FINCH, Heneage (1627/8-89)

Finch was the grandson of Sir Moyle Finch^‡, bt. of Eastwell, Kent, a leading figure in Kentish local administration in the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I. After Sir Moyle’s death his widow Elizabeth Heneage, was created, probably with the assistance of her nephew Sir John Finch, later Baron Finch, Viscountess Maidstone in 1623 and countess of Winchilsea in 1628, both in her own right. HMC 4th Rep. 290. Her grandson inherited the title on 4 Nov. 1639 from his father Thomas Finch, 2nd earl of Winchilsea. He is often referred to as the 2nd earl of Winchilsea because he was the second male holder of the title, but he is properly considered the 3rd earl as he was the third holder of the peerage. He succeeded when still a minor, and the court of wards entrusted, for £6,000, the wardship of the young earl to his mother, Cecily, dowager countess of Winchilsea (d.1642), his uncle Francis Finch^‡, his brother-in-law Sir William Waller^‡, and Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland. WARD 9/128, 42-45; CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 123, 218. Winchilsea’s principal estates were in Kent, especially around Canterbury, Maidstone and Wye, near which the family seat was located at Eastwell, with in addition the priory of Watton in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Hasted, Kent, ii. 97; iii. 69, 179-80, 191, 198, 201; iv. 444, 492; VCH Yorks. ER vii. 391.

In later years Winchilsea was to claim that from 1647, at the age of 19, he had put his life and, more disastrously, his fortune at the service of the king. CSP Dom. July-Sept 1683, p. 299; CSP Dom. 1685, p. 26; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 248; HMC Pepys, 297. He was closely associated with various royalist schemes from 1655 alongside his father-in-law, Hertford, whose daughter Mary he had married in 1649. Supported by Hertford, in 1659 Winchilsea aimed to be the principal agent in Kent and the southeast for the abortive rebellion planned for the summer of 1659, but perhaps because of his inactivity during Penruddock’s Rising in 1655, Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, suggested that the young earl be replaced by someone else more reliable, such as the acknowledged royalist leader Sir Thomas Peyton. Thurloe, State Pprs. iii. 330, vii. 98; CSPDom.1655, p. 225; CCSP, iv. 204, 205, 213; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 241. Hyde’s intervention may have been the cause of a distinctly uneasy relationship between the two in the early years of the Restoration.

In the weeks leading up to Charles II’s return Winchilsea was appointed commissioner of the Kent militia and colonel of a militia troop of horse. In this post he was responsible both for the capture of one regicide, Sir Henry Mildmay^‡, and the unfortunate escape of another, William Cawley^‡, at Kentish ports. A. and O. ii. 1433; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 600; CJ viii. 37-38. He also chaired the meeting of Kentish gentry which met at the Star Inn at Maidstone to choose the knights of the shire for the Convention. In advance of this meeting he wrote to his neighbour, Richard Sackville, 5th earl of Dorset, professing himself glad to find Dorset ‘so forward to serve your country’ and hoping to see him at Maidstone as well. Kent HLC (CKS), U269/C61/8. Winchilsea started attending the House of Lords on the third day of the Convention (27 Apr.), one of a handful of peers taking their seats for the first time that day. He was thereafter present on approximately 70 per cent of sitting days before the adjournment at the close of the summer. Prior to taking his seat he conveyed to the king his desire that his kinsman, Heneage Finch, later earl of Nottingham, might be rewarded with a baronetcy and its effective creation backdated to 1648. Winchilsea’s own ‘most handsome deportment’ was similarly brought to the king’s attention. The earl supplemented such panegyrics with his own assertions of his eagerness to serve the king. He was also at pains to court other returning royalists, such as James Butler, marquess (later duke) of Ormond [I], looking forward to the day when he would be able to kiss his hands and insisting how he would ‘feel a particular deliciousness in the restitution of your lordship to that [splendour] which your birth and virtues have long since made to be your due’. Bodl. Carte 214, ff. 69-70, 89; Clarendon 72, ff. 19-20, 98.

Once in the chamber, Winchilsea quickly involved himself with the business before the House. He was appointed to the committee assigned to draw up heads for the conference with the Commons discussing the settling of the nation (27 Apr.), as well as to those to draft a letter of thanks to the king for the Declaration of Breda (1 May), to settle the militia and to make General George Monck, (later duke of Albemarle) captain-general (both 2 May). On 3 May, already worried by the large debts he had accumulated in the service of the exiled king, he complained to the committee of privileges that he had not received his creation money for several years. On 29 June the committee reported their decision that creation money was ‘the undoubted right of the peers’ and that arrears should be duly paid to them. PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/ i. pp. 4-5, 28. On 10 May Monck entrusted Winchilsea with the governorship of the castle and town of Dover, and the following day he arranged for the king to be proclaimed there. Winchilsea corresponded with Edward Montagu, later earl of Sandwich, on the procedures for fetching the king from the Netherlands, and later attended the king, along with Monck, Montagu and the corporation of Dover at Charles II’s first landfall in England on 25 May. Whitelocke, Memorials iv. 414; Statham, History of Dover, 118-19. The following day Winchilsea was knighted at Canterbury, but unlike Monck and Montagu he was not made a knight of the Garter: one of many perceived snubs which rankled Winchilsea for years to come. HMC Finch, i. 141. On 26 June 1660, the king granted Winchilsea the additional barony of Fitzherbert of Eastwell, a peerage bestowed primarily to shore up the Finch family’s purported (though probably fictitious), claim to descent from Henry Fitzherbert, chamberlain to Henry I. J.H. Round, ‘The Origin of the Finches’, Sussex Arch. Coll. lxx. 19-31.

In the summer of 1660 Charles II recommended Winchilsea to the Levant Company as their ambassador to Istanbul, and the Company confirmed him in that post on 19 September. With the post came an annuity of 10,000 rix dollars with an additional 2,000 rix dollar gratuity. CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 270; HMC Finch, i. 80; HMC Downshire, i. 215. The Venetian resident in England, Giavarina, reported to his masters that this choice did not please the merchants, and the resident was not impressed by Winchilsea either. It was clear to him that ‘his chief object being gain, he has not thought of anything beyond and his talk is all of occasions which may bring him profit’ and that in addition ‘the earl is a young man full of idle talk, informed about many things, but not very steady, rather inclined to be light and volatile, like the climate of the country’. CSP Ven. 1659-61, pp. 168-9; HMC Finch, i. 80. This view of the earl was later corroborated by many of his English contemporaries. Roger North, writing about the experiences of his brother Sir Dudley North^‡ as a merchant in Turkey, described Winchilsea as ‘a jolly lord… having a goodly person and mustachios, with a world of talk, and that all (as his way was) of mighty wonders’. North, Lives, ii. 135. John Evelyn, conversing with the earl in August 1669 upon his return to England, also commented that Winchilsea was ‘a prodigious talker’. Evelyn, Diary iii. 537.

Winchilsea spent much of the summer of 1660 trying to put his affairs in good order before his departure. In July he had been appointed lord lieutenant of Kent and he spent many weeks appointing his deputies and giving them detailed instructions, particularly his principal and most trusted deputy, Sir Edward Dering, for the proper disposition of the Kent militia in his absence. Stowe 744, ff. 45, 46, 49, 50, 52. On 18 Aug. the Lords read and committed Winchilsea’s bill for settling his estate of Watton Priory in Yorkshire on trustees and also heard the claims of his father-in-law, Hertford, to the title of duke of Somerset, against the pretensions of Edward Somerset, 2nd marquess of Worcester. PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/298, 18 Aug. 1660. Winchilsea was anxious for the success of both of these matters and wrote to Dering in late August, encouraging him ‘to get the act for the settling of my estate in the North … to be passed your House with all the speed you can’, and further requesting him to get himself on a committee meeting the following afternoon on Hertford’s ‘business’. Stowe 744, f. 42. Winchilsea’s bill received the royal assent on 13 Sept. 1660 and was later confirmed by an act which received the royal assent on 19 of May 1662. In preparation for his absence, Winchilsea appointed his kinsman, Finch, as his proxy on 12 Sept., and attended for the last time on the following day. His plans proved inadequate as Finch died a few weeks later in November 1660. Winchilsea appears to have registered his proxy at least once more during his absence, a call of the House of 25 Nov. 1661 noting him among several peers who had appointed proxies, though there is no indication which peer had been entrusted with his vote. PH, xxviii. 437.

Winchilsea arrived in the Ottoman capital in late February 1661. His journey there was disrupted by storms and in late November he had been forced to put in to Lisbon after his ship’s main mast was broken. By the beginning of January he had reached Smyrna. Bodl. Clarendon 73, f. 283; HMC Finch, i. 92. He was to remain in his post for the next eight years, forced by financial necessity to prolong his stay longer than he wished in spite of receiving a bequest of some of the estates of his recently deceased kinsman, Lord Finch. Kent HLC (CKS), PRC32/53, f. 186. While on embassy he maintained a constant correspondence with England, in which he tried to maintain and improve his political situation at home, though he was dismayed at the loss of one of his ‘chiefest patrons(’ Henry Stuart, duke of Gloucester), as well as Somerset (the former Hertford), ‘who was a real father to me’. HMC Finch, i. 110. He corresponded with the Levant Company, with whom he had constant disagreements concerning his accounts and expenses; with the secretaries of state, especially Sir Edward Nicholas^‡, who informed him of government trade and foreign policy and kept him up to date on events in Parliament; with the trustees of his estate, to whom he gave directions regarding the disposition of his Kentish estate and emphasized his desire to sell the Yorkshire lands to alleviate his debts; and with his trusted kinsmen and associates, especially his cousin, Sir Heneage Finch, bt. and his brother-in-law Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton. He also tried to patch up from afar his frosty relations with Clarendon. In July 1661 he endeavoured to erase any bad memories of their previous public disagreement in Parliament over the disposition of Dunkirk and Jamaica by referring to it merely as a ‘friendly contest’ in which Clarendon was, as Winchilsea now claimed to realize, correct, which ‘will teach me hereafter to submit to your lordship’s judgment, and with an implicit faith to resign my whole reason to the determination of your lordship’. He assured both William Juxon, archbishop of Canterbury, and Gilbert Sheldon, bishop of London, in letters of August 1661, ‘I have always entertained a most reverend esteem of our English prelates’ and only regretted that he had not been present in the House to cast his vote in favour of the bishops’ readmission there. Ibid. 78-9, 83ff. 140, 147-8.

When new commissions for county lieutenancies were drawn up in the summer of 1662 following the passage of the Militia Act, Southampton agreed with Winchilsea to take over the lieutenancy of Kent and keep it for him until his return. Ibid. 206-7, 225-6. After Southampton’s death in May 1667, Winchilsea had to accept being made joint lord lieutenant with Charles Stuart, 3rd duke of Richmond, by a commission dated 13 May 1668. CSP Dom. 1667-8, pp. 234, 364. Winchilsea returned to England in July 1669, after months of letters from the Levant Company and the king urging his return. He immediately resumed his vigorous government of Kent, effectively managing affairs in the county alone, with little assistance from Richmond. CSP Dom. 1668-9, p. 398; CSP Ven. 1669-70, p. 79; Bell, Br. Dip. Reps. 1509-1688, 286.

Upon his return to England Winchilsea took his seat for the first time in almost nine years on 27 Oct. 1669, but proceeded to attend on just five occasions (14 per cent of the whole). In early 1670 it was suggested in a set of proposals submitted to the Privy Council concerning the prevention of wool smuggling from Kent that Winchilsea examine and amend the draft of the bill against the export of wool before the next meeting of Parliament. TNA, SP 29/272/29. As Winchilsea waited until early March to start attending the session of Parliament which had begun on 14 Feb. and was not named to the committee when the bill against wool exporting was first committed on 21 Feb, he does not appear to have been involved in its formulation or progress in any way in the weeks before he assigned his proxy to Prince Rupert, duke of Cumberland, on 7 Apr. 1670. Winchilsea’s early departure from the session seems to have been connected with his need to appear at a commission summoned at Saffron Walden to investigate the circumstances of his heir’s clandestine marriage to Elizabeth Windham, which had occurred while Winchilsea was still overseas ‘in a barbarous country, far distant, representing our royal master in a great empire’. William Finch, styled Viscount Maidstone, had been underage at the time of the marriage and (apparently) also under the influence of alcohol. Bemoaning his sorry condition, Winchilsea wrote to Ormond seeking his interest with the king, but the marriage was allowed to stand. Bodl. Carte 37, ff. 510-11.

Winchilsea appeared in the House again on 24 Oct. 1670, when the session resumed, and took a greater role in the wool bill. He chaired the committee himself on 3 Dec., when he was ordered, with Seth Ward, bishop of Salisbury, to draw up a clause to provide for boats caught illegally transporting wool to be burned. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 365, 366, 380. Later in that session, on 20 Mar. 1671, Winchilsea reported to the House that he had come across a pirated printed version of the inflammatory speech recently made in the House by John Lucas, Baron Lucas, and the House subsequently decreed that the pamphlet, ‘derogatory to the honour of his Majesty’s government’ was to be burnt by the hangman. Marvell, Poems ii. 322-3; CSP Ven. 1671-2, p. 32; HMC Fleming, 76. Winchilsea expected some reward for his loyalty in exposing this libel and three years later reminded the secretary of state, Sir Henry Coventry^‡, that ‘the service I did the king in my Lord Lucas his speech did then cause the king to promise me some favour’. Longleat, Bath mss, Coventry pprs. 4, ff. 191-2. On that same day of 20 Mar. he registered his proxy with Henry Pierrepont, marquess of Dorchester, who held it until the end of the session on 22 April. In May Winchilsea stood proxy for the duke of Saxony as his installation as a knight of the Garter. NLS, Yester pprs. 7023, letter 276.

Winchilsea was responsible for defending and supplying the south-eastern coast during the third Dutch War, during which his son and heir William, Viscount Maidstone, was killed in the Battle of Sole Bay in May 1672. CSP Dom. 1668-9, pp. 556; CSP Dom. 1670, pp. 8, 21, 25; CSP Dom. 1671-2, pp. 467, 468, 475, 477, 478, 487-8; CSP Dom. 1672, p. 105; Longleat, Bath mss, Coventry pprs. 4, ff. 92, 97. Perhaps disappointed by his reception back in England, by the autumn of 1672 Winchilsea was said to have been eager to return to his former posting at Constantinople. He was disappointed in his ambition and the position went instead to his kinsman, Sir John Finch, whose cause was backed by the Levant merchants. HMC Hastings, ii. 159; BL, Verney ms mic. M636/25, Sir R. Verney to E.Verney, 7 Nov. 1672; Add. 21948, ff. 401, 434. In December 1672 Richmond died, and by a commission of 29 Jan. 1673, Winchilsea was once again reinstated as sole lord lieutenant of the county, an office which he continued to execute actively until late in the reign of James II. CSP Dom 1672-3, p. 429.

Winchilsea took his seat at the opening of the ensuing session on 4 Feb. 1673 and proceeded to attend on 78 per cent of all sitting days. His activities in the House coincided with his efforts on behalf of his brother-in-law, John Seymour, 4th duke of Somerset, over his separation from his estranged duchess. Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 6, ff. 161, 163, 165. He was present the day that Somerset took his seat on 10 February, and was named to a few select committees Shortly after the adjournment at the close of March Winchilsea married for the third time. His decision to marry again less than 6 months after the death of his former countess caused some disapproving comment. Add. 70012, ff. 47-48. Winchilsea failed to return to the chamber for the final few days towards the end of October and was then missing from the House for the ensuing two sessions.

Winchilsea returned to his place at the opening of the session commencing on 13 Apr. 1675, of which he attended almost 93 per cent of all sitting days, but was named to only three committees, two of them on private estate bills. Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, considered him a supporter of the proposed ‘non-resisting’ test bill, and certainly Winchilsea was marked as present in the House for the key divisions on the bill and never entered a protest against it. Browning, Danby ii. 123. In return Winchilsea seems to have sought Danby’s interest to enable him to secure first refusal on one of the estates of the recently deceased Somerset. Eg. 3329, ff. 18-19. From June 1675 to July 1683 he also served as lord lieutenant of Somerset, standing in the place of his underage kinsmen (through his first wife Mary), Francis Seymour, 5th duke of Somerset and Charles Seymour, 6th duke of Somerset. CSP Dom. 1675-6, p. 108; CSP Dom. 1679-80, pp. 62, 70; CSP Dom. July-Sept 1683, p. 26. Winchilsea only attended four early sittings of the session beginning 13 Oct. 1675 before assigning his proxy to his cousin, Lord Chancellor Finch, one of Danby’s key allies in the Lords. Finch employed the proxy in the vote of 20 Nov. 1675 against addressing the king to request that Parliament be dissolved. HEHL, EL 8418.

From about 1675 complaints of insufficient reward for his loyalty and requests for a lucrative embassy in the Mediterranean, for the sake of his health, become recurrent themes in Winchilsea’s letters to ministers of the crown. By the summer of 1676 he had taken matters into his own hands in his quest for a more agreeable climate and had sought refuge in France and Italy, along with a sojourn to Smyrna to visit his old servant, Paul Rycaut. Bodl. Carte 38, f. 347; S.P. Anderson, Eng. Consul in Turkey, 248-9. From there he continued to petition for various postings from his contacts back in England. He looked in particular to his son-in-law Thomas Thynne, later Viscount Weymouth, to procure for him offices or preferment, even though from 1674 to 1680 he was engaged in a legal battle with him over a suspiciously last-minute codicil to the will of the duchess of Somerset, which gave Thynne a larger than expected share of the inheritance. Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 17, ff. 7-48, 93, 119-20, 124-5; HMC Bath, iv. 358, 369-74. Winchilsea also busily solicited Sir Henry Coventry, Sir Joseph Williamson^‡, Sir Edward Dering^‡, Danby, Lord Chancellor Finch and, in later years, Sir Leoline Jenkins^‡ and Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, as his intermediaries for royal favour. He was particularly embittered by what he saw as the neglect of his interests by his cousin, the lord chancellor. CSP Dom. 1675-6, pp. 446-7; CSP Dom. 1678, p. 337; CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 200; CSP Dom. 1685, p. 26; Stowe 745, ff. 111, 120; Eg. 3330, ff. 19-20. Perhaps because of Winchilsea’s continuing solicitation of and reliance on Court favour, Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, considered the earl ‘thrice vile’ in his assessment of lay peers drawn up in mid-1677. This judgment was probably borne out in his eyes when Winchilsea, who returned to the House in late January 1678 from his travels in southern Europe and attended 25 days of the latter part of the session, assigned his proxy on 9 Apr. 1678 to Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, a close ally of James Stuart, duke of York. Winchilsea was missing once more for the entirety of the brief session of May 1678. He then attended the House for just six days in the last two weeks of 1678 during the final session of the Cavalier Parliament. Barely two weeks before its dissolution he confided to his son-in-law, Thynne, ‘I have melancholy thoughts of the public affairs… I pray God give the king wisdom like Solomon to distinguish between those that really love him and others’. Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 17, ff. 76-77.

Winchilsea attended on 13 Mar. 1679, the last day of the abortive session of that month, and consequently was on hand to take his seat on 15 Mar. when the next session began. He was thereafter present on 62 per cent of all sitting days. In his assessments drawn up in advance of the session, Danby professed himself unsure which way Winchilsea would vote in the debates surrounding the proceedings against him, and considered him unreliable. In the event, Winchilsea proved an opponent of the imprisoned lord treasurer. On 22 Mar. he was named to draft the bill to disqualify Danby and appointed to manage a conference about Danby. He voted in favour of it in the crucial divisions. Perhaps this opposition to Danby was owing to Winchilsea’s personal disgruntlement at not getting a lucrative (or warm) foreign post. On the larger issue of exclusion, though, Winchilsea remained loyal to the king (and York). He took his seat at the opening of the new Parliament on 21 Oct. 1680 and in the crucial vote of 15 Nov. Winchilsea voted to throw the Exclusion Bill out at its first reading. He did, however, return a verdict of guilty on 7 Dec. against William Howard, Viscount Stafford.

Winchilsea proved an assiduous attendant of the curtailed Oxford Parliament, sitting on each of its seven days. By then his attitude towards Danby had altered and Danby seemed confident that Winchilsea would this time support his request for bail from the Tower and Danby’s son Edward Osborne^‡, Viscount Latimer, confirmed this and was able to report to his father that Winchilsea himself had volunteered to present Danby’s petition to the House, although James Bertie, 5th Baron Norreys (later earl of Abingdon), thought that Henry Cavendish, 2nd duke of Newcastle, would be a better choice for the task. Beinecke Lib. Osborne mss, Danby pprs. box 2; HMC 14th Rep. IX, 424.

In the early months of 1683 Winchilsea was actively involved in his duties in Kent, attempting to prevent fanatics from enticing a newly settled French population away from the Church of England. Bodl. Tanner 35, f. 210. After the discovery of the Rye House Plot, Winchilsea organized the loyal address for Kent and reported to Secretary Jenkins that though he was still suspicious of the loyalty of much of the county gentry, and did not wholly approve of the language which they wished to use in the address, he felt that ‘they are truly sound at the heart’. He commented that even Sir James Oxenden^‡, an exclusionist member of the Commons, had signed the address and ‘seems truly horrified by the Plot, I hope he has thus learned by his mistakes’. CSP Dom. July-Sept 1683, pp. 116, 124. Winchilsea also sent out a party of his deputy lieutenants to search the houses of Thomas Papillon^‡ and Colonel Edward Dering^‡ for arms. CSP Dom. Jan-June 1683, pp. 361, 384; CSP Dom. July-Sept 1683 p. 116. When presenting the loyal address to the king in August, Winchilsea described Dering, knight of the shire for Kent in all three Exclusion parliaments, as ‘the principal person who obstructs your Majesty’s service and hinders us in our addresses, all we endeavour to serve you in’. He went on to suggest that Dering’s father, his previously trusted deputy-lieutenant, was the principal encourager of this disloyalty. Dering Pprs. 128, 130-1. In August 1683 he further wrote to Weymouth that he had not been able to go on his long-planned trip to southern Europe for his health because ‘it was necessary for me to stay some time longer and keep a very watchful eye upon the discontented party’. Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 17, ff. 126-7.

At the accession of James II and the summoning of the new king’s first Parliament, Winchilsea, like all the other lord lieutenants, was requested by Sunderland to ‘use your utmost endeavours to ensure people of approved loyalty and affection to government are chosen’ to the new Parliament. Winchilsea promptly replied on 19 Feb., reporting to the secretary that ‘the knights of the shire are likely to be Sir William Twysden^‡ and Major [John] Knatchbull^‡. Canterbury and Maidstone, as also Rochester, I am assured will make loyal members their representatives, and I hope Queensborough will do the like’ – all predictions that were fully borne out two days later, when Kent returned a full complement of Tories for the county and its boroughs. Winchilsea himself attended 44 per cent of the sittings of James II’s Parliament of 1685, but left the session in early June to prepare the Kentish militia for their projected role against James Scott, duke of Monmouth and his rebels, entrusting his proxy to his son-in-law Weymouth until he returned to the House on 12 November. CSP Dom. 1685, pp. 21, 199, 204.

Winchilsea was one of those nominated to try Henry Booth, 2nd Baron Delamer at the beginning of 1686. JRL, Legh of Lyme mss, newsletter, 9 Jan. 1686. In early 1687 Robert Bertie, Baron Willoughby de Eresby (later duke of Ancaster), listed Winchilsea among those lords who opposed James II’s repeal of the Test Act in a list supplied to the Dutch agent Dijkvelt. In December of that year, however, the French ambassador Bonrepaus was more cautious when reporting to his master, and indicated that Winchilsea was undecided on this matter. James II himself clearly did not trust him and his Tory loyalty to the Church, and in January 1688 removed him from the lieutenancy of Kent (rumours of his likely displacement had circulated since the end of November of the previous year). Verney ms mic. M636/42, J. Verney to Sir R.Verney, 30 Nov. 1687. Yet in the chaos surrounding William of Orange’s invasion and James II’s flight through Kent and capture at Faversham, Winchilsea quickly fell again into his role as natural leader of the county. Certainly the local gentry looked to him for direction in the events surrounding the capture of the king and James II himself turned to him for help in his captivity. Add. 33923, ff. 437-55; Add. 32095, f. 298. Winchilsea rescued the king from the inn at Faversham where he was being held and moved him to more suitable surroundings. Kingdom without a King, 49-51, 54, 91, 93, 98. James promised to reinstate Winchilsea in his old offices and the local MP Sir John Knatchbull^‡ noted that from 15 Dec. Winchilsea styled himself in his formal correspondence lord lieutenant of Kent and warden of the Cinque Ports, ‘all which his lordship published to all the company with his usual vanity’, even though the patent for these offices was never sealed. Add. 33923, f. 453. Even without a formal commission Winchilsea continued to act as lord lieutenant of Kent during the unstable days of December 1688 and January 1689, being present at the meeting of the provisional government on 21, 22, 24, and 25 Dec. 1688 and providing the Lords with much local information. Kingdom without a King, 124, 153, 157-8, 162, 164-5. Early in January it was noted by Roger Morrice that he had captured various Catholic notables attempting to flee through Kent. Morrice, Entring Bk. iv. 459-60.

Winchilsea took his place at the opening of the Convention a month later on 22 January. Until his death in August 1689 Winchilsea was a regular attender of the first session of the Convention Parliament, being present on 95 sitting days before quitting the session for the final time on 22 June. He supported William and Mary’s claim to the throne, voting in favour of the resolution of 31 Jan. to declare them king and queen and in the divisions of early February consistently agreed with the Commons that James had abdicated and that the throne was vacant. He was involved in some of the important legislation of the Convention Parliament establishing the new regime, being named to the committee to draw up explanatory clauses in the bill to abrogate the former oaths (15 March). He was appointed to the committees overseeing the reversals of the attainders of William Russell^‡, Lord Russell (8 Mar.), Algernon Sydney^‡ (24 Apr.), and Dame Alice Lisle (3 May). On 25 Mar. he reported to the House on an interview he and Henry Compton, bishop of London, had had, at the order of the House, with James Cecil, 4th earl of Salisbury, about the whereabouts of his two younger brothers, suspected of having been spirited away to France to be raised as Catholics. As a reward for his services to the new regime, in May 1689 Winchilsea was formally reinstated to the lord lieutenancy of Kent, and in June was also made custos rotulorum for the county. CSP Dom. 1689-90, pp. 21, 180. He pressed for further rewards, moving throughout the spring of 1689 that he be confirmed as warden of the Cinque Ports and governor of Dover, as had been promised to him by James II, although these requests were ultimately rejected. His kinsman Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, explained to him that the king did not wish to add to Winchilsea’s ‘vexations’ as lieutenant and custos by adding the cares of Dover and the Cinque Ports to his official burden. He promised that in recompense Winchilsea would be granted a pension of £500 per annum. HMC Finch, ii. 205, 221; CSP Dom. 1689-90, p. 185. If this pension, which must have been gratifying to the constantly hard-up Winchilsea, was ever established the earl could not have enjoyed it for long, as he died shortly after this communication from Nottingham, in late August 1689.

In his will, written just before he died, Winchilsea made his fourth and surviving wife, Elizabeth, sole executrix and heir of his personal estate, ‘the better to enable her for payments of my debts because I would endeavour as far as in me lies to be just to all my creditors’. According to his executrix the value of his debts was still far in excess of his personal estate. In the months following his death there was a bitter dispute over the ownership and use of his property between his widow and his daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, Viscountess Maidstone, whose 17-year old son Charles Finch^*[1642], had inherited the earldom of Winchilsea upon his grandfather’s death. PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/417/162, 8 Nov. 1689.