Family and Education

b. 6 Jan. 1674, 4th but 1st surv. s. of James Brydges, 8th Baron Chandos of Sudeley, by Elizabeth, da. and coh. of Sir Henry Barnard (d. 1680), Mercer and Turkey merchant, of St. Dunstan-in-the-East, London and Bridgnorth, Salop, alderman of London 1661.  educ. Westminster 1686; New Coll. Oxf. 1690–2; Wolfenbüttel acad. 1692–4; I. Temple 1710.  m. (1) 27 Feb. 1696, Mary (d. 15 Dec. 1712), da. of Sir Thomas Lake† of Canons Park, Edgware, Mdx., bro. of Warwick Lake*, 6s. (5 d.v.p.) 3da. d.v.p.; (2) 4 Aug. 1713, his 2nd cos. Cassandra (d. 1735), da. of Francis Willoughby of Wollaton, Notts. and Middleton, Warws., sis. of Sir Thomas Willoughby, 2nd Bt.*, s.p.; (3) 18 Apr. 1736, Lydia Catherine, da. of John van Hattem of St. Swithin’s, London and wid. of Sir Thomas Davall II*, s.p.  suc. fa. as 9th Baron Chandos 16 Oct. 1714; cr. Earl of Carnarvon 19 Oct. 1714, Duke of Chandos 29 Apr. 1719.1

Offices Held

Freeman, Ludlow 1697, Old E.I. Co. 1700; commr. taking subscriptions to S. Sea Co. 1711; gov. Levant Co. 1718–36, Charterhouse by 1721–d., Foundling Hosp. 1739; ld. lt. Herefs. and Rad. 1721–d.; steward of crown manors, Rad. 1721; chancellor, St. Andrews Univ. 1724–d.; ranger, Enfield chase 1737–d.2

Commr. public accts. 1702–3; member, council of ld. high adm. 1703–Apr. 1705; paymaster of forces abroad Apr. 1705–13; jt. clerk of hanaper (in reversion) Nov. 1714; PC 11 Nov. 1721.3

Biography

Brydges’ climb to vast riches and a dukedom was agreed to have been ‘the most surprising instance of a change of fortune raised by a man himself, that has happened . . . in any age’, the details of which form an undeviating narrative of opportunism and corruption. At the height of his prosperity the parading of wealth in grandiose building projects and in patronage of the arts gave a spurious polish to what had been a grimy reputation. As a young man on the make, he showed a readiness to compromise past allegiances, personal loyalties and the ethics of public duty that was notorious even among his contemporaries. In the House of Commons, which he made the springboard for his official career, he was an indifferent speaker, with a delivery that one parliamentary reporter rendered as ‘rat-a-tat’, and an occasional insensitivity to the mood of the House, but was hard-working, clubbable and possessed of the saving quality of shamelessness, which prevented him from being intimidated by scandal or seriously embarrassed by failure.4

In so far as his principles extended beyond personal ambition, Brydges always demonstrated a strong attachment to de facto authority. A regular churchgoer, whose private papers reveal an unexpected interest in scriptural study, he was able to separate his spiritual from his material life, and unlike his High Tory father experienced no qualms over the Revolution: indeed, in March 1697 he and his family ‘talked of the present government, and I defended the justice of it’. Whether or not his sojourn in Germany from 1692 to 1694 was planned upon any calculation of the dynastic prospects of the Hanoverian house, as one biography has suggested, he returned to England eager to announce himself a staunch Williamite, and from at least the beginning of 1697, when his surviving diary opens, he besieged the Whig administration with daily attendance at the levees of Charles Montagu*, Sir Thomas Littleton, 3rd Bt.*, and Lord Somers (Sir John*), begging a place in the excise, or the jewel office, or wherever room could be found for him. His argument on these occasions was that ‘his father was a Jacobite and used him hardly by reason he was of contrary principles’, though the reality of his family’s finances was that Chandos did not possess the resources to spoil his son even if he had wanted to, and while Brydges was never impoverished he certainly needed the emoluments of office. A few years later, when he had firmly aligned himself with their opponents, the Whigs’ recollections of his morning visits were maliciously sharp. Littleton related a conversation in which Brydges had said, of the excise commission, ‘that he knew these places were disposed of to none but Parliament-men, that tho’ he was not now one he was sure he should [be] the next session . . . and that he would deserve his place by voting’, to which Littleton claimed to have replied, ‘“Sir, I don’t know that the King expects any man’s vote at the price of his place, but I believe this is an offer of the first impression, to promise how [you] will vote before you are chosen.”’ Montagu bid an acquaintance ‘observe the stinking of his [Brydges] breath, which was very offensive to him in a morning’. At the same time, Brydges was also in contact with the leaders of the Country opposition, in particular Speaker Paul Foley I* and Robert Harley*, whose local influence was a factor in his chances of obtaining a parliamentary seat in his own county of Herefordshire. But for friendship, as distinct from advantage, he seems to have favoured the society of men of antiquarian and scientific interests, like Sir Godfrey Copley, 2nd Bt.*, and Anthony Hammond*, through whom he was introduced to the circle of ‘commonwealthmen’ at the Grecian tavern, and to such advanced political reading as Harrington’s Oceana, Sir Thomas Pope Blount’s* Letters and Locke’s ‘Disputes’, though without making much of it.5

In preparation for the 1698 general election Brydges took pains to cultivate every political interest in Herefordshire, Whig or Tory, that might be useful. Even so, he faced a potentially difficult contest for the county, and was only rescued by the last-minute withdrawal of one of the outgoing Members from the election in Hereford, where he was returned unopposed. An interesting sidelight on the election was that, while canvassing for knight of the shire, he was obliged to counter rumours that he was ‘a great courtier, a great creature of the Earl of Portland, and one that had received considerable advantages already from the Court on that account, and would certainly be a pensioner if once chose Parliament-man’. He denied this vigorously, but when he came up to London for the session one of his first calls was on Charles Montagu. Neither Montagu nor Littleton was at home, and significantly, a fortnight or so later, Brydges went instead to the levee of the Tory leader, Lord Rochester (Laurence Hyde†), after which he took his place in the House in the ranks of the Country opposition. Soon after the election he had been marked as a Court supporter in a comparative analysis of the old and new Commons, though this classification was queried in a subsequent list. He was also forecast as likely to oppose a standing army, and, though this may have been no more than an inference from the fact that he had been chosen at Hereford alongside Paul Foley, it proved accurate, for his name did not figure on the ‘black list’ of those who voted on 18 Jan. 1699 against the disbanding bill at a time when his diary records regular attendance at debates and committees. His dining companions were almost exclusively Tory, and the political clubs he attended were the Tory gatherings at the Fountain and the Vine. It may be that he had taken umbrage at the Junto lords’ failure to make good their promises, but he was, on the whole, not a man to take serious offence at anything, and it seems more likely that his sensitive political antennae had detected a hint of change, and that he saw more prospect of advancement in hitching himself to the Tories, and in particular to Robert Harley, to whom he edged closer during this session. His first recorded speech was in the committee of supply on 2 Mar. 1699: after Charles Montagu had proposed granting £312,000 to cover the army estimates, Brydges moved an amendment to reduce this sum by £50,000, the difference to be made up by removing from the civil list the money provided for Queen Mary of Modena. On 14 Apr. he was elected to the chair of the committee on the bill to raise the militia, the Country party’s preferred method of national defence, from which he reported on the 17th. He was one of the small knot of Country party activists responsible for preparing the bill to state the public accounts, but his contributions to parliamentary business were not confined to the major issues. On 3 Mar. he attended the committee on the bill to amend the previous Act to regulate the working of the wholesale cloth market at Blackwell Hall, and on 26 Apr. recorded that he had received the thanks of the Stationers’ Company for efforts in securing an additional clause in the paper duty bill on the Company’s behalf.6

Prior to the next session Brydges was to be found attending the levees of Rochester and the Duke of Leeds (Sir Thomas Osborne†), and when Parliament reassembled he once again kept company with Tories, at their club at the Goat tavern, and with his cronies from the Royal Society, men like Copley, Hammond, Charles Davenant* and Cyril Arthington*. He was also on social terms, though not especially close, with Robert Harley, occasionally dining at Harley’s house. In the Commons he was anxious to make an impression as an energetic man-of-business and as an aggressive speaker on the Country side in the set-piece debates. In committee on 5 Feb. 1700 he took the lead in seeking to expose flaws in the accounting of the paymaster-general, Lord Ranelagh (Richard Jones*), a sublime irony in the light of his own later career: tactics had been concerted beforehand with Copley, Hammond and others, and Brydges had been chosen, or had chosen himself, to raise the matter, but, as James Vernon I* reported, ‘my lord was too hard for him at figures’. Ten days later, in the committee of the whole House on the state of the nation, he thrust himself forward again. Sir Richard Cocks, 2nd Bt.*, wrote that Brydges ‘downright railed against the government’. After denouncing the ‘luxury’ and ‘avarice’ of ‘evil counsellors’, he concentrated his fire on the issue of crown grants, bringing in the affair of Captain Kidd, and concluded with a motion to condemn the passing by ministers of grants to themselves. He was immediately challenged by Sir Rowland Gwynne*, for ‘reflecting’ by implication on Lord Somers, which ‘occasioned some warmth between these gentlemen’. The general feeling of the House, even of oppositionists like John Grobham Howe*, was to vindicate Somers’ good name, and Brydges was obliged first to deny that his motion ‘aimed at’ the chancellor, and then to apologize at the bar for expressions used in his reply to Gwynne. Neither this nor his earlier faux pas disconcerted him, however, and he was one of the Country MPs who hoped to serve on the commission to examine the debts due to the army, navy and transport service. When the House decided against allowing its Members to be appointed commissioners Brydges made sure that he and Copley participated in the gathering of Tory back-benchers at the Vine which agreed on the Country party’s slate for the ballot. But perhaps his most particular concern at this time was the situation of the Old East India Company. Already connected with overseas merchants through his father’s involvement in the Levant Company, he was approached on 10 Jan. by several ‘gentlemen’ to give his support to the Old Company’s petition, and he entered wholeheartedly into their parliamentary schemes, being ordered on 19 Jan. to bring in the bill to continue the Company. An analysis of the House into interests in early 1700 identified him with the Old Company, and in March he was consulted on the parliamentary affairs of one of the Company’s men, William Johnson, then absent on a voyage to the Indies, who wished to signify by letter his choice of constituency between the two for which he had been returned. The following month Brydges cemented his own relationship with the company by taking out his freedom, and in May he made his first purchase of Old Company stock. His participation in company cabals was at this time so intense that during the summer he attended discussions over municipal politics in the city of London with directors and their Tory allies.7

At this point in his career it would have been natural for Brydges to have formed a much closer association with Harley, who was not only the coming man in national politics but exercised considerable influence in Brydges’ own locality. But the two men were never entirely compatible: Harley was too shrewd to be taken in by Brydges’ flattery, and there was always a wariness, even an underlying coolness, in their relations. Perhaps, too, the very fact of Harley’s involvement in Herefordshire politics formed a barrier: the two men were potential rivals, and Brydges in particular was never eager to ally himself too closely with any other interest in the county. At the general election of January 1701, for example, although he was returned together with Thomas Foley II*, he resisted joining Foley until forced into the partnership by an attack on his own position by a third candidate. In political outlook, however, he was closer to Harley than to many High Tory colleagues in the Country party, and he found no difficulty in moving over from opposition to support the new Tory administration. In his view of the situation in Europe, for example, commitment to the Revolution and concern for the safety of long-distance trade meant that he did not share the more extreme Tories’ aversion to military action against France, even though he was highly critical of the second Partition Treaty. ‘In my poor opinion’, he told Thomas Coke*,

had anyone studied to have disposed of that monarchy more to the disadvantage of Europe in general, and us in particular, it would have required, I fancy, a better headpiece than any of the two plenipotentiaries is master of, to have compassed it. Had they given that crown entire to France, the knavery would have been too gross, and we should quickly, I doubt not, have had another confederacy as strong as the last to have opposed it. But thus giving the greatest part, in appearance, to the house of Austria they think, I suppose, to lull the world asleep, though they cannot but be conscious to themselves at the same time they have given France not only the best and richest part, but that which will enable him to be master of the rest whenever he pleaseth, and puts him into immediate possession, if he hath a mind to it, of all the Mediterranean trade.

None the less, when Brydges arrived in London on 26 Jan. 1701 his first port of call was the house of Sir Bartholomew Shower*, where he met other Tories to discuss the election results. From there he went to the Thatched House tavern, ‘to inquire for Colonel Granville [Hon. John*] and the club that used to be there on Sunday nights’. He now spent his mornings visiting Rochester, Sir Edward Seymour, 4th Bt.*, and Harley. At some point in February Brydges was listed with those likely to support the Court in agreeing with the committee of supply’s resolution to continue the ‘Great Mortgage’. A speech on 2 Apr., in the debate on the King’s message relating the answer that had been given by the French ambassador to the demands of the States General, besides giving what was undoubtedly a genuine opinion as to the best course to be followed in foreign policy, revealed the part Brydges was playing as one of Harley’s under-managers in the Commons. Starting off the debate, he

said he first opened, as the youngest, to give others the cue, and that the wiser might be kept to sum all up at last. He lightly reflected upon all miscarriages, and said he would not say anything to widen our breaches when we should unite; he spoke of our debts, of our inabilities, and at last concluded with the danger of having France in possession of all Spain.

It was as a spokesman for the new Court party as much as a Tory tribune that he was to the forefront of the proceedings to impeach Lord Halifax (Charles Montagu*) and the other Whig lords. An active member of the committee nominated on 1 Apr. to draw up the articles against Lord Portland, which was later extended to prepare the articles against Halifax, Orford (Edward Russell*) and Somers, and to manage the ensuing conferences with the Lords, he also served on the subcommittee to translate into English Portland’s letters on the second Partition Treaty and on 15 Apr. was chosen by the Commons to carry Halifax’s impeachment to the Upper House, an act Halifax regarded as a gross personal betrayal. Significantly, on that day Brydges dined with Harley. He acted as a teller on 13 May for an address to the King requesting an answer to the previous address for the removal of the impeached lords from his ‘counsel and presence’; made the report from the impeachments committee when the articles against Halifax were agreed on 9 June, and carried them to the Lords; and on 20 June reported from the committee to inspect the Lords’ Journals concerning the impeachment proceedings. Complementing the impeachments in Tory strategy was the harassment of the old ministers through the re-establishment of a commission of public accounts. On 10 Apr. Brydges’ diary noted that he had spent the evening at Shower’s, ‘where we finished the Act for stating the accounts’, and a week afterwards he himself introduced the bill into the House. More acceptable to the King were the new Court party’s efforts to forward supply. Brydges was a member of the committee to receive proposals for the payment of the public debts, and advancing the credit of the nation (10 Apr.), which, with ‘the committee on the half-pay’, he made a point of attending. On 2 May, in ways and means, he ‘offered at many things’ by way of fiscal expedients, which he had presumably discussed with Lord Godolphin (Sidney†) when he met him on 27 Apr., ‘about the raising of what we had voted’. Cocks observed sourly that Brydges ‘had taken great pains to inform himself of them, unless they were done for him’, but detailed only one of his suggestions, the removal of the prohibition on the import of Indian silks, a move which would obviously have benefited both East India companies. Members greeted this with ‘disdain, thinking this gent[leman] was not in the interest of his country’. After the next meeting of the committee Brydges and other Court Tories broke with the more violent members of their party in opposing a motion to cut £100,000 from the civil list, Brydges telling against a resolution to this effect when it was reported on 5 May, and finding himself on the opposite side to John Granville and Sir Charles Shuckburgh, 2nd Bt. To recover the situation, Sir Edward Seymour put forward a compromise in committee on the 21st, whereby the King would receive the civil list in full but would contribute a weekly sum of £3,000 to be used as security to raise a fund of £700,000. Brydges joined other courtiers in speaking for it. In the meantime his appetite for routine parliamentary business had not diminished: he reported a private naturalization bill on 4 June, and was frequently pressed to take up individual petitions relating to the Irish forfeited estates, from financial speculators and aggrieved ex-proprietors. For him the session ended very much as it had begun, as he supported the King’s intention to go to war, and was named to the committee of 12 June to draft the Commons’ address pledging support for any actions in defence of the allies and the liberties of Europe. This accorded with his own views on foreign policy as well as what he presumably gauged to be his personal advantage. He now regarded war as inevitable, and indeed essential to ‘our preservation’, though, as he confided to Thomas Coke, he felt the delay had been ‘the greatest advantage imaginable to us’, enabling the Dutch to put themselves ‘in a posture of defence’, and he hoped for economic reasons that hostilities would be brief, an outcome which in his view could only be achieved through ‘vigorous’ military action. In these circumstances it was hard that he should find himself blacklisted by the Whigs as one who had, among other things, allegedly opposed the making of preparations for war; and perhaps harder still that his strenuous attempts to earn himself some office, through assisting administration in the House, should meet with rebuffs from the King. Perhaps sensing that Harley had neither the personal interest nor the will to persuade William of his merits, Brydges had applied himself to other patrons, principally to the Earl of Marlborough (John Churchill†) and to Admiral Sir George Rooke*. His regular meetings with officers of the Admiralty and navy board suggest that he was seeking to qualify himself for a post in naval administration, but he seems to have pinned his hopes above all on Marlborough, whose influence may perhaps be detected in the bullishness of some of Brydges’ statements on foreign policy during the summer of 1701. Marlborough was already praising him to the King, without effect, and perhaps also receiving direct requests for assistance in patronage matters.8

The second general election of 1701, in which Brydges again overcame a challenge from a third candidate at Hereford, this time by a crushing majority, was an eventful one for him, ending in a duel fought with a hot-tempered Herefordshire squire, James Morgan*, over remarks Morgan had passed concerning Lord Chandos. Before the Parliament met, Brydges spent an hour with Speaker Harley, who had, naturally, classed him with the Tories in his list of the new Parliament. Brydges was appointed on 2 Jan. 1702 to the committee on the Address, whose meetings he records attending, and was also soon active in promoting a measure to regulate the practice of stock-jobbing, which had been a peculiar concern of his for several years. He probably acted as a teller on 5 Jan. 1702, on the Tory side, against appointing a day for the elections committee to hear the Norwich petition; on 10 Feb. 1702, against a Whig amendment to the oath of abjuration included in the bill for the security of the King’s person and the succession; and on 19 Mar., against leave for a bill to enable the appointment of commissioners to negotiate an Anglo-Scottish union. Apart from the bill to provide for the Protestant children of the Earl of Clanricarde and Lord Bourke of Bophin, which he presented on 7 Mar. and took a major share in managing, he seems to have been bothered less often in this session by Irish petitioners requiring assistance with saving bills concerning the forfeited estates. However, he may have been a teller on a number of divisions on Irish business: on 25 Feb., for a Tory-inspired instruction to the drafting committee on the bill to relieve Captain Bellew, to oblige Lord Romney (Henry Sidney†) to repay to the forfeiture trustees two-thirds of the purchase money received from Bellew; on 26 Mar., again with a Tory and in opposition to two Whig tellers, for a bill to relieve the Jacobite banker Sir Daniel Arthur; on 9 Apr., against committing a bill for the relief of Robert Edgworth; on 28 Apr., on an instruction to the committee on Ignatius Gould’s bill; and finally on 7 May, for an instruction on the bill to relieve the ‘Protestant purchasers’ of forfeited estates, to provide that a third of the purchase money designed to be repaid them be instead vested in the trustees, ‘for the use of the public’. With other Tories, he was listed as having voted on 26 Feb. in favour of the motion vindicating the Commons’ proceedings in the impeachments of the Junto lords. He was an active member of the committee of 8 Mar. to draw up the address of condolence on the death of King William and congratulation on the accession of Queen Anne. The one speech recorded by Cocks in this session occurred on 31 Mar. when Brydges and Sir Thomas Powys* vainly opposed a motion to take into custody the Shropshire Tory George Walcot* following the hearing of an election case in which Walcot had been found guilty of ‘notorious bribery’. His chief interest, however, seems to have been in the further attempt, this time successful, to reconstitute a plenary commission of accounts in order to pursue inquiries into alleged corruption by the previous Whig administration. As early as 14 Jan. he was at Simon Harcourt I’s house where, he reported, ‘we talked about commiss[ioners] of accounts’, and as the ballot for commissioners approached, he dined with Thomas Coke, Arthur Moore*, Sir Christopher Musgrave, 4th Bt.*, and others at the Thatched House, where a slate of six candidates was agreed. He himself was chosen in fourth place when the outcome of the ballot was announced on 8 Mar., and from early April his diary shows him to have been preoccupied with the work of the commission to the exclusion of parliamentary business.9

With Queen Anne’s accession Brydges’ cultivation of Marlborough’s friendship yielded dividends. Already in May 1702, Marlborough had ‘begged’ Lord Treasurer Godolphin to reserve Brydges a place on the council of the lord high admiral, Prince George of Denmark, ‘against the next year’. By December there were rumours of his imminent appointment, though these were not confirmed until the following March, after Marlborough (now a duke) had renewed his solicitations. In Parliament there seems little doubt that he was the Brydges who in January and February 1703 chaired the committee of the whole on the mutiny bill, and served as a teller twice in the 1702–3 session, in favour of John Grobham Howe at the hearing of the Gloucestershire election (19 Nov. 1702), and apparently for the Tory side on an adjournment motion (23 Dec.). The impact of his appointment to office, however, was immediately observable in his parliamentary conduct in the next session. He opened the debate on 26 Nov. against the motion for leave for the introduction of an occasional conformity bill, and was soon entrusted with the task of presenting to the House, on behalf of the Admiralty council, the estimates for the navy. He may again have chaired the committee on the mutiny bill and have been a teller twice in February 1704: on the 21st, against committing the bill for setting the poor to work; and eight days later, to agree with the committee resolution in favour of an address urging an inquiry into the Scotch Plot. But although he seems to have settled into the part of a loyal ‘Queen’s servant’, he did not regard his present post as sufficiently lucrative. In March 1704 he approached Godolphin for the vacant place of paymaster of marines, thereby disgusting his friend and confidant Charles Davenant, who was more conscious than he was himself of the dignity, as opposed to the profits, of office. Undeterred by his failure in this instance, he continued to bombard Godolphin and Marlborough with requests for a transfer from the Admiralty – to be chancellor of the Exchequer, lieutenant of the Ordnance, paymaster of the forces, and so on – on the specious grounds, not hitherto admitted, that he lacked experience in naval affairs. The tone of these letters was uniformly obsequious, and his behaviour in the Commons was equally servile and obliging. At the beginning of the 1704–5 session he was forecast as a probable opponent of the Tack; he did not vote for it on 28 Nov. By now the complexion of the ministry was changing, and Brydges was anxious that his indiscretions over the impeachments (as they now appeared to have been) should not be held against him. He wrote to Godolphin to beg him to intercede with the Junto lords, explaining that what had happened in 1701 was that

my natural temper carrying me to pursue with warmth their measures and interest with whom I am engaged, I made some steps which may be remembered hereafter to my disadvantage, but I can say this for myself, that I was a knight adventurer without the least malice to any of the adverse party, though I might think my credit concerned to decline no part of the action to which I was assigned by those whose side I then happened to espouse; I was pitched upon by the House of Commons to carry up their impeachment against my Lord Halifax.

As if sheltering more closely behind the ‘duumvirs’ for protection, he now identified himself as their client. L’Hermitage might reckon Brydges’ longed-for advancement in April 1705 to the office of paymaster of the forces abroad as a ministerial gain for the ‘moderate Tories’, but its partisan significance was minimal. Brydges spent the summer of 1705 on campaign with Marlborough, in order to secure himself in the Duke’s favour (a stratagem he repeated the following year), and moved quickly to establish close personal relations with Marlborough’s most trusted subordinates, as part of the same process.10

Re-elected without opposition in 1705, and marked as a placeman and as ‘Low Church’ in published preliminary assessments of the Parliament, he wrote optimistically to Marlborough before the session opened that ‘the warm heads of either side will find it their interest to be quiet, and not disturb the Queen’s affairs’. He voted on 25 Oct. for the Court candidate as Speaker. At about this time he was also acting as an intermediary between the lord treasurer and leading lights in the lower house of Convocation, like Francis Atterbury, whom he sought to persuade of the usefulness of inserting into Convocation’s loyal address a clause complimenting Godolphin on his management of the revenue. In Parliament, Grey Neville* recorded a speech of his on 4 Dec., in the debate on the proposed union with Scotland, though without giving details, and further interventions on 19 Dec., at the second reading of the regency bill, to support calls to censure the Tory MP Charles Caesar for innuendoes against the lord treasurer, and to call for Caesar’s confinement in the Tower. He may have spoken again in a subsequent debate on the regency bill on 12 Jan. 1706, and appears to have made a substantial contribution to the Court party’s resistance to extensions to place legislation. A ‘Mr Brydges’ was a teller on 13 Dec. 1705 against leave for bringing in a place bill, and on 18 Feb. 1706 against a ‘Country’ counter-amendment to one of the Lords’ amendments to the ‘place clause’ of the regency bill. Brydges was blacklisted as one who had supported the Court during these proceedings. Before he departed for the Low Countries in May he was also recorded as presenting official papers to the House concerning the payment of troops (22 Jan.), and, perhaps, reporting from the committee on a private naturalization bill. When he returned to England in the autumn he found the administration divided, and Harley making the first, secret and tentative, moves in a scheme to resist the drift towards the Junto, by ‘raising a third party’ of moderate men to join instead with the ‘more reasonable’ elements among the Tories. Brydges recounted this to Godolphin with the utmost care, expressing no direct personal opinion other than that he was himself entirely devoted to the treasurer’s interest, but implying some sympathy for Harley’s objectives. Nothing came of these approaches, however. In the 1706–7 session Brydges presented papers to the House on 22 Jan. 1707 in his capacity as paymaster. Either he or a namesake introduced the French wines bill in December 1706, and took charge in February 1707 of a bill to make the vessel Supply a free ship.11

The ministerial crisis foreshadowed by Harley’s manoeuvres the year before came to a head in the winter of 1707–8. Brydges’ correspondence at this time shows him identifying himself with the Court and especially with the ‘duumvirs’, deprecating the violence of party faction, and initially sympathetic to Harley’s renewed schemes for a coalition of ‘moderate Tories’ and lord treasurer’s Whigs. In Parliament he found himself as paymaster propelled into the spotlight during the controversial inquiries into the lack of available troops at the battle of Almanza, and also during the debates on recruiting which oppositionists from both parties opened up in the wake of the ‘Spanish troops’ scandal. He was repeatedly obliged to submit papers to the House, on 13 Nov., 13 Dec. (accounts of expenditure in Spain), 8 and 16 Jan. 1708 (accounts of money received for the Spanish service), made the motion for an alternative method of recruitment in committee on 16 Jan., and on 29 Jan., in the principal debate on ‘Spanish troops’, supported the secretary at war, Henry St. John II*, in expounding the ministry’s explanation of the shortfall. More generally too, he seems to have taken an active part in the scheme of Court management organized by Harley, but he was not himself a Harleyite, as some contemporaries were beginning to describe him, and when Harley’s alliance with Godolphin and Marlborough suddenly broke up at the beginning of February Brydges did not resign alongside the secretary. Instead, he remained loyal to the ‘duumvirs’, accepting their version of events and continuing in his post in an even more Whiggishly-inclined administration. Part of the explanation for his decision must lie in a rare instance of personal loyalty, reinforced by an awareness that, via his confidant William Cadogan*, Marlborough had been fully informed of the details of Brydges’ shady dealings as paymaster – the manipulation of foreign exchange rates, wagering on the course of the war with the benefit of privileged information, insider trading in stocks, and other expedients from which vast profits were derived for Brydges and his accomplices, including Cadogan and perhaps Marlborough too. These profits must also in themselves have constituted a powerful inducement to stay: as paymaster, Brydges had at long last, and precipitately, made his fortune. He was in the process of buying his wife’s family estate at Canons, which he finally acquired in 1713, and was casting about for other likely property, as well as investing large sums in shares and securities. So he drew even closer to Godolphin and Marlborough. Without the Harleyites there was more for the remaining Court managers to do, and by the end of the session Brydges was complaining not only of the workload of his office but of the fatigue of parliamentary attendance. His anomalous political position at this time is captured in two parliamentary lists drawn up early in 1708, which label him respectively as a Whig and a Tory, and reflected too in his preparations for the general election in May, in which he was anxious to be returned again to the Commons, ‘where at least I have room to show my zeal and affection to that government by which I have [been] countenanced so much beyond my merit’ (as he told Marlborough). Refusing Harley’s assistance in Herefordshire, and fighting shy of any specific arrangement with Thomas Foley II in Hereford itself, he was forced to rely on his own interest in the town, and even with the benefit of government patronage was still sufficiently fearful to avail himself of Godolphin’s recommendation to the Boscawen-controlled borough of Truro, where he was returned unopposed. In the event, however, he surmounted opposition in Hereford, and so the insurance was not required.12

Before the 1708 Parliament Brydges reassured both Godolphin and Marlborough of his loyalty, and indeed his complete reliance on their protection against the new ‘scheme’ he feared would arise: ‘I shall never covet or seek any other patronage’, he informed the lord treasurer,

than that of your lordship and the Duke of Marlborough. I hope I have for some years behaved myself so among those with whom I desire to live well, as that no rancour remains on the score of past division, and while I cheerfully co-operate with such as your lordship judges fittest in this juncture to serve her Majesty, I flatter myself that your lordship’s and my lord Duke’s favours will continue to shine upon [me].

Once in the House he supported government consistently, and, as far as he could, unobtrusively, aligning himself with ‘lord treasurer’s Whigs’ like Hon. Henry Boyle* and an old Herefordshire opponent Lord Coningsby (Thomas*). Typical of his attitude was the account he gave of the replacement of the Tory John Conyers as chairman of supply: ‘I must confess (tho’ I contributed to it) I am sorry for it, but there was no avoiding it; the Whigs were bent upon having favour, and the Court thought it not worthwhile to make a division among themselves.’ He was prepared to back such partisan measures if he had to, and was, for example, listed among those who supported the naturalization of the Palatines, but he does not seem to have been anywhere near the vanguard. His significant Commons activity in the 1708–9 session consisted largely of presenting departmental papers as paymaster (11 Dec., 1 Feb., 21 Mar. 1709), though he may have been the Member who on 18 Feb. brought in a bill for encouraging the export of tobacco. The one issue which animated him was, not surprisingly, the defence of Marlborough’s reputation from the snide attacks of some Tories, which he described as stemming from ‘the impotent anger of a few discontented men’. He had recently been given further reason to be grateful to the Duke, as recurrent rumours of his own dismissal, in December and January, had been brought to nothing, probably as a result of Marlborough’s intervention. As one cynical commentator had observed, when this talk had come to the surface, ‘I fancy Mr Br[ydges] will scarcely be outed, because he has been at the bottom of all the cheating of a certain great man’. Brydges carried his low-key support for the ministry over into the next session, helping to whip in Court Whig voters for the crucial early days. He took a ministerial view of the decision to impeach Dr Sacheverell, writing in December 1709:

I am clearly of opinion if there is not a stop put to the liberty some gentlemen of his coat take in their pulpits ’twill be in vain to think either the Queen can sit safe on the throne or the Members meet in peace and quietness in either House of Parliament.

And in January 1710 he was still convinced that ‘the liberty of the pulpit was grown so high that it was time to take notice of it and put a stop to it’; so that although he was absent from the House around the middle of February his inclusion in the list of those who had voted for Sacheverell’s impeachment was probably justified.13

The strength of popular reaction against the impeachment, however, gave Brydges pause. Aversion to any such outbreak of passion in politics led him to regard the trial as ‘unfortunate’, and in the immediate aftermath he wrote, ‘I heartily wish it had never been meddled with, for I am very much afraid it will have the effect on our friends that the occasional bill formerly produced to the Tories . . . it hath revived old and forgotten disputes and raised such heats and jealousies of one another in the kingdom as will take up no little time to allay’. In his own borough he could do no more than seek to moderate the tone of the corporation’s Sacheverellite address. He was also sensitive to the rising clamour against the war, considering peace to be ever more a necessity on political grounds, though to one correspondent in July he observed, ‘I know not whether we ought to desire it [a peace] or not, since if the continuance of the war did not prevent and keep us in a [?little] I cannot tell what extremities the violence of parties might not drive us into’. By this time the prospect of a ‘revolution’ at Court and in the ministry was leading him to reconsider his position, and the changes in the political scene enabled him to demonstrate some characteristically deft footwork, after an initial blunder when he had pressed to be appointed to succeed his ailing superior, John Grobham Howe, in the paymaster’s office and had been dissuaded by the Marlboroughs. He contrived to rebuild his links with Harley and ‘moderate’ Tories, and to distance himself from the Whigs and even from his erstwhile patron Godolphin, while retaining the confidence of Marlborough, whose military prowess would be needed by the incoming administration and who in any case knew too much about Brydges’ past activities. His reinterpretation of the Sacheverell episode, for instance, was that the offending sermon had been a ‘nonsensical’ piece of ‘Billingsgate’ scarcely worthy of notice, and that the furore against the impeachment had been a justified reaction to the Whigs’ open assertion of republican notions: ‘The point is not’, he wrote, ‘how far resistance in cases of necessity is lawful (where a constitution is manifestly attempted to be subverted)’, that question having been settled at the Revolution; rather,

what gave offence was the endeavours to establish such a position by a new law [the bill ‘for the better security of crown and Church’], which could serve only for a groundwork for any opposite to the Court, and which should happen to have a majority in Parliament, to form a rebellion.

As the months went by his correspondence shows him relocating his position on the party-political spectrum. In June ‘our friends’ were still the Whigs, but by September he was telling a Shropshire connexion that to join with a Whig faction in his election would not be ‘agreeable’ to his ‘principles’. The reality seems to have been that he did not consider himself as truly belonging to either party, and his private observations were written from a Court or ministerial viewpoint. But for public consumption he was presenting himself as having always been at bottom a Tory. As his friend Charles Davenant pointed out, he could justify this by harking back to his early career in the House, and could claim it as a merit in the eyes of the Tories that he had ‘meddled so little in the affairs of Parliament . . . these last three years’. As far as the party as a whole was concerned, and especially those who coveted his office, his failure to resign in 1708 had left an indelible stain. Harley, however, who had arguably the greatest reason to be aggrieved at his having remained in the ministry in 1708, was readily persuadable, and before the end of August was reassuring Brydges of the Queen’s satisfaction with his service. Nor, in the end, did Brydges find it too painful to go back on his earlier pledges to Godolphin to resign ‘cheerfully’ should the treasurer be dismissed. His own rationalization was set out in a letter to his subordinate John Drummond, following Harley’s message: he could reasonably claim, he wrote, to have kept faith with the ‘duumvirs’

in everything that regards them . . . personally . . . but, whatever I shall do for their service, I know no reason I have to sacrifice myself and fortunes to promote the interest of others from whom I have never received even so much as common civility, during the time I have been looked upon as one of them, and whose aims, I am persuaded, are to gain power enough to govern without control, not only those two, but the whole kingdom, and this in opposition to those I have, as ’twere, been bred up with, who are of the same principles with me, and who, notwithstanding my having differed with them of late, are willing to receive me with open arms.

Such arguments were accepted without question both by Marlborough, and, perhaps more surprisingly, by his Duchess, who commended, without sarcasm, Brydges’ ‘steady behaviour upon all occasions’. What remained was to secure his re-election at Hereford, where there had been reports of a weakening in his interest, and of treachery on the part of his agent. Paying rather more attention to the constituency than he had done in recent elections, he was able to win a substantial victory at the polls, even in absentia, and he approached the forthcoming Parliament in a confident mood, pleased with the Tory majority as a guarantee of stability, and sure of Harley’s ability to retain control, and to raise funds for the maintenance of the war.14

Unembarrassed by his own change of tack, Brydges proved to be a visible rather than a reticent supporter of Harley’s administration during the 1710–11 session. He served in all probability as a teller on 10 Mar. 1711 in favour of the bill to permit the importation of French wines, and frequently communicated papers to the House relating to the payment of troops. He himself recorded a vote with the Court party on 27 Mar. for the imposition of a leather duty. Despite having been noted as a Whig in the ‘Hanover list’, he was included among the ‘worthy patriots’ who detected the mismanagements of the previous ministry (a surprising inclusion since he was himself a prime object of Tory back-bench interest on this score) and the ‘Tory patriots’ who favoured peace. Behind the scenes he was useful to Harley as an intermediary with Marlborough, and with some financial interests in the City. All this encouraged ministers, and even some individual Tory back-benchers whom he had taken pains to cultivate, to come to his defence when the inevitable attempt was made, as he put it, to ‘blow me up’. The occasion was the report of the commissioners of accounts, one of whose most spectacular findings was the sum of £6,500,000 unaccounted for on his part, with no accounts in fact having been passed or even made up in his office since 1707. The attack was led by the October Club, with the avowed purpose of obtaining his dismissal. The timing of the revelations coincided with Harley’s spell of convalescence from the wound inflicted by Guiscard, and it thus fell to Brydges’ ‘cousin’, as he called him, Henry St. John II*, to speak on his behalf. Whether St. John valued Brydges’ gratitude for its own sake, or whether he saw this as a way to ingratiate himself even further with Marlborough and thus steal a march on his temporarily bedridden rival, is unclear. Whatever the reason, St. John made a spirited and successful defence, to Brydges’ relief. Harley’s rather cool reaction, however, was a complicating factor, and Brydges felt it necessary to write to him with an offer of resignation and a request for his full and unequivocal backing in order to deter any further assaults. On neither point did Harley reply directly, and although Brydges continued to recommend to Lord Treasurer Oxford (as Harley became) his own and his clients’ and kinsmen’s requests for favour and patronage, the two men did not recover anything approaching intimacy thenceforth but co-operated on the basis of mutual need. When Brydges applied to be appointed a director of the South Sea Company in June 1711 Oxford ignored him. The next crisis in his affairs took place in January 1712. This time it was not the renewed investigations of the accounts commissioners that troubled him, for he had not provided them with any further information on which to build a case and he could count on strong Whig support as well as the backing of ministerialists. The Whig tract A State of the Five and Thirty Millions . . ., published after the 1710–11 session, and allegedly the work of Robert Walpole II*, had taken pains to defend Brydges’ official record in particular, and the members of the Hanover Club rallied round him when the affair of his delayed and incomplete accounts was raised again in the House in May 1712. Instead, his difficulty was a more general one: the focusing of High Tory hostility brought about by his own vigorous defence of Marlborough, first in the censure debate of January 1712 and then a month later, by implication at least, when on the report of the commissioners of accounts he intervened to discount any suggestions of irregularities in the bread contracts, a speech which, as much as his official interest, probably explains his appointment on 18 Feb. to the committee to investigate abuses in the musters, the clothing of the army and in military hospitals abroad. The first of these two contributions was the more important: it was by some way the most striking and effective of his parliamentary speeches, and a rare example of his crossing the current of popular opinion in the House. Some surprised observers gave him credit for courage, but most Tories were simply enraged, and rumours flew, even as far as Hereford, that his dismissal was imminent, for this time he had defied not only back-bench prejudice but also the declared interest of the ministry. However, Brydges had been nothing if not careful in preparing the ground. He was in close touch with Marlborough throughout the winter – may even have sought to dissuade the Duke from pursuing a public vindication – and when at last it became inevitable that Marlborough’s reputation would be assailed directly in Parliament, Brydges wrote to Oxford to put his own case, shrewdly prefacing this with a letter of explanation to Lady Masham, whom he had already been flattering for some time. ‘The Duke of Marlborough’s business in Parliament has put me under very great difficulty’, he began:

The obligations I have to his Grace are known all over the world. His favour first raised me to what I am and I cannot leave him in his present troubles without incurring the censure of ingratitude. On the other hand, to appear in the defence of one who is so unfortunate as to lie under the Queen’s displeasure, while I am actually in her service, carries with it such an air of indecency, as every gentleman ought to avoid.

He omitted to mention that he depended on Oxford’s personal goodwill to continue to protect him from Treasury demands that he bring up to date his paymaster’s accounts. Although Oxford may well have resented the adverse publicity thus given to his efforts at ‘moderation’, he none the less accepted the difficulties of Brydges’ position and promised him indemnity, a fact that was quickly advertised to Brydges’ parliamentary colleagues and even as far away as his constituency.15

Less than nine months after receiving these assurances from Oxford, Brydges wrote to the treasurer in November 1712 to beg leave to resign, on the grounds that, with the imminent conclusion of a general peace treaty, his office would be regarded as ‘new’ and would thus fall under the terms of the disqualification clauses of the 1706 Regency Act. He repeated the request in February 1713, before Parliament reassembled, suggesting that he would be better able to serve the Queen if he did not appear to have any ‘immediate dependence’ on her, but even after the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in March Oxford took no action. No challenge was offered to Brydges’ position when the session opened, and in May Oxford promised that he would be permitted to resign, prompting an outpouring of gratitude and a renewed display of support for administration, which had already seen Brydges subscribing heavily to the £200,000 loan and encouraging local thanksgiving for the peace, and which now issued in the Commons in his vote on 18 June in favour of the French commerce bill. The accounts commissioners were still hunting him, and their report in this session criticized him personally for delay and prevarication, but he had become accustomed to shrugging off their attacks. Of more concern, as the session drew to a close, was Oxford’s failure to make good the promise to relieve him of his post, and enable him to settle the affairs of the office. At last, in August, his patent was suspended, though there was still a great deal of unfinished business, and in the 1714 Parliament he was still to be found presenting various sets of departmental papers to the House.16

The last year of the Queen’s reign necessitated another prolonged balancing act, as Brydges sought on the one hand the goodwill, or at least the neutrality, of both Oxford and Bolingbroke (the former Henry St. John), if for nothing else than to protect him from further inquiries into his accounts, which were now the subject of persistent Treasury investigations as well as being a prime target of the Commons’ commissioners, and on the other the favour of the reversionary interest, which was approachable via the Marlboroughs. He had kept up his correspondence with Marlborough during the Duke’s exile, with letters that recalled their past associations and pledged future service, while advising the Marlboroughs against returning to England before the Tories’ rancour against them had abated. The events surrounding the Hanoverian succession demonstrated how skilfully Brydges’ recent political course had been steered. When Oxford was dismissed from the treasurership in July, Brydges was widely reported to be among the leading candidates for the commission that was expected to take over from him; yet he had friends among the Whigs, such as Robert Walpole II, who had defended him from the accounts commissioners in the House in May, and he had so successfully paid court to Hanover that he was offered the comptrollership of the Household when the new King arrived, and succeeded in converting this proposal into a coronation earldom.17

Brydges never returned to office, though he did rise higher in the peerage in 1719, and he was considered on several occasions for the most prestigious places in government. After 1714 he found his way back to the Tories, having been described as a Whig in the Worsley list, and took up a position as one of the leaders of the ‘moderate’ or ‘Hanoverian’ wing of the Tory party. Certainly his attachment to the Protestant succession was never in doubt, and among his many improvements to his principal estate at Canons was the erection there in 1722 of an equestrian statue of George I. He played an important role in politics early in the reign, with a reputation enhanced by his wealth, his experience, and his connexions with the Marlboroughs, and during the Whig Schism was even talked of as a possible lord treasurer. But his heavy losses in the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles weakened his standing and perhaps sapped his will to pursue an active parliamentary and political career. He was far from pauperized, however, by these or other financial disasters, and at his death, on 9 Aug. 1744, left encumbrances of only £14,000 on his extensive properties. The ruin of his estate, and the consequent demolition of Canons, were instead the work of his son, the 2nd Duke of Chandos, Hervey’s ‘hot-headed, passionate, half-witted coxcomb’.18

Brydges’ epitaph on the Chandos monument at Whitchurch, Hampshire, spoke of the ‘patience, resignation and piety’ of his last years, which other witnesses attest; of his great acts of ‘humanity and charity’, which are open to question; and of his public service, tending ‘more to the good of his country and friends than his own’, which defies belief. Yet the inscription’s earlier reference to his ‘constant application to business’ did do him justice. As a Parliamentarian, Brydges’ prime virtue was diligence, his cast of mind managerial. ‘A great complier with every court’, as Swift described him, he deplored the ‘little narrow effects of party and faction’, the violence which weakened the prerogatives of the monarchy and even the influence of the constituency patron over dependent voters, introducing in each case an unwonted popular element. His commitment to the Revolution and to the Hanoverian succession thus reflected above all a reverence for power. That his career should have prospered in a time of party rage is not only ironical, but a tribute to political skills that contemporaries recognized: according to Speaker Arthur Onslow†, for example,

he had parts of understanding and knowledge, experience of men and business, with a sedateness of mind and gravity of deportment, which more qualified him for a wise man, than what the wisest men have generally been possessed with.19

Ref Volumes: 1690-1715

Author: D. W. Hayton

Notes

Unless otherwise stated, this biography is based on C. H. C, and M. I. Baker, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos.

• 1. J. R. Woodhead, Rulers of London (London and Mdx. Arch. Soc.), 24; Rec. Old Westminsters, i. 134; CSP Dom. 1691–2, p. 184; Lipscomb, Bucks. ii. 77; Lysons, Environs of London (1792–6), iii. 414; Mar. Lic. Vicar-Gen. (Harl. Soc. xxx), 155; VCH Essex, viii. 43, 45, 50; Morant, Essex, i. 492; The Gen. xxxi. 238.
• 2. Salop RO, Ludlow bor. recs. adm. of freemen; Pittis, Present Parl. 348; Al. Carth. 84, 118; Nichols and Wray, Foundling Hosp. 345; Hearne Colls. vii. 309; Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster Official Lists, 209–10.
• 3. Cal. Treas. Bks. xx. 236.
• 4. Burnet, vi. 47; Cam. Misc. xxiii. 42, 69.
• 5. Huntington Lib. Stowe mss 26(1), Brydges’ diary 1697–9, 16 Jan., 13, 23 Mar. 1697, 12 Feb., 21 Apr., 26 Aug. 1698 and passim; Vernon–Shrewsbury Letters, ii. 17; Cocks Diary, 95, 168; M. Hunter, R. Soc. and Its Fellows (Brit. Soc. for Hist. of Science Monographs, 4), p. 85.
• 6. Stowe mss 26(1), 7, 8 Feb., 21 Nov., 6 Dec. 1698, 21 Jan., 13–14, 23, 27 Feb., 3, 14, 17, 19–21, 25 Mar., 26 Apr. 1699 and passim; 57(1), pp. 22–23; Add. 70019, f. 20; Cam. Misc. xxix. 397.
• 7. Stowe mss 26(2), Brydges’ diary 1699–1702, 12 Nov., 21, 27 Dec. 1699, 10, 13, 26 Jan., 8, 22 Feb., 15, 19 Mar., 4, 24 Apr., 3 May, 1, 13, 31 Aug. 1700 and passim; Northants. RO, Montagu (Boughton) mss 48/29, 51, Vernon to Shrewsbury, 6 Feb., 28 Mar. 1700; Cocks Diary, 50–51; Som. RO, Sanford mss DD/SF 4107(a), notes of debate, 15 Feb. 1700; Yale Univ. Beinecke Lib. Osborn coll. Manchester mss, Robert Yard* to Ld. Manchester, 15 Feb. 1700; Macaulay, vi. 2956.
• 8. HMC Cowper, ii. 400–1, 410, 424–5, 433–4, 438; Stowe mss 26(2), 26 Jan., 2 Feb., 12 Mar., 10, 12, 14–15, 17, 26, 27 Apr., 1, 16 May 1701; 58(1), p. 25; 57(1), p. 34; Cocks Diary, 95, 97, 107, 167–8, 171, 181.
• 9. Stowe mss 26(2), 22 Dec. 1701, 2, 12, 14 Jan., 21–22 Feb., 3, 4, 8, 17 Mar., 4 Apr.–9 May 1702; 26(1), 3 Apr. 1697; Cocks Diary 250, 260; K. Feiling, Tory Party, 385.
• 10. Stowe mss 57(2), p. 1; 58(1), pp. 31, 42; Marlborough–Godolphin Corresp. i. 60, 159; Post Boy, 24–26 Dec. 1702; Add. 17677 WW, f. 138; ZZ, f. 497; AAA, f. 212; Atterbury Epistolary Corresp. iii. 140; Huntington Lib. Q. iv. 313, 316; xxx. 21–44.
• 11. Bull. IHR, xlv. 45; HMC Portland, iv. 274; Cam. Misc. xxiii. 31–32, 53, 56, 69; HMC Popham, 284; Boyer, Anne Annals, v. 432; Stowe mss 57(1), pp. 7, 46–47; EHR, lxxxii. 734; Add. 40776, f. 24.
• 12. Stowe mss 57(1), p. 225; 57(2), pp. 6, 18, 26, 29, 33–35, 112, 114, 123, 225; 58(2), pp. 243–4, 254, 262; 58(3), pp. 98–99; Huntington Lib. Q. xxx. 21–44, 264; i. 460; Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 253, 262; Vernon–Shrewsbury Letters, ii. 309; EHR, lxvi. 249–50; lxxx. 697–8; Add. 70338, list 26 Oct. 1707; Swift Corresp. ed. Williams, i. 69; DZA, Bonet despatch 10/21 Feb. 1707–8; Speck thesis, 24; Egerton 3359 (unfol.); HMC Portland, iv. 485.
• 13. Speck thesis, p. 97; Stowe mss 57(2), pp. 69, 86, 103–5, 135, 139, 178; 57(3), pp. 122, 127, 135, 167; 58(5), p. 124; HMC Portland, iv. 512–15; Wentworth Pprs. 69; G. Holmes, Trial of Sacheverell, 86.
• 14. Huntington Lib. Q. xxx. 43; iii. 238; iv. 335–6; Stowe mss 57(3), pp. 173, 186, 226, 274–5; 57(4), pp. 3, 30–31, 53–54, 88, 90, 109–10, 114, 133, 152, 178; 58(5), p. 198; 58(6), pp. 107, 177–8, 213; 58(8), pp. 130–1; G. Holmes, Pol. in the Age of Anne, 50; Swift Stella ed. Davis, i. 21–22; W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig, 57, 68–69; Add. 70226, Thomas Foley II to Harley, 30 Sept. 1710.
• 15. Stowe mss 57(4), p. 158; 57(5), pp. 52, 74–75, 133–4, 154–5; 57(6), pp. 152–3, 165–6, 171, 217–18; 58(7), p. 195; 58(8), pp. 3–4, 100, 139, 173–4, 236; 58(10), pp. 10, 128, 209–10, 225, 230; 58(11), p. 180; Pittis, 182–4; Cobbett, Parlty. Hist. vi. 1016, 1019; HMC Cowper, iii. 32; G. M. Trevelyan, Eng. under Q. Anne, iii. 128; H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke, 83; Swift Stella, i. 252–3; Huntington Lib. Q. i. 462–3; Hist. Jnl. iv. 190; Boyer, x. app. p. 56; Oldmixon, Hist. Eng. (1735), p. 488; Add. 17677 FFF, f. 36; NSA, Kreienberg despatch 25 Jan. 1712; Cal. Treas. Bks. xxv. 97.
• 16. Stowe mss 57(8), p. 111; 57(9), pp. 82, 114–15, 158–9; Huntington Lib. Q. 466–71; Add. 17677 GGG, ff. 84, 113; Chandler, iv. 341–2, 374; Boyer, Pol. State, v. 232–3; vi. 123; Cal. Treas. Bks. xxxi. 97–98.
• 17. Huntington Lib. Q. 471–2; iv. 340; Cal. Treas. Bks. xxviii. 155, 254, 397; Boyer, v. 136; vii. 361, 377, 626; Stowe mss 57(9), pp. 123–7, 168–9; 57(10), pp. 28–30, 189–91, 237–9; Macpherson, Orig. Pprs. ii. 638; Swift Corresp. ii. 78; HMC Portland, v. 436, 475; Trinity, Dublin, Lyons (King) mss 2004/1499, Ld. Mountjoy to Abp. King, 27 July 1714.
• 18. Hearne Colls. vii. 401; HMC Stuart, v. 187; L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, 188, 191–2; Bull. IHR, lv. 69, 81.
• 19. Burnet, vi. 47; Hearne Colls. ix. 68; Swift Works ed. Davis, v. 268; Huntington Lib. Q. xxx. 43; Stowe mss 57(2), p. 29; 57(4), p. 111; 57(10), pp. 28–30.