Pierrepont’s father achieved prominence during the reign of Charles I through his canny purchases of land in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire.
For his services on the council of war and at the Uxbridge treaty negotiations in February 1645, Kingston was placed on the king’s Privy Council in Oxford and was raised in the peerage as marquess of Dorchester.
Dorchester had always been scholarly, a trait emphasized by a near-contemporary biographer, Charles Goodall, M.D., president of the Royal College of Physicians in the early eighteenth century:
From his youth he was always much addicted to books; and when he came from Cambridge, where he was some time of Emmanuel College, for many years he seldom studied less than ten or twelve hours every day; so that he had early passed through all manner of learning, both divine and human – as the fathers, councils, schoolmen, casuists, the civil law, canon law, and was remarkably well-versed in common law.Munck, Roll, i. 282, 289.
Dorchester entered Gray’s Inn in 1651 and was called to the bar the following year, all which led Sir Edward Nicholas‡ to comment, ‘I see abundance of wealth doth not satisfy all men’s minds’.
you are terrible only in your medicines: if you had told us how many you killed that way, and how many you have cut in pieces, besides calves and dogs, a right valiant man that hath any wit would tremble to come near you: and if by your threatening to ram your sword down my throat, you do not mean your pills, which are a more dangerous weapon, the worst is past, and I am safe enough… Is it not enough that you are already as many things as any of your own receipts, that you are a doctor of the civil law, and a barrister at the common, a bencher of Gray’s Inn, a professor of physic and a fellow of the college, a mathematician, a Chaldean, a schoolman and a piece of grammarian (as your last work can show were it construed), a philosopher, poet, translator, antisocordist, solicitor, broker and usurer, besides a marquess, earl, viscount and baron, but you must profess quarrelling too, and publishing yourself an Hector?The Lord Marquesse of Dorchester’s Letter to the Lord Roos, with the Lord Roos’s Answer thereunto, (1660).
At the same time as these insults were being thrown, the actions that resulted in the Restoration were being played out. Dorchester was in residence at Highgate at the beginning of 1660 but it was not until 29 Apr., after the Convention had started, that he wrote to the king in exile, reminding him of his service to Charles I. He insisted that he had since been faithful to the new king, though ‘like Nicodemus’ he had been ‘forced’ to act in secret in the intervening years ‘and durst not give the full scope to my ardent zeal’. The king’s encouraging answer was dated 13 May.
It was not only the ‘Presbyterian Knot’ who wished to deny Dorchester and some of the other Oxford peers entry into the House. In a letter of 7 May Alan Brodrick, secretary of the royalist group the Sealed Knot, wrote to Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, with the suggestion of annulling all grants of peerage made since 1642 as many were given to those of little merit, ‘such as the marquess of Dorchester, who is not fit to be groom to an honest man’.
When I heard my lord marquess of Dorchester was made a member of his majesty’s Privy Council [in August 1660], I not only thought it incredible but impossible considering he is a person so firm to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of Rome, that he is even in the highest degree Jesuited, so that the many and subtlest papists have not only by way of civility a free admittance to his table, but to him they come, as a wise and close favourite for advice in their cause… in civil affairs perchance he may be trusted, but in ecclesiastical transactions not the least secrecy is to be expected from him… his counsel, his abetting shall ever be assistant not only from the love of the opinion and government of the Church of Rome, but from a perfect malice and diametrical hatred to all Protestants, miscalling them by horrid and disgraceful names.
Denham even cast doubt on Dorchester’s seemingly unblemished royalist reputation during the Civil War. He suggested that his speeches in Parliament defending the right of the bishops to sit and vote ‘were only made in opposition to Presbyterians and other sectaries, not out of love to our episcopacy’; and that at the death of Charles I he had ‘triumphantly demanded, where was the head of the Church?’
Although it is impossible to gauge the accuracy of these detailed allegations, Dorchester was always closely connected with the senior branch of the Catholic Howards, and especially with Henry Frederick Howard†, from 1646 the 22nd (or 15th) earl of Arundel, a fellow royalist councillor at Oxford. For some years after the fall of Oxford Dorchester lived in Worksop Manor in Nottinghamshire, which had been lent to him by Arundel, ‘his great and most intimate friend and relation’.
If these suspicions were current in the spring of 1660, Charles II and his leading ministers were either unaware of them, or placed more value on Dorchester’s evident loyalty to the late king and his legal knowledge. On 27 Aug. he was sworn of the Privy Council, where he proved himself a frequent, almost constant, member throughout the early 1660s.
Having taken his seat with the other ‘Oxford peers’ on 1 June, he sat in 57 per cent of the sittings of the Convention: slightly more diligent in his attendance in the first part before the recess than later. He was most active in the committee for petitions, and reported from there on four different occasions (the 7th, 13th, 19th and 23rd) in July. He chaired the meeting of the committee for privileges considering the case of Warwick Mohun, 2nd Baron Mohun, and on 7 Aug. reported to the House the committee’s conclusion that Mohun had, during the Interregnum, been sued as a commoner by common process, which was contrary to the privilege of peerage.
For each of the first three sessions of the Cavalier Parliament, from May 1661 to May 1664, Dorchester maintained a steady attendance level of about 48 per cent. In the 1661-2 session he was named to 17 committees on legislation, but in the following two sessions his rate of nominations to committees dropped steeply. He remained, however, active in the committee for privileges. On 3 Dec. 1661 he reported to the House the conclusions of the committee meeting of the previous day concerning peers’ abuse of ‘protections, while on 1 Mar. 1662 the committee named him to a sub-committee charged with drawing up arguments supporting a declaration against the precedence claims of ‘foreign’ (i.e. Scottish and Irish) nobility. On 2 Apr. 1663 he chaired the committee in a busy meeting when it heard evidence about a forged ‘protection’. It also considered complaints about the disorderliness in the lobby and ‘little committee chamber’ and about people eavesdropping on debates at the door of the House’s chamber.
In his assessment of 13 July Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, predicted that Dorchester would support the attempt of George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, to impeach Clarendon. This is certainly plausible as Bristol had been the leader of the party against the Portuguese match, which Dorchester too had opposed. Bristol was also one of the leading Catholics in the House and that too may have appealed to Dorchester, if Denham’s letter concerning his religious views is accurate. Certainly in December Dorchester found himself in opposition to the lord chancellor, as he joined with Henry Jermyn, earl of St Albans, Henry Bennet, later earl of Arlington, and others in opposing in the Privy Council Irish business supported by Clarendon, Anglesey and James Butler, duke of Ormond [I], earl of Brecknock in the English peerage.
Dorchester attended 54 per cent of the sittings in the session of 1664-5. On 21 Dec. 1664, Robert Sutton, Baron Lexinton, registered his proxy with Dorchester for the remainder of the session. Lexinton was a fellow Nottinghamshire royalist who had been married to Dorchester’s cousin, and also appears to have been acting as an intermediary between Dorchester and the countess of Rutland over their children’s troubled marriage.
The session of 1666-7 saw Dorchester attending the House more frequently than usual, with an attendance level of 59 per cent. This increased attendance may have been owing to the family interest in the bill to make illegitimate all of Lady Roos’s children—his grandchildren, including his only surviving male descendant—which made its way through Parliament that session. Dorchester had been present on 19 Apr. 1662 for the first reading of an earlier bill brought in by the Manners family to declare illegitimate Lady Roos’s son born the previous September and baptized tellingly ‘Ignotus’ (i.e. unknown).
Perhaps it was the frustration of seeing his daughter paraded as a ‘whore’ before all his peers, which led to the most famous outburst of Dorchester’s notorious temper. At a conference on the Canary Company held in the Painted Chamber on 19 Dec. 1666 Dorchester and George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, found themselves seated next to each other. Clarendon commented that already ‘there was no good correspondence’ between these two peers and ‘their mutual undervaluing each other always disposed them to affect any opportunity to manifest it’. A jostling for elbow space on their neighbouring chairs soon led to an exchange of insults and then proceeded to an unseemly fistfight:
in which the marquess, who was the lower of the two in stature, and was less active in his limbs, lost his periwig, and received some rudeness, which nobody imputed to his want of courage, which was ever less questioned than that of the other… The marquess had much of the duke’s hair in his hands to recompense for his pulling of his periwig, which he could not reach high enough to do to the other.
The House, outraged at this ‘misdemeanour, greater than had ever happened, in that place and upon such an occasion’, which they considered a ‘great offence to the king himself, and an affront to the House, bringing a reproach upon their lordships in the face of the kingdom’, committed both peers to the Tower. On 22 Dec. the House ordered Dorchester’s nephew-by-marriage Gilbert Holles, 3rd earl of Clare, to fetch Dorchester from the Tower so he could receive the House’s orders to keep the peace, to which Dorchester readily submitted. He did not resume his seat until a week later, 29 Dec., when he thanked the House for their favour in releasing him from his restraint and allowing him to sit again.
Dorchester’s name was included in a list sent by Anglesey to Ormond on 10 Nov. of councillors who were believed to support the Irish cattle bill, contrary to the wishes of the king and lord chancellor.
Dorchester was absent from the House from 29 July 1667 (he attended two sittings of the abortive session of that month) to 24 Oct. 1670. His absence was excused by the House as he consistently registered his proxy: with Lexinton on 28 Sept. 1667 for the session of 1667-8 and, after Lexinton’s death on 13 Oct. 1668, with his nephew Clare on 21 Oct. 1669 for the session of autumn 1669. He registered the proxy with Clare again on 15 Feb. 1670 for the first part of the following session of 1670-1. Dorchester did appear on one single day during this long period on 26 Feb. 1668, thereby presumably vacating his proxy. This lone appearance in the House may have been sparked by the submission four days previously of a petition from Lady Roos in which she begged for some sort of maintenance. She detailed the cruel treatment she had suffered from her husband and her present straitened circumstances, having fled to Ireland to escape her creditors. Dorchester entirely missed the proceedings and passage of the divorce bill which gave Lord Roos permission to remarry even though his wife was still living. This bill was introduced in the House on 5 Mar. 1670. In spite of the controversy surrounding the measure, it received the royal assent on 11 April.
Dorchester was ready to come to the House once the humiliation of the Roos divorce bill was past. He appeared again when the House reconvened on 24 Oct., vacating his proxy with Clare, and proceeded to sit on 84 per cent of the sitting days before the prorogation on 22 Apr. 1671. Winchilsea entrusted him with his proxy on 20 Mar. and Dorchester held it until the end of the session. This may have been about the time that he was negotiating with Winchilsea for the purchase of the latter’s house in Charterhouse Yard near the City of London. Certainly by the time Ogilby and Morgan drew up their map of rebuilt London in 1676 part of the Finch property on the east side of the square was labelled ‘Marquess of Dorchester’.
Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, later duke of Leeds, predicted that the marquess would support the ‘non-resisting’ test bill introduced in the session of spring 1675, where Dorchester sat in 78 per cent of the sittings. Earlier, in mid-February, when Danby had presented to the Privy Council the new measures decided upon with the bishops at the Lambeth Palace conference, Dorchester, surprisingly, sided with opposition peers such as Denzil Holles, Baron Holles, in asking for more time to examine the proposed laws so that they ‘might not be disadvantageously enforced’.
Dorchester was also a named party in a petition submitted to the House by Elizabeth, Edward and Bernard Howard, Norfolk’s younger siblings against the duke (still absent in Padua) and Henry Howard, earl of Norwich, later 6th earl of Norfolk, the effective head of the family. Dorchester’s strong links with this branch of the Howards had continued well into the 1670s. Having been involved in the passage of the bill for securing the restoration of the dukedom in 1660, two years later he was made a commissioner to execute the office of earl marshal, a hereditary office long held by the dukes of Norfolk. In 1672, with Norfolk still incapable of exercising the place, Norwich was appointed earl marshal but his effective tenure of this office was short-lived, being barred under the terms of the 1673 Test Act. Thus, while he formally maintained the title of earl marshal, the duties were again exercised by deputies, principally his Protestant kinsman Carlisle and the family’s long-term ally Dorchester.
Dorchester registered his proxy with Anglesey on 18 Oct. 1675 for the entirety of the autumn session. The proxy was employed on 20 Nov. in favour of an address to the king calling for the dissolution of Parliament, which was won by those against the address by a majority of two and only after proxies were counted.
Dorchester’s only known intervention in the session of spring 1678 (of whose meetings he attended just under one third) was his signature to the protest on 5 July against the decision to determine the relief of the petitioner in the cause Darrell v. Whichcot, without dividing on the question of whether to hear the details of the case. He attended sittings of the House regularly throughout late October and November 1678, as the Test Act was being debated in Parliament. On 2 Dec. he was among the first group of peers to take the new oaths and declaration, but some other members of the House noted that he did not say all the words required of him and he was ordered to swear again the following day. He did so to the House’s satisfaction, but left the chamber for good after that sitting on 3 Dec., never to sit again.
Dorchester was absent throughout the first Exclusion Parliament. On 18 Mar. and 21 Apr. 1679 his servants William Colgrave and Charles Pelham swore at the bar that the marquess was so ill that he could not attend the House without endangering his life. His absence may have helped in the decision to remove him from the Privy Council when it was reorganized in April to take in more members of the country opposition.
Charles Goodall described fittingly in great medical detail the onset and progress of the gangrene of the leg which led to Dorchester’s death on 8 December. Goodall had good reason to lavish praise on Dorchester in his biographical sketch, for the marquess had long been a benefactor of Goodall’s cherished Royal College of Physicians and in his will bequeathed it ‘perhaps the best library for physics, mathematics, civil law, and philology in any private hand in this nation, for a choice collection of books, to the value of above £4,000’.