Quarrelsome and ruthless in the pursuit of his own interests, Sandys has justifiably been described as ‘the most notorious of a group of aggressive parvenus’ in the Cambridgeshire fenland.
At his father’s death in July 1588, Sandys, then Cambridge University’s junior proctor, inherited some unspecified leases, as well as silverware and other goods.
Sandys was knighted at the Coronation in 1603. Soon thereafter he attempted to persuade the new king that the drainage schemes he had commenced on his estate were for the public good. He was almost certainly one of the Cambridgeshire landowners who introduced several pieces of fen drainage legislation to the first Jacobean Parliament in 1606.
Sandys’s highly developed sense of his own status undoubtedly contributed to his decision to purchase a baronetcy in 1611. By April 1613 he was bailiff to the bishop of Ely, a position which he probably owed to Humphrey Tyndall. In the following year he sought election to Parliament, having perhaps been alerted by his brother Sir Edwin to an impending assault in the Commons on the newly created baronetage.
On reaching Westminster, Sandys plumped for the University rather than Shaftesbury.
Sandys served as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1615-16, and was subsequently fined £20 for negligence in executing process.
The Bathing Bank controversy taught Sandys nothing of the art of conciliation. In November 1621, he effectively declared war on his Willingham tenants, whom he accused in Chancery of over-grazing their cattle and sheep, of refusing to perform manorial services and of occupying land which properly formed part of his demesne. His aim was to force them to agree to surrender a further slice of fen common, but after the matter went to arbitration it was merely decided that each landholder should be required to feed his beasts on the fens in proportion to the acreage he held. This was not the ruling which Sandys had sought, and in October 1622 he busily gathered signatures for a petition to have the land divided equally between all the claimants.
Sandys’s persistence, and the heavy-handedness of his behaviour, was not merely the product of greed but was a response to a serious crisis in his finances which threatened to plunge him into bankruptcy. In February 1618 he had entered into a bond for £6,000 as a guarantor of the debts of his wife’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Josselyn, who was engaged in an expensive attempt to improve Littleport and Upwell fens. By 1622 Josselyn was in serious financial trouble, and was demanding that Sandys pay off his debts, which allegedly amounted to £16,000. After a series of complicated legal manoeuvres, punctuated by the distribution of a libel against him at Stourbridge Fair by some of Josselyn’s supporters, Sandys seized control of his kinsman’s Cambridgeshire manor, which he then proceeded to purchase for a nominal £300. He subsequently paid off £2,800 worth of Josselyn’s debts from his own pocket.
In September 1622 Sandys averred that neither he nor his fellow sureties would be ruined if they were forced to pay off Josselyn’s debts in full.
Sandys probably owed his Huntingdon seat to his fellow sewer commissioner Sir Oliver Cromwell*, who lived just outside Huntingdon and was himself no stranger to serious financial difficulties. However, it is also possible that Sandys exercised personal influence over the borough’s electors, as his estates lay along the Ouse between St. Ives and Ely. Once in Parliament, Sandys played only a minor role in its proceedings, making no reported speeches and being named to just 16 legislative committees. A handful of these appointments may have reflected the interests of his brothers, Sir Edwin and Sir Samuel, who had also been returned. His inclusion on the committee for the bill to allow the Virginia and Somers’ Island Companies a monopoly over the tobacco industry (3 May) was surely prompted by Sir Edwin, the Virginia Company’s treasurer, while his inclusion on the committee to consider a measure to prevent the selection of impoverished jurors (19 Apr.) followed a speech delivered by Sir Samuel, who criticized the bill on the grounds that it pried too far into men’s estates.
None of the committees to which Sandys was named in 1621 appear to have reflected the particular interests of his constituents, although his name was placed on the committee for the bill to sell Peyton manor, Suffolk, alongside that of his fellow Member for Huntingdon, Sir Henry St. John (27 April). As a burgess of Huntingdon he was also entitled to attend the committee for the bill to authorize the sale of the Huntingdonshire manor of Fletton (4 May).
Sandys is known to have expressed an interest in a bill which received a first reading on 7 March. This concerned a fine of £1,440 which in 1609 had been laid on a former sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, Sir John Cage, by the commissioners of sewers for the Great Fens. The commissioners had subsequently agreed that the fine, which was never paid, should not have been imposed, as Cage had not committed any offence in refusing to levy a rate on the towns within his shrievalty for new drainage works. However, their clerk had neglected to record this decision in his minute book, and when a new clerk took office in 1616 he reported the fine to the Exchequer, which prosecuted Cage for debt. Although Cage sued the clerk for making a false certificate, and was awarded damages, there was a risk that he would lose a second related case ‘for want of form in strictness of law’. As one of the sewer commissioners who had imposed the original fine upon Cage, Sandys was naturally interested in this bill, but he must also have been concerned for the fate of the clerk, Nicholas Massey, as Massey was his estate steward. His views on whether the measure should go forward were canvassed by one of his parliamentary colleagues, and are recorded on the back of a surviving breviat of the bill. They appear to have been unfavourable, which may help to explain why the bill never received a second reading.
Sandys remarried in November 1626 at the age of almost 64. There is no evidence that he sought re-election to Parliament before 1628 when, following the decision of Sir John Cutts* and Sir Edward Peyton* not to stand, he was returned as senior knight of the shire for Cambridgeshire. He left no trace on the records of the 1629 session, and in those for 1628 he received only three mentions. These concerned his appointment to committees concerned with the complaints directed against the Cornish deputy lieutenants, who had allegedly interfered in their county’s election (9 May), a bill to amend a word in the 1624 Act to enable Vincent Lowe of Derbyshire to sell land to pay off his debts (16 May), and the recently established commissions to compound with recusants (24 May).