solved to have Strafford's blood, regarded his death as a judgment (Laud, Works, in. 443). Clarendon states that Bedford died 'much afflicted with the passion and fury which he perceived his party inclined to. ... He was a wise man, and would have proposed and advised moderate courses; but was not incapable, for want of resolution, of being carried into violent ones, if his advice would not have been submitted to; and therefore many who knew him well thought his death not unseasonable, as well to his fame as to his fortune' (Rebellion, iii. 192).
Bedford married Catherine, daughter of Giles, third lord Chandos. She died on 30 Jan. 1657. By her he had four sons and four daughters : (1) Francis, who married Catherine, daughter of William, lord Grey of Wark, and died without issue about a month before his father. (2) William, fifth earl and first duke of Bedford [q. v.] (3) John, a colonel in the royalist army and an active royalist conspirator during the protectorate period, who in November 1660 raised, and for twenty-one years commanded, Charles II's regiment of foot-guards (now the grenadier guards); he died on 25 Nov. 1687 (Dalton, Army Lists, i. 7). (4) Edward, married Penelope, widow of Sir William Brooke, and was the father of Edward Russell, earl of Orford [q. v.] Bedford's four daughters were: (1) Catherine, who married Robert Greville, second lord Brooke [q. v.]: (2) Anne, who married George, lord Digby, afterwards second Earl of Bristol: (3) Margaret, who married James Hay, second earl of Carlisle, became the fifth wife of Edward Montague, earl of Manchester, and married, thirdly, Robert Rich, fifth earl of Warwick; (4) Diana, who married Francis, lord Newport (Wiffen, ii. 126, 160).
Bedford's portrait, painted by Vandyck in 1636, is at Woburn Abbey. It was engraved by Houbraken. A list of other portraits is given by Wiffen (ii. 195).
[Doyle's Official Baronage; Collins's Peerage, ed. Brydges; Wiffen's Memorials of the House of Russell, 1833; Sanford's Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion, 1858, p. 286; The Earl of Bedford's Passage to the highest Court of Parliament, 4to, 1641, a pamphlet on Bedford's death.]
RUSSELL, FRANCIS, fifth Duke of Bedford (1765–1802), baptised at St. Giles-in-the-Fields on 23 July 1765, was son of Francis Russell, marquis of Tavistock, who was killed by a fall from his horse on 22 March 1767. His mother, Elizabeth, sixth daughter of William (Keppel), second earl of Albemarle, died of consumption at Lisbon on 2 Nov. 1768, aged 28. Succeeding his grandfather, John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford [q. v.], in 1771, he was educated for a time at Loughborough House, near London, and was admitted on 30 May 1774 to Westminster School. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1780. The greater part of 1784 and 1785 he spent in foreign travel, returning from the continent in August 1786, a few weeks after attaining his majority. He took his seat in the House of Lords on 5 Dec. 1787.
Bedford, although he showed much character, owed little to his education. At the age of twenty-four he had scarcely ever opened a book. He told Lord Holland (Memoirs of the Whig Party, i. 78) in 1793 that he hesitated to address the House of Lords from a fear of exposing himself by speaking incorrect English. In politics he shared the whig views of his family, and accepted Fox as his political leader. When, in 1792, the Duke of Portland called a meeting of the whigs at Burlington House to consider the propriety of supporting the proclamation against seditious writings and democratic conspiracies, Bedford withdrew on learning that Fox had not been invited. An intimacy with Lord Lauderdale [see Maitland, James, eighth Earl] strengthened his attachment to Fox, and encouraged him to overcome the defects of his education. He soon nerved himself to take a part in debate, and became in the course of two sessions a leading debater in the House of Lords. Deficient in wit and imagination, though exceptionally fluent, he was not a lively speaker, but by perspicuity of statement and solidity of argument he arrested the attention of his audience. He had another great defect: he always seemed ‘to treat the understandings of his adversaries with contempt, and the decision and even the good will of the audience which he addressed with utter indifference’ (Lord Holland).
When the bill for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act was passed, on 22 May 1794, Bedford signed a protest with four other peers. A few days later he brought forward a motion for peace which had been previously submitted by Fox to the other house and rejected by a large majority. It was defeated in the lords by 113 to 13. In November 1795 he strenuously opposed the ministry's bill extending the law of treason. But when Pitt appealed for the great loan of 18,000,000l. at 5 per cent., the duke, ‘though in strenuous opposition, subscribed 100,000l.’ (Stanhope).
Bedford joined the circle of the Prince of Wales's friends, and was one of the two unmarried dukes who supported him
