PASTON, William (c. 1654-1732)

William Paston was from an early age raised to take over the duties in county administration and political fighting of his father Robert Paston, Viscount (later earl of) Yarmouth. Yarmouth thought William was ‘a very solid young blade and understands matters with a quick intelligence’. HMC 6th Rep. 390a. In his role as lord lieutenant he made the young man a justice of the peace, a deputy lieutenant and a colonel of a militia regiment of horse, for which reason William was usually referred to as ‘Colonel Paston’ during this time. HMC Lothian, 127; CSP Dom. 1677-8, p. 655; 1679-80, p. 32; Add. 27447, f. 417v; Add. 36899, f. 180v. When Christopher Jay, a burgess for Norwich, died in August 1677 Yarmouth and his patron, Henry Howard, earl of Norwich (later 6th duke of Norfolk), pushed forward the younger Paston as his replacement. Although Yarmouth’s ‘country’ rivals in the county, the former lord lieutenant Horatio Townshend, Baron (later Viscount) Townshend, and Sir John Hobart^‡, set up various opponents against him, Paston won by a three-to-one majority when the by-election went to a poll in February 1678. HMC 6th Rep. 382-5, passim; J.T. Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich, pp. 255-8; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 329-32. Paston was subsequently returned for the following three Exclusion Parliaments of 1679-81, in which he was a reliable, if largely inactive, supporter of the court and opponent of Exclusion. HP Commons 1660-90, i. 213. His kinship connections with Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), and with the king himself led to lucrative marks of favour. In October 1676 he acquired a lease on land in the former ‘bowling green’ of Whitehall Palace. CTB, v. 284, 301, 357; Survey of London, xiii. 240. In May 1678 he received a patent granting him the monopoly on printing public documents and forms for 31 years. CSP Dom. 1678, pp. 156-7, 188, 226. Later, in September of that same year, he received a pension of £1,000 to be taken from the income from the farm of the import of wood and earthenware held by his father. In July 1679 Viscount Yarmouth was further promoted in the peerage to be earl of Yarmouth, perhaps with the aid of his royal daughter-in-law, and the former Colonel Paston was then styled Lord Paston.

Paston helped his father enforce the ‘Tory reaction’ in Norfolk. Throughout 1682 he assisted his father to persuade the corporation of Norwich to surrender its charter voluntarily. Add. 27448, ff. 64-170, passim; HMC 7th Rep. 533; Add. 36988, ff. 194-8; Evans, 283-92. At the behest of a group of Tories on the court of aldermen he was named as recorder of the city in the new charter. Add. 27448, ff. 171-2. Paston’s ready acceptance of the honour quickly encountered opposition from those who argued that the right of appointment of the recorder had long been exclusively in the gift of the common council. CSP Dom. (Jan.-June 1683), pp. 1-2; Add. 27448, ff. 171-2, 177-8, 181-4, 187-90, 194-200, 209-10.

Paston succeeded to his father’s earldom on 8 Mar. 1683. His new title did not make his affairs with the Norwich corporation any easier – indeed, it may have only exacerbated the tensions between him and his opponents. In the first place, the king diminished Yarmouth’s local influence when he appointed Henry Howard, Baron Mowbray (later 7th duke of Norfolk) lord lieutenant of the county in place of the late earl. Yarmouth’s appointment as recorder of Norwich and his wish, from April 1683, to appoint a deputy to exercise his place, encountered strong resistance from a section of the common council. They objected both to the king’s naming of Yarmouth as recorder in the charter as well as to the recorder’s absence from the town and his insistence that a deputy perform his duties. The dispute may reflect divisions within the Tory faction in the city government, between the ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ Tories among the aldermen, the latter of whom opposed Yarmouth because they may have found him too ‘moderate’. CSP Dom. 1683 (Jan.-June), 207; 1683 (July-Sept.) 165, 243, 245, 256-8, 288, 292, 417-18; 1683-4, p. 21; Add. 27448, ff. 233-4, 265-6; Evans, 296-305. This is suggested by the conflict between Yarmouth and one of his fiercest foes in the recordership dispute, the alderman and former sheriff, Philip Stebbing. In the autumn of 1683 Yarmouth, who by any standard had acted like a Tory up to that point, charged Stebbing with scandalum magnatum for publicly stating that ‘the earl of Yarmouth doth converse with a trimming Whiggish cabal and is a fit man to head the faction’. Roger Morrice recorded the offending words as ‘his Lordship was a Whig and for the Exclusion of the [James Stuart] duke of York and fit to head a faction’. Yarmouth won his case in March 1684, and Stebbing was fined £10,000 in damages. Add. 27448, ff. 253-6; CSP Dom.1683-4, pp. 280, 289; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 458. Yarmouth was also the court’s main agent in persuading the corporation of Great Yarmouth, where his father had been high steward, to surrender its charter in March 1684. He was duly named high steward of the corporation under the new charter. CSP Dom. 1683 (July-Sept.), 104, 150; 1683-4, pp. 171, 325, 327, 363; Add. 27448, ff. 261-4, 277-86.

Yarmouth’s principal connection with the court and the royal family was cut in July 1684 with the unexpected death of his wife, Charlotte. His mother, the dowager countess of Yarmouth, was another leading contact of his at court but her influence was at best ambiguous. She had long ‘made a great bustle’ at Charles II’s court with her sometimes strident advocacy of her family’s interest. Prideaux Letters, 165-6. The financial affairs of the Pastons were always precarious, and the first earl reputedly suffered from a ‘broken heart’ in his last days caused by the king’s ‘ingratitude’ and unwillingness to assist the family further. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 358; Add. 27448, f. 321-2; HMC 7th Rep. 534; Add. 36988, ff. 220-1. This probably referred to the failure just before the earl’s death of a complicated and long-running scheme in which he and a number of others, led by the projector Perceval Brunskell, tried to obtain a lucrative patent to farm the green wax fines. A patent constituting Yarmouth one of the patentees in a grant for 31 years at an annual rent of £250, of one half of the profits arising to the exchequer from Greenwax fines, was sealed on 25 May 1678 but was quickly revoked in July 1679 upon a negative report of the attorney general, Sir William Jones^‡. The chief opponent to the scheme, Sir Francis North, later Baron Guilford, considered the earl of Yarmouth to be a dupe to Brunskell’s persuasions and Lady Yarmouth to be the projector’s chief patroness. North, Lives, i. 138-40; also HMC 14th Rep. IX, 434. In January 1682 a draft royal warrant for another patent for the Greenwax fines, with the same patentees and the addition of Lord Paston and some others, was sent to the attorney-general, Robert Sawyer^‡, for his examination. After a year of delay, the proposal was finally and definitively ‘quite baffled’ at the Privy Council in January 1683, shortly before the first earl’s death. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 345. Brunskell, with the backing and patronage of the dowager countess, prepared a printed rebuttal of the charges against the scheme shortly after the first earl’s death, as part of her last-ditch efforts to salvage some financial benefit for the family. CTB, vi. 120-1, 662, 742; vii 124-5, 236, 284-6, 361; P. Brunskell, Vindication of the Case Relating to the Green-Wax Fines (1683); Add. 27448, ff. 163-4, 205-6, 217-32, 267-76; North, i. 138-40; CSP Dom. 1700-1702, pp. 589-93. The countess’s activities in this, and other petitions and interventions, gained her a reputation at the court for importunity. Add. 27448, ff. 251-2, 289-90, 311-12; CSP Dom. 1684-5, p. 1; CTB, vii. 1146. In October 1684 an anonymous correspondent informed Yarmouth that he had been present when the dowager countess had made her representation at court at Windsor and ‘know nothing could be more contemptuous, she being held an indiscreet and mischievous woman. ... if you suffered to be governed by her, you would be held a weak person and ruin your interest at court’. Add. 36988, ff. 233-4; HMC 7th Rep. 534.

Both mother and son had a stake in the late earl’s farm of the customs on wood, which was considered void at the death of Charles II. Add. 27448, ff. 300-1. Yarmouth successfully petitioned, although with some trouble, to maintain the farm for the remaining three years of its lease, but the restrictions placed on it (he was only to be paid a fixed annuity out of the customs which were to be managed by customs officers) indicated that its renewal, due in 1688, would be difficult. CTB, viii. 46-47, 221, 500; Add. 27448, ff. 313-14, 393-4. Perhaps in part to protect this interest, Yarmouth pushed himself forward at James II’s court. He probably had some role in having court candidates returned for the boroughs of Great Yarmouth and Norwich in 1685 (including his own younger brother Robert Paston). HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 329-32. Yarmouth himself sat in the House at the first opportunity he could, attending on the first day of James II’s Parliament. He attended in total 58 per cent of its meetings and was named to only three committees. Over the following months Yarmouth convinced the king of his unswerving loyalty and became a favourite at court. He raised an independent troop of horse for the king to help suppress the rebellion of James Scott, duke of Monmouth. Contemporary political commentators consistently marked him throughout 1687 and 1688 as a supporter of the king’s policies and of the repeal of the Test Acts and penal statutes. This, with perhaps the continuing importunate solicitations of his mother – for whom James II and his queen appear to have had a high regard – led eventually to Yarmouth’s appointment on 9 Feb. 1687 as treasurer of the royal household. HMC Downshire, i. 182; HMC 7th Rep. 534-5; Add. 36988, f. 260; CSP Dom. 1686-7, p. 366; HMC 7th Rep. 532; Add. 36988, ff. 160-1; Add. 27448, ff. 323-4, 329-30, 333-5, 351-2. At about the same time, in March 1687, he contracted an advantageous marriage with Elizabeth Wiseman. The marriage made him brother-in-law of the commissioner of the customs, Sir Dudley North^‡, but this connection did him little good when the lease on the wood farm expired, as North and the other commissioners refused to renew it. North, ii. 232-3. Yarmouth was appointed, in March 1688, joint lord lieutenant (and from June sole custos rotulorum) of Wiltshire, a county with which he had no connection but whose incumbent lord lieutenant, the local magnate Thomas Herbert, 8th earl of Pembroke, was increasingly mistrusted by James. Yarmouth’s commission for this post included a dispensation from the penal statutes against Catholics. HMC Lords, ii. 302. At the time of Yarmouth’s appointment in February 1687 he had been considered a Protestant, but there are suggestions that as early as June 1686 his mother had converted to Catholicism and in July 1688 it was reported in the newsletters that Yarmouth himself had become a Roman Catholic. Add. 34510, f. 14; HMC Downshire, i. 182; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 449. By September 1688 a member of the Catholic Waldegrave clan at court placed the dowager countess ‘in the first rank’ of ‘those who are their majesties’ true and faithful servants’. HMC 7th Rep. 535; Add. 36988, f. 260. With the farm on the greenwax and the wood custom gone, Yarmouth appears to have turned in 1687-8 to investing in the exploitation of lead mines, particularly near Wirksworth in Derbyshire. Add. 27448, ff. 336-7, 346-8, 356-62, 365-6. At the time of the Revolution Yarmouth, not knowing his fate in the coming war, left his mother explicit instructions regarding his estate, instructing her to ensure that the work on the mines might be continued and that his patent for the monopoly of printing public documents be maintained. Add. 36988, f. 261-2; HMC 7th Rep. 535.

Yarmouth survived the Revolution, though his actions in November 1688 are not known. He first attended the meeting of the provisional government established in the Guildhall on the afternoon of 13 Dec. just after reports of the king’s discovery at Faversham were reaching the capital. It was decided that Yarmouth, as treasurer of the king’s household, was to go with other prominent members of the king’s court to Faversham to bring the king back to the capital. Kingdom without a King, 92, 95; Ailesbury Mems. 202; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 422. In the Convention Yarmouth voted on 29 Jan. 1689 in favour of the unsuccessful motion to establish a regency. Over the following days he consistently voted against proclaiming William and Mary king and queen or accepting the Commons’ phrasing in the declaration that James II had ‘abdicated’ and that the throne was thereby ‘vacant’, although he did not join in the protest of 6 Feb. 1689 when this wording was accepted by a majority of the House. Two days after this vote Yarmouth left the House for good, unwilling to acknowledge William and Mary as his new monarchs. Although he formally reconverted to Protestantism sometime in the spring of 1689, he refused to swear the necessary oaths to the new regime until he finally relented in November 1696. CSP Dom. 1689-90, p. 528. He was frequently summoned to the House by official letters, but his excuses for his absence, usually involving his recurrent illness or the distances needed to travel from Norfolk, were always accepted by the House. His refusal to accept the new monarchs marked his own political downfall, as he lost all his court and most of his local, offices over the course of 1688-9, although he formally remained custos of Wiltshire until as late as February 1690 and retained the high stewardship of Great Yarmouth until his death. Palmer, Continuation of Manship’s History of Great Yarmouth, 329-30.

In late June 1690 Yarmouth was committed to the Tower on suspicion of high treason and involvement in Jacobite conspiracy but even though the judge thought ‘there was more matter against him than against some that had been tried and condemned’, he was discharged on 15 August. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 470, 493; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 67-68, 72-73; Clarendon Corresp. ii. 322-3; CSP Dom. 1690-1, p. 60; WO 94/7. There was good reason to suspect Yarmouth of Jacobite conspiracy, as became clear over the following months. An informant told the government that a Jacobite agent had travelled to Norfolk in September 1691 to meet with ‘Ld. Y’ and other Tories; he had been told that Yarmouth and the others ‘would raise more money, men, horses and arms than could be expected’. Surr. Hist. Cent. 371/14/J2. Yarmouth was also included in a list of Jacobite peers who had sent an agent to St Germain with professions of their loyalty and an optimistic account of England’s readiness to accept the return of the king. Bodl. Carte 181, f. 582. Yarmouth was predictably high on the list when the government effected another clampdown on Jacobites in early May 1692. He was committed to the Tower again on 15 May, only to be released a month later on bail. TNA, WO 94/7; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 452-3, 458 ; CSP Dom. 1691-2, p. 284; Verney ms mic. M636/45, J. to Sir R. Verney, 16 June 1692. These brushes with incarceration do not appear to have changed Yarmouth’s views, and by the winter of 1693-4 he was deeply involved in a plan for an immediate Jacobite invasion, taking upon himself in his letters to St Germain the responsibility of securing Norfolk for the deposed king and providing the Jacobite court with a detailed and optimistic list of the principal inhabitants of Norfolk who would declare for James II in the event of an invasion. Carte 181, ff. 529-33, 563-6. Yet at the same time as Yarmouth was describing himself to St Germain as the leader of the Norfolk Jacobites, the Norfolk clergyman Humphrey Prideaux described him as living ‘very obscurely’ at Oxnead, in increasing debt, while his once imperious mother ‘boards in a thatched house, and ... with difficulty enough finds money to pay for her board’. Prideaux Letters, 165-6.

The countess dowager died in February 1694. By that time the Paston interest at court was being managed by Yarmouth’s son and heir, Charles, styled Lord Paston, who in January 1694 had ‘kissed the king’s hand in order to his coming into favour’. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 256. He quickly allied himself to Hans Willem Bentinck, earl of Portland, who may have procured for him a commission as a major in a troop of the Life Guards and appears for several years to have been receptive to the idea of Paston’s marriage to his own daughter. Ibid. iv. 98, 675; Glos. Archives, Sharp pprs. box 78, no. 49; HP Commons 1690-1715, v. 110-11. It may have been through Paston’s and Portland’s interest that Yarmouth, so long in self-imposed isolation, returned to favour. On 23 Nov. 1696 he kissed the king’s hands and took the requisite oaths to William III in the House, sitting there for the first time since ‘the coronation’, as Narcissus Luttrell^‡ commented (inaccurately, as Yarmouth had made two brief and unnoticeable appearances on 7 May and 12 Nov. 1689). Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 144. He came to over half of the meetings of this session, but on the most controversial issue of that time, the attainder of Sir John Fenwick^‡, he avoided taking a stand, leaving the House before the question was put on 23 Dec. 1696 whether the bill of attainder should pass, and he did not join in signing the protest against the bill.

Yarmouth’s political stance in the ensuing years was ambiguous. On one hand, he could clearly express his Jacobite sympathies, as when he stood £5,000 surety in June 1697 for the bail of William Herbert, styled Viscount Montgomery (4th earl of Powis). Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 183, 241; CSP Dom. 1697, p. 206. His steadily declining attendance after his return to the House in 1696-7 may suggest that he still found proceedings in the House distasteful to his political views. He attended only 37 per cent of the meetings in 1697-8 session, but was named to 27 committees and chaired and reported from one on a private bill for vesting a Norfolk estate in trustees to be sold. On 15 Mar. 1698 he was present to vote against the commitment of the Junto bill to punish the exchequer official, Charles Duncombe^‡. He only came to just over a quarter of the meetings in the first session of the 1698 Parliament and to none at all in the second. Similarly, he attended only ten of the gatherings of the Parliament of 1701, during which he managed to get himself excused through illness from passing judgment in the impeachment of the Junto peers. He did not attend any of the meetings of William III’s last Parliament.

On the other hand, he relied on his son’s growing connection with Portland and tried to use him as a patron and protector as well. In 1697 his claim that he only remained in contact with Jacobite agents in order to discover information which he could loyally pass on to Portland and the government was generally accepted. His daughters also testified that he blamed his wife for continuing to place him in such a damaging position by ‘bringing him among such people’. He told her (at least according to his daughters, who may have wished to shift blame on to their step-mother) that ‘she would never be quiet till she had brought him to a scaffold, asking with what face could he now look upon the king, when these things appeared against him, after the assurances he had given of carrying himself faithfully towards him’. CSP Dom. 1697, pp. 327, 359, 360, 384, 389. On 29 June 1698, just before Yarmouth left the 1697-8 session for its last few days, he even registered his proxy with Portland. Lord Paston had accompanied Portland on his embassy to France in early 1698 and in the elections of later that year stood as a Whig for Norfolk with Sir Henry Hobart^‡, son of the first earl of Yarmouth’s local enemy in the 1670s. HMC Hastings, ii. 303, 320; CSP Dom. 1698, p. 138. As had happened earlier when they had stood together at the county elections of 1690, Hobart and Paston came bottom of the poll, but Paston was shortly after chosen as a burgess for Thetford at a by-election in January 1699. Prideaux Letters, 191-2; CSP Dom. 1698, pp. 401; 1699-1700, pp. 7, 28. Hobart was killed in a duel shortly after his defeat, at which Yarmouth surprisingly set himself up as the head of the county’s Whig party, ‘which’, Humphrey Prideaux commented to John Sharp, archbishop of York, in March 1699,

cannot but appear very strange to your Grace who will know how better his father presented those sort of people ... but for want of another to buoy them up they have taken him in and are now endeavouring to get him in to be lord lieutenant in the place of the duke of Norfolk whom they would fain dispossess of it. Glos. Archives, Sharp pprs. box 78, no. 49.

Yarmouth’s ambitions were founded on the projected marriage of Paston and one of Portland’s daughters, the rumour of which Luttrell had already recorded in August 1696 and repeated as late as August 1700, although it never did go through. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 98, 675. To further burnish his Whig credentials, Yarmouth was trying to arrange a marriage between his daughter, Rebecca, and Sir John Holland^‡, grandson of the old Civil War parliamentarian, Sir John Holland^‡. The old man’s son, Thomas Holland, the prospective groom’s father died in December 1698, and his debts of £9,000 temporarily interrupted the marriage negotiations, much to the relief of the county gentry, who ‘apprehend that if the earl of Yarmouth and Sir John Holland join interest it would be the worse for the [county]’. Glos. Archives, Sharp pprs. box 78, no. 49. The marriage took place in May 1699. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 514. Sir John Holland went on to be an active knight of the shire from January 1702 until the Tory landslide in 1710.

Yarmouth for his part had rehabilitated himself so well that in the early days of the reign of Anne there was an unfounded rumour circulating that he had been made a privy councillor. Add. 70073-4, newsletter of 18 June 1702. Macky could describe him as ‘a man of sense and knowledge in the affairs of his country’ while noting that he had been ‘a non-juror all King William’s reign’. Macky Mems. 97. Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, in forecasting the vote on the occasional conformity bill in December 1703, tentatively placed Yarmouth in the ‘good’ category of those that would oppose the bill, but further indicated that Yarmouth was ‘uncertain’ and tellingly noted that he ‘probably won’t come up’, for Yarmouth continued to be a persistent absentee from the House throughout the early years of Anne’s reign. He first attended on 15 Feb. 1707 for a total of 20 sittings in that year. In the following Parliament he first took the oaths and sat on 23 Feb. 1709 but then attended again for just three more days in mid-March. During this long period of absence Yarmouth was considered by one political commentator to be a Jacobite, and in a list of the political leanings of the peerage at the time of the 1708 Parliament he was classed as a Tory. Another factor in his isolation may have been the crippling state of his finances and debts. In September 1708 Humprhey Prideaux commented to John Ellis^‡ that,

the earl of Yarmouth is as low as you can imagine. He hath vast debts, and suffers everything to run to extremity; so his goods have been all seized in execution and his lands extended, so that he hath scarce a servant to attend him or an horse to ride abroad upon, and yet cannot be persuaded to take any method of putting his affairs into a better position, which they are still capable of, if he would set about it. Prideaux Letters, 200.

By 1711 Prideaux himself was owed arrears of tithes due to him from the earl which, he noted in his diary, ‘with other parts of the earl’s estate [were], assigned to Sir John Holland [the earl’s son-in-law], and other trustees for the payment of some of the said earl’s debts’. Norf. RO, Prideaux’s diary (DCN115/1-3), ii. 309.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his debts, Yarmouth returned to active political life from the time of the second session of the Whig-dominated 1708 Parliament, when he perhaps saw that the Tories were on the ascendant. He first sat in the House on 9 Jan. 1710 and attended in total 32 per cent of the sittings. He joined the Tories in the defence of Dr Sacheverell and signed six protests between 14-20 Mar. 1710 against the trial and conviction of the minister, including the protest against the final verdict of guilty. He then attended three sparsely attended days of prorogation in the summer of 1710 as the old Whig ministry was being dismantled. As he was forming his new government, Robert Harley, later earl of Oxford, included Yarmouth among those who were expected to support his ministry. Yarmouth attended over three-quarters of the meetings of the first session of 1710-11 and on 16 Apr. 1711 reported from a committee of the whole House discussing a bill on the assize of billet. Ibid. 275. He also played a role in the sub-committee for the Journal. Ibid. 269, 286; Nicolson, London Diaries, 567.

Yarmouth looked to benefit from the politically sympathetic ministry now in place. Throughout 1711 Harley, now earl of Oxford and lord treasurer, received solicitations from Yarmouth or his advocates promoting his candidacy for offices which would supply him with an income. Add. 70251, Yarmouth to Oxford, 25 July 1711. Robert Ferguson, who by that time was heavily involved with the Jacobites, put him forward as a candidate for first commissioner of the victualling commission because, as he argued, Yarmouth ‘hath a great esteem and a cordial affection for those in the present ministry, so he doth particularly avow himself a friend, as well as both an undaunted advocate for the reputation and professed partisan for the safety of the ... lord high treasurer’. Add. 70225, R. Ferguson to Oxford, 16 Nov. 1711. In the meantime, those on the opposite side of the political spectrum saw Yarmouth’s continuing indebtedness as an opportunity for bringing him over to support the Hanoverian succession. In both 1712 and 1713 he was among the ‘poor lords’ whom Hanoverian agents recommended be pensioned with £500 or £600, as he was considered one of those lords ‘as vote with the court, but may be had for money’. Perhaps seeing Yarmouth’s financial vulnerability, Oxford did reward the earl with a bounty of £400 in 1713. In the summer of that same year, when Oxford found himself increasingly embattled over the opposition to the peace terms, Yarmouth put himself forward as his replacement as lord treasurer with (according to Yarmouth) Oxford’s own approval. Carte 211, f. 129.

Yarmouth attended all but 14 of the sittings (87.5 per cent) of the 1711-12 session, where he supported the ministry by voting in December against the inclusion of the ‘No Peace without Spain’ clause in the address to the queen and against the motion to exclude James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton [S], from sitting in the House by right of the British peerage conferred on him after the Union. The status of hereditary Scottish peers given British titles after the Union was further discussed in a number of meetings of a committee of the whole in January 1712; and Yarmouth chaired the last of these, on 4 Feb., but did not report as no decision had been taken. HMC Lords, n.s. ix. 175. On 29 Jan. 1712 he did report from a committee of the whole that discussed the bill to build a causeway between Great Yarmouth and Caister, and on 5 May 1712 he reported from a select committee on a private estate bill involving an estate in Somerset, perhaps a remnant from his days as custos in the west country. Later in that month he voted against the address to the queen protesting against the ‘restraining orders’ sent to the captain-general James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond. He continued to attend the House regularly whilst it was continuously prorogued in 1712-13 when the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht were being hammered out and then came to three-quarters of the meetings of the session of the spring of 1713. Oxford forecast that Yarmouth would support the French commercial treaty, if it came before the House. Between 20 May and 19 June 1713 Yarmouth reported from four select committees on private bills, one of these, the bill to exempt the estate of his son-in-law, Sir John Holland, from various trusts and uses, being of personal concern to him. LJ, xix. 545, 548, 556, 580. On 9 July he also reported from a committee of the whole on the bill to raise £1,200,000 by a circulation of exchequer bills and for the queen to raise a further £500,000 on the credit of the civil list. At around this time he acted as the middleman in the negotiations for the marriage between Oxford’s daughter, Elizabeth, and the son and namesake of Yarmouth’s own second cousin, Peregrine Osborne, 2nd duke of Leeds. Add. 70218, E. Collins to Oxford, 11 Nov. 1712; Add. 70250, Oxford to Leeds, 10 Dec. 1712; Add. 70251, Yarmouth to Oxford, 28 Nov. 1713. Leeds appears to have been very close and reliant on his cousin, for when in June 1713 there was a concern that there would not be sufficient Tory peers in the House to block a vote against Oxford, it was noted that if Yarmouth was intending to be absent, then ‘it is not to be doubted, but that in consequence thereof the duke of Leeds will be likewise’. Add. 70225, R. Ferguson to [unknown], 22 June 1713.

Yarmouth was at his most assiduous during the first session of the Parliament elected in late 1713, when he came to all but four (95 per cent) of the meetings; he only came to eight of the gatherings of the much shorter session of August 1714 following the queen’s death. He was named to 19 committees and between 7 May and 9 July 1714 he reported from two select committees on naturalization bills (on 16 June and 5 July) and from six committees of the whole dealing with a range of bills mostly to do with various revenue raising measures of the crown, particularly through the customs. On 17 Apr. he told for the majority contents in a very tight division in a committee of the whole on whether to include a clause in the bill to reduce the number of office holders in the House of Commons. He told in another committee of the whole on 9 June for the minority not contents in a division on whether to insert a word in the schism bill. Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, considered him a supporter of this bill. At the end of June he told again, this time against reading the examination accounts bill a second time. On 16 Mar. 1714 the Tory, Thomas Lennard, earl of Sussex, registered his proxy with Yarmouth, who held it until Sussex returned to the House on the penultimate day of the session, and from 22 June Yarmouth also held the proxy of another Tory, Edward Hyde, 3rd earl of Clarendon, for the remainder of the session.

Yarmouth appears to have adapted successfully to the Hanoverian succession. It is true that in the winter of 1714-15 he acted as a representative commissioned by the dowager queen, Mary of Modena, to negotiate the payment of her jointure, but otherwise he appears to have put his Jacobite, and even his Tory, past behind him and to have supported the government of George I. HMC Stuart, ii. 530-4. He did not stay away from the House, as he had done under previous whiggish administrations. Throughout the king’s first Parliament his attendance per session ranged between 64 per cent (during the first long session of 1715-17) to 85 per cent (during 1718-19). In total he was present at three-quarters of the meetings of the long Parliament that met from March 1715 to March 1722. In contrast, by the time of the 1722 Parliament age or poverty was taking its toll, and he came to only just over half of all the sittings between October 1722 and the king’s death in June 1727. His presence in the first few meetings of the Parliament of George II was negligible, coming to only to 37 meetings in total between February 1728 and February 1732.

His actions during George I’s Parliaments suggest that he had become a court Tory and supported the de facto government, perhaps through a wish to enlist its assistance in his increasingly difficult financial situation. He was briefly rewarded by the government for his loyalty when he was made vice-admiral of the Norfolk coast between the months of January and April 1719: this was his only royal appointment. Yarmouth surprised commentators in April 1716 when he joined a small band of Tories in voting with the court in favour of the repeal of the Triennial Act. Ibid. 122-3. Even his old patron, the earl of Oxford, considered Yarmouth one of his potential opponents in the impeachment proceedings of the spring of 1717, although Yarmouth avoided taking a stand by absenting himself from proceedings before the vote that acquitted the former lord treasurer. BIHR, lv. 85. A more detailed account and analysis of Yarmouth’s political activities in the House after 1715 will be found in the next section of this work.

Yarmouth died at Epsom, Surrey, on Christmas Day 1732, the last male of his line. Lord Paston, who had been made a colonel of an infantry regiment in March 1704, promoted to brigadier-general in January 1710, and who had then sold his regiment, had died without a male heir in 1718. HMC Portland, iv. 108, 575. Yarmouth’s three brothers and their sons had all predeceased him. Not only was the peerage extinct (and was quickly recreated for George II’s mistress in 1740), but the Paston estate was in ruins. All Yarmouth’s lands and goods, including the valuable possessions at the family seat of Oxnead, were sold to pay his and his father’s outstanding debts. Yet even when the estate, which had been eyed for purchase by Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough, for several years, was finally settled in 1764, Yarmouth’s creditors could only receive 11s. 3d. in the pound in recompense. Add. 61470, ff. 88, 163; Add. 61477, ff. 148-9; Add. 61478, ff. 1-2, 15, 128; Ketton-Cremer, 56-57.