PASTON, Robert (1631-83)

Robert Paston was of the Norfolk family whose rise to prominence in the early fifteenth century can be traced through its carefully preserved correspondence, the celebrated ‘Paston Letters’. His father served as sheriff of the county in the 1630s and bought a baronetcy just before the outbreak of Civil War in 1641. During the Civil War Paston senior’s estate was sequestered and valued at £5,594 p.a. for the benefit of the Eastern Association, but he was able to compound for it by contributing £500 to the parliamentary cause and thereafter held local office throughout the Interregnum. HP Commons 1660-90, iii. 210.

The rise of Robert, the eldest son, to the peerage was inaugurated by his intervention in the Commons on 25 Nov. 1664 when he successfully moved to grant a supply to the crown of £2,500,000, just as Charles II was preparing for war with the Dutch. Add. 36988, f. 88. It could have been no coincidence that earlier that same day saw the first reading of the bill to extend the corporation boundaries of the port of Great Yarmouth to include part of Paston’s estate on the southern bank of the Yare, Little Yarmouth (or Southtown). This would allow him to partake of some of the customs duties flowing into the port. The bill was strenuously opposed by the Yarmouth corporation and its burgesses in the Commons but Paston was sure of its success. He was ‘sufficiently caressed by the chancellor [Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon]’ for his motion for supply and felt that ‘the service I have done the king ... is so great that I am looked on in a capacity of not being denied anything in his majesty’s power.’ Add. 27447, f. 324. He informed his wife in early December 1664 that, coming into a royal audience ‘in a very great crowd’, the king instantly came over to him ‘and took me into a corner of the room and told me, Sir Robert Paston, your kindnesses to me and more especially at this time, I'll never forget and if any favour and respect may ever manifest itself to you, you are sure of a friend of me’. Add. 36988, ff. 100-1. The king’s intervention was necessary for the passage of the Great Yarmouth bill, which had a difficult time getting through the Commons in early 1665. Add. 27447, ff. 324, 329; Add. 36988, f. 100-1; HMC 6th Rep. 364. The final meeting of the Lords’ select committee on the bill, on 20 Feb. 1665, was unusually well attended, with 33 peers attending – ‘thirty lords and earls, three dukes’ as Paston reported. The king had already summoned the committee chairman Richard Sackville, 5th earl of Dorset, to instruct him to tell those lords opposed to the bill that the king would not prorogue the session until it were passed. Paston included among his supporters in the committee his kinsmen, Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, and Montagu Bertie, 2nd earl of Lindsey, who personally vouched before his peers for Paston’s trustworthiness. The king’s warning and these peers’ support were sufficiently persuasive and the bill passed without amendment on 22 February. Add. 27447, f. 338; HMC 6th Rep. 364; LJ, xi. 663.

Paston was confident ‘that the king intended to mend my honour and fortune’ and ‘that he will speedily make me a nobleman of England’, but Charles insisted on delaying this honour for the moment, else ‘it would look too near a contract’. Paston assured himself that, ‘the words and ways of a prince are not to be disputed’. HMC 6th Rep. 364. Paston needed royal favour, as he was chronically short of money. He confided to his wife that he wanted something that ‘shall set me free in the world and put some money in my purse’. A title was not as important as funds, for ‘I know so much what the want of money is and what the straightness of a fortune is’. Add. 27447, ff. 329-30. The king was not immediately as good as his word regarding the title but did help ease the way for Paston to improve his income. In April 1666 Paston was granted a 21-year lease, for a rent of £2,000 p.a., on the farm of the customs on wood, glassware and earthenware, to take effect formally from Michaelmas 1667. CSP Dom. 1665-6, pp. 228-9, 331-2. By that time there were already calls for this patent to be rescinded as it was noted that Paston was making hefty profits from the import of building materials needed for the reconstruction of London after the Fire. In March 1668 he agreed that he would increase his rent for the farm to £3,800 p.a. for four years; it actually remained at that level until 1674. HMC 6th Rep. 365-6, 370; Eg. 3328, f. 103. In less pecuniary signs of royal favour, Paston was made a gentleman of the privy chamber in January 1667. In late September 1671, perhaps through the auspices of his patron, Henry Howard, Baron Howard of Castle Rising (later 6th duke of Norfolk), he had the honour of hosting the king and queen at his house at Oxnead during their tour of East Anglia. He was, however, mortified in having to admit that his house was insufficient to lodge both the king and queen at the same time in the manner they would expect. Bodl. Tanner 44, f. 272; HMC 6th Rep. 370. Paston’s long-promised elevation to the peerage came in August 1673, when he was created Viscount Yarmouth. His elevation was probably prompted by the marriage in July 1672 of his eldest son and heir, William Paston, later 2nd earl of Yarmouth, to Charlotte Howard, an illegitimate daughter of Charles II and the Viscountess Shannon [I].

Yarmouth first sat in the House under this title as quickly as he could. He was introduced on a day of prorogation, 20 Oct. 1673, alongside his patron and kinsman, Thomas Osborne, who was introduced that day as Viscount Latimer (later earl of Danby and duke of Leeds). He then sat in all four of the sittings of the very brief session which began a week later and was named to one select committee. He came to 58 per cent of the meetings of the session of Jan.-Feb. 1674 and to 71 per cent in the following session of spring 1675, during which he appears to have supported the non-resisting test, as the earl of Danby (as Latimer had quickly become) himself predicted he would. Yarmouth narrowly escaped death in August 1675 when he was shot at by highwaymen while riding in his coach. He survived, one commentator cattily attributing this to his corpulence (‘he hath flesh enough to spare’), which had always been a point on which his enemies liked to harp. Verney ms mic. M636/28, J. to Sir R. Verney, 12 Aug. 1675; HP Commons 1660-90, iii. 211.

He was back in the House on 19 Oct. 1675 and proceeded to attend 76 per cent of the meeting of that session, and perhaps surprisingly, considering his connections with Danby and the court, on 20 Nov. 1675 he voted in favour of the motion to address the king for the dissolution of Parliament, even signing the protest at the motion’s rejection. When Parliament reconvened in February 1677 he attended 65 per cent of the meetings of the spring of 1677, and was in the House for the first two weeks of April when, fulfilling his recently conferred role as high steward of Great Yarmouth, he oversaw the rapid passage through Parliament of the bill to repair the pier at that port. HMC 6th Rep. 382. Yarmouth, though, did not appear in the House again after a day of prorogation on 16 July 1677 until midway through the first Exclusion Parliament, on 12 Apr. 1679, thus missing all the controversial proceedings of the House in 1678. He registered his proxy with his cousin, Robert Bertie, 3rd earl of Lindsey, twice in 1678: on 1 Feb. until the prorogation on 13 May and then again from 23 May until that session’s prorogation on 15 July. It may have been illness rather than lack of interest which kept Yarmouth away, for in October 1677 he was already complaining to a correspondent of being incapacitated by a ‘violent’ fit of the gout. HMC 6th Rep. 383. When the peers were ordered to attend the House to hear the proceedings on the Popish Plot in the winter of 1678, Yarmouth sent two of his servants to testify on 23 Dec. 1678 ‘that the Lord Viscount Yarmouth is so ill of the stone, that he is not able to come to attend the House’.

In mid-1677 Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, considered Yarmouth ‘doubly vile’ in his political attitudes. Shaftesbury almost certainly formed this judgment not from Yarmouth’s few activities in Westminster but from those in Norfolk, where Yarmouth became an increasingly important leader of the court and Church faction during the course of the 1670s. On 23 Dec. 1674 he was elected high steward of the corporation of Great Yarmouth in the place of the recently deceased earl of Clarendon. CSP Dom. 1673-5, p. 475; 1675-6, pp. 319, 323; HMC 6th Rep. 371, 373-4; HMC 7th Rep. 531. Yarmouth’s controversial scheme to incorporate Little Yarmouth into the municipality had never taken effect, so some of the passions of 1665 had cooled by this time. Yet despite his grand and crowded entrance into Yarmouth in September 1675, not all members of the corporation were pleased with his appointment, and he remained preoccupied with the fractured politics of that port for the next several years. HMC 6th Rep. 373-390, passim; P. Gauci, Pols. and Soc. in Great Yarmouth. The year 1675 also saw the lord lieutenant of the county, Horatio Townshend, Baron (later Viscount) Townshend, disastrously take sides in the partisan politics that sharply divided county society during a set of controversial by-elections. Townshend angered Danby by his strenuous opposition to the election of Danby’s son-in-law, Robert Coke^‡ of Holkham, for King’s Lynn in April 1675 and by his heavy-handed (not to say underhanded) support, in tandem with the ‘country’ Members, Sir John Hobart^‡ and Sir John Holland^‡, for Sir Robert Kemp^‡ in an election the following month. HMC 6th Rep. 371-2; Add. 27477, ff. 344-5, 350-2; HP Commons 1660-90, i. 320-1, 327-8; Rosenheim, Townshends of Raynham, 39-43. Yarmouth, Danby’s kinsman and dependent, was appointed lord lieutenant and vice-admiral of Norfolk in place of the out-of-favour Townshend in the spring of 1676. One of the new lord lieutenant’s correspondents told him that ‘the other party’ were quickly claiming that Townshend had been ousted because he had fought against the government’s plans to introduce popery. Add. 36988, ff. 109-10; HMC 7th Rep. 532. Townshend’s followers would definitely have placed Yarmouth in the ‘popish’ camp, especially as he and his wife were patrons of the high Anglican churchmen in the county. Edward Reynolds, bishop of Norwich, thought in 1670 that Paston, as he then was, had made the ‘little church’ at Oxnead ‘as beautiful as any in this or the next diocese’, and went on to remark approvingly that he was ‘very careful to get the place supplied by able divines’. Tanner 135, f. 182. Reynold’s successor from February 1677, Anthony Sparrow, bishop of Norwich, was to work well with Yarmouth in the years following in putting forward the interests of the Church and always spoke highly of Yarmouth to William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury. Tanner 36, ff. 52v, 228; Tanner 138, f. 34. For his part, Yarmouth was pleased with Sparrow and felt that he ‘carries himself like a bishop’. Norf. RO, BL/Y/2/35. Yarmouth had earlier considered Townshend ‘the best friend I have in the world’ because of his support for the Great Yarmouth bill in 1665, but by the time he took up his lord lieutenancy, relations between the two had broken down and each had become the head of opposing parties in the county. Add. 27447, ff. 329, 370-1.

A series of by-elections under Yarmouth’s lieutenancy in 1678 revealed these factions. An election in February 1678 to replace the deceased burgess of Great Yarmouth, Sir William Doyley^‡, led to a contest between the former bailiff, Sir Thomas Medowe^‡, described by a government informer as ‘ever loyal to the king and true to the Church’ and one of the current bailiffs, Richard Huntington^‡, who ’has been in office under all the late usurped government, the only friend to the factious, by whose means they are grown so numerous and insolent that it is become dangers for us to speak our danger’. With the assistance of Yarmouth Medowe won at the poll. HP Commons 1660-90, i. 324-5.

The county town of Norwich presented more problems and, in general, was always troublesome as it was split between the large Church interest (represented by the cathedral and its many officials) and the strong Dissenting tradition in the city. Party strife there came to a head again in early 1678 after the death of the sitting member, Christopher Jay^‡, in August 1677. HMC 6th Rep. 382. Yarmouth and his close patron in Norwich affairs Henry Howard, who succeeded to the dukedom of Norfolk in December 1677 – ‘one that merits it as much as any of his ancestors’, Yarmouth thought – put forward Yarmouth’s own son, William, as a replacement. Ibid. 384. Townshend and the knight of the shire, Sir John Hobart, encouraged opposition to Paston from the Norwich corporation and its mayor Richer, deemed by Yarmouth ’the impudentest fanatic in the world’. Ibid. 382-5. In the event William Paston won the election handily, but Yarmouth struck back 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’. The ensuing municipal elections reduced the predominance of the ‘fanatics’ in the corporation, especially by the overthrow of the troublesome mayor. CSP Dom. 1678, pp. 45, 76-77, 106, 131-2; Add. 27447, ff. 387-90. In addition, another by-election had to be held in May 1678 to replace the other recently deceased burgess, and the moderate alderman Augustine Briggs^‡ was returned with no opposition from Yarmouth. HP Commons 1660-90, i. 330-1.

Yarmouth’s purges in the county town had their effect, and Norwich returned Paston and Briggs, both opponents of Exclusion, for all three Exclusion Parliaments. Otherwise, Yarmouth’s actions only exacerbated tensions within the county. Between 1679 and 1681 uncontested elections were a rarity in the county and boroughs, with Yarmouth at the centre of the court’s efforts to defeat the strong Presbyterian and ‘country’ electoral interest represented by Townshend, Hobart and Holland. Throughout the spring of 1679 Yarmouth kept Williamson, himself the member for the Norfolk constituency of Thetford, abreast of developments in the elections. CSP Dom. 1679-80, p. 59. The favourable situation in Great Yarmouth was quickly reversed, as Yarmouth had alienated the corporation and populace by his proposal to build a new customs house on his estate in Southtown. The number of candidates willing to stand against Medowe was large, but in the end Huntington was returned with the other sitting member Sir William Coventry^‡, while Medowe descended to the bottom of the poll. HP Commons 1660-90, i. 325-6. For the county election Yarmouth ‘morally secured’ himself to Williamson that he would send down to Westminster the court candidates Sir Christopher Calthorpe^‡ and Sir Neville Catelyn^‡, ‘men that will not meddle with ministers of state’, against their likely opponents Hobart and Holland. Yarmouth was particularly incensed by the old Cromwellian Hobart. ‘I had rather lose my life’, he assured the secretary, ‘than have men triumphing in a House of Commons that sang a psalm about the Worcester Cross when the king was driven into that distress by his rebels, and that have never in one vote testified any repentance’. CSP Dom. 1679-80, p. 75; Add. 27447, ff. 399-402. Yarmouth gleefully reported to his wife the results of the poll that saw Calthorpe and Catelyn victorious, with Hobart a distant third by some 500 votes. HMC 6th Rep. 390. Nevertheless, Hobart petitioned the elections committee, alleging that the under-sheriff of the county had snatched away the poll-book before all of Hobart’s supporters had been counted. The matter swiftly became a partisan cause célèbre in the Commons. Townshend and his kinsmen marshalled the witnesses for Hobart, while Yarmouth’s letter to the Commons in support of Calthorpe and Catelyn was deemed to be threatening. HMC 7th Rep. 532; Add. 36988, ff. 139-40. The election having been declared void, the ‘country’ party narrowly failed to vote Hobart as the victorious candidate and a by-election became necessary. Another poll was held on 5 May 1679, this time between four candidates, William Windham^‡ having joined with Hobart. The physician Sir Thomas Browne claimed, surprisingly considering the febrile atmosphere of the time, to have ‘never observed so great a number of people who came to give their voices, but all was civilly carried at the hill, and I do not hear of any rude or unhandsome carriage’. Less than 500 votes separated the top and bottom of the four candidates. In the end it was determined that Hobart and Catelyn topped the poll, but by this time they had less than three weeks to sit in the Parliament before it was prorogued and ultimately dissolved. HP Commons 1660-90, i. 321-2. Yarmouth could only breathe a sigh of relief: ‘I am glad those elections are so well over; they are the most troublesome things in nature, and the most vexatious, though a man gets the better as I have done in all points’. HMC 6th Rep. 390.

Danby counted on Yarmouth’s support during the impending impeachment hearings against him in Parliament but was frustrated by the Norfolk peer’s continued absence from the House throughout March and early April 1679. Yarmouth probably stayed away through a combination of illness and his attention to the protracted Norfolk election, and it was doubtless strong pressure from Danby, or possibly Yarmouth’s cousin Lindsey, that persuaded him to come to the House to assist his kinsman. He first sat in the House that session on 14 Apr. 1679, when he voted against the bill of attainder. Yet on 10 May he once again diverged from the court line by voting in favour of the motion to establish a committee of both Houses to consider the method of trying Danby and the impeached peers and by entering his protest against the rejection of that motion. On 27 May, however, he probably voted for the right of the bishops to stay in the House during capital cases. He was present on only 39 per cent of all sitting days in the session.

By July 1679 the viscount felt that he had merited an earldom and drafted a petition, perhaps never sent, reminding the king of his promises of favour ‘when I last waited on you at Whitehall’ and assuring him that any such honour would enable him to better serve the royal will ‘when the country sees me borne up as well as others by your majesty’s favour so long expected’. Add. 27447, ff. 412-13. He soon got his wish and was made earl of Yarmouth on 30 July 1679, just in time, as Yarmouth himself had noted, for him to make use of his influence and electioneering methods on behalf of the court at the elections of August. Yarmouth’s son and the moderate alderman, Briggs, won without too much trouble at the poll in Norwich. HMC 7th Rep. 532. He was less successful for the county, where the sitting member Hobart joined with a moderate Sir Peter Gleane^‡ to see off another challenge from Catelyn and Calthorpe, neither of whom by this time had much stomach for the fight. Yarmouth’s tactics were too heavy-handed even for the lord chancellor, Heneage Finch, Baron Finch (later earl of Nottingham), who reprimanded Yarmouth for trying to delay the election for his own advantage by purposely withholding the writ from the sheriff. Add. 27447, ff. 421-2. In Great Yarmouth Huntington won again, and this time it was a new candidate George England^‡ who consigned the churchman Medowe to the bottom of the poll.

Yarmouth had a long time to wait before he could take his seat in the House with his new title. Even after the Parliament’s many prorogations, Yarmouth was largely absent for the first weeks of the Parliament in October 1680 and out of its 66 meetings, he only attended five. But these included four of the most important days of Charles II’s Parliaments – the days, from his first sitting as earl of Yarmouth on 11 Nov. 1680, which saw the House debate and ultimately reject the Exclusion bill. He himself took part in the debate on 15 Nov. and then voted to reject the bill on its first reading. Indeed, so concerned was he by Exclusion that he made or acquired a division list of the vote of 15 Nov., which is among his surviving papers. Add. 36988, f. 159. The bill having been rejected, he promptly left the House and did not return until 10 Jan. 1681. Consequently, he missed the vote on the guilt of William Howard, Viscount Stafford, a kinsman of his patron, the duke of Norfolk. That single day in January was the last time Yarmouth ever sat in the House. He missed the short Parliament in Oxford in March 1681 completely, even though Danby was once again relying on him to help him with his application for bail. Beinecke Library, OSB mss Danby pprs. box 2; HMC 14th Rep. IX. 425. The elections for this Parliament which Yarmouth oversaw did not bring any significant changes in the court’s fortunes, the only sitting member not returned being Huntington who declined to stand for Great Yarmouth and was replaced by another supporter of Exclusion, Sir James Johnson^‡..

Yarmouth, not surprisingly, helped the ‘Tory reaction’ in its early stages in Norfolk, and forced through addresses of loyalty and thanks to the king for dissolving what was to be the last Parliament of his reign. Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 92. Bishop Sparrow was pleased that Yarmouth was ‘heartily true to the king’s and Church’s interest’ and encouraged by Yarmouth’s ‘great interest in this county’ which even enabled the earl in October 1682 to persuade the factious corporation of Norwich to surrender its charter to the king. Tanner 35, f. 107; Tanner 36, f. 228. Yarmouth had long, at least from October 1677, been incapacitated by gout and other ailments. HMC 6th Rep. 383. By the early 1680s he was an immobile invalid, prompting his rival Townshend in 1682 to make a bid to replace him as lord lieutenant. Tanner 36, f. 228. Yarmouth died on 8 Mar. 1683, but Townshend was still frustrated, for the earl was replaced in the Norfolk lieutenancy by Norfolk’s son, Henry Howard, Baron Mowbray (later 7th duke of Norfolk), who had conveniently converted to Protestantism. Yarmouth’s very brief will, written only a few days before his death, left his estate to his wife to pay for his debts and made her and his heir William, long-time burgess for Norwich and now 2nd earl of Yarmouth, executors of his overextended estate.