John Somers, 1st Baron Somers - Later Life

Later Life

He was President of the Royal Society from 1698 to 1703. He was, however, active in 1702 in opposing the Occasional Conformity Bill, and in 1706 was one of the managers of the union with Scotland. In the same year he carried a bill regulating and improving the proceedings of the law courts. He was made Lord President of the Council in 1708 upon the return of the Whigs to power, and retained the office until their downfall in 1710. He spent his later years at Brookmans Park in Hertfordshire. Somers died on the day the Septennial Bill—which extended the maximum life of parliaments from three years to seven—passed the Commons. A story, possibly apocryphal, goes that Charles Townshend visited Somers during his last illness, with Somers saying to Townshend on his death bed:

I have just heard of the work in which you are engaged, and congratulate you upon it. I never approved the Triennial Bill, and always considered it, in effect, the reverse of what it was intended. You have my hearty approbation of this business, and I think it will be the greatest support possible to the liberty of the country.

Somers never married, but left two sisters, of whom the eldest, Mary, married Charles Cocks, whose grandson, Sir Charles Cocks, Bt., became the second Lord Somers in 1784, the title subsequently descending in this line.