Cavalier general, 1642-67
Charles Gerard was a great-grandson of Elizabeth I’s attorney-general Sir Gilbert Gerard‡, who established the family seat at Gerard’s Bromley in Staffordshire. The main branch of the family was represented by the Barons Gerard of Gerard’s Bromley; Charles was of a cadet branch which had been established in Halsall in Lancashire since his father bought the estate in 1625. He raised a foot regiment for the king at the commencement of the Civil Wars and was quickly in the thick of the fighting. He caught the eye of Charles I’s nephew and leading commander, Prince Rupert, later duke of Cumberland, who made him commander-in-chief of the royalist forces in the six counties of south Wales. During his campaign there of 1644-45 Gerard became renowned both for his effective military tactics and for his brutality. In the face of complaints from the local population of Gerard’s excessive exactions, Charles I, taking refuge in Wales after the defeat at Naseby, was forced to dismiss him from this post. He compensated him by putting him in charge, as lieutenant-general, of all the cavalry remaining in the royalist army and by creating him on 8 Nov. 1645 Baron Gerard of Brandon, Suffolk. He had no known connection with Suffolk, and Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, who is hostile to Gerard throughout his history of the civil wars, claimed that he chose that title after reasoning that ‘because there was once an eminent person called Charles Brandon, who was afterwards made a duke, he would be created baron of Brandon, that there might be another Charles Brandon who had no less aspiring thoughts than the other’.
In late 1648 he was appointed vice-admiral, under Rupert, of the royalist navy at Helvoetsluys. He did not sail with the fleet in January 1649, though, and remained at The Hague where shortly after the execution of Charles I he was made a gentleman of the bedchamber to the new king.
Gerard of Brandon first sat in the Convention on 15 June 1660, where he immediately set to work reclaiming and augmenting his estate with the same determination which he had shown during the wars. Three days after his first appearance the House ordered his estate to be discharged from sequestration. He then moved to have a bill passed confirming to him the restoration of all his estates held as of 23 Oct. 1641. His request was exempted from the restrictions of the pending indemnity bill. It was first introduced on 8 Aug. and committed five days later. It was delayed while the committee tried to set a date from which his ownership of the properties would be reckoned. This was eventually determined to be 20 May 1642, and the revised bill was passed by the House on 27 August. It was returned unamended from the Commons on 5 Sept. and received the royal assent eight days later.
Gerard attended 43 per cent of the sitting days of the first session of the new Parliament elected in 1661. His position as an ex-cavalier keen to reward his old colleagues and punish his former enemies is suggested by his nomination to consider the bills to determine the pains and penalties for those excepted from the Act of Indemnity, to distribute the £60,000 raised for ‘loyal and indigent’ officers of the late war, and to repeal the acts of the Long Parliament. Identification of Gerard of Brandon’s activities in the House until the end of 1667 is slightly complicated by the intermittent presence there of his distant cousin Charles Gerard, 4th Baron Gerard of Bromley, but Gerard of Bromley sat infrequently and was not a major figure in the House. He missed some sessions altogether. Gerard of Brandon even held his cousin’s proxy from 13 June 1661 for the remainder of the 1661-62 session.
During these early years of the Restoration Gerard of Brandon tried to augment his fortunes by acquiring the Gawsworth estate in Cheshire, lands that were to embroil him and his descendants in protracted, bitter and controversial litigation for almost a century. In 1643 Gerard’s maternal uncle, Sir Edward Fitton‡, 2nd bt., who owned the lucrative estate of Gawsworth, had died childless. In his will of 1641 Sir Edward had left the estate to a distant Irish cousin, William Fitton, in order to keep the family name attached to the property. Gerard pushed for his own right to the property through his mother, Fitton’s sister, but war and exile impeded his ability to do so and in the 1650s William Fitton’s son and heir, Alexander, who had sided with Parliament to secure possession, took over the property. When Gerard returned, high in the king’s favour, he worked to reverse this situation, with little regard to the legality of his means. In Cheshire itself he produced forged documents casting doubts on Fitton’s legal tenure of the estate.
At the same time in July 1663 as Gerard’s proceedings against Fitton were occupying the House, George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, brought articles of impeachment against his old enemy, Clarendon. Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, forecast that Gerard of Brandon would oppose Bristol’s attempt against Clarendon, while a contemporary newsletter writer, Thomas Salusbury, placed Gerard among Bristol’s supporters. Both these conflicting reports are plausible. Bristol had been one of Prince Rupert’s foremost antagonists in the royalist camp during the Civil Wars and Gerard would have had little reason to countenance Bristol’s Catholicism or calls for religious toleration. A few days after the affair of the impeachment, Gerard of Brandon joined with other zealous Anglicans in signing, on 25 July, the protest against a measure that would allow those subscribing to the Act of Uniformity to limit their agreement with its terms only to outward practice and obedience.
After the prorogation of 27 July Alexander Fitton’s three accomplices in the publication of the libel against Gerard – Edward Lloyd, John Cade and John Wright – were also arrested. Upon their pardon and release by order of the king in August they adamantly refused to pay the serjeant-at-arms and other of the House’s officials the accustomed fees, ‘accompanied with high and threatening language’. During the following session, on 9 May 1664, the House heard the petition of its officials against this treatment and ordered that these three were to pay the officers the fees owing them or risk being recommitted.
Gerard once again attended just under half of the sittings in 1666-67. On 30 Oct. 1666 he was assigned to be part of the delegation from the House to present the king with the address requesting the prohibition of French imports and the following day he joined John Belasyse, Baron Belasyse, in introducing Richard Arundell, to the House as Baron Arundell of Trerice. During this session his opposition to Clarendon was revealed once again. On 10 Nov. 1666 Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, included Gerard in a list of royal servants acting against the wishes of the lord chancellor and the court by aggressively supporting the Irish cattle bill.
The William Carr affair, 1667-71
By that time Gerard himself was mired in controversy and distrust and had himself become a target of the Commons. As early as 1663 the king himself began to have suspicions that Gerard was using his company of the Life Guards and the pay allotted to them for his own profit. In October 1663 Pepys recorded that when Charles II decided to muster his own Guards himself ‘he found reason to dislike their condition to my Lord Gerard, finding so many absent men or dead pays’. On 9 Dec. 1667 the stationer John Cade, who had already been punished for his involvement in the publication of Fitton’s libel in 1663, told Pepys ‘my Lord Gerard is troubled for several things in the House of Commons’, which prompted Pepys to comment that ‘it seems this lord is a very proud and wicked man’.
Gerard informed the House on 16 Dec. 1667 both of the paper’s derogation of a peer and of Carr’s insulting solicitation to the Commons alone. The petitioner saw the lower House as ‘the only hopes and protectors of England’, as his case could ‘be that of any commoner under the tyranny of a great lord’. Carr and his accomplices were interrogated before the committee for privileges on 17 Dec. and the day afterwards, following the report from committee, Carr was heard at the bar before the whole House. The lords sentenced him to be fined £1,000, while copies of the offending paper were to be publicly burned. Carr was sentenced to be placed in the pillory for three consecutive days at central locations in the metropolis, with a notice over his head detailing his offence: ‘For publishing several scandalous and libellous papers against the Lord Gerard of Brandon, a peer of this realm, and reflecting upon the honour and justice of His Majesty and the House of Peers.’
Determined to rid himself of the troublesome Carr once and for all on 6 Feb. 1668 Gerard started proceedings against Carr in king’s bench under three indictments: felony (for desertion of his military service, even though Carr was never a soldier) and two of forgery.
the madness of the House of Commons … and much more, the base proceedings (just the epitome of all our public managements in this age) of the House of Lords, that ordered him to stand in the pillory for those very things, without hearing and examining, which he hath now, by the seeking of my Lord Gerard himself, cleared himself of in open court, to the gaining himself the pity of all the world, and shame for ever to my Lord Gerard.Pepys Diary, ix. 55, 57; Bodl. Carte 36, f. 149; Verney ms mic. M636/22, M. Elmes to Sir R. Verney, 20 Feb. 1668.
Previously the stationer John Cade had also told Pepys on 20 Jan. 1668, before Parliament resumed from its winter recess, ‘how my Lord Gerard is likely to meet with trouble the next sitting of Parliament, about Carr being set in the pillory, and I am glad of it’.
By September 1668 the numerous allegations against Gerard had become too much even for his patron the king. Gerard agreed to sell his commission as captain of the first troop of Life Guards to the king’s natural son James Scott, duke of Monmouth, for £8,000 and to purchase Monmouth’s residence of Chiswick House in Acton.
Court supporter, 1669-79
Gerard came to 57 per cent of the sitting days of both the sessions of 1669 and of 1670-71. He was most active in the latter session when he was named to 24 committees on legislation and two for investigation, including the large committee assigned in the first days of the session to investigate the fall of rents and decay of trade. On 13 Jan. 1671 he chaired the committee on the bill to allow the underage Edward Clinton, 5th earl of Lincoln, to settle a jointure of certain Lincolnshire manors on his prospective bride Dorothy, daughter of John Ferrers‡. He reported the bill as fit to pass the following day, but it soon became a moot point as the marriage failed to go through.
He attended 95 per cent of the sittings in spring 1675, with six committee nominations, including that for the bill to confirm letters patent for his colleague Prince Rupert. He held the proxy of Robert Montagu, 3rd earl of Manchester, from 28 May for the remainder of the session. He came to 80 per cent of the sittings in the session of autumn 1675, with only two committee nominations. The lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later marquess of Carmarthen and duke of Leeds), considered Gerard an important part of the ‘court and church’ party he was trying to construct. Something of Gerard’s importance to Danby may be suggested by his presence in a list of ciphered names in the lord treasurer’s correspondence, among such other important figures as the king, the duchess of Portsmouth and Roger Boyle‡, earl of Orrery [I].
Shaftesbury drew up this list while imprisoned for making the claim when Parliament reassembled on 15 Feb. 1677 that the long prorogation of 15 months automatically led to a dissolution. Gerard himself was present for 87 per cent of the meetings of this session of 1677-78. He missed only one day of proceedings in the sittings of spring 1677, when he was named to 29 committees on legislation, as well as to the committee established on the second day of the session to investigate the circumstances of the publication of the libels arguing that Parliament was dissolved. He also held the proxy of John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, from 20 Feb. to 3 Mar. 1677. He was undoubtedly a prime mover in the bill to naturalize his children born in France during his exile, Charles Gerard, later 2nd earl of Macclesfield, and Elizabeth. In September 1678 the latter married Gerard’s distant cousin, the dissolute Digby Gerard, 5th Baron Gerard of Bromley, who, fortunately for the purposes of distinguishing Gerard of Brandon’s activities in Parliament, never sat in the House from the time of his succession in December 1667, as he only came of age in 1683 and died the following year in a drinking match. The bill for the Gerard children, first introduced on 21 Feb. 1677, was eventually replaced and superseded by a more general bill for the ‘naturalizing of children of his Majesty’s subjects born in foreign countries’, which was first read on 2 Mar. and reported from committee as fit to pass 11 days later. The Commons’ proviso to the bill was rejected when it was brought up to the House on 3 Apr. by Gerard’s cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard, but after a few conferences the Commons relented and Sir Gilbert was able to deliver another version of the bill on 9 Apr. of which the House approved. It received the royal assent on 16 Apr., the day of adjournment.
On 23 Mar. he was placed on the committee to draw up reasons to be presented in conference why the House could not agree to the word ‘immediately’ in the Commons’ address to the king urging him to declare war on France. This is an indication that from this time Gerard’s contemporaries looked to him once more for his military expertise and experience. He was commissioned a colonel of his own regiment of horse for the threatened war with France on 15 Feb. 1678 and in May was made lieutenant general of all the English forces, perhaps on Monmouth’s recommendation.
Danby continued to consider the baron an ally in the House during the first Exclusion Parliament, and appears to have assigned him to be managed by his own son Peregrine Osborne, Viscount Osborne of Dunblane [S] (later 2nd duke of Leeds). Initially Gerard did not disappoint Danby’s expectations, as he was a diligent attender. He came to five of the six days of the brief and abortive session from 6 to 13 Mar. 1679 and then to 93 per cent of the session which eventually met for business on 15 Mar., during which time he was placed on five committees on legislation as well as the large committee to receive information regarding the Plot. Perhaps it was in his role as a member of this committee and a military commander that on 27 Mar. Gerard was delegated by the House to request the king to dismiss Humphrey Weld, suspected to be a Papist, from his command of Portland Castle. In the first weeks of the Parliament Gerard opposed the Commons’ attempt to commit and then, following Danby’s going into hiding, attaint the former lord treasurer. Gerard had little time for the Commons’ demand on 21 Mar. that Danby be committed immediately pending his impeachment proceedings. This would have forced the House to rescind its previous vote of 27 Dec. 1678 and the period of time they had set within which Danby was to remain at liberty to respond to the articles of impeachment. In a speech redolent of his brusque, abusive manner, and his bitter memories of the 1640s, Gerard argued:
All that I find to make any change in this matter is that the House of Commons comes now to prosecute the impeachment of my lord treasurer upon that which you have voted to be no treason. In ’41 the attorney general impeached the five members and he was clapped by the heels for doing it. We should have some regard therefore to ourselves. The other House as they called it, though they were cobblers and tinkers, they were concerned for one another. Let this noble lord have fair play for his life. Will you blow him away with noise and then say he is guilty? You have given [him] time for his answer, and we are now engaged by our word for seven days.Add. 28046, f. 49.
In the first two weeks of April he consistently voted against the Commons’ bill threatening the former lord treasurer with attainder if he did not surrender himself once he had gone into hiding, as well as the House’s eventual and reluctant decision to agree with the attainder. Following Danby’s turning himself in Gerard took part in the debates throughout late April and May about the procedures to be followed in the trials of Danby and the five Catholic peers. On 24 Apr. he was placed on the committee to consider the response to the Commons’ objections to the answers submitted by these peers. Later, in a debate of 7 May 1679, he defended the right of the bishops to sit and vote in the House during trials which involved capital punishment, arguing that ‘when they are quiet the government [is] quiet. They have kept faithful to it’.
Exclusionist and earl, 1679-89
Following the prorogation, and eventual dissolution, of Parliament, Gerard significantly altered his political allegiances. During the summer of 1679 he turned decisively against the Catholic duke of York, and began to espouse the cause of his friend and military colleague, the Protestant pretender Monmouth. There had long been signs of Gerard’s attachment to Monmouth and dislike of York such as when, in September 1678, he had refused to serve under York’s favourite, Louis de Duras, 2nd earl of Feversham, who was acting as Monmouth’s second in command.
Seeing Gerard going over to Monmouth’s camp, Charles II tried to bind him more tightly to the court by raising him in the peerage. On 21 July 1679 Gerard of Brandon became earl of Macclesfield by letters patent. The title had been entered in the docket book originally as earl of Newberry but this was subsequently crossed out and replaced by Macclesfield.
In the second Exclusion Parliament the new earl of Macclesfield, introduced under that title on 21 Oct. 1680 between Charles Sackville, 6th earl of Dorset, and John Granville, earl of Bath, defended Monmouth’s pretensions and voted consistently for exclusion and other measures against Catholics in general and the duke of York in particular. He came to 86 per cent of the sittings of this session, was appointed to four committees on legislation. He was most noticeable on 15 Nov. when he took part in the debate on the exclusion bill brought up from the Commons. According to the rough jottings on the debate made by Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon, Macclesfield’s arguments all had a military and martial context, both in the concerns he expressed and the precedents and metaphors he used. ‘This bill may be good; with a bent sword one may hit an enemy’ was his first contribution to debate. He later raised the topic of the safety of the present king and those assigned to guard him, citing the precedent of the murder of Henri III of France by a ‘papist priest’. He both voted and protested against the motions leading to the rejection of the bill at its first reading that day.
In early 1681 it had been rumoured that the earl would be removed from all his offices at court. He temporarily ‘made his peace’ with the king, but at the end of August Macclesfield was dismissed as a gentleman of the bedchamber, as ‘the king is resolved thoroughly to purge his family from disaffected persons’.
In order to further its campaign against Macclesfield the government released Alexander Fitton from prison, where he had been languishing for over 20 years. Fitton presented a bill of review to chancery in late 1684 resuscitating the old dispute over the Gawsworth estate. Surprisingly, considering the political mood of the time, the lord keeper, Francis North, Baron Guilford, dismissed the bill on the basis that Fitton had waited too long to submit it for review. Fitton took advantage of the new Parliament of James II to appeal and brought in his petition for a reversal of chancery’s decree on 23 May 1685. It was referred to the committee for petitions which reported back on 27 May that the case should be heard before the whole House and that Macclesfield should submit his answer. On 1 June the House granted Macclesfield permission to print the statement of his case and his answer was read before the House two days later. After counsel for both sides had been heard before the bar on 5 June the House also decided against Fitton and dismissed his petition.
Macclesfield was otherwise largely inactive in James II’s Parliament, although he came to 64 per cent of the sittings, and was named to eight committees, in what he must have perceived as a hostile environment. He does not appear to have been actively involved or implicated in Monmouth’s Rebellion. The duke’s agent Robert Cragg would later testify in December 1689 that when he was in the Netherlands in the spring discussing with Monmouth potential supporters in England, the duke expressed doubts as to whether Macclesfield would be willing to take up arms for his rebellion, ‘for he was old, and his blood was cool’.
Reprising his old role, Macclesfield became captain of William’s bodyguard in exile and during the descent on England entered Exeter with the prince and his other English followers ‘with all the grandeur and solemnity they could’.
Convention, 1689
The Convention was by far the busiest period of Macclesfield’s long parliamentary career. He came to 88 per cent of the sittings, when already at the age of 70, and from the start was at the forefront of all affairs before the House. From January 1689 until his death five years later he was named to just about every committee established by the House on days when he was present. His increased activity was largely owing to his concern to ensure the establishment of the new Williamite regime, and to have his revenge on the Tories of the 1680s who had persecuted him. On the very first day of the Convention he was named to the committee of 14 assigned to draw up an address of thanks for William of Orange’s letter to the assembled members. Throughout late January and early February Macclesfield worked to ensure that William and Mary became king and queen. In the debate on the regency on 29 Jan. it was noted that ‘the Lords were very warm in their disputes’ and that Macclesfield contributed to the ‘several sharp speeches … some of which made the bishops a little uneasy’ made that day.
For his support more rewards came his way. His outlawry was quickly reversed and he was sworn to the Privy Council on 14 February. He was made lord lieutenant of all the counties of Wales, both north and south, as well as of the border counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. In addition he briefly, and controversially, served as lord president of the council of Wales from 21 Mar. until its abolition in July. To these offices he added in October that of custos rotulorum of Herefordshire, Monmouthshire and Breconshire. His son Brandon was given the post of lord lieutenant of Lancashire so that, between them, father and son were entrusted with defending most of the long and vulnerable west coast of the country from invasion from Ireland. Both were energetic in their pursuit of Catholics and Jacobites in these areas and in promoting the selection of Whigs for local offices and for parliamentary seats, especially in bitterly divided boroughs such as Bristol, where Macclesfield took an especial interest. The copious correspondence of the Harley family, whose members were prominent in the administration of the Marcher counties, is peppered with references to Macclesfield and his activities there.
Macclesfield also had his own concerns in the House. He was exercised over the derogation of the peerage and on 28 Jan., early on in the Convention, he complained to the committee for privileges that members of the Commons were daring to keep their hats on in the presence of peers. While he was certain of the inferior place of the commoners, he thought that the peers and the king were at the same level and that new year’s presents should be given reciprocally between members of the nobility and the king. He later asserted to the committee that the peers had long enjoyed the privilege of keeping their hats on in the presence of the king in the playhouse or the king’s chapel if he himself were covered. He continued to press for the rights of the peers to keep their heads covered in the presence of the monarch during further discussion of the matter in the committee of the whole House and in the committee for privileges. He was backed up by George Howard, 4th earl of Suffolk, and Peter Mews, bishop of Winchester, who could rely on their own memory of customs and procedures in Charles II’s court. This was enough for the committee for privileges and on 16 Apr. it was ordered to report to the House that ‘by the information of persons of great honour and credit that when the king was present at plays and put on his hat, the peers of the realm there present did so likewise, and also at such times when the king used to walk abroad covered, they did likewise cover’. However, no such official report appears in the Journal.
Macclesfield, with his heightened sense of the peerage’s privilege, was even more concerned with what he saw as the inferior courts’ breach of privilege in their proceedings against the nobility (and himself in particular). On 28 Jan. in the committee for privileges he complained ‘that the peerage is invaded in their trials’, ‘that a peer hath not so fair a trial as a commoner’ and that the peers ought to be tried only in Parliament. Furthermore he pointed out that in times past a delegation from the House – two earls, one prelate and two barons – would attend the courts in Westminster Hall ‘to see wherein was any failure in justice’. These complaints, made in the first week of the Convention, may have been what helped to spur the House to consider the many bills of 1689-90 dealing with the regulation of trials and justice, both among the peerage and in the courts of Westminster Hall.
Macclesfield had other reasons to be aggrieved against his treatment in the courts during his exile under James II. In 1683 he had applied to chancery to redeem part of the Gawsworth estate which had been mortgaged in 1640 and which had been, for a consideration of £2,400, assigned to Alexander Fitton’s father-in-law William Joliffe as a trustee for Fitton and his wife, Joliffe’s daughter. Macclesfield tried to fight back after chancery decreed that he would have to pay this initial consideration of £2,400, with interest for all the ensuing years, as part of his redemption, but he could not pursue his defence after his flight. During this time Lord Chancellor Jeffreys voided the earl’s injunctions against Fitton’s proceedings and stopped the hearing of the master in chancery’s report on the case because of Macclesfield’s outlawry. Now Macclesfield took advantage of the more sympathetic political environment and on 15 Mar. 1689 submitted his appeal that these decrees against him be overturned. Fitton could not submit his answer because he was in Ireland in arms against the new regime, but the House decided on 20 Apr. to continue with consideration of the appeal in any case. Counsel was heard on 2 May and the following day the House ordered that the case be referred back to the commissioners of the Great Seal to rehear the case in chancery, as it transpired that no official decree had ever been enrolled by Jeffreys and the case involved the technicalities of chancery’s proceedings.
Macclesfield was involved in a number of other pieces of legislation that came before the House. He was a teller on 25 Mar. 1689 for a division at the report stage of the bill to establish commissioners for the Great Seal and on 10 June he told in the division whether counsel should be called in as the House considered the case of Barnardiston v. Soames. In this latter case he also signed the protest of 25 June against the decision to uphold the Exchequer’s reversal of the original judgment. On 15 Mar. he was named to the committee to draft a clause for the bill for abrogating oaths which would remove the requirement of the sacramental test for holding office. On 20 Mar., when this clause was reported to the House from committee, he was a teller, Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, telling on the opposing side, in the division on whether to leave this clause unchanged. One month later, on 20 Apr., he and Charles Mordaunt, earl of Monmouth (later 3rd earl of Peterborough), were the only two peers to dissent from the House’s insistence on an amendment that would give the king the power to dispense incumbents in clerical livings from taking the oaths to the new regime. He was later appointed a manager for a free conference on this bill on 24 April.
The cause that seemed to exercise him most, though, was the attempt by the House to reject or place stringent conditions on the reversal of the two punitive judgments against Titus Oates of 1684 and 1685. When the case first came up in late May 1689 Macclesfield acted as one of Oates’s foremost defenders. On 25 May he protested against the resolution that Oates’s printed apologia, ‘The Case of Titus Oates’ was a breach of the privilege of the House and on 31 May he voted to reverse the two judgments and subscribed to the lengthy protest when this motion was rejected. He was appointed on 6 June to a committee of six members assigned with drafting an address requesting the king to grant a pardon to Oates, on the basis that he had already suffered sufficient punishment. The bill to reverse the judgments came up from the Commons in July and quickly became a point of contention in the House again. On 10 July Macclesfield was one of the 16 peers who dissented to all the decisions made that day in the debate on amendments to the bill. Two days later he subscribed to both parts of the lengthy and strongly-worded protest against the House’s amendments, which the protesters felt were too weak in their condemnation of the judgments, and the proviso which forbade him from ever testifying in a court of law again. The Commons also disagreed with the proviso and a series of conferences were held to discuss them. On 27 July the Commons requested another free conference on this matter for that day, but this request was rebuffed by the House, a decision which was greeted by another dissent signed by Macclesfield and a small band of five other determined Whig peers. The free conference was held instead on 29 July and upon its report the following day Macclesfield voted against insisting on the proviso. He entered his protest when the House decided instead to adhere to it.
Macclesfield continued his busy career in the House in the second session of the Convention, where he came to all but three of the meetings. In a list compiled by the marquess of Carmarthen (as Danby had become) between October 1689 and February 1690, he was reckoned to be an opponent of the court. In a debate on the Bill of Rights on 23 Nov., he was one of 12 who protested against the rejection of a proviso that would invalidate all royal pardons upon impeachments of the House of Commons which did not have the concurrence of both houses of Parliament. On 13 Dec. he was a teller, Monmouth telling for the opposing side, in the division in the committee of the whole House considering the bill for a land tax on the question whether to add a clause. On 11 Jan. he once again told, this time on the question whether to refer the debt at issue in the cause of Fountaine v. Coke to a trial at law.
William III’s Parliament, 1690-94
Macclesfield, lord lieutenant of all of Wales and the marcher counties, tried to exercise a political interest for Whig candidates during the elections to William III’s first Parliament in the spring of 1690. However, he often found himself up against long-entrenched local and regional interests with which he, as an interloper, could not successfully compete. His greatest interest may well have been in the Shropshire borough of Ludlow, where he had been based as lord president of the council of Wales before its abolition in July 1689. Here he was able to see through the election of the Whig, and former Exclusionist, Silius Titus‡, in a by-election in January 1691, after the first election which had seen the return of two Tories (and the defeat of his younger son Fitton) had been declared void.
Macclesfield himself missed only one sitting throughout the brief session of spring 1690 and on 5 Apr. registered his protest against the House’s decision to amend wording in the bill for making the Convention a full Parliament. He also dissented from the decision of 13 May not to allow counsel for the City of London more time to prepare and present their case regarding James II’s quo warranto proceedings against the corporation. Much of his attention in this session was taken up with his further litigation against his political enemies from the previous reign. On 7 Dec. 1689 Macclesfield had brought in a writ of error against the judgment found against him in Exchequer in 1684 concerning his bill of scandalum magnatum against the members of the Cheshire grand jury. He named one of these jurymen, John Starkey, as the defendant in his writ. Starkey did not submit his answer quickly and the hearing of the case was constantly postponed. Even when counsel were to be heard before the bar on 11 Apr. 1690, only one representative for Starkey appeared and quickly admitted that he was insufficiently instructed in the case and requested another postponement.
The period between sessions saw the disastrous Allied defeat at the naval battle of Beachy Head on 30 June 1690. The investigation into the debacle was assigned to a committee consisting of Macclesfield, Thomas Herbert, 8th earl of Pembroke, Sir Robert Howard‡, Sir Henry Goodricke‡ and Sir Thomas Lee‡, which on 19 July reported that the English admiral, Arthur Herbert, earl of Torrington, alone had been responsible for the defeat.
His attendance dropped off significantly in the 1691-92 session, down to 40 per cent. This was most likely because he was ‘sick’, the reason given for his absence at a call of the House on 2 Nov. 1691. He assigned his proxy on 28 Nov. to John Vaughan, 2nd Baron Vaughan (3rd earl of Carbery [I]), who like Macclesfield had an interest in the government of Wales. It was vacated on 29 Dec. on Macclesfield’s return to the House. He was back to his usual level of attendance in 1692-93, when he came to 87 per cent of the sittings. During this session he was involved in the investigation into the state of the armed forces that followed William III’s request in his speech to both houses for ‘advice’ in the further conduct of the war, as the Allies had suffered a series of disasters and disappointments in both land and sea campaigns the previous summer. The Prussian envoy reported to his masters that in the last days of November 1692 Macclesfield, ‘a great Whig and not at all a Jacobite’, told the committee of the whole House that although he had previously been a general, his great age now gave him the liberty to say whatever he liked without being suspected of any interest. He then launched into an attack on the predominance of the Dutch: ‘it was true that they placed Dutchmen everywhere, and that he did not despair of seeing a Dutchman as secretary of state, nor even to see others as bishops’. These ‘sarcasms’, as Bonet termed them, contributed to the ‘advice’ of the House requesting the king to limit the appointment of general officers in the army to those born in England.
By this time other matters were preoccupying Macclesfield and the House. Macclesfield voted to commit the controversial place bill on the last day of December 1692, but when the vote for its passage came on 3 Jan. 1693 he was, according to Ailesbury, one of those ‘lords that went away and for the bill’. This view is corroborated by Bonet, who claimed that Macclesfield, ‘although a great Whig, wished to please the court and absented himself’ from the vote.
When Parliament resumed on 7 Nov. Macclesfield was as active as usual. His involvement was cut short by his death two months later, having attended 35 sittings. During those final two months he chaired a meeting of the committee for privileges on 20 Nov. which heard the petition for breach of privilege of Piers Mauduit, Windsor Herald at Arms. It was probably Macclesfield who reported to the House the next day the committee’s decision that Mauduit should receive privilege of Parliament. This matter may have been the source of the debate two days later, on 23 Nov., on the rights of the king’s servants, when Macclesfield protested against the House’s resolution that it would not receive any further petitions for protection from the king and queen’s servants. On 13 Dec. he was one of only seven who dissented from the House’s affirmation of the court of king’s bench’s judgment in favour of Simon Harcourt‡ in the case of Fox v Harcourt.
On that same day, Friday 5 Jan., he enjoyed a dinner with the king and the visiting dignitary Prince Louis of Baden, but shortly after he was overtaken with a fit of vomiting. He died during the night of Sunday 7 Jan., ‘not having been sick two hours’. He was 75 years old, and a correspondent of Sir Ralph Verney‡ marvelled that ‘my lord Macclesfield has lived as fast as any man, therefore I wonder he attained to old age’.