Admiral for two rulers, 1666-89
Arthur Herbert came from a renowned legal family. His father had been attorney-general to Charles I and keeper of the great seal for the exiled Charles II between 1653 and 1654; his maternal grandfather was briefly master of requests under James I in 1608-9. Unlike these forebears (or his elder brother Edward, chief justice of king’s bench under James II) Arthur did not choose a legal career but from an early age turned to a life at sea. After sailing with Sir Robert Holmes‡ in 1664 and 1665 he was commissioned lieutenant in the Royal Navy in March 1666 and captain in November. After several years of brave and reckless service in the Mediterranean and in both of Charles II’s wars with the Dutch, Herbert was appointed in February 1678 vice-admiral in the Mediterranean squadron fighting against the Algerian corsairs and, on 17 July 1680, admiral and commander-in-chief of the fleet protecting Tangier.
His bravery may have been well-known, but so too was his penchant for lechery and for ‘pride and luxury’. Samuel Pepys‡, visiting Tangiers, heard
of captains submitting themselves to the meanest degree of servility to Herbert, waiting at his rising and going to bed, combing his perruque, brushing him, putting on his coat for him, as the king is served, he living and keeping a house on shore and his mistresses visited and attended one after another, as the king’s are.
Pepys also related that, ‘Herbert never lay aboard, but on shore in state, where besides other captains, the governor [of Tangier] himself was always there an hour before he was up every morning and stayed by him while he lay abed’. Pepys’s general, but hyperbolic, conclusion was that ‘of all the worst men living, Herbert is the only man that I do not know to have any one virtue to compound for all his vices’.
He returned to England from his Mediterranean posting in 1683, from which point he was a favourite and client of York. The duke helped to make him a rear-admiral of the English fleet on 22 Jan. 1684 and placed him on the admiralty commission, first as a supernumerary member in August 1683 and then as a full member in April 1684, though the commission itself was revoked on 19 May 1684 when the king took the administration of the admiralty into his own hands.
Despite his dependence on the king for his own advancement, Herbert refused to countenance James’s proposal to repeal the Test Acts and Penal Laws. After an uncomfortable ‘closeting’ with the king, in which Herbert tried to take a high tone of ‘honour and conscience’ with a king who knew only too well how Herbert ‘had blemished himself with some personal miscarriages, especially with women’, Herbert was dismissed from all his offices in March 1687. A correspondent of Herbert’s kinsman, Henry Herbert, 4th Baron Herbert of Chirbury, was full of praise for the admiral:
It was put to him, that he had not been so regular a liver as to make the Test a case of conscience, to which your cousin replied, that every man has his failing. He is grown popular upon it, warm in everybody’s bosom and frequent in every man’s glass.TNA, PRO 30/53/8/42.
Roger Morrice saw Herbert’s dismissal ‘as exceeding considerable, and a prognostic that there will be a universal purge, and those of the other persuasion placed in everywhere. Some thought if any subject had made his station necessary it had been this man’.
William of Orange took advantage of Herbert’s disgruntlement and in June 1688 invited him, via Herbert’s fellow admiral Edward Russell, later earl of Orford, to join him in the Netherlands.
Herbert was thus instrumental to the success of the Revolution, as his fleet, with the help of the ‘Protestant wind’ was able to evade that of his professional rival George Legge, Baron Dartmouth, and to land and disembark William’s army successfully at Torbay. While Herbert was cruising with the fleet off the southwest he was kept informed of William’s progress towards London through letters from Russell, Hans Willem Bentinck, later earl of Portland, and particularly Gilbert Burnet, later bishop of Salisbury. Burnet informed him gleefully of the decision to hold a Convention in a letter of 25 Dec. 1688 and Herbert was elected a burgess for the borough of Plymouth but had little involvement in that assembly as he was soon dispatched to fetch Princess Mary from the Netherlands in late January 1689.
On 1 May Herbert engaged in a scrappy fight with the French fleet off Bantry Bay in south-western Ireland, during which the English were kept occupied while the French were able to unload a large amount of money and arms for the Irish forces under James II. William III nevertheless used the opportunity of the battle to confer a peerage on Herbert, who was created earl of Torrington by letters patent on 29 May, largely in recognition of his services to William at the Revolution. Torrington quickly took his seat in the House, only two days after his creation. He was introduced between his distant kinsman Thomas Herbert, 8th earl of Pembroke, and another soldier Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, but he left the House on 5 June to rejoin the fleet at Portsmouth. He spent that summer cruising off Brest to blockade the French fleet
He first sat in the second session of the Convention on 2 Nov., as the Commons took up an investigation of maladministration at the admiralty. By mid-December Torrington made it clear that he wished to resign his commission as first lord. Roger Morrice, who thought Torrington ‘one of the worst and most injudicious of men’ who ‘put in the worst officers into the ships’, suspected that Torrington wished to resign because he knew he was about to be pushed out. Burnet thought that it was because Torrington had found he could not ‘dictate to the board’. His resignation was delayed because of troubles in finding a suitable replacement, and when the commission constituting the newly modelled admiralty commission was issued on 20 Jan. 1690 Torrington’s kinsman Pembroke was placed at the head of it. At the time of this new commission, both he and Pembroke were given command of two new regiments of marines.
The Battle of Beachy Head and its aftermath, 1690
Torrington first sat in the new Parliament on its second day, 21 Mar. 1690, and continued to sit for 54 per cent of its meetings. In late April he was given overall command of the joint Anglo-Dutch fleet for that summer’s campaign. He joined the fleet after Parliament was prorogued on 23 May, and in late June warned the secretary of state Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, of the approach of a much larger French fleet: ‘the odds are great and you know it is not my fault ... Let them tremble at the consequence whose fault it was the fleet is no stronger’. But Nottingham, Russell (by this time a fierce rival of Torrington for naval command) and other members of the ‘Council of Nine’ advising Mary in William’s absence did not fully accept Torrington’s account of French strength, and on 29 June they issued positive orders to the admiral to give fight to the French.
if I take the part of [Torrington, then in the House] it cannot be thought I can do it through partiality, since there never was any friendship between us, rather the contrary, but by doing his lordship justice by affirming that he saved our fleet in 1690 by anchoring after the battle, so I do affirm that [Russell] by anchoring deprived us of an entire victory, the French profiting by that false step of his, and had time to retire into their harbours.Ailesbury Mems, 295-96.
But in the immediate aftermath of the battle in 1690 the recriminations for the disaster started at once, and fell squarely on Torrington. Mary herself wrote to William in Ireland that ‘what Lord Torrington can say for himself I know not, but I believe he will never be forgiven here. The letters from the fleet, before and since the engagement, show sufficiently he was the only man there had not mind to fight’.
The question of who should replace Torrington in command of the fleet and how and when he should be tried quickly revealed the divisions both within and between the Council of Nine, the admiralty commission and the parties which had representatives in each. The admiralty commissioners asserted their right to have a consultative role in the appointment of naval officers, yet at the same time were unwilling to take responsibility or authority for bringing those officers to account. It took a number of stormy interviews with the queen and her cabinet in late July and August 1690 before a bare majority of the commissioners acceded to the monarchs’ request and signed the commission for the new royal appointees as co-admirals.
Mary’s cabinet obtained a legal ruling that a power formally vested in the lord high admiral could be exercised by the commissioners appointed to execute his duties.
There was still the question of whether the admiralty commissioners, acting with delegated powers originally vested in the lord high admiral, could exercise the power of life and death in capital punishment in courts martial. To push through the government’s agenda for a speedy court martial of the disgraced Torrington, and to stop the constant delays of the admiralty commissioners, on 25 Oct. the king’s chief ministers Nottingham and Carmarthen introduced into the House the admiralty commissioners bill, which ‘declared’ that the rights and powers legally enjoyed by the single lord high admiral were, and always had been, equally exercised by the commissioners assigned for executing that office. The bill met with opposition in the House, and when it was passed on 30 Oct. it provoked a protest of 17 peers. Many were concerned by what they saw as the retroactive justice inherent in the bill, by which Torrington would now be tried by a power and authority which had not existed at the time he had committed the offences with which he was charged. The protesters were also concerned at Torrington’s loss of privilege of peerage, and undoubtedly there was a fear that the bill gave too much power to a collection of commoners who could now try, and at the worst execute, a member of the peerage.
The bill was sent down to the Commons where it again ran into fierce opposition from the ministers’ foes. Torrington had an ally in the Tory John Granville‡, son of John Granville, earl of Bath, the latter one of the protesters against the bill in the Lords. Granville had served under Torrington at Beachy Head and pushed for a motion to impeach Torrington in the Commons, which was lost at a division by a margin of three to one.
Reaction to the acquittal varied across parties and nationalities: ‘The Whigs generally are angry at it, and the Tories well pleased therewith; his Majesty is displeased with it, and the Dutch ambassador is very angry, and has sent an account thereof into Holland’.
All he had left from his brief ascendancy under William III was the peerage that had been granted him (and the concomitant forfeited estates in the Bedford Level). For the rest of his life Torrington took advantage of this honour and was a reasonably serious member of the House of Lords. He first sat again only five days after his acquittal, on 15 Dec. 1690, but only came to a further four meetings, the last on 2 Jan. 1691, three days before the prorogation. In the 1691-2 session he sat on seven occasions in November 1691 and appears to have registered his proxy with Charles Talbot, 12th earl (later duke) of Shrewsbury on 3 Jan. 1692, but this would have been vacated on 27 Jan. when he returned to the House to sit for a further four meetings before leaving it on 19 February. In 1692-3 he came to just under a quarter of the meetings, first sitting on 9 Nov. 1692. On 7 Dec. he subscribed to the protest against the resolution not to form a joint committee with the Commons to consider what advice to give to the monarchs concerning the state of the nation, and in particular the naval miscarriages of the previous summer—in which debates, as has been seen, his example was invoked by Carmarthen. He left this session on 23 Dec., but registered his proxy on 16 Jan. 1693 with his fellow protester of 7 Dec. Shrewsbury, who held it for the remainder of the session.
Renewed activity in the House, 1693-97
The three sessions from 7 Nov. 1693 to 27 Apr. 1696 saw his most engaged participation in the House of his entire career. It may be significant that he really came to the fore from 1695, after the death of Queen Mary, who had made her distrust of the former admiral so evident. His political stance however is difficult to determine. Despite the fact that by all accounts in the partisan battles of autumn 1690 Whigs and Tory ministerialists were his enemies and country Tories his defenders, he has most often been considered a Whig. This may largely be owing to his unusual deathbed bequest of the bulk of his estate to the Whig stalwart Henry Clinton, 7th earl of Lincoln, and perhaps also to some Whig stances he took on particularly notable partisan issues—against the occasional conformity bills and the schism bill. One historian considered him a court Whig, but it is difficult to see him as such.
He came to slightly less than half of the sittings of the 1693-4 session. His naval expertise was relied on during hearings on the loss of the Smryna fleet.
He was present for three-quarters of the sittings of the 1694-5 session. His more regular presence in the House is also indicated in that this session was the first in which he held a proxy, that of John Holles, duke of Newcastle, from 14 Jan. to 6 Feb. 1695. On 23 Jan. he protested with a large number of Tories, including his old antagonist Nottingham, against the resolution to accept the amendment postponing the implementation of the treason trial bill – which he had earlier supported in February 1694 – from 1695 to 1698. More noticeably he supported Nottingham’s criticisms of the Whig ministry delivered in a committee of the whole House considering the state of the nation on 25 January. Torrington limited his comments to his own naval expertise and a criticism of the dispatch of the fleet the previous summer to escort a merchant fleet, thereby drawing it away from defending the English coasts. This led the Dutch envoy L’Hermitage to comment ‘this one [Torrington] having been divested of the office of admiral, one is not surprised that he places himself among the malcontents’.
On 11 Apr. he was made a manager for the conference on the treason trials bill, which was held four days later and on 18 Apr. he was appointed a reporter for a conference on the bill to make the Licensing Act and other laws perpetual. On that same day he was one of eight peers to enter a protest against the House’s resolution exonerating John Sheffield, marquess of Normanby (later duke of Buckingham and Normanby) from the suspicion that he had received a lease from the City of London on beneficial terms as gratification for legislation favourable to the city. From 16 Apr. when he was named to the large select committee assigned to draw up the bill to indemnify Sir Thomas Cooke‡ for the evidence he could supply, Torrington was heavily involved in the investigation into corruption in the East India Company and its bribes and payments for parliamentary favours. On 22 Apr. he was chosen by ballot to be one of the 12 peers to serve on a committee of both Houses charged with examining Cooke. After being a manager for two conferences dealing with this evidence, on 24 Apr. he was further named to a similar joint committee to interrogate Cooke’s colleagues, including Sir Basil Firebrace‡.
Torrington came to just over four-fifths of the meetings of the first session of the new Parliament in 1695-6 – his highest rate of attendance of any parliamentary session. He first sat on 22 Nov. 1695 and in early December became very involved in the numerous matters regarding the ‘state of the nation’ discussed in committees of the whole House. On 3 Dec. he moved successfully in debate that the merchants of the East and West India companies should be heard as to the damages done to English trade by the establishment of the Scottish East India Company. The following day, in the debate on the coinage, he again was the first to move the resolution eventually adopted by the committee, that the king be requested to issue a proclamation prohibiting the import of debased English coin. He was named to the committee to draft the address and appointed to manage the conference where it was presented to the Commons. In the days following he kept up his attack on the Scottish East India Company, participating in the debates of the committees of the whole on 5 and 9 Dec. considering this matter and the general bad state of trade.
At the same time in early 1696 his attention was directed towards a bill he had had introduced—in the Commons, strangely enough—on 14 Jan. to confirm the grant made to him of forfeited land in the Bedford Level, and to allow him to recover the arrears of rent due to him. The bill was not read a second time until 20 Feb., when it encountered opposition from James II’s former mistress Katherine Sedley, suo jure countess of Dorchester, who had been granted a rent charge of £600 p.a. on the land and who for several years had been frustrated in her attempts to claim the arrears of her pension because of the earl’s claim of privilege. When the bill was first reported from the Commons select committee on 14 Mar. it was recommitted so that a clause could be formulated for her benefit. After further delays, the bill was reported again on 18 Apr. when the clause in the countess’s favour was accepted, but the entire bill was lost when the question whether to engross it with the amendment was carried in the negative.
In early 1696 there were rumours that Torrington, at that time apparently thought of as a Tory, would come back into office, either at the admiralty itself or in charge of the fleet.
Torrington did not sit in the House again until 23 Nov. 1696. His absence had been noted at a call of the House on 14 Nov., and he was formally summoned to appear by the end of that month to participate in the proceedings concerning Sir John Fenwick‡, 3rd bt. Torrington was opposed to the bill for Fenwick’s attainder and put his name to the protest against the second reading of the bill on 18 December.
After having made his mark in the debate, and having voted against the bill, he appears to have left the House early for the Christmas recess, for that is the most plausible explanation for the absence of his name from all contemporary lists of dissenters and protesters to the bill, such as that drafted by Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford, on 23 Dec. itself, although his name does appear at the bottom of the list of dissenters in the manuscript and printed Journal for that day. On 23 Dec. those opposed to the bill received a special dispensation allowing them to subscribe to the protest whenever they next appeared in the House, with the deadline for subscription not limited, as usual, to the next sitting. As a result, it would appear that Torrington, despite being marked one of the leaders of the opposition to the Fenwick attainder, was probably the last to indicate formally his opposition to the act through his signature to the protest, as after sitting for some time on 23 Dec. he did not return to the House until 26 Feb. 1697, and all manuscript copies of the protest compiled between those two dates omit his name.
On 2 Dec. 1696 Torrington had been named to a large select committee to consider papers submitted by the commissioners of the admiralty. On 17 Mar. 1697 this committee was revived to consider the previous summer’s naval mishap when the Anglo-Dutch fleet failed to intercept its Toulon counterpart. Narcissus Luttrell‡ noted that the chief members of this committee, ‘their lordships being resolved to find out in whom the fault lay’, were Leeds, Normanby, Rochester, Charles Powlett, duke of Bolton, and, providing some naval experience, Torrington and Leeds’s nautical son Peregrine Osborne, styled marquess of Carmarthen (who attended the House as Baron Osborne and later succeeded as 2nd duke of Leeds).
Decreased attendance, 1697-1702
Torrington came to only 16 sittings of the House in 1697-8. Although he was named a manager for two conferences in quick succession, on 10 and 13 Jan. 1698, concerning the House’s amendments to the bill against corresponding with James II and on the bill to continue the imprisonment of a suspect in the assassination plot against William III, he absented himself from the House entirely between 26 Feb. and 29 June. By his own account he was too ill to attend, but he was concerned by rumours that the Commons would introduce a bill to vacate all of William III’s land grants in England, and throughout the spring of 1698 he tried to enlist Herbert of Chirbury to manage his interest if and when this bill came up.
Torrington did not sit in the new Parliament elected in summer 1698 until 24 Jan. 1699, and only after the House had formally summoned him a week previously. He left the House again on 10 Feb. and in that brief period both voted and protested with the country movement against the resolution of 8 Feb. pledging the House’s assistance in maintaining the king’s Dutch guards in England. After having been summoned once again by the House on 13 Mar. he appeared a week later but remained only until 29 Mar. when the House formally dispensed him from further attendance because of his indisposition. He attended just 15 sittings during the session; but, despite his illnesses and lack of engagement, there were rumours in March that he would soon replace Orford at the admiralty.
This change did not take place, but the king did visit Torrington at Oatlands Park after a day’s hunting in the first days of 1700.
Torrington first appeared in the new Parliament on 25 Feb. 1701. He only came to 18 meetings in total, but crowded in a large number of protests and dissents in that time. On 8 Mar. he protested against the address to the king to take off the suspension of Captain John Norris, who two years previously had been, upon an address to the king from the House, deprived of his naval duties for failing to engage with a hostile French squadron. The similarity of Norris’s case to his own did not necessarily make Torrington sympathetic. He and the other protesters felt that Norris’s innocence had not been sufficiently proved to the House and that such matters should be determined by a court martial—as Torrington himself had had to undergo. He left the house for an extended period after 12 Apr. but returned in early June, perhaps to take part in the proceedings against the impeached Whig lords. He joined other Tories in calling for a joint committee of both Houses to handle the impeachments and signed two protests on 9 and 11 June against resolutions which tried to scupper the project of a joint committee or any sort of co-operation with the lower House. But he left the House again on 13 June, just as the impeachments were heating up, and was not present to vote against the acquittal of John Somers, Baron Somers, and of Orford on 17 and 23 June.
At the turn of 1701-2 rumours were again rife that Torrington would return to naval affairs as first lord of the admiralty and acting admiral of the fleet in the place of Sir George Rooke‡. Luttrell observed ‘that the sea captains begin already to attend his lordship and make their court to him as though he was actually in that high station, but ‘tis not known how the Dutch will brook this’.
Naval expert under Queen Anne, 1702-8
Macky provided a pithy summary of Torrington’s career to his Hanoverian contacts in about 1702-3: he ‘came over Admiral of the fleet with King William, was in favour, made an earl, commanded at the Beachy Head engagement, where we were beat, and he was disgraced for his conduct therein, and hath never come into play since’.
He was involved in a number of major matters. On 11 Jan. 1703 when the House debated whether the clause in the bill to grant a revenue to George of Denmark, duke of Cumberland, which allowed the prince consort to retain his seat in the House after the queen’s death implicitly deprived other foreign-born peers of their right to sit in the House, Torrington moved:
that an expedient might be considered on, how to grant the prince all that this bill pretended to give him in another manner, such as might not occasion any disputes betwixt the two Houses... and such as might be more for the honour of his highness, since this, if it passed at all, would be carried in this House by a very slender majority.
Upon this motion Devonshire proposed that a separate declaratory bill be readied that would affirm the right of the foreign-born peers to sit in the House, regardless of the provisions against this in the Act of Succession. Torrington subscribed to the protest of 19 Jan. when the offending clause was confirmed by the House, and the plans for a separate declaratory act defeated.
He also took part in the debates and proceedings concerning the renewed war against France. On 9 Jan. letters from the States General to the queen requesting English assistance against the predicted French onslaught of that spring were laid before the House. William Nicolson, bishop of Carlisle, noted that ‘the first that spoke to this was the earl of Torrington, who moved that the queen might be addressed with an assurance of the readiness of this House to comply (as the Commons had done) with the proposal of the Dutch, provided they would immediately prohibit all commerce and correspondence with France and Spain’. Torrington’s motion, with its suspicion of Dutch double-dealing, was voted to be incorporated in the address and Torrington was appointed to its drafting committee. He distinguished himself most of all by the prominent part he took in the investigation of Sir George Rooke’s role in the failure to capture Cadiz and the attack on the Spanish plate fleet in Vigo Bay that previous October. On 10 Dec. the House ordered the admiralty to submit to the House the journals of the flag officers involved in the action, but when five days later the secretary of the admiralty claimed that the journals ‘were making ready and some of them would be prepared’ for the following day, Torrington commented that ‘this was an odd way of obeying their lordships’ orders, to talk of preparing matters, when the original journals were required’. The same issue came up again in the new year when Nottingham could only produce for the House copies of Rooke’s correspondence of the previous summer with the secretary of state’s office. Torrington pointed out that the House had once again requested the originals. He was prominent in the select committee investigating the naval action, to which he was appointed on 17 Dec. 1702, and contemporaries reported the merciless grilling he and Orford, ‘the two old admirals’, gave Rooke in committee on about 23 Jan. 1703. Torrington in particular queried why he did not take greater measures to attack and secure Cadiz.
On 17 Dec. 1702 Torrington was appointed to help manage the conference on the Lords’ amendments to the occasional conformity bill, and the following day he was placed on the committee to draft a defence of them. Torrington attended another conference on these amendments on 9 Jan. 1703 and a week later voted to adhere to them, thus ensuring the bill’s demise that session. He again voted against the bill when it came up again on 14 Dec. in the following session. Both supporters and opponents of the bill forecast that he would vote this way, and this vote, and his protest against the clause in Prince George’s bill, marks a shift in his political allegiances, from Tory during William III to Whig under Anne. The reasons for this shift cannot be easily explained but it is clear that from late 1703 Torrington was associating both socially and politically with prominent Whigs. Charles Bennet, 2nd Baron Ossulston (later earl of Tankerville), recorded in his diary seeing Torrington at a number of grand consults of Whig leaders in the winter of 1703-4, such as the one on 17 Dec. 1703, the day after the defeat of the occasional conformity bill, held at the house of Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, where Torrington was in the company of Devonshire, Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron (later marquess of) Wharton, Charles Montagu, Baron (later earl of) Halifax, Charles Cornwallis, 4th Baron Cornwallis, Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, and several others. Similarly on 13 Feb. 1704 he was present at another evening meeting at Sunderland’s house in St James’s Square where the Whig personnel was even more extensive—Wharton, Halifax, Somers, Cornwallis, Herbert of Chirbury and Charles Howard, 3rd earl of Carlisle among them.
This latter meeting took place only a few days after Torrington had introduced in the House on 9 Feb. 1704 a bill ‘for the effective manning of the navy’, which made its way through the House concurrently with a similar bill ‘for the increase of seamen and the protection of the coal trade’, brought up from the Commons on 1 February. But while this latter bill passed both Houses and received the royal assent on 24 Feb., Torrington’s bill was lost in committee in the Commons, suggesting that it had been devised as an alternative, and competitor, to the scheme of naval recruitment proposed by the lower House.
Ossulston reported that on 23 Mar. 1704 Torrington dined at the house of Charles Seymour, 6th duke of Somerset, with such prominent Whigs as Wharton, Somers, Orford, Sunderland and Carlisle.
In the 1704-5 session Torrington held the proxy of his kinsman Herbert of Chirbury from 18 Nov. until Herbert’s first sitting on 11 Jan. 1705. He remained principally concerned with naval matters, and on 21 Nov. 1704 was added to the select committee, chaired by Orford, investigating the expenses and increasing debt of the Navy.
In the final two weeks of the 1704-5 session he was very active in the House. On 2 Mar. he once again signed the protest against that session’s recruiting bill, but most of all during these final weeks he was involved in conferences. On 27 Feb. 1705 he was named to the large committee assigned to draw up heads for the conference in which the Lords would make clear their disapproval of the Commons’ prosecution of the ‘Aylesbury men’, and he was named a manager for this conference held the following day. He formed part of the House’s delegation again for another conference on this matter on 7 Mar., on which day he was also appointed to a committee of 18 lords charged with drawing up a representation to the queen of the state of the proceedings between the Houses on this matter. On 1 Mar. he was placed on a committee to formulate arguments against the lower House’s amendments to the bill to naturalize Jacob Péchels, and he was one of the lords appointed to manage the conference on this matter 12 days later. He was a manager for the conference of 12 Mar. on the Lords’ amendment to the militia bill, and was placed on the committee assigned to write a defence of the amendment and to present it to the Commons in conference the following day. Following this the lower House receded from its objections so the queen could assent to the bill at the prorogation on 14 March.
He remained relatively active in the new Parliament’s first session of October 1705-March 1706, when he came to almost half of the meetings (45 per cent). His absence was excused when he was found to be missing at a call of the House on 12 Nov. 1705, and he first sat in the House nine days later. He was named on 7 Feb. 1706 a manager for the conference on the disagreements over the Lords’ amendments modifying the Commons’ place clause in the regency bill. He was appointed to the committee constituted to draw up reasons in defence of the amendments, and took part in two subsequent conferences on this matter on 11 and 19 February.
His most prominent role in this session was not in the House, but in committee, and particularly the large committee of 49 lords established on 18 Dec. 1705 to ‘consider of proper methods for the more easy and effectual manning of the fleet of England, and to inquire into the present state and condition of the navy’. He quickly took the chair of this committee and on its first day, 19 Dec., was requested to speak to several naval officers in the Commons ‘to give notice to those gentlemen, that they might consider whether they were at liberty to attend without leave’. Torrington reported to the House on 9 Jan. 1706, after the Christmas recess, that the committee needed to hear from Sir Clowdesley Shovell‡, George Churchill‡, Sir George Byng†, later Viscount Torrington, Sir John Jennings‡ and Sir Stafford Fairborne‡. These members of the Commons, many of them former clients of Torrington from Tangier days, received dispensation from their own House and were heard before the committee on 14 and 19 January. They complained of the difficulty in tempting away seamen from the rival attractions of the merchant marine, which paid ‘great wages’, and the recent act of 1704 ‘for the better encouragement of navigation and security of the coal trade’, by which colliery owners could use young able-bodied seamen who would otherwise be destined for the navy. A bill ‘for the increase of seamen and speedy manning the fleet’ based on the recommendations set out by Torrington and his naval colleagues in committee was ordered to be prepared by the Commons on 23 January. The bill passed the Commons and was sent up to the Lords on 18 March.
The following day, the day of prorogation, was a busy one for Torrington. He chaired the committee of the whole House which passed the bill to provide more time to settle debentures on forfeited estates in Ireland. The bill for the encouragement of seamen, so much his work, was rushed through the House. He was then named to the committee to draft an address to the queen asking her to appoint a commission to prepare a report, to be ready before the next session commenced, on further ways of manning the fleet and restoring discipline in the navy. The queen confirmed that she would appoint such a committee, and then passed Torrington’s bill for the recruitment of seamen.
Torrington was, not surprisingly, a principal member of this committee and in May the lord high admiral, Prince George of Denmark, consulted with him and his fellow commissioners. A report on the means for manning the fleet was ready to be signed by Torrington and presented to the lord high admiral by late October 1706, but its recommendations appear to have been lost in the administrative morass of the prince’s council after that.
Retirement, 1708-16
After the elections of 1708 Torrington abandoned Parliament altogether. He did not come to a single meeting of the House between 16 Nov. 1708 and 21 Sept. 1710, the only Parliament in his career which he avoided in its entirety. When Robert Harley drew up a forecast of the potential support for his ministry of autumn 1710 he marked Torrington as ‘doubtful’, suggesting that Torrington’s political leanings remained unclear even at this time and particularly after such a long absence. Torrington initially showed the same unwillingness or inability to attend the House under the new ministry as he had in the previous three years, and came to only six sittings in the entire 1710-11 session, most in late November and early December 1710. When Parliament reconvened on 7 Dec. 1711 Torrington was present and voted against the Whig motion to present an address insisting that there could be ‘No Peace without Spain’; Oxford (as Harley had become) included him in a list of loyal peers who were to be rewarded with office or pension. But only a few days later Torrington went against the ministry by voting to disable James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton [S], from sitting in the House under his British title of duke of Brandon. After sporadically coming to the House in January 1712, Torrington’s attention turned to the House again in April when his petition against Robert Depup’s alleged breach of privilege in felling wood on Torrington’s land in the Bedford Level was presented to the House in his absence on 3 April. Proceedings in the committee for privileges on this matter were suspended on 7 Apr., as Torrington’s illness prevented him from attending, but he made his way into the House for the first time since 28 Feb. on 14 April. The following day he was able to hear the report in his favour from the committee and to witness Depup’s reprimand and discharge on 7 May. He reappeared in the House on 28 May to vote with the Oxford ministry against the motion to present an address against the queen’s ‘restraining orders’ prohibiting English forces from engaging in offensive military action against France.
these [peers] had made a sort of agreement that the court should prevent a division, by which means they should not be discovered, but they were gudgeons, for the court wanted not a majority, but a triumph, to show the people the disparity of numbers [the ministry won the vote 81 to 36], and so they were caught like fools. A great deal of money and promises were spent to work this apostasy.Christ Church, Oxford, Wake ms 17, f. 329; Holmes, ‘Great Ministry’, 207-8.
Oxford may well have been trying to win Torrington over to support the ministry with ‘money and promises’. Certainly Torrington’s name appears frequently in the many lists which Oxford drew up in 1713-4 for his calculations of political support.
His last appearance in the House was on 2 Aug. 1714, the day after Anne’s death. From that date he took no part in the affairs of the nation. He died at his house at Oatlands Park on 14 Apr. 1716. He left behind no children by either of his wives. His peerage became extinct, although the title of Torrington was revived a few years later for his fellow naval officer and erstwhile client Sir George Byng. He bequeathed the bulk of his estate, including Oatlands Park, reckoned to amount to £6,000 p.a., to the impecunious but vigorous Whig earl of Lincoln.