MONTAGU, Edward, Visct. Hinchingbrooke (1648-88).

Lord Hinchingbrooke was returned for Dover at a contested by-election in 1670 as the court candidate, but with the support of the ‘fanatics’. In his one session in the Lower House he was appointed to only five committees, none of which was of political importance, and was named as a court supporter on an opposition list. In the House of Lords he was probably very irregular in attendance, being absent from the exclusion vote in 1680. Nor was he active in public affairs; his lord lieutenancies of Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire must have been entirely nominal, for he had previously retired to France, probably for reasons of health. In 1684 the 2nd Earl of Clarendon (Henry Hyde) asked Sir William Temple to persuade Sandwich to return. ‘Indeed his being so long at Saintes in the manner he has done, in so profound a retirement, seems very strange’, especially as he had ‘two hopeful sons to whom he is quite a stranger’. He appears to have been seriously ill in the spring of 1686 and died shortly before 29 Nov. 1688. The 3rd earl was of weak intellect, but a grandson sat for Huntingdon as a Whig from 1713 to 1722.2CSP Dom. 1670, pp. 228, 494, 506; HMC Hastings, ii. 198; Harris, ii. 180, 289.