HATTON, Sir Christopher (1605-1670), of Kirby Hall, Gretton, Northants., and Scotland Yard, Westminster

Hatton was descended from a branch of a Cheshire family that had acquired Holdenby, Northamptonshire, by marriage in the fifteenth century.46Vis. Cheshire (Harl. Soc. xviii), 115. In 1597, Hatton’s father Sir Christopher Hatton – MP for Buckingham, Bedford and Huntingdon in the early seventeenth century – had inherited from his second cousin, Sir William Hatton†, an estate in Northamptonshire and several other counties worth approximately £4-5,000 a year, which Sir William had acquired as heir to his uncle, Sir Christopher Hatton†, Elizabeth I’s lord chancellor. The latter had died owing huge sums to the crown, however, and those parts of his estate that were not seized by the exchequer or sold off had passed, in controversial circumstances, not to Sir Christopher but to Sir William’s widow, whose second husband was Sir Edward Coke†, then attorney-general. Sir Christopher and Sir Robert Rich† (who had married Sir William’s only surviving daughter) succeeded in wresting the estate from Coke’s hands in 1616-17, but the portion that fell to Sir Christopher consisted largely of lands in east Northamptonshire worth only about £1,600 a year.47HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Sir William Hatton (formerly Newport)’; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Christopher Hatton’; J.P. Wainwright, Musical Patronage in 17th century England: Christopher 1st Baron Hatton (Aldershot, 1997), 3, 5. This estate, which Hatton inherited at the age of 14 (his wardship being granted to his mother for £1,333), included lands and ecclesiastical patronage near Peterborough; and early in 1625 he was returned for the borough in a by-election, although he was still a minor at the time.48WARD9/162, f. 336; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Christopher Hatton’. He was re-elected for Peterborough to the first Caroline Parliament in 1625 and was created a knight of the bath at Charles I’s coronation in February 1626. His election for the Lancashire borough of Clitheroe in 1626 was secured with the assistance of his kinsman, the auditor of the duchy of Lancaster, William Fanshawe†.49HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Clitheroe’.

Hatton was active on the Northamptonshire bench in 1630 – as he probably was for much of the personal rule of Charles I – and as one of the county’s commissioners for knighthood fines in 1631-2.50Q. S. Recs. for the Co. of Northampton ed. J. Wake (Hereford, 1924), 26, 27, 33, 51, 92, 94; E178/7155, f. 134v. By the late 1630s, he was a patron to the ‘rabidly anti-puritan’ Peter Hausted and other Laudian clergymen. Moreover, his household chaplain, James Longman, favoured ‘altars and bowing to them’ and similar ‘innovations’. Hatton’s household at Kirby Hall functioned as a ‘miniature court’, affording patronage not only to ministers but also to playwrights, musicians and architects – many of them future royalists. He was especially generous in promoting the studies and career of the antiquary William Dugdale – another prominent future royalist – who described him as ‘a person highly affected to antiquities’. Hatton’s inquiring mind and hospitable nature allowed room for a range of opinions to be heard at Kirby Hall, for his dinner guests during the late 1630s also included local puritan ministers and laymen.51Diary of Robt. Woodford ed. J. Fielding (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, xlii), 48, 77, 122, 155, 181-2, 238-9; Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 11, 12-13, 169-73, 177, 181-2, 185; Dugdale, Warws. i. epistle ded.; Wainwright, Musical Patronage, 7-8, 9-10, 12-13, 208; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir William Dugdale’; ‘Peter Hausted’; Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts’, 46. But his artistic patronage and connoisseurship came at a high cost, obliging him to mortgage several of his properties to his uncle Sir Thomas Hatton*, Sir Edward Baeshe* and Sir Dudley North* and leaving him with debts that by 1642 amounted to £25,360.52Northants. RO, FH4106, 4446; SP23/200, pp. 103, 133-4; Wainwright, Musical Patronage, 11. Hatton also assigned part of his estate to his uncle Sir Robert Hatton* and Baeshe in 1640 to hold in trust after his death for the use of his wife.53SP23/200, pp. 129, 131.

Hatton campaigned as a court candidate for one of the county places in the Northamptonshire elections to the Short Parliament, early in 1640, but decided, or was persuaded, to withdraw from a contest in which he evidently enjoyed insufficient support, particularly among the county’s influential godly community.54Woodford Diary ed. Fielding, 342. He therefore turned his attention to the single-seat borough of Higham Ferrers, for which his father-in-law had been elected in the 1620s. Hatton’s office as duchy of Lancaster steward of Higham Ferrers and several nearby manors gave him a strong proprietorial interest in the borough. In addition, his loyalty to the Caroline regime and its policies won him the backing of the town’s Laudian vicar and its leading inhabitant: the king’s military engineer Thomas Rudd. His most effective coup, however, was to secure legal decisions from Chief Justice Sir Robert Heath†, Geoffrey Palmer* and Oliver St John*, asserting that the borough franchise properly comprised the generality of the townsmen rather than the municipal officeholders as had traditionally been the case. On election day, 28 March, Hatton was duly returned after out-polling the godly Northamptonshire gentleman Edward Harby*, who had refused to accept any widening of the electorate.55Supra, ‘Higham Ferrers’.

Hatton was named to four committees in the Short Parliament, including those established on 23 and 24 April to prepare for a conference with the Lords concerning the redress of grievances in church and state.56CJ ii. 4a, 4b, 10a, 12a. In the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, he was returned for both Higham Ferrers and the Norfolk borough of Castle Rising, where he was a nominee of Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel, whose artistic and academic circle and interests overlapped with those of Hatton. Both men were patrons of Dugdale, for example.57Supra, ‘Castle Rising’; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir William Dugdale’. Hatton’s reason for seeking a safe seat, courtesy of Arundel, is not clear, although it was probably to oblige the duchy of Lancaster and the queen’s council, which had both recommended another candidate for Higham Ferrers. However, the ‘loyalist’ interest in the town had insisted on returning Hatton again – apparently because the official candidate lacked sufficient support to prevail against the godly interest among the townsmen.58Supra, ‘Higham Ferrers’. On 9 November, Hatton waived his election at Castle Rising, where his place was taken by his uncle Sir Robert Hatton.59CJ ii. 22b.

Hatton was named to only two committees in the Long Parliament – the committee for privileges (6 Nov. 1640) and on a bill for reforming disorders in parliamentary elections (30 Mar. 1641).60CJ ii. 20b, 114a. In March 1641, Hatton and the godly Northamptonshire gentlemen John Crewe I* and Sir John Driden* lent £1,000 towards securing a loan from the City.61Procs. LP ii. 654, 655; Northants. RO, FH2876. His purchase that same month – probably on favourable terms – of a lease of the royal manor of Little Weldon, Northamptonshire, suggests that he was well insinuated at court.62SO3/12, f. 141. The fact that he took the Protestation on 12 May – over a week after it had been introduced – probably owed more to what was apparently his fitful attendance at Westminster rather than to misgivings concerning the oath itself.63CJ ii. 144a. That summer, fearful of what the spreading ‘Presbyterian contagion’ in public affairs might portend, he persuaded Dugdale to tour the kingdom’s cathedrals and principal churches, making ‘exact draughts’ of their monuments, ‘to the end that the memory of them, in case of that ruin then imminent, might be preserved for future and better times’.64Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 14; Hist. of St Paul’s Cathedral (1658), epistle ded. There is also evidence that Hatton knew the Cheshire episcopalian polemicist Sir Thomas Aston* and shared his commitment to mobilising support for the episcopate.65R. Cust, ‘The defence of episcopacy on the eve of civil war: Jeremy Taylor and the Rutland petition of 1641’, Jnl. of Eccles. Hist. lxviii. 78-9. The royalist divine Jeremy Taylor would dedicate his 1642 treatise defending episcopacy to Hatton, who became his principal patron.66Taylor, Of the Sacred Order, and Offices of Episcopacy (1642), epistle ded.; Theologia Eklektike. A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (1647), epistle ded.; Wainwright, Musical Patronage, 13-14.

Hatton was granted leave of absence on 5 August 1641 and again on 16 December, when Sir Guy Palmes assured the House that once Hatton had attended to some personal business ‘he would return with all speed’.67CJ ii. 238b, 344b; D’Ewes (C), 296. That assurance was not honoured, however, for there is no evidence that Hatton ever resumed his seat. In a letter written from Kirby on 5 June 1642 to his friend Sir Justinian Isham†, Hatton revealed that he was in communication with the royal court at York (it was later alleged that he ‘been formerly at York, with the king’) and involved in what seems to have been the selection process for the Northamptonshire commission of array.68Northants. RO, IC/243; Add. 29550, f. 50; PJ iii. 336. At the call of the House on 16 June, Sir Robert Hatton claimed to have received a letter from his nephew ‘showing that he was sick’. But this did not convince a majority of the Members, who voted by 142 to 122 against excusing Hatton’s absence. The losing tellers were Sir Robert Hatton and John Selden.69CJ ii. 626b; PJ iii. 87.

Appointed to the Northamptonshire and Rutland commissions of array in the summer of 1642, Hatton emerged as one of the king’s most committed adherents in the region.70Northants. RO, FH133, 2871; Add. 29548, ff. 7, 9; HMC Montagu, 155, 156, 157-8. On 20 August, a week after the Commons had summoned Hatton to return to Westminster (13 Aug.), the godly Northampton MP Richard Knightley informed the House that Hatton, his uncle Sir Robert, Geoffrey Palmer and Sir Robert Napier* ‘were providing of horses to send to the king’, whereupon they were ‘summoned forthwith to attend the service of the House, all excuses laid aside’.71CJ ii. 719b, 729a; PJ iii. 311. Following the reading on 7 September of a letter from the Northamptonshire parliamentary committee, the Commons voted to disable Sir Christopher and Sir Robert Hatton from sitting.72CJ ii. 755b; PJ iii. 336. Hatton had joined the king at Oxford by April 1643, when he was named to the royalist commission for the defence of the city.73Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 30-1. A willing contributor of money to the king’s service, and ‘of great reputation’ in royalist circles, he was created Lord Hatton of Kirby in July and, in December, appointed a privy councillor and comptroller of the king’s household.74PC2/53, p. 223; SO3/12, f. 232v; CCAM 996, 1000, 1001, 1003, 1004; CP; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 507; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 536. He was an active member of the royalist council of war from the autumn of 1643.75Harl. 6851, f. 229; Harl. 6802, f. 17. He attended the upper House in the Oxford Parliament early in 1644 and signed its letter to the earl of Essex on 27 January urging him to compose a peace.76Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573; SP23/200, p. 126. Appointed one of the king’s commissioners at the treaty of Uxbridge early in 1645, he named Dugdale among his personal attendants at the negotiations.77LJ vii. 150a, 151b.

In March 1645, secretary of state Sir Edward Nicholas† heard a rumour that Hatton intended to go to London ‘and quit the king’ and chided him that ‘it seems by your long absence [from Oxford] you care little for our company here’.78Add. 29549, f. 54. In fact, Hatton had been at Oxford as late as 23 February, but his dissatisfaction with proceedings there would surface dramatically that summer in a bitter falling out, apparently over court preferment, between him and his friend James Compton*, 3rd earl of Northampton.79Harl. 6802, f. 17 In the course of this feud a detailed dossier was complied and circulated at court of Hatton’s private and highly disparaging observations concerning his fellow courtiers and the king, whom he supposedly described as ‘a most irresolute man and so false that he was not to be trusted’.80Add. 29570, f. 89v and passim. Although he denied these allegations, they almost certainly damaged his relations with Charles and with his court colleagues.81Add. 29570, f. 68; Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 83. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, these accusations, he seems to have aligned during the last year of the civil war with the hardliners in Oxford who favoured fighting on to the bitter end rather than negotiating a soft peace with Parliament.82CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 140; Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 87; Charles I in 1646 ed. J. Bruce (Cam. Soc. lxiii), 53. Having had his request for a parliamentary pass to travel abroad denied by the Commons in April 1646, he was still in Oxford when it surrendered a few months later.83CJ iv. 509b, 510a; LJ viii. 270b; Wainwright, Musical Patronage, 17. In November, he left England for France, but not before petitioning to compound on the Oxford articles. His fine was set at a tenth – that is, £4,156.84CCC 1579-80; CJ vi. 34a; Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 93.

In the summer of 1648, at the height of the second civil war, Hatton attended the counsels of the queen and the prince of Wales in Paris, but was consistently hostile to the powerful Francophile and pro-Scottish alliance faction there – the so-called ‘Louvre group’ headed by Henry Lord Jermyn* and John Lord Culpeper*.85Bodl. Clarendon 31, f. 106; SP23/233, pp. 217-18; Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 95; Nicholas Pprs. i. 90-1, 116-17, 149-52, 159, 173-6, 204, 207, 213, 214, 294. In October, Parliament passed an ordinance granting him a pardon, and his fine was reduced in February 1649, on review, to £3,226.86CJ vi. 34a; LJ x. 532b; CCC 1580. By the end of that year, however, there was growing suspicion at Westminster that Hatton was complicit in Charles II’s designs; and in March 1650, after receiving a report from the council of state that he was in France ‘with the late queen and her son and is active there against this commonwealth’, the Commons voted that his estate be sequestered.87CJ vi. 386a; CCC 233, 1580. After the king’s defeat at Worcester in September 1651, it was reported from Paris that Hatton, in order to ‘save his estate in England’, had ceased to attend the king unless ordered to do so.88CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 3.

In February 1654, Lady Hatton petitioned the protector for the discharge of her husband’s estate, claiming that he had gone abroad to lead a ‘retired life’ and to pay off his debts (which amounted to £59,871 by the late 1640s), and that since then – contrary to the ‘base suggestion’ received by the Rump in March 1650 – he had done nothing against the state. In March 1654, the protectoral council ordered that Hatton’s estate be discharged, having received a report that he was not countenanced by the court and was aggrieved that he had been passed over for appointment as a gentleman of the bedchamber and a privy councillor.89Northants. RO, FH4106, 4446; SP23/200, pp. 103, 134; SP23/233, pp. 213, 218; CCC 1580. Hatton’s correspondence during the mid-1650s betrays little sense of thwarted political ambition – he was apparently more interested in securing a viscountcy than a major court office. But it does reveal that he had no direct contact with the court by this point and that his main role in royalist politics was as a Paris-based intelligencer for Nicholas, Sir Edward Hyde* and their allies.90Nicholas Pprs. i. 246-7, 249, 303; ii. 90, 94, 100-1, 143-4, 147, 159, 215; iii. pp. vi, 4, 7. In September 1656, the council of state granted his request for a pass to return to England, where – he informed Nicholas – he intended to ‘walk circumspectly’.91CSP Dom. 1656-7, pp.116, 583; Nicholas Pprs. iii. 283-4, 291. In October 1659, he proposed a scheme to Hyde for restoring monarchy by way of a marriage between Charles II and the daughter of John Lambert*, but nothing came of this far-fetched idea. In the event, Hatton’s son Christopher proved considerably more useful to Hyde and more active in the Restoration than did his father.92CCSP iv. pp. xii-xiii, xv, 278, 427-8, 450 and passim. Both father and son signed the loyal address to Charles II from Northamptonshire in the spring of 1660.93SP29/1/41, f. 80; May it Please Your Most Excellent Maiesty (1660, 669 f.25/49).

At the Restoration, Hatton failed in his bid for the office of treasurer of the king’s household; and a royal warrant of 1649 for creating him a viscount was never ratified. He attended his seat in the Lords in the 1660 Convention and in the Cavalier Parliament from 1661-3 and 1669-70.94CSP Dom. 1682, p. 583; HP Lords 1660-1715, ‘Christopher Hatton, 1st Baron Hatton’. Restored to the privy council early in 1662, he was appointed governor of Guernsey in May, although he did not embark for the island until February 1664.95PC2/55, f. 269; CSP Dom. 1670, p. 671; HP Lords 1660-1715, ‘Christopher Hatton, 1st Baron Hatton’. In 1663, he intervened, unsuccessfully, on behalf of his son Christopher Hatton† in the Northampton by-election. Once installed on Guernsey, Hatton’s increasingly erratic judgment and high-handed behaviour quickly alienated the islanders. His huge debts – which had forced him to convey most of his estate to trustees for the repayment of his creditors – also encouraged him to use his position to misappropriate government funds. After a little over a year in Guernsey he was forced to return to England to answer for his mismanagement, leaving his duties in the more capable hands of his deputy.96HP Lords 1660-1715, ‘Christopher Hatton, 1st Baron Hatton’; Wainwright, Musical Patronage, 19-21.

For much of the remainder of his life, Hatton lived in lodgings in Scotland Yard, Westminster, where he ‘diverted himself with the company and discourse of players and such idle people that came to him, while his family lived in want at Kirby’.97R. North, Lives of the Norths, ed. A. Jessopp (1890), ii. 294. According to Dugdale, Hatton died in London on 5 July 1670.98Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 132. He was buried at Westminster Abbey in August.99Westminster Abbey Regs. 172. He was succeeded as 2nd Baron Hatton by his son Christopher, who was created Viscount Hatton of Gretton in 1683.100HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Hon. Christopher Hatton’.