Edward Rich’s succession to his father’s honours and estates was not easy. According to his uncle (Cope Rich), the real Edward Rich, who inherited the peerage when barely two years old, had died while an infant and his mother had substituted another child to ensure her continued control of the Warwick and Holland estates. Cope Rich estimated the estate to be worth £8,000 a year clear of all charges, but what little evidence there is suggests that even in the lifetime of the 2nd earl of Holland the annual income was rather less than £4,000 a year.
A further drain on the Warwick and Holland finances was the revival of litigation involving Joseph Garrett, the erstwhile steward of the Holland estates. It may have been a sign of financial strain that the young earl’s guardians claimed creation money (for both titles). In February 1678 a bill was submitted to Parliament to enable Warwick’s guardian to make leases during his minority and in May his mother was forced to appeal to Parliament for her privilege to be upheld after one of her servants was arrested. It is possible that it was to avoid such disagreeable problems that in May 1682 Warwick was taken by his mother to France.
Even as a young child Warwick’s name appeared on lists of supporters and opponents compiled by Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury (who listed him initially as ‘vile’ but then erased the comment) and Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds). In 1683 his mother’s house was searched for suspected persons in the wake of the Rye House Plot, but it seems likely that the search stemmed more from the reputation of her family than because of any overtly political activity.
There is no particular evidence of Warwick, still only a teenager, being involved in the events of the 1688 Revolution. By the following summer he was orphaned while still a student at Oxford and in September, when he responded to a request to all peers to provide a self-assessment of their personal estates, he stated simply that he was underage and had nothing to declare.
By the autumn of 1691 Warwick was overseas, undertaking his long-planned tour of Italy.
In September 1694 Warwick attained his majority. A newsletter of 9 Oct. reported his recent return from campaign along with several others, who had all narrowly avoided being lost at sea.
Shortly after the close of the session, rumours circulated that Charlotte Middleton had absconded from her home and was believed by some to have taken up with Warwick. Over the next few days the newsletters sought information about the missing woman, whose marriage without her grandmother’s consent would, it was said, be likely to ‘cost her dear’. By the beginning of July the story came to a disappointing end with the news that she had been intercepted before she had been able to leave town. The incident was presumably an early manoeuvre in the negotiations that ultimately resulted in Warwick marrying her in February 1697.
Warwick returned to the House at the opening of the subsequent session on 22 Nov. 1695 and was again present for approximately 27 per cent of all sitting days. He then attended the prorogation of 28 July 1696 before taking his place once more at the opening of the new session on 20 October. The session proved the zenith of his involvement in the House’s business, with him turning out on just under half of all sitting days. In December 1696 he voted to convict Sir John Fenwick‡. The following month he was noted among ‘12 or 13 dissenting peers’ who had objected to the address to the king for Charles Mordaunt, earl of Monmouth (later 3rd earl of Peterborough), to be censured.
In October 1697 Mohun, who was on the run after killing a Captain Hill, was arrested at Warwick’s house in Essex Street. Warwick and Macclesfield were two of the four men who bailed him.
Warwick again provided bail for Mohun in April. In October the two were involved in a quarrel after a late-night drinking session. The resultant scuffle on a dark night in Leicester Fields barely qualified as a duel, as Warwick and his companions claimed it to be. During the fight a Captain Coote (possibly a relative of Richard Coote‡, earl of Bellomont [I]) was killed. It was by no means clear who had struck the fatal blow or even whether Warwick and Coote had been fighting on the same or opposite sides. Luttrell reported that Warwick and Mohun had both been acting as seconds for Coote.
The resulting trial, which was held before the House of Lords on 28 Mar. 1699, required extensive preparations, with scaffolding ordered to be erected to accommodate extra seating at a cost of £2,000.
The earl’s acquittal of murder aroused considerable cynicism. There were minor discrepancies in the evidence of one witness as given in the House of Lords and at the Old Bailey. More significantly the trial established that, of all the swords inspected after the fight, only Warwick’s was bloody to the hilt. Warwick’s explanation, that this was on account of his own injuries, persuaded William North, 6th Baron North and Grey, but not surprisingly there was a general suspicion that it had been used to inflict the fatal wounds.
After his acquittal, Warwick’s attendance at the House – never high – declined still further. No doubt distracted by the trial, he attended just once during the session of August 1698–May 1699, and he attended a mere 13 times during the 1699–1700 session (16 per cent of the whole). It is possible that his reluctance to sit at this time was related to the mistaken reports of the sickness and death of his wife in September. At least one correspondent recorded that ‘most people say she has a happy deliverance from her wicked husband’ but the reports proved not to be true and the countess survived to outlive her husband by three decades. Warwick was himself believed to be ‘dangerously ill’ early in 1700 but he rallied to take his place once more on 16 January.
That summer Warwick was said to have busied himself with negotiations with the corporation of London over the erection of booths in Smithfield, where he was lord of the manor, during Bartholomew Fair.
Warwick’s achievement in halting the Brookfield and Newport bill proved to be his last action in Parliament. In July he composed a brief will providing for the disposal of his estate, and he died ‘very penitent’ the following month, aged just 28. He was succeeded in the peerage by his three-year-old son, Edward Henry Rich, as 7th earl of Warwick and 4th earl of Holland. Warwick’s widow won considerable encomiums for the generous way in which she fulfilled her late husband’s final wishes. She later married the author and prominent Whig politician Joseph Addison‡.