Reverend Richard Bate, who died in 1751 at the age of seventy-four, proudly announced that:
She was honourably descended
And by means of her Alliance to
The illustrious family of Stanhope
She had the merit to obtain
For her husband and children
Twelve several employments
In Church and State.41
Yet even contemporaries, well aware of how the system operated, sometimes thought that it went too far. In 1722 a news-sheet lambasted Robert Walpole, the first man to be widely regarded as prime minister.
First Lord of the Treasury, Mr Walpole. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Walpole. Clerk of the Pells, Mr Walpole’s son. Customs of London, second son of Mr Walpole … Secretary of the Treasury, Mr Walpole’s brother. Secretary to Ireland, Mr Walpole’s brother. Secretary to the Postmaster-General, Mr Walpole’s brother in law.42
Many posts, lucrative in themselves, brought with them the right to appoint to other posts, and there was a palpable pull-through as interest groups prospered, and its distressing reverse as the fall of powerful patrons sent misfortune knocking on down the line. In 1718 Sir Christopher Wren lost his post as surveyor general as part of a wider redistribution of spoils. Sir John Vanbrugh would not accept the office ‘out of tenderness to Sir Christopher Wren’, so it went instead to an incompetent nonentity, William Benson.43
Sarah Marlborough often repeated that her cousin Abigail Hill, who was to supplant her in the queen’s affections, had been raised from nothing by her deployment of interest. Abigail was the daughter of a City merchant ‘by a sister of my father’, and as soon as Sarah heard that she was in want she sent her ten guineas. When the Duke of Gloucester died Sarah got her £200 a year out of the queen’s privy purse, and secured a place in the customs for her son. She recommended Abigail’s brother Jack – ‘a tall boy, whom I clothed … and put to school at St Albans’ – to the Duke of Marlborough.
And although my Lord always said that Jack Hill was good for nothing yet to oblige me he made him his aide de camp, and afterwards gave him a regiment. But it was his sister’s interest that raised him to be a general, and to command in that memorable [Sarahese for deeply unsuccessful] expedition to Quebec: I had no share in doing him these honours.44
As Sarah’s interest waned, Abigail’s waxed. In 1710 Lord Raby told his brother Peter that ‘Lord Powlett has complemented Brigadier Masham [Abigail’s husband] by having him chose a member in a borough he controls.’ It seems likely that Sam Masham sensibly chose himself, for he became MP for Ilchester at about this time, though the grateful Tories soon ensured that he had the peerage that his wife’s new interest demanded.
With Sarah deprived of all her offices she had no interest, and she always respected the few who stood by her in these chilly times. Lady Scarborough wrote to her on 5 November 1711, after Sarah had been succeeded as keeper of the queen’s privy purse by the Duchess of Somerset. Sarah annotated the missive: ‘A very kind letter when I had lost my interest. This is a very great deal for her to say, for she had a great friendship with the Duchess of Somerset …’45 Lady Hervey, ‘who has been a slave to the Duchess of Marlborough’, was roundly told by the Duchess of Montagu that she was a fool to waste her time on someone who had no interest.
Lady Hervey in return in a whole company of ladies told her that might be, but she was honest and had lain with nobody but her own Lord. Her Grace had lain with the Duke of Grafton, and the marshal, so they call Lord Villars … The Duchess of Montagu made no reply, but O Lord my Lady is in a passion … 46
Those with interest, however small, were besieged by those who sought favours. In the army, colonels of regiments were essentially proprietors who ran their regiments at a profit, receiving a grant from the government for arms, clothing and equipment and generally spending rather less than the allowance for these items and pocketing the difference. Like many other offices, military and civil, colonelcies were sold by private treaty or bestowed by a grateful government or a commander-in-chief anxious to line his pocket or reinforce his own interest. In September 1700 Lord Raby reported that: ‘Lord Portmore has done one good thing for himself, he has sold his regiment for £6000 to Kirk his lieutenant colonel, of a stranger he could have had £7000, as Lord Trelawney told me.’47
In 1710 the three disgraced officers Meredith, Honeywood and Macartney were allowed to sell their regiments for half their market value, and Lord Orrery, a political ally of the Duke of Argyll’s, was to have Meredith’s at a knockdown price, having first sold his own for its full value. Honeywood came close to being let off ‘as a young man that might be drawn in … He and Macartney are to sell for £2500 and Meredith for £3500 which he can well afford as he can sell his own [regiment] for more money.’48
In 1711 Lord Raby decided to seek an ensign’s commission (in the ungrammatical idiom of the age, ‘to ask a colours’) for his schoolboy son George from Colonel Bellew.
I did design before he went into Ireland to ask a colours for him [George]. He very kindly told me he was to have a regiment, and that when I asked that he would put the Duke of Ormonde [then captain general, who had to ratify the agreement] in mind and desire it might be in his regiment, which was a great favour, for he might be set down for a colonel that would make interest against him … If the regiment is broke [disbanded] the year after it is raised, the half pay will keep the boy at school and save me the charge I am now at.49
The monarch was the fountain of all interest, and those who could sipped direct from the fountainhead. Thomas Bruce, Earl of Ailesbury, was a well-placed courtier under the later Stuarts and a well-connected exile in the Low Countries after 1688. He recalled that Charles II rarely had time to himself in the jumbled hothouse of Whitehall, but after getting ready for bed,
according to custom he went to ease himself, and he stayed long generally, he being there free from company, and loved to discourse, nobody having entrance but the lord and the groom of the bedchamber in waiting, and I desired him to bestow a colours in the Guards on a relative of mine.
‘Trouble me not with trifles,’ said the king. ‘The Colonel will be glad to oblige you therein.’50 Ailesbury later seems to have repeated the request on behalf of another relative, this time asking ‘a colours for him in the Royal Scottish Regiment of Dumbarton’.51 The earl was very fond of Charles, who ‘knew men better than any that hath reigned over us, and when he gave himself time to think, no man ever judged better of men and things’.52 But being lord of the bedchamber had its disadvantages, for he and the duty groom slept on truckle beds by the king’s door, and the monarch’s affection for the little spaniels that now bear his name meant that ‘a dozen dogs came into our beds’.53
On 16–19 July 1693 the London Gazette, a news-sheet with
