William Shippen, MP

Family and Education bap. 30 July 1673, 2nd s. of Rev. William Shippen, DD, rector of Stockport, Cheshire, proctor, Oxf. 1665. educ. Stockport g.s.; Brasenose, Oxf. 1687; Westminster 1688; Trinity Coll. Camb. 1691, BA 1695; M. Temple 1693, called 1699. m. lic. 17 July 1712 (with £70,000), Frances (d. 1747), da. of Sir Richard Stote, serjeant-at-law, of Jesmond Hall, Northumb., coh. to her bro. Bertram Stote*, s.p.1

Offices Held Commr. public accts. 1711–14.

Biography As the younger son of a clergyman, Shippen inherited only a small income, which he later greatly improved by marriage to a wealthy heiress. Rather unusually, he was admitted to Oxford but then returned to school, at Westminster, and then went on to Cambridge. Although trained as a lawyer, Shippen does not seem to have practised. Evidently a keen follower of public affairs, he indulged his talent for writing political satires which reveal strong Tory and Jacobite sympathies. However, he guarded his anonymity with care, and few poems can be assigned to him with absolute certainty. He may have been the author of Advice to a Painter (1697), describing a Tory patriot’s reactions to the Peace of Ryswick and attacking Whig placemen. This was followed by A Conference (June 1700) dealing with the negotiations between King William and the Earl of Sunderland on the appointment of a successor to Lord Chancellor Somers (Sir John*). If Shippen was the author of this piece, he showed considerable disillusionment with the King’s ministers, writing

         There’s no man among you, whate’er he pretends

         But laughs at the public and acts for self ends.

He was probably the author of the well-known Faction Displayed, written in 1702 and published in 1704, which contained overtly Jacobite sentiments and savage caricatures of the Whig leaders. It provoked several Whig replies. He probably also wrote Moderation Displayed, published in December 1704, attacking ‘moderates’ such as Robert Harley* who were prepared to work with Lord Treasurer Godolphin’s (Sidney†) ministry. A little over a year later, he ran into trouble with the law when he was arrested in February 1706 on a warrant signed by Harley. According to Luttrell, he was charged with ‘bantering Mr Secretary Harley about discovering the authors of The Memorial of the Church of England, while another account claimed that he was accused of publishing seditious libels. Whatever the cause, the hearing of his case was postponed in June 1706 and then apparently dropped.2

Perhaps to safeguard himself from any further arrests, Shippen entered Parliament in December 1707 at a by-election for Bramber on the interest of his friend Lord Windsor (Thomas*) whose brother Dixie* subsequently became his brother-in-law. Shippen and Lord Windsor successfully contested the borough in 1708, Shippen being classed as a Tory in a list of early 1708. In July he may have written, although not published, a satirical poem, ‘Duke Humphrey’s Answer’, a Jacobite piece which attacked the ambitions of the Duchess of Marlborough. Six months later in January 1709, Shippen was unseated on petition. While out of Parliament he wrote a poem, ‘The Junto’, attacking the Whig lords.3

Shippen did not stand at the general election of 1710 but came in at a by-election in December for Bramber when Lord Windsor chose to sit for Monmouthshire. Somewhat surprisingly, on 12 Dec. 1710 he told for the Court against the place bill. On 19 Dec. he joined with Ralph Freman II in leading the attack on former Lord Chancellor Cowper (William*) over the Bewdley charter, which he was reported as saying ‘was arbitrary and illegal and tended to the destroying of the constitution’. He acted as a teller in favour of declaring the charter ‘void, illegal and destructive’, and moved the subsequent resolution, that an address be made to the Queen to repeal it. In the new year, he was closely associated with the measures promoted by the October Club, and although his name was omitted from a list of members drawn up by Boyer, he was classed as a member by both Swift and Defoe. On 1 Mar. he seconded the club’s motion for a bill to resume William III’s grants, in which he compared the reign of James II (‘too good and too well tempered to be king of England’) with the present ‘miserable state of the nation’ which he blamed on William III’s treatment of England as ‘a find for plunder to his favourites’. He and two other Tories, Thomas Strangways and George Lockhart, were directed to draft the bill. On 19 Mar. he was elected one of the commissioners of accounts. On 10 Apr. he was a teller with fellow High Tory, Henry Campion, against an amendment to a motion allowing Sir John Anstruther, 1st Bt., to continue sitting despite having inherited an office. He invited Dr Adams to preach before the House, later thanking him for his sermon.4

At the start of the 1711–12 session, the commission of accounts, tacitly encouraged by the Court, began to present evidence against the previous Whig ministry. On 21 Dec. 1711 the first report on abuses in the army was presented to the House by Lockhart, accusing the Duke of Marlborough (John Churchill†) of receiving bribes from the bread contractor to the army. Shippen followed the next day by presenting the depositions and evidence in support of the allegations. Shippen may have occupied part of the Christmas recess by writing ‘Character of a Certain Whig’, a verse satire on the character of Lord Wharton (Hon. Thomas*). Back in Parliament, on 24 Jan. he was a leading speaker and a teller in favour of a motion condemning Marlborough’s actions as ‘unwarrantable and illegal’. On 1 Mar. he was teller against recommitting the address on the state of the war. On the same day, he supported (Sir) Thomas Hanmer II’s resolutions condemning the Barrier Treaty. He played a leading part in the October Club’s attempt to reintroduce the grants resumption bill, being one of the original proposers of the measure on 22 Mar., and was first-named to the committee to prepare it. He was teller on 21 Apr. in favour of tacking the measure to the lottery bill, which it was rumoured the Court had connived at with the October Club. If so, the Octobrists were disappointed when the decision was not only attacked by members of the March Club, but ‘disavowed’ by the ministry on 6 May, Shippen speaking and then telling against ‘untacking’ the bill.5

In the last session of this Parliament Shippen presented a further report from the commissioners of accounts on army debts on 16 Apr. 1713, and on 7 May brought in the commission’s evidence of bribery against William Churchill*, a commissioner of the sick and wounded, and a report criticizing Wharton for accepting bribes to grant offices. Like the other Octobrists he co-operated with the ministry over the peace, and voted for the French commerce bill on 18 June.

In October 1712, Shippen had written that he was expecting ‘violent opposition’ at the next election and was already considering seeking a seat elsewhere. He had indeed lost the patronage of the Windsor family (who had become Hanoverian Tories, a group he despised), and for the 1713 election was obliged to transfer to Saltash in Cornwall, presumably on the interest of Lord Lansdown (George Granville*). In Queen Anne’s last Parliament he emerged as one of the leaders of the Jacobites in the Commons. On 15 Apr. 1714, in a committee of the whole, he supported the Court motion that the Protestant succession was not in danger. On this occasion he criticized an attempt by Sir Arthur Kaye, 3rd Bt., to stifle debate with a motion for the chairman to leave the chair, and reflected on a speech by the leading Hanoverian Tory Lord Nottingham (Daniel Finch†) in the Lords’ debates on 5 Apr. on a similar question. He acted as a teller on 6 July in favour of allowing Catholics to sell advowsons to Anglicans at a fair price. After the Queen’s death he supported the payment of the arrears to the Hanoverian troops. Boyer reported that on 13 Aug. ‘Mr Shippen very ingenuously owned he had opposed that payment in the late reign, but that he was for it now’. The next day he opposed a move to increase to £100,000 the reward offered for the Pretender’s capture.

Returned in 1715 for Newton on the interest of the Legh family, into which his elder brother had married, he quickly established himself as one of the most prolific opposition speakers, sending his speeches to the Political State for publication.1 At the end of the session of 1717 Atterbury reported to the Pretender that Shippen’s ‘services in the House of Commons can never be sufficiently acknowledged’. He was rewarded with a letter of appreciation from the Pretender which for some time he was unable to answer, having been sent to the Tower for describing the King’s speech opening the next session as ‘rather calculated for the meridian of Germany than that of Great Britain’, and the King as ‘a stranger to our language and constitution’. His imprisonment was an inconvenience in more ways than one to Atterbury, who had entrusted him with raising the money required to finance a projected Swedish invasion for the restoration of the Stuarts, and also with a plan for disrupting the Anglo-French alliance, which had now to be dropped. Its effect on Shippen, according to a Jacobite agent, was that for some time after his release he ‘spoke often and well to the nature of the thing, but no personal reflections. In short, [he] has taken wise advice not to go to the Tower again’.2 However, by 1719 he had recovered sufficiently to risk another gibe at the royal family, observing

when it was urged in the debate in relation to the schism bill that it was unnatural to deprive parents of the education of their children [that] since it was now the case of the greatest subject in England [the Prince of Wales], he did not see why others should complain.3 After the collapse of the South Sea Company, in whose stock he had refused to speculate,4 though offered £4,000 stock by Craggs with the prospect of a £10,000 profit, he provoked Craggs into offering to fight him for asserting that he knew some ministers who were no less guilty than the directors. He spoke and voted against Sunderland on the charge of accepting bribes from the Company, replying to Tories who objected that this was playing Walpole’s game that he would ‘be against them all in their turns. Overturn, overturn all Whigs’.5 Later in the year a representative of the Scotch Tories, who had met him to concert plans for the general election, reported to the Pretender that Shippen had told him that Sunderland had recently made advances ‘with great earnestness’ to the English Tories, which they had ‘utterly rejected’,

resolving to enter into no concert with any of the two contending powers at court, but to stick together and wait till it pleased God some event might occur, that would give them an occasion to do you and the country service.6 On the discovery of Atterbury’s plot in 1722 Shippen’s house was searched for papers but, though his name was mentioned in the ensuing trials, he himself was not arrested. During the proceedings in Parliament in 1723 against Atterbury and his accomplices he insinuated that the arrest of John Freind on a charge of high treason had been due to his recent attacks on ministers in connexion with the plot and that it was therefore an interference with freedom of speech in Parliament. On a bill of pains and penalties against another of the conspirators he pointed out

how slender the evidence was and that people without doors might say it was extorted, suborned and bought, and was going on in that strain but was taken down by the Speaker.7 In the budget debate of 1726 he made a personal attack on Walpole, accusing him of stock jobbing.

He went on with great violence and insolence, he said he would do anything to bring such a bear to the stake; that as much as he detested a bill of pains and penalties, he would readily come into it to make such a monster spew up his ill-gotten wealth.8 On George II’s accession Shippen was one of the few Tory leaders who did not go to court to pay their ‘condolence and congratulations on the new King’. Walpole’s motion for an increased civil list was ‘unopposed by anybody but Mr. Shippen, the head of the veteran staunch Jacobites’. Shippen, a Jacobite observed in 1728, ‘keeps his honesty at a time when almost everybody is wavering.’9 When Pulteney in 1729 agreed to the Address after saying that he would oppose it, Shippen hinted that he had been ‘softened’ by a report that he was to be sent to the Tower for an attack on the Government in the Craftsman. Next year he sailed close to the wind with another near-seditious speech on the army:

Shippen said that at this rate he saw no prospect of being free from a government by a standing army; that he hoped the German constitution of ruling by an army was not to be introduced here, and that in England a King who should propose to govern by an army was a tyrant. This bold and audacious speech struck the House mute, till Sir William Yonge got up and said such things were not proper to be heard, and were intolerable, that the House ought to make him explain himself, not but that he believed the House understood his meaning. Shippen said something to extenuate his expression, but not to much satisfaction. Sir Robert Walpole said what was proper, and concluded that it was believed there would have been a long debate, but what Shippen had said had so shocked gentlemen that he could find nothing wiser than go to the question immediately. On the excise bill in 1733 he dissociated himself from a ‘violent motion’ by Wyndham, directed to securing the formal rejection of the excise bill, expressing himself as satisfied with Walpole’s announcement that it was to be dropped. Later in the same session he not only spoke ‘obstinately’ against the Princess Royal’s marriage portion, which neither Pulteney nor Wyndham opposed, but

when the question was put for agreeing with the motion, said No, as did Sir John Cotton, and one or two more, that it might not appear in the votes that the House was unanimous in this affair, an ill-natured and scandalous procedure.10 In the following session he and his ‘squadron’ again parted company from their Whig allies by refusing to support a motion for making army officers not above the rank of colonel irremovable except by court martial.11

During Shippen’s last years his activity fell off and his political position became increasingly isolated. He did not conceal his dislike of the leaders of the opposition Whigs, declaring that ‘Robin and I are two honest men; he is for King George and I for King James; but those men in long cravats [meaning Sandys, Rushout and Gybbon] only desire places, either under King George or King James’.12 Nor was he now prepared to go as far as the extremist members of his own party. When in 1740 an emissary from the Pretender came over to sound the English Jacobites as to a rising, combined with a French invasion, Shippen displayed such alarm ‘upon the prospect of real business’ that it was considered advisable to leave him out of the consultations.13 On the opposition Whig motion for Walpole’s removal in 1741 he walked out, declaring that ‘he would not pull down Robin on republican principles’.14 He took little part in the closing scenes of Walpole’s Administration. His last recorded speeches were made on the King’s speech opening Walpole’s last Parliament, when ‘the Jacobites, with Shippen and Lord Noel Somerset at their head, were for a division, Pulteney and the Patriots against one’; and on the army estimates of 1742, which were voted without a division, ‘Shippen alone, unchanged opposing’.15 He died 1 May 1743.

[http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1715-1754/member/sh...]

Colonial and Revolutionary Families of Pennsylvania