Yorkshire baronet, 1633-60
George Savile came from the Lupset branch of the long-established Savile family of the West Riding, which in the early 17th century acquired the Thornhill estates near Wakefield. His great-grandfather George Savile was created a baronet in 1611 and his son Sir George predeceased him in 1614, but not before making an advantageous marriage with Lady Anne Wentworth, sister of Thomas Wentworth†, later earl of Strafford, who took a pragmatic and solicitous care of his two fatherless nephews, Sir George Savile, the second baronet from 1622, and his younger brother William, who became the 3rd baronet upon Sir George’s death in 1626. The death of the 3rd baronet on 25 Jan. 1644 made his eldest son George the 4th baronet at age 11.
Parliament quickly took action by an ordinance of 17 July 1645, vesting the wardship of Savile in the hands of Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, who immediately received £2,000 out of the estate, which Savile fruitlessly tried to recover at the time of the Restoration. Despite this ordinance, Savile was effectively raised by his redoubtable royalist mother, Lady Anne Coventry. Through his connection to the extended Coventry family, he had as an uncle (by marriage) Anthony Ashley Cooper, the future earl of Shaftesbury, who was married to Lady Margaret Coventry (d.1649). Savile could also count among his maternal uncles Henry Coventry‡, later secretary of state, and William Coventry‡, who later became one of the leading politicians of the Restoration.
From 1647 to 1652, Savile was abroad on a tour of Europe, during which he spent time studying at Huguenot academies in Paris, Angers and Orléans, which appears to have instilled in him a life-long sympathy for the Huguenot cause. Settled at Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire (the principal Savile residence of Thornhill having been destroyed in 1648) upon his return, Savile in late 1656 married Lady Dorothy Spencer. This marriage also connected him to a number of prominent families, both royalist and ‘presbyterian’. His new wife was the daughter of the royalist martyr Henry Spencer†, earl of Sunderland and Dorothy, dowager countess of Sunderland, who, as Lady Dorothy Sydney, a daughter of Robert Sydney, 2nd earl of Leicester, was ‘Sacharissa’ in the poems of Edmund Waller‡. Her brothers, now Savile’s uncles, were the presbyterian peer Philip Sydney, 3rd earl of Leicester, the republican Algernon Sydney‡ and Henry Sydney, the future earl of Romney. This marriage even connected Savile to Ashley Cooper a second time over as Ashley Cooper married as his third wife in 1655 Lady Margaret Spencer, Savile’s wife’s paternal aunt. Another, perhaps more significant, new kinsman was his brother-in-law, Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, whose paths were to cross many time during their long political careers.
Restoration, 1660-68
At the Restoration Savile was seated in the Convention for the borough of Pontefract, but only after petition in a dispute concerning a double return. He did not stand for the Cavalier Parliament.
After Buckingham’s dismissal from the lord lieutenancy in February 1667 Savile, along with his fellow Yorkshireman, Sir Thomas Osborne, later earl of Danby, resigned his commissions and refused to serve under the duke’s replacement Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington.
Viscount Halifax, 1668-73
Halifax took his seat in the House of Lords on 6 Feb. 1668, introduced by his brother-in-law Sunderland and his fellow Yorkshire peer Thomas Belasyse, 2nd Viscount Fauconberg. In total Halifax came to just over three-fifths of the meetings of this part of the session before it was further adjourned for several months on 9 May. Samuel Pepys‡ was summoned to the ‘Brooke House’ commission on 3 July and recorded that ‘Halifax, I perceive, was industrious on my side, on behalf of his uncle Coventry’. The influence of Coventry as a patron, however, did not last for long, for on 1 Mar. 1669 Henry Savile conveyed to Buckingham a challenge from either Coventry or Halifax—contemporaries were not sure who was intended to do the actual fighting—in response to Buckingham’s plan to mock Coventry in his play The Country Gentleman. For the challenge both Coventry and Henry Savile were incarcerated, and Coventry dismissed from the Privy Council and the treasury.
While Halifax’s relations with Buckingham, and with Buckingham’s associate Osborne, deteriorated from this point, he appears to have also come increasingly into the orbit of his uncle Lord Ashley, who may have arranged for Halifax’s appointment to the enlarged council of trade on 16 Apr. 1669. When Parliament reassembled for business on 19 Oct. 1669 Halifax attended four-fifths of the sittings of that session. On 4 Nov. the report of the Brooke House commissioners, without Halifax’s signature, was brought up from the Commons, and Halifax was appointed to the select committees established on 6 Nov. to consider the commission’s reports and ancillary papers. Halifax was opposed to Buckingham’s bill to reform the procedure for trying peers arguing, according to the French envoy Colbert, ‘in favour of the maintenance of royal authority, making it known that it was already too constrained for the glory of the state, and above all, the interest of the peers, who, being as the rays of majesty, cannot shine until it is at its height’. This speech won the admiration of York who commended Halifax to the king.
Halifax maintained the same rate of attendance, 80 per cent, in the following long session of 1670-1, and even came to all but four of the meeting days in the spring of 1670. He held the proxy of his distant kinsman James Savile, 2nd earl of Sussex, throughout the session. On 22 Feb. he was one of the minority of nine peers who voted against the motion to follow the king’s direction and delete all record of the proceedings of Skinner v East India Company from the House’s Journal.
Halifax was one of the principal speakers against the bill to enable the divorced John Manners, styled Lord Roos, the future duke of Rutland, to remarry, and signed the protest of 17 Mar. 1670 against the bill’s second reading. At its third reading on 28 Mar. he again spoke against it, in a witty and irreverent speech, redolent of the cynical style for which he became celebrated. It was summarized thus by Edward Montagu, earl of Sandwich: Lord Halifax, he wrote,
thinks the Church was a better judge in this matter when the priests were unmarried. For surely the generality of them are not to be supposed unclean. And therefore the argument of preventing sin [by remarriage after divorce] cannot weigh much, because a great many live holily without marriage, and prayer and fasting and a good climate are good means to keep safe in that point. He said precedents of Parliament were not infallible, for it may be the best things we have done may have been the repeal of some acts of Parliament... This bill hath already done much hurt, it hath put by many private bills, wherein men have wanted relief as much as my Lord Roos can want a wife. And it is likely these cases will be more frequent hereafter and take up much of our time… He said he feared [?not] the introduction of the customs of poisoning and stabbing wives in this climate, but he feared the great encouragement of perjury, when it shall have this strong motive, viz. of being quit of a wife one is weary off and the hopes of obtaining one one loves. The inconvenience on the one hand is that if my Lady Roos do not die in convenient time, my Lord Roos cannot marry. But on the other hand, there is a likelihood of inconveniences, public and eternal… Whereas it is said bishops [and] martyrs have been for it, that is no good argument for they might have done ill before that, as it was notorious [Thomas] Cranmer† [archbishop of Canterbury] who once recanted, before he was burnt.Harris, Sandwich, ii. 318-33.
Halifax was one of the few lay Protestants who joined with York, the bishops and the Catholic lords in opposing it.
Halifax also opposed the second conventicle bill, subscribing to the protest against the bill’s passage on 26 Mar. 1670, and between 30 Mar. and 5 Apr. he was named as a manager for four conferences on the House’s amendments to the bill. He did not sign the protest against the House’s eventual decision to recede from its controversial amendment exempting the houses of peers from searches. He was also involved in other conferences in the last weeks before the adjournment—on additions to a naturalization bill (30 Mar.) and on the bill for the repair of the harbour of Great Yarmouth, the constituency represented by his uncle Sir William Coventry (5 Apr.).
Halifax’s irreverent speech in the Roos divorce bill debate and his opposition to the Conventicle Act raise the issue of Halifax’s attitude towards religion and the established church, which was always an aspect of his character remarked upon by contemporaries. In his character sketch of Halifax in his History, Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, concentrated on this:
He was a man of great and ready wit; full of life, and very pleasant; much turned to satire. He let his wit run much to matters of religion so that he passed for a bold and determined atheist; though he often protested to me he was not one; and said, he believed there was not one in the world. He confessed, he could not swallow down everything that divines imposed on the world. He was a Christian in submission. He believed as much as he could and he hoped that God would not lay it to his charge, if he could not digest iron, as an ostrich did, not take into his belief things that must burst him. If he has any scruples, they were not sought for, nor cherished by him, for he never read an atheistical book. In a fit of sickness, I knew him very much touched with a sense of religion. I was then often with him. He seemed full of good purposes: but they went off with his sickness. He was always talking of morality and friendship. He was punctual in all payments, and just in all his private dealings.Burnet, i. 491-2.
By contrast, in the unpublished draft introduction to the projected edition of Halifax’s works, composed shortly after Halifax’s death, his chaplain Alexander Sion was at great pains, to emphasize that ‘his Lordship had also a very great veneration for our blessed Saviour’, although even Sion had to conceded that ‘this real respect for religion did not hinder his Lordship from being faulty in some of the methods, by which it is recommended to the world. He loved the clergy, but he would sometimes give broad hints of dislike of the lives and carriage of some of them’.
Halifax was present when the House resumed its sittings on 24 Oct. 1670, and attended just over three-quarters of this part of the session’s sittings, during which he was named to 30 committees. On 1 Dec., when the House was debating the petition of Anne Fry for a dismissal of the chancery decree that deprived her of the house her grandfather Mountjoy Blount, earl of Newport, had provisionally bequeathed to her because she had infringed one of the conditions of his will by marrying without the consent of her guardians, Halifax spoke against her, mordantly commenting (again according to Sandwich) that:
the clause of the will [stipulating the consent of her guardians], if it be in terrorem ought to take effect, for nothing could terrify that could not hurt. That the seeming hardness of the case is nothing, for she had a portion of £9,000 from her father, but had no right to anything from her grandfather [Newport]. That Porter has a real damage by the decree of the [court of] rolls [which had decided in Fry’s favour], for he was then vested in the legal right of the land.Mapperton, Sandwich mss, Journal, x. 314.
He was absent for a period from mid-December 1670 to mid-January 1671, during which time was introduced in the House the bill to make him a trustee and guardian of his kinsman the young Charles Talbot, 12th earl of Shrewsbury following the death of his father Francis Talbot, 11th earl of Shrewsbury from injuries inflicted in a duel with Halifax’s erstwhile patron Buckingham. Halifax seconded John Lucas, Baron Lucas of Shenfield, in his controversial criticisms of the subsidy bill in late February 1671 and on 2 Mar. he was named a reporter for a conference on the amendments to the bill.
At the end of the session Halifax became heavily involved in the conflict between the chambers over the House’s attempt to amend parts of the bill for additional imposts upon foreign commodities. On 10 Apr. 1671 he was named one of ten managers for a conference to discuss the House’s amendments and to draft an address to the king. This conference was postponed by the ‘unparliamentary’ answer given to their request by the Commons, in which they agreed to the conference on the amendments but deferred the decision on the address to the king. The following day was taken up by discussions on the House’s proper response to the Commons’ answer. Halifax was appointed to the committee to draw up what was to be presented to the Commons on the subject and helped to manage the conferences held on 11 and 12 April. That matter resolved, from 15 Apr. to the session’s prorogation a week later, Halifax continued to act as a principal in the dispute with the Commons, which dealt with both the specific amendments and the general principle whether the Lords could make amendments to money bills, as both a conference manager and a member of the committee assigned to draw up the House’s arguments. Sandwich, who developed the economic arguments for the amendments and strongly defended the House’s right to make such amendments, considered Halifax, with Ashley and Buckingham, among his principal allies on the business.
In the spring of 1672 Charles II sought to co-opt many of the potential opponents of the renewed Dutch war and his French-oriented policy. These included Halifax, who was sworn of the Privy Council on 17 Apr. 1672, and Henry Coventry, who was made secretary of state at the start of July. On 14 June, Halifax was appointed an extraordinary envoy to the French king, then in the midst of his successful invasion of the Netherlands, ostensibly to congratulate him upon the birth of a son. He came quickly, though, became involved in the separate embassy of the plenipotentiaries Buckingham and Henry Bennet, earl of Arlington, which agreed with Louis XIV (against Halifax’s judgment) harsh conditions for a peace with William of Orange and the States-General.
There were other developments in his domestic life at this stage. On 16 Dec. 1670 his wife died, leaving him with three surviving sons and one daughter. In 1672, in keeping with his growing family and political importance, he stopped leasing his house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and established his London residence in a large house on fashionable St James’s Square, which quickly became well known as Halifax House.
Country peer, 1673-7
Halifax came to all but one of the sittings of the House when it resumed on 4 Feb. 1673 after its long and controversial recess and was named to 11 select committees on legislation. He quickly came to the fore of the opposition to the king’s recent policies, particularly concerned with the role of the royal prerogative in relation to parliamentary statute, which had been the legal justification for the Declaration of Indulgence. When the king referred the legality of this embattled measure and its use of the prerogative to the House, Halifax, according to the later account of Burnet, said, ‘if we could make good the eastern compliment “O king, live for ever!” he could trust the king with everything; but since that was so much a compliment, that it could never become real, he could not be implicit in his confidence’. York apparently never forgave Halifax for showing his distrust of the Catholic heir presumptive so clearly and took a great dislike and aversion to him from this point.
After the tumultuous four-day session of autumn 1673, all of which Halifax attended, Shaftesbury was dismissed as lord chancellor and soon joined the band of ‘malcontent’ peers of which Halifax was a part. In the weeks before the next session of Parliament in January 1674 ‘the Cabal’, as a correspondent of Arthur Capell, earl of Essex, termed them, of Halifax, Shaftesbury and Buckingham, met regularly at the house of Denzil Holles, Baron Holles, in Covent Garden as they discussed their tactics for the forthcoming session.
Instead of being removed, Halifax was even appointed in March 1675 one of the Privy Councillors on the newly formed committee for trade and plantations and was also one of the nine members of the committee assigned ‘to have immediate care and intendency’ of its business.
In 1674-5, though, Halifax and Shaftesbury still worked reasonably well together against the strenuous and effective efforts of the lord treasurer the earl of Danby (as Sir Thomas Osborne had become), to build a ‘court’ party, based on loyalty to the Church of England and a prosecution of nonconformity. There was a ‘very warm’ debate at the Privy Council on 2 Feb. 1675 when Danby presented measures for the more rigorous enforcement of the laws against Protestant Dissenters. Halifax and others moved that the measures be enforced against all nonconformists, including Catholic recusants, and were able to ensure that the resulting proclamation from the Council contained ‘very large directions for prosecution of papists’ and with the similar instructions regarding Protestant nonconformists made much more lenient.
Halifax maintained his high attendance rate in the session of April-June 1675: he came to all but one of its 42 sittings, and was named to seven select committees. From the first day he clearly showed his opposition to Danby and the court. He was one of the small band of ten country peers who signed the protest of 13 Apr., against the rejection of their motion to thank the king merely for some ‘gracious expressions’ in his opening speech to Parliament, but not for the speech in toto. Danby’s ‘non-resisting’ Test bill was introduced on the third day of the session, and Baxter commented that throughout its proceedings in April and May 1675 Danby and the bishops were ‘the great speakers’ for the bill, while Halifax was one of ‘the chief speakers’ against it and one of those that made the best speeches, ‘which set the tongues of men at so much liberty, that the common talk was against the bishops’.
that as there really was no security to any state by oaths, so also no private person, much less statesman, would ever order his affairs as relying on it; no man would ever sleep with open doors, or unlocked-up treasure or plate, should all the town be sworn not to rob. So that the use of multiplying oaths had been most commonly to exclude or disturb some honest, conscientious men, who would never have prejudiced the government.
He showed his sarcastic flair, and his dislike of the Church hierarchy, in a further debate on 12 May on the oath not to promote alterations in either Church and State. By this measure the country peers accused the bishops of claiming for themselves a jure divino power above the royal supremacy of the Church. When Wharton, ‘upon the bishops’ claim to a divine right, asked… whether they then did not claim, withal, a power of excommunicating their Prince?’ they responded, evasively, ‘they never had done it’, Halifax told them, ‘that that might well be, for since the Reformation, they had hitherto had too great a dependence on the Crown to venture on or any other offence to it’.
Halifax was indirectly involved in the dispute between the Houses over their privileges in appeal cases involving members of the Commons heard before the House, a case which helped to bring the session to an end. On 13 Apr. 1675 his uncle Algernon Sydney wrote to him asking him if he would present a petition before the House concerning the appeal of the nonconformist Sir Nicholas Stoughton against the Member of the Commons Arthur Onslow‡.
Halifax only missed one of the 21 sittings of Parliament when it resumed on 13 Oct. 1675, and was named to six select committees. On 9 Nov. 1675 Halifax was placed on a committee assigned to fashion into a formal address the Commons’ vote calling for the recall of the king’s subjects serving in the French armies. On the following day he was named as a manager for the conference at which the address was presented to the lower House. He chaired the committee of the whole on 17 Nov. when the bill for better securing the Protestant religion was considered, and on the 20th was one of ‘the chief lords’ promoting the narrowly rejected address calling on the king to dissolve Parliament, which led to the prorogation two days later.
Halifax, with his sardonic and sarcastic tone, was irritating the king at the council board as well. In January 1676 charges of corruption were levelled against Danby. A witness described to the council how he had offered Danby a bribe and the lord treasurer had rejected it. Halifax though suggested that Danby had rejected the offer very mildly, as if he wished it to be offered to him again, which was, ‘as if a man should ask for his neighbour’s wife and meet with a civil refusal’.
Halifax had recovered sufficiently from a serious illness which afflicted him in the first months of 1676 to attend the court of the lord high steward, convened outside of time of Parliament, which on 30 June 1676 found Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, not guilty of the murder of a guard at Whitehall.
The end of the Cavalier Parliament, 1677-8
A letter from Lemuel Kingdon‡, deputy paymaster of the forces, to an associate of Danby dated 13 Feb. 1677 gives an insight as to how contemporaries perceived Halifax’s enmities and alliances just a few days before the convening of Parliament. Kingdon recounted a conversation he claimed to have had with Shaftesbury, who said that Danby’s ‘professed enemies’ were Halifax and Sir William Coventry, and others, all of whom were plotting to replace Danby with Coventry as lord treasurer.
if an idle motion was made, and checked at first, he that made it might be censured for it, though it was seldom, if ever, to be practiced in a free council, where every man was not bound to be wise, nor to make no impertinent motion. But when the motion was entertained, and a debate followed, and a question was put upon it, it was destructive to the freedom of public councils, to call any one to an account for it. They might with the same justice call them to an account for their debates and votes. So that no man was safe, unless he could know where the majority would be. Here would be a precedent to tip down so many lords at a time, and to garboil the house, as often as any party should have a great majority.Burnet, ii. 109-10.
Such arguments did not prevent the consignment of Buckingham, Shaftesbury and their main supporters to the Tower, and when on 20 Mar. 1677 Halifax seconded the motion by George Booth, Baron Delamer that Buckingham and his fellow prisoners should be released from their incarceration, he received little support.
Halifax was a constant attender of the House: he missed only one of the 49 sitting days before the adjournment on 16 Apr. 1677, during which he was named to 35 committees on legislation. His most noticeable activity was being named as a representative of the House in conference: on 4 Apr. on the amendments to the bill for the naturalization of the king’s subjects born abroad; and over 13-16 Apr. in three conferences on the House’s amendments to the supply bill for building warships. At the free conference on 16 Apr. it was reported that the lord chancellor Heneage Finch, Baron Finch, was the primary spokesman for the Lords, who warned of the danger of the bill’s failing because of the Commons’ refusal to accept the Lords’ right to amend money bills, but that after the lord chancellor had finished ‘several of the other lords the managers’, such as Halifax, ‘argued with great sharpness to show the impossibility that the Lords could at this time comply’.
From the Tower Shaftesbury, drawing up his list of the political attitudes of the peerage, marked Halifax as ‘triply worthy’, an acknowledgement that, whatever their personal rivalry at that time, Shaftesbury still considered Halifax an ally in the campaign against Danby and the court. Halifax missed the brief week-long meeting of Parliament of 21-28 May 1677, having retreated to his country estate of Rufford for the spring and summer. Halifax was however kept amply aware of proceedings in both houses of Parliament during this week by his many correspondents present at Westminster, including his brother Henry, recently returned to the Commons for the first time after a by-election in Newark, his first cousin Thomas Thynne, the future Viscount Weymouth, and especially by his uncle Sir William Coventry.
Halifax returned to the capital in early September 1677, and was present for the first sitting day when Parliament did eventually meet again after its long adjournment on 15 Jan. 1678. He was absent for only five of the 61 sittings before the prorogation on 13 May and was named to 20 select committees. On 9 and 15 Mar. he chaired select committees on two bills, and reported one of them to the House on 11 March.
Halifax’s attendance dipped for the session of June and July 1678, when he attended only just 33 of its 43 sittings and was nominated to 18 committees, one of which he chaired and reported from on 10 July.
When the next session began on 21 Oct. 1678, Halifax appears to have been more than ready to exploit the allegations of the Popish Plot, which he seemed to have doubted personally, as a way to further weaken York and to promote limitations on his rule. As he remarked to Burnet when the latter told him of Titus Oates’s allegations, ‘considering the suspicions all people had of the duke’s religion, he believed every discovery of that sort would raise a flame, which the court would not be able to manage’.
Halifax missed only five of the 62 sitting days of this last session of the Cavalier Parliament. On 23 Oct. 1678, he was placed on the committee to draft an address urging the removal of all papists from London and was also named to the committee assigned to examine the papers regarding Oates’s allegations. On 28 Oct. Buckingham persuaded this committee to establish a sub-committee consisting of himself, Halifax and Charles Powlett, 6th marquess of Winchester, to examine the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, with extended powers to secure as well as examine witnesses. In the first two weeks of November Halifax was placed on a further two committees to investigate allegations of an imminent popish attack.
Despite this Halifax at the same time was suspected by some in the Commons of being set against the Test bill to exclude Catholics from Parliament, at least if Anchitell Grey‡ is accurate in his identification of Halifax as the intended target of some comments made by Shaftesbury’s ally Thomas Bennet‡ in the lower House against ‘men of that House [who] talk high without doors, and within are for Popery’. (That Halifax’s friend and colleague Sir William Hickman‡, 2nd bt. rose after these comments to reprimand the speaker does suggest that Halifax was intended.)
Halifax’s involvement with opposition measures continued thereafter. He was placed on the committee for the bill to disable recusants from exercising trades (7 Dec.) and that for the bill to remove recusants’ children from a Catholic education (12 December). On 9 Dec. he was placed on the committee assigned to draw up and then present to the Commons in conference the House’s view that the army troops stationed in England should be disbanded first, before those in Flanders should be allowed to return. A bill to raise supply to disband the army was soon being debated between the Houses and Halifax sided with the country opposition in the Commons who insisted that the money raised be placed in the chamber of the City of London rather than under the king’s control in the exchequer, as he made clear in two protests he signed, on 20 and 26 Dec., against the House’s continuing adherence to its amendment to the bill.
First Exclusion Parliament, 1679
Halifax took a keen interest in the elections of February 1679 and exerted his own electoral influence in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.
Halifax attended 88 per cent of the sittings of this Parliament during which he acted consistently against his old rival Danby. In the debate of 19 Mar. he supported the argument that proceedings on Danby’s impeachment by the Commons could be taken up where they had been left off before the dissolution of the previous Parliament.
I see Lords that except against the rejection of the bill sent down to the Commons who were against the bill while ‘twas here… For hardship here’s none at all because he [Danby] may come in if he pleases. Though the House of Commons rejected your bill I think they proceeded very regularly and certainly ‘tis a very good House of Commons: conferences with them may accommodate the matter… Bring this bill as near as you can to the other if you have that intention… I shall move therefore to have it committed.Add. 28046, f. 56.
In a sense the House did follow part of Halifax’s advice and tried to bring the Commons bill more in line with the intention of its own first bill, amending it to make Danby’s ultimate punishment banishment rather than attainder. It was decided to present the amended bill at a conference and Halifax and Shaftesbury were originally appointed to the committee assigned on 4 Apr. to draft the explanation that was to be presented to the Commons, but were later replaced by Fauconberg and John Colepeper, 2nd Baron Colepeper.
Following Danby’s reappearance on 15 Apr. 1679 Halifax was prominent in the debates surrounding the proceedings for the former lord treasurer’s trial. On 8 May he was named a reporter for a conference at which the Commons requested that a joint committee of both Houses be established to settle trial procedures. Over the following days, Halifax was a keen supporter of this proposition: he subscribed to two protests, on 8 and 10 May, against the House’s rejection of the proposal and was named to manage three more conferences on it over 10-11 May. After the second conference of 11 May the Lords backed down. Halifax was among the 12 members who formed the House’s delegation to join with the Commons to discuss the trial procedures. Halifax stated his opposition to the bishops’ presence in such capital cases as early as a debate of 7 May and four days later he joined 20 other peers to dissent from the House’s resolution that the bishops could attend such a trial until judgment of death was pronounced. He again ‘did his part’ on 19 May, joining Shaftesbury and Buckingham in arguing against the bishops in a debate in committee of the whole House.
Halifax on 7 Apr. joined eight other members of the country opposition in dissenting from the House’s decision to commit John Sidway for his slanderous, and false, ‘informations’ against Peter Gunning, bishop of Ely, and other bishops. He was named to two select committees on 8 Apr., one for the bill for clearing London of papists and the other for the estate bill of Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun. He chaired meetings of the committee on Mohun’s bill on 10, 12, 15, 16 and 17 Apr. and reported it as fit to pass with some amendments on 21 April. He submitted a paper of proposed amendments to the bill against papists in London on 9 Apr. and chaired the committee on the 12th and 17th. When he reported the amendments on 22 Apr. the House determined to discuss the whole matter in committee of the whole.
Against the initial strenuous opposition of Charles II, Halifax was on 21 Apr. 1679 placed on the revamped and expanded Privy Council formulated by Sir William Temple to co-opt members of the opposition into government counsels.
you must excuse me, the king is too artificial for me. I can guess at none of his intentions, nor will I expose myself to be used as my Lord Danby has been, for how the king can intend to make good his pardon [to Danby], and at the same time be principally advised by my Lord Halifax and Lord Essex, whom he has heard say such things about his pardon to his face, I do not understand.Add. 28049, ff. 62-63.
York, cooling his heels in Brussels, was convinced that the king was damaging himself by listening to the advice of such men who ‘will absolutely make him a duke of Venice’. Writing to his friend George Legge three months later, on 22 July 1679, York was concerned by the growing influence of Halifax and Essex, for ‘I have long looked on [them] as men that did not love a monarchy as it was in England’ and he considered Halifax in particular ‘as one of the dangerousest men I knew’.
His ministers were to administer business to him as doctors do physic, wrap it up in something to make it less unpleasant; some skilful digressions were so far from being impertinent that they could not many times fix him to a fair audience without them. His aversion to formality made him dislike a serious discourse, if very long, except it was mixed with something to entertain him. Some even of the graver sort too, used to carry this very far, and rather than fail, use the coarsest kind of youthful talk.Halifax Works, ii. 494-5.
Halifax was eminently suited to convey advice to the king in this entertaining manner, as Burnet, admittedly a hostile witness in regard to Halifax, affirmed:
The liveliness of his imagination was always too hard for his judgment. A severe jest was preferred by him to all arguments whatsoever. And he was endless in consultations: for when after much discourse a point was settled, if he could find a new jest, to make even that which was suggested by himself seem ridiculous, he could not hold, but would study to raise the credit of his wit, though it made others call his judgment in question.
William Legge, earl of Dartmouth, in his notes to Burnet’s History corroborates this aspect of Halifax’s character and style, though he would have had experience of his style only after 1691:
In the House of Lords he affected to conclude all his discourses with a jest, though the subject were never so serious, and if it did not meet with the applause he expected, would be extremely out of countenance and silent, till an opportunity offered to retrieve the approbation he thought he had lost; but was never better pleased than when he was turning Bishop Burnet to ridicule.Burnet, i. 492.
Within only a few days of the new Privy Council’s formation a ‘triumvirate’ (as contemporaries termed it) of Halifax, Sunderland and Essex had emerged as the leading advisers and ministers to the king. Sunderland was initially reluctant to take Halifax into his confidence, warning Temple, Halifax’s main advocate, that he ‘should not find Lord Halifax the person I [i.e. Temple] took him for, but one that could draw with no body, and still climbing up to the top himself’.
Halifax was opposed to the idea of York’s outright exclusion from the English throne from the time of the Commons’ first vote on an exclusion bill on 28 Apr. 1679. Burnet found this attitude puzzling and infused with covert motives:
Lord Halifax’s arguing now so much against the danger of turning the monarchy to be elective was the more extraordinary in him, because he had made an hereditary monarchy the subject of his mirth; and had often said, who takes a coachman to drive him, because his father was a good coachman? Yet he was now jealous of a small slip in the succession. But at the same time he studied to infuse into some a zeal for a commonwealth. And to these he pretended that he preferred limitations to an exclusion, because the one kept up the monarchy still, only passing over one person, whereas the other brought us really into a commonwealth, as soon as we had a popish king over us. And it was said by some of his friends, that the limitations proposed were so advantageous to public liberty, that a man might be tempted to wish for a popish king, to come at them.Burnet, ii. 205-6.
There were a number of strands to Halifax’s opposition to exclusion: fear of an inevitable civil war, as James would be able to count on the support of much of the Irish and Scottish population to reclaim his throne; his long-held preference for and advocacy of ‘expedients’ to limit a Catholic king’s ability to wield political and ecclesiastical authority; and a reluctance to disrupt birthright, as seen in his previous opposition to Test bills which sought to exclude members of the peerage from their seats in the House. Whatever his motives, his opposition to the exclusion Bill deepened: Burnet thought he had become ‘as it were the champion against the exclusion’.
In particular Halifax was hostile to Shaftesbury’s campaign to establish James Scott, duke of Monmouth, as a Protestant pretender and rival to York. When news of the Presbyterian rising in Scotland reached the council, Halifax initially joined the other members of the ‘triumvirate’ in calling for the dismissal of John Maitland, earl of Guilford (better known as duke of Lauderdale [S]), from his governing role in Scotland and for negotiations to be established with the rebels. The king refusing, against the majority advice of the council, to dispense with the trusted Lauderdale, Halifax and the other councilors reluctantly acceded to the request to send an armed expeditionary force against the Presbyterians. Halifax and his colleagues though were concerned when the king appointed his son Monmouth commander-in-chief of the force: it ‘discontented Lord Halifax and Sir William Temple so much that they thought of quitting’.
Fearing the renewed influence of Shaftesbury, the ‘triumvirate’ and Temple decided that the best course was to dissolve Parliament, and they soon found the king in agreement. It was decided by this group to raise the question of a dissolution at the next meeting of the Privy Council, on 3 July 1679. At the meeting that day, however, they were the only ones who expressed support for the measure, having inexplicably failed to canvas their fellow councilors before the meeting. Their suggestion was strongly rejected by the majority of the Council.
On 16 July 1679, only four days after the dissolution, Halifax was further raised in the peerage to an earldom. Halifax was now at the heart of government and had all the marks of royal favour. This change in his position caused Sir John Reresby‡, 2nd bt, Member for Aldborough and formerly a client of Danby, to solicit Halifax’s patronage, especially with an eye to the inevitable forthcoming elections, ‘no man having more interest with the Commons than he had’. Halifax acceded to this request and from this point Reresby became one of his foremost clients, confidants and admirers and, fortunately for later generations, copiously recorded many of his conversations with Halifax, in which the peer ‘opened himself very freely to me in several concerns of his own and the public’.
Not all were as impressed with Halifax’s elevation and closeness to the king as Reresby. Burnet was puzzled by the apparent disparity between Halifax’s previously expressed views and his actual behaviour:
When he talked to me, as a philosopher, of his contempt of the world, I asked him what he meant by getting so many new titles, which I called the hanging himself about with bells and tinsel. He had no other excuse for it, but this, that, since the world were such fools as to value these matters, a man must be a fool for company: he considered them but as rattles: yet rattles please children: so these might be of use to his family. His heart was much set on raising his family.Burnet, i. 492-3.
The new title earned Halifax opprobrium from many of his former colleagues in the country opposition who saw the Parliament elected in February 1679 as the best hope for punishing Danby and effecting exclusion. Even Halifax’s closest kin and associates, such as Sir William Coventry and Thomas Thynne could not help expressing to him grave reservations about the course he had taken, Thynne disingenuously remarking on the day of the dissolution to its actual architect, ‘out of what quiver this arrow comes, I am not prophet enough to divine’.
The elections to the new Parliament were one arena for these rivalries to be fought out. Halifax was keenly interested in their progress, and was kept closely informed of the details of elections in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.
In his previous parliamentary career, Halifax had given ample evidence of his mistrust of York and dislike of the prospect of his unfettered succession to the throne, but his attitude to Shaftesbury, and his opposition to Exclusion, led him for a time to support York in his battle against the pretensions of the king’s natural son Monmouth. When Charles II became seriously ill on 21 Aug. 1679, Halifax, Essex and Sunderland secretly encouraged York to return to court to forestall any advantage Monmouth might gain by the crisis. Halifax and Sunderland were present at the king’s meeting with his brother on 2 Sept., but found themselves in a difficult position following the king’s speedy recovery and were at pains to convince the duke to return to Brussels immediately.
At this point Halifax became seriously ill, and had to withdraw from active business to his house in London.
Lord Halifax fell ill, much from vexation of mind: his spirits were oppressed, a deep melancholy seizing him. For a fortnight together I was once a day with him, and found then that he had deeper impressions of religion on him than those who knew the rest of his life would have thought him capable of. Some foolish people gave it out that he was mad. But I never knew him so near a state of true wisdom as he was at that time. He was much troubled at the king’s forgetting his promise to hold a Parliament that winter; and expostulated severely upon it with some that were sent to him from the king... He was offered to be made secretary of state, but he refused it. Some gave it out that he was pretended to be lord lieutenant of Ireland and was uneasy when that was denied him. But he said to me that it was offered him, and he had refused it.Burnet, ii. 242.
While Halifax was sidelined from business, Charles II had announced in the Privy Council on 15 Oct. 1679 that Parliament would be postponed by short prorogations for an entire year. Upon his recovery Halifax argued strenuously for the Parliament to be allowed to meet, though his hostility to Shaftesbury—on 2 Dec. 1679 Southwell reported to Ormond that Halifax ‘does frankly and professedly revile Shaftesbury in every point of the compass’—prevented him from joining in the petition of the country peers of 6 Dec. 1679 insisting on the immediate convening of Parliament.
Second Exclusion Parliament, 1680
In January 1680 Halifax retreated to Rufford, where Reresby visited him in March and found him ‘angry with the measures then taken’ at court.
Upon his return to the capital in mid-September 1680 Halifax found that Sunderland, Essex, Godolphin and Henry Sydney had all moved towards exclusion, leaving himself as one of the few former country opposition members still willing to take a stand against it. As he wrote to Thynne shortly after returning to Halifax House:
I confess I was a little surprised to see such a change in some of the court in relation to the duke. I am told there is now as much anger against him at Whitehall as there can be at the other end of the town, so industrious his Highness hath been to spoil his own business. The waves beat so high against him that a great part of the world will not hear of any thing less than exclusion. … But yet if there is any possibility of making ourselves safe by lower expedients, I had rather use them, than venture upon so strong a remedy as the disinheriting the next heir of the crown.Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 15, f. 13.
Nevertheless, in October 1680, Halifax cooperated with Essex, Sunderland and Godolphin in persuading the king in council to order York to leave the country for Scotland during the long-delayed parliamentary session, scheduled to meet on 21 Oct. 1680
The Lord Halifax brought in a bill for the speedy discovery and conviction of Papists, and ease of Nonconformists, but so contrived, that both parties are almost equally incensed against him for it. The House of Lords was on Thursday turned into a committee, and, as I hear, will be so every day, to consider of it, and try whether it can be so mended, as to be useful unto the ends intended. I know not whether that can be done or no; but I could have wished, that intending to oblige above a million of men, that go under the name of nonconformists, he had been pleased to consult with one of that number, concerning the ways of doing it.Halifax Letters, i. 243.
Both contemporaries and some later commentators have seen the debate on the exclusion bill, conducted in committee of the whole House on 15 Nov. 1680, as primarily an oratorical duel between Halifax and Shaftesbury (and secondarily his more recent associate Essex), conducted ‘in spleen’.
The sketchy notes of the debate taken by Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon, and James II’s own memoirs suggest that Halifax’s principal argument was that Exclusion would inevitably lead to civil war, as he was assured that James ‘will immediately fall on us’. Such a move could prompt York to raise forces in Ireland and Scotland, and York was already in control of the government and army in the northern kingdom, which previously had ‘made a figure in the world when separated from England’. He also wondered pointedly who would be trusted in government after such an exclusion, as so many, in both Houses, had been implicated in the government of the royal brothers up to this point. He made clear that he had long distrusted the Catholic heir and continued to do so. ‘I believe the duke a papist’, he pronounced, ‘he must suffer’ and suggested instead an alternative bill of ‘expedients’ which would limit the ability of a Catholic monarch to govern and rule the English Church and state. When Essex, sensing that the bill was in danger under Halifax’s onslaught, moved ‘before the bill is thrown out to offer expedients’ to it, Halifax rejected this as well, replying that the ‘motion is unparliamentary and unpracticable’ and that it was ‘not agreeable to the debates amongst mankind that before a law is offered to find expedients’. He stated that ‘he is against exclusion as so bad that it is impossible to mend the bill and therefore it signifies nothing to retain the bill’ .
Contemporaries were quick to see Halifax’s oratory as the main cause of the bill’s defeat by a majority of 33, after a debate which lasted about ten hours and did not end until 11 at night. Reresby thought that Halifax ‘having a great deal of wit, and both judgment and eloquence with it, he made so fine and so powerful a defence that he only (for so all confessed) persuaded the whole House against it’. Cooke told Ormond that Halifax ‘did so outdo his usual argument he cleared many eyes (purblinded by prepossession) to vote against the bill’.
Jotham of piercing wit and pregnant thought,
Endued by nature and by learning taught
To move assemblies, who but only tried
The worse a while, then chose the better side,
Nor chose alone, but turned the balance too,
So much the weight of one brave man can do.POAS, ii. 488 and n.
From the other end of the political divide Anne, countess of Sunderland, lamented to Henry Sidney that, following the defeat of the bill, Halifax was ‘the king’s favourite and hated more than ever the Lord Treasurer [Danby] was and has really deserved it. For he has undone all’.
The House took up the matter of ‘expedients’ to replace the rejected Exclusion bill over the following days, 16-17 Nov., when Shaftesbury put forth a plan for the king’s legal divorce and remarriage to a Protestant princess. The proposal was rejected by Halifax, who, according to Barrillon, ended his speech by making some aspersions on the vagaries of Shaftesbury’s previous political career, and especially his role in promulgating and defending the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence, which Halifax termed ‘a declaration for establishing liberty of conscience in favour of papists’. Yet any gratitude York may have felt towards Halifax for his role in the defeat of the Exclusion Bill was quickly dispelled when he learned of the expedients proposed by Halifax himself, which included the duke’s banishment from England for five years, ‘if the king lived so long’, which York thought ‘was as bad as a stab with a dagger’ and ‘of as bad consequence if not worse to me, and much worse for the monarchy, than the bill that was thrown out’.
When the address was debated in council, Halifax offered to retire from business voluntarily, but the king rejected it. Sunderland ostensibly supported his brother-in-law in council, but later remonstrated with him, telling him that if such an address were ever to be made against himself, he would ask leave of the king to retire, for the good of the king’s own service. Halifax stormed out of the room, and from that point relations between the brothers-in-law were irreparably broken.
Many of the measures of the bill ‘for securing the Protestant religion’, first read in the Lords on 29 Nov. 1680, which set out a series of limitations on the rule of a Catholic successor, were closely akin to some of the expedients Halifax had earlier suggested, and met with predictably strong opposition from York. The bill fell at the prorogation, having been caught in the press of business surrounding the trial of the Catholic William Howard, Viscount Stafford. On 7 Dec. Halifax took the side of Stafford, and voted him not guilty at his trial in Westminster Hall, another vote that caused consternation among his erstwhile friends.
First minister, 1681-2
On 10 Jan. 1681, Charles responded by proroguing Parliament and eight days later dissolved it, calling another for 21 Mar. 1681 in Oxford. Reresby thought that Halifax ‘seemed averse to this dissolution in his discourse, but it was but a grimace, for he had no reason to wish that Parliament long lived that used him with such freedom’.
the king would not call a Parliament so speedily as was believed; that the king was slow to resolve where any difficulty arose; that he [Halifax] intended to go to Parliament whenever it assembled, but that afterward he would leave the court and business, except his Majesty would be advised to do such things as were for the public good, change some officers about him, and take such in their rooms as would act according to the present counsel. For it would ruin all if his majesty continued to advise with those of one interest this day, and harken to those of another tomorrow, nor could his ministers be safe under such uncertainty’.Reresby Mems. 215.
In the weeks preceding the Oxford Parliament, Halifax was involved in negotiations on proposals for further expedients to mitigate the rule of the Catholic prince, including a project, attributed to Halifax as well as to a number of other contemporary statesmen, to establish a regency in James’s name under his daughter Mary, princess of Orange.
I hear my old friend my Lord Halifax said my petition was ill-timed for spoiling the king’s business and that it ought to have been to be tried and not to be bailed. I hope both his advice and his arguments will be better for the king’s business when the matter concerns his Majesty for in the first place I moved for bail and not for trial only in consideration of not hindering the king’s business… and yet my Lord Halifax is for going with it to the Commons, which is the only means by which any danger can arise of interrupting other business. I am sorry to find my Lord Halifax joined with Lord Essex, Shaftesbury, Salisbury, etc as men who he thinks now ready to promote the king’s business than my friends who he judges to be obstructors of it desiring a little fresh air for me after two years’ imprisonment.Add. 28049, ff. 134-5.
On 26 Mar. the House rejected the motion that Edward Fitzharris should be impeached before Parliament, rather than prosecuted by course of the inferior courts, and Tillotson later wrote to Halifax lamenting that ‘our friends came very warm and not a little dissatisfied with your lordship’ because Halifax had voted against the motion.
After the dissolution of Parliament Halifax went to Rufford and affected a retirement from business, but it was obvious that he would not be allowed to remain away from government for long. In mid-April there already were unfounded rumours that he would soon replace Ormond as lord lieutenant of Ireland, while others saw an imminent appointment as secretary of state or claimed that he was to be made marquess of Dorchester and that he was angry with Lord Chancellor Finch for claiming the title of Nottingham in May 1681, ‘wherein he had long set his heart’.
From the time of Halifax’s return in late May to consult with the king until York’s eventual return to the English court the following March, Halifax in effect acted as the king’s principal adviser and minister. Reresby wrote that in the summer of 1681 Halifax ‘was become the entire favourite’, ‘the chief favourite and minister’ of the king.
It was from this period, when Halifax acted as the king’s chief minister in 1681-2, that Burnet based his judgment that Halifax ‘went backwards and forwards, and changed sides so often, that in conclusion no side trusted him. He seemed full of commonwealth notions: yet he went into the worst part of King Charles’s reign’. Burnet suspected that ‘his resentments’ against the Whigs who had passed the vote against him ‘wrought so violently on him, that he seemed to be gone off from all his former notions’. In the autumn of 1681 Halifax encouraged Burnet to make his peace with the court, and even brought him to an interview before the king, but ultimately warned him that he faced continued disfavour because of the company he kept—principally Essex, William Russell‡, styled Lord Russell, and Sir William Jones‡, who had all been Halifax’s own political allies just two years previously. Burnet for his part suspected that Halifax was ‘deep’ in attempts to prejudice the forthcoming trial of Shaftesbury, ‘though he always expressed an abhorrence of such practices’. On Shaftesbury’s unexpected release in November, Halifax promised Reresby that he would convince those who doubted his loyalty that he was a true servant of the king by his future ‘demeanour’ towards Shaftesbury.
The question of how to counteract French influence at the English court, especially in the context of increased French aggression on the continent, also much preoccupied Halifax during the ‘personal rule’ of Charles II in 1681-2. But Halifax’s influence on the king was limited by the terms of the verbal agreement Charles II had entered into with France at the time of the Oxford Parliament, by which he undertook not to summon Parliament again and not to take military action against France in return for 3,000,000 crowns to be paid over three years. Halifax was appointed on 1 Aug. 1681 a commissioner to treat with the Spanish and Dutch ambassadors concerning an alliance to ‘guarantee’ the terms of the treaty of Nijmegen. Reresby summed up the situation and Halifax’s views in the autumn of 1681:
He… told me that if it were not for the king of France his interest here he did not question but to put England into a very happy state and condition in a short time, but there was now no hopes of a Parliament, except that king should make some new attempt upon Flanders, and an emergency of that kind would venture as it might be handled to reconcile all things. … This occasion happened soon after, that news came that the French king had taken Strasbourg [30 Sept. 1681] where the command of the Rhine would fall into his hands… our king could afford them [the United Provinces] no help without a Parliament to supply him with money, which it was feared the present jealousies would either prevent, or, if they gave him money, would not trust him with the disposal of it. The king of France knew this and made an advantage of it, so that [what] the good my Lord Halifax expected from this occasion did not appear very probable as yet.Reresby Mems. 233.
Halifax acted as the principal proponent at court of an aggressive anti-French policy and an alliance with the United Provinces and Spain.
My Lord Halifax argued for [summoning a Parliament] for these reasons, that all Christendom desired it, France only excepted, and that nothing ought to discourage it at home but the fear that they might fly upon high points, which if they did, the king might dismiss or dissolve it when he pleased, and show the world that it was their fault, not his, that he endeavoured to give satisfaction to his people by frequent Parliaments; but if the king and they agreed, his Majesty would then gain the great point to be united at home and formidable abroad.Reresby Mems. 248-9.
On 17 Mar. 1682 Louis surprisingly announced that he would withdraw from Luxembourg and Halifax provided his own explanation of this sudden change in his Character of a Trimmer, written only a few years afterwards:
The true ground of [the French king’s] retiring is worth our observation; for at the instance of the Confederates, offices were done, and memorials given, but all ineffectual till the word Parliament was put into them. That powerful word had such an effect that even at that distance it raised the siege: which may convince us of what efficacy the king of England’s words are, when he will give them their full weight, and threaten with his Parliament.Halifax Works, i. 230.
Court rivalries, 1682-5
For from the spring of 1682 Halifax’s influence at court began to be supplanted by that of York himself, who was finally given leave by the king to return to England for a brief visit to Newmarket in early March 1682. The heir presumptive had maintained an antagonism and distrust towards Halifax throughout 1681, seeing him as his leading opponent on the council who had been able almost single-handedly to undermine York’s plea to be allowed to return to court in August 1681.
Soon after York’s return, Sunderland, whom Burnet claimed Halifax ‘hated beyond expression’, was, through the offices of the duchess of Portsmouth and York, brought back to court.
At the end of January 1683 Halifax’s position at court and in councils was overtaken by the promotion of Sunderland as secretary of state, under the patronage of Portsmouth and York.
The breach between Halifax and Rochester grew even wider with this affair for, again according to Reresby in his copious conversations with Halifax at this time, the public in general praised Halifax for protecting the king’s interest, while the court faction centred around York, Rochester and the duchess of Portsmouth increasingly acted against him for stirring up the controversy. Halifax admitted to Reresby that ‘he knew not how long he should keep his station (being driven at so fiercely by some) but he did think he had the king his friend, and could not believe that he would part with him for having committed no fault’.
he had enemies enough besides, and that his displeasure against him [Danby] was now ceased; but he would not make more enemies by being his friend, as he had formerly done by being his enemy. So that I [Reresby] found my lord privy seal making up his interest on one side, as my Lord Rochester was endeavouring on the other; for he had also sent for Mr [Edward] Seymour to return to Court, and had promised to be his friend ... he said it would be hard for him to continue there with these men, for it was their interest to remove him. They would be apt to play tricks for their own advantage… Upon the whole I perceived my lord privy seal had the better (and the most approved) cause, and my Lord Rochester the better interest. The first weighed more in parts, in his family, estate, and his reputation in the nation; the other weighed more (though undeservedly) with the duke of York, the duchess of Portsmouth, my Lord Ormond, and most of those at court, who depend upon the king’s purse, of which his lordship was the chief dispenser.Reresby Mems. 298-300.
During this period of court intrigue Halifax also saw the marriages of two of his children. His only daughter by his first wife, Anne, married John Vaughan, later 2nd Baron Vaughan and 3rd earl of Carbery [I], a man 24 years her senior, in late September 1682. In March 1681 Reresby had acted as a mediator for a marriage between Halifax’s heir, Henry Savile, Lord Eland, and the duke of Newcastle’s daughter Catherine, but these negotiations were finally broken off in September 1681 over Newcastle’s refusal to give his daughter a suitable portion, leading Halifax to make particularly acerbic comments about his brother-in-law the duke.
Halifax played a shadowy, and perhaps reluctant, part in the ‘Tory revenge’ which reached its peak with the executions following the revelations of the Rye House Plot and the wholescale remodeling of corporations. Weymouth certainly suggested in a letter of 25 June 1683 that Halifax would have been pleased by both the recent Tory capture of the shrievalty of London and the revelations of the Rye House Plot: ‘The City is now at your feet, and a new plot comes opportunely to justify all that you have [done] or shall do’.
Halifax’s enemies also later accused him of encouraging the surrender of borough charters and instigating quo warranto proceedings against corporations. After the surrender of the charter of the City of London, which Halifax appears to have opposed, in January 1684 he was placed on a special commission to ‘supervise all things concerning the City’, which turned out corporation officials ‘who are whiggishly inclined’.
Halifax did use the Rye House Plot revelations to urge more strenuously that a new Parliament be summoned, arguing that the outpouring of loyalism in the wake of the Plot would guarantee a co-operative session, and also reminding Charles II of the terms of the Triennial Act of 1664, which required a new Parliament to be summoned by spring 1684. In this he constantly encountered the opposition of Rochester. Strong words were reported to have passed between them in early July and Richard Grahme‡, Viscount Preston [S], wrote to Halifax from Paris on 6 Oct. 1683 that he had been told by one of the French ministers ‘that they have accounts from England that upon a consultation whether the king should at this time call a Parliament or not, your lordship and Secretary [Leoline] Jenkins were for it, and that my Lords of Sunderland and Rochester opposed it’.
Halifax also displeased York and his followers Rochester and Sunderland in his attempts to reconcile the duke’s rival Monmouth, who had fled the country following the Rye House Plot allegations, with his father the king. Earlier Halifax had, on 21 May 1682, almost engaged in a duel with Monmouth after the young duke had accosted the earl after Sunday prayers about advice Halifax had allegedly given against Monmouth in council. Halifax may have tried to have his revenge on this affront by proposing in council that no members of the king’s court have any further communication with the duke, but this proposal was apparently scuppered by Ormond.
I found the duke of York was much displeased with my lord privy seal (though he showed it not openly), that he was not consulted in the affair of bringing in the duke of Monmouth; and it was my lord privy seal his expression that the duke would never forgive him. But the king being the chief instrument of it, it did not appear that his lordship lost any interest with him, though the duke of Monmouth performed not what was expected from him.
York used Christopher Monck, 2nd duke of Albemarle, to convey to Halifax, through Reresby, York’s extreme displeasure at Halifax’s actions.
Despite this setback Halifax also worked to bring another ‘exiled’ figure back into the court. In January 1684 Danby used Chesterfield and Reresby to enlist the marquess in having him released from the Tower. Halifax told Reresby at this time that ‘it would be done, that he was that lord’s friend in the thing’, and Danby’s kinsmen on their part told him of Halifax’s efforts and urged him to reconcile with Halifax. Rochester and Sunderland both strongly opposed the release, though underhand, fearing lest Danby and Halifax would join to weaken their interest.
Halifax had undoubtedly lost influence at court, however. His repeated and earnest urging of the king to call a Parliament, arguing that the longer the king waited the worse the Parliament elected would be, was increasingly pointless. By April, despite Halifax’s assurances that he was still in the king’s good favour, it was ‘visible’ to Reresby that his friend ‘was less in business than before’.
In contrast to Burnet, the Tory Roger North‡ had little but praise for Halifax’s role in the government in this period. The marquess (whom North misnames ‘Sir Henry Savile’) ‘was a person of incomparable wit, formerly a malcontent also but came in to rescue the crown and continued firm all King Charles the Second’s reign’. North was also insistent that the good governance overseen by Guilford and Halifax began to break down from spring 1684.
Halifax expanded on the theme in his tract The Character of a Trimmer, which was originally circulated in manuscript in late 1684 and early 1685. The whole matter of ‘trimming’ as a recognizable political creed in the 1680s, and Halifax’s role in it has been much discussed.
We are now come under the three denominations of Tories, Whigs and trimmers… The language of the last is moderation, unity and peace, enjoining with the Whigs in the care of religion and property and with the Tories for monarchy and army and legal prerogative, but it is so easy to slip into either of the extremes from such a mediocrity that as their principles are inscrutable so they may be thought to be their interest and safety. Those of this temper I am sure think the earl [sic] of Halifax to be their patron… yet in consultations he yet is in most things unanimous with the thoroughest Tories. But where there is any difference of opinion it seemed to me to lead to the trimming way.Carte 219, f. 417.
The accession of James II came only weeks after its composition. The new king made it clear very quickly that he had no intention of following a ‘trimming’ course.
James II, 1685-8
Almost immediately after his accession James II reshuffled his ministerial offices, not surprisingly to Halifax’s detriment: he was moved to the office of lord president of the council, to replace Rochester, now the lord treasurer. Rochester’s brother, Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, became lord privy seal. ‘Whether this preferment (though a degree higher as to place) was desired or not by his lordship was a doubt, the trust and profit of privy seal being thought to be greater’, Reresby noted.
Halifax attended all but two of the meetings of James II’s Parliament that first met on 19 May 1685, on which day he was introduced in the House in his new title of marquess, between Clarendon and Shrewsbury. On 1 June he received the proxy of his nephew William Pierrepont, 4th earl of Kingston and his complement of proxies was complete 15 days later when Shrewsbury likewise registered his with the marquess. He was named to 12 committees and reported on 26 June from the committee of the whole considering a naturalization bill. By early September 1685, following the defeat of Monmouth’s Rebellion, it was expected in many quarters that Halifax would soon be made first commissioner of the great seal, or even made lord chancellor.
Halifax worked hard to persuade his friend Chesterfield to come to Westminster for the next sitting of Parliament in early November 1685 to help defeat the king’s proposal to repeal the Test Acts. He assured the earl that there were the numbers sufficient to defeat it, even among some previously obedient ‘court lords’, such as Danby, John Egerton*[426], 2nd earl of Bridgwater and Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, who were now willing to defend ‘the strongest bulwarks of all that is left us’. These arguments fell on deaf ears, and Chesterfield hoped that Halifax would accept his proxy instead. On 10 Nov., the day following the commencement of the reconvened Parliament, Halifax continued to urge Chesterfield strongly to attend: ‘I could wish with all my heart, that you would overrule your aversion to the journey, since I make very much difference between my Lord of Chesterfield and his proxy. I know of what weight your assistance is in speaking, as well as your countenance in being present’. Failing Chesterfield’s agreement Halifax insisted that he be true to his promise and ‘that you will immediately give order that I may have your proxy’. Chesterfield replied on 13 Nov. that he had ordered his servant in London to cause his proxy for Halifax to be entered in the register by the clerk of the House, although there is now no record of this proxy in the registers.
The proxies Halifax already held from Kingston and Shrewsbury were vacated by their presence in the House on the first day of the reconvened Parliament, 9 Nov. 1685. On that day Halifax helped to introduce into the House Henry Fitzroy, duke of Grafton. Sources give conflicting accounts of whether it was Halifax or William Cavendish* [1404], 4th earl of Devonshire, who first responded, with heavy irony, to the King’s Speech of the 9th, in which he announced his plans to continue the Catholic officers in the army and to exempt them from the Test Act, that ‘they had now more reason than ever to give thanks to his Majesty, since he had dealt so plainly with them, and discovered what he would be at’.
In the weeks following the surprise prorogation of 20 Nov. 1685, there were further signals of Halifax’s fall from royal favour. On 3 Dec. 1685 Sunderland was named to the office of lord president of the Council vacated by Halifax and early in 1686 Halifax was left out of the commission of peers assigned to sit in judgment on Delamer.
A number of family events and losses marked the years 1686-7. On 23 June 1686 his uncle and long-term political associate Sir William Coventry died, depriving Halifax of his first political mentor and guide. His other Coventry uncle, the former secretary of state Henry, to whom Halifax appears to have been less close, died on 7 Dec. 1686.
Halifax’s dynastic situation was radically transformed by the unexpected death of Lord Eland in October 1687 who, according to Roger Morrice, ‘had lived as extravagant a life as any man of this age’.
When his son William had set out on a tour of the United Provinces in late 1686, Halifax had taken the opportunity, through the requisite letter of introduction, to commence a correspondence with William, prince of Orange. His first letter to the prince dates from December 1686 and discusses the prospects of Parliament reconvening for business in February, which Halifax doubted (and was soon proved right, as the Parliament was merely prorogued on 15 Feb. 1687).
the men at the helm are certainly divided amongst themselves, which will produce great effects, if men will let it work, and not prevent the advantages that may be expected, by being too unquiet, or doing things out of season; the great thing to be done now, is to do nothing, but wait for the good consequences of their divisions and mistakes. Unseasonable stirrings, or anything that looketh like the Protestants being the aggressors, will tend to unite them, and by that means will be a disappointment to those hopes, which otherwise can hardly fail. Nothing, therefore, in the present conjuncture can be more dangerous than unskillful agitators, warm men who would be active at a wrong time, and want patience to keep their zeal from running away with them… There can be nothing better recommended to you, than the continuance of the method which you practice; neither to comply in anything that is unfit, not to provoke further anger by any act that is unnecessary.Dalrymple, Mems. (1790), ii(1), appendix to book V, pp. 95-99.
Halifax himself, though, was not inactive in 1687-8 against the king’s measures. As a governor of the Charterhouse, in January 1687 Halifax strenuously opposed a Catholic candidate put forward for election by the king’s ministers Jeffreys and Sunderland, arguing that the king’s dispensation of the candidate from the Test Acts was illegal and ‘unwarrantable by the laws of England’.
Revolution, 1688
Halifax did not participate in the plotting of the Revolution, even though, according to Burnet, he had been approached by Henry Sydney on the subject.
Halifax was initially supportive of the design of Rochester and Clarendon to address the king on the necessity of calling a Parliament, though he raised some scruples lest the address attracted too few signatories and was anxious to know before he himself signed who else would join him. On 12 Nov., though, Clarendon was nonplussed when he was presented with an address of Halifax’s own composition, which effectively forestalled his own effort. When Clarendon went to discuss this with Halifax, the marquess expressed his ‘indifference’ whether a petition was submitted at all as well as a refusal to put his own name to any petition which also contained the signatures of discredited servants of the regime such as Jeffreys or those who had sat in the ecclesiastical commission, who included Rochester. An address was eventually prepared by Clarendon, Rochester and some of the bishops, without the signature of Halifax, Nottingham or Weymouth, and presented to the king on 17 November.
After his return from Salisbury, James summoned another meeting of the peers on 27 Nov 1688, where Halifax and Nottingham, by James’s own account, spoke ‘with great respect and seeming concern... they thought there was no remedy except it could be had by a treaty with the prince of Orange’.
Lord Halifax spoke very flatteringly; that he would not join in the petition, because he believed it would displease the king and he should always be very tender of doing that. Besides, he thought the meeting of a Parliament at this time very impracticable, though, he must own, he would never at any time advise against the calling of a Parliament... This lord is a strange man’.
But Clarendon did have to admit that Halifax and Nottingham ‘laid all miscarriages open; though in smoother words than I had done’. In spite of Halifax’s misgivings it was decided at this meeting to re-issue the writs to a Parliament, and to proclaim its imminent meeting. The advice of Halifax and Nottingham was followed, however, in that it was also agreed to send commissioners to treat with William of Orange.
The commission was conferred on 30 Nov. on the three peers, and Clarendon recorded that Halifax ‘pretended not to be pleased with the employment’.
From these snatched conversations with members of William’s English entourage, the commissioners, perhaps led by Halifax, were able to report to the secretary of state, Charles Middleton‡, 2nd earl of Middleton [S], in a letter of 8 Dec. that there was no likelihood that the prince would halt his march on the capital. There has long been speculation whether it was the despairing tone of the dispatch from the commissioners on 8 Dec. which prompted James II’s flight, and whether Halifax had pitched the letter with that specific goal in view, as was charged by his Jacobite opponents, basing themselves on a short and inconclusive passage in Burnet.
After his return to the capital, Halifax was on 12 Dec. 1688 requested to act as chair of the ‘provisional government’ of peers and bishops meeting at Guildhall which took upon itself the administration of the country in the king’s absence. He remained moderator of this assembly until the king’s return to the capital on 16 December. After this provisional government was formally disbanded, Halifax repaired to the prince of Orange, now based at Windsor. Here he chaired, and took notes on, a meeting on 17 Dec. of William’s followers at which they discussed steps to take in the face of James’s return.
After James’s second flight, Halifax, at least according to an anecdote later retailed by Dartmouth, was bold enough to assure the prince that ‘he might be what he pleased himself, for as nobody knew what to do with him, so nobody knew what to do without him’.
By this time Halifax had become one of William’s principal confidants and had begun recording notes on his conversations with the king. On 30 Dec. 1688 Halifax noted that William ‘catched at proposals, not having time to examine them’ and commented on his ‘aversion to talk with many together’ and how he ‘loveth single conversations’. Halifax appears to have been from this early date the principal recipient of these ‘single conversations’ to whom William told his suspicions of Clarendon and Rochester as well as of John Churchill, Baron Churchill. William also already showed a distrust of the Whigs, whom he considered a ‘Commonwealth party’ which hoped to make him merely ‘a duke of Venice’, and of the Tories, with their plans for a regency.
Convention, 1689
Halifax continued his pivotal role during the Convention itself, particularly during its important and influential early proceedings. Without a lord chancellor or a lord keeper in being at the time of the Convention’s first meeting on 22 Jan. 1689, the House was forced to choose a Speaker pro tempore and, having already worked under Halifax’s guidance in late December, chose him.
Halifax took to his role with vigour and energy, and acted on behalf of the Williamite cause. Burnet thought that in an attempt ‘by his zeal for the prince’s interest, to atone for his backwardness in not coming early into it’ Halifax advocated giving William himself the crown outright, to the exclusion of Mary. John Colepeper, 2nd Baron Colepeper, was, according to Burnet, the only other peer to hold this view at this time.
Halifax had made clear his own sentiments at the meeting of 28 Jan. 1689 when he moved that the prayers to the king which usually opened proceedings ‘might be suspended till further order’.
In the debates over the following days, Halifax continued to support the Commons’ vote of 28 Jan. that James had abdicated and that the throne was vacant and needed to be filled. On 31 Jan. he even voted to insert words proclaiming the prince and princess of Orange king and queen in place of ‘that the throne is thereby vacant’, and he signed the protest against the rejection of the original wording of the Commons’ vote. He made his reasons clear to Reresby in a meeting on 1 Feb.:
My Lord Halifax told me that night that he was not privy to this design of the prince’s coming at the first, but now that he was here, and upon so good an occasion, we were obliged to defend him. I acquainted him with what I heard, that Lord Danby expected preference before him in the prince’s favour. He gave me some reasons which satisfied me to the contrary, and that his lordship began to lag in his zeal for the prince’s interest in the House of Lords… My Lord Halifax spoke further that himself should be employed and used some arguments to me to prove the legality of accepting to be so. One was, that the king having relinquished the government, it was not for that to be let fall, and it could not be supported if men did not act under those on whom it was conferred, and that as things stood now salus populi was suprema lex.Reresby Mems. 547-8.
On 3 Feb. Halifax was confirmed in his determination by a meeting with the prince of Orange and other of his advisers at which William made clear his intention to settle for nothing less than the crown in his own right, with Mary as joint sovereign at most.
so unfair was he in the chair, that he would do nothing but what he pleased... So much haste was his Lordship in, and so much zeal did he and others show to unsettle the old and set up a new government, that they thought every hour’s delay a ruin to the undertaking which some of them had made.Clarendon Corresp. ii. 259-60.
Clarendon continued to be frustrated by Halifax on 6 Feb., when
all that was said [by Clarendon and James’s other supporters] was violently opposed by the other party, most eminently by my Lord Halifax, who thought he answered all the weighty reasons of the other Lords with the pretence of necessity; saying that the Crown was only made elective pro hac vice, and then reverted to its hereditary channel again.Clarendon Corresp. ii. 261.
On the other side of the political spectrum Roger Morrice felt that ‘none spoke more excellently at this time than Halifax and Danby according to their respective talents which are very great, and few speeches made in this House have exceeded either of them’.
On 13 Feb. 1689, Halifax had the duty of presenting, on behalf of the Convention, both the recently-drafted Declaration of Rights and the offer of the crown to the prince and princess of Orange at the Banqueting House, and within 24 hours of William’s and Mary’s acceptance of the crown, Halifax was appointed to the monarchs’ new Privy Council. Much more was expected, but the rivalry between the two old foes Halifax and Danby was bound to complicate the distribution of posts. Initially Halifax won this particular battle. While Danby, according to Halifax’s account to Reresby, had initially expected to be made lord chancellor or lord treasurer, he had had to settle for the lord presidency, while Halifax had chosen the office of lord privy seal himself and had been given it. It was the second time he held the post.
Halifax was at the heart of William’s new government and was probably the new king’s closest English adviser. His many notes of his conversations with William during the first months of his reign as king show both the confidence in which William held him and the fascination with which Halifax observed this other example of kingship and rule, so very different from that of Charles II. Nevertheless, they show a certain lack of confidence in both William’s abilities and the permanence of the regime, views which he repeated openly to Reresby. Halifax said that William ‘was desirous to be king yet really shrunk at the burden, at the very first putting on of his crown… [He] said he fancied, he was like a king in a play’. Furthermore Halifax credited himself with seeing through the appointment of his friends and colleagues Nottingham and Shrewsbury as secretaries of state. The king initially opposed the appointment of the latter, complaining that ‘he was a young king with a young secretary’. William decided that in the bewildering world of English, even British, politics, ‘he must not yet declare himself, but must be a Trimmer’. These notes also provide evidence of the continuing rivalry and distrust between Halifax and Carmarthen (as Danby had been created in April), although Halifax was anxious to record in his notes, ‘for his own justification’, that William thought the maintenance of the feud largely came from Carmarthen’s side.
At the heart of Halifax’s concerns was the conduct of the war in which England was engaged from William’s first coming to the throne.
Halifax supported both the Toleration bill and the legislative initiatives in favour of comprehension, but was apt to blame both the ‘Church of England’ and the ‘Presbyterians’ for the failure of the latter. The Churchmen ‘had rather turn papists than take in the Presbyterians amongst them... the Presbyterians hated the Church of England men as much, and spoiled their own business by the ill preparing of their bill of comprehension, and the untimely offering of other bills and matters in both Houses to disoblige those from whom they expected this indulgence’. He thought the plans to relegate the comprehension bill to consideration by Convocation would kill it. According to Reresby Halifax strongly urged in the debates of 19-23 Mar. 1689 that the sacramental test should be omitted from the revised oaths to the new monarchs, against the opposition of Churchmen such as Nottingham and Danby and even Whigs such as Devonshire.
Old resentments continued to plague Halifax. His support for both Comprehension and Toleration, as well as his earlier avowal of William of Orange’s claim to the throne, condemned Halifax in the eyes of the High Church Tories.
The most sustained attacks on Halifax came in the Commons and especially on and after 1 June 1689 when it took up consideration of what they perceived as the grievous miscarriages in the stalled Irish campaign, for which many Whigs blamed Halifax, a prominent figure in the Irish committee of the Privy Council. On that day John Grobham (‘Jack’) Howe‡ argued that the Commons ‘must come to the root’ of the problem, culminating in a motion to address the king for the removal of all such Privy Councillors ‘as have been impeached in Parliament’, which Narcissus Luttrell‡ and his contemporaries saw as distinctly aimed against Carmarthen and Halifax. At the same time the Commons committee investigating the Irish campaign was especially assigned to investigate ‘who has been the occasion of the delays in sending relief over to Ireland’, another veiled attack on Halifax. Debate on the motion was adjourned until early the following week, and during the interim the Whigs rustled up a virulent petition from the City calling for an inquiry ‘into several mismanagements ancient and modern’, while the court put pressure on Howe. The City petition was never presented and when debate on the Commons address was resumed on 4 June Howe proved unwilling to name the councillors he had in mind and the motion was laid aside.
These moves by the Commons against Halifax were met by increasing anger from the king.
No longer Speaker, Halifax did not have to sit in every meeting of the second session of the Convention when it reconvened two days after the prorogation, on 23 Oct. 1689. He was still attentive, and came to all but six of the meetings. Furthermore, he was eligible for committee nominations and was named to five committees considering legislation. He was also, as lord privy seal, dispatched to the king with an address, whose reception he reported to the House on 18 Nov., and was placed on the drafting committee established on 9 Dec. for an address urging the king to put into execution the laws against papists residing in the capital.
On 2 Nov. 1689 the duke of Bolton, a professed Whig enemy of Halifax, moved in the House, that a committee be established to consider who were the advisers of the ‘murders’ of Lord Russell, Algernon Sydney, Sir Thomas Armstrong‡, and others, as well as who were the advisers of the quo warrantos against corporations. Burnet was clear that this ‘committee of inspections’ (sometimes dubbed the ‘Murder Committee’) ‘was levelled at Halifax’.
The committee’s request to have access to the council registers for the 1680s was ‘readily granted’ on 9 Dec. and the committee’s protracted proceedings soon began. Halifax took hurried notes of the testimony on several of the days, and the marginal notes to these suggest that he was also formulating and asking questions of the witnesses. Another set of notes on the testimony, those of the earl of Huntingdon, suggest that Halifax asked his most determined enemies a number of searching questions. Halifax recorded the testimony heard before the committee on 15 Nov. from Tillotson about his letter to Lord Russell, urging him to renounce the principle of resistance. If the committee had expected Tillotson to provide damaging evidence of Halifax’s involvement in Russell’s death it badly backfired as Tillotson took pains to praise the solicitude with which Halifax had tried to rescue Russell from death and emphasized that Russell to the very end was grateful for his assistance. More troublesome was the testimony of the next few days—on 18, 20 and 22 Dec.— concerning the duke of Monmouth’s ‘confession’ of knowledge of the Rye House Plot which Halifax ‘persuaded’ the young man to sign in December 1683. John Hampden blamed Halifax directly for the duke’s ruin by ‘overbearing’ Monmouth into signing it. Hampden claimed that the cowed Monmouth’s recognition of the Plot had ‘murdered’ him, Hampden, as much as Russell had been murdered (Hampden, though tried for high treason on account of the Rye House Plot, had secured a pardon from James II, but was a broken man as a result). According to Huntingdon’s notes on proceedings in the committee that day, Halifax asked Hampden whether he and his wife had not acknowledged at the time that Halifax had tried to mitigate Hampden’s hardship.
The committee’s report was heard and debated in the House on 20 Dec. 1689. A further series of manuscript notes in Halifax’s hand suggest that on that day he also rebutted incisively and with a great deal of irony and acerbity each of the points of the testimony on Halifax’s role in Monmouth’s confession. To Hampden’s claim that he had been murdered as much as Lord Russell, Halifax commented, ‘his next business was to give evidence he was dead: and really he had almost persuaded me into it for from a living man I never heard such evidence’ and to his further claims that his long imprisonment had damaged his memory, Halifax commented drily, ‘an inconvenient preface for a witness’. Referring to Hampden’s humiliating confession in 1685, made to escape harsh punishment, Halifax could not resist the pun, ‘let him be contented with the honour of a confessor without pretending to that of a martyr’. There are also notes for his rebuttal of the allegations of Dr Hugh Chamberlain on some distantly remembered words Chamberlain claimed the marquess had said to him in the public gallery at Whitehall, that ‘the King must have the Charter’, a reference to Charles II’s desire to revoke the London city charter. ‘White Hall galleries [are] a fine private place for such a secret’, Halifax sneered in response.
Nevertheless, the attacks continued. The Dutch envoy wrote to his masters on 3 Dec. 1689 that
In the Upper House certain members remain very resolved upon the removal [of] the lord Danby [sic], Halifax and Godolphin, and some others… all men now behold and endure in the king’s presence and council such ministers as in former reigns have sought to reduce all to an arbitrary government, and to bring the nation to a complete slavery; and therefore so long as these have access to the king, the Commons, in their opinion, should grant no supply.Halifax Letters, ii. 107.
On 14 Dec. 1689, Hampden made an angry speech against James’s three commissioners—Halifax, Nottingham and Godolphin—in a Commons committee of the whole considering the state of the nation:
Look into your books and you will find those now employed [were] voted enemies to the king and kingdom, and favourers of Popery. If those Parliaments were mistaken, tis strange! And hindering this king, who was come to deliver us, and bantering this king—that these three men who came to Hungerford from King James, should be the three greatest men in England, I leave the world to judge… if we must be ruined again, let it be by new men.Grey, ix. 487.
Hampden reported an address against Halifax on 21 Dec. but it was opposed by Whigs such as Jack Howe for not being ‘home enough’ and by Churchmen such as Serjeant Sir William Wogan‡ for being a ‘libel’ against the ministers. The address was recommitted and eventually lost at the prorogation.
On 5 Jan. 1690 Chesterfield sent a request that Halifax hold his proxy, and it was registered in Halifax’s name on 10 Jan. for the remainder of the session.
By the time of the dissolution of the Convention Halifax had had enough of the constant attacks from the Whigs in the Commons and also feared that his continuing presence in the ministry offered too much ammunition to his and the king’s enemies: he was determined to leave office, and formally resigned from his position as lord privy seal, and thus from his central place in the ministry, on 8 Feb. 1690. He recorded in his own notes his interview on that day with William III, in which he claimed that his resignation was for the king’s own service:
He said he doubted it was not for his service and that he did not know where to place them [the seals] in so good hands &c. I told him I had weighed it &c and in this he must give me leave to overrule him. He argued earnestly against me, and as I was going out, shut the door, and said, he would not take the seals [sic], except I promised him I would come into employment again when it was for his service; I said, I would, if my health would give me leave; Tush replieth he, you have health enough; I said again, I must make that exception.Halifax Letters, ii. 248-9.
The black marquess, 1690-2
It was reported on 14 Mar. 1690, one week before the new Parliament convened, that ‘my lord Halifax is glad to lay down all and be quiet for else he would have been in danger by the very commonalty, they were so enraged against him’.
Halifax was present for the first day of the new Parliament, 20 Mar. 1690, and he missed only six of the session’s 54 sitting days in the spring of 1690 and was named to nine committees on legislation. He was closely involved in the debates surrounding Bolton’s bill for declaring the acts of the Convention ‘to be of full force and effect by the laws of the realm’ and for recognizing William and Mary ‘rightful and lawful’ monarchs. When the bill was first read on 26 Mar. 1690, Halifax initially joined with the government ministers in opposing this wording which was destined to scupper the bill, as so many of the Tories in both houses would be unwilling to agree to the ‘rightful and lawful’ wording—as Bolton undoubtedly intended when he introduced the bill in an attempt to show up the disloyalty of the Tories now dominant in Parliament.
William prorogued Parliament on 23 May and on that day, in what was his last recorded audience with Halifax, made clear his frustration with his former minister’s opposition to government measures in the recent session, and his suspicion of his involvement in an unsuccessful attempt in the Commons to demand the removal of Carmarthen, and the decision of the duke of Shrewsbury to leave office:
After the first introduction I fell upon the things I heard were objected to me, as first, the protest [against the] recognising bill. To which I gave my answer, it had been represented to him with the aggravation &c. he seemed to be satisfied. Secondly, the bill of oaths. He said, Lord Nottingham was always of that opinion viz. of a king de facto, said a great many of the clergy had scruples of that kind. For that reason I told him it was unseasonable at this time, he seemed in conclusion to wish it had not come in. He was satisfied I had nothing to do, in the attempt against Lord Carmarthen. He said, Lord Carmarthen was sorry I was out, especially at the last; and that the other party were mad at themselves for having ever meddled with me; Lord Monmouth in particular. He was satisfied I had no part in persuading Lord Shrewsbury to quit, was ill satisfied with him, and particularly with the reason he gave for it, viz. that the king was engaged in measures in which he could not concur. Said Lord Shrewsbury did not consider how kind he had been to him.Halifax Letters, ii. 250-2.
Halifax returned to the House for the second session of the 1690 Parliament, and was present on its first day of 2 Oct. 1690. On the first two days of the session he was placed on the drafting committees for addresses, one to the king congratulating him on his victories in Ireland and the other to the queen thanking her for her care of the nation in the king’s absence. Halifax took over the chair of the latter committee on 7 Oct. when the initial address was recommitted and drafted a new address which was accepted by the House when he reported it that afternoon.
From December 1690 Halifax was heavily involved in chairing committees. In particular, he was closely involved in the bill to establish a judicature to settle the claims on the City of London’s orphans’ debt. In the period 1-13 Dec. 1690 he chaired ten meetings of the bill’s select committee which on 13 Dec. decided that it would be more useful to turn the judicature proposed into a commission of inquiry into the finances of the City and the state of the debt. Halifax reported this conclusion to the House on 15 December. With the terms of the bill revised, Halifax chaired a further two meetings of the committee on that and the following day: on 16 Dec. he was able to report a bill ‘for erecting a court of enquiry in order to the relief of the distressed orphans of London’.
As soon as those bills were successfully reported to the House, Halifax took on the chair of the committee on the bill to allow Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, to manage his wife’s Wiltshire estate. He chaired three separate meetings of the committee on 17 and 19 Dec. 1690 and reported the bill fit to pass with amendments on 20 December. The Westminster agent of the duchess of Beaufort raised some ‘scruples’ against the bill and on 22 Dec. it was recommitted. The committee met again the following day, Halifax again in the chair, where the duchess insisted that adequate provision and protection for Ailesbury’s younger children be enforced in the bill, and Halifax reported the revised bill, with an offending clause left out, later that afternoon.
Among the revelations made by Jacobite Richard Grahme‡, Viscount Preston [S], in the summer of 1691 was an account of a visit by Preston to Halifax’s house ‘to desire to speak with him in private because he owed him money, otherwise [Preston] believes he had not seen him’. Preston broached the topic of James’s restoration with him but found Halifax very guarded and noncommittal and his responses, as given in Preston’s testimony, were hardly sufficient to prosecute him.
Halifax was back in the House when Parliament met again on 22 Oct. 1691 and he proceeded to attend 86 per cent of the sittings of the 1691-2 session and was named to 34 committees on legislation. The session was marked in part by Halifax’s worsening feud with Carmarthen. Contemporaries commented on the competition between the sickly and pasty-faced ‘white marquess’ (Carmarthen) and the swarthier ‘black marquess’ (Halifax). In one matter, though, Halifax and Carmarthen agreed—an attack on their mutual enemy Monmouth. This came in the context of the judicial cause Brown v. Wayte, in which Monmouth was involved. Bonet commented that Halifax and Carmarthen ‘were the principal and the most dangerous of those against the earl’, but on the other side Monmouth had the support of Rochester. The House was evenly divided on this complicated legal matter and Halifax was a teller, Rochester telling for the other side, in the division on 25 Nov. on the question whether to adjourn debate. This and the subsequent division five days later on the motion to affirm chancery’s original judgment in the cause were both resolved in the negative, but only because there was an equality of voices on each side in both divisions.
Where Carmarthen did attack Halifax was on the issue of his alleged contacts with James II and Jacobite agents. He kept the issue of Preston’s allegations alive and from 17 Nov. 1691 a series of conferences were held to discuss the evidence from the letters confiscated from James’s former secretary of state. Halifax, implicated tangentially in some of this evidence, was a manager or reporter for several of these conferences in November and December. Carmarthen also tried to attack Halifax through the fabricated testimony of William Fuller. On 9 Dec. Fuller declared before the Commons that James II had issued a commission to about 18 peers and bishops to manage affairs in England. Halifax, Fuller attested, was the head of this commission. But ‘the discovery did not produce the fervour in the House which might have been expected’, wrote Robert Harley, the future earl of Oxford to his father: ‘the marquess of Carmarthen is a manager of this plot, which cools many in the prosecution of it… The discovery made by Fuller is under the management of the white marquess [and] is supposed to be directed by him against the black marquess’.
In November and December 1691 Halifax was involved in a number of disputes with the Commons over amendments to their bills. On 16 Nov. he was placed on a committee to examine two amendments drawn up by the judges to the bill for devising new oaths for Ireland after the Treaty of Limerick, adapt them to the bill and report back to the House. On 1 Dec. Halifax was appointed a reporter for the conference at which the lower house stated their disagreement to the House’s amendments. He was subsequently on 3 Dec. placed on the committee to draw up reasons for the House’s insistence on their amendments which he helped to present to the Commons in conference on 5 and 10 December. On 3 Dec. he was named to committee to prepare a clause to be added to the treason trials’ bill relating to impeachments in Parliament. This clause, stipulating that all the members of the House should be summoned to constitute the jury of the court of the lord high steward, held outside time of Parliament, was objected to by the Commons in a conference on 17 December. Halifax was placed on a committee to draft reasons for the House’s insistence on its amendment, which he chaired on 28 Dec., when it developed a long justification of the House’s adherence to the amendment. He reported from the committee the following day, and helped to manage the conferences on this dispute on 5, 9 and 14 Jan. 1692.
Halifax took the side of the Commons in a number of disputes between the Houses. On 2 Jan. 1692 the House debated the lower House’s printing, without their consultation or concurrence, of its votes of 18 Dec. 1691 regarding the East India Company. Halifax signed the dissent, with four others, against the resolution not to send for the original record of a precedent from the time of Edward III cited during the debate. He subsequently joined two others in dissenting from the resolution condemning the lower house for printing their vote. On 26 Jan. 1692, he was named to the committee of ten members assigned to count the ballots cast for those members chosen by the House to be commissioners of public accounts, as provided for in the bill sent up from the Commons. Halifax was on 2 Feb. one of 11 members who signed the dissent from the House’s resolution to adhere to its amendment to the Commons’ bill insisting that the House had a share in the appointment of commissioners.
Throughout the session Halifax continued to be heavily involved in chairing committees. He chaired two meetings of the committee for the bill for regulating the collection of alnage on 6 and 9 Nov. 1691, which had been lost at the prorogation in the previous session. He reported on 29 Dec. the bill for James Waldegrave, 2nd Baron Waldegrave. On 17 Feb. 1692, as chair of the committee on the bill for recovering small debts in Westminster, he summoned parties to attend to be heard and the following day Edward Villiers, Viscount Villiers (later earl of Jersey) set out his complaints against the bill, which Halifax reported to the House.
In other matters Halifax was on 10 Nov. 1691 placed on the committee of 13 members assigned to consider a clause to the bill against clandestine marriages, which dealt with the special conditions for Quakers. On 15 Dec., in a debate on the report of the commissioners of public accounts, the Whig earl of Warrington (as Delamer had become) complained that, contrary to the report’s allegations, he never received secret service money, ‘on which the Lord Halifax moved that each Lord might, as his name occurred, stand up and justify himself in the same’.
On the day of the House’s adjournment, 24 Feb. 1692, Halifax’s daughter Lady Elizabeth Savile married Philip Stanhope, styled Lord Stanhope, the future 3rd earl of Chesterfield, and the son and heir of Halifax’s old friend and correspondent. Halifax and Chesterfield together had brought in a bill in Parliament in the preceding session to allow the underage Lord Stanhope to make jointures for his prospective bride.
Opposition, 1692-3
Halifax was clearly in the ‘opposition’ to William III in Parliament, and Burnet came close to accusing him of being a Jacobite and a Tory, claiming in his History that shortly after his resignation from office Halifax ‘reconciled himself to the Tories, and became wholly theirs: he opposed every thing that looked favourably towards the government, and did upon all occasions serve the Jacobites, and protect the whole party’.
Halifax saw such a tide raised against him in both Houses that he thought fit soon after to withdraw from business and ever since he has seemed to lean to K. James’s party[.] he has always favoured them and he is finding fault with everything the government does so that he is thought a Jacobite[.] yet I believe his commerce that way goes no further than that he is laying in for a pardon and perhaps for favour if a Revolution should happen for he is neither a firm nor a stout man.Halifax Letters, ii. 141.
The ‘Memoirs’ of James II claim that the Jacobite agent Henry Bulkeley‡ was received by Halifax ‘with open arms’ who ‘promised to do everything that lay in his power to serve the king’. ‘The free assurance of Halifax encouraged others’, including Godolphin.
The reasons for Halifax’s growing opposition to the Williamite regime lie elsewhere than ideological Jacobitism. Like many of his contemporaries he became increasingly disillusioned with the reality of William’s rule after the expectation and hope of the Revolution. He was disturbed in particular by William’s rough and disparaging treatment, as he saw it, of Parliament. Already expressing concern over William’s single-minded obsession with the war with France—’he hath such a mind to France, that it would incline one to think, he took England only in his way’—Halifax was more disturbed by William’s increasingly peremptory demands on Parliament for extraordinary supply. ‘Whilst there was war’, William had told Halifax as early as July 1689, ‘he should want a Parliament and so long, they would never be in good humour’ (to which Halifax responded that ‘a prosperous war might put them in better humour’).
Of what use are Parliaments if when there is a war everything that is asked is to be given. When there is no war there needeth no great matter. So that a Prince hath by consequence the power of money when he will, because he hath war when he will. The king having the power to make war was restrained only by not having that of taking money, but now that is made such a necessary reason for giving all the money that is asked, that the argument turneth the other way’.Halifax Letters, ii. 137-40.
Much of the remainder of Halifax’s career in the House is marked by his concern for the rights of Parliament and in particular by certain ‘country’ stances he took in opposition to the growing power of the court and the war-time ministry.
The fear of internal Jacobite conspiracy, insurrection and foreign invasion in the summer of 1692 led to the arrest on 5 May of Marlborough and Huntingdon. On 15 June Marlborough was bailed from the Tower under a writ of habeas corpus, Halifax acting as one of his sureties. As a result, on 23 June the queen ordered the names of Halifax, Shrewsbury, Marlborough and Torrington to be struck out of the Council, the official reason in respect of Halifax being that he ‘had forebore to come to Council for some time past’.
the expedient of gracious expressions hath its danger in it… Here then is the inconvenience. It will be asked and cannot be denied, where are the gracious expressions upon which the thanks are to be founded. These will be insisted upon and no doubt allowed but yet really the ransacking a King’s speech to find matter for thanks, when there is matter, is an unpleasant undertaking and is yet more so, when it happeneth that there is not a clause which giveth a proper handle for it.Halifax Letters, ii. 156-7.
Halifax was immediately thrown into the controversy surrounding the commitment of Marlborough and Huntingdon, which came before the House on 7 November. When the judges, and especially Huntingdon’s chief prosecutor, Aaron Smith, were heard on 10 Nov., a ‘long debate’ was held, during which Halifax apparently made a strong speech opposing the government’s procedures concerning the two peers, especially against the decision, supported by the judges, that one positive sworn witness to Huntingdon’s treason was sufficient, there being an unsworn witness ‘to a circumstance tending to treason’. Throughout the speech he upheld the superior judicature of the House and its ability, its duty, to correct errors made by the inferior courts, especially those errors which may have been caused by undue pressure from the government.
At around this time Halifax became involved in the most controversial debates in the House of the session, concerning the ‘advice’ that was to be tendered to the king regarding the various reversals of the summer. On 12 Dec. 1692 Halifax chaired the committee assigned to draw up a clause regarding the use of English forces in Flanders for inclusion in the ‘advice’. The clause which Halifax reported from the committee that day proposed that, according to the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1678, English officers should be able to command foreign officers of the same rank, without regard of the date of their commission.
Both Burnet and the Prussian resident Bonet considered Halifax a prominent leader of the fractious ‘opposition’ that obstructed proceedings in Parliament from early 1693.
Another ‘country’ measure, opposed by the court, in which Halifax was involved was the ‘bill for more frequent parliaments’, or triennial bill. On 16 Jan. 1693 he was placed on a committee appointed to draw up clauses providing for annual meetings of Parliament, for a new Parliament to meet every three years and for the existing Parliament to be dissolved by 1 Jan. 1694. Halifax strongly supported the need for a new Parliament, as he made clear in the notes for a speech he may well have delivered on 16 Jan. when the determination of the present Parliament was debated. To the court argument that it was too great a ‘hazard’ to risk the crown ‘to the chance of a die’ in an election, Halifax commented that it was ‘strange to fear that for which the Revolution was principally undertaken... If pursuing the intention of the law is not the surest game a king can play, where are we?’ If the court were to argue further that it was not ‘seasonable’ to make ‘new experiments’ during a war, Halifax said that he would answer, ‘is the true constitution of England to be called a new experiment? Here is a war and a Parliament seem to be agreed to continue one another. A precedent for any king. Let him but make war and it giveth him a right to suspend the calling a new parliament’. To the argument that this Parliament was ‘true’ to the interest of the government and therefore it was not justifiable to change it, Halifax responded that ‘frequent Parliaments is a part of the government and therefore the continuance of this Parliament is a contradiction to an English government’.
Halifax was one of the managers appointed on 18 Jan. 1693 to hear the Commons’ objections to the House’s amendment to the land tax bill providing for a separate body of commissioners, drawn from the peerage itself, to assess the value of the peers’ lands. Both Bonet and Burnet were of opinion that the chief among those who wished to adhere to this amendment were Halifax, Mulgrave and Shrewsbury. The two commentators also agreed that this was a concerted move by the ‘opposition’ to wreck a money bill, delaying its passage by insisting that the controversial amendment be considered by the committee for privileges. This attempt at obstructionism was ultimately unsuccessful and Halifax was one of those members who signed the dissents that day, first, against the rejection of the motion that the amendment be considered by the committee for privileges and then against the decision to abandon the amendment entirely.
On 24 Jan. 1693 Halifax was placed on the committee assigned to write a resolution condemning (Burnet’s) King William and Queen Mary Conquerors, which had been ordered to be burned by the common hangman, and he was a manager for the two conferences held the following day in which the final wording of the resolution and order was agreed with the Commons. He was also involved in a number of issues involving the rights and privileges of individual peers. At the turn of the year, he was forecast as an opponent of Norfolk’s divorce bill and on 2 Jan. 1693 he voted against reading the bill in the House. On the other hand, through two dissents he signed on 17 Jan., Halifax made evident his support for the claimant to the earldom of Banbury. On 13 Jan. 1693 Halifax chaired the committee for privileges on the matter on the procedures for the trial of Mohun, which found that there was no precedent of a peer being tried for murder anywhere else but in Westminster Hall, that a ‘convenient’ time should be set for Mohun’s trial and that in the meantime he should be committed to the Tower.
Throughout this long and busy session, and away from the business of the chamber itself, Halifax served as chair of numerous committees. On 12 Nov. 1692 he chaired the meeting of the committee for petitions considering the cause between Obadiah Sedgwick and George Hitchcock and reported to the House six days later the committee’s opinion that the dispute be referred back to the judges.
He remained occupied in the House through the first two weeks of March 1693 until the prorogation of 14 March. On 2 Mar. he was present at the debate on the rights of the Irish house of commons to originate the heads of money bills, which were then to be approved, under Poyning’s Law, by the English Privy Council. There survive in Halifax’s manuscripts sketchy notes on Poyning’s Law, which may be points towards a speech he delivered at this time.
Further writings, 1693-5
Perhaps the most significant development for Halifax during 1692-3 was the gradual but steady re-emergence of his previously disgraced brother-in-law Sunderland on the political scene and the seriousness with which his political advice was being taken by both William III and Portland. In particular, Sunderland had been recommending since May 1692 that William abandon his plans for a mixed ministry reliant on the ‘Churchmen’ and Tories and turn to a party government reliant on the Whigs, Halifax’s enemies. It was probably during 1692 that Halifax circulated in manuscript his epigrammatic ‘Maxims of State’ (as they were later titled in the Miscellanies of 1700), which has many cynical reflections on the conduct of ministers, kings and parties and was almost certainly compiled in the context of his disappointment with William’s reign and the disgraced Sunderland’s increasing influence. These reflections were published as a broadsheet in 1693 as Maxims found amongst the Papers of the Great Almansor. Halifax’s authorship of them was an open secret. Many of the maxims repeat some of the sentiments to be found in his earlier Character of a Trimmer regarding the necessity for a king to uphold and be bound by the laws, in which he obviously felt William was failing: ‘that a prince who falleth out with his laws breaketh with his best friends’ (no. 1). Others can be related more directly to the rise of Sunderland: ‘That a Prince who can ever trust the man that hath once deceived him looseth the right of being faithfully dealt with by anybody else’ (no. 15). There are also veiled comments against the increasing influence of Carmarthen, who at this time was able to introduce four of his brothers-in-law into important court offices, despite their lack of ability or experience: ‘that a prince who will give more to importunity than to merit had as good set out a proclamation to all his loving subjects forbidding them to serve well upon the penalty of their being undone for it’ (no. 11).
When the House met for business on 7 Nov. 1693 Halifax was present and went on to sit in 83 per cent of the sittings, a lower than usual attendance rate, which may merely reflect his advancing age, or perhaps the changing political climate following the dismissal of Nottingham. On that very first day he was placed on the committee of 17 members assigned to consider the petition of Zouch v. English. On 22 Dec. 1693 he signed a dissent from the resolution of the House to allow the duchess of Grafton and William Bridgeman‡ to withdraw their petition submitted to the House. Halifax was the only peer to dissent from the decision without giving an explanation; a further eleven signed the formal protest complete with reasons for their objection.
Halifax was involved in the three principal ‘country’ measures which were revived in this session. He, with Rochester, Monmouth and Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, was credited with bringing in the triennial bill in its second attempt through Parliament and he and Rochester spoke most for the bill, against the arguments of Carmarthen and Nottingham, in the debates during the first week of December 1693, when it was decided to make the terminal date of the present Parliament 12 Sept. 1694.
As in the previous session, it was the naval disasters of the preceding summer which principally occupied the House over the winter of 1693-4. The Commons on 4 Jan. 1694 requested a conference to determine where responsibility lay for the loss of the Smyrna fleet. The Lords had delayed a response while they exacted an agreement from the king that privy councillors could testify before the House and on 15 Jan. they agreed to the conference requested and added Halifax to the number of managers already appointed for the conference to be held that day. At the same time Halifax took a leading role as chairman of a committee of eight who were assigned to draw up a list of the main points that were to be discussed with the Commons in another conference on a separate but related point, the details of the timing when intelligence of the sailing of the French fleet from Brest was transmitted to the admirals. Halifax’s ‘heads’ for the conference, reported to and approved of by the House that same day, pointed out that though there was clear evidence of a letter from Nottingham, as secretary of state, to the admirals concerning the Brest fleet, having been written, there was no conclusive evidence that it had actually been sent. At a conference the following day, 16 Jan., managed by Halifax, his paper regarding the timing of the intelligence of the Brest fleet was delivered to the Commons, with a request for further consultation on the matter.
At the same time the House was dealing with the long-running dispute between the earl of Montagu and John Granville, earl of Bath. Halifax, temporarily indisposed, was absent for the negative vote on 17 Feb. 1694 on the motion to agree to the petition of Montagu (which sought to reverse chancery’s dismissal of his original petition against Bath). On 24 Feb., on which day he received the proxy of Weymouth, Halifax was present to sign his dissent from the order to dismiss Montagu’s petition calling for evidence exhibited to the courts on the case to be laid before the House. In this case Halifax’s legal scruples may have won out over personal dislike of Montagu, long one of Halifax’s keenest enemies among the Whigs.
In March and particularly April 1694, Halifax’s principal activity was as a conference manager. On 3 Apr. he was named to the committee to draw reasons to be presented in a conference on the bill for the late John Stawell, 2nd Baron Stawell and on 5 Apr. he acted as a manager for the resulting conference with the Commons. Later, on 16 Apr. he was appointed a manager for a conference on the bill for the recovery of small tithes. By far Halifax’s most significant contribution came at the session’s very end, in the debate on 23 Apr. 1694, when he was one of the leaders, along with Rochester, Nottingham and Monmouth, of the group arguing against the clause in the tonnage bill which established the Bank of England. According to Bonet ‘it needed the presence of all the Lords attached to the court to pass the bill’, and even its chief proponent Carmarthen urged its passage solely because of the urgency with which the king needed supply to conduct the summer’s campaign. Halifax did not expend much energy refuting the opposition’s arguments against the Bank. At one point in the debate John Berkeley, 3rd Baron Berkeley of Stratton, argued that if the bill did not pass, the fleet would not be ready for the forthcoming summer’s campaign. To this argument Halifax insouciantly replied, somewhat surprising in a man so long associated with opposition to France, that from what he could gather the French no longer wished to set out a fleet against the allies.
The summer months of 1694 may have seen Halifax preparing for publication a pamphlet whose origins may go back as early as 1666-7. ‘A Rough Draft of a New Model at Sea’ was mainly concerned with the old ‘gentlemen versus tarpaulin’ debate in naval personnel of the Dutch War of 1665-7, which had taken on a new life and cogency in light of the many recent naval disasters and miscarriages of the past few years.
On the first day of the new session, 12 Nov. 1694, Halifax helped to introduce Mulgrave into the House, as the newly promoted Lord Normanby. He continued to be active in the House, placed on a number of drafting committees: for proposals for preventing coin clipping, based on the debate in committee of the whole House (6 Feb. 1695); for a representation to the king on the peerage claim of Richard Verney, the future 11th Baron Willoughby of Broke (13 Feb.); and for an address on the state of the fleet (1 March). When the triennial bill was before the House on 18 Dec. 1694 many peers, including Halifax, attempted to restore the original date for ending the current Parliament, November 1695, rather than November 1696, the date that had been substituted in the Commons. It was this amendment by the Commons which accounted for Halifax’s ‘opposition’ to the bill in this session which many contemporaries found inexplicable. Bonet wrote to his masters that the bill was passed ‘such as it had been sent by the Commons’, and that Nottingham had come up especially ‘in order to come to increase the number of those trying to have it rejected. They had the marquess of Halifax at their head, who did all he could for that end’.
Although Halifax did not succeed in bringing forward the deadline for the current Parliament’s dissolution, he would have been greatly pleased by the general import of the bill. In the weeks following the its passage, he compiled his ‘Cautions Offered to those who are to choose Members to serve in the ensuing Parliament’, a witty analysis of the composition of the present House of Commons, with a ‘country’ agenda for the selection of new Members for the next Parliament. Particularly listed as types to be avoided in chosing Members are ‘men tied to a Party’ (no. 15), ‘pretenders to exorbitant merit in the late Revolution’ (no. 16), military officers who ‘are out of their true elements when they are misplaced in a House of Commons’ (no. 17), ‘men under the scandal of being thought private pensioners’ (no. 18), ‘men who have places of any value’ (no. 19), and ‘those gentlemen who for reasons best known to themselves thought fit to be against the triennial bill’ (no. 20).
Simultaneously, Halifax was continuing to be active in the House. On 23 Jan. 1695 he joined 23 others in signing the dissent from the acceptance of an amendment to the treason trials’ bill which, as with the Triennial Act, postponed the implementation of the bill, this time from 1695 to 1698. On 24 Jan. Weymouth once again registered his proxy with Halifax. On 25 Jan. Nottingham made an ill-tempered attack on the Whig administration in the committee of the whole House when considering the state of the nation, particularly against the Bank of England. Bonet reported that Nottingham’s chief supporters in this bitter diatribe were Rochester and Halifax, while L’Hermitage’s account stated that ‘Lords Nottingham, Halifax and Rochester spoke very strongly in Parliament and in a fashion which will anger the prince of Orange’. In the course of this debate Halifax took Godolphin to task, ‘in a cruel manner’, for his robust defence of the Bank.
Halifax was also a frequent chairman of committees in this session. On 22 Jan. 1695 he first chaired the committee on the estate bill of Sir Gervase Clifton, bt, led further discussion in committee on the bill on 1 Feb. and reported it the following day.
Halifax was heavily involved in the arrangements for the funeral of Queen Mary. On 10 Jan. 1695 he was placed on the large committee to consider this matter, but on 2 Feb. the countess of Nottingham reported that ‘the House of Lords finding the committees of the council very slow in adjusting things for the queen’s funeral, have taken it out of their hand, and ordered my Lord Halifax and my lord Normanby should finish it’.
Shortly after this vote Nottingham left the House to return to his country house at Exton, in order to prepare for a long-delayed wedding ceremony. For as early as December 1694 Halifax and his old friend Nottingham were in discussions for a match between Lord Eland and Nottingham’s eldest daughter Mary, with a dowry of £20,000. Eland’s first wife had been Nottingham’s niece, and this second marriage thus only further strengthened the connections between the Saviles and the extended Finch clan. Halifax was back in the House of Lords on Saturday, 30 Mar. 1695. At dinner the following night he ate a ‘roasted pullet’ which was probably insufficiently cooked. ‘In the night he was taken very ill, and vomited much’.
with great penitence, great resolution and patience and perfect resignation to the will of God. He received the sacrament yesterday with a firm belief in Christ Jesus, begging pardon of God and man for the scandal he had given by his loose way of talking of matters of religion and for the neglect of his duty to God, whose creature he was.Leics. RO, DG 7, box 4950, bdle 22, Aylesford to Nottingham, 5 Apr. 1695.
Burnet was similarly impressed by Halifax’s repentance in these last hours, but still harshly censorious of his conduct in the previous years:
he had gone into all the measures of the Tories, only he took care to preserve himself from criminal engagements. He studied to oppose everything, and to embroil matters all he could. His spirit was restless, and he could not bear to be out of business. His vivacity and judgment sunk much in his last years, as well as his reputation. He died of a gangrene, occasioned by a rupture that he had long neglected. When he saw death so near him, and was warned that there was no hope, he showed a great firmness of mind, and a calm that had much of true philosophy at least. He professed himself a sincere Christian, and lamented the former parts of his life, with solemn resolutions of becoming in all respects another man, if God should raise him up. And so, I hope, he died a better man than he lived.Burnet, iv. 268-9.
Halifax was survived by his wife Gertrude and by only two of his children, Elizabeth, Lady Stanhope and his son and heir William, Lord Eland. William’s new father-in-law Nottingham quickly took the bereft and fatherless young 2nd marquess of Halifax under his wing and became his protector, and political patron and mentor, for the remainder of Halifax’s life.
Halifax’s will of 17 Mar. 1692 increased the amount of his wife’s jointure and secured to Eland and his heirs the disposable part of the estate not included in the settlements made upon his marriage to his first wife. Failing any heirs on his part, Lady Stanhope was to receive the reversion of the disposable estate. Halifax had had sufficient foresight to provide in a codicil of 19 Nov. 1693 that his ‘godson’ George Savile‡ of Lupset, a descendant of the first baronet by his first wife, would receive £1,000 for his education, so that he might be sufficiently qualified to manage the estates and the inheritance which would come to him if Halifax’s heir Eland himself died without male heirs. This is precisely what happened at the 2nd marquess’s death in 1700, when the Saviles of Lupset inherited the estates and the baronetcy, though not the marquessate.
To the public and political culture in general the marquess bequeathed his works, although it is a matter of debate how many he actually wished to see published posthumously. Shortly after his death his chaplain, the Huguenot Alexander Sion, began preparing an edition of his works entitled ‘Saviliana’, for which he wrote a long biographical introduction. He was forestalled in this by the publication by Matthew Gillyglower in 1700, shortly after the death of the 2nd marquess, of Miscellanies by the Right Noble Lord the Late Lord Marquess of Halifax, which included: ‘Advice to a Daughter’; ‘The Character of a Trimmer’; ‘The Anatomy of an Equivalent’; ‘A Letter to a Dissenter’; ‘Some Cautions for Choice of Parliament Men’; ‘A Rough Draft of a New Model at Sea’; and ‘Maxims of State’ (i.e. the ‘Maxims found amongst the papers of the Great Almansor’). Later in 1750 Halifax’s granddaughter Dorothy, countess of Burlington, added some additional manuscripts in her possession, in particular the ‘Character of King Charles II’ and ‘Political, Moral and Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections.’ For over two centuries these works were the accepted canon of Halifax’s work, until the recent research uncovered many more still in manuscript.
With the publication of these works, and particularly the ‘Character of a Trimmer’, was cemented Halifax’s posthumous reputation as an intellectually able and reflective ‘moderate’ or ‘trimmer’, able to stand above and aloof from the transient passions of the time to see the larger issues at stake. Many of Halifax’s contemporaries, who were with Halifax in the fray of the council board and the House, and did not have the luxury of reading his considered political works at the time, would probably have had a different and far more ambivalent view of the constancy and consistency of the ‘black marquess’.