TOWNSHEND, Horatio (1630-87)

Local worthy in Norfolk, 1648-58

The Townshends had been based at Raynham, near King’s Lynn in north Norfolk, since the end of the fourteenth century, but the family’s estate had been greatly enlarged by the exertions of the eminent lawyer Sir Roger Townshend^‡ in the late fifteenth century. Horatio’s paternal grandfather Sir John Townshend^‡ had, through his union with Anne Bacon, married into another illustrious legal clan (her father was Sir Nathaniel Bacon^‡ and uncle was Francis Bacon^†, Viscount St Albans) and brought the family additional estates in north Norfolk, particularly Stiffkey and Langham. Horatio’s father had been made a baronet in 1617 and in 1627 married a daughter and coheiress of the military leader Baron Vere^† of Tilbury. The couple had two sons in quick succession – Roger and Horatio – named in honour of these paternal figures. Sir Roger Townshend died in 1637, leaving his new grand residence of Raynham Hall, inspired by the architecture of Inigo Jones^‡, unfinished and unoccupied and his elder son and namesake heir to the baronetcy. Within almost a year of his death, his widow remarried, her second husband being Mildmay Fane, 2nd earl of Westmorland, and it was in this household that Sir Roger Townshend, 2nd bt, and his younger brother Horatio spent their formative years. Rosenheim, Townshends, 13-15.

In early 1647 the brothers began a tour of the continent, but this was cut short by Sir Roger’s death at Geneva. Horatio thus returned home in mid-July 1648 as the 3rd baronet and one of the largest landowners in the county with, apart from his father’s mansion at Raynham, 30 manors and three lordships in Norfolk, all worth about £4,200 p.a. By October 1649 he was married to Mary Lewkenor, who brought with her lands in that county worth £1,200 p.a. Rosenheim, Townshends, 65, 67; Add. 41655, ff. 116-17. Owing to his standing both the Commonwealth and Protectorate governments turned to him to fulfil local offices and responsibilities – justice of the peace and commissioner of assessment for Norfolk and commissioner of sewers for the Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire fenland, among others. A fuller list of his many local offices is in HP Commons, 1660-90, iii. 579. Most significantly he was a knight of the shire for Norfolk in the second and third Protectorate Parliaments.

The leaders of the Protectorate probably thought they could rely on the young man because he was untainted by involvement in the previous war and came from a renowned puritan background. Townshend’s late father and surviving mother were both zealous Protestants, his maternal grandmother was a benefactress of godly causes and her husband, Baron Vere, had been a champion of English intervention in the International Protestant cause during the religious wars of the early seventeenth century. The Veres were also cousins to the puritan Harley family and Townshend maintained a friendly correspondence with Sir Edward Harley^‡ throughout his life. HMC Portland, iii. 266, 310, 323, 337, 339, 357, 358. His maternal aunt Lady Anne Vere was married to the parliamentary general Thomas Fairfax^‡, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron [S]. In addition, his wife’s family, the Lewkenors, had long been celebrated for their piety, charity, and campaigning for further reformation of the Church of England. But Townshend’s loyalties were more complex. His stepfather Westmorland was a former royalist who had been punished with fines and sequestration, nor does Townshend appear to have adhered closely to the religious zealotry of his parents and kin. He later claimed to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, that he ‘might have been a presbyter or fanatic’ had he not been ‘forewarned by their Jesuitical practices and insinuations’. Historians of the Restoration often classify Townshend as a ‘Presbyterian’, but this is primarily because of his later, largely opportunistic, association with the country opposition. His prosecution of nonconformity in Norfolk in the early 1660s does not suggest that he was particularly motivated by any lingering attachment to Dissent. Rosenheim, Townshends, 15, 17, 20-21, 26n., 35n.; HMC Townshend, 36; Swatland, 271.

The Restoration, 1659-60

Certainly he was not attached to the Protectorate regime itself and from March 1659 his opposition in Parliament to the government was being reported favourably to Hyde. CCSP, iv. 159, 161, 166-7, 177, 194. In a surprise move, after the collapse of the Protectorate in May the reinstalled Rump Parliament appointed Townshend to the council of state and to the commission for the Norfolk militia, but he only accepted these places after receiving a dispensation to do so from the king himself. After Charles Fleetwood^‡ accused him of being a covert royalist, Townshend left the council for good and retired to the country. From that time Townshend was enlisted, through the agency of John Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt, to try to secure the port of King’s Lynn for the royalists in the general rising that was planned for that summer. CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 349; HMC 10th Rep. VI, 196, 199, 203; Cam. Soc. 3rd ser. lxix, 9, 10, 13-14, 15, 21, 29; CCSP, iv. 201, 204, 205, 208, 209, 227, 235, 243, 244. Townshend, according to Clarendon’s later account, was ‘a gentleman of the greatest interest and credit in that large county of Norfolk’ and, as he ‘had been under age till long after the end of the war’, he was ‘liable to no reproach or jealousy, yet of very worthy principles, and of a noble fortune which he engaged very frankly to borrow money, which he laid out to provide arms and ammunition’ for the attempt on King’s Lynn. Unfortunately he and his confederate in the attempt, Francis Willoughby, 4th Baron Willoughby of Parham, were apprehended before the port could be secured and perhaps imprisoned, although there is no other evidence for Townshend’s arrest outside of Clarendon’s account. Clarendon, Rebellion. vi. 111-12, 118-19; CCSP, iv. 330; Rosenheim, Townshends, 20n. He was certainly at large in September 1659, when the king’s secretary of state Sir Edward Nicholas^‡ wrote that Townshend had ‘sent to Mr Mordaunt that they will now attempt anything for the king to prevent the ruin of the nation’, but only if ‘there can be but 5,000 men sent over from France of Flanders’. CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 206-7. Later that year he and Sir Edward Harley worked together to convince their mutual kinsman Lord Fairfax to support General George Monck, later duke of Albemarle, in his march to London. Townshend even transmitted to Fairfax a letter from Charles II assuring him of his favour despite his past actions. Clarendon, Rebellion, vi. 165.

Townshend thus emerged as the leader of the Norfolk gentry acting for the restoration of the king and on 28 Jan. 1660 he presented to the Speaker of the Rump a ‘Declaration by the gentry of Norfolk and Norwich’ asserting that without the recall of the members secluded in 1648 the people of Norfolk would not feel obliged to pay taxes. CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 332; Rosenheim, Townshends, 21n. The reinstated Long Parliament in March constituted him a commissioner of the militia for Norfolk as well as governor of King’s Lynn, and the king wrote to him expressing his gratitude and favour. On the king’s behalf he played a prominent part in overseeing the election of royalists to the Convention, and was himself elected a knight of the shire for that assembly. CCSP, iv. 609, 618-19, 639-40, 682-3; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 283; Add. 41656, ff. 12-13. He was also chosen one of the 12 members assigned to travel to Breda to convey the Convention’s invitation to the king for his return. With the king restored, in the summer of 1660 he was made a deputy lieutenant, with a regiment of horse, under the nominal and largely absent lord lieutenant of Norfolk Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton. CJ, viii. 15; Clarendon, Rebellion, vi. 229; CTB, i. 77; Norf. Ltcy Jnl. 1660-76 (Norf. Rec. Soc. xlv), 26; Add. 41656, f. 16.

Clarendon’s agent in Norfolk, 1661-68

Hyde, soon to be earl of Clarendon himself, valued the young man as his principal agent in ‘that large county of Norfolk’ and undoubtedly had a role in his elevation to the peerage in the coronation honours of April 1661. HMC Townshend, 38-39. Undoubtedly aware of his impending promotion, Townshend declined standing in the general election that year, but his recommendation at a meeting of gentry before the election ensured that his former partner in the Convention, Thomas Richardson^‡, 2nd Lord Cramond [S], and his own brother-in-law Sir Ralph Hare^‡, bt were returned unopposed for the county seats. Sir John Holland^‡, bt, who had sat for the borough of Castle Rising in the Convention, applied himself to Townshend when he changed his mind late in the day and decided that he wished to sit for that borough in the new Parliament after all. He had earlier assured the borough’s patron, Lord Henry Howard, later 6th duke of Norfolk, that he did not wish to serve at Westminster again. Howard had already settled on his members for Castle Rising, but through Townshend’s offices, he ensured that Holland was returned for his Suffolk borough of Aldeburgh instead. Townshend also shared the interest at Thetford with Howard, and ensured the return of the courtier Sir Allen Apsley^‡, master of the hawks, for that borough. Norf. Arch. xxx. 130-9; Seaward, Cavalier Parlt. 81.

Having secured suitable members for Norfolk in the Commons, shortly after his elevation Townshend replaced the absentee Southampton as lord lieutenant. However, his commission of 15 Aug. gave him the wrong forename, and as this mistake took some time to rectify it was not actually until mid-October that he fully entered into his office. Until then, he was still considered a deputy lieutenant. CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 64; CTB i. 280-1; Add. 27447, f. 302. Norf. Ltcy Jnl. 1660-76 (Norf. Rec. Soc. xlv), 25, 28-30. From the time he formally took up his duties he proved an active, conscientious and energetic lord lieutenant for the crown. He may have voted against the Corporation Act, but once it had been passed he enforced its provisions and conducted a thorough purge of those corporations and conventicles sympathetic to the old regime in many of the county’s more troublesome boroughs. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, 335. In particular, he considered the port of Great Yarmouth a ‘nest of schismatical rogues’, and complained that the town corporation protected ministers ‘against the king and liturgy’. He calculated that Presbyterians or Independents made up two-thirds of the corporation’s officials and under the terms of the Corporation Act and the Act of Uniformity prosecuted those ‘not conformable unto the government of the church’. Clarendon would have been sympathetic to this view for, as high steward of the port, he had already had his share of disagreements with the corporation over the ejection and replacement of a nonconforming minister in August 1663. Rosenheim, Townshends, 26-27; Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich, 238n.; CCSP, v. 328, 329. Disputes with Great Yarmouth continued throughout the 1660s, and when the king tried to force his choice of bailiffs on the corporation in August 1665, supported by a letter of recommendation from Townshend, the town fathers studiously ignored this royal command and instead appointed a suspected nonconformist who had previously taken up arms against Charles I. Continuation of Manship’s Hist. of Gt Yarmouth, ed. Palmer, 247; CSP Dom. 1667-8, p. 186.

Townshend constantly faced opposition from Norfolk’s independent-minded boroughs, not just Great Yarmouth, but Norwich and Thetford as well, where his interest competed with that of the more long-standing and eminent, albeit Catholic, Howard family. When the corporation of Thetford considered renewing its charter in 1664, they ignored Townshend’s help, claiming that ‘they had a friend worth forty of my Lord Townshend who would do it for them … Mr Henry Howard’ (i.e. Lord Henry Howard), and in 1668 the corporation completely bypassed Townshend when drawing up its commission of the peace: a pointed insult. He also felt the need to reassure Clarendon that Norwich remained loyal to the king, despite its long-standing reputation for nonconformity and rebelliousness. Rosenheim, Townshends, 30-32; Add. 41656, f. 95; Bodl. Clarendon 83, f. 172.

He was only rewarded for his efforts to enforce the central government’s policies with further local responsibilities, and not the position at court he apparently craved. In August 1663, he added to his local duties when he was appointed vice-admiral of the Norfolk coast, and then high steward of King’s Lynn, near his own estate of Raynham, in 1664. Add. 41656, ff. 30-33; Norf. Official Lists, ed. Le Strange, 199. With this conglomeration of local roles, he was highly active and effective in organizing the defence of the Norfolk coast from invasion during the second Dutch War, shuttling around the county almost nonstop to prepare the militia and oversee the coastal defences, although he still faced obstruction from the port of Great Yarmouth, so close to the Dutch coast. For this conflict he also raised his own regiment of horse. There was a slight financial recognition of his services, and in June 1664 he was granted a lease of 4 shillings per chaldron of exported coals for 21 years, at a rent of £2,000 p. a., later reduced to £1,000 p.a. in March 1667. This proved to be a useful source of income for the indebted peer, and by 1668 brought him an income of about £2,100 a year. HMC Townshend, 27; Rosenheim, Townshends, 27, 32-33, 65; CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 630; 1666-7, p. 569; 1667, pp. 179-80.

Early service in the Lords

Townshend’s importance in the early years of the Restoration lies far more in his electoral interest and in the local politics of Norfolk than in his activities in the House of Lords itself. He does not stand out as a leading actor in the House during the 1660s and even when present was more often than not overlooked by his peers when forming select committees. The newly created Baron Townshend was present on the opening day of Charles II’s first Parliament on 8 May 1661, but it was not until 11 May that he was introduced formally between George Berkeley, 9th Baron (later earl of) Berkeley, and William Maynard, 2nd Baron Maynard. He came to 81 per cent of the meetings during the first part of the session in spring 1661, but was named to only one select committee throughout this period. Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, forecast that he would support the case of his kinsman Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, in his dispute with Montagu Bertie, 2nd earl of Lindsey, over the office of lord great chamberlain. He came to a little less than two-thirds of the meetings between the time Parliament resumed in November 1661 and its prorogation in May 1662, and was named to only nine select committees, including those to consider the uniformity bill and the bill to reform frauds in the collection of customs duties – which may explain the presence of papers entitled ‘Proposals for the better management of his Majesty&rsquos customs’ among his personal papers. Add. 41656, ff. 97-104. He was absent from 8 Feb. to 3 Mar. 1662 and thus missed much of the discussion on the dispute between the ports of Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft concerning the herring fisheries, although he was kept informed of Parliament’s proceedings on this issue by one of the members for Great Yarmouth. HMC Townshend, 26.

Townshend was present on the opening day of the subsequent session, 18 Feb. 1663. Five days later he informed the House that Edward Reynolds, bishop of Norwich, was detained in Norfolk owing to his wife’s illness. HMC Townshend, 25-26. From 6 Mar. to 2 Apr. he held Maynard’s proxy. He was placed on only six select committees, until he was given official leave to be absent from the House ‘for some time’ on 20 June. He did not attend the House from that point and registered his own proxy with John Lucas, Baron Lucas of Shenfield, on 23 June. Concerning the attempt of George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, to impeach Clarendon in July 1663, Wharton forecast that Townshend would support the lord chancellor. His basis for this was Townshend’s proxy with Lucas, whom he mistakenly put on Clarendon’s side, whereas Lucas was in fact one of Bristol’s leading advocates in the house and later became one of Clarendon’s fiercest opponents. Seaward, Cavalier Parlt. 229, 230, 232-3.

If faulty in his reasoning, Wharton was probably right in placing Townshend in Clarendon’s camp, for throughout this period Townshend remained in close correspondence with the lord chancellor regarding the lieutenancy of Norfolk, and probably served him as manager of the 12 Norfolk members in the Commons. Bodl. ms Eng. Hist. b. 212. Notes made by Townshend in about April 1663 are suggestive that he may have acted as a ‘parliamentary manager’ alerting the ministry to the concerns of his followers on the backbenches. These included complaints of French and Dutch interference in the fishing trade and of the preponderant influence in Scotland of John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale [S] (earl of Guilford). Seaward, Cavalier Parlt. 81-82; Add. 41654, ff. 62-65; HMC Townshend, 30-35. This close collaboration with the lord chancellor was further shown in the session of 1664-5, which followed upon Townshend’s high attendance in the brief session of spring 1664, when he was present at all but two of its 37 sittings. In the run-up to the session starting in November 1664, as Clarendon was casting around for members of the Commons willing to support an unprecedented supply for the intended war against the Dutch, he turned specifically to three members from Norfolk for assistance, undoubtedly with Townshend’s aid and advice. Sir Robert Paston, later earl of Yarmouth, a burgess for the Howards’ borough of Castle Rising, agreed to take on the daunting task, while the other two, unfortunately unnamed, members from Norfolk agreed to second the motion. On 25 Nov. Paston moved that Parliament grant the Crown supply of £2,500,000, an extravagant proposal which was duly seconded by his two Norfolk colleagues and which surprisingly met with little opposition in the Commons. Clarendon Life, ii. 306-11; Add. 36988, f. 88. On that same day Paston introduced in the Commons a bill that would extend the boundaries of Great Yarmouth to include his own property on the south bank of the Yare. After barely passing the lower house by one vote, this controversial bill proved equally difficult in the Lords, but was ably seen through the House through the efforts of a small number of sympathetic peers, including Townshend, whom Paston described at this time (February 1665) as ‘the best friend I have in the world’. HMC 6th Rep., 364; Add. 27447, ff. 324, 329, 334, 338; Add. 36988, ff. 100-101; LJ, xi. 663. Townshend wrote a letter to Clarendon sometime in 1665 recommending Paston for advancement at court, as a reward for his promotion of the king’s interest in the Commons, and continued to act as an intermediary between Clarendon and Paston. Clarendon 83, f. 422; CCSP, v. 553; Norf. RO, BL/Y/1/15, 23. When Paston felt himself deceived by promises of a peerage made to him by Henry Bennet, later earl of Arlington, and Sir Charles Berkeley, later earl of Falmouth, which did not come through, he ‘complained to a friend of his who he knew had interest in the chancellor’ – almost certainly Townshend – &lsquoand desired him to acquaint him [the chancellor] with all that had passed’. Clarendon, upon receiving the king&#rsquo;s final refusal, ‘truly advertised his friend of all the king had said, who again informed Sir Robert Paston, who thought himself very hardly treated’. The king was unwilling to give much but kind words to Paston at this time, although later he received a lucrative farm on the customs on unwrought wood and other imported commodities and ultimately a peerage. Clarendon Life, ii. 312-14; CSP Dom. 1665-6, pp. 228-9, 331-2; HMC 6th Rep. 365, 366, 370.

Townshend was present for all but 18 days of this 1664-5 session, was named to 11 select committees, one of which he chaired on 13 Jan. 1665, and held the proxy of Charles Henry Kirkhoven, Baron Wotton, throughout. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 16. Townshend stayed away from the session held at Oxford in October, but on 30 Apr. 1666 he was one of the members of the House who found Thomas Parker, 15th Baron Morley (and 7th Baron Monteagle), not guilty of murder (but guilty of manslaughter) in an extraordinary court of the lord high steward convened outside of time of Parliament. HEHL, EL 8399; Stowe 396, ff. 178-190. He missed only eight of the 89 days of the session of 1666-7, when he was again appointed to 11 select committees and on 24 Jan. 1667 he was provisionally named one of the Lords’ commissioners for the ultimately abortive parliamentary commission of public accounts.

He was too preoccupied in preparing the defences of the Norfolk coast against Dutch invasion to attend any of the meetings of the brief five-day session of July 1667, but he was present for 61 per cent of the sitting days of the following long session of 1667-9. He was most active in the meetings of winter 1667 before the Christmas recess, when he came to over three-quarters of the sittings, but was still named to only four select committees. Townshend’s principal involvement in these weeks was his own private bill to confirm an exchange of land between himself and the rector of East and West Raynham, which was brought up from the Commons on 30 Oct. 1667. As the bishop of Norwich made clear to the bill’s select committee that he approved of the exchange, the bill was reported and passed the House without amendment on 6 Nov. the same day that Charles Stanhope, 2nd Baron Stanhope, registered his proxy for the remainder of the session with Townshend. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 195. Townshend’s bill received the royal assent on 19 Dec. by which time he had left the House for the winter.

The main event in Parliament during those winter months was the impeachment and ultimate banishment of Clarendon, and although there is no evidence of Townshend acting vigorously in the lord chancellor’s defence, after the downfall of his erstwhile patron Townshend’s attendance in the House slackened, and at a call of the House on 17 Feb. 1668 his absence was formally excused. In fact he appeared in the House only four days later but he left the House again for an extended period of time between 17 Mar. and 9 Apr. when he was given leave by the House ‘to go into the Country for some time’. In all, he was present at less than half of the sittings from February 1668 until the session’s prorogation on 9 May and was named to only seven select committees. He was likewise lacklustre in his attendance at the following session of winter 1669 when he came to 53 per cent of the meetings, but was only named to the large committees, comprising almost the entire House, assigned to consider the decay of trade and to examine the report of the Commissioners of Accounts.

‘Country’ leader, 1672-8

Townshend was a frequent attender of the session that met between February and April 1670. He came to 88 per cent of that period’s sittings, when he was named to 18 select committees. On 30 Mar. he was named to the committee on the bill to repair the harbour of Great Yarmouth. After the bill was reported from committee and sent down to the lower house on 2 Apr. the Commons made clear their dissatisfaction with a proviso in the bill and Townshend was named one of the six reporters delegated to a conference on 5 April. The following day, 6 Apr. his brother-in-law John Cecil, 4th earl of Exeter, who had recently married Townshend’s half-sister Lady Mary Fane, registered his proxy with Townshend for the remainder of the session, which was adjourned in April for the summer months. Townshend was far less attentive when Parliament resumed on 24 October. He came to just less than half of the meetings before the prorogation on 22 Apr. 1671 and was named to 13 select committees. In the autumn of 1671 the king visited Norfolk and made a point of stopping for a time at Raynham Hall at the end of September when he showed Townshend every mark of favour. Blomefield, Hist. of Norf., iii. 413; Corresp. of Thomas Corie, ed. Hill (Norf. Rec. Soc. xxvii), 34.

Townshend’s situation, personally and politically, changed dramatically in the year 1673. In May of that year his wife Mary died, aged 38. The couple had been childless, and Townshend quickly took steps to remarry. On 27 Nov. he married as his second wife the 20-year old Mary Ashe. Add. 70120, D. Michell to Sir E. Harley, 21 May 1673; Add. 25117, f. 146. She was reported to have brought ‘£8,000 with her, and a snip of 1,500 guineas from the mama’. Their first son was born in April 1675 and was named Charles, later 2nd Viscount Townshend, after his godfather the king. A second son, Roger^‡, followed in 1676, and Horatio^‡ a few years after that. Townshend was reputedly a ‘very joyful father’ and these births significantly changed his attitude both towards his local interest and the legacy he would leave his three sons. In addition, from 1671 letters to Sir Edward Harley from Townshend himself and from Harley’s sister Dorothy, who was married to Townshend’s chaplain William Michell, became increasingly concerned with Townshend’s debilitating and painful bouts of gout – one of which happened only a few weeks after his wedding in late 1673. HMC Portland, iii. 323, 342, 350, 357-8; CSP Dom. 1673, p. 599; Bodl. Tanner 42, f. 146; Tanner 285, f. 153; Add. 70011, ff. 264, 286; 70012, ff. 60, 62, 68, 166, 197, 259, 260, 269. This recurrent incapacitation was to play an important role in Townshend’s political behaviour in the years ahead.

The year 1673 also saw the early stages of Norfolk’s division into antagonistic political camps, divisions which had a largely personal dimension, as the groups initially gathered around the lord lieutenant on the one hand, and his erstwhile client, and rising man at court, Paston, on the other. Paston had recently cemented himself more firmly in the king’s affections by the marriage in July 1672 of his son William Paston, later 2nd earl of Yarmouth, to one of Charles II’s illegitimate daughters. At a by-election in February 1673 to replace the deceased county member Sir Ralph Hare, Townshend fully backed the old parliamentarian Sir John Hobart^‡, 3rd bt., who had been nominated to the ‘Other House’ of Oliver Cromwell^‡ and ‘having been one of Oliver’s lords, retains a respectful memory for his master and his cause, and … would stick at nothing to promote it again’. CSP Dom. 1672-3, p. 572; 1682, p. 54; HP Commons, 1660-90, ii. 552-3. This controversial choice, perhaps made in a fit of personal pique at his continued neglect by the king, backfired on Townshend and probably played a part in Charles’s decision to create Paston Viscount Yarmouth in August 1673, thus introducing him into the peerage at a higher level than Townshend (a mere baron). In 1675 Townshend alienated himself further from the court when in the course of two by-elections he flouted the apparent preferences of Whitehall. In the by-election at King’s Lynn in April 1675 Townshend clearly set himself against Robert Coke^‡, a son-in-law of the lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds). Coke won but Danby was not likely to forgive Townshend’s strenuous opposition to his son-in-law and to his attempts to strengthen the court party in Norfolk. HP Commons 1660-90, i. 327-8. Only a month later, in May, Townshend joined with Hobart and Sir John Holland in ensuring the victory of Sir Robert Kemp^‡, 2nd bt. by using under-handed and oppressive means against the court candidate Sir Neville Catelyn^‡ in another county by-election. HMC Townshend, 28; Add. 27447, ff. 342-3. Townshend and his associates occupied the lodgings which Catelyn’s supporters were planning to use and forced them into the street, took up positions outside the poll to discourage potential voters for Catelyn, and used the power of the county militia for Kemp’s benefit. It was noted ‘that many of those persons that came to the poll for Sir Robert Kemp cried out that they came for the lord lieutenant&rsquos sake, and others for this colonel, captain, or justice, but rarely any man said he came for Sir Robert Kemp’s sake’. HMC 6th Rep. 371-2; Add. 27477, ff. 344-5, 350-2; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 320. Townshend’s motives for this strenuous opposition to the court are not clear, but it seems to have been born more out of a need to exert his personal influence and interest in the county where he may have felt his power slipping away with the rise of Yarmouth and his patron Danby, than from any strong ideological objection to the policies pursued by the lord treasurer. One Norfolk contemporary lamented the lord lieutenant’s heavy-handed interference in the recent elections and saw it as a personal bid for influence: ‘My Lord Townshend by his greatness alone made Sir John Hobart [a knight of the shire] and now Sir Robert Kemp must be an addition to his glory, so our parliament men are made by the peer, not the gentry and commoners&rsquo. Rosenheim, Townshends, 42.

Townshend’s stance towards Danby and his court party in the turbulent sessions of 1673-4 is unclear. On 24 Jan. 1673 William Willoughby, 5th (CP 6th) Baron Willoughby of Parham, brother of Townshend’s old colleague in the royalist attempt on King’s Lynn in the summer of 1659, registered his proxy with him for the session which was to begin on 4 Feb. but this was vacated by Willoughby of Parham’s death on 10 Apr. when Parliament was in adjournment. Townshend also received the proxy of his fellow East Anglian magnate Leicester Devereux, 6th Viscount Hereford, on 11 Mar. which he was able to hold until the prorogation. Townshend was present for 58 per cent of the meetings in spring 1673, when he was only named to the large select committee assigned to draft advices to the king against the growth of popery. He was present for two sittings in late October 1673, but his absence owing to an attack of the gout was excused by the House on 12 Jan. 1674, at the beginning of the session of early 1674. Eventually he was able to come to almost three-quarters of the sittings of that session.

The year 1675 marked his watershed in the House, just as it did in Norfolk electoral politics. Townshend was present for exactly half of the session of spring 1675 which saw the concerted campaign against Danby’s non-resisting test bill. Danby himself, doing battle with Townshend in King’s Lynn at almost the same time as the test bill was before the House, clearly thought that Townshend would be an opponent. Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, in the Letter of a Person of Quality also mentioned Townshend, ‘a man justly of great esteem and power in his country’, among the bill’s opponents. Yet though contemporaries were clear where Townshend’s stance on this issue lay, he did not subscribe his name to any of the protests drawn up by those opposed to the bill throughout the debates in April and May. He came to two-thirds of the meetings of the following short session that autumn. In the 14 days he was in the House he was named to two select committees, and on 15 Nov. complained before the House of the ‘scandalous words’ uttered against him by Dr Owen Hughes, commissary of the Norwich and Norfolk archdeaconry and a confidant of Lady Yarmouth. Hughes had used the interest of Sir Robert Southwell^‡ and the earl of Norwich (as Lord Henry Howard had become in 1672) to be made, alongside his ecclesiastical appointments, a justice of the peace and a judge of the vice-admiralty court. From these positions he had vigorously attacked Dissenters, supported the candidacy of Robert Coke in King’s Lynn and opposed that of Sir Robert Kemp in Norfolk. The final straw had been a scurrilous paper distributed during the Norfolk by-election, with words reflecting on Townshend, which the baron insisted had been composed by Hughes. The case was to be heard before the House on 19 Nov. but as Townshend’s witnesses had not come up to town, the case was put off for a week. It never came to that, for on the following day, in the final act of the House before its speedy prorogation, Townshend joined other country peers in voting in favour of the motion to address the king to dissolve Parliament –indeed contemporaries considered him one of the 12 ‘chief lords of the address’ – and he then subscribed the protest when this motion was rejected by a mere two votes. Timberland, i. 158, 183.

This vote set a seal on Townshend’s ostracism from the court. In early March 1676 he was dismissed from all his local offices, most notably that of lord lieutenant, and replaced by Yarmouth. It was reported to Yarmouth upon his taking up the post that the rumour going around was that Townshend had been ‘turned out for tyrannizing in his country, caballing with Shaftesbury, Sir Samuel Barnardiston^‡, etc’. CSP Dom. 1675-6, p. 577; HMC 6th Rep. 374-5. In later years a commentator on Norfolk affairs saw this change as the crucial event in forming the later divisions in Norfolk and he provided a brief survey of recent Norfolk political history:

It is the general opinion that Lord Townshend whilst lord lieutenant had by his industry and conduct gained as great an influence as any lord lieutenant had and that he would in time have reduced all parties to the king’s service, but Lord Danby, as ’tis said, being angry with him for preferring a particular friend of his own in the choice of burgesses for Lynn before Mr Coke, the earl’s son-in-law, never left off till he got him removed from being lord lieutenant and procured Lord Yarmouth to be put in his place, which Lord Townshend looked on as so great an injury, reflecting on his services to the Crown, having spent above £20,000 in promoting the Restoration, and likewise that he was supplanted by one he looked on as a creature of his own, he having brought him first to Court and there helped to advance him from a mean fortune to his present share in the king’s favour, could not contain his resentment, but joined himself to Sir J. Hobart’s party... CSP Dom. 1682, p. 55.

The appointment led to turbulence in the administration of the county as many of Townshend’s ‘friends’, such as Holland, Kemp, and Hobart, refused to take up the deputy lieutenancies offered them by Yarmouth. HMC 6th Rep. 376; Add. 41656, ff. 53-54. The perspicacious commentator on Norfolk affairs in 1682, saw the animosity between the personal followers of Townshend and those of Yarmouth overlapping, and confusing, the boundaries of the ideological camps into which Norfolk and the rest of the country were slowly hardening:

The commissions of the peace being altered and Lord Townshend’s friends put out, and persons put in their places that have neither interest or estate here or elsewhere, they take it so very ill that those who at first only took part in Lord Townshend’s disgrace are become dissatisfied for their own account too and are entirely of Sir John Hobart’s party. CSP Dom. 1682, p. 55.

Yarmouth for his part saw Townshend as an enemy of his own patron Danby. He reported that Townshend had supposedly said ‘that the king should never have penny of money in Parliament as long as he was Treasurer, and threatens terrible things at the next Parliament’. HMC 6th Rep. 377. Townshend’s threats were empty. After his vote for the address to the king for the dissolution of Parliament on 20 Nov. 1675, he did not attend Parliament again until March 1679, completely missing the turbulent sessions of 1677-8. When both Shaftesbury and Denzil Holles, Baron Holles, solicited his attendance for the session beginning in February 1677, Townshend turned them each down, explaining that ‘my infirmities of body are such and the gout hath so prevailed all over me as that I am fit for nothing but to keep home and in that my chamber rather than parlour, and bed than either’. He did ask Shaftesbury to accept his proxy, ‘and if your Lordship be full, you may please to present it … to my lord of [Salisbury James Cecil, 3rd earl of Salisbury]’. To Holles he added further that ‘my parliament talent is not worth the carrying up so far under the difficulties I must struggle with’. Add. 41654, f. 30. It was Shaftesbury who took up his offer of a proxy, formally registered with the earl on 13 Feb. 1677, two days before the opening of the new session, and through this proxy Townshend’s absence was excused at a call of the House on 9 March. By then Shaftesbury was incarcerated in the Tower, where in his analysis of the political sentiments of the peerage, he noted Townshend ‘triply worthy’. As late as December 1678 Townshend was still so ill that he could reportedly eat nothing but ‘spoonmeat’ and vomited up whatever food he could ingest. Norf. RO, BL/Y/2/90.

Away from Westminster Townshend devoted himself to county politics, where enemies seemed to be encircling him. In late July 1676 Edward Reynolds, the ‘presbyterian’ bishop of Norwich, died who had worked closely and harmoniously with Townshend, frequently turning a blind eye to the widespread nonconformity in his diocese. Reynolds was replaced, as Yarmouth wished, by Anthony Sparrow, bishop of Exeter, a convinced ceremonialist and foe of Dissent. From this point both the secular and ecclesiastical administrators of the county were set against Townshend and his colleagues. Instead of taking a moderate and conciliatory stance with the new and hostile regime, as his friend Holland suggested, Townshend adopted a paranoid and combative stance against his local enemies. Add. 27447, ff. 370-1; HMC Townshend, 28; HMC 6th Rep. 378. He won a victory in his vendetta against Owen Hughes, which had been curtailed by the prorogation of Parliament. In early 1676 Townshend brought an action of scandalum magnatum against him. An assize jury awarded Townshend damages of £4,000 in July, a punitive verdict later upheld by the court of common pleas in February 1677, upon Hughes’s appeal to that court. Sometime in 1677 Townshend felt he had to rebut to a friend still in London charges of disobedience to the king and participation in nonconformist conventicles. He could only conclude wearily, ‘But that they who write me out of my commission and the king’s service have a mind to work me out of the country too is no news to me, who know I can never be other than a[n] eye sore to them’. Add. 36988, ff. 117-18; HMC 7th Rep. 532; HMC Townshend, 28; Add. 29556, f. 116; Add. 41654, ff. 66-67.

He once again quickly got wrapped up in electioneering, this time for the country opposition. The first trial of strength came following the death of the sitting member for Norwich Christopher Jay^‡ in August 1677. Yarmouth and the earl of Norwich, who succeeded as 6th duke of Norfolk in December 1677, put forward Yarmouth’s son William Paston as a replacement. Townshend and Hobart encouraged opposition to Paston from the Norwich corporation and its mayor, who was described by Yarmouth as ‘the impudentest fanatic in the world’. In the event, and ‘notwithstanding the strange strategems and tricks used by the Raynham and Blickling Cabal’ (Blickling being Hobart’s seat), William Paston won the election handily, by a three-to-one margin. HMC 6th Rep. 382-5. Yarmouth soon followed up this success by enforcing a purge of his opponents from the corporation, which, as he told secretary of state Sir Joseph Williamson^‡, ‘put an opportunity into my hands to make that city the loyalest in England’. In addition, another by-election had to be held in May 1678 to replace the other recently deceased burgess. The moderate alderman Augustine Briggs^‡ was returned, with no opposition from Yarmouth and no support from Townshend and his allies. CSP Dom. 1678, pp. 45, 76-77, 106, 131-2; Add. 27447, ff. 387-90; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 330-1.

Fractures among the Norfolk Whigs, 1679-84

Norwich returned Paston and Briggs for all three Exclusion Parliaments, and throughout 1679-81 the county and boroughs of Norfolk saw a series of bitterly contested elections, with Yarmouth and his court interest going head-to-head with the country faction represented by Townshend, Hobart and Holland. Townshend, more concerned with shoring up his own interest and prestige than working for party unity, could be more of a hindrance than a help to his more committed and energetic ally Hobart. In King’s Lynn, the death of Danby’s son-in-law Robert Coke on 19 Jan. 1679, only five days before the dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament, left the field wide open for the elections there. Hobart took the first step and wrote a letter to Townshend’s brother-in-law William Windham of Felbrigg (married to another daughter of Sir Joseph Ashe) encouraging him to stand, and assuring him of Townshend’s support and interest. Add. 37911, f. 3. But Townshend, still smarting from the personal humiliation of 1675, haughtily remained aloof from the corporation of ‘his’ borough. Windham’s candidacy never got off the ground, leading Yarmouth to conclude that ‘my lord Townshend’s influence prevails not in that place at all’. Similarly in the borough of Thetford, Townshend strongly encouraged the corporation to return the incumbent member Sir Allen Apsley, and further emphasized that the lord chamberlain, Arlington, would also be ‘very earnest’ on Apsley’s behalf. HMC 6th Rep. 387; Rosenheim, Townshends, 50; Add. 27447, f. 398. Little note appears to have been taken of this request and William Harbord^‡ was returned in Apsley’s place, alongside the other incumbent, Sir Joseph Williamson. Yarmouth ‘morally secured’ himself to his ally the secretary of state that he would send down to Westminster for the county Sir Christopher Calthorpe^‡ and Sir Neville Catelyn^‡, ‘men that will not meddle with ministers of state’, against their opponent Hobart. CSP Dom., 1679-80, p. 75; Add. 27447, ff. 399-402. Calthorpe and Catelyn defeated Hobart, standing singly, by some 500 votes at the poll on 10 Feb. 1679, but Hobart petitioned the elections committee against the result, and the matter swiftly became a partisan issue in the Commons. Townshend was heavily engaged and he and Windham marshalled the witnesses for Hobart, while Yarmouth’s letter to the Commons in support of Calthorpe and Catelyn was deemed to contain veiled threats. HMC 7th Rep. 532; Add. 36988, ff. 139-40. The election was declared void on 21 Apr. and the ensuing by-election on 5 May saw four candidates competing, William Windham, having again been persuaded to try his hand at campaigning, joining with Hobart for the country party. Only a little more than 500 votes separated Hobart, at the top of the poll, from the unfortunate Windham, who came bottom. Hobart and Catelyn were deemed the winners, although by the time of their election less than three weeks remained to run in the Parliament. After the election, Townshend and Hobart fell out over Townshend’s apparent satisfaction with a mixed representation at Westminster and his unwillingness to give his backing to another petition disputing Windham’s defeat. Surveying the course of the elections, Hobart lamented that Townshend’s interest was ‘not much stronger … than his present constitution of body’. He regarded him as ‘almost as dead as a herring … some men’s tempers are like spring tides, suffering great ebbs and flows’. HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 321-2; Rosenheim, Townshends, 51. Townshend’s apparent changeability and inconsistency may also have been behind the unusual project put forward in May 1679 by James, duke of York, at that time in Brussels, to George Legge, later Baron Dartmouth, asking him to solicit Townshend to approach Shaftesbury (temporarily in favour as lord president of the council) on York’s behalf with terms for a reconciliation. HMC Dartmouth, i. 32-33.

Townshend missed the Exclusion Parliament’s six-day sitting of 6-13 Mar. 1679, and first sat in the Parliament’s 61-day second session on 18 Mar. 1679. This was his first appearance in the House since the prorogation on 22 Nov. 1675. He attended regularly for about a week from 25 Mar. to 2 Apr. and then stayed away from the House until 10 May, perhaps in order to oversee the election for the county seats. On the day of his return he voted in favour of appointing a committee of both houses to consider the methods of the trials of the impeached peers and signed the country protest against the rejection of this proposal. He continued coming to the House reasonably regularly after this and was present on the day of prorogation, 27 May, when he voted against the motion to adhere to the vote allowing the lords spiritual to be present at trials involving capital punishment. He ended his brief participation in this session by signing the protest against the motion in favour of the bishops’ presence in such cases. He had attended just under 30 per cent of sitting days in the session.

After the dissolution of this Parliament Townshend convened a meeting of the Norfolk Whigs at Raynham, who chose Hobart and Sir Peter Gleane^‡,, bt. as their candidates for the following election. Tanner 38, ff. 55, 58. But after having presided over this choice, Townshend was not active in the campaigning. Hobart and Gleane won, and this election marked the height of Whig power in the county, as ten of the 12 members returned were associated with that party. During the long period between the elections and the actual convening of Parliament in October 1680 party unity fractured further, especially under fears about the reliability of Gleane, and a dispute between Townshend and Hobart over election expenses. HMC Townshend, 29. In December 1679 Townshend, although apparently resident at Raynham at that time, was sufficiently associated with the Whigs to be included, inaccurately, in accounts of those peers who signed the petition requesting the king to summon immediately the Parliament elected that summer. HMC Hastings, iv. 302; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, ii. 210; Rosenheim, Townshends, 52n. By early 1680, though, he was openly talking of ‘accommodation’ in Norfolk and disapproved of overt partisan organization, such as the regular meetings Hobart and his allies were having to discuss political strategy during the period of Parliament’s prorogation. In March it was reported that Townshend was reconciled to the court, and in May he made an ambitious proposal to the king that if he convened Parliament immediately, he would manage Parliament for the king’s benefit. Townshend was distancing himself from Shaftesbury at this time. He took the opportunity of his memorial to the king to suggest that the continued delay was playing into Shaftesbury’s hands, as he wished to see the king’s supply run out so that his ‘affairs may be more desperate and his wants more pressing and so his Majesty be constrained in to greater compliances’. Add. 75360, Sir W. Hickman to Halifax, 7 Mar. 1680; Bodl. Carte 243, ff. 473-4. Despite his pretensions as a parliamentary manager, when Parliament was finally convened in October Townshend once again stayed away. He was excused because he was ‘sick’ at a call of the House on 30 Oct. although he does appear to have been in the capital at the time. Consequently he was absent for the vote to reject the exclusion bill on 15 Nov. even though Hobart was later to assert that Townshend had always advocated the necessity of exclusion. Despite the evident tensions between Townshend and the more ideologically committed Whigs, he still endorsed Hobart and Gleane at the elections of February 1681, but barely campaigned for them. They were able to squeak by at the poll by the smallest margin of any of the Exclusion Parliaments. Rosenheim, Townshends, 51, 54n., 57, 58; LCC Survey of London, xxxiv. 345. Townshend himself attended none of the meetings of the House in Oxford in March.

After the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, Townshend tried to set himself up as a moderate figure who could find compromise candidates for what all assumed would be another Parliament quickly summoned. He proposed to call another caucus at Raynham in the summer of 1681, from which Hobart would be specifically excluded, as Townshend was resentful that he acted ‘as if there were no other [but him] worthy to serve their country’. Those to whom Townshend addressed himself, most of whom still saw Hobart as the ‘support of our religion and liberties’, rejected this attempt at compromise with their ideological opponents. Rosenheim, Townshends, 54-55. No election was forthcoming in the remainder of Charles II’s reign but partisan feeling remained high. A commentator on the state of Norfolk in early 1682 thought society was hopelessly divided and noticed that, ‘Lord Townshend, perceiving these mischievous effects, begins now to repent joining that party and endeavours to remedy the evil he has wrought, but finds it now very late, for he having put them into the saddle, they think they can ride without his assistance’. He formally cut his ties in January 1682 when at the county quarter sessions he announced, through his kinsman Thomas Townshend, that ‘I will not concern myself in the next elections, nor shall not desire or advise anybody as my friend to appear either for Sir J. Hobart or Sir P Gleane … it being my opinion that there are other securities as effectual and powerful against popery as the bill of exclusion. And therefore I cannot give my consent to the choosing of any person, who hath for 3 parliaments and will in the next give his vote and insist upon that bill’. According to the analyst of the situation in Norfolk the Whigs attending the session gave Mr Townshend ‘no answer but cried out tumultuously for a good time “A Hobart, A Gleane”’. CSP Dom. 1682, p. 55. Townshend’s action prompted a resigned response from Hobart, who commented with surprise at Townshend’s renunciation of exclusion when Hobart remembered that he had ‘twenty times declared, that there would be no other security of our religion and properties but by the passing the bill of exclusion’ and wearily sighed, ‘If I had not been well acquainted (even a great part of my life) with the various, uncertain and changeable steps (to say no more) of this noble person, I should have been much more surprised at the whole series and carriage of this affair’. Rosenheim, Townshends, 56-57. Again the anonymous commentator observed that:

That party [Hobart and the Whigs] has ever since treated Lord Townshend with such open indignities, that he is become more their enemy than ever he was their friend, so that now he has no interest except with his particular friends, many of which he carried over to Sir John’s party, and those perhaps he may be able to bring back. CSP Dom. 1682, pp. 55-56.

He concluded:

If Lord Townshend’s disgust to the opposite party were made use of to regain him and a better understanding wrought between him and Lord Yarmouth and some of Lord Townshend’s friends restored to the commission of the peace, ’tis most likely the king’s party would find the good effects of it, for several put out at the last great reform were no otherwise disaffected than that Lord Townshend was out of the lieutenancy and therefore by good treatment might easily be reduced again. CSP Dom. 1682, p. 56.

This advice seems to have been taken and moves taken to conciliate the former lord lieutenant, for in January 1682 Luttrell confidently reported that ‘Lord Townshend is entirely come over to the court party’. Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 161. But there was no immediate advantage to this submission to the king. He was unsuccessful in his attempt to regain his position as lord lieutenant, which he claimed (with some irony considering his own constant complaints of gout) he was more suitable for because Yarmouth had become ‘lame and unserviceable, and himself is the man who hath the great interest in the country’. Tanner 36, f. 228. Without office nor signs of renewed favour, he retired to Raynham Hall in May 1682, after a period of two and a half years in the capital. He maintained old animosities back in the county, and continued his arguments with Gleane or Hobart, with whom there were differences ‘grounded upon such indispensable reasons as cannot in prudence and honour be ever … obliterated’. Even when the king urged him to make peace with Yarmouth, Townshend refused to make the first move. His only reward for his return to the court was a viscountcy conferred on him belatedly in December, at a time when ten other new creations or promotions were distributed to adherents of the court. Rosenheim, Townshends, 58-59; Add. 41654, ff. 31-32; HMC Townshend, 30; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 242. Even with this new honour he remained below his rival Yarmouth in precedence, who had been created an earl in July 1679 for his services in the elections.

Under James II, 1685-7

Townshend was encouraged by the death of Yarmouth on 8 Mar. 1683 to expect a reinstatement in his old position as leader of the county, but it quickly became clear that he would be passed over in favour of Henry Howard, Baron Mowbray (later 7th duke of Norfolk), the Protestant heir to the 6th duke. In August the death of his other principal rival, Hobart, would also seem to have boded well for Townshend’s renewed influence as a moderate peacemaker for the warring factions in the county. He was reconciled with Gleane and encouraged him and Sir Robert Kemp to share the county and borough seats with Tories in the next election, which was abortively scheduled for March 1684. Rosenheim, Townshends, 59-60. It was not until March 1685, in the elections for James II’s Parliament, that Townshend was able to return to the electoral arena. Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, wrote to him asking him to use his influence to ensure that ‘well-affected’ members be chosen for the Parliament. The new lord lieutenant, 7th duke of Norfolk since January 1684, also sought to work with Townshend, and ordered his deputy lieutenants to consult with him and Holland regarding candidates to put up for the county seats. Norf. Ltcy Jnl. 1676-1701 (Norf. Rec. Soc. xxx), 63, 65; HMC 11th Rep. VII, 105-6. Townshend probably played a part in selecting Sir Thomas Hare^‡, bt and Sir Jacob Astley^‡, bt, the defeated candidates in the 1681 election, who were approved at a gentry meeting and who in March 1685 soundly beat, by large margins, Sir John Holland and Sir Henry Hobart^‡, bt, the son and successor of Townshend’s old ally turned adversary.

Throughout the 1680s Townshend continued to be plagued by ill health and incapacitation from gout. His recurrent illness prevented him from attending the coronation of James II, and he was only able to attend 20 days in James II’s Parliament, all in its first part in May and June. Clarendon Corresp. i. 113-14. He was introduced to the House as Viscount Townshend, between Thomas Belasyse, 2nd Viscount (later earl of) Fauconberg, and Francis Newport, Viscount Newport (later earl of Bradford), on the Parliament’s first day, 19 May, along with 20 other peers promoted or created since the last meeting of Parliament. He was named to two large select committees in this his last Parliament, and after a committee of the whole house had considered the Deeping Fens bill for a time, Townshend, with an obvious local interest in the matter of fen drainage, was nominated on 22 June to the committee assigned to amend the bill. He left the House on 25 June, his last sitting.

His wife’s death from small pox in December 1685 left him grief-stricken and, coupled with his own recurring illness, further reduced his political activity. HMC Portland, iii. 391; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, iii. 73. The following month witnessed the conclusion of the final piece of local politics with which he was involved. This had had its origins in January 1685 when the justices of the peace meeting in one of Norfolk’s three districts in Norwich decreed that no money for the payment of pensions throughout the county was to be disbursed without authorization from the Norwich justices. Officials of the other two regions, at King’s Lynn and Fakenham, were infuriated and turned to Townshend, who lived in the King’s Lynn district, for support. He took up the cudgels for the neglected and implicitly second-class areas with enthusiasm. He ‘espoused the business and gave out that if those justices of the peace of the Norwich division did not revoke this order that he would bring the complaint before the king and council’. The octogenarian Holland, spokesman of the Norwich justices, was eventually able to effect a compromise with his old colleague Townshend on this matter in January 1686, a full year after the matter had first been broached. Tanner 259, ff. 1-10; Add. 41656, ff. 62-65; Rosenheim, Townshends, 61-62.

That was Townshend’s last foray into local politics. His declining health, his retirement after his wife&#rsquo;s death, and the careful estate management he undertook to provide his three sons with a sufficient inheritance conspired to make him withdraw further from public life. Throughout 1687 contemporaries included him in their assessments of the attitudes of members of the peerage to James II’s policies, and all agreed that he would be opposed to the repeal of the Test Act. Whether he would have been actively engaged in the attack on James II cannot be known, for Townshend died at Raynham on 1 December. As his political star had faded his financial situation had improved owing to his careful estate management. In 1684 the rental income from his estates in Norfolk and Suffolk was £5,557, an improvement of almost £2,000 on its condition in 1655, only a few years after Townshend had inherited the estate. He left his three sons with a good estate. By his will of March 1687 he assigned his trustees Robert Walpole^‡, Sir Jacob Astley, James Calthorpe and William Thurisby to raise legacies for his two younger sons Roger and Horatio of £8,000 each, money to be secured largely on his Suffolk lands. Under the careful management of the trustees, and especially the principal trustee Calthorpe, the estate remained flourishing and the two younger sons were well provided for while the heir Charles, still just 12 years old on his father’s death, was able to grow up as a wealthy and cultured young man of promise, soon to take his rank among the premier Whigs of Anne’s reign and in later years a secretary of state under George I. Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 423; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk, iv. 183, 191; Rosenheim, Townshends, 69, 107-12; PROB 11/389.