NORTH, Charles (1635-91)

Charles North is the least known of the many children of Dudley North, 4th Baron North. His talented younger brothers—Francis, Dudley, and Dr John North—all received glowing accounts in their biographies written by the youngest brother Roger. Their eldest brother and heir to the title, despite his long and busy career in public life, received no such treatment, indeed barely a mention in any of his brother’s works. One of the few references there is suggests the reason for this neglect: ‘We had the unhappiness of an elder brother who had attached himself to that faction! and, for that reason and other family differences we corresponded little with him’. North, Lives, ii. 230. While Roger’s heroes Francis and Dudley were prominent in their attempts to thwart the excesses of the Popish Plot, their brother Charles was a leading member of the circle of Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, manipulating the Plot to promote his agenda against James, duke of York, and was not even above using Titus Oates’s services to try to settle a personal vendetta. Later, while Roger and Dudley withdrew from public life in protest at what they saw as the illegal accession of William III, Charles (by then 5th Baron North) was one of the staunchest and busiest of William’s Whig supporters in his first parliaments.

North was marked out from an early age to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps as a courtier. He was assisted in these early days by his connection to Edward Montagu, later earl of Sandwich, his mother’s first cousin. It was probably through Montagu’s patronage that North took part in the voyage to fetch the restored king from the Netherlands in May 1660, at which time Samuel Pepys^‡ first met him and praised his musicianship (a family trait of the Norths). Pepys Diary, i. 123, 129, 138, 142, 153. A year later North again accompanied Sandwich to take possession of Tangiers and bring back the new queen from Portugal. Bodl. North c.4, f. 112. Sometime during this period he may have been knighted, for, although his name does not appear in the lists of knighthoods conferred in this period, he is referred to as Sir Charles North in all other documents from the mid-1660s; alternatively this might simply have been a courtesy title paid to him as the eldest son of a baron.

North’s political and financial fortunes were notably changed by his alliance with the Grey family, perhaps the determining factor in shaping his future career. In April 1667 he entered into an advantageous marriage with Katherine, the only daughter of Baron Grey of Warke, and the recipient of a substantial income from lands in Staffordshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire that were part of her marriage settlement with her first husband Sir Edward Mosley, 2nd bt. (who had died within seven months of the marriage). Bodl. North b.26, f. 133. There had long been connections between the Norths and the Greys. North’s grandfather, Dudley North, 3rd Baron North, had been a political ally of Grey of Warke in the sparsely attended House of Lords in the 1640s, where both had supported a more vigorous prosecution of the war and a Presbyterian church settlement. J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D., 1986), Appendices A, B, D. A settlement for the marriage between North and his new bride was agreed between the two families on 3 Apr. 1667, in which land in Cambridgeshire worth £400 p.a. was settled on the young couple (Katherine Mosley was receiving an income of at least £1,200 p.a. from the lands settled on her at her first marriage). Barely 10 days later North wrote to his parents to inform them that he and his bride had already proceeded with the marriage ceremony, without either set of parents being informed. Bodl. North b.26, ff. 133, 141-2; c.4, ff. 137, 146; Mar. Lic. Vicar-Gen. (Harl. Soc. xxiii), 132. By his own letters it appears North was very happy with this match, and when Pepys ran into him in December 1667 he ‘of his own accord was so silly as to tell me he is married; and for her quality, being a Lord’s daughter (my Lord Grey), and person and beauty and years and estate and disposition, he is the happiest man in the world. I am sure he is an ugly fellow; but a good scholar and sober gentleman’. Pepys Diary, viii. 600; Bodl. North c.4, ff. 146, 149, 164, 207, 243, 260. He became closely connected with the Grey family, living with his wife’s father and brothers at their London residence in Charterhouse Square. The ageing Grey of Warke was clearly fond of his son-in-law and found him ‘so good company that were it not his nearness to me would deserve his living here… I suppose we shall not be weary of one another’s company’. From this base in the capital, North was able to inform his father of court and political gossip in a series of newsletters, and was even the medium through whom Grey of Warke assigned his proxy to the 4th Baron North in October 1669. Bodl. North adds. c.11, f. 30, North c.4, ff. 164, 207, 243, 260, North adds. c.11, f. 36.

Grey of Warke’s favour towards his son-in-law had important results. On 24 Oct. 1673, Charles North was created Baron Grey of Rolleston by writ of summons, even though he was the heir apparent to his father’s barony of North. He was formally introduced to the House of Lords by Grey of Warke three days later. Grey of Warke’s heir, Thomas Grey^‡, had died in early 1672 and the old man appears to have been devastated by this loss, even though he had another son, Ralph Grey, later 2nd Baron Grey of Warke, in line to inherit. According to later accounts Grey of Warke held a deep affection for his daughter, and may have seen her, and by extension her husband, as his preferred heir rather than Ralph. Bodl. North c.4, f. 283; Bodl. North adds. c.11, f. 30; TNA, DEL 1/155. North’s title did not commemorate his own family name or estates, but those of his wife, whose principal estate given to her in her jointure lay in Rolleston in Staffordshire. The title was, in effect, an indirect ennoblement of the old baron’s daughter and perhaps indicates the continuing influence of the former parliamentarian lord at court even as late as the 1670s. In the following years Grey of Rolleston (as North was now styled) most closely followed the political inclinations of his wife and the family through whom he had first risen to the peerage, which put him increasingly at odds with the views of his younger brothers.

If Grey of Rolleston’s relations with his own family were difficult, he had an altogether more acrimonious relation with the 1st Baron Grey of Warke’s heirs. They were perhaps resentful of the favoured interloper whom they could easily see as a ‘pensioner’ on his wife’s fortunes. Bodl. North c.4, f. 243. From late 1674 Grey of Rolleston initiated a number of actions against Ralph Grey, 2nd Baron Grey of Warke, and later against his widow, Catherine, in which he accused them, in a complicated case that included conflicting testimonies about locked strong-boxes and the manner in which the old baron habitually signed his name, of destroying the original will of the 1st Baron, and forging a new one to deprive his daughter Katherine of the provision and the estates in Essex he had promised her. TNA, C 6/62/53, 54; A. Elliot, A Modest Vindication of Titus Oates (1682), 21-3, 44-5. This long-running dispute took up much of Grey of Rolleston’s energy over the succeeding years.

From his first appearance Grey of Rolleston was a constant presence in the House of Lords. He attended over four-fifths of all the sittings of the House between 27 Oct. 1673 and Charles II’s last Parliament, sitting in all but one of the meetings of the session of January-February 1674 and in every single sitting of the short session of October-November 1675. He was named to 88 select committees from his first sitting to the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament. He was consistently placed on the standing sub-committee for the House’s Journal, in which he took an active role, examining, approving and signing off on the official record of the House’s proceedings, from April 1677 up until his death in 1691. LJ xiii. 42, 48, 51-57, 61, 121, xiv. 569.

Grey of Rolleston came increasingly to prominence in the two sessions of 1675, where he was a vocal member of the opposition against the Test Bill proposed by Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later marquess of Carmarthen and duke of Leeds) and a strong supporter of the judicial rights of the Lords against the claims of the Commons. For both sessions he held the proxy of his father, who had previously always entrusted it to the 1st Baron Grey of Warke. Grey of Rolleston signed the protests of 21 and 29 Apr., which insisted that the oaths in Danby’s test amounted to an encroachment of the privilege of the peerage. He proposed that the wording of the controversial oath be amended by the addition of the words ‘by force or fraud’ to allow for constitutional measures to reform Church or State. This modification, supported by the duke of York, was still defeated by Danby’s supporters. A Letter from a Person of Quality, in Locke, An Essay on Toleration, ed. J.R. and P. Milton, 364. Later in the same session he insisted on the judicial rights of the House of Lords as an appellate court in cases involving members of the Commons when on 27 May he joined in a protest against the resolution not to insist to the Commons on the Lords’ right of judicature in the case of Arthur Onslow^‡. In the session of autumn 1675 he further served to stir up this furore, when, on 20 Nov. he reported to the Lords that two members of the lower chamber had prevented him from taking down from the gates of Westminster Hall an offending declaration of the Commons denouncing as a traitor to the privileges of that house any MP who appealed a case to the Lords. Haley, Shaftesbury, 400. Not surprisingly, this incident caused an uproar in the Lords and provided Shaftesbury and the country peers the perfect opportunity to move for an address to the king calling for the dissolution of Parliament. Grey of Rolleston voted for the address and signed the dissent when this motion was rejected. A record of the division noted that Grey was also in possession of the proxy of his father, North, which he had held since 4 October. Browning, Danby iii. 125-6; HMC 9th Rep. pt. 2, 79; Bodl. Carte 72, ff. 292-3; Bodl. ms Eng. hist. e. 710, ff. 14-15; HEHL, EL 8418.

When Parliament met again in 1677 after its long prorogation, Grey of Rolleston supported the Country agenda by signing protests against the bill providing for the Protestant education of royal children (on the basis that it did not go far enough) and against the rejection of limiting amendments to a supply bill providing money for the Navy. LJ xiii. 75, 118. From the confines of the Tower, Shaftesbury listed ‘Grey of Rolleston’ as ‘doubly worthy’ in his analysis of lay peers. BIHR xliii. 92-5. This judgment was certainly made sometime before 24 June 1677, because on that day, while Parliament was prorogued, the 4th Baron North died and Grey of Rolleston inherited his title, becoming the 5th Baron North. Henceforth he was usually known as Lord North and Grey, and it was with this name that he was given permission to visit Shaftesbury in the Tower in November 1677. CSP Dom. 1677-8, p. 267. Three years later, in 1680, as a member of the sub-committee for the Lords’ Journal, North and Grey was among those who signed their approval of the excisions from the House’s formal record of the proceedings in 1677 surrounding the commitment of Shaftesbury and George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, to the Tower. LJ xiii. 51-57, 61. On 4 Apr. 1678 he voted Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, guilty of murder.

In the violent clashes of the last session of the Cavalier Parliament and the first Exclusion Parliament, North and Grey remained a key voting member in Shaftesbury’s Country party, yet showed himself slightly less willing to adopt all the positions, and sign all the protests, that many of his colleagues did. In most matters he remained a principal player in the country opposition. For the Cavalier Parliament’s last session, and indeed for all the succeeding Exclusion parliaments, he was named to the standing committee to gather and consider evidence on the Popish Plot, and in October 1678 he was further named to a committee to take evidence on the constables of London and Westminster. In May 1679 he was appointed a reporter for a conference with the Commons on the Habeas Corpus Bill. LJ xiii. 299, 300, 552. He voted in favour of the commitment of Danby on 27 Dec. 1678, and in his various calculations of the forces ranged against him, the lord treasurer consistently considered North and Grey to be against him. Certainly during the proceedings in April and May 1679, North and Grey continued to vote in favour of Danby’s attainder. As relations between the two Houses deteriorated over the course of the spring of 1679, North and Grey took the side of the Commons in their attempts to prosecute Danby speedily and effectively. He supported the measure to form a committee of both houses to discuss the procedure for the trial of the impeached lords, and consistently opposed the Lords’ insistence on the bishops’ right to remain in the House during their capital trials. Yet he did not enter his protest, as so many of the Country opposition did, when the motion for Danby’s attainder in December 1678 was defeated, and did not subscribe his name to any protests in the last session of the Cavalier Parliament, despite the mustering of Country forces to oppose Danby’s measures. Browning, Danby iii. 129-32, 134-5, 137-9, 143, 146, 151; Add. 29572, f. 112; Bodl. Carte 81, f. 588; LJ xiii. 565, 570, 587, 594.

During the long series of prorogations before the second Exclusion Parliament, North and Grey continued to dine regularly with Shaftesbury and the other opposition lords at the Swan Tavern in order to discuss strategy. With them he attended the large public trials of figures involved in the Popish Plot, such as Knox and Lane, in order to show support for the Plot allegations. He was also one of those present when Oates was said to have come off ‘with flying colours’. CSP Dom. 1679-80, p. 296; HMC Ormonde n.s. iv. 560-1, 565; Verney ms mic. M636/33, Dr W. Denton to Sir R. Verney, 27 Nov. 1679. He was one of the 16 peers who signed the petition to Charles II in December 1679 calling on him to summon the new Parliament speedily. HMC Hastings iv. 302; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 210. It was perhaps for this presumption that his name was deleted from the Cambridgeshire commission of the peace in January 1680. HMC Lords i. 174. Later he was one of the 10 peers who that summer exhibited an information at King’s Bench against the duke of York for recusancy. HMC 7th Rep. 479. Yet his allegiance with the group and commitment to their cause was ambiguous. He had already become something of a ‘renegade’ amongst his colleagues because he had recently kissed York’s hand. More serious was his battle with the Greys over the authenticity and terms of the will of the 1st Baron Grey of Warke, especially as at this point the target of his suits was the heir to the disputed estates, his nephew, Ford Grey, 3rd Baron Grey of Warke (later earl of Tankerville), who was one of the most effective and committed members of the country group. The case came to a head in late 1679 when it was heard by the court of delegates, which ultimately rejected North and Grey’s claims. Despite this setback, in February 1680 North and Grey exhibited yet another bill in Chancery aiming at recovering some of Grey of Warke’s estates. TNA, DEL 1/155, C 6/35/100; Elliot, A Modest Vindication, 21-3, 44-5. At a meeting at the house of Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, Shaftesbury accused North and Grey of instigating a suit against one of his colleagues for an estate and, as Shaftesbury thought, an earldom (the earldom of Tankerville, which had originally been conferred upon a member of the Grey family in the 15th century, and was eventually bestowed on the 3rd Baron Grey of Warke in 1695). When North and Grey denied that he was aiming at the earldom, Shaftesbury, slyly referring to his recent deference to York, suggested that there were other ways for him to get an earldom. To this North and Grey retorted that whereas Shaftesbury had already been able to find such means, he himself could not. Hatton Corresp. i. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxii), 223-4. North and Grey also suspected that his own brother, Francis (later Baron Guilford), who was at that point lord keeper, had swayed the judges at the court of delegates against him, an accusation which occasioned an exchange of insults between North and Grey and his merchant brother Dudley. Add. 32512, ff. 152-3.

When it came to the sticking point, though, on 15 Nov. 1680, North and Grey did vote against the rejection of the exclusion bill and entered his dissent when that motion succeeded. Add. 36988, f. 159, Add. 51319, f. 55; Bodl., Carte 81, f. 654. He also voted to appoint a committee to consider the state of the kingdom in conjunction with the Commons and in December found the Catholic, William Howard, Viscount Stafford, guilty. But his protest against the rejection of the exclusion bill was the only occasion he publicly took a stand against the proceedings of the House in that Parliament. Unlike many of his colleagues in the Country opposition, he seems not to have put his name to the dissents against the refusal to discuss Sir William Scroggs’s impeachment (though a list in the Carte manuscripts suggests that he was among the signatories). Bodl. Carte 81, ff. 657, 669, Carte 80, f. 823; Bodl. Rawl. A183, f. 62. At the short-lived Oxford Parliament of March 1681, where he was named again to the standing committee to receive information about the Popish Plot, he did not join in with the protest against the Lords’ rejection of the Commons’ impeachment of Edward Fitzharris. However, three months after Parliament’s dissolution, North and Grey was among ‘a great concourse of persons of quality’ who attended the ‘so much expected trial of Fitzharris’, as part of Shaftesbury’s show of force and intimidation in this political trial. Luttrell, Brief Relation i. 95. At the same time as he was making such a public show of his support for Exclusion, he still petitioned the crown in November 1681 to establish a commission of review to consider yet again his case against the Greys of Warke. CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 546. His failure to gain additional land from his wife’s side of his family may have been compensated in early 1681 by his own accession to the remainder of his paternal estate, and particularly the manor of Tostock in Suffolk, upon the death of his mother. This caused yet another fracas with his brothers as North and Grey proved so eager to take possession of the house that he provided his mother’s executors, Dudley and Roger North, very little time to clear out her personal effects. North, Lives, ii. 172-3.

At the height of the Popish Plot, North and Grey had been able to use his connections within the opposition and among those fomenting the conspiracy theories to settle a personal vendetta against the Anglican priest Adam Elliot. Elliot had been chaplain for William, Lord Grey of Warke, and had acted as a witness for the Dowager Lady Grey of Warke in the proceedings before the court of delegates in December 1679. North and Grey, according to Elliot, persuaded Oates to accuse the priest falsely before the king both of being a Catholic and a Muslim renegade, as Elliot had spent many months in captivity in Salé in North Africa. In June 1682, with the Popish Plot agitators now on the defensive, Elliot won an action of defamation against Oates, and then proceeded to write an attack on ‘the Salamanca doctor’, with the sarcastic title A Modest Vindication of Titus Oates. In this work he made the central claim that ‘Charles, Lord North and Grey was the sole and only occasion of Oates’s swearing against me’. Elliot was scathing on North and Grey in this pamphlet, especially in the purportedly verbatim transcription of North and Grey’s rambling and nonsensical testimony in Elliot’s defamation action. Elliot, A Modest Vindication, 21-3, 44-5. For this attack North and Grey issued a writ of scandalum magnatum in October 1682 against both Elliot and his publisher, but before the case could be heard, Elliot submitted himself to North and Grey, ‘and begged his pardon in open court, so that his lordship very generously forgave him’. North’s magnanimity on the occasion was said to have won him ‘great commendation’. CSP Dom. 1682, p. 461; Luttrell, Brief Relation i. 231, 249; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 351; Bodl. Carte 222, ff. 322-3.

On 9 Oct. 1688 the king issued a warrant to prepare a grant for a lease, to be made out to Lady North and Grey specifically, to recover concealed crown lands in Kent and Essex made derelict by the sea (with part of the revenue to be sent to the crown). The grant’s progress seems to have been halted by the crisis of William of Orange’s invasion, but it suggests that North and Grey may have effected some sort of reconciliation with James II in the late days of his reign. CTB viii. 1868, 2058, 2069, 2087-93, ix. 357, 360, 2010. However, throughout the reign North and Grey had been considered by observers to be an opponent to the king in his attempts to repeal the Test Act. He had been one of those suggested by Henry Compton, bishop of London, as a possible surety for one of the seven bishops in the summer of 1688 and featured in information sent to Holland by Van Citters. In addition, from the first moment of William’s invasion, North and Grey showed himself an eager supporter of the prince. BIHR xlii. 118-20; Add. 34526, ff. 48-56; Add. 34510, ff. 157-9; Bodl. Tanner 28, f. 76. He was a constant member of the provisional government established in London on 11 Dec. 1688 after James II’s flight, attending every single session of its meetings, including the emergency gathering of nine peers at 3am on 13 Dec. to decide how to handle the panic caused by rumours that Irish troops were massing outside the city. He subscribed his name to almost all of the orders issuing from the provisional government, including those on the crucial first day ordering Louis Duras, 2nd earl of Feversham, and George Legge, Baron Dartmouth, not to engage the Prince of Orange in battle. He, with James Brydges, 8th Baron Chandos, and John Bennet, Baron Ossulston, were the three lords appointed on 15 Dec. to interrogate the incarcerated George Jeffreys, Baron Jeffreys, on the whereabouts of the Great Seal and the writs for the new Parliament, and to report his testimony to the council. He was present at all of William’s consultations with peers to discuss the proper calling of Parliament, and at a meeting on 24 Dec. joined Henry Compton, bishop of London, and William Paget, 7th Baron Paget, in arguing that James’s flight was a ‘demise’ in law and that therefore Princess Mary could issue the writs in her own name as the succeeding monarch. A Kingdom without a King, 56, 67-70, 72-5, 77-9, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92, 97-8, 100-103, 105-6, 109-10, 112, 114-15, 117, 120-2, 124, 153, 158, 165; Clarendon Corresp. ii. 235.

North and Grey was at his most active in the few short years he sat in William III’s parliaments. He attended 90 per cent of the sittings in the Convention Parliament and 96 per cent of those of the first two sessions of the 1690 Parliament, including every single meeting in its first session. He was appointed to a total of 127 select committees from the opening of the Convention to his death in January 1691—that is, almost every committee established by the House in those two years—and he worked on many of them, for throughout 1689-90 he frequently reported to the House on proceedings in committees he had chaired. For example, he served as a chairman of the committee for petitions on a dozen occasions between December 1689 and December 1690. PA, HL/PO/CO/7/3.

Throughout, North and Grey remained one of the government’s leading supporters. In the divisions on the transferral of the crown in late January and early February 1689 he firmly took the view, expressed in his votes and his formal dissents, that ‘the throne was vacant’, that James had ‘abdicated’ by his departure, and that William and Mary should be declared legal king and queen. BIHR liii. 85; LJ xiv. 112, 116. He once again revealed himself an advocate of the privilege of the peerage through his opposition to the trial of peers bill, against whose passage he entered protests in both March 1689 and January 1690. On 21 Mar. 1689 he further protested against the House’s rejection of the motion to repeal the sacramental test in the new oaths, ‘because this obligation to receive sacrament is a test on Protestants rather than on the Papists’. Throughout the first half of April he acted as a manager in conferences discussing the bill to remove papists from London and Westminster, and he later chaired and reported from a committee to draft an address to the king petitioning him to expel all French papists from the vicinity of Whitehall. LJ xiv. 140, 157, 171, 176, 179, 250, 412; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/4, p. 117. So involved was he in the proceedings of the House that on 23 Apr. he entrusted his proxy to George Savile, marquess of Halifax, for the short period until 10 May that he was absent. From 21 June he in turn held the proxy of Thomas Coventry, 5th Baron (later earl of) Coventry, whose vote North and Grey exercised until the end of the first session of the Convention Parliament. He joined other Whigs in rallying to Titus Oates, trying in May and July to overturn the judgments of perjury against him and to reduce the vindictive measures taken against him by the House. BIHR liii. 85; LJ xiv. 228, 299. He was even manager for a conference on the Oates bill, as well as for one putting the Great Seal in commission. LJ xiv. 249, 250, 288.

Throughout the Parliament North and Grey chaired a number of committees, most of them for private estate bills, on which he occasionally reported as well. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/4, pp. 73, 78, 89, 137-8, 178; LJ xiv. 223, 236, 237, 270, 296. He was a public figure who apparently saw himself as a leading parliamentary spokesman for the Whig government. When a crowd of angry silk-weavers besieged Westminster in August 1689, protesting against the bill for wearing woollens, North and Grey, along with some other lords, ‘set up for Publicolas’ and ‘made several orations’ trying to calm the crowd. At length the silk-workers were placated by these reassurances, and ‘my Lord North boasted how he had preserved the Lords’ House by his prudent management’. But ‘a clownish fellow by way of reply took notice how the Capitol of Rome had been preserved’. Early in October he received a boost to his standing when the king promised to dine at his house. Even so, his reputation with William was uncertain: Halifax had noted earlier in the year that the king had refused to consider appointing North and Grey to the governorship of Jamaica. Hatton Corresp. ii. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxiii), 138-9; Epistolary curiosities, ed. R. Warner, i. 142-3; Add. 75367, f. 30; Halifax Letters, ii. 211-16. In a list compiled between October 1689 and February 1690 Carmarthen (as Danby had become) regarded North and Grey as an opponent of the court.

North and Grey’s allegiance to the Whigs caused friction with his younger Tory brothers Dudley and Roger, especially in November 1689 when Dudley was being prosecuted by the Whigs for his role, as sheriff of London in 1682, in selecting the juries that found William Russell,^‡ Lord Russell, and Algernon Sydney^‡ guilty. Yet North and Grey, ‘for aught I know meaning well but deceived by men of his party’, still saw fit to warn his estranged brother Roger that unless Dudley ‘applied himself’ that is, ‘by going to some principal men on the other side and so interest or soften them’ he would be ruined. Roger insisted that Dudley merely intended to justify himself by telling the truth, but North and Grey felt that his defence would fall on deaf ears, and that in trying to justify himself he would only make matters worse. ‘So we parted with much dissatisfaction on his part’. It may have been concern for his brother too that caused North and Grey to move that the term ‘murder’ be omitted and ‘a softer word’ substituted when a committee was established to investigate the deaths of Russell and Sydney. His suggestion was not acted upon. North Lives, ii. 230; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 241.

In the first year of the 1690 Parliament North and Grey continued his busy activity in the procedural life of the House. He often chaired and reported from many of the select committees he was named to, mostly on private estate and naturalization bills, and was also occasionally chairman and reporter of Committees of the Whole House. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/4, pp. 391, 397, 399, 441, 451-2, 458, 459, 468-9, 497-8, 510; LJ xiv. 448, 458, 462, 467, 524, 543, 552, 554, 562, 571, 594; HMC Lords iii. 22. He was also frequently a teller in divisions. HMC Lords iii. 95, 135, 145, 233, 249. In April he dissented from a change made in the wording of the recognition bill to formalize and render legal the proceedings of the Convention, as the new word inserted in the bill, ‘enacted’, was not as positive as the word it replaced, ‘declare’; he subscribed a further protest when the House determined to expunge from the record the reasons given in that dissent. LJ xiv. 455, 459; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 422; HEHL, HM 30659 (7); Ellesmere mss 9909. During a debate on the Abjuration Bill in early May North and Grey received the injunction of the House for irate words passed between him and John Lovelace, 3rd Baron Lovelace. HMC Lords iii. 40. On 6 Oct. he voted against the discharge of James Cecil, 4th earl of Salisbury, and Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, from theiir imprisonment in the Tower, and a little later dissented from the decision to discharge them from their bail. Also in October, he recorded his dissent from the House’s decision in the case of Forster vs. Munt Throughout the remainder of the winter he remained involved in the bill to allow Salisbury to nullify the entail on his lands, acting at different times as a conference manager and a teller in this legislation. LJ xiv. 529, 538, 596; HMC Lords iii. 145.

North and Grey died shortly after the prorogation of the second session of the 1690 Parliament, probably quite suddenly as he was still sitting about a week before his death at the age of fifty-five. His will, unrevised since October 1683 and in which he had stipulated that he did not wish to be ‘opened or embalmed when dead’, provided an unusual inheritance for his children: ‘I desire to live in the memory of just men and leaving my four children only five pounds a piece leave them and the sole care of them and as far as I can the disposing of them and nothing more than what she please to bestow upon them unto my dear and truly loving wife’, whom he also made his sole heir and executrix. TNA, PROB 11/405, f. 291. If he was trusting his wife to provide adequately for his children, he was quickly deceived, as she waited a little over three months after North and Grey’s death before marrying Colonel Francis Russell, younger brother of Admiral Edward Russell, later earl of Orford, and himself governor of Barbados. She travelled with him to that island where she, with her eldest daughter, died intestate. Luttrell, Brief Relation ii. 220; HMC Finch iii. 53. Colonel Russell died in October 1696. In his will, in which he called himself Francis Russell ‘of Rolleston’, he bequeathed a further 10 pounds to his remaining step-children. TNA, PROB 11/434, ff. 270-1. It was up to Roger North to manage the affairs of his almost disinherited nephews and nieces, born to a brother with whom he had serious disagreements. He took special care of the eldest child and heir, William North, who upon North and Grey’s death succeeded to both of his titles, though only 12 years old at the time.