LEIGH, Francis (1598-1653)

Leigh’s great-grandfather was a wealthy London merchant who acquired a substantial Warwickshire estate in the mid sixteenth century, paving the way for two aristocratic lines. Thomas Leigh^†, 1st Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh, was descended from the merchant’s second son, while the youngest established the King’s Newnham branch. Leigh’s father and grandfather both married into families which acquired peerages in 1603, namely the Egertons and Haringtons.23 Vis. Warws. 10-11; VCH Warws. vi. 193-4. While Leigh’s great-uncle John Harington^*, 1st Lord Harington, achieved prominence as guardian to Princess Elizabeth, the greater influence on his early life was undoubtedly his maternal grandfather, Lord Ellesmere^* (later 1st Viscount Brackley). Successively lord keeper and lord chancellor, and one of the lynchpins of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean government, Ellesmere encouraged Leigh’s father to pursue a court career, which culminated with a minor office in Prince Henry’s household.24 SP14/67/147.

Born in Westminster in 1598, Leigh probably spent his early years either in the environs of Whitehall or at Apps Court, his father’s seat near the royal palace of Oatlands.25 St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 27; VCH Surr. iii. 473. Between 1612 and 1617 his family faced a series of social setbacks, with the deaths of Prince Henry and Lord Ellesmere, and the extinction of the Harington peerage. Nevertheless, in 1618 Leigh revived his court ties by marrying Audrey Anderson, née Boteler, niece of the royal favourite George Villiers^*, marquess (later 1st duke) of Buckingham. A knighthood and baronetcy followed within months, though Leigh received few other marks of Buckingham’s favour until his appointment as a trade commissioner in 1625. Meanwhile, he cultivated another aristocratic kinsman, Fulke Greville^*, 1st Lord Brooke, who arranged for him to represent Warwick in the 1625 and 1626 parliaments and made him a trustee of his estates in February 1628. Shortly afterwards Leigh came into his patrimony, consisting of more than 22,000 acres, primarily in Warwickshire.26 CSP Dom. Addenda, 1625-49, p. 94; PROB 11/154, ff. 286-90; WARD 7/85/130.

During 1628 several of Buckingham’s relatives received peerages, probably in order to boost the duke’s support in the House of Lords. They included Leigh’s brother-in-law Edward Howard^* and father-in-law John Boteler^*, who were ennobled on 12 Apr. and 30 July respectively as Lord Howard of Escrick and Lord Boteler. On 31 July Leigh himself became Lord Dunsmore. It is not known whether money changed hands, but Dunsmore had certainly helped pave the way for a peerage by lending the government £2,000 just a few months earlier. However, the duke’s assassination in August effectively negated any political purpose behind his advancement.27 CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 536.

Dunsmore attended two-thirds of the 1629 parliamentary session, taking his seat on 21 Jan., when Edward Noel^*, 1st Lord Noel and Edward Montagu^*, 1st Lord Montagu acted as his supporters. He made no extant speeches, and received just one committee nomination, to help consider a proposal first made by Buckingham in 1628, for a new academy to train aristocratic children.28 LJ, iv. 8a, 39b; HMC Buccleuch, iii. 331.

Following his grant of a peerage, Dunsmore was added to the Warwickshire bench and the Midland counties’ commission of oyer and terminer, but his public career failed to develop any further during the next decade. In part his character may have held him back. Edward Hyde^†, 1st earl of Clarendon described him as ‘a man of a rough and tempestuous nature, violent in pursuing what he wished, without judgment or temper to know the way of bringing it to pass’.29 Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion, ii. 533. There was clearly some basis for this observation. In September 1628 Dunsmore was summoned before the Privy Council to explain his ‘recent unkindnesses’ towards his father-in-law. However, that incident did not prevent Lord Boteler nine years later from appointing Dunsmore as both his executor and guardian of his heir, the mentally enfeebled William Boteler^*, 2nd Lord Boteler.30 APC, 1628-9, pp. 168-9; PROB 11/175, f. 187v; CSP Dom. 1637, p. 556. Moreover, in 1632, another of his kinsmen by marriage, Thomas Meautys^‡, trusted Dunsmore to act as his front man in the purchase of the former estates of Francis Bacon^*, Viscount St Alban.31 Clutterbuck, Herts. i. 93, 444; ii. 46-7, 476; C54/2938/17; L. Jardine and A. Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, 513, 515. If Dunsmore lacked judgment, it was probably in allowing himself to be drawn too frequently into such arrangements, which tended to strain his finances and lead to litigation. His annual income has been estimated at £3,000, but he had to stump up double that sum on Meautys’ behalf, albeit briefly. Almost simultaneously he needed to find another £2,600, after being sued by his sister Juliana for non-payment of her dowry.32 A. Hughes, Pols., Soc. and Civil War in Warws. 26; C54/2938/17; V. Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture, 54-6. In 1629 he was outlawed on account of his role as a trustee of Lord Brooke’s estate, and he experienced similar troubles as executor to the debt-ridden 1st Lord Boteler. When, in 1637, the Privy Council pursued Dunsmore for not paying his promised £100 subscription to the Fishery Society, he claimed that he could not currently find the money, having been ‘forced to pay great sums for other men’s debts’.33 SO3/9, unfol. (Dec. 1629); CSP Dom. 1637, pp. 199-200, 248, 556. During these years, he borrowed at least £5,850 in short-term loans, while in 1631 he had to sell one of his already mortgaged manors.34 LC4/58/228, 351; 4/65/43; 4/66/163; C54/2841/5; 54/2886/16-17; 54/2955/113; 54/2996/87, 154; 54/3106/97.

As joint executor to Lord Boteler, Dunsmore worked closely in the later 1630s with his brother-in-law, the prominent courtier Endymion Porter^‡.35 CSP Dom. 1637, p. 556; PROB 11/175, f. 188; LC4/66/182; HMC Cowper, ii. 170. However, around the same time he also increasingly mixed with peers who were critical of the government, including his kinsman Robert Greville^*, 2nd Lord Brooke and the latter’s father-in-law, Francis Russell^*, 4th earl of Bedford. In 1638 he and Bedford became trustees of the estates of another reformist nobleman, Oliver St. John^*, 1st earl of Bolingbroke, while in February 1639 Dunsmore was party to the marriage settlement for Bolingbroke’s heir, Oliver St. John^†, Lord St. John (later 2nd earl of Bolingbroke).36 Hughes, 125, 143; C54/3237/14.

Summoned to attend Charles I at York in the spring of 1639, in preparation for the first Bishops’ War, Dunsmore was one of 15 peers who actually turned up in person. However, he once again sided with the crown’s critics during the Short Parliament of 1640, opposing the king’s demand for supply. This ‘popular’ stance led to his appointment in the following autumn to help negotiate with the invading Scots at the Treaty of Ripon. During the elections for the Long Parliament he campaigned in Warwickshire alongside Lord Brooke.37 R. Cust, Chas. I and the Aristocracy, 185, 194; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 66; Hughes, 122, 125-6. Nevertheless, as tensions mounted between king and Parliament, Dunsmore sided with the former. Admitted to the Privy Council in August 1641, he was an active Warwickshire commissioner of array at the outset of the Civil War.38 HMC 2nd Rep. 36; 5th Rep. 183; HMC Montagu, 157. In 1643 he joined Charles in Oxford, serving as captain of the gentlemen pensioners, and attending the royalist Parliament. A generous donor to the royalist war-chest, he was rewarded the next year with the earldom of Chichester. He participated in the 1645 Treaty of Uxbridge, and was still in Oxford when the city surrendered in June 1646. Briefly imprisoned by the House of Lords, he managed to get the sequestration of his estates suspended in January 1647, but largely failed in his attempts to secure a reduction in his composition fine of £3,694.39 Docquets of Letters Patent 1642-6 ed. W.H. Black, i. 358-9, 406; LJ, viii. 450a; CCC, 1498-9.

Chichester made his will on 2 Sept. 1652. In a codicil added shortly before his death in December 1653, he bequeathed £11,000 to various relatives, but the scale of these gifts was optimistic since the will was proved six months later by his principal creditor. As Dunsmore died without a direct male heir, his barony became extinct. However, by special remainder, his earldom passed to his son-in-law Thomas Wriothesley^*, 4th earl of Southampton.40 PROB 11/240, f. 401r-v.