GERARD, Digby (1662-84)

Gerard succeeded to the family estates and title as a child of five. He remained in the care of his mother and her second husband, Sir Edward Hungerford^‡, until his marriage in 1678 to a distant cousin. Gerard then joined his wife to live in the household of his father-in-law, though this appears to have been a short-lived arrangement and he soon returned to live with his mother and stepfather. TNA, C9/378/2, 4.

Coming of age after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament and dying before the calling of James II’s Parliament, Gerard never took his place in the House of Lords. He was nevertheless included upon two parliamentary lists compiled in the late 1670s. In 1677-8 Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, included Gerard upon his assessment of lay peers, noting only that Gerard was then underage. In 1679 Gerard was listed by Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, (later duke of Leeds) among those peers absent from the Lords and who were not Catholic. Danby classed Gerard as a probable court supporter, a judgment that might have been grounded in the perceived influence of Gerard’s father-in-law, who at this stage was also regarded as loyal to the court, and/or as a result of the abortive negotiations the previous year for the marriage of Gerard to one of Danby’s daughters. Eg. 3331, ff. 22-23, 26. The significance of these lists lies in the light they may throw upon Gerard’s religious sympathies. Gerard’s father has traditionally been regarded as Catholic, but clearly neither Shaftesbury nor Danby believed that the 5th Baron was such. How well they were informed about a relatively obscure junior nobleman is uncertain. Despite negotiations with the staunch Anglican Danby for a marriage, there are indications that the young Gerard’s mother was close to the Catholic nobility. The Catholic William Howard, Viscount Stafford, was also involved in trying to find Gerard a bride.

Gerard appears to have been an impetuous and short-tempered youth. When he was only 14 he drew his sword during a scuffle with a social inferior and ran his opponent through the groin. HMC 7th Rep. 469a; Bodl. Carte 228, f. 228v. His marriage in the late summer of 1678 to his distant cousin Elizabeth Gerard seems to have taken place without his mother’s consent as she was reported to have been ‘in a very great rage at it’. HMC Rutland, ii. 53. His lack of judgment led to his premature death at the age of 22 when he collapsed and died suddenly at the Rose Tavern at Covent Garden. The cause of death was given either as a ‘drinking match’ or as ‘a surfeit of buttered eggs, toast and gravy, and mulled sack’. HMC Ormonde, n.s. vii. 278; NAS GD 406/1/3238, 3256; Verney ms mic. M636/38, Sir R. to J. Verney, 10 Oct. 1684. One contemporary described Gerard as ‘a great swearer, drunkard and very debauched’; another was slightly more charitable in his opinion that Gerard was ‘a beautiful young man … [who] was utterly marred by keeping company with base lewd fellows’. HMC Hodgkin, 17; Wood, Life, iii. 114. His title and settled estates descended to a Catholic junior branch of his family, while the remainder of his estate fell to his only daughter Elizabeth, later duchess of Hamilton [S]. Throughout the late 1680s she was engaged in legal causes against her mother-in-law concerning the latter’s rights to the profits of certain lands in accordance with her marriage settlement and the disposition of rents received while the 5th Baron was still a minor. TNA, C9/378/2, 4. Gerard was buried in the family vault in Ashley, Staffordshire. Soc. of Genealogists, Ashley par. reg. transcripts.