# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Williamson, Joseph

​WILLIAMSON, Sir JOSEPH (1633–1701), statesman and diplomatist, was baptised on 4 Aug. 1633 at Bridekirk, a village three miles north of Cockermouth. He was the youngest son of Joseph Williamson, who was instituted to the vicarage of Bridekirk in 1625 and died while his son was an infant. His mother married as a second husband the Rev. John Ardery (Fam. Minorum Gentium, p. 424).
After a good grounding at the grammar school of St. Bees, Joseph seems to have gone to London as clerk to Richard Tolson, the member of parliament for Cockermouth, ​through whose influence he was admitted as a town-boy to Westminster school, then under Dr. Busby. Busby recommended him to Gerard Langbaine the elder [q. v.] as a deserving northern youth, and in September 1650 he entered as a bateller of Queen's College, Oxford, whence he graduated B.A. on 2 Feb. 1653–4. His college tutors were Dr. Lamplugh and Dr. Thomas Smith. After graduating he went into France and the Low Countries as tutor to a young man of quality, possibly one of the sons of the Marquis of Ormonde (Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Rep. App. p. 546; cf. Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1651–2, p. 300). In November 1657 he was elected a fellow of Queen's (graduating M.A. in the same month), and he held his fellowship until his marriage. Soon after the Restoration he quitted Oxford for political life upon obtaining a place in the office of Sir Edward Nicholas [q. v.], an old Queen's man, at that time secretary of state. In July 1660 Charles II sent to the provost and fellows of Queen's a special request that they would grant Williamson a dispensation for absence from college; his loss was regretted both by the parents of his pupils and by his colleagues. Henry Denton, the successor to his rooms in college, alluded to his musical tastes when he wrote in October 1660 ‘Your couple of viols still hang in their places as a monument that a genuine son of Jubal has been here.’
His position in the secretary's office was not at first lucrative; but his status was improved on 30 Dec. 1661 by his appointment as keeper of the king's library at Whitehall and at the paper office at a salary of 160l. per annum. The paper office work was performed by four or five clerks under Henry Ball, Williamson's subordinate. They issued news-letters once a week to numerous subscribers and to a smaller number of correspondents, the correspondents in turn furnishing materials which were subsequently embodied in the ‘Gazette’ (see below; cf. Ball's curious report of 23 Oct. 1674 appended to Christie's Williamson Correspondence and Mrs. Everett Green's preface to Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1665–6).
Meanwhile in October 1662 Nicholas was succeeded as secretary by Sir Henry Bennett (afterwards Lord Arlington), and Williamson was transferred to him as secretary. Facilities for making money now became abundant, and he showed himself no backward pupil in the generally practised art of exacting gratifications from all kinds of suitors and petitioners. Pepys met him at dinner on 6 Feb. 1663, and describes him: ‘Latin Secretary … a pretty knowing man and a scholar, but it may be he thinks himself to be too much so.’ On the 28th of the following month he became one of the five commissioners for seizing prohibited goods, and in November 1664 he was one of the five contractors for the Royal Oak lottery, which became a source of considerable profit to him (the right of conducting and managing lotteries was restricted exclusively to the five ‘commissioners’ in June 1665). In this same year (1664) Williamson seems to have been called to the bar from the Middle Temple.
When, in the autumn of 1665, Charles II sought refuge in Oxford from the great plague, the lack of a regular news-sheet was strongly felt by the court. The ravages of the pestilence seem to have disorganised L'Estrange's ‘Intelligencer’ and ‘News.’ Under these circumstances Leonard Lichfield [q. v.], the university printer, was authorised to bring out a local paper. On Tuesday 14 Nov. the first number of the ‘Oxford Gazette’ appeared, and was thenceforth continued regularly on Mondays and Thursdays. The Oxford pioneer of the paper was Henry Muddiman; but, after a few numbers, Williamson procured for himself the privileges of editor, employing Charles Perrot of Oriel College as his chief assistant. When the court was back at Whitehall, Muddiman made vain endeavours to injure Williamson's efforts as a disseminator of news, and L'Estrange put forth a claim, which was rejected, to a monopoly in publishing official intelligence. Williamson's paper became the ‘London Gazette,’ the first issue so named being that of 5 Feb. 1666 (No. 24); it soon outdistanced its rivals, and survives to this day as the official register of the transactions of the government.
As secretary to Arlington, who was at the head of the post office, Williamson took an active part in its management. The amount of official work of all kinds that he got through during the next fifteen years from 1665 to 1680 is enormous, and his correspondence at the Record Office is extraordinarily voluminous. Evelyn wrote that Arlington, ‘loving his ease more than businesse (tho' sufficiently able had he applied himselfe to it), remitted all to his man Williamson, and in a short time let him go into the secret of affaires, that (as his lordship himself told me) there was a kind of necessity to advance him, and so by his subtlety, dexterity, and insinuation he got to be principal Secretary …’ Williamson found some compensation for his labours in the opportunities afforded him of rapidly making money. Two instances of his generosity are afforded ​in August 1666: he sent down money by a private hand to be applied to the relief of sick and wounded seamen, and also presented to his old college two pairs of banners wrought with silver thread, and a massive silver trumpet which was long used to summon the college to dinner (the summons has always been made by ‘a clarion,’ as ordained by the college statutes). The motive of the gift to the college appears to have been Williamson's anxiety, though he was a non-resident, to retain and sublet his rooms in college, and he menaced the fellows with ‘inconveniences’ if they did not accede to his wish; the college in reply diplomatically evaded the demand. In small matters, and especially in his management of the ‘Gazette,’ Williamson showed a decidedly grasping and penurious spirit.
With the warm concurrence of his chief, Williamson made various efforts to get into parliament, without meeting at first with success. His candidature failed at Morpeth (October 1666), Preston (May 1667), Dartmouth, and at Appleby, where in December 1667 his hopes were crushed by the intervention of Anne Clifford, the famous countess of Pembroke [for the laconic letter said by Horace Walpole to have been written on the subject by the countess, see Clifford, Anne; that there is some truth in Walpole's story is rendered very probable by State Papers, Dom. Charles II, xxxi. 170]. On 22 Oct. 1669 Williamson eventually succeeded in getting elected for Thetford, and he was re-elected in February 1678–9, August 1679, February 1680–1, and March 1685. He did not sit in the Convention, but he was returned for Rochester in March 1690, while in October 1695, July 1698, and January 1700–1, being elected both for this city and for his old borough, he preferred to sit for the former. He seems to have voted steadily as a courtier, but, except in his official capacity as secretary, rarely opened his mouth in parliament.
In January 1671–2 Williamson became a clerk of the council in ordinary and was knighted. The post of clerk, which had been held by Sir Richard Browne, John Evelyn's father-in-law, had been promised to Evelyn by the king, ‘but,’ explains the diarist, ‘in consideration of the renewal of our lease and other reasons I chose to part with it to Sir Joseph Williamson, who gave us and the rest of his brother clerks a handsome supper at his house, and after supper a concert of music.’ He mentions elsewhere that Williamson himself was an expert performer at jeu des gobelets. On 17 May 1673 Williamson started, in company with Sir Leoline Jenkins [q. v.] and the Earl of Sunderland, as joint British plenipotentiary to the congress at Cologne. There he remained until 15 April 1674 (the letters written to him during his absence were printed for the Camden Society in two volumes, under the editorship of W. D. Christie, in 1874); but although the negotiations, which are detailed in Wynne's ‘Life of Jenkins,’ were tediously prolonged, nothing in reality was effected, and the separate peace between England and Holland (which was suddenly proclaimed in April 1674) was made not at Cologne, but in London.
Before he left England on his embassy it had been arranged between Williamson and his patron Arlington that upon his return Arlington should resign his office as secretary of state, and that Williamson, if possible, should be offered the reversion of the post upon paying a sum of 6,000l. This arrangement was provisionally sanctioned by the king. Meanwhile, in March 1674, Arlington offered to secure the office for Sir William Temple, another of his protégés, and to provide otherwise for Williamson; but Temple refused the offer, remarking to his friends that he considered it no great honour to be preferred before Sir Joseph Williamson.
Williamson returned in June 1674, and was at once appointed secretary of state, being then not quite forty-one; Arlington obtained the more lucrative post of chamberlain. A few days after his appointment Williamson was on 27 June 1674 admitted LL.D. at Oxford, and on 11 Sept. he was sworn of the privy council. Except for the great industry that characterised all Williamson's departmental work, there is little to distinguish his tenure of office as secretary. In September 1674 the new secretary officially announced to Temple as English ambassador at The Hague that the affairs of the United Provinces would henceforth come under his special care. The announcement cannot have been especially agreeable to Temple, and it seems to have been no less distasteful to the Prince of Orange, who saw in Williamson even more than in Arlington an instrument of complete subservience to the French sympathies of Charles II. With respect to another despatch Temple writes, on 24 Feb. 1677: ‘The prince could hardly hear it out with any patience. Sir Joseph Williamson's style was always so disagreeable to him, and he thought the whole cast of this so artificial, that he received it with indignation and scorn.’ He said on another occasion, as on this, that Williamson treated him ‘like a child who was to be fed on whipt cream.’ Temple ​speaks elsewhere with compassion of Sir Leoline Jenkins lying under the lash of Secretary Williamson, who, upon old grudges between them at Cologne, never failed to lay hold of any occasion he could to censure his conduct, nor did Temple himself altogether succeed in escaping the lash.
During 1675, at the instigation of Charles II, Williamson tried to induce the master of the rolls to remove Burnet from his place as preacher to the master of the rolls, but he encountered a determined opposition from Sir Harbottle Grimston [q. v.], and the outspoken Burnet was enabled to retain his foothold in London. In 1676 Milton's friend, Daniel Skinner, wished to print the deceased poet's ‘Latin State Letters’ and treatise ‘De Doctrina Christiana,’ and applied to Williamson for the necessary license (that of the official licenser being apparently insufficient). The secretary refused, saying that he could countenance nothing of Milton's writing, and he went so far as to write of Skinner (to a likely patron) as a suspect ‘until he very well cured himself from such infectious commerce as Milton's friendship.’ Williamson managed eventually to lay his hands upon the original manuscripts, and locked them up for security among the state archives. The ‘State Letters’ were surreptitiously printed from a transcript in 1676, but the treatise was not published until 1823 (see Lemon, Robert; for the full complicated story of the manuscripts, see Masson, Milton, iv. 158, vi. 331, 603, 616, 721, 729, 774, 805).
Dry and formal though Williamson may have been in his usual manner, it seems fair to infer that he was by no means deficient as a courtier, and his letters to several of the royal concubines show that he did not share Clarendon's scruples about paying court to the ladies whom the king delighted to honour. Upon the whole, however, he confined himself very closely to his official and administrative business and to the direction of foreign affairs. His fellow secretary, Sir Henry Coventry, undertook the parliamentary work. He had to take a decided line upon the subject of the Duke of York's exclusion, and on 4 Nov. 1678, in answer to Lord Russell's motion to remove the Duke of York from the king's presence and councils, in a succinct and not ineffective speech he declared that this would drive the heir to the throne to join the French and the catholics. Almost immediately after this he fell a victim to the panic excited by the supposed discovery of a ‘popish plot,’ and on 18 Nov. he was committed to the Tower by the lower house on the charge of ‘subsigning commissions for officers and money for papists,’ in other words of passing commissions drawn up by the king's order in favour of certain recusants. He remained in the Tower but a few hours, for Charles with unusual energy and decision lost no time in apprising the commons that he had ordered his secretary's release. At the same time the offensive commissions were recalled. Williamson's continuance in office, however, was not considered altogether desirable (cf. Wood, Life and Times, ii. 438). The newsletters on 10 Feb. announced ‘Sir Joseph Williamson is turned out, but is to be repaid what his secretaryship cost him.’ As a matter of fact he received from his successor, Sunderland, 6,000l. and five hundred guineas.
In 1676 Williamson was elected master of the Clothworkers' Company (presenting a silver-gilt cup bearing his arms); he was succeeded as master by Samuel Pepys.
Williamson had been declared a member of the Royal Society by nomination of the original council on 20 May 1663, and on the resignation of Lord Brouncker on 30 Nov. 1677 he was elected second president of the society, a post which he held until 30 Nov. 1680, when he was succeeded by Sir Christopher Wren. The secretaries under him were Thomas Henshaw and Nehemiah Grew. On 4 Dec. 1677, being ‘the first day of his taking the chair, he gave a magnificent supper’ at which Evelyn was present. Immersed in multifarious business though he was at the time, Williamson presided at every meeting of the council during his term of office, and generally managed in addition to preside at the ordinary meetings. He presented several curiosities to the museum, and a large screw press for stamping diplomas, as well as his portrait by Kneller, now in the Society's meeting-room. Oldenburgh dedicated to him the ninth volume of the ‘Philosophical Transactions.’
Though he evidently took much interest in the society's work, researches of a legal, historical, and genealogical nature seem to have been more really congenial to him. He collected many valuable manuscripts relating to heraldry and history, and he purchased the rich collections of Sir Thomas Shirley, which contained visitations of many counties of England written by the heralds or their clerks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Shortly before his removal from office in December 1678, Sir Joseph married Catharine, eldest and only surviving daughter of George Stuart, lord D'Aubigny (fourth, but second surviving son of Esmè, third duke of ​Lennox), by Lady Catharine, eldest daughter of Theophilus Howard, second earl of Suffolk. She was baptised at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, Middlesex, on 5 Dec. 1640, and married, first, Henry O'Brien, lord Ibrackan, who was buried in Westminster Abbey on 9 Sept. 1678. As heiress to Charles Stuart, duke of Richmond and Lennox [q. v.], his wife brought Williamson a noble fortune. ‘'Twas thought,’ says Evelyn, ‘that they lived not so kindly after marriage as they did before. She was much censured for marrying so meanly, being herself allied to the royal family.’ The alliance offended Danby, who coveted the Richmond estates for one of his own sons, and it may have had something to do with the secretary's fall from office. When the Duke of Richmond died in 1672, Lady O'Brien succeeded to the bulk of his property, but his debts were so heavy that it was found necessary to sell some of the estates to defray them. Under these circumstances the Cobham estates, together with the fine old hall, were bought in by Williamson for 45,000l. In 1679 with his wife's money he purchased for 8,000l. Winchester House in St. James's Square (No. 21), which he tenanted until 1684.
In 1682 he became recorder of Thetford, and on his acquisition of the Cobham estates interested himself not only in Rochester, but also in Gravesend, for which in 1687 he procured a new charter (Cruden's Hist. of Gravesend, 1843, pp. 376 sq.). In May 1690 he was appointed upon the committee to take account of public moneys since William's accession, and in February 1691–2 a false rumour was spread abroad that he was to be lord privy seal. On 21 Nov. 1696, however, Williamson was sworn of the privy council, and on 12 Dec. he was, together with the Earl of Pembroke and Lord Villiers, accredited a plenipotentiary at the congress of Nimeguen. Owing to indisposition he did not arrive in Holland until 8 June. The peace of Ryswick was signed somewhat more than three months later, on 20 Sept. 1697. Williamson stayed on at The Hague in the capacity of ‘veteran diplomatist’ (as he is termed by Macaulay), and on 11 Oct. 1698 the first partition treaty was signed by him at Loo as joint commissioner with Portland. The secrecy with which the treaty had been negotiated excited the wrath of the commons in April 1699, but their full fury fell not upon Williamson but upon Portland and Somers. Williamson returned from Holland in November 1698, and next month it was reported that he would be sent as plenipotentiary to Versailles. He returned, however, to The Hague until the middle of March 1699, when he finally retired from his diplomatic post. He received several visits from the king at Cobham Hall, and in the Rochester Corporation accounts are two heavy bills (May 1697 and 1701) for expenses in connection therewith.
He died at Cobham, Kent, on 3 Oct. 1701, and was buried on 14 Oct. in the Duke of Richmond's vault in King Henry VII's chapel in Westminster Abbey (Chester, Reg. of Burials, pp. 249, 251). Williamson's widow was buried in Westminster Abbey on 11 Nov. 1702, leaving no issue by her second husband.
Rather a man of affairs than a statesman, Williamson appears to have been dry and formal in his manner; he was strictly methodical, scrupulous and exact in the transaction of business, subservient in all things to his chiefs, and severe and exacting towards his subordinates. Music and historical antiquities were his chief relaxations, but his multifarious correspondence can have left him but little time to indulge them. Like most of the statesmen of the day, he turned his industry to good account and managed to accumulate a large fortune during his tenure of office. Some of his early stiffness of manner seems to have worn off, and a gradual rise in Pepys's estimation of him is to be traced through the pages of the ‘Diary.’ Anthony à Wood had no love for the secretary, who on 23 May 1675 ignored Wood's application for the post of keeper of records in the Tower. But he was ‘a great friend,’ Wood admits, to Queen's College and to Queen's College men. Williamson befriended Dr. Lancelot Addison [q. v.], a contemporary with the secretary at Queen's, who dedicated to Sir Joseph, in his capacity of curator of the Sheldonian press, his interesting ‘Present State of the Jews in Barbary.’ The famous essayist was named Joseph after his father's benefactor. Williamson also sent Dr. William Lancaster and Bishop Nicolson (both Queen's men) abroad at the crown's expense, in accordance with a plan of his own for training young men of promise for diplomatic work. Nicolson, when a young taberdar of Queen's, dedicated to the secretary his ‘Iter Hollandicum’ in 1678 (still in manuscript in Queen's Library).
Evelyn's charge of ingratitude is refuted by the dispositions of Williamson's will, in which all institutions and individuals who by blood, affection, or service had any claims upon him were mentioned. To Bridekirk, in addition to a present of silver flagons and chalices for the church, he left 500l. to be distributed among the poor. To the library ​at St. Bees he gave his portrait; he had already, in September 1671, given two exbibitions for scholars of Dovenby in his native parish. To the provost and scholars of Queen's College he left 6,000l. 'to be laid out in further new buildings to the colledge and otherwise beautifying the said colledge,' as well as his 'library of printed books and books of heraldry and genaligy, as well manuscripts as printed;' to Christ's Church Hospital, London, he gave 300l.; to St. Bartholomew's (of which he had been a governor) 300l.; and to the Royal Society at Grasham College 200l. To Thetford, in addition to munificant gifts during his lifetime (see Blomefield, Norfolk, i. 463 sq.), he bequeathed 2,000l., and the income is now devoted partly to a school and hospital foundation at Thetford, and partly in binding out apprentices and in local charities. To Rochester, besides 20l. for the poor, some gilt communion plate, and a portrait of William III to hang in the town-hall, he left 5,000l. for the purchasing of lands and tenements to support a free 'mathematical school.' This was opened in 1708 under the mastership of John Colson [q. v.], and rebuilt under a new scheme in 1892-4. As a mark of his loyalty to his old college, Williamson chose for his crest one of the Queen's eagles, and for his motto 'Sub umbra tuarum alarum' (his arms are still to be seen in a window at Clothworkers' Hall). Among Wood's pamphlets was a now rare 'Impressio secunda Carminia beroici in honorem Jo. Williamson' [by Payne Fisher].
An interesting portrait (erroneously attribnted to Lely) was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 1895. Besides the portrait at St. Bees, and the half-length by Kneller at Burlington House, there are portraits of Williamson in Queen's College Hall, in the town-hall, Rochester, and in Clothworkers' Hall.
T. S.