officer at court’ (Rebellion, i. 341); and he ‘rested not until he had bereaved him of all power and place in court, and so sent him down a most abject, disconsolate old man to his country’ (ib.)
Upon his ejection from the office of custos rotulorum, Savile began intriguing with Buckingham, whom in September 1617 he induced to write to Wentworth demanding his resignation of the office. Wentworth, however, remonstrated, and, being powerfully supported in the county, carried his point. Buckingham acknowledged that he had been misled by Savile (cf. Strafford Letters, passim; Fortescue Papers, Camden Soc., pp. 24, 27; and Browning, Life of Strafford, 1892, pp. 25, &c.). On 19 Jan. 1623–4 Savile was again elected for Yorkshire, his colleague being his son Thomas; but in 1625 Wentworth and Fairfax carried the election against him. This was the occasion of the famous dispute in parliament which first brought Wentworth and Eliot into collision. Savile accused the sheriff of having interrupted the polling when it was going against Wentworth, who was his friend. After a heated debate, in which Wentworth broke the rules of the house, and Eliot denounced him as Catiline, the election was declared void (Gardiner, v. 349–51; Forster, Eliot, i. 160). At the by-election Wentworth was again elected; but on 16 Jan. 1625–6, in a new parliament, Savile once more carried the seat, Wentworth having been made sheriff to prevent his contesting it.
Savile was now high in Buckingham's favour; in July 1626 he was again appointed custos rotulorum in Wentworth's place. Soon afterwards he was sworn of the privy council for his services in parliament, and in December was placed on a commission to inquire into abuses in the navy. In the following April his exertions secured the success of the forced loan in Yorkshire (Gardiner, vi. 158), and soon after, through Buckingham's influence, he succeeded Sir John Suckling as comptroller of the household. In May he was placed on a commission to inquire into offices existing and fees taken in Elizabeth's reign. In July he was appointed receiver of the revenues from recusants in the north, and a year later he was created Baron Savile of Pontefract, on the same day (21 July) that Wentworth was raised to the peerage. He held the office of comptroller till his death, aged 74, on 31 Aug. 1630, so that Clarendon's reference to him as an ‘abject, disconsolate old man’ is exaggerated. He was buried in Batley church, Yorkshire, where a monument, with an inflated inscription (printed by Whitaker), was raised to his memory by his daughter, Anne Leigh.
About 1590 Savile built Howley Hall in Batley, which he made his seat; Camden described it as ‘ædes elegantissimas,’ and its ruins are still extant. Tradition says that Rubens visited him there, and painted for him a view of Pontefract. Savile married, first, Catherine, daughter of Charles, lord Willoughby of Parham, by whom he had no issue; secondly, on 20 Nov. 1586, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Edward, and sister of Sir Henry Cary, first viscount Falkland [q. v.] By her he had five sons and three daughters; he was succeeded by his eldest surviving son, Thomas Savile, earl of Sussex [q. v.]
[Cal. State Papers, Dom.; Strafford Letters, passim; Fortescue Papers (Camden Soc.); Official Returns of Members of Parliament; Journals of the House of Commons; Clarendon's Rebellion; Forster's Eliot; Forster's Life of Strafford (sometimes attributed to Robert Browning); Gardiner's Hist. of England; G. E. C.'s Complete Peerage; Burke's Extinct Peerage; Foster's Yorkshire Pedigrees; Hunter's Antiquarian Notices of Lupset; Whitaker's Life and Correspondence of Sir George Radcliffe, and Loidis et Elmete, pp. 237–9.]
SAVILE, JOHN, first Baron Savile of Rufford (1818–1896), diplomatist, born in 1818, was the eldest natural son of John Lumley-Savile, eighth earl of Scarborough, his mother being of French origin. His grandfather, John Lumley (1761–1835), elder brother of Sir William Lumley [q. v.], was the fourth of the seven sons of Richard Lumley Saunderson, fourth earl of Scarborough, by Barbara, sister and heir of Sir George Savile (1726–1784) [q. v.] of Rufford Abbey, and a descendant of the Saviles of Thornhill and Lupset [see Savile, George, Marquis of Halifax]. Soon after graduating from King's College, Cambridge, in 1782, John Lumley, the grandfather, assumed the name of Savile by royal sign-manual, pursuant to the will of his uncle, Sir George. Having taken orders, he became a prebendary of York, and he succeeded to the earldom of Scarborough on the death of his brother Richard in 1832, but never took his seat in the House of Lords. Dying three years later from the results of a fall in the hunting-field, he was succeeded by his son, John Lumley-Savile, eighth earl of Scarborough (1788–1856), who graduated M.A. from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and represented Nottinghamshire, 1826–35. He was maimed as a boy, owing, it is said, to his father's violence. He never married, but left five natural children. His large property at
