FRESCHEVILLE, John (1606-82)

The Frechevilles, as they originally spelled their name, were a gentry family of Norman descent of long standing in Derbyshire, particularly in the northeast corner around their principal manor of Staveley. The antiquary Gervase Holles, a kinsman and contemporary of John, Baron Frescheville, described the baron’s father Sir Peter Frecheville^‡ as ‘the person of most principal account and had the greatest power of any of the gentry in his country [i.e. Derbyshire]’, and John quickly followed in his father’s footsteps, representing the county in the Parliament of 1628 and serving as a deputy lieutenant in the 1630s. G. Holles, Mems. of the Holles Family (Camden Soc. 3rd ser. lv), 160. He was also making his way at court and in April 1630 married, without his father’s consent, a maid of honour, Sarah Harington, who, Gervase Holles insisted, ‘brought him no portion but Court legacies: pride, passion and prodigalities’. Holles, 162-4.

Frescheville fought for Charles I during the Scottish wars and the first Civil War, but in 1644 he appeared to be lukewarm in his commitment to the cause. In 1643 he had recaptured his own house at Staveley, which had been occupied by the enemy, but quickly surrendered it again in August 1644 upon the first appearance of Parliament’s troops and without a shot being fired. CSP Dom. 1644, p. 191; Holles, 161. Holles attributed Frescheville’s apparent abandonment of the royalist cause to the thwarted ambition of his wife Sarah, who ‘had long nourished a most violent ambition to have her husband created a baron’. In April 1644 the king drew up a warrant for a patent for Frescheville’s creation as ‘Lord Frescheville of Stavelely, Musard and Fitzralph’. Harl. 7535, f. 53 (orig. pagination 97). The king’s messenger informed Sarah, presumably with the court at Oxford that the patent could not pass immediately because of the press of other matters. ‘At which words’, Holles asserted, ‘she falls into intemperate expressions both of the king and queen … and away she flies into the country to her husband, prevails with him to desert the king’s service’. Holles, 163-4. The composition fine for his sequestrated estate was reportedly ‘something mitigated by friendship by some of the adverse party’ and set in 1649 at £287 10s. 4d. Coll. Top. et Gen. iv. 213; CCC, 1048. This was a small amount for a man who in 1651 raised, albeit with damage to his estate, a portion of £10,000 for the marriage of his eldest daughter Christiana to the royalist Charles Powlett, then styled Lord St John (later duke of Bolton). Holles, 164.

Frescheville was one of those assigned to raise Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in the planned rising of summer 1659 and was considered a principal royalist leader in the early months of 1660. Underdown, Roy. Conspiracy in England, 1649-60, pp. 242, 276, 298; CCSP, iv. 225, 236. He petitioned for the barony promised him in 1644 and in June 1660 Charles II ordered out a new warrant for a creation, with remainder to his two surviving daughters (Christiana having died in 1653) in default of male heirs, but once again there were delays in passing the patent. Harl. 7535, ff. 56-58 (orig. pagination 104-7); Bodl. Carte 214, ff. 244-5. In the early years of the Restoration, Frescheville enhanced his royalist credentials and his position at court by the marriage of his elder surviving daughter, Elizabeth, in 1661 to Philip Warwick, only son and heir of Sir Philip Warwick^‡, secretary to the lord treasurer, Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton. However, his remaining daughter Frances eloped in 1662 with a penniless, but ingenious (and quarrelsome) soldier and engineer, ‘colonel’ (as he dubbed himself) Thomas Colepeper. This marriage did not help Frescheville socially or economically, and for a period he disowned the couple, but Colepeper’s voluminous and detailed researches into the Frescheville records in order to stake his claim to the title and the lands of the Baron after his death provide most of what we now know of Frescheville genealogy and history. Harl. 7535, Abstract of Lord Frescheville’s Evidences; Harl. 6820, Col. Culpeper’s Case and transcripts of Frescheville documents.

At the Restoration Frescheville received a commission as captain of a troop in the Royal Horse Guards, and he resumed his prominent position in local Derbyshire society and government, where he acted as a deputy lieutenant under the lord lieutenant, his friend William Cavendish, 3rd earl of Devonshire. Devonshire was very close to Frescheville and put great trust and responsibility in him, and helped ensure that he was selected by the Derbyshire freeholders, with Devonshire’s son William Cavendish, styled Lord Cavendish (later duke of Devonshire), to represent the county in the Cavalier Parliament. HMC 15th Rep. VII, 162; WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/480; Add. 34306, ff. 10, 11; HP Commons, 1660-90, ii. 367-8. In August 1663 Frescheville was commissioned to take his troop of Guards to York and there to act as general of that city’s military forces in the suppression of the feared rising of that autumn, and from this point he acted as military governor of York, a position confirmed by periodic renewals of his commission. Frescheville himself petitioned in 1669 for funds to help defray the personal expenses incurred during what he calculated to be his six years’ command in the city. CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 226, 360, 431; 1664-5, p. 527; 1665-6, pp. 106, 115, 201; 1668-9, p. 642; 1670, p. 204. On 16 Mar. 1665 the patent for his creation as Baron Frescheville of Staveley finally passed the great seal. The patent left out the remainder to his daughters and their heirs that had been included in the warrant of 1660, an omission which was to prove exasperating for Thomas Colepeper in the years after Frescheville’s death. This patent was followed within three months by the death of Frescheville’s wife Sarah, who for so long had ambitiously driven him to press his suit for this honour, and he married in the space of a year the much younger Anna Charlotte de Vic, who was to serve as a lady of the bedchamber for many years in the household of Anne Stuart, both as princess and as queen. Savile Corresp. 9; Gregg, Queen Anne, 91, 303; Add. 61414, ff. 57-58.

Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, put forth a theory that Charles II was prompted to fulfil his long-standing promise to Frescheville because of his determination to make his secretary of state, Henry Bennet, a peer (as Baron, later earl of, Arlington) and ‘the king took the occasion to make these two noblemen from an obligation that lay upon him to confer two honours at the same time’. Clarendon, Life, ii. 359-60. Frescheville and Bennet were made barons, as part of a general creation or promotion of eight new peers in mid March 1665, shortly after the prorogation of the 1664-5 session. Frescheville and Arlington were the only two of these eight to be introduced to the House on the next sitting day of Parliament, the prorogation of 21 June 1665, when Frescheville was introduced between George Berkeley, 9th Baron (later earl of) Berkeley of Berkeley and John Carey, Baron Hunsdon (later 2nd earl of Dover). Frescheville and Arlington were to continue to have a close connection over the next few years. Frescheville, as a loyal servant of the crown, frequently looked to Arlington for specific instructions on whether his attendance was needed in Parliament and relied on the secretary of state as a recipient of his proxy. Initially Frescheville was not a diligent member of the House, perhaps kept away from Westminster by his duties at York. He was not present for any of the meetings of the session of October 1665 in Oxford, perhaps preoccupied with the examinations and prosecutions of those involved in the abortive rising of 1663. Eg. 3328, ff. 25, 27. He was summoned to the court of the lord high steward to sit in trial of Thomas Parker, 15th Baron Morley, on 30 Apr. 1666 and, as the most recently created baron in the court, was the first peer called upon to give his verdict of guilty of manslaughter. HEHL, EL 8398; Stowe 396, ff. 178-190. He came to only five sittings of the following session of September 1666-February 1667, perhaps because of his responsibilities for keeping the north-eastern coast secure during the Dutch war. Bodl. Carte 222, ff. 136-7. He was once again absent for all of the sittings of October-December 1667, but this time registered his proxy in favour of Arlington on 9 Nov. 1667 for the proceedings against Clarendon. Frescheville resumed his seat on 17 Feb. 1668, when his proxy was vacated, and proceeded to sit in 83 per cent of the sittings during spring 1668, during which he was nominated to six committees on legislation. He was once again absent for the session of winter 1669, but on 29 Oct. 1669, ten days after the session had begun, he wrote to Arlington, via Sir Joseph Williamson^‡, asking the secretary to excuse his absence and assuring him that in a previous letter he had already ‘tendered my proxy … but have not received [Arlington’s], commands’. CSP Dom. 1668-9, pp. 520, 557. Three days later, on 1 Nov., Frescheville’s proxy to Arlington was officially registered in the records of the House.

He was present every day during the sittings of February-April 1670, when he was named to 15 committees on legislation. When the House passed a version of the second Conventicle Act in March which did not include a proviso asserting the king’s supremacy in religious matters, Charles II summoned Seth Ward, bishop of Salisbury, and Frescheville, among others, to give them instructions that they were to work on their fellows in the House to ensure the passage of the controversial proviso. HMC Var. iv. 11. In the weeks preceding the reconvening of Parliament in October 1670, Frescheville wrote increasingly anxious letters to Arlington and Williamson ‘desiring to know His Majesty’s pleasure as to whether I am to attend Parliament or stay at York’. CSP Dom. 1670, pp. 401, 434, 467. As he did not appear in the House until five days before Parliament was prorogued on 22 Apr. 1671; it appears that the court preferred his services in York, from where Frescheville had reported on 19 Mar., ‘I will not trouble you with any relation of Parliament speeches and cursed libels already divulged in the north. I put them together, for I think if a speech in either of the Houses be published upon design and without the king’s permission it is worse than a libel’. Ibid. 1671, p. 137; TNA, SP 29/288/85. This is almost certainly a reference to the inflammatory speech against the king’s request for supply made by John Lucas, Baron Lucas of Shenfield, the printed version of which was ordered by the House to be burned by the public executioner.

Frescheville came to only one meeting of Parliament, on 4 Nov. 1673, during the two sessions between the prorogation of 22 Apr. 1671 and the session beginning 7 Jan. 1674. Undoubtedly he was preoccupied again with the defence of Yorkshire during the Dutch war, but he also spent much of these years petitioning for royal grants, such as for the lease, including the right of presentation, of the manor of Eckington, which adjoined his own at Staveley but was part of the queen’s jointure. CTB, 1669-72, pp. 361, 364, 396, 527, 572, 1124; CSP Dom. 1671, pp. 325, 350. From late 1673 he was asking his nephew, the lord treasurer, Sir Thomas Osborne, Viscount Latimer (later earl of Danby and duke of Leeds) for further offices and favours. Eg. 3328, f. 96. Frescheville’s mother’s first husband had been Sir Hewett Osborne, and her son by this first marriage, hence Frescheville’s half-brother, was Sir Edward Osborne^‡, father of the lord treasurer. Danby (as Latimer quickly became) complied with his uncle’s wishes and a sheet among Danby’s papers, headed ‘Lord Frescheville’s grants and payments’ shows that during 1675-6 Frescheville was granted the reversion of the manor and advowson of Eckington, Derbyshire and of Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire after the queen’s death and, to maintain him while awaiting her death, a pension of £152 p.a. for life and fee farm rents in Yorkshire totalling £120 p.a. Throughout 1677 Frescheville was paid an additional £1,200 in secret service payments. Danby appears to have been willing to make grants for Frescheville’s clients in York as well. Eg. 3352, f. 68-70; Eg. 3348, f. 81; CTB, 1672-5, pp. 309, 655, 676, 753, 839, 861; v. 405-6. Frescheville, long a courtier and servant of the crown, would most likely have supported the court party without these financial blandishments, but they and his close kinship ties to Danby only made his association with the lord treasurer and his faction in Parliament the stronger, to the point that Frescheville was considered one of Danby’s leading lieutenants and associates. HMC 6th Rep. 376; Browning, Danby, ii. 37.

Frescheville attended every single sitting day of the House (except for six days) in the six remaining sessions of the Cavalier Parliament from January 1674 to the dissolution in January 1679, precisely the period when Danby was most involved in managing Parliament. He was also active in the business of the House and was appointed to 91 select committees (although he only reported from one, on 18 May 1675, on a private estate bill) during that period, and by the final sessions of the Cavalier Parliament he was being named to every select committee established.

Danby counted on Frescheville to support his Non-Resisting Test bill in the session of spring 1675. After the lord treasurer had prompted William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle, to ‘place his proxy in some good hand’ before the session started, Newcastle, clearly considering Frescheville to be a suitable lieutenant of the lord treasurer, registered his proxy with him on 9 Apr. 1675. HMC Portland, ii. 150. In the following session of autumn 1675 Frescheville again received the proxy of Newcastle on 21 Sept. 1675, and also was entrusted with that of John Berkeley, Baron Berkeley of Stratton on 10 November. He was able to use both of these to bring three votes to help defeat the motion for an address calling for the dissolution of Parliament on 20 Nov. 1675. HEHL, EL 8418; Bodl. Carte 72, ff. 292-3. During the long prorogation that followed this contentious vote, Frescheville was summoned to the court of the lord high steward to sit in judgment on Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, on 30 June 1676, where he voted with the majority in finding the peer not guilty. HEHL, EL 8419.

When Secretary Henry Coventry^‡ prompted Berkeley of Stratton in the weeks before Parliament reconvened in early 1677 to nominate a proxy ‘that may have the same zeal and real intentions for [the king’s], service as you have’, Berkeley of Stratton once again chose Frescheville, who held the proxy from 25 Jan. 1677 to 4 Mar. 1678. The king himself was concerned to know to whom Berkeley had entrusted his proxy. Add. 25119, ff. 76, 82. On 15 Feb. 1677, after the House had debated and rejected the allegation made by George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, that the Parliament had been automatically dissolved by the long prorogation, Frescheville made a motion that the duke be called to the bar to be censured for his temerity in making the suggestion. It was Frescheville’s motion, seconded by Richard Arundell, Baron Arundell of Trerice, which eventually led to the House’s order that Buckingham and three other peers who maintained that the Parliament was dissolved be imprisoned. Bodl. Carte 79, ff. 37-8; HMC Rutland, ii. 38-39; Life of James II, i. 505-6. It is hardly surprising that Buckingham’s fellow prisoner in the Tower during the spring of 1677, Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, considered Frescheville ‘triply vile’. Frescheville carefully observed proceedings and may have acted as one of the many parliamentary correspondents of his Derbyshire neighbour the earl of Devonshire. Certainly one letter of his from 13 Mar. 1677 survives, in which Frescheville promised that through him Devonshire would have ‘a better account’ of the House’s proceedings surrounding the address to the king for war against France ‘than any other absent Lord’. The tone of his account is largely neutral, but there is still evident a note of disapproval towards those peers who pressed for an ‘immediate’ declaration of war. Chatsworth, Devonshire Coll. 2 (General Corresp.), Frescheville to Devonshire, 13 Mar. 1677. In the period 13-15 Mar. 1677 Frescheville protested against both the engrossment and the eventual passage of the bill for ‘further securing the Protestant religion’ which enjoined a Protestant education of the children of a Catholic monarch and placed episcopal appointments to be in the hands of a committee of bishops. On 13 Apr. he was named to a committee to consider heads for a free conference on the bill to raise supply for building warships.

When Parliament resumed in January 1678 after a long adjournment he dissented, on 14 Feb. 1678, to the resolution to dismiss Dacre Barret’s petition in his long-running dispute with Edward Loftus, 2nd Viscount Loftus [I]. Perhaps presuming on his increased favour with the king and his ministers at this time, in February 1678 Frescheville submitted a petition to the king requesting an elevation in his precedence within the peerage. He argued that he was the lineal descendant of Raphe de Frescheville who had received a writ of summons in 1297 and that, following the precedent of recent cases involving baronies by writ, his title and precedence, should be considered to date back to that ancient time, rather than to the more recent 1665 creation. The king ‘having a gracious sense of the petitioner’s constant loyalty and faithful services’ referred the petition to the attorney general, Sir William Jones^‡, who found that there had been no subsequent writ of summons to any member of the Frescheville family beyond that one of 1297 and that it was doubtful whether Raphe de Frescheville had even attended that Parliament. Perhaps sensing that this was not the answer that the king wished, Jones suggested that the petition be passed on to the House itself, who first heard it, together with the attorney general’s report, on 20 Feb. 1678. After a number of hearings the House itself came to the same negative conclusion, reporting on 6 Mar. that they ‘do not find sufficient ground to advise his Majesty to allow the claim of the petitioner’. Bodl. Carte 79, ff. 452, 458, 460-1; Add. 38141, f. 112; Harl. 7535, ff. 62-63 (orig. pagination 116-18). On 4 Apr. Frescheville voted with the majority to find Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, guilty of manslaughter.

In the following session of summer 1678 Frescheville contributed to the debate of early July concerning the petition and appeal of Louis de Duras, 2nd earl of Feversham, to have a chancery decree against him dismissed. The debate concerned to what extent the House of Lords, as the final court of appeal, were bound by the procedural rules of chancery. Frescheville, wishing to see the decree against the court favourite Feversham reversed, argued, with Danby and Berkeley of Stratton among others, that the House was not bound by the procedures of the lower courts. Lord Nottingham’s Chancery Cases ed. D.E.C. Yale (Selden Soc. lxxix), 646-9. In the final session of the Cavalier Parliament in the winter of 1678, Frescheville voted on 15 Nov. in a debate on the Test bill that a refusal to make the declaration against transubstantiation should not incur the same penalties as a refusal to take the oaths. On 6 Dec. he protested against the resolution to join with the Commons in requesting the king to order the disarming of all convicted recusants. At the end of that month he voted against the commitment of the earl of Danby and in favour of the House’s amendment to the supply bill which placed money for the army’s disbandment in the exchequer instead of the Chamber of London. He was named on 26 Dec. to a committee to draw up reasons in favour of this amendment and was appointed a manager of the conference that took place on 28 Dec., two days before Parliament was prorogued.

Danby clearly saw Frescheville as a supporter in the proceedings against him which would take place in the next Parliament in the spring 1679, and he assigned the Baron to the management of his son Edward Osborne^‡, styled Viscount Latimer. Frescheville was active in the first Exclusion Parliament, coming to five of the six sitting days of the abortive first session of 6-13 Mar., and 60 of the 61 sittings in the second session of 15 Mar.-27 May. In the first few days of the second session he was named to the committee to gather information on the Popish Plot. He defended Danby vigorously and on 19 Mar. 1679 argued that the impeachment proceedings against him were extinguished with the dissolution of the last Parliament. Bodl. Carte 228, ff. 229-30. That argument having been lost, two days later he took part in the debate on the Commons’ insistence on the immediate commitment and impeachment of Danby. The debate hinged on whether the peers should agree with the Commons, which would entail their countermanding an order they had made the previous day which gave Danby a week, until 27 Mar., to appear and submit his answer to the articles of impeachment. Not surprisingly Frescheville moved ‘it for your own honour that your orders may stand inviolable’, but was overruled and on 24 Mar. 1679 the House ordered that Danby should be secured and appear for his impeachment proceedings. Add. 28046, f. 51. With Danby now in hiding, a bill of attainder against him was brought up from the Commons and Frescheville spoke out against its commitment at its second reading on 2 Apr., arguing that it had been agreed the previous day at its first reading that the bill would be debated before being referred to a committee. He voted against the passage of the amended attainder bill in the House on 4 Apr., although he did not subscribe his name to the protest against it. Ibid. f. 53. The two Houses debated the Lords’ amendments (which the Commons thought diluted the force of the bill) for close to two weeks before the House acceded to the Commons arguments and passed the lower House’s version of the attainder bill on 14 April. Frescheville voted and protested against its passage. On 10 May, with Danby having surrendered himself and being incarcerated in the Tower, Frescheville voted against the establishment of a joint committee to consider the impeachments against the lord treasurer and the five Catholic lords. He was later appointed a manager of the conference considering Danby’s complaint to the House that no counsel wished to act for him because of a vote of the Commons that would inflict penalties on any who acted in his defence. On the very last day of the Parliament, 27 May, Frescheville probably voted in favour of the bishops’ right to sit in the House in judgment of cases involving capital punishment.

By 1680 Frescheville was ‘of great years and infirm’ and rivals such as the powerfully connected Sir John Reresby^‡, and Sir Thomas Slingsby^‡, who had bought Frescheville’s captaincy in the Royal Horse Guards in 1679, were jostling to take over his post as governor of York. Reresby Mems. 226, 259-60; CSP Dom. 1679-80, p. 440. Although Frescheville did manage to make it to three days of the second Exclusion Parliament, those were all days when the Parliament was prorogued – 17 Oct. 1679, 15 Apr. and 17 May 1680. He appears to have been in Westminster during the winter of 1679; his letters to the corporation of York informing them of the way in which James Stuart, duke of York, should be properly received in that city on his way to Scotland were not received in time and the duke ‘had no kind reception, neither being met nor complimented by the mayor or aldermen’. Verney ms mic. M636/33, J. to Sir R. Verney, 13 Nov. 1679. When the Parliament did meet for actual proceedings in October 1680, Frescheville was absent, excused owing to illness at a call of the House on 30 Oct. 1680, and on 29 Nov., two weeks after the vote rejecting the Exclusion Bill, John Buckly and John Harris swore before the bar of the House that the Derbyshire neighbours, Frescheville and Devonshire, ‘were so ill as that they cannot attend the service of this House, without danger of their lives’. Frescheville had confided to his son-in-law, Thomas Colepeper, in August 1680 that ‘though I have health yet my pains of the strangury are so great and come so often that I cannot expect less than death in a short time’. Harl. 7005, ff. 24-25. Frescheville, however, did make it to all seven of the sittings of the Oxford Parliament of 1681, where both Danby and his agent in Oxford, Latimer, counted on him as an advocate for Danby’s petition for bail from the Tower. HMC 14th Rep. IX, 423. On 24 Mar. Danby’s petition was presented to the House by his kinsman James Bertie, 5th Baron Norreys (later earl of Abingdom) and supported by Frescheville and a number of Danby’s other ‘old friends’ who ‘never go off the business without a question’. Contemporaries as politically diverse as Latimer and Roger Morrice who enumerated Danby’s supporters in this petition consistently placed Frescheville among them. Ibid. 423, 426; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. i. 303; Bodl. Carte 79, f. 164.

Frescheville’s finances were by this time in such a precarious position, despite the many grants bestowed on him by Danby, that in late 1680 he was reduced to selling the reversion of his principal manor of Staveley for £2,600 to Devonshire. Harl. 6820, f. 55 (orig. pagination 100-101). From late 1681 he was further pressed on all sides to make adequate provision for his youngest daughter Frances. Danby, though still in the Tower, took an active part in these negotiations, as he had been acting as his cousin’s ‘solicitor to know [Frescheville’s], good intentions in future towards her’ since 1666, shortly after she had incurred her father’s wrath for her elopement with Colepeper. In January 1682 Frescheville complied and made out a will constituting Danby, Latimer and Danby’s other son Peregrine Osborne, styled Viscount Osborne of Dunblane [S], (later 2nd duke of Leeds), trustees to provide an annuity of £300 to Frances which, Frescheville insisted, could not be touched by Colepeper. Add. 28051, f. 116; Eg. 3332, ff. 9, 11, 13; Harl. 6820, ff. 42v-45 (orig. pagination 83-89); TNA, PROB 11/371; Browning, ii. 15.

Frescheville died on 31 Mar. 1682, lamented by his ‘noble friend’ Henry Cavendish, 2nd duke of Newcastle, as ‘a brave gentleman as any was in his time’. Eg. 3338, ff. 159-60. His son-in-law, Colepeper, refused to accept the sale of the Staveley estate and the extinction of the Frescheville title caused by the Baron’s lack of male issue and compiled a voluminous collection of papers and documents to support his claims to them himself. Harl. 6820 (‘Col. Culpeper’s Case’ and transcripts of Frescheville docs.); Harl. 7535 (‘Lord Frescheville Evidences’); Harl. 7005 (Frescheville/Colpepeper corresp.). As late as 1701 he insisted on titling himself, thanks to his extensive genealogical and heraldic research on the family (as well as a good deal of creative fantasizing), ‘Baron of Croich, Musard, Fitzralph and Staveley in right of Frances his wife and Prince of Alberan in Africa’ while his wife, he insisted was ‘Baronnes of Staveley, Croich, Musard and Fitzralph’. Harl. 6819;.Harl. 7005, ff. 141-240, esp. 148, 150, 153, 156, 180, 191, 192, 228, 240. Colepeper’s sense of grievance over the loss of the Staveley estate brought him into direct legal and, more importantly, physical conflict with Devonshire’s successor in the earldom. The unseemly physical brawls the two men had at the court of James II over Staveley had indirect far-reaching consequences for British constitutional history, which are recounted in more detail in the biography of the 4th earl, later duke, of Devonshire.