‘Honest Jack Lee’, as he was known at the bar, an inveterate Rockingham Whig whose maxim was ‘never speak well of a political enemy’, lost his seat at Clitheroe on the Lister interest in 1790, when the patron’s control was compromised. A founder member of the Whig Club, he had acted with opposition in the Parliament of 1784; but this ‘man of strong parts and coarse manners who never hesitated to express in the coarsest language whatever he thought’, had dried up and professed himself ‘little ambitious ... of public life’ when Earl Fitzwilliam pressed him to accept the vacant seat for his borough of Higham Ferrers in December 1790. Lee accepted it on the understanding that Lord John Cavendish, who was closer to his patron, would not take it and that Portland and Fox approved; he referred to the connexion in his mind between ‘the name of Higham Ferrers and my dear and inestimable friend’ [Rockingham]. Richard Burke, who coveted Lee’s seat, wrote after Lee’s death, 16 Aug. 1793, to Fitzwilliam:
It is not possible for me to tell less, in the scale of your political consequence for the remainder of the Parliament than he did and was, in his own estimation, certain of doing, from the first day of it. It could operate to him merely as a compliment—a tribute to passed [sic] services.
Gent. Mag. (1793), ii. 772; Wraxall Mems. ed. Wheatley, ii. 370; Fitzwilliam mss, Lee to Fitzwilliam, 18 Dec. 1790; Burke Corresp. vii. 396.
Lee’s only political gesture in his last Parliament was to vote with opposition on Grey’s Oczakov resolutions, 12 Apr. 1791, though the same month he was listed among supporters of repeal of the Test Act in Scotland. Ill health incapacitated him from attendance and he died of cancer, 5 Aug. 1793, ‘in his 61st year’, thought to be immensely rich.