Women behind the polls: the electoral patronage of Anne St John, countess of Rochester

Earlier this month the History of Parliament Trust with partners UK Parliament’s Vote 100 project and the Schools of Humanities at the University of Westminster held a conference to mark the centenary of the passing of the 1918 legislation that formally accorded women the right to sit in Parliament. It is in this context, and as a follow-up to her previous blog on female voters in the 17th century, Women at the polls, Dr Vivienne Larminie of the House of Commons 1640-1660 section looks at Anne St John. She exemplifies how, in the early modern period, a well-connected and determined woman of property might exert influence over elections...

In late February 1660 there was excitement among those who now saw the restoration of the monarchy as an imminent and welcome possibility, at the prospect that the Long Parliament would finally be terminated and a new ‘free’ Parliament called. Elections were expected for a Convention to commence sitting that April. Among those who scrambled to exert influence at the polls to promote the return of the king was Anne, dowager countess of Rochester. In her person she illustrates several of the usually hidden ways in which women of high social status might exercise power before the age of fashionable political hostesses.

Anne St John (1614-1696) was one of those early modern women who, through a combination of their own longevity and the gender imbalance in susceptibility to prevailing epidemics, found themselves outliving their husbands and sons, gaining control of extensive estates during the minorities of their children and grandchildren, and deploying the patronage that went with it. Among the elder surviving children of Sir John St John of Lydiard Tregoze in north east Wiltshire, in October 1632 she married 16-year-old Sir Francis Henry Lee, 2nd bt., of Quarrendon, Buckinghamshire, and Ditchley, Oxfordshire. When Lee died suddenly from smallpox in July 1639, Anne was left as guardian of their 18-month-old son Sir Henry Lee, 3rd bt., and his even younger brother Francis (later Francis Henry), and as custodian of extensive but encumbered estates. In her mid-20s, and fighting to secure her sons’ inheritance, she could still engage with politics. In November 1640 she confidently informed Edward Hyde, a sitting MP and the future earl of Clarendon, that the king’s need for money would ensure the continuance of the recently-assembled Long Parliament. Enquiring whether William Pleydell, her sister’s stepson and MP for the St Johns’ pocket borough of Wootton Bassett, had yet made any learned speeches, she claimed he would have been a good choice as Speaker of the Commons.

When the civil war broke out, unlike their kinsmen the St Johns of Bletsoe [see for example, Sir Oliver St John I], the St Johns of Lydiard Tregoze became royalists. Anne married as her second husband Henry Wilmot, who had been expelled from the Long Parliament in 1641 for his involvement in the ‘Army Plot’ and who went on to become a controversial commander of royalist forces. Defeat drove the couple into exile on the continent, where Wilmot was created earl of Rochester by Charles Stuart, the future Charles II. Having been involved in royalist insurrection, he eventually died at Ghent in 1658. Meanwhile, his widow, already returned to England with their young son, John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, the future poet and libertine, continued the struggle by other means.

In 1655 Anne arranged the marriage of her eldest son, Sir Henry Lee, to one of the two daughters and co-heirs of the very recently deceased Sir John Danvers, a regicide who had covertly given succour to royalists. Not only did she vigorously assert her daughter-in-law’s claims to the Danvers estates in Wiltshire, but – as effective lord of the manor – in the elections of December 1658 she prevailed on the 13 voters of Malmesbury to choose her son for the parliamentary seat once held by Sir John. Sir Henry Lee joined Danvers’ other son-in-law, Robert Villiers alias Danvers, and his uncles (Anne’s younger brothers) Sir Walter St John and Henry St John (MP for Wootton Bassett) among a sizeable number of covert royalists in the Parliament of Richard Cromwell. However, partisan hopes were dashed when Lee also succombed to smallpox, and died in March 1659, aged only 21, leaving two daughters, one as yet unborn.

By the spring of 1660 Anne, countess of Rochester, controlled as executor or guardian the Danvers inheritance of her granddaughters, the Lee inheritance of her younger son Sir Francis Henry Lee, 4th bt., only just coming of age, and the Wilmot inheritance of her youngest son the earl of Rochester. This potentially conferred wide electoral patronage. Staying in London, she enlisted the help of Thomas Yate, an executor of Sir John Danvers who was to be an important figure in Restoration Oxford, to secure seats for her relations and friends in several boroughs in north Wiltshire and elsewhere which were open to her influence. Her priority was to get places for her son Francis Henry and for Sir Ralph Verney, ‘whose own merits is such, as it will bee a happinesse to the place and they will have cause to give us thanks for him’, but who, as she explained to Yate, ‘obliges me to doe him any service hee shall command’ because of his support to her, as a Lee family executor, over ‘the children’s business’. Indeed, ‘if my brother St John be not chosen, I shall rather have him disappointed than Sir Ralph Verney’ [M. M. Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family (1894), iii. 465].

The countess soon found her power a mixed blessing and was led to scale down her aspirations. She told Verney she had been ‘soe trobeled with solicitors, for those [burgesses’] places in the children’s estate’, that she had had to ‘put them all off with telling them that I am alredy promised as far as my interest goes’. The places for Verney and Sir Francis Henry Lee ‘will bee as many as wee can compass’. Malmesbury corporation informed Lee that ‘if he would come in person they did hope to chuse him’, despite there being a dozen other candidates; probably because he obliged ‘for fear of the worst’ they duly elected him, as they did again in 1661 [ibid. 467]. But at Great Bedwyn, where the countess nominated both Verney and her brother Sir Walter St John, despite an initial undertaking by electors to ‘do their duty to their Country and their young lande ladyes to serve Sir Ralph therein’ [ibid. 464], after a double return neither of her candidates succeeded in securing their seats.

However, this was by no means Anne’s final opportunity to influence the polls, or indeed wider society. Later in 1660 she petitioned the Commons over the Lee estate and submitted ‘a very effectual letter’, read in Parliament, advocating mercy for John Hutchinson, former MP for Nottingham and a regicide, in return for the help he had previously given her [Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (1863), 412]. Surviving her sons Francis Henry Lee (d.1667) and John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester (d.1680), and her grandson Charles Wilmot, 3rd earl of Rochester (d.1681), she lived to raise her grandson Edward Henry Lee (1st earl of Lichfield) and marry him to an illegitimate daughter of Charles II, and to preside over the upbringing, estates and attendant patronage of her Wilmot granddaughters as she had over those of their Danvers-Lee cousins.

VL

Additional reading:

• Elsie Corbett, A History of Spelsbury (1962)
•  Journal of the House of Commons, viii. 185b
• Among MPs mentioned here, the House of Commons 1640-1660 section are preparing for publication biographies of Sir John Danvers, Robert Danvers alias Villiers, John Hutchinson, Edward Hyde, Sir Henry Lee, William Pleydell, Henry St John, Sir Walter St John, Sir Ralph Verney and  Henry Wilmot.
• History of Parliament: The House of Lords 1660-1715 has already published in print biographies of John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Charles Wilmot, 3rd earl of Rochester, and Edward Henry Lee, 1st earl of Lichfield.