James II, Revolution and Convention, 1684-90
Thomas Tufton was the fourth son in the large family of John Tufton, 2nd earl of Thanet. In his youth he had relied on the patronage of his formidable and doting grandmother Lady Anne Clifford, dowager countess of Dorset and Pembroke and in her own right (although not recognized by the House as such in her lifetime) Lady Clifford, to be elected to the Commons for the Clifford borough of Appleby in Westmorland at a by-election in 1668, even over the under-secretary of state Joseph Williamson‡.
On his elder brother’s death on 8 Mar. 1684 Thomas succeeded to the earldom of Thanet, and with it to Tufton estates in Kent (centred on Hothfield House) and Sussex (Bolebroke House in Hartfield), the Clifford properties in Yorkshire (Skipton and its castle) and Westmorland (Appleby, Brough and Brougham and their castles). He also succeeded as hereditary sheriff of Westmorland, another inheritance from the Cliffords. By May Thanet was negotiating with Henry Cavendish, 2nd duke of Newcastle, to marry Newcastle’s fourth daughter Lady Catherine Cavendish. Although Newcastle expressed his ‘great esteem’ for Thanet and that he found a marital alliance with him ‘pleasing’, he wished Thanet would consider his third daughter Margaret to whom he intended to leave the larger portion of his estate, rather than insist on Catherine. Years later, however, when there was acrimony over the sisters’ inheritance, it was claimed that Newcastle had always been dissatisfied with Thanet’s estate.
James II saw Thanet as a new and friendly power in the north and appointed him lord lieutenant of Cumberland and Westmorland and custos rotulorum of Cumberland in early March 1685. This was a dynastic shift: Edward Howard, 2nd earl of Carlisle, the son and heir of the recently deceased holder of those offices, Charles Howard, earl of Carlisle, had effectively been deputizing for his father in those roles from at least 1678 and could reasonably have expected the appointment.
Thanet was present on the first day of James II’s Parliament on 19 May 1685 and came to 56 per cent of the sittings, during which he was named to two committees on legislation. He raised a troop of horse to help suppress the rebellion of James Scott, duke of Monmouth, but in October 1685 he resigned his commission, ‘on the account of the ill state of his health’.
Thanet was diligent in his attendance during the important first few weeks of the Convention. He was present on its first day, 22 Jan. 1689, and quickly made known his opposition to William of Orange’s accession. On 29 Jan. he voted in favour or establishing a regency and two days later voted against the motion to insert words declaring William and Mary king and queen in the draft text of the vote on the disposition of the crown. On 4 Feb. he was a teller, almost certainly for the not contents (especially considering that William Cavendish, 4th earl (later duke) of Devonshire, told for the opposite side of the question), in the division on whether to agree with the Commons that James II had ‘abdicated’ the throne.
Having helped to bring, however reluctantly, William and Mary to the throne, Thanet remained engaged in the proceedings of the House throughout the remainder of the spring of 1689. During this time he was named to six committees on legislation, including those on the bills for the trial of peers, for reversing the attainder of William Russell‡, styled Lord Russell, for ‘uniting Protestants’ (the comprehension bill), for reviving proceedings at law, and for establishing commissioners of the Great Seal. He was a teller on 27 Mar. 1689 in the division whether to give judgment in the case of Roper v Roper and on 4 Apr. was again a teller on the question whether to use the word ‘approve’ in one of the clauses in the toleration bill. His soon-to-be brother-in-law, John Holles, 4th earl of Clare, later duke of Newcastle, was teller for the opposite side in this latter division.
Thanet returned to the House on 15 Nov. 1689, almost three weeks into its proceedings. On his first day he was added to the ‘Committee of Inspections’, which had been assigned to investigate the judicial murders of Lord Russell, Algernon Sydney‡ and others as well as the quo warranto proceedings against corporations. Four days after this he was added to ‘all the committees’ then acting, but was named to only an additional three committees of legislation after this, including that on the bill for restraining the export of arms. On 23 Nov. 1689 he was a teller in a division whether the proposed rider which would prohibit the use of royal pardons to bypass impeachments brought by the Commons should be incorporated into the Bill of Rights; the virulent Whig Henry Booth, 2nd Baron Delamer, later earl of Warrington, was the opposite teller. He was a teller again on 21 Dec. 1689, this time in the division on the motion to hear the report from the committee dealing with the suborning of witnesses against a number of Whig peers following Monmouth’s rising. This time the opposite teller was Charles Montagu, 4th earl (later duke) of Manchester. In total Thanet came to just over half of the sittings of this second session of the Convention.
William III’s first Parliament, 1690-5
Thanet first sat in William III’s first Parliament in its second session of 1690-1, of which he came to almost three-quarters of the sittings, the best attendance of any session in his career. He was named to seven committees on legislation. On 7 Oct. 1690, his second day in the House, he stood bail for £5,000 for the Catholic peer James Cecil, 4th earl of Salisbury, from which charge he was later discharged on the penultimate day of that month.
Most significantly for Thanet, this and the following session saw the culmination in the House of a long-simmering dispute between his family and the Boyles, whose head was Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington and 2nd earl of Cork [I], over the barony of Clifford created by a writ of summons to Robert de Clifford in 1299. Thanet’s grandmother Lady Anne Clifford had claimed the barony in 1628 on the basis that the title descended through the heir general and that she had inherited it from her father George Clifford†, 12th Baron Clifford and 3rd earl of Cumberland. Elizabeth Clifford, countess of Burlington and Cork, claimed it by descent through the heir male and her father, the 3rd earl of Cumberland’s nephew Henry Clifford†, 5th earl of Cumberland, who had been summoned to Parliament in 1628 as ‘Lord Clifford’ on the assumption that the barony of 1299 was a junior title of his father Francis Clifford†, 4th earl of Cumberland. Charles I had confused matters more when in 1643 he created Elizabeth Clifford’s husband Richard Boyle, Baron Clifford of Lanesborough by letters patent. The competing Ladies Clifford, Anne and Elizabeth, had effected something of a reconciliation in 1664 through the marriage of Lady Elizabeth Clifford’s daughter, Elizabeth Boyle, to Lady Anne Clifford’s grandson Nicholas Tufton, styled Lord Tufton, who succeeded as 3rd earl of Thanet soon after.
Burlington’s son and heir, the late 3rd earl of Thanet’s brother-in-law, Charles Boyle, Baron Clifford of Lanesborough, first sat in the House on 18 July 1689 under a writ of acceleration; he was first erroneously called Lord Boyle, but on 10 Aug. this was amended to Lord Clifford.
Thanet was apparently in London by 24 Oct. 1691, two days after the opening of the new session, when he was reportedly one of the lords who dined with George Legge* , Baron Dartmouth, then imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of Jacobite conspiracy; but if so he did not take his seat until 31 October.
In other matters during this session, Thanet was appointed on 31 Dec. 1691 to a committee to draw up heads for a conference on the Commons’ resolution, as stated in a printed vote, to address the king regarding the incorporation of the East India Company without the concurrence of the House. On 27 Jan. 1692 he told in the division whether the Speaker should be required to stand with his hat off when addressing the duchess of Norfolk in the hearings surrounding the divorce bill of Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk.
From early 1692, Thanet began a long series of challenges to the will of his father-in-law Newcastle, who shortly before his death on 26 July 1691 had amended it to leave the entirety of his estate to his third daughter Margaret, excluding Thanet’s wife Catherine. Thanet insisted that Newcastle had not been in compos mentis when he revised his will.
Estate and inheritance matters continued to preoccupy Thanet in the following sessions of William III’s first Parliament, where he sat in a little over two-thirds of the sittings of the 1692-3 session. He brought to the attention of the House on 2 Dec. 1692 a breach of his privilege wherein one of his stewards in Silsden manor in the Craven district of west Yorkshire, a part of the Clifford inheritance long in dispute between the family’s different branches, had been arrested at the suit of various inhabitants who refused to recognize Thanet’s right to the property. The perpetrators of the breach of privilege all made their submission and were discharged by the House by 4 Jan. 1693.
In the winter of 1692-3 Thanet was also involved in the debates in the committee of the whole House considering the ‘advice’ the House should give the king concerning the recent military reverses, at both sea and land, the English forces had suffered the previous summer. On 10 Dec. he was placed on the committee to consider the papers regarding the failure to launch a ‘descent’ on France after the naval victories at Barfleur and La Hogue. Four days later the committee of the whole House placed him on a sub-committee to draw up a clause to state that English officers were to have precedence over any similarly ranked officer of another nation, regardless of the date of commission. On 2 Jan. 1693 he voted against the second reading of the Norfolk divorce bill while the following day he voted for the place bill and signed the protest when that bill was rejected. He supported the proposed amendment to the land tax bill which provided that peers would be assessed by a commission of their own, and on 19 Jan. he dissented, first, from the House’s refusal to refer this amendment to the committee for privileges and then from the resolution to abandon it entirely. The following day he was placed on the committee to consider methods for the trial of Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, and on 4 Feb. he voted the young nobleman not guilty of murder. On 11 Feb. Thanet was placed on the drafting committee for an address to the king concerning the number of foreign officers employed in the Board of Ordnance. In the first days of March 1693 he was assigned to be a reporter for two conferences on the bill to prevent malicious prosecutions, one scheduled for 1 Mar. which was aborted, the other taking place two days later. Throughout the session he was named to 13 committees on legislation.
He was present on the first day of the 1693-4 session and proceeded to sit in just under half of its meetings, during which he was named to seven committees on legislation and, on 16 Jan. 1694, was a manager for a conference dealing with the dispatching of intelligence regarding the sailing of the Brest fleet prior to its mauling of the Smyrna convoy the previous summer. He introduced on 15 Feb. 1694 a bill which would allow him and his younger brother Sackville Tufton to lease out their family’s former town residence, Thanet House in Aldersgate, for a further 60 years. The bill was committed the following day and John Egerton, 3rd earl of Bridgwater, reported it as fit to pass without amendment on 19 February. (Bridgwater shared interests with Thanet in lead smelting in Yorkshire.)
Thanet first came to the House for the 1694-5 session on 4 Feb. 1695, almost three months into its proceedings, and came perhaps for a specific personal reason, for a week after his arrival he introduced a private bill to confirm the deed and indentures he had entered into with his brother Sackville for dividing the southern Tufton properties more equitably. The bill was committed the following day and on 13 Feb., only two days after its introduction, the bill was reported as fit to pass without amendment. It received the royal assent on 22 Apr. without any further obstructions.
Under William III, 1695-1702
The general election of 1695 went smoothly for Thanet, where he convinced the two sitting members for Appleby to stand down in favour of two Tories favoured by the leadership at Westminster: the Kentish gentleman Sir William Twisden‡, 3rd bt, and Sir Christopher Musgrave‡, 4th bt. Electoral management aside, Thanet was never again quite as involved in the business of the House as he had been before 1695. He had been teller on eight occasions in the period 1689-95, but last told for a division on 27 Jan. 1696, on the question whether to re-commit the small tithes bill, and never again acted in this role in the House.
Thanet was closely allied socially and politically throughout this time to Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, who was his nephew by his marriage in 1685 to Thanet’s niece Anne Hatton, daughter of Christopher Hatton, Viscount Hatton, and Thanet’s late sister Cicely.
Thanet attended 51 per cent of the 1696-7 session. He was among the Tory opposition to the bill to attaint Sir John Fenwick‡, 3rd bt. He signed the dissents from the decision of 15 Dec. 1696 to hear the written evidence of the absent and disreputable Cardell Goodman and from the resolution of three days later to give the bill a second reading. Winchilsea once again entrusted him with his proxy, registered on 23 Dec. 1696, when Thanet would thus have been able to bring two votes against the Fenwick attainder bill; he later entered his own protest against the bill’s passage.
Thanet was present for most of the first four months of the session of 1697-8. From 23 Feb. 1698 he once again held the proxy of Winchilsea, which he may have used when voting on 15 Mar. against the commitment of the Whig-inspired bill to punish the Exchequer official Charles Duncombe‡. Thanet last attended the House on 1 Apr. 1698, and 11 days later registered his proxy with William Savile, 2nd marquess of Halifax, for the remainder of the session. In total he had come to just over a third of the sittings of that session.
At the election of 1698 Thanet returned two Tory kinsmen in Appleby, his nephew Sir John Walter‡, 4th bt, and his wife’s maternal uncle Gervase Pierrepont, later Baron Pierrepont. He came to only 41 per cent of the first session of the new Parliament, in 1698-9, and was present at 53 percent of the following session of 1699-1700. On 23 Feb. 1700 he supported the Tory bill to maintain the old East India Company as a corporation, while on 8 Mar. he protested against the second reading of the bill for the divorce of the duke of Norfolk. As the session reached a rancorous end, he was, on 2 Apr., made a reporter for the conference on the bill that would remove duties from woollen manufactures and on 9-10 Apr. was delegated to represent the House in three contentious conferences on the disagreements on the bill to resume the forfeited Irish lands granted by the king to his followers.
At the election of winter 1700 Thanet was only able to retain one of his candidates at Appleby: Pierrepont easily headed the poll, but Walter was defeated by one vote by Wharton Dunch‡, nephew of Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron (later marquess of) Wharton. Thomas Sprat, bishop of Rochester, emphasized to Sir Christopher Musgrave’s friends at Oxford that the leaders of the Tory party, disturbed by the narrowness of Musgrave’s victory in his own county, had decided that he should sit for Westmorland and not Oxford University. Otherwise, Sprat warned, ‘my Lord Thanet and all the true Church of England men will never be able to hold up their heads again in any elections for town or counties’.
Thanet came to 46 per cent (48 meetings) of the House in the Parliament which convened on 6 Feb. 1701 but he was busy in putting his names to dissents and protests during those few days, such as against the resolution of 8 Mar. to request the king to lift the suspension of the disgraced naval officer Captain James Norris. Most of his dissents, though, concerned the second Partition Treaty and the impeachment of the Junto lords in the spring of 1701. On 15 Mar. he subscribed to the protests against the decision to reject two heads of the report on the Partition Treaty which caused offence among the Whigs and five days later he further objected to the House’s refusal to seek the Commons’ concurrence to its address to the king regarding the treaty. Through his dissents and protests he showed his opposition to all of the House’s measures which tried to avoid the impeachment and punishment of the Junto lords. He dissented from the decision to address the king asking that the impeached lords not be dismissed pending the hearings (on 16 Apr.), from the refusal to establish a joint committee with the Commons to discuss the procedures for the trial (14 June) and from the resolutions to proceed to Westminster Hall to try John Somers, Baron Somers, and to acquit him (both 17 June). At the general election of late 1701, Thanet’s principal agent in Appleby, the town clerk Thomas Carleton, saw disaster looming because of Thanet’s delay in naming his candidates and laxness in purchasing those burgages which became available and conveying them to ‘faggot voters’, a practice that was being pursued vigorously by Wharton’s agents. Pierrepont and Dunch were again returned for Appleby in December 1701, while for the county elections Thanet supported Musgrave, who was defeated (he was later returned for Totnes), and Henry Grahme‡, who won the second seat, though an informant told Henry’s father James Grahme‡ that ‘we should have lost it entirely but for Lord Thanet’s interest’.
Thanet first appeared in William III’s last parliament on 19 Jan. 1702 and came to only 27 sittings, 27 per cent of the whole. He dissented from the passage of the abjuration bill on 24 Feb. 1702 (although he did sign the House’s address condemning Louis XIV for recognizing the Pretender) and on 8 Mar. was made, along with the rest of the House present, a manager of a conference on arrangements for the accession of Anne.
The reign of Anne to 1710
Thanet was reportedly offered the position of lord chamberlain by Anne, but refused, supposedly on the grounds that ‘on coming to the title and estate I took a resolution to retire and to live a private life’ and because he was widely suspected of Jacobitism and would thereby bring the queen into disrepute.
Thanet attended 43 per cent of sittings in the 1703-4 session, and again seems to have been spurred into attendance by the fortunes of the occasional conformity bill. He was present on 14 Dec. 1703, voting with the minority for the bill and registering his dissent from its rejection. Further dissents followed in March 1704, when he opposed the decision to remove Robert Byerley‡ from the list of commissioners of public accounts (on 16 Mar.), dissented from the passage of the bill for raising recruits (21 Mar.) and objected to the resolution, part of the attack on Nottingham in the Scotch Plot affair, that the failure to take Robert Ferguson into custody for further questioning was an encouragement to the crown’s enemies (25 Mar.). Thanet was included in a list of members of both Houses drawn up by Nottingham in 1704 which may indicate support for him over the Plot.
Thanet first sat in the 1704-5 session on 2 Dec. 1704, almost two months into proceedings, and attended 44 per cent of the whole session. On 15 Dec. 1704 he again voted for the occasional conformity bill and again dissented from the House’s continued rejection of it. He was opposed to the union with Scotland from the first and on 20 Dec. 1704 voted against the passage of the bill to establish commissioners to treat with the Scots about a union.
As custos Thanet was able to place members of Appleby corporation on tax commissions, and could also influence appointments in the army.
The regency bill was returned to the House early in the new year, with the addition of the Commons’ ‘whimsical’ place clause. In the debate on 31 Jan. 1706, Thanet joined in three dissents against the attempts of the court interest in the House to amend out of recognition the country clause. Thanet and his fellow Tory dissenters may have seen the place clause as a ‘wrecking amendment’ which would be sure to prompt a royal veto of the bill in its entirety if included. This attempt once again to derail the bill was ultimately unsuccessful and the regency bill, without the place clause, received the royal assent on the last day of the session on 19 Mar. 1706. In the days running up to this prorogation Thanet, on 6 Mar., dissented from another act for recruiting the armed forces and five days later he, along with the rest of the House present, was made a manager for two conferences on the printed letter from Sir Rowland Gwyn‡ to Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, which was deemed a seditious libel.
During the session of 1706-7, of which he attended 42 per cent of sittings, Thanet was most clearly concerned by the Union bill and its implications for the Church of England – and for himself. On 3 Feb. 1707 he dissented from the resolution not to insert a clause reaffirming the inviolability of the 1673 Test Act into the bill to secure the Church of England. In a debate on the Union bill on 24 Feb. he requested from the judges the full import of the 20th article, which affected him personally as it placed restrictions on heritable offices, such as Thanet’s own office as sheriff of Westmorland. Nicolson recorded that Thanet was ‘for [his] rights, which Lord Wharton calls tyranny and oppression’, but in practice Thanet’s position as hereditary sheriff of Westmorland was never threatened.
Thanet only attended 40 per cent of sittings in the 1707-8 session, chiefly in February and March 1708. On 31 Mar. 1708 he dissented from the House’s decision that the arrest of the Catholic Marmaduke Langdale, 3rd Baron Langdale, was not a breach of privilege, because he felt that the statement agreed on by the House did not go far enough in explaining that Langdale was ineligible for privilege because he had never taken the oaths and test.
At the 1708 election, Thanet secured one seat for Edward Duncombe‡ in Appleby, but Wharton’s candidate, Nicholas Lechmere†, later Baron Lechmere, won the second seat by seven votes.. The first session of 1708-9 in the following Parliament saw Thanet’s highest attendance rate, 57 per cent, for the entire period 1695-1715. He was involved in the petition of the Squadrone peers against the right of James Douglas, 2nd duke of Queensberry [S], and duke of Dover in the British peerage, to vote in the elections of the Scottish representative peers for the new Parliament. He was appointed to the committee to consider this petition on 10 Jan. 1709 and 11 days later, somewhat surprisingly, voted with the Junto and Squadrone peers against Queensberry and his ally the lord treasurer Godolphin. On the other hand Thanet joined many other Tories in protesting against the commitment of the general naturalization bill on 15 March. On 26 Mar. Thanet complained against a provision in the ‘attorneys’ bill’ against fraud in stamp duties which specifically required Thanet, as hereditary sheriff of Westmorland, to appoint a new under-sheriff every year. Four days later his counsel was heard at the bar and Nicolson recorded that Charles Montagu, Baron (later earl of) Halifax, ‘to make the work short’ of the matter, moved that the offending clause be rejected. In this he was seconded, surprisingly, by Wharton, who usually took any opportunity to undermine Thanet’s position as sheriff.
Montagu’s death on 9 Mar. 1709 brought the complicated relations between the daughters of the 2nd duke of Newcastle and their spouses to the fore again. Montagu had married Newcastle’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who was widely considered a lunatic. Thanet and his brother-in-law the duke of Newcastle (as Clare had been created in May 1694), now lord privy seal, sought a commission to guard their sister-in-law and her estate, worth £8,000 p.a. ‘and upwards’. Whatever their own differences both these brothers-in-law had a common cause, along with their fellow commissioner Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, who had briefly been married to the fourth Cavendish daughter, to see that further inroads on the Cavendish-Newcastle estate were not made.
The matter of the Newcastle inheritance perhaps distracted Thanet from taking his seat in the 1709-10 session until 10 Jan. 1710. He proceeded to sit for only a further 35 days, but those meetings, primarily in February and March, were some of the most contentious of his career. On 16 Feb. he dissented from the decision to proceed with the debate on the Commons’ address that John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, should be immediately sent to the Low Countries. On that same day Thanet also dissented from the House’s decision not to require the Scottish Episcopalian minister James Greenshields and the Edinburgh magistrates to attend the House before the minister’s appeal against the Kirk officials would be formally received. He was understandably even more agitated by the treatment of Dr Sacheverell and subscribed to eight dissents and protests in this matter in the period 14-21 Mar. 1710. In particular he protested against the decisions: that the ‘criminal’ words did not have to be included verbatim in the articles of impeachment (14 Mar.); that the Commons had proved the first four articles in the impeachment (16 and 17 Mar.); that peers were limited to a single vote of guilty or not guilty upon all the articles (18 Mar.); that Sacheverell was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours (20 Mar.); and that he be imprisoned and barred from preaching for seven years (21 Mar.).
In July 1710 Thanet nominated as his two candidates for Appleby, the sitting Member Duncombe and the Tory lawyer, Thomas Lutwyche‡. Thanet’s confidence of victory in the elections of 1710 was borne out by Wharton’s choice of Joshua Blackwell, a man with sound Tory principles, a desperate attempt, ultimately unsuccessful, to prevent Thanet from controlling both seats for the borough.
The Oxford ministry
With a ministry more to his taste, Thanet became more active in the House. He came to 57 per cent of the meetings of the 1710-11 session in the new Tory-dominated Parliament, his highest attendance rate in any session (apart from 1708-9) in the 20 years from 1695 to 1715. He was more involved than in previous years as well, and even reported on 7 Mar. 1711, for the first time in his parliamentary career, from a select committee considering a private bill, that allowing the sale or settlement of the lands and herediments in Kent of William Henden. He was named to the large committee established on 22 Jan. 1711 to consider the unprepared state of the forces in Spain which had led to the debacle of Almanza and on 3 Feb. he was placed on another committee to draft an address to the queen regarding the insufficiency of the numbers and equipment of the forces in Spain – and the previous ministry’s responsibility in this.
The possibility was raised that Thanet be restored to his former positions of influence, to cement the Tory dominance in the north. Sir Simon Harcourt, later Viscount Harcourt, suggested in May 1711 that Thanet replace Wharton as custos of Westmorland.
Thanet, Nottingham and others attracted widespread comment on 2 Jan. 1712 by voting against Oxford’s motion to adjourn the House to 14 Jan. when the queen would give both Lords and Commons more details on the peace negotiations.
The ministry still sought some accommodatsion with Thanet, and on 1 May 1712 Sir John Lowther‡ anticipated that ‘the making my lord Thanet lord lieutenant I fear will occasion some alterations in the commission of peace purely to be vexatious.’
Excluding an appearance on a prorogation day on 17 Mar. 1713, Thanet only came to 5 sittings in the third session, eight per cent of the whole, all during April 1713. Oxford still forecast that Thanet would support the French commercial treaty of June 1713 that foundered in the Commons. At the 1713 election he secured the return of Thomas Lutwyche in one of the Appleby seats, but James Grahme had sold his burgages to Richard Lowther, 2nd Viscount Lonsdale, a Whig, whose candidate secured the second seat.
Thanet came to only 29 per cent of the meetings of the first session of spring 1714. He left the House on 11 May 1714, but despite his absence Nottingham forecast that he would support the schism bill, which was voted on later that month. That month he was appointed custos rotulorum of Westmorland, replacing Wharton. On 2 June 1714 Thanet gave his proxy to Northampton for the remainder of the session, as he did again on 10 Aug. when he left the House after sitting for only three days in the 15-day session convened upon the queen’s death.
An account of his sparse activity in the House after the Hanoverian Succession will appear in the subsequent volumes of this project. Thanet died at Hothfield in Kent on 30 July 1729 and was succeeded in the earldom of Thanet and his entailed estates by his nephew Sackville Tufton†, although the barony of Clifford, whose descent through the female line Thanet had worked so hard to have recognized, fell into abeyance between his five daughters as heirs general. As well as leaving £20,000 to each of these daughters, his will appointed trustees to administer funds in the interest of several charitable projects intended to benefit the education of the poor and the clergy of the Church of England.