KIRKHOVEN, Charles Henry (1643-83)

Charles Henry Kirkhoven (as his name was anglicized) was named after Charles I and Frederick Henrik, prince of Orange, an indication of both his royal connections and his complicated Anglo-Dutch inheritance. He was the son of the Dutch noble and diplomat Jan van den Kerckhove, heer van Heenvliet, who had come to England in the late 1630s on the mission to arrange the marriage of Charles I’s daughter Mary to William, the young son of the prince of Orange. While in England he had courted and eventually married Katherine, Lady Stanhope, whose deceased husband had been heir apparent to Philip Stanhope^†, earl of Chesterfield. Heenvliet returned with his new wife (who continued to be known as Lady Stanhope) to the United Provinces, where they were placed in charge of the household and person of the young Princess Mary. Green, Lives of the Princesses, vi. 191–3, 236–45 et seq. When their first son was born in May 1643 both Princess Mary and her father-in-law, Frederick Henrik, prince of Orange, stood as his godparents.

During much of the 1640s Heenvliet and his wife pressed for some guarantee that their Dutch-born son would be able to inherit Lady Stanhope’s English properties. CSP Dom. 1645–7, pp. 66, 112. In June 1649 the exiled Charles II formally renounced any intent to seize Lady Stanhope’s property in case she died before her foreign husband. On 31 Aug. 1650, when in Scotland for his ill-fated attempt on England, he further issued letters patent creating Charles Henry an English peer, as Baron Wotton of Wotton, in honour of the Dutchman’s maternal grandfather. Wotton’s father, Lord Heenvliet, died in March 1660, and at the time of the Restoration Wotton’s attention shifted to England, especially when his widowed mother was rewarded for her contribution to the royalist cause upon Charles II’s arrival in London on 29 May 1660, when he created her suo jure countess of Chesterfield. The king appears to have earlier intervened with the States-General to convince them to grant a troop of horse in the Scots brigades stationed in the United Provinces to Wotton, who had already replaced his late father (though only 17 years old) as intendant of the princess of Orange’s household; he also held a post in the young prince of Orange’s establishment.

On 13 Sept. 1660 a bill to naturalize in England the countess of Chesterfield’s two Dutch-born children, Wotton and his sister, Emilia, received the royal assent, after which Wotton was eligible to inherit his mother’s English estate. A source of patronage for him and his mother was cut short with Princess Mary’s unexpected death in December 1660, but the countess quickly moved on to a position in the household of the duchess of York, Anne Hyde, and was later made a lady of the bedchamber of the new queen, Catherine of Braganza. Some time around 1662 she also married, as her third husband, the prominent courtier and former royalist agent Daniel O’Neill^‡, who built for her the grand house of Belsize Manor in Hampstead. After the Restoration the countess established herself permanently in England.

Wotton at first had less cause to devote himself entirely to England and in the early years of the 1660s appears to have maintained a connection with his place of birth, where he had considerable interests. CSP Dom. 1663–4, pp. 128, 618. He was still underage at the Restoration and he first sat in the House as an English peer on 21 March 1663, although even at that point he would not have been of age. He only sat for a further two days until 24 Mar., at which point he registered his proxy with John Berkeley, Baron Berkeley of Stratton. In July 1663 Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, in drawing up his forecast of the divisions in the House over the impeachment of Clarendon initiated by George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, recorded that Berkeley of Stratton controlled Wotton’s proxy. Whether Wotton shared in Berkeley’s personal animus towards the lord chancellor is not known; Wharton marked the Dutchman as an enemy of Clarendon because of his proxy recipient.

Although Wotton managed to come to just over half of the sittings in the spring 1664 session, his Dutch affairs may have kept him away from the House thereafter and on 9 Nov. 1664 he registered his proxy with Horatio Townshend, Baron (later Viscount) Townshend, for the entirety of the 1664–5 session. He was caught on the wrong side of the North Sea during the Second Anglo-Dutch War and seems to have spent 1665 in the Netherlands. In April 1665 he wrote to Henry Bennet (later earl of Arlington), explaining that he had been prevented from returning to England to express his fidelity to Charles II by the dowager princess of Orange, Amalia van Solms-Braunfels (the deceased Princess Mary’s mother-in-law), who threatened that if he did so she would ‘deprive him of all he has under the Prince [of Orange], which is very considerable’. CSP Dom. 1664–5, p. 294. He was, however, back in England by early 1666 for a prorogation on 20 Feb. and came to half of the meetings of the House in 1666–7, though he was placed on only one select committee.

Wotton may have wished to return to England, even in the midst of the war, because his fortunes there were improving. In October 1664 Daniel O’Neill had died a very wealthy man and left everything to the countess of Chesterfield – Belsize Manor, a monopoly on the manufacture of gunpowder and the lease of the office of postmaster-general. Lady Chesterfield herself died in April 1667, leading Katherine, Lady Ranelagh [I], to comment that ‘my Lady Chesterfield has left this world and in it a greater stock of plate and fine goods (besides bonds and a great revenue) than has been owned by any private person here’. The countess had made her two sons – Wotton and Philip Stanhope, 2nd earl of Chesterfield – her two heirs, and Lady Ranelagh estimated that she had given Wotton ‘much the greater share’ of her estate, including the grand house of Belsize Manor in Hampstead’. Add 75354, Lady Ranelagh to Burlington, 13 Apr. 1667. Wotton soon set about improving the house’s fabric and gardens. In August 1668 Samuel Pepys^‡ visited Belsize with Sir Christopher Wren^‡ and was impressed with the gardens, ‘being indeed the most noble that ever I saw’ – indeed, they were ‘too good for the house’. Pepys Diary, ix. 281. In June 1676 John Evelyn, a more exacting horticulturist, visited the house; he was less impressed, finding the gardens ‘very large, but ill kept’. Evelyn Diary, iv. 92; VCH Mdx. ix. 98. The countess had jointly bequeathed to Wotton and Chesterfield O’Neill’s patent for the monopoly of making gunpowder, which they surrendered back to the crown for £9,000. CSP Dom. 1668–9, p. 454; HMC Hodgkin, 10. She also left to Wotton her lease of 492 hectares of St John’s Wood, which she had bought from Arlington in 1666. In 1673 the crown gave Wotton the freehold of this estate as part payment of a debt that Charles II owed the baron, probably from his days of impecunious exile. CSP Dom. 1673, p. 93; VCH Mdx. ix. 103. This inheritance and the grand house in Hampstead made Wotton a significant figure in the social life of the capital and a desirable item on the marriage market, his ‘person and fortune being considerable’. Bodl. Tanner 46, f. 68.

After the peace in the Second Dutch War, and flush from his inheritance, Wotton came to the House for 34 per cent of the sittings in 1667–9, was named to one committee on the preservation of timber in the forest of Dean and was added to two other committees. He was more active in the winter of 1669 when he came to all but 15 of the short session’s meetings, but he was named to no select committees on legislation, although he was placed with the majority of the House on the committees to investigate the decay of trade (25 Oct.) and to consider the report submitted by the commissioners of accounts (9 Nov.). He first sat in the 1670–1 session on 17 Mar. 1670, when he signed the protest (his first and only one) against the second reading of the divorce bill of John Manners, styled Lord Roos (later duke of Rutland). A week later, having attended on only five days, he registered his proxy with Charles Stuart, 3rd duke of Richmond.

This was vacated when Wotton appeared in the House again on 24 Oct. 1670 once Parliament had resumed, and a week after his return he was placed on a committee to prepare bills for the punishment of perjury and for preventing abuses in breaches of trust. Later he was assigned to the committee to settle the dispute between the Hamburg Company and its creditors. He was present at almost two-thirds of the meetings of the short session in early 1673, when he was named to two committees on legislation, but missed the next session of late 1673 entirely and attended just under a quarter of the meetings in January 1674. He was present for 45 per cent of the sittings in the spring of 1675. On 21 Apr. 1675 he was named to the committee on the bill for preventing dangers from recusants. He probably supported the court in the debates on the Non-resisting Test, as his name does not appear on any of the protests against this measure. He later came to one-third of the sittings of the session of late 1675.

It is only from around 1677 that there is any indication of the positions that Wotton took in the partisan politics of the period. From about this point he became more active in the House, or at least more visible because of the greater survival of division lists and forecasts. The number of his committee nominations increases substantially from this point as well. He was present for two-fifths of the meetings of the long and turbulent session beginning in February 1677, and was named to ten select committees, most of them on private bills. On 4 Apr. 1678 he joined with the majority to vote Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, guilty of manslaughter. PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/19, 4 Apr. 1678. Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, considered Wotton ‘doubly vile’ for his perceived support of the court, but Shaftesbury’s estimate was initially belied by Wotton’s votes in the session of winter 1678. He was very active in this session, coming to 87 per cent of the sitting days, the highest attendance rate of his career. He appears to have at first shared many of the concerns and views of the country party, being named to committees to examine the evidence of the Popish Plot (23 Oct. 1678), to consider the bills for raising the militia (26 Nov.) and to prevent recusants from sending their children abroad (12 December). On 15 Dec. he voted in the debates on the Test Act that the declaration against transubstantiation should be under the same penalties as the other oaths. He was marked as an ‘opposition lord’ in a division list on the votes in late December concerning the House’s insistence that money raised for disbandment be deposited in the exchequer and on the commitment to the Tower of the lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds).

Danby himself evidently thought that Wotton could be turned, and considered him one of his supporters in the weeks preceding the first Exclusion Parliament. Wotton attended five of the six days in the abandoned first session of 6-13 Mar. 1679, and then 70 per cent of the sitting days of that Parliament’s second substantive 61-day session of 15 Mar.-27 May. A list drawn up by Danby in the early days of proceedings on the bill for his attainder suggests that Wotton initially abstained from voting, and that the lord treasurer still hoped to bring him on side. By the time that the attainder bill came to a head Wotton had been won over, perhaps by his half-brother Chesterfield, a prominent supporter of Danby; he voted against the bill on 14 Apr. 1679. On 27 May, he probably voted for the right of the bishops to stay in the House during capital cases.

Wotton continued to side with the court for the remainder of that and the following two Parliaments. He voted against the establishment of a joint committee to consider the method of trying the impeached peers and at the end of the first Exclusion Parliament supported the right of the bishops to remain in court during the hearing of capital cases. In the second Exclusion Parliament, where he came to almost three-quarters of the meetings, he was added on 25 Oct. 1680 to the committee to consider evidence about the Popish Plot, but he voted to throw out the Exclusion Bill (15 Nov.), rejected the motion of having a joint committee to consider the state of the nation (23 Nov.) and found William Howard, Viscount Stafford, not guilty (7 December).

It was probably for his support of the court in its hour of need that Wotton was rewarded with a promotion in the peerage, being created earl of Bellomont in the Irish peerage by a patent dated 9 Dec. 1680, though this was not enrolled in Ireland until 11 Feb. 1681. CSP Dom. 1680–1, p. 155; HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 580. The decision to give him an Irish, rather than an English, title may have been determined by his connection with his step-father O’Neill. In August 1680 Wotton had submitted a petition to be granted the lease of the duty on French tonnage shipped to Ireland, which had formerly been held by O’Neill and Sir George Carteret^‡. The lord lieutenant, James Butler, duke of Ormond (whose son-in-law was Wotton’s half-brother Chesterfield), opined that the lease could be granted, under certain conditions, and Wotton’s Irish title may have been a recognition of his new position in that kingdom. CSP Dom. 1679–80, p. 626; 1680–1, p. 81. Bellomont sat in the English House of Lords as Baron Wotton in the Oxford Parliament of March 1681, where he was present for all but the final two days. Danby counted him among the supporters of his petition for bail and the lord treasurer’s son Edward Osborne^‡, styled Viscount Latimer, included Bellomont among a list of Danby’s ‘friends’ who had arrived in Oxford by 20 Mar. in order to promote this petition. HMC 14th Rep. IX, 423.

Bellomont died unexpectedly on 5 Jan. 1683 of an apoplexy. Add. 19253, ff. 109v, 196v. In August 1679 he had married Frances Willoughby, daughter of the 5th (or 6th) Baron of Parham, and widow of John Harpur of Swarkeston, Derbyshire. Through this connection Wotton had been made warden for the preservation of game in Swarkeston in 1681. There were no children of this marriage and Wotton, after assigning a rent charge of £600 p.a. to his wife, left his whole estate, including property in Norfolk, Kent and Flanders, to his nephew Charles Stanhope, the younger son of Chesterfield, with a reversion to Chesterfield’s elder son and heir, Philip Stanhope, styled Lord Stanhope (later 3rd earl of Chesterfield), on the condition that the heir take the surname Wotton. Charles Stanhope followed these instructions and changed his surname, but he died young and childless in 1704, by which the residue of the countess of Chesterfield’s large estate was united with that of the earls of Chesterfield. Add. 19253, f. 188v.