By Sir Godfrey Kneller.
HE was the eldest son of Francis Russell, fourth Earl of Bedford, by Catherine Brydges, daughter and co-heir of Lord Chandos. He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford; and after travelling abroad for two years, we are told he returned home in 1634, a very handsome and accomplished gentleman. Of his personal beauty and noble bearing the fine portrait of William Russell, and Lord Digby, by Vandyck, bears undoubted testimony. He had been created Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Charles the First. The representative of a high-born family, and heir to a very large fortune, young Lord Russell was keenly watched by the match-makers of the day. At that time three rival beauties divided the admiration of the Court—Lady Elizabeth Cecil, Lady Dorothy Sidney, and Lady Anne Carr, the only child of the Earl and Countess of Somerset. She was born in the Tower at the time of her mother’s imprisonment for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and had been brought up in total ignorance of her parents’ ignominy. ‘The voice goes,’ says a contemporary writer, ‘that young Russell bends somewhat towards the Lady Anne Carr.’ One would not be surprised to hear that Lord Bedford was most adverse to the union. He trembled for the future welfare of his son, and the honour of his house, for heavy was the blot on the young lady’s ‘scutcheon. He promised his consent to any other union his son should project; but it was too late: Lord Russell’s choice was free no more, and the sequel proved the selection had been for his own happiness, and that of the whole family. The King interested himself in the cause of the young lovers, and sent the Duke of Lennox to mediate with Lord Bedford in the matter. Lord Somerset, with all his crimes on his head, had proved himself the most tender and devoted of fathers, giving his child an excellent and strictly virtuous education, and he made every sacrifice in his power to give her a good dowry, seeing that her poverty was an additional obstacle to the marriage in Lord Bedford’s eyes; so Somerset sold his house at Chiswick, his furniture, his plate and jewels; in fact denuded himself of almost all he had, to make settlements on Lady Anne, ‘for,’ said he to the Lord Chamberlain, ‘if one of us is to be undone by the marriage, let it be myself, rather than my own deserving child.’ And so came about this marriage, and the lovely creature, whose sweet innocent young face is familiar to all lovers of Vandyck, became the wife of Lord Russell, and the future mother of the patriot William.
Lord Russell sat in Parliament for Tavistock, having for colleague the famous Mr. Pym; but in the commencement of his career he did not take much part in debate, but was chiefly employed in carrying messages from the Lower to the Upper House.
The death of Francis, fourth Earl of Bedford, caused great excitement in political circles, and the new Earl received a deputation from the House of Peers expressive of condolence, and the hope that ‘as soon as his Lordship’s sorrow would allow him, he would take his seat, for no one could better supply the place of his deceased father.’ These conjectures were confirmed, for the new Lord followed in the footsteps of his father, and in all the part he took in the coming struggles, he was ever ready to support liberal and enlightened views, and to advocate what he considered necessary reforms; withstanding undue encroachments on the part of the King. He was, however, inclined to wise and moderate views from the beginning, and deeply regretted the circumstances which had led to civil dissension and open war; but the times were too stormy, and the pressure of the political barometer too high, to allow of a middle course. Disgusted with what he considered the arbitrary measures and the obstinacy of the King, Lord Bedford now espoused the cause of the Parliament, and even accepted the post of General in their army. He besieged the Royalist forces in Sherborne Castle, and afterwards, on joining the Earl of Essex on the eve of the battle of Edgehill, he accepted, under that general, the command of the corps de reserve. His conduct in the action gained him great distinction, as it was supposed to be owing to his skill and courage that the defeat of the Parliamentarians was averted, ‘for Lord Bedford brought up very gallantly amidst a play of cannon.’ He was ever ready to propose and to facilitate every means of pacification between Charles and his people, but all these endeavours proving fruitless, and finding himself in opposition to the ultra opinions and measures of the Roundheads, he, with some other Lords, determined on joining the King at Oxford. One of his biographers says, the Earl of Bedford came to Oxford, had his introduction, made a declaration of the motives which had actuated his past conduct, and received a formal pardon under the Great Seal. The King was naturally inclined to welcome so noble an adherent, but was rather lukewarm in his manner, while the Queen and the greater part of the courtiers treated him with much discourtesy. He fought with the Royalists at the siege of Gloucester and the battle of Newbury, where the gallant Falkland was killed. The Parliament, infuriated at Lord Bedford’s secession, sequestrated his estates; but this sentence was reversed shortly after the battle of Marston Moor in 1644. The next year Lord Bedford, with Lord Carlisle and four other Peers, who had come from the King’s quarters, went to the House of Parliament and took the Covenant before the Commissioners of the Great Seal; this being the only compliance made by Lord Bedford with the faction he had abandoned. He now retired from public life, absented himself from Parliament, and sought that quiet and domestic peace in the bosom of his family, for which it may be well imagined he had often sighed amid the turmoil and strife of political and military life. He repaired to his home at Woburn Abbey, where, between the years 1645 and 1647, his royal master visited him on three separate occasions. After the execution of the King, and during the vicissitudes of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, Lord Bedford continued to live in seclusion, and it was not until the Restoration (to which event he contributed, as far as in him lay, both by his influence and his aid in pecuniary matters) that he reappeared in public. How ill was he repaid by an ungrateful and cruel King! Lord Bedford carried St. Edward’s sceptre at the coronation of Charles the Second, and some time after received the Blue Ribbon of the Garter. He belonged to a large number of loyal spirits, who, after assisting and rejoicing in the return of the lawful Sovereign, experienced the most bitter disappointment at the tyrannical and unconstitutional course pursued by Charles, and following in the steps of his father, stood up manfully against the encroachments on civil and religious liberty; conduct which was supported and nobly carried out in the House of Commons by his son William, Lord Russell, whose union with Lady Vaughan about 1669 (better known to history as Rachel, Lady Russell) was a source of unalloyed satisfaction to Lord and Lady Bedford, to whom she became a tender and devoted daughter. In the life of William, Lord Russell, we have given full details of his political career, of the animosity his independent line of conduct aroused in the minds of the King and the Duke of York, of his arrest on the false pretence of being implicated in the Rye House Plot, of his unjust trial and hurried execution, particulars of which it would be superfluous to repeat here. Lady Russell spent the early days of her widowhood, and indeed the greater part of her subsequent life, at Woburn, with her father-in-law, affording and imparting sympathy. Lord Russell’s execution took place in July 1683, and within a year his fond mother followed him to the grave. Since the death of that beloved son, Lady Bedford’s health had gradually declined; she pined away silently, almost imperceptibly; but there is little doubt her death was accelerated by a strange and unforeseen incident. She was sitting one day in the gallery at Woburn, when her attention was attracted by a pamphlet which contained the whole history of her mother’s life, her marriage and divorce from Lord Essex, and the tragedy connected with the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, together with the complicity of both parents—the mother, whose memory she knew no reason to despise, the father whom she fondly believed she had every reason to adore. The next person who entered the room found the unhappy woman senseless on the floor, the fatal book beside her. It appears from some letters of her daughter-in-law at the time, that the family not only believed that this sad incident had hastened her death, but that if her life had been spared, her reason would have been endangered.
The remainder of Lord Bedford’s life is so intimately bound up with that of his daughter-in-law and her children, that we must refer the reader to our notice of Lady Russell for further particulars, even the passage in which we have given the account of the creation of the Dukedom, which honour was doubly acceptable to the aged Duke, as a tribute to the memory of his lamented son. His love for his grandchildren, and the tender letters he writes to their mother on their account, his delight in the society of Mistress Katey, his little playfellow of nine years old, when he was past eighty, all vouch for the gentleness of heart which characterised the first Duke of Bedford. He had lived to see his son’s memory vindicated, his son’s widow honoured and sought after by every class in the kingdom, beginning with the Sovereigns, William and Mary; the attainder reversed, his grandchildren prosperous, his grandson and heir married with his sanction and approbation, and the family name, in which he had a right to glory, respected through the kingdom. He was ready to depart, and ‘now his daily prayer was to the effect that the God in whom he had so humbly and faithfully trusted would grant him an easy passage to the tomb.’ And never did any person leave this world with greater inward peace, or with less struggle and discomposure; his lamp of life was not blown out: the oil wasted by degrees, nature was spent, and he fell asleep on the 7th September 1700, aged eighty-seven. He was buried at Chenies by the side of his beloved wife.
No. 17. SIR THOMAS MYDDLETON, BART., OF CHIRK.
Brown dress. Purple sleeves. Lace cravat. Long hair.
DIED 1683.