘the Wizard Earl’. During this period of enforced inactivity he doubled his rent-roll to nearly £13,000 p.a., and applied himself to the education of his heir ‘to wean him from his nursery company and his mother’s wings’ at an early age. From 1608 Percy spent considerable time in the Tower with his father and may have fallen under the influence of another prisoner, Sir Walter Ralegh†. When he left the Tower for Cambridge in 1615, Northumberland thought him ‘raw and behind many of his age’, and drew his tutor’s attention to his bashfulness, ‘partly to be excused in him, for all our name are subject rather to few words than to much babbling’. The backwardness was curable, Northumberland himself admitting that by 1618 Percy had ‘a piece of the scholar’ and would readily ‘gain the tongues’ on travelling in Europe under the conduct of Edward Dowse*.32 Batho, 139-40, 142-3; HMC Hatfield, xxi. 99. He maintained his reserve: ‘no man’, observed Clarendon (Edward Hyde†), ‘had ever fewer idle words to answer for’.33 Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion ed. W.D. Macray, ii. 537.

Northumberland was released as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners in the summer of 1621 and Percy, having come of age two years later, was returned for Sussex in 1624.34 T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, ii. 269. He was appointed to six committees in the last Jacobean Parliament. On 27 Feb. he was named to the committee to consider the dishonour allegedly done to the duke of Buckingham by the Spanish ambassador, and he was among those instructed to confer with the Lords on 3 Mar. about the address for breaking off negotiations for the Spanish Match. He was also appointed to attend conferences with the peers on the monopolies bill (8 Apr.), and to serve on committees for bills on limitations and the abuse of privilege in the Exchequer (1 May). On 16 Apr. he was named to the committee to ‘agree of the heads of a bill about finding of horse and armour’, and was likewise among those instructed to inquire into the abuses of heraldry 12 days later. On 29 Apr. he presented the names of Sussex office-holders suspected of Catholicism. The wife of his father’s former servant (Sir) Edward Fraunceys* and some of the earl of Arundel’s servants did not attend church, he declared, while three commissioners of sewers were ‘absolute papists’.35 CJ, i. 676b, 693a, 695a, 722a, 757b, 768a; ‘Holland 1624’, ii. f. 53v.

After the end of that Parliament Percy joined his brother-in-law, James Hay, 1st earl of Carlisle, and his cousin Viscount Kensington (Henry Rich*) in France, where they were negotiating Prince Charles’s marriage, and returned in the autumn, ‘with good news as is presumed’, reported Chamberlain, ‘else would they not make him the messenger’.36 HMC 7th Rep. 221; Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, ii. 580. The following year he was returned at Chichester, some 12 miles from Petworth. In the first Caroline Parliament he was named to attend the conference with the Lords of 23 June 1625 on the petition for a fast, and was among those ordered six days later to consider a bill to prevent the corrupt procurement of judicial places.37 Procs. 1625, pp. 228, 269. He is not known to have attended at Oxford, where much time was spent in attacking the anti-Calvinist writings of Richard Montagu, then rector of Petworth and on good terms with Percy’s father.38 Oxford DNB sub Mountague, Richard; Corresp. of John Cosin, i. ed. G. Ornsby (Surtees Soc. lii), 31, 44, 51, 73.

Re-elected for Chichester in 1626, Percy was appointed to four committees. He was instructed to attend the conferences with the Lords on the Commons’ invitation to Buckingham to explain the renewed detention of the St. Peter (4 Mar.), and on matters of defence (8 March). He was also appointed, on 25 Mar., to consider the bill ‘for the making of the arms of the kingdom more serviceable’.39 Procs. 1626, ii. 195, 216, 367. His conduct in the House and elsewhere must have been such as to encourage Buckingham in the hope that he would prove useful to him in the Lords, for on 28 Mar. he was called up in right of his father’s barony. He received his father’s proxy, which had previously been given to the duke, and after the Parliament it was rumoured that he would purchase the mastership of the horse from Buckingham, although in the event he only received the equivalent position in the queen’s Household.40 Ibid. i. 216; iv. 11, 346. In the summer of 1628, however, he resigned his office at Court, and retired to the country, having become disillusioned with Buckingham. Indeed, later that year he told his father-in-law, the 2nd earl of Salisbury, that he did not lament the duke’s recent assassination.41 CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 218; HMC Hatfield, xxii. 246.

By 1633 Percy had succeeded to his father’s title and had returned to Westminster, being described by Carlisle in March of that year as ‘one of the honestest, discreetest, and ablest young lords about the Court’. He rose rapidly in the 1630s, despite chronic ill health, becoming a privy councillor and lord admiral.42 Strafforde Letters (1739) ed. W. Knowler, i. 220; ii. 168; Clarendon, i. 189, 354. He nonetheless wrote in January 1640 that a loan of £5,000 towards fighting the Covenanters was all that Charles could expect from one ‘whose house has in these latter ages received little or no advantage from the Crown’.43 HMC 3rd Rep. 80. After commanding Charles I’s army in the Second Bishops’ War he took the side of Parliament in the Civil War, but became a leader of the peace party in the Lords, and protested against the trial of the king. He received a pardon at the Restoration, and was re-appointed to the Privy Council. He drew up his will on 10 Apr. 1667, added one codicil seven days later and another on 30 Mar. 1668, the last granting an annuity to his nephew, the republican Algernon Sidney†. He died on 13 Oct. 1668, and was buried at Petworth on 4 November. His only son died within less than two years, leaving a daughter, through whom the estates and name of Percy passed eventually to Sir Hugh Smithson†, who was made duke of Northumberland in 1766.44 S.R. Gardiner, Hist. of Gt. Civil War, i. 53; iv. 289; HMC Pepys, 295; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 44; PROB 11/328, ff. 155-9; CP, ix. 738-40, 743.