MONTAGU (MOUNTAGU), William (c.1618-1706), of the Middle Temple, London and Little Oakley, Northants.

William Montagu’s great-grandfather, Sir Edward Montagu (d.1557), had risen to become lord chief justice of king’s bench and of common pleas, and it was probably always envisaged that William, as a younger son, would seek to emulate that example. After following his elder brother, Edward*, to Sidney Sussex, he enrolled at the Middle Temple and began his studies to become a lawyer. Even before being called to the bar, he was conducting business in London on behalf of his father, most notably in 1639 when he assisted his brother and his uncle, the 1st earl of Manchester (Henry Montagu†), in deciding what assistance it would be politic for Lord Montagu to offer the king for the military campaign against the Scots.32HMC Buccleuch, i. 265-6, 276-84. As Manchester was lord privy seal, William already had useful connections at court and in early 1639 he was able to inform his father that he was ‘much bound’ to Lord Keeper Coventry (Sir Thomas Coventry†).33HMC Buccleuch, i. 280.

Through Manchester’s influence Montagu got the chance to sit in the Short Parliament of 1640. Both seats at Huntingdon were securely in the earl’s gift and, having nominated his steward, Robert Bernard*, for one of the seats, he made the other available to his nephew. It is not clear why William was chosen rather than his elder brother, but it may have been felt that William, as a prospective professional lawyer, had more to gain from the experience. Once elected, he was probably content to spend most of the session watching and learning. In the dispute which formed the climax to this Parliament’s proceedings, Lord Montagu is known to have supported the Commons’ view that grievances should take precedence over supply.34E.S. Cope, The Life of a Public Man - Edward, First Baron Montagu of Boughton (1981), 173-4. His son’s only recorded intervention was during the debate on this issue on 2 May 1640 and it is likely that his speech, which called for a sub-committee to be appointed to consider what reply they should give to the king, was likewise intended to assert the priority of the Commons’ grievances.35Aston’s Diary, 126. As a young lawyer-to-be, Montagu might have been expected to flourish in the Commons and for a novice MP aged only about 22 to speak in a major debate of this sort certainly showed promise. Yet it would be almost 20 years to the day before he again sat in Parliament.

That autumn Montagu stepped aside to allow his brother, Edward, to succeed him as MP for Huntingdon and he was forced to watch the events of the Long Parliament from the side-lines. In November 1641, four months after his call to the bar, he acquired chambers in the Temple, whereupon he told his father that he had done so ‘upon pure obedience to your commands, even contrary to my own inclination’.36Mins. of Parl. of MT, ii. 916-17; HMC Buccleuch, i. 285, 287-9. Whether this referred only to the new rooms or to more general doubts about a legal career was not made clear. It may be that, for Montagu, events elsewhere within the palace of Westminster now made the law courts in Westminster Hall seem something of a backwater.

There is no doubt that Montagu followed political events closely – he kept a copy of the king’s speech from the throne at the opening of the Long Parliament on 3 November 1640 and two copies of the speech by Sir Benjamin Rudyard* delivered four days later.37C108/63: speech of Charles I, 3 Nov. 1640; speech of Sir Benjamin Rudyard, [7 Nov. 1640] (two copies). After Lord Montagu had withdrawn to the country in February 1641, Montagu regularly wrote to his father with information on the latest developments in London, and the 21 surviving letters from him covering the period from November 1641 until June 1642 form important first-hand testimony of the descent into civil war.38HMC Buccleuch, i. 285-91, 293-7, 299-306; HMC Montagu, 149-50. Much was recounted without comment and so provides few clues as to what he himself thought, but occasionally his own attitudes show through. Following the celebrations to greet the king’s return to London on 25 November 1641, Montagu suggested that the king and queen had ‘a policy in it to see if they can gain the city, but God forbid, for if they [the city] hold not firm we are all undone’.39HMC Buccleuch, i. 286. (That same day he had visited his cousin, Geoffrey Palmer*, in the Tower, where he had been sent after protesting against the Grand Remonstrance.40HMC Buccleuch, i. 286.) Already suspicious of the king’s intentions, he could assume in early December 1641, on the basis of the king’s reshuffle of the leading court offices, that ‘the good party is tottering’.41HMC Buccleuch, i. 288. Unfortunately, a gap in the correspondence means that the account he doubtless wrote reporting the king’s attempt to arrest his cousin, Viscount Mandeville (Edward Montagu†), together with the Five Members, on 4 January 1642 does not survive.

By the middle of February 1642, by which time the surviving correspondence had resumed, Montagu was a bit more optimistic.42HMC Buccleuch, i. 291. He had several times expressed the view that, amid the confusion at Westminster, the plight of ‘poor Ireland’ was being ignored.43HMC Buccleuch, i. 287, 289. He therefore advised his father in March 1642 that it would be worth investing £500 or £1,000 in the Irish Adventure, given that it was ‘a very feasible business, if, please God, our distractions were but settled’.44HMC Buccleuch, i. 293. Lord Montagu failed to heed him and William probably could not yet afford to invest any money himself. By April his father had formed the view that a settlement would be reached only if Parliament met away from London, a suggestion which Montagu had to explain was not likely to be accepted.45HMC Buccleuch, i. 297. On 9 June he told his father that he agreed with him in his desire for a peaceful settlement, only that such an outcome was now very unlikely.46HMC Buccleuch, i. 304. By this stage both must have realised that their views on these events were diverging. Lord Montagu, deeply troubled about the idea of choosing sides at all, wrote back to tell his son that, for all his devotion to Parliament, he could not accept that the Lords and Commons had the right to act independently of the king.47HMC Buccleuch, iii. 414. Montagu, in contrast, was much more inclined to accept that Parliament’s behaviour was understandable. The final letter of this series, written on 27 June, informed Lord Montagu that, together with Mildmay Fane†, 2nd earl of Westmorland, and John Mordaunt, 1st earl of Peterborough, he headed the commission of array which the king had issued for Northamptonshire.48HMC Buccleuch, i. 306. It was this stance which, in part, explains why correspondence from son to father was not continued. That September the Commons summoned Lord Montagu to London as a delinquent for having implemented this commission and, after spending several days in the Tower, he was detained at his London house in the Savoy.49CJ ii. 760a; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 317; Cope, Life of a Public Man, 190-7. Thereafter there was no need for him and his younger son to keep in touch by letter.

With the ending of this correspondence, Montagu suddenly becomes a much more shadowy figure. Little is known about his legal career during the 1640s and 1650s, but, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems likely that he spent these years quietly building up his practice.50Mins. of Parl. of MT, ii. 945, iii. 1026, 1045. A few of the legal deeds which survive among his papers and which probably relate to the affairs of some of his clients date from this period.51C108/62-3. Several of those clients were leading royalists in financial trouble following their support for the king. In 1648 Viscount Campden (Baptist Noel*) mortgaged his lands at Immingham, Lincolnshire, to Montagu in return for a loan of £5,000.52C108/63: indenture, 20 May 1652. Similarly, from 1649 onwards Montagu and his neighbour, Francis Harvey*, acted as trustees for Lord Hatton (Sir Christopher Hatton*), the husband of one of Montagu’s cousins, in order to underwrite Hatton’s debts.53CCC 1581; C108/62: indenture, 18 Jan. 1657. These were probably just straightforward financial deals. There is no reason to suppose that, like his elder brother, he played any active part in the civil war or its aftermath.

The death of his father in June 1644 helped establish Montagu as a Northamptonshire landowner in his own right. Under the terms of an agreement which had been completed shortly after his birth, Montagu now inherited the estate at Little Oakley, several miles to the north of Boughton, which had been left to Lord Montagu by his uncle, William Montagu.54C142/684, f. 51. It was in anticipation of this that these lands had been leased to Montagu since 1639.55C108/62: indenture, 27 Sept. 1639. Constrained by this prior bequest, Lord Montagu left instructions that his adjacent lands at Great Oakley, Stanion and Geddington should pass to his younger son to form a convenient bequest.56Bridges, Northants. ii. 329; PROB11/196/404. The house at Little Oakley henceforth became Montagu’s principal country seat. The other lands he inherited from his father were at Seaton in Rutland, which he sold in 1646 for £9,000.57C108/62: indenture, 20 Oct. 1646; C108/63: indentures, 29 Oct. 1646 and 18 Jan. 1649. It seems likely that Montagu was the member of the family who used his influence with his cousin, the 2nd earl of Manchester (formerly Lord Mandeville), to secure a decree from him in September 1644 by which the parliamentarian forces were ordered to leave the dower house of Lord Montagu’s widow at Barnwell unmolested.58C108/62: warrant, 10 Sept. 1644.

With a career and a country estate to his name, Montagu was now able to consider marriage. Although his first wife, Elizabeth Freman, died after only one year, he evidently kept in touch with her family, for it was presumably he who in 1662 would arrange for his first wife’s brother, Ralph Freman†, to marry his second’s wife’s younger sister.59Kimber and Johnson, Baronetage, ii. 73-4. That second wife’s father, Sir John Aubrey, one of the leading landowners in Glamorgan, had passionately supported the king during the civil war.60P. Jenkins, The making of a ruling class – the Glamorgan gentry 1640-1790 (Cambridge, 1983), 114, 120, 118-19, 123. After attending a dinner held by the countess of Sandwich in 1662, at which Montagu and his wife had been present, Samuel Pepys† would write of Mary Montagu that, ‘she seemed so far from the beauty that I expected her from my lady’s talk to be, that it put me into an ill humour all the day to find my expectation so lost’.61Pepys’s Diary, iii. 1-2. He was more charitable six year later when he described her as ‘a fine woman’.62Pepys’s Diary, viii. 598.

Montagu’s legal career prospered to such an extent that he was shortlisted for the position of recorder of London in 1655.63LMA, COL/CA/01/01/067, f. 347v. (Lislebone Long* was appointed instead.) Montagu’s appointment as a Northamptonshire assessment commissioner in June 1657 was in line with moves to include men who had hitherto avoided involvement in local government during the protectorate.64A. and O. This marked the initiation into county affairs which, under other circumstances, Montagu might have expected by right a decade earlier. He had no difficulty in accepting the Restoration three years later. Something of his attitude to these events emerged in his remarks in November 1660 welcoming the arrest of the Fifth Monarchy Men who had had ‘a horrid intention of murdering the king and divers of the nobility’, praying that ‘God defend him [the king] from such blood-thirsty men’.65HMC Buccleuch, i. 312.

If Montagu had failed to fulfil his full potential during the 1640s and the 1650s, the decades after 1660 were to be very different. His practice as a lawyer went from strength to strength and his cousin, the earl of Sandwich (Edward Montagu II*), was just one prominent client who made regular use of his services.66Pepys’s Diary, i. 94, 95, 271, 294, 310, ii. 3, iv. 45, viii. 190, ix. 28; Bodl. Carte 73, ff. 341, 345; Carte 223, ff. 264-265; Carte 74, f. 343. His appointment in 1662 as Catherine of Braganza’s attorney-general proved to be the stepping stone to a distinguished judicial career as chief baron of the exchequer, which was only ended by James II’s purge of the bench in 1686. He sat in Parliament from 1660 as an active supporter of the court until his elevation to the court of exchequer forced him to resign his seat, and, despite his advancing years, he was able to sit again in the 1690s.67HP Commons 1660-1690; HP Commons 1690-1715. He lived on into the reign of Queen Anne, finally dying in late August 1706. His lands passed first to his only surviving child, Lady Drake, who died leaving no heir, and then, after litigation, to his elder brother’s grandson, John, 2nd duke of Montagu.68PROB11/490/86; Bridges, Northants. ii. 329; HMC Lords, n.s. x. 247-7.