SONDES, George (1599-1677)

Sir George Sondes’s family had been prominent local landowners in Kent since the fourteenth century, and Sondes himself held a number of important local and county offices in the 1630s. He was made a royalist commissioner of array in 1642 which led eventually to his imprisonment and the sequestration of his estate, calculated to be worth £1,600 p.a. A. Everitt, Community of Kent, 64, 70-71; Kent Proceedings, 6; CCC., 867-8; Harleian Misc. x. 42-3. While still recovering from those setbacks, tragedy struck again in 1655 when his younger son Freeman murdered his elder brother George and was swiftly executed. The fratricide, and Sir George’s perceived responsibility for it, became the subject of many pamphlets. Harleian Misc. x. 23-67. His son’s conviction meant that Sondes feared his estate might be liable to confiscation by the government and at the Restoration. Sondes’s second wife Mary petitioned Charles II not to deprive them ‘of the estate to which that horrid murder may give you some title’. CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 27; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 502. Perhaps to acquire added influence and privilege which would help safeguard his property, Sondes at the Restoration resumed his previous position in local government, entered Parliament in 1661 as a Member for the Devon borough of Ashburton and loaned large amounts to the Crown throughout the late 1660s. CTB, 1667-8, p. 173; CTB, 1669-72, p. 799.

Sondes had sufficiently improved his finances by 1670 to make his two daughters by his second marriage, Mary and Catherine, much sought-after heiresses for aspiring aristocrats. Belvoir, Rutland MSS Add. 7, letter no. 12; HMC Rutland, ii. 17. It was the Frenchman Louis de Duras, Baron Duras (later 2nd earl of Feversham), an increasingly influential favourite of James Stuart, duke of York, who was eventually settled upon as the match for the elder daughter Mary. Their marriage was solemnized in March 1676. Duras moved quickly to ensure that he could further benefit from what was already an advantageous marriage. In early March 1676 Duras conferred with Sir Joseph Williamson^‡ about ‘the favour the king has been pleased to do me, which is, to give me the title of earl’, and set out a plan whereby an earldom would be offered to Sondes, with a special remainder to Duras. If Sondes did not wish to take the title, Duras was still to have an earldom himself ‘at once’, and two separate warrants for patents of creation were duly drawn up to cover each of these contingencies. CSP Dom. 1676-7, pp. 14, 16. Sondes himself chose the proffered earldom and on 8 Apr. 1676 his patent creating him earl of Feversham, with a special remainder to his son-in-law, was sealed.

Mary, Lady Duras, died less than a year after the marriage, on 1 Jan. 1677, and Sondes himself held the title for just over a year before his own death. In that year, during most of which Parliament was prorogued, Feversham sat in the House on only 13 occasions. In his brief career in the House, he was named to eight committees, half of them on private bills. He last sat in the House on 11 Apr. 1677 and died ‘suddenly’ five days later. Verney ms mic M636/30, A. Nicholas to J. Verney, 26 Apr. 1677. He was succeeded in his title by his son-in-law Duras, but the deaths of Lady Duras and the earl of Feversham in quick succession had reverberations for several years, as Duras had entered into a marriage settlement with Sondes in which receipt of his promised portion of £3,000 was contingent on his settling estates and jointures on his new wife. After her early death the conditions laid on him were redundant and so left unfulfilled but Duras still demanded the agreed portion and, continued to do so after Feversham’s death, from his sole heiress Lady Catherine Sondes and Lewis Watson, later earl of Rockingham, whom she married in July 1677. Lord Nottingham’s Chancery Cases (Selden Soc. lxxix), 637-47.