THE EARL OF NORWICH AND HIS SON GEORGE LORD GORING.
As in small matters accuracy is of vital consequence, let me correct a mistake which I made, writing in a hurry, in my last communication about the two Gorings (Vol. ii., p. 65.). The Earl of Norwich was not under sentence of death, as is there stated, on January 8, 1649. He was then a prisoner: he was not tried and sentenced till March.[2]
The following notice of the son's quarrels with his brother cavaliers occurs in a letter printed in Carte's bulky appendix to his bulky Life of the Duke of Ormond. As this is an unread book, you may think it worth while to print the passage, which is only confirmatory of Clarendon's account of the younger Goring's proceedings in the West of England in 1645. The letter is from Arthur Trevor to Ormond, and dated Launceston, August 18, 1645.
"Mr. Goring's army is broken and all his men in disorder. He hates the council here, and I find plainly there is no love lost; they fear he will seize on the Prince, and he, that they will take him: what will follow hereupon may be foretold, without the aid of the wise woman on the bank. Sir John Colepeper was at Court lately to remove him, to the discontent of many. In short, the war is at an end in the West; each one looks for a ship, and nothing more.
"Lord Digby and Mr. Goring are not friends; Prince Rupert yet goes with Mr. Goring, but how long that will hold, I dare not undertake, knowing both their constitutions."
It will be observed that the writer of the letter, though a cavalier, here calls him Mr. Goring, when as his father was created Earl of Norwich in the previous year, he was Lord Goring in cavalier acceptation.
He is indiscriminately called Mr. Goring and Lord Goring in passages of letters by cavaliers relating to the campaign in the West of 1645, which occur in Carte's Collection of Letters (vol. i. pp. 59, 60. 81. 86.).
A number of letters about the son, Lord Goring's proceedings in the West in 1645 are printed in the third volume of Mr. Lister's Life of Lord Clarendon.
The Earl of Norwich's second son, Charles, who afterwards succeeded as second earl, commanded a brigade under his brother in the West in 1645. (Bulstrode's Memoirs, p. 142.; Carte's Letters, i. 116. 121.)
Some account of the father, Earl of Norwich's operations against the parliament in Essex in 1648, is given in a curious autobiography of Arthur Wilson, the author of the History of James I., which is printed in Peck's Desiderata Curiosa, book xi. part 5. Wilson was living at the time in Essex.
An interesting fragment of a letter from Goring the son to the Earl of Dorset, written apparently as he was on the point of retiring into France, and dated Pondesfred, January 26, 1646, is printed in Mr. Eliot Warburton's Memoirs of Prince Rupert, iii. 215.
Mr. Warburton, by the way, clearly confounds the father with the son when he speaks of the Earl of Norwich's trial and reprieve (iii. 408.). Three letters printed in Mr. W.'s second volume (pp. 172. 181, 182.), and signed "Goring", are probably letters of the father's, but given by Mr. Warburton to the son.
I perceive also that Mr. Bell, the editor of the lately published Fairfax Correspondence, has not avoided confusion between the father and son. In the first volume of the correspondence relating to the civil war (p. 281.), the editor says, under date January, 1646,—
"Lord Hopton in the meanwhile has been appointed to the command in Cornwall, superseding Goring. Also has been sent off on several negociations to France."
Goring went off to France on his own account; his father was at that time Charles I.'s ambassador at the court of France.
I should like to know the year in which a letter of Goring the son's, printed by Mr. Bell in vol. i. p. 23., was written, if it can be ascertained. As printed, it is dated "Berwick, June 22." Is Berwick right? Is there a bath there? The letter is addressed to Sir Constantine Huygens, and in it is this passage—
"I have now my lameness so much renewed that I cannot come to clear myself; as soon as the bath has restored me to my strength, I shall employ it in his Highness's service, if he please to let me return into the same place of his favour that I thought myself happy in before."
I should expect that this letter was written from France after Goring's abrupt retreat into that country. It is stated that the letter comes from Mr. Bentley's collection.
The Earl of Norwich was in Flanders in November 1569, and accompanied the Dukes of York and Gloucester from Brussels to Breda. (Carte's Letters, ii. 282.)
CH.
If the following account of the Goring family given by Banks (Dormant and Extinct Peerage, vol. iii. p. 575.) is correct, it will appear that the father and both his sons were styled at different times. "Lord Goring," and that they may very easily be distinguished.
"George Goring, of Hurstpierpont, Sussex, the son of George Goring, and Anne his wife, sister to Edward Lord Denny, afterwards Earl of Norwich, was created Baron Goring in the fourth of Charles I., and in the xxth of the same reign advanced to the earldom of Norwich, which had become extinct by the death of his maternal uncle above-mentioned, S.P.M.
"He betrayed Portsmouth, of which he was governor, to the king, and rendered him many other signal services. He married Mary, one of the daughters of Edward Nevill, vith Baron of Abergavenny, and had issue four daughters, and two sons, the eldest of whom, George, was an eminent commander for Charles I., and best known as 'General Goring,' and who, after the loss of the crown to his royal master, retired to the Continent, and served with credit as lieutenant-general to the King of Spain. He married Lettice, daughter of Richard Earl of Cork, and died abroad, S.P., in the lifetime of his father, who survived till 1662, and was succeeded by his only remaining son, Charles Lord Goring, and second Earl of Norwich, with whom, as he left no issue by his wife, daughter of —— Leman, and widow of Sir Richard Beker, all his honours became extinct in 1672. He was unquestionably the Lord Goring noticed by Pepys as returning to England in 1660, and not the old peer his father, who, if described by any title, would have been styled 'Earl of Norwich.'"
BRAYBROOKE.
July 1, 1850.
Footnote 2:[(return)]
Let me also correct a misprint. Banks, the author of the Dormant and Extinct Perrage, is misprinted Burke.