Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/375

 Hist. iv. 590–7). Returning to England, the popular hero of the siege, he was in constant attendance on the king's person when not employed on military duty. Besides the Earl of Portland, he was the only witness of William's interview with the conspirator Prendergrass (ib. 666), and his devotion to the king in defeating Barkley's plot was recompensed by the gift of the forfeited manor of Dumford, said to be worth 2,000l. a year, which had belonged to [q. v.], the late queen's secretary, and which Cutts afterwards sold to Caryll's brother for 8,000l. In 1696, Cutts was appointed captain of the body guard, and in January 1697 he married his second wife, Elizabeth, only daughter of Sir Henry Pickering, baronet, of Whaddon, Cambridgeshire. She is described as possessing 1,400l. a year (, iv. 174). In the summer of 1697 he was engaged in the negotiations which led to the treaty of Ryswick, during which he was despatched on a mission to Vienna. He brought home the welcome tidings of peace, and a few weeks later had the misfortune to lose his young wife, who died on 23 Nov. 1697, after giving birth to a dead child. She was only eighteen, and is described by Bishop Atterbury, who preached her funeral sermon, as a young person of great piety (, Sermons and Discourses, i. sermon vi.) Nahum Tate addressed to Cutts ‘a consolatory poem … on the death of his most accomplished lady,’ and John Hopkins published an elegy at the same time (1698). An allegorical print designed by Thomas Wall, and engraved in mezzotint by B. Lens, suggested by Tate's poem, is described in Noble's continuation of Granger's ‘Biog. Hist.’ i. 369–70. On 4 Jan. 1698 the palace at Whitehall was burned down, on which occasion Cutts, combating the flames with the wretched appliances then available, at the head of his Coldstreamers, was as conspicuous as he had been in the breach at Namur. In 1699 he addressed to the king a curious letter on the subject of his debts, which some years ago was printed in the ‘Transactions of the Essex Society,’ from an original then in possession of Mr. W. W. Cutts of Clapham. In this letter Cutts estimates his debts at 17,500l. He reminds the king of many promises, and begs that his confidence may be respected, as he has never betrayed his majesty's secrets. In 1700 Cutts was engaged in a dispute with the burgesses of Newport, Isle of Wight, in respect of their having returned a certain mayor after another person had been appointed to the office by Cutts. The case was tried at nisi prius before Lord-chief-justice Holt, on 7 May 1700, when the jury found a special verdict. A little later, Richard Steele, who was Cutts's private secretary, and was indebted to him for his company in Lord Lucas's fusiliers, dedicated to Cutts his ‘Christian Hero.’ Steele subsequently published in the fifth volume of the ‘Tatler’ some of Cutts's verses, as the productions of ‘Honest Cynthio.’ As brigadier-general, Cutts accompanied Marlborough to Holland in 1701. In March 1702 he became a major-general on the English establishment, and lieutenant-general the year after (Home Office Military Entry Books, vol. v.) After a brief visit to England in the spring of 1702, he returned to Holland bearing the tidings of the combined declaration of hostilities, which formally opened the war of the Spanish succession. He bore an active part in the ensuing operations, and won fresh fame by the capture of Fort St. Michael, a detached outwork of the important fortress of Venloo in Guelderland, by a sudden assault on 18 Sept. 1702. The achievement was variously regarded. Cutts's enemies, and they were many, viewed it as a vain-glorious act of one who, in the words of Swift, was ‘brave and brainless as the sword he wears.’ Nor was this idea altogether scouted in the army, where Cutts's romantic courage rendered him popular. Captain Parker of the royal Irish, who was one of the storming party, after describing the onrush of the assailants ‘like madmen without fear or wit,’ winds up by saying: ‘Thus were the unaccountable orders of my Lord Cutts as unaccountably executed, to the great astonishment of the whole army and of ourselves when we came to reflect upon what we had done; however, had not several unforeseen accidents concurred, not a man of us could have escaped’ (Captain Parker's Memoirs). Probably Cutts, the hero of many assaults, had measured the chances more truly than his critics. In any case, the enterprise succeeded. It was, as Cutts suggests in a modest and soldierlike letter to Lord Nottingham, the first real blow struck at the enemy. Cutts's persistent detractor, Swift, who wrote of him as ‘about fifty, and the vainest old fool alive,’ seized the occasion for a scurrilous lampoon, entitled ‘Ode to a Salamander,’ which gave deep offence to Cutts's friends. Cutts had sat for the county of Cambridge in five successive parliaments, from 1693 to 1701, and on his first election had been very nearly unseated on petition (see Commons' Journals, xi. 27, 46, 84, 90–3). In the first parliament summoned after the accession of Queen Anne he was returned for the borough of Newport, Isle of Wight, for which he sat up to the time of his death. Cutts remained in