Family and Education

b. c.1659, 1st s. of Richard Cocks of the Middle Temple, (d.v.p. o. s. of Sir Richard Cocks, 1st Bt., of Dumbleton), by Mary, da. of Sir Robert Cooke^† of Highnam, Glos., and sis. of William Cooke I*.  educ. M. Temple 1667; Oriel, Oxf. 1677-by 1680.  m. (1) lic. 6 Oct. 1688, Frances (d. 1724), da. of Richard Neville*, s.p.; (2) by Nov. 1724, Mary (d. 1764), da. of William Bethell of Swindon, Yorks., s.p.  suc. fa. 1669; gdfa. as 2nd Bt. 16 Sept. 1684.

Offices Held

Sheriff, Glos. 1692–3; freeman, Evesham by 1697.1

Biography

Tradition, upheld by the Member himself, located the common origin of the Cocks family in Kent, but the Gloucestershire branch can be traced back no farther than the mid-16th century, to a Thomas Cocks of Bishop’s Cleeve. The manor of Dumbleton was acquired through marriage by Thomas Cocks’s daughter, from whom it passed in two removes to the 1st baronet, a staunch adherent of King Charles I and ‘a great sufferer for his love to the royal family and for his zeal for the laws and established religion of his country’. This cavalier heritage meant little to the 2nd baronet, his grandson, who took the path of Whiggery, perhaps influenced by his wife’s family or even by his cousin Charles Cocks*, a brother-in-law of Lord Somers (Sir John*). In other respects too, the succession of the 2nd baronet marked a new departure: he was responsible for the rebuilding of Dumbleton, which he had returned to occupy after the death of his grandmother in 1690; and his ambitions to play a part in local and national politics were soon realized. He was involved in the manoeuvring that preceded the county election in 1690, at first active in support of Sir John Guise, 2nd Bt.*, and later making promises of goodwill, perhaps genuine, to Lord Weymouth’s brother James Thynne*. Sheriff in 1692, and chairman of the Gloucestershire quarter sessions from at least 1696, he stood unsuccessfully against Sir Francis Winnington* in the neighbouring borough of Tewkesbury in 1695, and at the next election was returned as knight of the shire on the Whig interest, receiving a sour tribute from one opponent, who dubbed him ‘an ill-favoured orator of that county’.2

Cocks’s parliamentary career is unusually well documented, thanks to the survival of his memoranda-books. Beginning as a record of some of his own letters and speeches (prepared if not always delivered), his views on matters of theology, morality and politics, and interesting facts culled from the Votes and from papers laid before the House, these notes extended into a parliamentary diary comparable in length to that of Narcissus Luttrell*, though much more vivid and personal, covering parts of the sessions of 1698–9 and 1699–1700, and forming a near-continuous record of proceedings in the 1701 and 1701–2 Parliaments. In September 1698 he was listed, probably in error, as a placeman and classed in a comparison of the old and new Commons as a supporter of the Court, presumably on account of his connexion with Somers. However, this latter classification was later queried and Cocks was, in fact, a consistent and enthusiastic Country Whig. His ‘first speech in Parliament’ delivered on 4 Jan. 1699, was in favour of the disbanding bill. Pointing out that it was not troops but ‘the people’s affections’ which provided the best ‘security’ for the monarch, he warned that a future King might not be as trustworthy as William III: ‘if the throne should be again filled with a weak and impotent prince, and he should have an army at his command, does anyone think he would be mended by his power?’ In another speech on the same topic, he dwelt on Cromwellian precedent, drawing on the recent edition of Ludlow’s memoirs. The maiden speech also took up more general themes that were to recur in Cocks’ speeches and writings: ‘the frailty and imbecilities of human nature [and] how many unthinking creatures there are over the virtuous and wise’; the destructive self-interest of ‘proud and ambitious’ place-seekers; and his own disinterested patriotism – ‘I am guided by reason not party’. During this session he also spoke, on 24 Feb., at length, ‘extempore’, in favour of the place bill:

Sir, there are two families I always opposed from sitting within these walls, the one I have heard in other Parliaments is the family of the obliged, the other the family of the disobliged: the one by fawning and flattery does everything he is bid and more to get preferment; the other brays and bawls against the government in order to be bought off. If places were not to be the rewards of our actions here men of small or no estates would never try to get in and the chief aim of everyone would more probably be the true interest of their country since they could propose to make no other advantage to themselves.

An even lengthier and more rambling discourse in support of the resumption of Irish forfeitures, delivered on 19 Apr., contained several injudicious passages. Although attacking those who ‘aggravate matters by railing and by hot, satirical, witty speeches’ (probably a sideswipe at John Grobham Howe*, his bête noire), he himself indulged in similarly offensive remarks:

I have often thought with myself how foolishly those unthinking creatures about court generally live: they invite, keep great tables, have many attendants, liveries and other innumerable fineries; those they entertain scarcely think themselves beholding to them, they think it is on the public. Those that entertain oftentimes do it more to show their grandeur than to show any particular respect to their guest.

Such lapses of judgment were common to Cocks’s character: in speaking to the place bill on 8 Mar. he had opposed the exemption of the treasurer of the Ordnance with a personal condemnation of the then incumbent, Charles Bertie I*, which had found no seconder; on another occasion he proposed to move for a bill to disable Sir John Trevor* from ‘executing any place of profit or trust’, and arranged a meeting of ‘those I thought zealous in the matter’, to which only two Members turned up (one of them his brother-in-law Neville). In the case of his speech for the Irish forfeitures resumption, his enthusiasm led him not just beyond good manners but beyond the principles of Whiggism and even his own prejudices. He began with a statement of (Country) Whig orthodoxy – ‘if this land had been divided among the conquering army they would there have planted colonies and bred up people in the religion and interest of England and would have defended Ireland but without the charge of a standing army’ – but went on to show a remarkable sympathy for the deprived Irish Catholics and even for James II. Dismissing the complaints of the ‘poor Protestant purchasers’, he declared:

it is less hard for them to pay some years’ purchase in acknowledgment of the advantages they have received; than for the poor Irish who stood by their natural prince, whose chiefest fault and misfortune was his being of their religion, of their understanding and being extremely favourable and partial to them on all occasions. Methinks it is a great hardship to be reckoned a traitor for only adhering to one’s natural prince . . . but I had almost forgot that the traitor is still he that is beaten; well then, since the Irish are traitors it is more reasonable that they should be traitors to the . . . people of England than to a few court minions.

At other times Cocks showed his party colours, when putting forward an additional clause to the place bill ‘to exclude some few . . . that did refuse . . . the voluntary Association from sitting in the next Parliament’; when opposing, on 5 Jan., Tory efforts to displace all foreign-born army officers, ‘these outlandish men that came over with the Prince of Orange to assist us . . . to recover our liberties, our religion and properties’; and when speaking for a general naturalization bill against ‘the Jacobite party’. He was also prepared to desert the Country side if he felt its conduct to be merely factious, as over the Tamworth election and the East India bill; or if he clashed with ‘Jack’ Howe. Most of his speeches in his first session, however, reflected Country concerns. A good example was his advocacy of legislation for ‘moral reform’. Obsessed with the upkeep of morality in public and private life, he believed strongly in the duty of a civil magistrate to ‘punish vice and discountenance immoralities’. A magistrate ‘should like a schoolmaster correct faults, punish idleness and instruct all under our care’. Named to the committee of 23 Dec. 1698 to bring in the unsuccessful ‘immorality’ bill, Cocks vainly proposed another such bill, to the consideration, as he put it, of ‘the beaux of all ages . . . the wits, the halfwits, and those that know no lawmaker’. Throughout his parliamentary career the Journals show him to have been an assiduous attender, nominated to numerous committees, especially on private bills or on measures connected with trade and manufacture. Family connexions with commerce; the local importance of the woollen industry in Gloucestershire; and a personal interest in the problem of poverty as an aspect of social regulation: all helped to focus his interests. In this session he introduced the bonelace importation bill (14 Apr.), and reported and carried to the Lords the bill to prevent the production of cloth buttons (11, 13 Jan.). He presented three other bills: the defective titles bill (7 Jan.); a bill to prevent Catholics from disinheriting their Protestant heirs (16 Feb.), which reflected his fierce antipathy to popery; and a bill to prevent jury corruption (6 Mar.), another element in the Country campaign to purify public institutions. He was appointed one of the drafters of the disbanding bill on 17 Dec. 1698. The essential corollary to disbandment was reform of the militia, and on 6 Feb. 1699 he was named to a committee to bring in such a bill. At the end of the session he set down his first impressions of Parliament and the Members, whose behaviour, seen at close quarters, had disappointed even so determined a jeremiah as himself:

before I was one among them . . . I fancied the fools were awed, governed and had respect for those that were famous and renowned for their worth and parts, and that the knaves, for indeed I knew some such there were, would disguise themselves and be in fear of being censured . . . upon these considerations I expected, if not a judicious, honest, sober and grave assembly, at least in appearance, I mean one that would seem to be such: instead of judicious and honest I found them all upon parties, in so much that if they did not totally banish judgment I am sure they did honesty . . . then as for the gravity and sobriety it is intolerable, there is such a noise one can scarce hear or mind what is said, and indeed what is particularly minded is private business, to make parties, to make court etc. . . . There [are] few that mind or understand the true integrity of the nation; in most of our public business men are biased by private ends.3

The second session of the 1698 Parliament saw Cocks as busy as before, though his most frequent nominations were to committees on private bills and petitions, or uncontroversial items of legislation. His particular interests were again well represented, his committees including those of 6 Mar. 1700, on the j.p.s’ qualification bill, 12 Mar., on the London poor bill, and 26 Mar., to draft reasons for a conference over the Lords’ amendment to the bill removing duties on the export of woollens. Two failed bills from the preceding session he now reintroduced: the defective titles bill, presented on 8 Dec. 1699, and the bill to stop Catholics disinheriting Protestant heirs, brought up ten days later. He chaired the committee on the Protestant heirs’ bill, and his commitment to ‘no popery’ also earned him a place on the committees to inquire into the recusancy laws (7 Feb. 1700), and on the superstitious uses bill (12 Mar.). His other bill, introduced on 7 Feb., had as its purpose the fixing of the ‘water-measure’ of fruit. Having seconded the motion for a bill to resume all crown grants since 1684, he was one of the three Members ordered on 13 Feb. to bring it in. He believed this measure would ‘yield more than the Irish forfeitures’. His diary records that he spoke regularly, and in some of the more important debates, though there are indications that he was not always taken seriously. When he had prepared a lengthy reproof of Members’ unparliamentary habits to be delivered on 13 Feb. 1700, the Speaker ‘pulled off his hat as I rose up to speak and so prevented me by speaking to order himself; I believe he partly knew what I intended to speak to’. On another occasion, a debate of 6 Dec. 1699, Sir Bartholomew Shower* seems deliberately to have dropped the name ‘Dumbleton’ into a speech in order to provoke Cocks into a customary harangue. Possibly it was Cocks’s pursuit of his two vendettas, against Howe and Trevor, that encouraged the picture of him as a man with bees in his bonnet. Early on in the session, on 28 Nov., he took up the subject of bribery in order ‘to set himself loose against’ Trevor but his performance proved a damp squib, concluding only with a motion that Trevor’s commission as master of the rolls be laid before the House, which nobody seconded. The speech itself had, at one point, raised ‘a quarter of an hour’s laugh’ in the House. On 13 Mar. 1700 Cocks dragged Trevor’s name into a debate on the purges in the commission of the peace: ‘vice and immorality’ had been mentioned, and on this subject Cocks commented, ‘I am afraid . . . all is true; I hear without doors of those entertainments and clubs and caballing of some within doors at the master of the rolls; I fear vice and immorality will find some patrons within doors’. But it was Howe, more than anyone, who could be guaranteed to bring him to his feet. Time and again he rose in response, particularly if any speech from Howe had referred to conditions in Gloucestershire. When, on 13 Feb. 1700, Thomas Stringer*, who was sitting next to Cocks, himself launched a vigorous answer to Howe’s attacks on the ministry, ‘they said merrily in the House that I had planted my great gun opposite to Jack Howe and discharged it full at him’. Such personal animosities may have made Cocks more of a Whig in this session. In the debate on 6 Dec. 1699 on Captain Kidd he claimed to have changed his mind after Howe and various prominent Tories had denounced the patent, for then

I had time to consider and strip truth stark naked from the dregs of oratory and filth of satire with which she was defiled and disguised, [and] I found no more in it than that these gent[lemen], when the government was in distress for men, ships and money, set out a ship at their own cost, not to get . . . treasures but to serve the nation at their own loss and hazard.

A similar conversion occurred on 13 Dec., over the proposal to address the King to remove Bishop Burnet from being tutor to the Duke of Gloucester. Howe had ‘thirded’ the motion, but Cocks spoke directly in answer to Sir Bartholomew Shower. Before the debate, Cocks said, he had thought Burnet to be ‘the fittest’ to be addressed against ‘except one’. However, after ‘the incomparable character I have heard of him from . . . gent[lemen] who I am sure know men and on whose judgment I much rely I own I have altered my opinion and believe [him] the fittest man in the world for the place he is in’. There were still issues, of course, on which he followed a Country line.

Upon Sir Charles Hotham’s moving for a supply just after the King’s Speech was read . . . I said ‘Sir, I have heard that it was the ancient method of Par[liament] to redress grievances before they gave money. I am sure there is nobody more truly loves K[ing] W[illiam] than I do, but . . . I am not for making a bad precedent in a good reign. I desire, therefore, that things may go in their ancient channel.’

The return to the question of the Irish forfeited estates found him again arguing forcefully for resumption. He ‘thirded’ Simon Harcourt I on 15 Dec. 1699 in moving for the bill, and spoke at its second reading on 14 Jan. 1700, in opposition to a Court-inspired proposal to instruct the committee ‘to set apart a proportion for the King’. On each occasion his arguments were derived from Charles Davenant’s* pamphlet on the subject, though in the second-reading debate he did take pains to praise King William and register his detestation of King James, whom ‘we hate and abominate because he did by an arbitrary power invade our rights, liberties and properties, and because he would have introduced a ridiculous, strange and detestable religion among us’. While in favour of resumption in general terms, ‘for the public service’, he was nevertheless unhappy with the opposition tactic of singling out for criticism the individual grants to Charles Montagu* and Lord Somers: ‘I will not do anything that has any private look or end in it.’ As for the Junto ministers, ‘I own I like them better than I did. I know no way to judge of men but by comparing them, nor no way of judging of ministers but by comparing them. They are good or bad only comparatively as they are better or worse than others.’ Such an attitude may explain why an analysis of the House dating from early 1700 listed Cocks as in the interest of Montagu.4

Re-elected for Gloucestershire as a Whig in January 1701, supposedly following an agreement under which he agreed not to stand at the next election, Cocks was up in town early to pledge his vote to Sir Thomas Littleton, 3rd Bt.*, for Speaker. He also attended a meeting of Whigs at the Rose tavern, ‘in order to oppose Mr [Robert] Harley*, because we did not like the preceptor [Rochester] at all nor the pupil very well’. Privately, however, he did not despair of Harley: ‘for all the opinions of many I cannot believe Mr Harley in the main to be in any interest but that of the country, though I confess I do not approve of many of his words and actions.’ Littleton having absented himself from the House on 10 Feb. when the Chair was to be filled, under orders from the King (or so many Whigs suspected), and in order to smooth the way for Harley, Cocks spoke in support of a second Whig candidate, Sir Richard Onslow, 3rd Bt. The climax of his oration, which included an illustration from ‘Romish history’, was that ‘whoever shall by bribe, menaces or any other art persuade a Member to absent himself from the House . . . does pollute the sacra of the House’. This emphasis on purification of parliamentary and governmental processes was then reflected in his appointment to committees on 20 Feb. 1701, to bring in a bill to regulate elections and the qualification of MPs, and on 27 Feb., to prepare a further bill to prevent the corruption of juries. Another echo of past battles was the ordering on 21 Feb. of a bill to resume crown grants since 1684, and again he was included in the drafting committee. But in this Parliament Cocks, as a Whig, was becoming even further alienated from erstwhile Country Tory allies, some of whom, in forming a new Court party, had shown themselves to be men who ‘prefer the rising sun before God, country, friend and everything’. Cocks’s enduring capacity for vigorous Country rhetoric was demonstrated on 10 May, over the ‘place clause’ of the bill of settlement:

There is nothing has occasioned so much flattery, so much railing envy and satire as this thing place, which is often the bane of the kingdom and ought to be avoided above all things . . . we all know that those in places generally vote in matters of state all one way, and this can hardly proceed from conscience, to have a body of men entirely all of one mind; it must have something more than chance, and we have seen men vote and talk one way before they have places, another way when in places, and then alter again when they have been out. It gives a handle to gent[lemen] to reflect to people out of doors to believe, there is a separate interest between the King and the country.

He was thus led to oppose the Tories by his own devotion to the Country interest, speaking twice early in May in support of the proposal to trim the civil list, which Tory ‘courtiers’ were attempting to suppress. On the second occasion, on 5 May, he added a rustic touch, recalling a conversation prior to the election with ‘several of my country neighbours’, in which they had urged him to ‘make war with France and pay our just debts’ and ensure that ‘poor working horses’, rather than courtiers and pensioners, should be fed. So powerful was his conviction that he found himself in the unlikely position of seconding Jack Howe, as he had done once before, earlier in the session, in a debate on the bill of settlement. Cocks also objected to the sheer factiousness of the Tories. On 28 Mar., defending the patent to Captain Kidd’s bankers, he deplored the fact that this had become ‘a party cause’. Similarly, in May he denounced attacks on Lord Stamford as ‘guided’ in the main by ‘party’. Tory partisanship in election cases was a recurrent grievance. Considering the role of the Commons as judge of elections, he once wrote that ‘never was a more corrupter place than this fountain of justice’. In contrast, he was himself capable of a degree of objectivity, as on 13 May, when he moved the taking into custody of the election agent of the Whig Reynolds Calthorpe I*, after bribery had been proved by a Tory petition. But more usually he seems to have excused Whig corruption by focusing instead on that of the Tories. In the prolonged debates in March on the case of Samuel Shepheard I*, his obvious reluctance to condemn, in spite of his often-trumpeted aversion to bribery, led to difficulties. His speech of 14 Mar. began with a faux pas, in that he mistakenly named Sir Stephen Fox* as having once before been ordered to name Members in receipt of secret service money; carried on with the obligatory jab at Trevor, for which he was rebuked from the Chair; and ended with an unwilling vote for ‘guilty’:

I really believe the bribery of the Old Company to be the occasion of this corruption of the New, for the New found that the Old had bribed Members, and the New were in a manner forced to bring some in by bribery to make a balance to the interest of the Old.

The next day he was prepared to excuse the Shepheards on some charges:

Sir, I am not New East Indian enough to acquit them when I believe them guilty, nor am I Old East Indian enough to find them guilty when the evidence is not sufficient. Shepheard was undoubtedly guilty in hindering the evidence from . . . Bramber . . . he and his two sons were turned out: himself and one justly enough, the other to bear them company because his name was Shepheard. There were more things, I believe, proved upon him than he was guilty of, and yet he was too guilty to sit there.

When the case of the Great Grimsby election, another scene of conflict between the Old and New East India companies, was heard at the bar on 6 Mar., he acknowledged that the New Company man, William Cotesworth*, had ‘come in by bribery’ but reserved the severer judgment for Cotesworth’s opponent, Arthur Moore*, largely because Moore’s case had been argued so ‘partially’ by the Tories:

I was truly, Sir, very uneasy to see this House show so much partiality . . . how was everything reflecting on Cotesworth contrary to reason and rules all lost in debates magnified; how was everything relating to Mr Moore after the same partial manner extenuated.

The Old Company, whom he decried as ‘the tools of the present ministry’, remained an object of his enmity, and on 17 May he spoke against a move to settle the East India trade in their interest. In these and other respects Cocks’s one-sided censure of the Tories for factiousness and ‘private’ motives reveals his own implicit partisanship. In seconding Howe’s proposal, on 1 Apr., for a clause in the bill of settlement ‘that no foreigner should be capable of a grant or place in this kingdom’, he went out of his way to insert a thrust against Lord Rochester, showing that he regarded Rochester’s being ‘prime minister of state’ as just as great a grievance as the making of ‘grants to foreigners’. His view of the composition of the House at the opening of this Parliament is an interesting one. He divided the Membership into three ‘parties’: ‘the honestest’, ‘the Jacobites’ and ‘the Commonwealthmen’. The two latter, he wrote, ‘join in everything’, adding, ‘many that wished for a commonwealth could not trust the virtue of their party and feared the designs of the Jacobites in conjunction with them’. His own return to the ranks of the ‘honestest’ party was largely determined by the priority he accorded to the Protestant succession and foreign policy. On 16 Apr. he spoke for amending the address to the King to include a promise to endorse action ‘in preventing the union of France and Spain’. ‘If we say we will have no war’, he told the House, ‘we shall be forced to have a war. If we say we will engage in a war if we cannot without it have what we think necessary for our preservation it is very probable our terms may be complied with, and I don’t see these words intend further.’ Hatred of France and sympathy for the plight of the Dutch led him to acquiesce in the giving of any assistance required by the allies, even by the land tax. In the debate of 24 Apr. he opined that although ‘all my small fortune is in land and I believe everyone that knows me knows that I will not easily part with my money’, and therefore ‘I am against charging land, I mean for charging it with as little as possible’, he could not accept the fixing of a maximum rate for the land tax by the committee of ways and means:

We are threatened and in danger abroad from a malicious and potent enemy . . . [and] though I shall not be willing to raise more upon land, nor do I well like what is done, yet since there is a possibility that we may be forced into a war I would not give such great encouragement to our enemies . . . if there is a necessity, I would willingly part with one half to secure the other.

Subsequently he revised his view in accordance with Country orthodoxy, arguing instead that ‘money’ rather than land should bear the weight of taxation. Taxes in general were ‘odious and grievous to the people’, the land tax most of all because of its inequality. Land had ‘in a manner borne the whole charge’ of the previous, ruinously expensive, war. Of the other alternatives, ‘trade’ (which was ‘the life of England’ while land was ‘England itself’) was ‘in most parts sufficiently charged’ already, and the idea of an excise was particularly ‘odious’. On the great party struggle of the session, over the impeachments, Cocks proved himself uncompromisingly Whiggish, standing for ‘moderation and justice’ against the factiousness of the prosecution. His family connexion with Somers may well have brought him close to the former lord chancellor: he records being ‘with Lord Somers, Orford [Edward Russell*] and Halifax [Charles Montagu]’ on 26 Apr. and hearing their own explanations of the Partition Treaty. On 16 May, speaking on the articles of impeachment, he paid Somers this tribute:

I live in the neighbourhood near him, I have known him as long as I have known anybody, in all the parts of his life he has merited esteem from good men and been honoured . . . in the reign of King James he behaved himself as an Englishman, he defended the Church and the bishops for nothing when others betrayed our liberties and attacked them for profit and preferment, and after this Revolution he was deservedly made attorney-general . . . lord keeper and afterwards . . . chancellor, in no way possible to increase or advance his fortune but by the favour of his prince, and since he has left his business and dedicated himself wholly to the public.

When Somers and Orford were finally cleared he wrote:

were those little, villainous, poor wretches that hatched these evils against the lords tried for their former ills in Westminster Hall, there would have been as many demanding justice and rejoicing at their condemnation as were at these lords’ acquittal.

He reported and carried to the Lords a private estate bill (9, 23 May), and on 3 June was given a fortnight’s leave of absence, but to judge from the evidence of the diary, he did not take it up.

Having ‘voted well’ in the 1701 Parliament, Cocks was able to secure the backing of the entire Whig interest in Gloucestershire in the general election of November 1701, despite any previous pledge to step down. Sir John Guise, 3rd Bt.*, yielded his ‘pretentions’ and Cocks joined Maynard Colchester* in a ruthless and successful campaign to ditch Jack Howe. The absence of his great enemy robbed parliamentary exchanges of some of their spice, though from time to time Sir Christopher Musgrave, 4th Bt.*, threatened to prove an adequate substitute. Predictably, Cocks was included with the Whigs in Robert Harley’s list of this Parliament, and in his diary Cocks was quite open about his antagonism towards ‘the Speaker and his party’, meaning the Tories. When the accounts commissioners were balloted for, on 17 Mar. 1702, he wrote of ‘their list’ and ‘our list’. As in the preceding Parliament, the judging of election disputes showed as clearly as anything else the conflicting pressures of party and conscience. A lover of justice, who could denounce the elections committee as ‘certainly the most corrupt court in Christendom, nay the world’, he regularly spoke and voted in favour of Whigs and against Tories. To take three of the most notorious cases in this Parliament: in the debate of 29 Jan. on the Malmesbury election he might have disapproved of the petition from the Whig voters against the Tory Hedges – ‘only to put a blemish upon Sir Charles Hed[ges]* now turned out of his employ of secretary of state. S[o in]solent and unmanlike to run a man quite down that was going down before’ – and regarded the defence of the Whig Parke as ‘artificial’, but his conclusion was that Hedges must have bribed harder than Parke. His insinuations to this effect, that ‘had I not known the modesty and virtue of the gent[lemen] that were elected I should have thought them the best bidders’, aroused Tory anger; and for all his contempt for the petitioners, he felt their prolonged imprisonment by the House to be ‘unjust’. He was again an object of Tory fury for remarks on the decision of 24 Feb. in favour of the election of Sir Christopher Hales for Coventry: ‘I . . . said . . . I did not see any right, any colour of a majority, unless that his being one of the black list . . . This made all the black-listed buss [sic] all over the House . . . and some of the fools cried “to the bar”.’ During the hearing of 7 Feb. concerning the Maidstone election, where the ‘Kentish Petitioner’ Thomas Colepeper had been a candidate, he admitted that Colepeper had been ‘guilty of bribery’ but still argued on his behalf. Later that same day, in a debate arising from Colepeper’s ‘silly reflecting letter on the last House of Parliament’, he seconded a motion to have the affair of the ‘Poussineers’ inquired into, another merely party cause. In terms of parliamentary business, this, his last session, was one of Cocks’s most important. He was named to prepare a bill for taking public accounts (6 Jan.), a measure to which he subsequently ‘brought up a clause’ in committee ‘to inquire into the briberies and corruptions used among the officers concerned in managing the King’s treasure’; and to draft a bill to prevent bribery and corruption at elections (17 Jan.). The rest of his work covered mainly private bills and legislation concerning trade and industry, with now and then a local flavour, as when he was nominated to a committee to bring in a bill, along the lines of one of his own previous bills, to regulate the ‘water-measure’ of fruit, in response to a petition from the Gloucestershire grand jury, or when he presented a petition from Gloucestershire clothiers. He took a special interest in the difficulties of the Quakers over oath-taking, speaking on 28 Jan. in favour of committing the affirmation bill. The subject of oaths had preoccupied him, and he had already spoken twice on the question when in April the bill to ‘explain’ the Abjuration was read. Now, acting as the Quakers’ parliamentary agent, he brought in a clause on their behalf. The attempt proved something of a fiasco, however. On 13 Apr. he and others had suggested that the Quakers seek ‘a liberty to affirm the same words’, while they themselves ‘had a mind to have a shorter way’:

at last we agreed that they should prepare two clauses, one as I directed and one that they liked themselves: but they were so long consulting, so long preparing, that the bill was read before they brought either and at last the short one, so in I went into the House and opened it as if it had been the long clause, and there was a debate and a question put, whether I should bring it up; that was carried and when it was read and it differed a pretty deal from what I had opened it . . . I told the truth which was the haste, and when I saw the House would not receive and that some were for rejecting I asked leave to withdraw it.

On Cocks’s further advice, the clause was introduced ‘by way of amendment’ in the Lords, but some among the Quakers were still unsure that this was the best way to proceed, and were ‘soliciting us not to agree’. On the great issues of war and the succession, Cocks made several speeches. In committee of supply on 31 Jan. he refuted the comment by Sir Godfrey Copley, 2nd Bt.*, that ‘we must accommodate the war to our conveniences’, and later, on 19 Mar., he warmly supported an Anglo-Scottish union as the best ‘bulwark to our liberties’, extending the idea to include Ireland as well. King William’s death was a heavy blow:

he . . . was . . . engaged in the quarrel of Europe, to defend them against France and . . . to defend us from the pretended Prince of Wales. He was the supporter of the Protestant religion, of the liberty of Europe, and an enemy to France . . . he was the justest, wisest and bravest prince of his age, and his faults were as few as any, his virtues more than any, King now reigning . . . had he lived longer it may be he might have lived more to our good than to his own glory.

Cocks’s Country sympathies could still make him an irritant to Whig party leaders. On 11 Feb. he reverted to a topic of former sessions, in moving for the resumption of ‘all the grants made since the Revolution’, which he thought would raise £700,000. Not for the first time, he was bereft of a seconder. And after Anne’s accession he resurrected another pet project, moving on 13 Mar. for an inquiry into the yield of duties given to support the civil list. This time Sir Edward Hussey, 3rd Bt., a man after Cocks’s own heart, seconded the motion. Indeed, Cocks’s ungracious verdict on Hussey might not unjustly have been applied to himself: ‘very honest, but has no great judgment, and [such] a great opinion of his own abilities that he thinks nobody able to advise him’. Cocks persisted in the scheme, vainly approaching several Whig Members, but suspected ‘that the impeached lords were against our going on with such a debate lest it might be insinuated that they had promoted it’. The question of the administration of the resumed Irish forfeitures, which took up much of the time of this Parliament, presented him with a dilemma, spelled out by Irish Whig protests, of whether to adhere to the public over private interest, or to uphold the rights of Protestants against Papists. The changed international and political scene now inclined him more to the latter course. Early on in the session he referred to the ‘rogueries’ of the Irish Catholics, and took a hard line against accepting petitions from those whose ‘ancestors were attainted after death, though they had been slain in battle’. He seemed impressed by the arguments of the Irish Protestants’ ‘national remonstrance’. While not closely involved in the solicitation of any individual case, he did vote on 9 Apr. to commit a Protestant petition. One of his only two interventions in debate on the subject occurred on 30 Apr., when he proposed a measure to ‘oblige’ Church of Ireland clergy ‘to a residence’. The other was more significant, and marks the survival of his faith in the resumption principle: on 7 May he supported the ‘public’ against the ‘poor Protestant purchasers’, attacking a move to allow those who had bought from the grants to Lords Albemarle and Romney two-thirds of the ‘purchase money’ instead of the customary one-third. ‘We must not consider persons’, said Cocks, ‘but what is fit for us to do.’ Towards the end of the session he took the opportunity to reaffirm other convictions. On 2 May he once again defended the foreign army officers. Then two days later, on the deficiency bill, he was able to make his last statement of principle to the House:

I hope, Sir, you will not let us spend our time . . . in unnecessary reflections. We are engaged in a war with France, and I hope we shall reserve all our malice and envy for France, and not spend it upon one another. I know the hopes and desire to get places has been the only thing that has so long supported party among us and I hope that those that have had the places so long will be satisfied with their so long enjoyment of them, and those that have them now will be satisfied with the possession of them, and that we that never had nor expected places shall all of us join to support our common country. I am sure for my part, though my estate is not a great one, yet it serves my turn, and I don’t spend it all every year; if other gent[lemen] would do so too there would not be such hunting after places . . . I am of opinion that it will be more dangerous to our constitution not to reward those that have served us faithfully, and much more not to pay those that have shed their blood for us in a former war . . . I will therefore preserve that part of the constitution, and venture the other as the less dangerous.5

With the accession of the Queen came a change of political fortunes in Gloucestershire. A straw in the wind was Howe’s clear victory in an election for foreman of the grand jury in March 1702. Already Cocks was preparing to abandon the county and put up at Tewkesbury, but in fact he contested neither constituency in the 1702 election, and found himself out of the House. Robbed of this platform for his views, he began to write in earnest and at greater length than hitherto. In 1704 he sent his great friend and correspondent Lord Hervey (John*) an ‘Answer to Faction Displayed’ and a ‘Vandyke-like picture of Westminster Hall’, in which the Duchess of Marlborough was eulogized under the character of ‘Sempronia’. Soon afterwards came a ‘discourse of religion’, a subject on which Cocks was never slow to pick up his pen. Hervey was greatly impressed: ‘though I always took you to be an honest good man, I should never have believed you so able a divine, so skilful a merchant, and so general a statesman as I find by your writings’. In retirement, however, Cocks was giving full rein to his various idées fixes, especially his overpowering fear of popery. Robert Harley was the recipient of a curious letter in 1704 congratulating him on his elevation to secretary and adding ‘an account of the fears and uneasiness of many of the best affected to her Majesty’s government at the unusual grandeur of the papists’. Cocks allowed that he had no actual evidence from Gloucestershire of Catholics arming themselves: he was merely keeping Harley informed of what fellow Protestants were thinking. The real aim of the letter was to protest against purges of Whigs from the commission of the peace. Out of Parliament, Cocks seems to have become an even firmer partisan. According to Hervey, Lord Somers was anxious to see Cocks return to the House, agreeing with Hervey ‘with respect to the unhappy competition’ between Cocks and Sir John Guise for the Whig interest in Gloucestershire in 1705, that while Guise would

act upon the same honest bottom, yet we can neither of us come up to allow him near the usefulness you’ll be of in Parliament, who not only can but will speak those bold and timely truths we all want to hear again uttered there . . . and we jointly agree . . . that there is nobody we had rather have in the H[ouse] of C[ommons] than Sir Richard Cocks.

In the event Cocks stood at Evesham, presumably with the assistance of his kinsmen there and possibly thanks to the intercession of Somers himself, but was defeated in a contest marred by much ‘foul play’. He determined to try his popularity in his own county again, and by 1707 had announced himself a candidate for knight of the shire at the next election. He persisted, even though this meant opposing two Whigs, Guise and Matthew Ducie Moreton*, but a further defeat ended his hopes of re-election. The Sacheverellite fever of 1710 found him either in his study, writing circular letters to freeholders in support of Guise and Moreton and composing further unpublished papers in support of the Hanoverian succession, or at quarter sessions, where his own Whiggish address ‘had too much of the antidote in it to pass with so poisoned a people’. There followed some further exposition of ‘true old Whig principles’, culminating in a manuscript history of the reign of Henry III of France, which ran ‘almost parallel with more recent transactions’. Of this Cocks entertained quite sanguine literary hopes. He resisted Matthew Ducie Moreton’s ‘persuasions’ to stand for the county in 1713, contenting himself with behind-the-scenes efforts to urge a motion to invite over the Hanoverian heir to the throne, but once the ‘happy accession’ was accomplished, he reconsidered Moreton’s earlier offers. ‘Truly, Sir’, he wrote, ‘I have a desire to appear once more in public in order to take leave of my old friends, and to put my helping hand to part with some enemies to my country.’ Unfortunately, he had missed the boat.6

Cocks’s service in the cause was now restricted to his writings and to his charges to Gloucestershire grand juries. Hervey had recommended publishing the ‘excellent discourse you entertained your countrymen with at the quarter sessions in 1715’, and two years later a charge did find its way into print. This was in the main a defence of the Hanoverian succession and the right of resistance, as exercised at the Revolution, and a denunciation of the Pretender, who had been ‘educated in arbitrary French principles, instructed in all the cruel arts of Popery’. Papists received a verbal lashing, but so too did the ‘High Church plotters’ whose arguments were seen as no more than a cover for self-interest, the advancement of ‘arbitrary power’, and even popish sympathies. Subsequently, as he wrote, ‘the great infirmities of my body forced me for some years to decline all public business’. He even ceased to act as a j.p. in Gloucestershire. Then in 1721 he returned to print with a belated postscript to the Bangorian controversy, A Perfect Discovery of Longitude (1721), in which he claimed to ‘prove’ that Parliament was ‘the fittest body of men to be entrusted with the government of the Church’. In order to do so he was prepared to believe that all parliamentary legislation was for the ‘public good’ and that there could be no possibility of ‘private views’, a contrast to his impressions while a Member. The ‘High Church’ party were the principal objects of his scorn, for neo-papist ambitions. Cocks expanded some of his ideas the following year in The Church of England Secured, which judged the established church by the standards of rationality and the pattern of primitive Christianity. In a two-pronged attack, he denounced on the one hand authoritarianism and persecution and on the other the notion of an apostolic succession. Both were derived from popery, and showed the ‘High Churchmen’ seeking to emulate ‘Antichrist’. The pamphlet developed into a swingeing condemnation of ‘horrid impudent priestcraft’, and concluded with a call for ‘another Reformation’ in the hearts of men, to be encouraged by specific reforms enacted by Parliament: a change in ordination procedure; prevention of genuflection at communion; outlawing of pluralism and non-residence; abolition of ecclesiastical courts; and lastly, the appointment by the secular authorities of teachers and overseers to instruct people in the principles of true religion and morality. Some passages were frankly abusive. This tone, combined with his accusations that the Church of England clergy were crypto-papists, and his explicit sympathy for Dissenters, whom he hoped to see brought back into ‘one sheepfold’, naturally provoked replies from High Churchmen, one of which, The Knight of Dumbleton Foiled at His Own Weapon, was a scholarly demolition of his shaky theology. Undaunted, he fired off a sequel to The Church of England Secured, entitled Over Shoes, Over Boots. This was a prolix revisitation of previous arguments, in which he became even more scurrilous and offensive, and at one point criticized his own brother Charles, whom he had presented to the living of Dumbleton: ‘my parson is not inspired; I was bred up with him, and I had then as much learning as he had’. By this time he was acquiring notoriety. Tories regarded him as ‘a whimsical, crazed man’ or a ‘peevish elf’, but his tracts went through several editions, more rejoinders appeared, and in 1723 he published yet another restatement of his views, cast as a Farewell Sermon, the formula emphasizing his conviction that he was as good as any parson. The basis of the work was a paper written at the time of the schism bill in 1714, to demonstrate that ‘the Christian religion was not introduced by power and force’. Farewells were premature, since, in the wake of the Atterbury Plot, he returned to the Gloucestershire quarter sessions in 1723 to deliver another charge warning his hearers of the perils of popery and Jacobitism, exonerating the ministry from any criticism over the South Sea Bubble, and pleading for all to ‘leave off faction’, that is to say to become Whigs.7

In his last years Cocks became even more determinedly eccentric. When his wife died in 1724 he erected a monument on which was inscribed his gratitude for the years she had lived ‘in peace, harmony and tranquillity with her husband, as far as human imbecilities common to the best of mortals would permit’. He immediately remarried, and in a new will gave his second wife a life interest in his estate. His last pamphlet, published posthumously, purported to be an inquiry into the so-called ‘bloody execution’ at Thorn, together with ‘a vindication of some of the tenets of the Quakers’, but was in fact nothing more than a stale reprise of past polemics against popery and High Church priestcraft, the flavour of which is conveyed by his description of Anglican ordination:

We often see an ignorant, immoral dunce, because he was a relation of the bishop’s or his wife’s, or for marrying a poor relation or an old servant maid, or sometimes without that drudgery, by making a present to the wife or steward, it will open a way, and prevail upon an old, doting fellow to lay his hands on him, and by that means imprint on him an indelible character, and give him credentials to be from thenceforth an ambassador of Heaven.

After spending some time at Bath in 1726, afflicted by the gout, he died about 21 Oct. of that year, and was buried at Dumbleton. Predictably, in the preamble to his will he gave vent to his natural self-opinionated verbosity, on the worthlessness of deathbed repentances. Under the terms of the will, which took some 11 years to prove, the estate passed directly to a nephew and on his death without issue in 1765, to a kinsman from Herefordshire, who demolished the greater part of the house. The baronetcy had already become extinct.8

Ref Volumes: 1690-1715

Author: D. W. Hayton

Notes

Unless otherwise stated, this biography is based on the evidence of Cocks's own diary and commonplace books (Bodl. mss Eng. hist. b. 209-10, published as The Parliamentary Diary of Sir Richard Cocks, 1698-1702 ed. D. W. Hayton).

• 1. J. V. Somers Cocks, Hist. Cocks Fam. pt. 3, pp. 96, 99, 111; info. from Mrs Elizabeth Boardman, Archivist, Oriel Coll. Oxf.; C 219/81.
• 2. Add. 21420, f. 208; Somers Cocks, pt. 1, pp. 6–7; pt. 2, pp. 38, 45–46, 56; pt. 3, pp. 76–79, 97–100; Bath mss at Longleat House, Thynne pprs. 13, ff. 256–7; CSP Dom. 1694–5, p. 234; Guise Mems. (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxviii), 140.
• 3. Cam. Misc. xxix. 381; Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower: Part V ed. Worden (Cam. Soc. ser. 4, xxi), 47, 50, 73; Party and Management ed. Jones, 62; Add. 34730, f. 250; W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife, 6; Whig Ascendancy ed. Cannon, 63.
• 4. Add. 34730, ff. 238–9; Vernon–Shrewsbury Letters, ii. 369; Beaufort mss at Badminton House, 503/1/2, Charles Hancock* to Beaufort, 1 Jan. 1700[–1]; HMC Portland, iv. 14.
• 5. Surr. RO (Kingston), Somers mss 0/1/1, Mrs Burnet to Lady Jekyll, [c.Nov. 1701]; Guise Mems. 243.
• 6. Add. 70254, Robert Price* to Robert Harley, 30 Mar. 1702; 70421, Dyer’s newsletter 24 Aug. 1710; Hervey, Letter Bks. i. 182, 199–200, 205–7, 215–20, 229–30, 262–6, 270–5, 302–3, 335–9, 389–90; HMC Portland, iv. 86–87; Defoe Letters, 111; Bodl. Ballard 31, f. 50; Post Man, 15–18 May 1708; Glos. RO, Ducie mss D340a/C22/10, Cocks to Moreton, 17 Aug. 1714.
• 7. Hervey, ii. 12; Cocks, Charge to Glos. Grand Jury 30 Apr. 1717 (1717); A Perfect Discovery of Longitude (1721); The Church of England Secured . . . (1722); Over Shoes, Over Boots . . . (1722); Sir R—-d C—ks His Farewell Sermon (1722); Charge to Glos. Grand Jury Midsummer 1723 (1723); [Z. Grey], The Knight of Dumbleton Foiled at His Own Weapon (1722); Anon. A Pair of Clean Shoes and Boots for a Dirty Baronet . . . (1722); Ballard 48, f. 212; Atkyns, Glos. 212; Hearne Colls. vii. 372.
• 8. Somers Cocks, pt. 3, pp. 101, 110–11; Cocks, A True and Impartial Inquiry Made into the Late Bloody Execution at Thorn . . . (1727); Hist. Reg. Chron. 1726, p. 40; Rudder, Glos. 420–1; info. from Mr J. V. Somers Cocks.